White Space Season 2

hours after their fight, until they eventually made up, not with sex, but by lying beside one another on the bed, falling deeper into thoughts birthed on their tongues and sent to the air. They spoke of their previous weeks together, about the next day’s funeral, and the many things they thought might happen. Cassidy wondered out loud about the dress she had picked out for Emma to be buried in — light pink with tiny clusters of lilac and daffodils, the one Emma had worn to church only twice. Cassidy wasn’t sure if she actually liked it, or whether she only told Sarah she did to make her happy. Jon said that either way it was perfect. They touched only safe topics, not even dancing around anything else — no mention of Houser or drugs or a future together.
    It was time to heal. And grieve. They could worry about the future once tomorrow lay behind them.

    * * * *

CHAPTER 5 — Chief Kevin Brady

    Brady couldn’t sleep.
    It was two in the morning, and he’d been tossing and turning for two straight hours, his mind an unsettled storm. Tomorrow was the funeral for Emma Hughes, and he couldn’t push Brock Houser out of his mind — the man behind bars for her murder.
    No matter how many times Brady stared at the evidence, and there was plenty tied to her disappearance, something seemed off. For one, Houser had no clear motive. By all accounts, he was a decorated cop, and an excellent PI. He was also close friends with Jon Conway and had found the girl the first time she vanished, a month or so back.
    The autopsy, which came in earlier, reported the girl’s cause of death as blunt force trauma to the head. No signs of sexual abuse, or any other signs of violence. The medical examiner said it looked like a single blow with a blunt object, likely a metal rod of some sort.
    It was the kind of case that had accidental death written all over it. But Houser wasn’t a young parent panicking in the aftermath of manslaughter; accidentally killing their child with no idea what to do. He was a former cop. If it was an accident, he had to know he could make that case. Hell, if it wasn’t an accident, he could have easily set it up to look like one. That was the hill Brady couldn’t see past: If Houser had it in his heart to murder the girl, he wouldn’t have run off with her. Not when he could have easily set up any number of scenarios to shift blame from him to another.
    But that hadn’t happened. Houser took off with Emma, wrapped in a blanket, no less, and was captured by security cameras as he put her in his trunk, then drove onto the ferry. He had to know he’d been seen by cameras, tracked by the GPS in the rental car.
    Why would he allow himself to be seen?
    Then again, despite the lapses in logic, Brady could think of nothing which might clear Houser. He was the last person with the girl, and was clearly carrying her from the room in his arms.
    Unless she wasn’t in the blanket?
    Brady’s eyes shot open.
    He thought of the blanket, found in the car’s trunk and now still in the evidence room at the station, and wondered if hair or fiber tests had been run yet, or if the tests had been set aside, no rush, since they clearly had the guy on video.
    Houser was carrying something in the blanket. If not Emma, then who? Or what?
    Brady thought about the room, and crime scene photos. Was there anything missing, something large? He needed photos from a similar suite so he could run side-by-side comparisons and see if he could find something missing from Houser’s room. He needed to call the hotel and see if they reported anything gone from the room. He had to call Jon in the morning and see if he could think of something that might be missing that he’d not thought of earlier.
    Why wrap something else in a blanket and take it?
    Why make it look like you’re kidnapping the girl?
    And if Houser didn’t take her, how the hell did she leave the hotel? Or get to the island?
    Brady slipped out of bed and grabbed his uniform. If he couldn’t sleep, he may as well go into the office and look over the evidence again. He wasn’t sure what he could do without lab techs to process the evidence, but perhaps he’d find something which only required good old fashioned police work, and not high-tech sleuthing.
    He scribbled a note for Molly and left it on the kitchen counter, hoping to return before she woke. He opened the back door, slipped quietly outside, then headed to the station guided by a hunch more than anything