Truth Comes Second

The Photographs

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Julie's POV:

"Please," I begged. "Please, just stop."

"Julie, this investigation isn't finished until I say so," Cameron said.

He was leaning back in the chair. He had stopped writing down notes long ago. I don't know why he'd even bother, the recorder was sitting on the nightstand.

Cameron had been asking me the same questions for the past hour. I was crying so hard that I was choking on the tears. The fire in my chest was unbearable. I dug the heel of my palm into my eyes to calm my crying down.

"Did you ever try to escape?" he asked me.

"Yeah." I shook my head. "When I first got there."

"What did you do?"

"I stole the keys in the middle of the night."

"The one they wore around their necks?"

I took my hands off of my eyes. How did he know about the keys? I remember telling him that they locked us in the house, but I never told him that they wore the keys.

"Carrie told me," he said. I must have had a shocked expression on my face. "She told me that she remembered Tommy wearing a key around his neck."

"I took Jimmy's," I said.

"And what happened?"

"It doesn't matter. I didn't get out."

"Juliet, this is a federal case," he said. "You have to answer my questions. We need to know if we need to charge Jimmy and Tommy with anything else other than kidnapping and the homicide charges we already have."

"Jimmy didn't do anything!"

I couldn't count how many times I had been shouting that to Cameron. He refused to listen to me. I would have no problem with Tommy going to jail, but Jimmy was most likely with him. He wouldn't leave his brother alone. If they found Tommy then that meant they found Jimmy. If he got thrown in jail then I would never see him again.

Cameron let out a deep breath and shifted his weight in his seat. He rested his elbows on his knees. He had taken his jacket off a while ago and now it was thrown across the back of his chair.

"Tell me this, I want you to tell me who came into that house," he said. "More importantly, I want you to tell me who they killed."

"I don't remember," I said.

"If you want to keep Hunter you're going to tell me," he said.

I bit down on my lip. I managed to control my crying, and I wasn't going to let the tears come out again. I needed to keep Hunter. I wasn't going to let anyone take him for me. My answers needed to be vague.

"I honestly don't know," I said. "Like a dozen."

"Do you know any of their names?"

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to think back. Jimmy made me go up to our room before they would drag them down into the basement. There was those three travelers who ran out of gas and there was that one girl who was banging on the door when she was being chased.