August 24th
8:53 A.M.
“So, basically, your whole charade imploded.” Heidi Kramer looked even angrier today than she had a couple of days ago.
“I suppose you could say that,” Miller agreed.
For Nick, this had imploded on so many levels. And yet he was feeling cautiously optimistic this morning. Aggie hadn’t thrown him out last night. At least on some level she still believed that he had feelings for her. But he wasn't kidding himself. This was going to take time. And perhaps that was actually a good thing. What he felt for her was strong, and even though they had only known each other a few days, he was in love with her.
Love.
Did he really understand what that was?
He’d loved his parents, but he didn’t remember them, had been too young when they died to truly intellectually understand what love was. He had loved his first foster family, the loss of the man he thought of as his father had been a major blow, had cut deeply at him. His love for his second foster family had been slower developing, he’d already begun to be cautious of getting invested in another human being because the pain of losing them was an experience he wished to never repeat. But it had also been deeper than the love he had experienced for either of his previous sets of parents. He had liked his older foster brother, but it had been his foster parents’ rejection in the face of their indescribable loss that had speared his heart, breaking it into a million pieces he hadn’t wanted to put back together. So he hadn’t. He had made the conscious decision to let his heart stay broken and never risk it again.
Maybe that was what he had been missing. Love wasn't intellectual, it was emotional. It was feeling, instinct, belief, intuition, attachment, something you sensed subconsciously when you came into contact with it. What he felt for Aggie was strong but if she hadn’t come right out and asked him if he loved her, he would never have brought up the word.
Nick wasn't sure that a man who could decide to have a woman attacked and permanently traumatized, then while she was vulnerable take advantage of her fully intending to toss her aside when he was done, just so he might be able to better work a case, was capable of love. Some time, some distance, might be just what he needed to sort out his feelings, to sort out himself, so that he could be the man Aggie deserved.
“It isn’t all bad news,” Miller was explaining to their boss. “Nick, this case is your baby. You want to tell her the good news?”
“Good news?” Heidi raised a hopeful brow.
“We re-interviewed some of Emily Hadden’s neighbors.” Nick forced himself to focus on the task at hand. “We got lucky. An elderly gentleman remembered seeing her the day that she disappeared. He said it was earlier in the morning. He was walking his dog and stopped to chat with her while she was collecting her mail. They talked for a few minutes and then a car pulled up in front of her house. Emily went to the car, he said she argued with the driver, then got into the car with him and they drove off.”
“Are you trying to bother me?” Heidi snapped. “Who was the driver?”
“It was Sebastian Candella,” he replied. “He told Miller and I categorically that he had not seen any of his ex-wives since their divorces.”
“We gave him every opportunity to amend that,” Miller added. “To tell us about any innocuous visits that he may have had with them. Given that they were stepmothers to his young daughter it was plausible that they may have had cause to occasionally meet up. I can imagine Selene in particular might have become attached to Aggie, wanting to keep up with what was going on with her. But he was adamant that he had not seen them. We now know for a fact that he lied.”
“The neighbor is sure of what he saw?”
“Positive.” Nick nodded. “He said he knew Sebastian, had seen him around a couple of times. At least three that he could recall. Said that Sebastian and Emily argued regularly, and that every time Emily vowed she would never speak to him again.”
“How does he know they argued?”
“I think the guy is lonely, he uses walking his dog as an excuse to wander around the neighborhood and get into other people’s business.”
“Does he know what they argued about?”
“No, unfortunately he doesn’t hear too well. But given that he positively identified Sebastian as arguing with Emily just hours before she disappeared, we were able to get a warrant to have his car checked out …”
“Hey, guys.” The door flew open, and Kane Curtis breezed into the room. Kane worked with the crime scene unit, was in his forties, Hispanic, an animal lover who rescued abandoned pets, and married to one of the medical examiners. Kane was one of Nick’s favorite forensic techs.
“Did you …?” Heidi started to ask.
“Of course I've done the car, jumped it right to the top of my list.” Kane dropped into a seat and pulled a piece of paper from a file. “Found a hair belonging to Emily Hadden in Sebastian Candella’s car.”
“Sebastian will be able to come up with a plausible explanation for why you found a hair in his car. And we knew that she was in the car, the neighbor saw her get it,” Heidi reminded him.
“A plausible explanation for why I found a hair in thetrunk?” Kane grinned.
Nick was pretty sure all their eyes lit up at that.
“And that’s not all I found,” Kane continued. “There was also a small amount, averysmall amount of blood in the trunk too. Emily’s blood. We found blood on Emily’s bed, so we know she was bleeding when she was taken. Heidi’s right though, your guy could still come up with an explanation as to why and how her hair and blood were in his trunk. It’s not enough for an arrest warrant. I wish we could get something from Emily’s house to prove he had been in there, but nothing turned up when we searched it.”
“That’s more than we had before.” Nick was thrilled. If it turned out that he couldn’t prove Sebastian was a serial killer, then everything Aggie had been through because of him and the choices he had made would have been for nothing. Not solving this case wasn't an option.