Page 48 of Nightmare

Maybe he’s right, maybe I shouldn’t be telling him this stuff. It only makes him mad, and I shouldn’t expect any other reaction out of him. I hate fighting with him, mostly because he’s the only person in this world I truly tell everything to, and I do respect his opinions.

Exhaling, I pick up my towel and finish up my session before leaving the gym. I go and get myself a coffee before returning home to do some more research on the case. I have to present to Pete later today, and I need to show him I am onto something good so he’ll let me continue.

I want to blow this story right open; I want to clear Western’s name, and I want the people involved to go down for whatever the fuck it is they’re doing in this town.

Sitting down, I pull out my laptop and do some research on the missing teens around the time when Braithe was shot. Nathan mentioned it, and I haven’t had the chance to spend time researching, but I very much plan on doing that today. Typing a few different things into my search, I manage to stumble across a few reports and articles. As I dig deeper, I’m quite surprised to see over twenty teenagers that have gone missing in the last twenty years, all of which were indeed written off as runaways because of the fact that they’re foster kids.

All of them boys.

This is alarming.

It’s truly gut wrenching.

Because of how messed up the system is, these boys have been overlooked. They have been dismissed and forgotten about. There is no way that so many teenage boys have run away, within a certain area, in that amount of time. Surely someone has looked at this and thought, gee, this doesn’t make sense? How can the police honestly believe that all these boys would just run off, never to be seen again? I get it, it happens, but this should be raising some red flags.

The fact that it’s not is concerning.

I write down all the names of the boys and make a note to try and locate their foster families, to see if I can get some more information. I’m starting to believe this theory that foster kids in town have been taken and sold to human trafficking rings. Is that how all this fits together? Did Daniel know about it and was killed because of that? Is Bill Whart the person behind it all? Is he paying police officers to make things go his way?

Was Western just in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and made for a perfect way of discarding that situation so Bill didn’t get into trouble for what he was doing?

Does Colt know about all of this?

Surely the club is trying to bring these people down?

Or maybe, they don’t know about it?

Maybe, my story might just open it all up for everyone.

Shutting my laptop, I press my fingers into my temples. There is so much swirling around in my brain right now, I’m not even sure where to start when it comes to processing it. I know what I’m diving into is dangerous, but with what I know now, I can’t just let it go. There are boys out there, who have already had it hard, that could possibly still be alive and living through hell because nobody is helping them.

I’m going to help them.

I just don’t know how, yet.

The club is my best option, I know they’re powerful, and I know they do illegal things. They would be able to get information, if they knew about what was going on. But first, I have to get Western to talk to me about what happened that day. To tell me how it all went down and maybe when he does, we can truly start piecing things together.

This goes far deeper than I could have ever imagined, but I’m determined to get to the bottom of it.

Dangerous or not, Western deserves people to know the truth.

Those boys deserve to be found.

Those families deserve justice.

I’ll get it for them.

Even if it kills me.

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