Page 28 of Holiday Grief

After he hung up he gave Fauna a pat. If the dog hadn't drawn his attention to the picture it might not have been discovered until CSU went through the place. Hours. They might have wasted hours.

Finding Jett Crane’s number, Adam called it.

“Hello?” Jett said.

“This is Adam Abram. I'm standing in your sister’s house,” he said.

“What's wrong?” the other man asked immediately.

“I don’t know. I got here and the place was empty, front door open, dog locked out.”

“I'm on my way,” Jett said immediately.

“She left behind a clue for us,” Adam told Jasmine’s brother as he could hear the man moving about. “It’s a sonogram picture.”

“Jasmine doesn’t have a kid.”

“Well, she has a sonogram picture dated six years ago.”

Jett sucked in a breath. “Eight years ago Jasmine disappeared. Completely. No signs of her, no contact, nothing. She was gone for two years. When she was eighteen she made contact, told us she was okay, but wouldn’t talk about those two years, and kept her distance.”

“Do the initials B J mean anything to you?”

“B J? There was a man when Jassy was sixteen. I had already moved out long before then, but I remember Mom was upset about this man Jas wanted to date. She thought he was too old for her. She was sixteen, he was twenty-seven. Jas claimed she was in love with him, when she ran we all thought it was to be with him. Bobby Johnson. B J.”

Now it was Adam’s turn to suck in a breath. He knew that name. It had come up in a recent investigation into a missing teenager.

The man was rumored to be a pimp who took teenage girls by force and coerced them into working for him.

Chapter Nine

December 16th

11:04 A.M.

Pain drummed through her body, thrumming a steady beat.

It weighed heavily upon her, making it hard to think of anything else.

Jasmine knew she shouldn’t be surprised that Bobby was taking such pleasure in beating her, but for some reason she was.

Too much time had passed and the events, while still in her mind, were less vivid than they’d been when she first escaped. Time had dulled the terror and allowed her to become complacent. It had turned Bobby Johnson from a very real monster who had ruined her life, to a distant kind of bogeyman, still real, still dangerous, but she had been distracted by other things.

Things she’d never get a chance to fix.

There might not—likely wouldn’t be—an opportunity to tell Adam that she had been planning on getting professional help so she could be who he and Claire needed her to be. Or tell her family she was sorry for being stupid and selfish, and that she hadn't stayed away for two years because she wanted to, but because she was unable to go home.

Her life would very likely end in this room.

She had no idea where she was or how far away from home she’d been taken because Bobby had moved her while she was unconscious. When she woke, she’d been in this room, chained to the wall. Her throat ached, and she was sure if she looked in a mirror it would be marred with black fingerprint-sized bruises.

Not the first time it had been.

Not the first time her entire body had been covered in bruises.

Jasmine looked down her body, he’d stripped her naked while she’d been unconscious, and now her skin was littered with black and blue marks.

Beating her into submission was just one way he had ensured she complied with his orders, the other was threats. Not just to herself and what would happen to her if she tried to leave, but threats to her family as well.

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