AN: Sorry for the delay, guys. I wasn't kidding when I said there was stuff I really needed to get done, and then I had a really bad mental health week, but I've got the next chapter done! I am introducing two OCs in this chapter, and they're not gonna be the main focus obviously, but I still want them to be fully fleshed out characters, since I'm considering turning this fic into a full original novel at some point. So please let me know what you think of them, and I hope you enjoy!
Deputy Rosa Villarreal groaned as she stepped out of her air conditioned patrol car and out into the San Diego heat. It wouldn't have been that bad if not for her underclothes, kevlar vest, and various other gear weighing her down and trapping more heat, but it was all part of the job, and she'd been doing it for a few years now. She had returned to her substation for a missing person's report. There were always a lot of them in a county the size of San Diego, especially since so much of the county was desert, and thus county sheriff jurisdiction rather than the various municipal departments strewn throughout it.
Rosa barely resisted sighing in relief as she stepped through the doors of the substation and back into the wonderful air conditioning. She passed a few people sitting in the lobby and headed straight for the secretary.
"Who's here for the missing?" she quietly asked, then nodded in thanks as the secretary pointed to the incredibly stressed and worried looking couple sitting in the corner of the lobby. Rosa walked up to them, and mustered up a gentle smile. "Hi, I'm Deputy Villarreal," she said, holding out her hand for them to shake as they both stood up. "If you come with me, I can take your report."
The couple smiled politely, shook her hand, and followed her to a conference room. Rosa sat down opposite from them and pulled out a pen and a pad of paper.
"Can I start with your names?" she asked, despite recognizing the man as the weatherman on Channel 7.
"Of course, I'm Walter Nichols, and this is my wife Audrey Parker-Nichols. We live in the city, but when we went to the San Diego police, they told us we had to go here instead because our boys were out of city jurisdiction when they went missing," Walter said, holding his wife's hand as she fought against tears. This clearly was not one of those cases where teenagers had just run off for a while and would return on their own time.
"Okay, let's get to your boys. I need their names, ages, and what happened."
"Josh Nichols, and Drake Parker," Walter continued. "They're both seventeen. They were supposed to show up to my aunt's wedding with the cake last night, and they never did. Drake doesn't have a phone right now, and Josh didn't have his phone with him. We found the car they had been driving broken down on the side of the highway, but nothing else. There's no sign of them anywhere. Their friends haven't seen them, the people at the gas station haven't seen them, they're just gone." Walter shook his head and looked away, squeezing his wife's hand. She was still quiet, wiping away silent tears.
"Have they ever been known to do anything like this before?" Rosa asked. She had a feeling she already knew the answer, but she had to ask anyway.
"Never," Audrey replied with a helpless shrug. "Drake can get into some trouble every now and then, but he doesn't mean to, and when Josh is with him they're always okay. Josh is cautious and smart and he looks out for Drake, and Drake would never get them into anything serious anyway." She took a breath and fidgeted with her fingers. "I just know something is really wrong. This isn't like them, not at all. I'm their mom and I know something is wrong."
"Well hopefully they're just becoming rebellious teenagers and aren't in any trouble at all," Rosa offered with a smile. It wasn't much, but any small bit of hope she could give these parents, she had to, even if it was likely that their boys had run into some trouble. "Can you give me a rundown of what happened yesterday? How you found out that something wasn't right?"
Walter took a breath and nodded.
"We weren't that shocked when they didn't show up to the ceremony on time," he started. "Actually, we probably would've been more surprised if they had. But then they didn't show up for the reception either, and that was out of character for them. Drake can be irresponsible, but they both knew how important this was. They wouldn't have messed this up." Walter took another breath before continuing. "But then we got all the way home, and the boys weren't there. Two of their friends came by and dropped off Josh's computer bag, which had his cell phone in it, so we couldn't even call them to find out if they were okay. Their friends hadn't heard from them either. So I drove to the bakery and then towards the wedding venue, hoping to find at least some sign of where they went, and that's when I found Drake's friend's car with the cake in it on the side of the road with the keys locked inside and the hood up."
"What kind of car was it?" Rosa asked.
"An old El Camino, I don't know the year," Walter answered with a slight shrug. Rosa copied down what he said.
"And who is the owner?"
"Drake's friend, Trevor. I don't know his last name. He's a few years older than Drake. Nineteen, I think? Maybe twenty?" Walter glanced over at Audrey, but she shrugged helplessly. "I don't know his phone number, so I haven't called him yet to tell him I found his car, but he hasn't called and asked about it yet either."
"That's okay," Rosa said with the soft smile she always wore when talking to stressed out parents. "You said the hood was up. Was there anything else you noticed?" she asked. Even the smallest detail could point to something. If it had all happened the night before, there was a chance that the car and any existing evidence was still there, but she needed to get Walter's account of what he saw first.
"Well, the keys were locked in the car, and the wedding cake was in the back. There was a parking ticket on the windshield, and the hood was up. Josh's suit jacket was torn to pieces too, but there wasn't any blood on the ground or anything like that. It looked like maybe it had gotten caught in part of the engine and gotten torn that way? I really don't know." Walter shrugged again. "The only other thing I noticed were some other tire tracks right in front of the car. I didn't call a tow truck or anything, I just left it there."
Rosa nodded as she jotted down what Walter told her. The other tire tracks could have been nothing, and they could be something. There wasn't any way to tell in the moment.
"After I left the car, I drove towards the wedding venue, hoping that maybe they just started walking and stopped somewhere on the way, but the nearest gas station is ten miles away from where the car is, and when I went there, they hadn't seen anything. Our boys are just gone," Walter said, his voice breaking at the end. He took a breath and ran his hands through his hair. Audrey just sat next to him, staring off into the middle distance and worrying her lip in clear anxiety.
Rosa finished jotting down what Walter had said and set down her pen.
"Thank you. Now, I do have to ask some hard questions, but we can take a break first if you want to," she offered.
"I'm okay, let's just get through this," Audrey said. She glanced at Walter, who nodded.
"Okay," Rosa replied. "Is there anyone you know of who might want to hurt your sons? Have they talked about having problems with anyone recently? Problems at school? Anyone following them? Disagreements with friends, vengeful exes even?" she asked.
"No, nothing like that," Audrey said. She sighed. "Everything was perfectly normal. Josh wears his emotions on his sleeve, and Drake tells Josh everything, and if something was really wrong with Drake, Josh would've told us. But everything has just been normal. I'm sorry, I know that doesn't help."
"It's okay, you don't have to apologize for anything," Rosa assured her. Now she had to ask the more personal question. "Being from a blended family, is there any bad blood with biological family?"
"Josh's mother passed away when he was in elementary school, but we're still on great terms with her family," Walter said before awkwardly glancing at Audrey, who was looking away from them with tears in her eyes.
"What about Drake's father?" Rosa gently pressed when Audrey remained silent. Audrey remained quiet for another moment, wringing her hands together and fidgeting in her seat.
"I haven't heard from or seen Drake's father since the day he left, and we're all better for it," she finally said.
"What do you mean by that?" Rosa would be patient, but this seemed like a promising lead.
"Luke, Drake's father, he wasn't who I thought he was," Audrey carefully replied. "He hid a lot from me and Megan, our daughter. But he was hitting Drake for years. It started when Drake was around ten, and I didn't know until Drake was fourteen and Luke put him in the hospital with some broken bones and the worst concussion he's ever had. The concussion was so bad that he finally told me what had been going on. I confronted Luke about it, and he left, and we haven't seen him since. We've never really been in contact with his family either. I immediately divorced him and he lost all custody. Walter was there for me throughout it all, and he legally adopted both Drake and Megan once we were married. If Drake has heard from him, he hasn't said anything to anyone, not even Josh, because Josh would've told us if he had." Audrey wiped away a tear that fell, but sat tall and straight.
"Thank you, that's very helpful," Rosa replied. "I'll need as current of pictures of your sons as you have, and if you could fill out these forms, I would really appreciate it." Rosa handed over two missing persons forms for the parents to fill out. The forms would be filled out with all the boy's physical information, as well as where they were last seen and what they were wearing. Once she had them completed, Rosa would submit them to get actual missing persons posters made, along with photographs of the boys.
"Of course, we brought some," Walter said, pulling out a picture of two teenage boys at SeaWorld, with their arms around each other's shoulders and grinning ear to ear. Rosa's heart dropped, but she didn't let it show.
"I'm gonna make a copy of this while you fill out those forms," she said with her trademark gentle smile, excusing herself from the interview room. Once she closed the door, she looked again at the picture of the boys. They both had darker hair, had similar complexions, and were good looking boys. Rosa shook her head and made her way over to the copier by the admin offices. The boys were younger than all of the Snatcher's other victims, and there were two of them. The Snatcher had never taken two at the same time, and he'd never taken teenagers, aside from one nineteen year old.
Rosa made the copies, took the forms from the parents, and sent them on their way with promises that she would do everything in her power to find their sons, but the lingering thought of the Snatcher wouldn't leave her mind. As she wrote up the report and sent it up to the detectives, who were the ones who would actually be doing the legwork on it unless they specifically assigned a deputy to do something, she tried to focus more on Drake's father. That was a good angle, and an all too common story, but she wasn't sure how much it actually fit with the facts. Rosa shook her head. It wasn't up to her to figure it out. It was above her paygrade. That was for the detectives to do. Her job was to take reports and calls, not criminal investigation.
And yet, throughout the rest of her shift, Rosa couldn't stop thinking about it, and was, for once, overjoyed to get home to the apartment she shared with her brother and see that he was home from work as well, clearly having skipped the gym again in favor of continuing to pour over his own case files. Rosa's brother, Detective Diego Villarreal, was assigned to the San Diego Snatcher case, and had been working on it nonstop since getting the assignment the week before. He was only one of four detectives all assigned to it so far, but it was the biggest case of his career, as he had stated to Rosa many, many times.
Rosa leaned against the doorway as Diego ignored her, busy flipping through the files he'd brought home. She took in the take out boxes and sighed. Looks like she was on her own for dinner.
"Kinda busy, if you can't tell," Diego said in lieu of a greeting, not taking his eyes away from his work. "Chinese is in the fridge."
Rosa smiled. At least her brother had thought to get her some too.
"I wanted to talk to you about the case, actually," she said, stepping into the study and into her brother's space. She crossed her arms and looked down at the various crime scene photos laid out across the desk, most of them depicting young, naked men, with dark hair, and their throats slit. All of the bodies had been dumped out in the desert and had been left completely exposed to the elements, destroying any physical evidence on them.
"What about it?" Diego asked, still not looking up.
"Do you think it's possible that the Snatcher could take more than one victim at a time?" she asked.
"No, why?" Diego closed one file and opened another.
"I just took a missing persons report today, and there's a lot of similarities with the other victims. Suddenly vanished without a trace, no physical evidence left, young and attractive and dark haired."
Diego finally turned towards his sister with a sigh.
"Yeah, that describes a ton of missing persons in this county. Not all of them are Snatcher victims," Diego said. "So what's this about?"
"Just look at them," Rosa said. She pulled out an extra copy of the photo of Drake and Josh that she had made and handed it to her brother. "Tell me they don't look like the other victims."
Diego looked between the photograph Rosa had handed him and the crime scene photos. He shrugged with another faint sigh.
"Yeah, I guess there's a passing resemblance, but young, attractive, and dark haired describes a lot of people in this county. This is a big county, Rosa. And besides, there's two of them, and they've gotta still be in high school. All of the Snatcher victims have been older, and the guy's never taken more than one at a time. Serial killers don't really do that, it makes things go out of control, and control is the thing they crave. Sorry, but I don't think it's related." Diego shrugged. "Why are you worrying about it anyway? I already saw that you sent the report up to the detective bureau, so there's nothing else for you to do right now with it anyway."
"I don't know," Rosa sighed, leaning against Diego's desk and crossing her arms. "It's just a feeling. You've been doing this job longer than I have. You must have gotten a gut feeling about something before."
"Yes, but it usually comes with a little bit of evidence," Diego replied. He gave her a pointed look. "I'm sure those kids are just off being stupid kids and will show up in a day or two."
"I don't know," Rosa repeated with another sigh. She took the photograph back from her brother. "Their parents really don't think that's it, and I believe them, and before you say 'that's what all parents would say', they described their sons, and exactly why they don't think they would be so irresponsible, especially under the circumstances in which they went missing."
"They're kids, Rosa," Diego once again stated. "Being irresponsible is kind of a guarantee, even for 'good' kids. And why are you so worried anyway? You sent the report up to the detectives already, so it's not your problem anymore."
"That's not the outlook I have on this job and you know it," Rosa replied, glaring at Diego. "And it's not the outlook you have on it either. Or are you forgetting exactly what you did to get promoted to detective before anyone else your age?"
Diego looked away, clearly thinking about what Rosa had said. Rosa had been so proud of Diego when he got that promotion. All she had ever wanted was to be just like Diego growing up, and that had continued all the way to when she had been in the academy herself, and Diego had taken a case into his own hands and got to the bottom of things before the detectives had. It had ruffled some feathers, but he hadn't broken policy, and the brass had been impressed with his drive, determination, and attitude towards policing, earning him the early promotion. That same promotion wasn't exactly what Rosa was gunning for - one day, for sure, but she was content on the road for now - but she knew that Diego had to know how she was feeling.
"Okay, fine," Diego said with a sigh. "I'll help you look into it, but only as long as I don't have other leads I need to track down and you're not doing anything that breaks policy or chain of command."
"Okay, great." Rosa smiled. She pulled some papers out from her bag. "I brought a copy of the report home so you could look at it and compare." She shoved the papers into Diego's hand and turned around, making to leave the room. "I'm gonna shower and eat and then we'll go over it," she called over her shoulder.
"How'd you know I was gonna say yes?" Diego called out after her.
Rosa ignored him, and smiled again. She knew her brother.