The house was large, with lots of white walls and glass. The garden was also big, but sparse, mostly grass with one huge tree in the lawned area between the driveway and garden path, and a water feature in the middle of the other grassy half of the yard between the path and the side fence. The fountain was stone, a naked boy with the water stream coming from his penis. While clearly not an indication that the house owner was a murderer it was still too distasteful for Nick.
As he unlocked the front door, he couldn’t help but stop and stare. Miller too. The house’s interior was not at all what he had been expecting.
“Whoa.” Miller walked over to the nearest wall and ran his hand over it. “It’s wallpaper.”
“Really?” He joined his partner and also ran a hand over the wall. “This must have cost a fortune to get made up.” The entire room was wallpapered in family photographs. Hundreds of them lined the walls, he’d thought that Aggie’s house had a lot of photos, but this was like a whole other level, although she had obviously picked up the love of displaying her life history in her home from her father.
Miller moved off into the next room. “Photo wallpaper in here too. You think he had the whole house done like this?”
Nick glanced into the room on the right. “I'm guessing he does because this room has it too.”
“There must be hundreds.” His partner sounded in awe.
The room was impressive, but it was so busy, it was like his eyes couldn’t find a place to look to rest. “I’d guess approximately eight to nine thousand total in the house.”
“Where did you get that number?”
“Approximating that the average room is twelve feet by twelve feet by eight feet, and there are fifteen rooms in the house. The average photo is about six inches by four inches, which means there would be roughly five hundred and seventy-six photos per room. Making the total of all the rooms in the house around eight thousand six hundred and forty.”
“I didn’t know you were so good at arithmetic. You are just full of surprises today. I'm going to have a look around.”
“All right, I'm going to look through these photos, see if there’s anything in them that’s helpful. We might see a possible location where he could be holding Emily.”
While Miller went to check out the rest of the house, Nick started in one corner and carefully worked his way clockwise around the room, examining each individual photograph as he went, or at least all that he could reach. The photos appeared to be in no particular order, jumping about from one stage of Sebastian’s life to another.
“Come and look at this,” he called to Miller when his partner re-entered the room some time later. “Tell me I'm not imagining things.”
“What did you find?”
“Look here at this photo.” Nick pointed to a picture of Sebastian, Selene Andabaka, and Aggie standing together on a beach. How old do you think Aggie looks here?”
“Early teens, thirteen, maybe fourteen.”
“She was fourteen when Selene and her dad got divorced. Now look at this picture.” He moved to a picture on the opposite wall, it was Selene in an evening gown at some sort of party. “See this here,” he gestured to a large red scar on Selene’s right arm. “She didn’t have it in the previous picture, which had to have been taken only shortly before the divorce. That means that this photo was takenafterthey had already broken up. And it’s not the only one either. I found pictures of Selene, Claudia, and Emily that I believe were all taken after their relationships with Sebastian had ended. Not only has he seemingly been stalking them, but he’s used those pictures to decorate his house.”
* * * * *
8:26 P.M.
“What’s wrong?”
Aggie heard the words, but they barely seemed to penetrate her mind. All day she had felt off. Weird. Distant, like everything happening around her was a long way away. She wasn't quite sure why she was feeling so odd because sleeping in Nick’s arms last night had been wonderful.
“What’s going on with you tonight?”
Blinking slowly, she struggled to get Nick’s face to come into focus. “I don’t know,” her voice sounded hollow even to her fuzzy mind.
“Aggie,” he sounded both concerned and exasperated. Then he took her face in his hands and kissed her. Hard and fast, but it had the effect he desired and managed to somewhat pull her out of the quicksand that was dragging her down. “There you go,” he said as he released her and searched her face. “You're a million miles away today, talk to me, tell me what’s bothering you.”
Nick was crouched beside the open passenger door of his car, where he’d put her when they'd left the circus. He’d had to keep an arm around her to steady her and guide her because she couldn’t seem to find her way to the car on her own. She had barely been able to function all day. After watching her bumble around at work for a couple of hours, achieving absolutely nothing, Summer had insisted on taking her home, but that hadn’t helped. If anything, it had made things worse. She was scared to be alone in her apartment, she kept wondering if the man who had broken in while she was asleep in bed would come back.
“You're not your usual happy, bubbly self. You barely saw the circus, you barely touched your food, you’ve barely said a word. What’s wrong, honey?”
“I don’t know,” she answered helplessly.
“It’s been a crazy couple of days, I think you’ve been high on an adrenalin overload, and now you’ve crashed back down, and it’s left you feeling shaky and empty.”
“Yeah, maybe. I feel really spaced out,” she admitted.