Page 74 of Crash and Burn

But it couldn't be Maggie. Maggie's phone was left behind. Maggie was gone.Unless, he thought for a moment,everything he’d believed had happened was wrong.

Looking at the screen, he saw an unknown number. Normally, he didn't answer those, but he'd never hit the button so fast in his life. “Hello?”

“This is Special Agent Watson.”

“Yes?” Maybe there was good news.

“We're at the house. We've got techs dusting for fingerprints.”

“Yes?” Sebastian breathed the word out again, still running back toward home—a home that wasn’t anything without Maggie in it.

“It appears that everything you said is correct. However, you've walked through the grass in the back yard and ruined some of the evidence.”

“I know.” He felt like shit. What if he’d destroyed even more evidence that could help them find Maggie?Fuck. But there was nothing he could do to reverse time.

His adrenaline spiked at the thought and his muscles threatened to shake. He was afraid there would be long, long years ahead of him to feel guilty about how he lost Maggie. He couldn’t dwell on it now. “I think I found her shoe. What do I do?”

“Don’t touch it.”

He looked at it in his grasp. “Too late.”

“We need you to come back to the house,” Watson told him her voice turning sharp. “If we're going to find her, we need everybody in this together.”

“I'm almost there.” His words came in short, choppy phrases between breaths as he ran. “There was nothing I could see at the dock. So if he left with her from there, he's been gone for a while.”

Sebastian stopped where he was. His eyes burning and his heart clenching as he made that declaration. He was thinking about saving Maggie, but if she'd been gone for a while, maybe it was too late. Maybe Geller had already hurt her. Maybe she was already dead.

But Watson was talking to him and he needed to pay attention because he had to grab any chance he could to save Maggie.

“—spoke with her clients from this morning. The first one, an elderly gentleman, Mr. Horace, believes he didn't leave until twelve ten.”Okay, Sebastian thought,Maggie had been alive and well until just after noon.

“Her next appointment was at one-thirty,” Watson was still giving him information and he did his best to absorb it as he ran the last distance. “That couple says they came by on time, but Maggie didn't answer the door. They called, left a voicemail, waited, and after a while they left. So we have a very clear window here.”

Sebastian looked at his watch. It was almost three pm.

She’d been gone at least an hour and a half, long enough for the wake to leave the surface and long enough for Geller to take her plenty far away.

He’d stopped moving as his crazy thoughts had taken over. Now he was standing in the woods on the verge of breaking down, but he couldn’t give in to the overwhelming urge. Standing here and crying about what might be wasn't his style. But his style was also taking care of other people's problems, not his own. He’d just gained a newfound respect for everyone who'd stood and watched their home and all their belongings burn right before their eyes. He was not handling this half as well as they did.

It wasn’t time to get lost in self pity. It was time to move, and Sebastian started to run again. Watson kept him on the phone, explaining that they'd found no fingerprints from anyone other than him and Maggie.

The good news, he thought, was that between him, Maggie, Kalan, Luke, and the Kellys, they’d cleaned the house so thoroughly that any prints could be pinpointed to the last handful of days.

The bad news was they weren't finding any prints but Maggie’s and his.

He spotted Watson as she held open the back gate and motioned for him to hop over the footprints at the entrance, and not further destroy any evidence. He handed over the shoe which she took without a word.

There were three officers in the yard between him and the house. One was taking photographs, another seemingly looking for samples, and a third cruising the perimeter. Inside the house was crawling with people in white paper suits. At least the feds had all hands on deck.

For Maggie, he thought.

“Don't touch anything.” Watson issued the stern reprimand as Sebastian walked through the back door. “Straight through and out the front.”

He followed her, walking like a dead man, still not certain if he was breathing. As he watched, she handed the shoe to a tech and rattled off a few instructions. The one thing he’d found of hers was gone. But maybe it would still help them find her.

A small white tent was erected in the small front yard. The lawn sloped relatively sharply, and Sebastian's brain latched on to ridiculous details, like how someone had jammed the ends of the tent poles into the ground to help it stand even.

A table was set up in the center of the tent, officers and agents ringed it, even Marina Balero. But a handful of people he didn't know.

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