Maggie felt the brick wiggle under her fingers. But it wasn't enough to pull it out.
Turning to Sebastian, she told him, “We need a chisel and a phone to document it.”
She pushed at the brick again. Jeez, she was such a lawyer. Over her shoulder, she called back, “Abbie’s toolbox is on the shelf in the laundry!”
Then again, he might already know. He probably knew her aunt better than she did. Maggie pushed that thought away as she continued to work at the brick with her bare fingers. But nothing happened.
When Sebastian returned, they began diligently snapping pictures, chipping at the paint, and trying to break it loose.
Sure enough, when it came out, it wasn't just a loose brick. It was a half brick, leaving a space behind it. Sebastian was already reaching in for the folded paper they could see when Maggie gently pushed his hand aside.
“Can’t touch. There may be fingerprints or other evidence. Let’s photograph it like it is.” She sighed. “And we have to call the fucking FBI again.”
The last thing she needed was more fingerprint dust and more investigation. But that seemed exactly like what she was going to get. Though her fingers were dirty, she scrolled through her contacts looking for Watson or Decker.
“Let's call Marina,” Sebastian suggested softly. “Marina’s much more likely to share information. So if it goes to her first … I think it's perfectly reasonable for two average citizens—” they were not, not now, but Maggie didn’t argue it. “To call 9-1-1 rather than the local Bureau of Investigation.”
“Smart.”
Five minutes later, a knock came at the door. Expecting to find Marina Balero, Maggie swung the door open and was saying, “Wow, that was fast.” But instead, she looked directly into a broad chest. When she allowed her eyes to move upward, past the dark t shirt to the dark skin and broad smile, she found her friend.
“Kalan!” she exclaimed as she spotted Luke, Rex, Patrick Kelly, and his son Ronan standing behind him. Ronan was on A-shift, and the patriarch Patrick was an interim Captain. Two other Kelly sons were on units in Lincoln and Sacramento. Even in Nebraska there were Irish firefighter families. She loved them all.
“You found a sitter?” she asked Rex. It was a huge task for him to be here. Her eyes flitted from him to Sebastian, but there seemed to be no animosity.
“My first free day.” He grinned at her.
And he was here? She saw Luke motion to a pile of supplies on the porch beside them. There was a janitorial mop and bucket, a box of various cleaning sprays, paper towels, shop cloths, and more.
“We’re your cleaning crew.” Patrick announced proudly.
Why? Her head whipped around to look at Sebastian.
“You volunteer for us,” he said it as if it were no big deal. “So we volunteer for you.”
She couldn't help it—happy tears rolled down her cheeks. The house was so big that even just the task of just putting the furniture back seemed daunting. She’d thought cleaning the fingerprint dust was going to take days … except now it wouldn’t.
She opened the door and five large men blew past her, carrying all their supplies with them.
“Holy crap,” she whispered. These guys were no slouches either. The fire station and the engines shined. Their lives depended on the cleanliness and functionality of their trucks’ instruments.
Though she was still in shock, Sebastian was not.
Apparently, he had called them. If she hadn't already been tumbling head over heels for him, she was now off the cliff for this guy. With no parachute. And she didn’t care.
He’d taken charge, organizing them into pairs. Then he paused and asked Maggie what needed to be done first.
Before she answered, she caught his eye over the backs of their shoulders and mouthed the words, Thank you. His smile warmed her as much as if he was touching her.
“The kitchen needs to be first. We need the kitchen. If we can't cook and eat, we're in trouble. Next probably the dining room. The living room, then upstairs. Then my office,” she said. There were so many rooms!
She was following them into the kitchen when another knock came at the front door. This time, when she opened it, she found detective Marina Balero.
It took a moment to organize everything that she and Sebastian had found. Then Maggie thought to tell the firefighters not to clean the living room yet. Not until further evidence was gathered.
The guys told her “no worries,” and “just tell us where to work.” Lord, she was buying them pizza and beer, or pasta dishes, or … whatever they wanted.
After Marina took a preliminary look at the fireplace, she grabbed the comm on her shoulder and called in more officers. They set up another evidence gathering station, more pictures were taken. Maggie tried to both watch and clean. She couldn’t just stand around and watch while the guys worked.
After pushing the couch and chairs back into their rightful spots, she headed to the dining room, where she could still see the fireplace. She moved the table back into place grateful that Abbie had been smart enough to put felt sliders on all the furniture.
Though Maggie kept one ear on the officers’ conversation, her first priority was to flip the two upside down chairs. But as she bent over, she discovered there was not only writing but fingerprint dust on the undersides of the seats.
“Officer Balero?” she called out, curious now. “You took fingerprints from under the chair. Why is that important?”
“That's just it,” Marina said as she headed over to see what Maggie was pointing at. “We don't know whose fingerprints they are when we find them. And we don’t know what they’ll mean, so we try to get everything we can.”
“Were these useful?” Maggie pointed to the bottom of the chairs. Abbie had reupholstered these herself. Maggie had been a teenager at the time and Abbie had been so excited to show off the work. She’d found this fabric that she loved—which Maggie now realized didn't go with anything else in the house, but Abbie adored it.
Marina used a small flashlight to illuminate the pencil scratches. “It's dated.”
Abbie was definitely a DIY kind of woman and, though she kept terrible records, she loved making scrapbooks and taking pictures. The year matched to Maggie's memory, but as she was getting ready to flip it back upright, she stopped.
“So are the fingerprints here from when it was reupholstered?” That would be ridiculous. Wouldn’t it?
Marina flicked the light back and forth. The fingerprints became clear and easy to see, and even Maggie could see there were two sets of prints.
Marina tipped her head and continued scanning with the light. “Fingerprints can last forty or more years if they are undisturbed.”
Maggie blinked, the smaller set of fingerprints was most liked Abbie’s. Just like Sebastian suggested, something of her was still here. The other set looked larger, probably made by a man, though she knew better than to make that assumption.
“Have you ever reupholstered a chair?” Marina asked Maggie and Maggie shook her head.
“No, I just remember that I came back one year, and these were done. That year, actually.” She pointed to the date.
“Well,” Marina looked up at her, “Two people upholstered these chairs.”
Once again, Maggie felt it like a blow and she realized something very important. Something that she wasn’t yet ready to tell Marina Balero.
Instead, she nodded as though that was very interesting and went about setting the rooms to rights. She wondered what other surprises the fingerprints might reveal. But she was holding onto her secret for now.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Sebastian probably groaned Maggie's name loud enough for the neighbors to hear. Just in case they hadn't missed the old bed creaking with every push and pull between them. Probably the FBI agents that were sitting out front casing the place now knew exactly what he and Maggie were doing.
He sighed with the release of being with her and realized he didn’t care who knew.
He watched as Maggie's eyes rolled up, and her expression turned to pure ecstasy as he'd moved inside her. That was more than enough to make up for anything the neighbors might hear.
After a good handful of minutes of rough breathing to make up for the energy he'd spent, he curled his arms tighter around her and enjoyed the sensation of her curling into him too. There was no feeling quite like knowing Maggie wanted him.
He wondered if she was falling asleep when she said, “I have to tell you something.”
His back stiffened. That sounded more than a little bit ominous.
He tried not to let his eyebrows pull together or his arms clench tighter around her. “What is it?”
“I asked Marina about the fingerprints on the bottom of the chairs. There were clearly two different sets. She said it looked like two people had done the upholstering—which would mean the prints were old. She said they could last that long.”
Sebastian appreciated that Maggie was more than willing to say this wasn't her field of expertise and willing to let Marina tell her how it had worked.
“So someone reupholstered the chairs years ago, and this is important?”
“I got on my phone and checked the contracts we photographed.”
He didn’t like the sound of that, but Maggie continued. Her body was tense in his arms, but there was nothing he could do but hold her.
“Merrit Geller was here when the chairs were reupholstered. And Marina told me that they weren't making an official call yet about the prints—that the lab wanted to do one more run—but it looked as if the La Vista Rapist’s DNA was on that pillowcase.”
Sebastian nodded along. The house was full of fingerprints and Marina had been feeding Maggie and him whatever information she could. So far, nothing had turned up from the Blue River Killer.
But the La Vista Rapist had left clean, fresh prints all over Maggie's house, and apparently older ones, too.
“Is it him?”
Maggie shrugged in his arms. “It’s possible. But so far the two are not officially linked.”
Sebastian understood. They had a name and a person who'd been here. Until they had something that could hold up in court to show that those prints belonged to Merrit Geller, they couldn't say the man was, in fact, the rapist.
“Surely, the FBI or the police in Lincoln are working on finding him. On getting a DNA or a fingerprint match?”
“That would be my guess,” Maggie added. “Unfortunately, it was Marina’s guess as well. She's not part of the unit and they aren’t sharing information.”
“That sucks,” Sebastian said, thinking that was the end of it. But it wasn’t.
Maggie propped herself up on one elbow. “Here's the kicker: I remember when Aunt Abbie reupholstered the chairs. She told me how much she loved the fabric and she talked about when they had done it. She told me she had a friend who helped her …” Maggie let the words hang in the air.
Sebastian put it together. “And those prints match the La Vista Rapist?”
“I don't know yet.” She was clearly frustrated. “I mean, I looked around the house and it looks to me like the same prints. But what do I know?”
Sebastian wanted to squirm just as much as she was, but fought to stay calm. It seemed Maggie wasn’t done dropping bombs.
“I didn't understand when I was a kid, but thinking back to the things she said, and what she talked about them doing together, and the way Aunt Abbie worked … Sebastian, she was in love with him.”
“Why do you say that?” He didn’t remember Sabbie having a lover or even a boyfriend.
“She told me about her friend. I was just a kid. I didn't think anything of it, even as a young teenager. But looking back, thinking about the way she talked about this friend, he had to have been her lover.”
The words were clearly not comfortable on her tongue.
Sebastian understood. His whole life, he believed Sabbie to be just an older woman. Only recently had he come to understand that just because people looked older than him didn't mean their lives were empty. But in his memories of Sabbie, she was only running the boardinghouse and handing out candy to the neighborhood kids.
“I'm afraid that, when they get this confirmed, they're going to discover that Abbie had a decades-long affair with him.”
“That long?” He was surprised by Maggie’s assessment.
“I don't know, but he kept coming back and he kept renting a room. She trusted him enough that she wrote him a contract on a napkin. And Abbie was in love with the boarder who helped to reupholster those chairs. I'm confident enough of my memory on that …”
She took a deep breath, “I’m getting more convinced that person was Merrit Geller and that he is also the La Vista Rapist.”
This time her sigh was pained as she pulled out of his arms and flopped onto her back, exasperated. He wished they could make love again and at least release some of this awful stress.
She rolled only her head to face him. “We have to do something.”
“Like what?” Concern bloomed in his chest. Maggie was the kind of woman who went after what she wanted. It was amazing and sexy but, right now, it was downright scary.
“I can’t go on like this. This man has been in my house multiple times.”
“The guys went around everywhere, and they didn't find any new entries.” He protested but understood when Maggie raised an eyebrow.
“I appreciate their efforts and, in any other house, I’d feel safer. But I'm not confident that other entries don't exist.” She paused. “Old houses have secrets.”
Sebastian nodded. At least he was staying in the room here with her, rather than across the hall.
“He wants something that's still here.” She said it with conviction.
But Sebastian didn’t fully agree. “I don't know. He opened the closet, so he had to see that we found the second stash of jewelry.”
“But he didn't get the brick,” Maggie told him. “Who knows what else he left hidden around this house? I’ve lived here four months. He was here off and on for decades.”
He wanted to protest, but she beat him to it, switching topics like a racecar driver, and he didn’t like it.
“I'm losing work, and so are you.”
His lawyer was building a case, and he didn't think he would like her conclusion. She told him how she needed to get her life back together. And so did he.
Sebastian listened intently, trying to be open minded and ignore the dread that was closing around his chest, but it didn't work. Her next words made his blood run cold.
“He wants something here. I say we hold it out like bait.”
Chapter Fifty
Sebastian felt his heart go cold. He thought the topic had been dropped—after all, it had been three days. Maggie hadn't mentioned anything since the night she’d first brought it up.
Now he heard her talking to her clients and he realized he’d been wrong.
He was making lunch while Maggie finished up with a young couple who wanted to set up guardianship for their two young daughters should anything happen to them.
A-shift was on today, but once again he'd canceled. The chief was understanding about him not coming in, but Sebastian wasn't sure how much longer he could sustain that.
Maggie opened her office door and Sebastian waved to the couple as they passed through the living room and out the front door. When Maggie closed the door behind them, Sebastian couldn't help himself.
The words came out of his mouth in a flood of accusation. “You told them about the paper behind the brick!”
“Yes,” she said, the word was delivered simply, with no argument.
“Why would you tell them that?”
“I've told several people,” Maggie replied.
“Did you tell them it was a target list, too?” The very idea of what they'd found turned his stomach even though it would be important to the investigation.
When the police techs pulled the paper from where it was wedge
d they used tweezers to open it. Maggie had been allowed to take photos. Later, the two of them had put the list together on their own. Then Marina Balero had confirmed that they were correct: It was a list of targets.
Some of them were decades old. Many of the notes had been written in different pen, and appeared to be added at different times. Initially, Sebastian and Maggie had struggled by assuming that the list was all La Vista Rapist victims, but they hadn't all been. They weren’t all names either, in fact, most weren’t. Many entries were just dates, descriptions, addresses, or physical traits. But when they checked old news reports, they found each piece led to someone who’d been targeted.
However, some were La Vista Rapist victims and some were Blue River Killer victims. The list confirmed that the two had been working together, maybe finding each other victims. It was giving Sebastian nightmares.
“I didn’t tell them what it was, just that we had found it.”
“You told them that the police have it?”
“No,” she shook her head at him. “Just that we found it.”
“What happens when that information gets out?” What happened when her stalker—almost definitely a serial rapist—decided to come get his list?
Now, Maggie looked at him like he was being slow. “Exactly what I said will happen: he'll come back for it.”
That was when Sebastian felt the floor drop out from under him. She'd said she wanted to bait her stalker. But when she hadn't said anything further, he’d assumed she dropped the idea. That had been his mistake.
“You're actually trying to get him back here?”
“Yes.” Maggie said, putting emphasis on the word again, as though maybe he were being a little slow on the uptake … and maybe he was.
“Why?”
“What other option do I have?”
That was when the argument really began.
“Lay low. Wait. Don’t bring him here on purpose! You know what he does, Maggie!” He was practically yelling, the ramifications of what she was suggesting were possibly horrific.
“Yes.” She said it again, with emphasis, as though he weren't catching on. “And by doing this on my time frame—at least as much as possible—I'm prepared.”
Crash and Burn (Wildfire Hearts Book 1) Page 18
