Chapter eight

Briggs was wondering how he was going to clean up this monumental mess when Jillian spoke again.

"Actually, I have another memory but it is fuzzy. I can't even be sure if it is from what happened last night or just a fragment of a nightmare."

Briggs straightened up eagerly, "It's okay Jillian, tell me even if you are not sure. At this point we are desperate for leads and even your nightmare is better than nothing. Who knows, maybe a clue to the truth is hidden in your nightmare"

"Well, I have the memory of the two officers getting blasted by a shotgun but it feels wrong like I am remembering a movie not something that happened in real life."

Briggs froze in shock. There was no way that Jillian could have known that the two officers were shot dead with a shotgun. The timeline was all wrong.

Briggs tried to organize his thoughts and get all his eggs in a row. What did he actually know?

He knew that Jillian was kidnapped by Bruce meaning that he had gotten to her while the two officers were still guarding her. Combined with the fact that the two officers were corrupt scumbags, Bruce probably bribed them to get to Jillian. Everybody must have been alive at this point.

Then what happened? Bruce probably took Jillian somewhere quiet so that he could torture and murder her and normally he would have been successful but this was where things got weird. Jillian, the one who should be dead was still alive but the one who was supposed to be the predator was now dead. His head was smashed in and his body was dumped at a medical waste disposal facility.

Did someone save Jillian? Did she have some sort of guardian angel?

But if Jillian did have a guardian angel then it was an angel of vengeance because the two cops who had sold her out had their heads blown away a few hours after Bruce died. The question was how did Jillian know about the circumstances of two officers deaths? Was she really there?

For a moment Briggs had a theory that could fit all the facts. What if Jillian was the culprit? What if she was the one who killed Bruce? What if she was the one who killed the two officers? What if she used Bruce Macalister's phone to call Manelli's pizzeria to make the entire situation unstable then dumped Bruce's body at the same spot the Manellis usually used to set the whole thing off?

Briggs looked at the heavily bruised, petite woman shivering in front of him like a frightened chihuahua and scoffed at himself and his overactive imagination. Jillian an evil mastermind? If that was true then he would quit the police force to work as a go go dancer who moonlights as a gigolo.

Jillian was getting uneasy because of Briggs's sudden long pause and the many expressions that were flying across his face like clouds on a windy day, "Detective Briggs, are you okay?"

Briggs smiled at Jillian to comfort her when he saw how nervous she was, "Sorry Jillian, I sort of zoned out for a second and I thought I told you to call me Ed?"

"Alright Ed. "

Briggs couldn't help but smile again when he saw that Jillian looked adorably bashful and blushed furiously when she said his name.