Which, during the first two days of the investigation, according to Detective Vale’s report, was the boyfriend. It’s always the love interest, until he can be cleared.
Jamison Smith cooperated with the locals and was cleared within forty-eight hours with an alibi. Though not an ideal alibi, personal judgment shouldn’t overshadow an investigation. Jamison’s lover, Kimberly Towell, had definitive proof of Jamison’s whereabouts for the estimated time of death of his girlfriend. He was with Kimberly. Handcuffed to her bedpost. There’s a video to prove it.
Long exhale. Flip the page.
Cases that involve cheating trigger a negative response in me. Of course, I try not to let my personal feelings muddy the water, but I’m human. I’m going to have human emotions and reactions to details that pluck a sensitive nerve.
And sometimes, those things that make us human can even further the investigation.
It’s all how you look at it.
Right now, sitting in Orlando Melbourne International, brushing up on the facts of the case, I’m looking at the case too personally already.
I hate this godforsaken state.
As I’m putting away my binder, I spot Agent Nolan through the glass-sliding doors. Seeing him is like coming home in a way that Florida will never hold for me again. I stand to meet him, and with a slight nod, he grabs my carry-on and we’re off. No time for pleasantries; there’s a case to solve.
It’s truly what I like best about him.
How I met Special Agent Rhys Nolan:
My case went cold around the six-month mark. Honestly, it was cold well before then, but that was when Detective Dutton officially threw his hands in the air. When leads halt, and officials are at a loss for where to take the investigation, the case goes cold. That doesn’t mean that my case was closed—unsolved cases are never officially closed—they remain open. Just set aside.
Every detective I’ve interviewed has admitted to working on cold cases in their free time. What little free time they have, that is. For them, they’ve said, it’s a compulsion, a driving need to break out the files and go over the cases at least once a year, to see if the distance allows them to view things in a new light. Discover some piece of the puzzle they missed.
No one was driven to compulsively work on my case. After six months, the understaffed and overworked Leesburg PD declared the Cynthia Marks (my given name) case cold. I was set aside for more pressing investigations, like the local drug ring.
I was alive, after all. Detective Dutton wasn’t trying to solve a murder. There were no similarities between my attack and any others around the Lake County area; there was no pressing concern to prevent a future attack.
The return calls from the department heads and detectives became fewer and fewer. The lengthy pauses on the line dragging out longer. Soon I didn’t bother with the routine calls seeking updates.
My case was dead.
My parents were content to let it go. Talking about the event only caused them anxiety, pain. I wasn’t Amber. I hadn’t become lost to them like she had. Their daughter, their only child, had survived. They weren’t pursuing justice. I no longer involved them in my obsessive search.
I turned my focus to other cases with similar MOs. I expanded the search radius. Maybe my attacker wasn’t a local. Maybe it wasn’t a personal assault. It’s possible the assailant moved from city to city in Florida, attacking young women. And no one looked close enough to connect the dots.
For Agent Nolan, working in the FBI’s cold case division didn’t happen willingly. At the age of twenty-nine, Rhys was injured in the field. Gunshot to the thigh. His injury benched him for nearly a year, where he worked hard at recovery in order to be reinstated as a field agent.
We had this in common.
My recovery took me on a different course, also. All the way to Missouri. With a new name, new identity, and a new career path. A self-imposed—inflicted—witness protection program.
Agent Nolan would never be a field agent again. And I would never complete my degree to become a psychologist. By some divine twist of irony, due to our failures, our paths crossed.
I placed a call to the FBI cold case division and spoke with a sullen Agent Nolan who had no time for paranoid victims. Later that week, a knock at my door, and there stood the sullen agent, case file in hand.
I was his first official cold case.
Rhys claims that what changed his mind was one thing: victims rarely get the chance to tell their story. So many times he wished he could ask the dead their secrets. Now, this was his chance.
Maybe I should’ve been offended about the comparison. But I was, in fact, neither dead nor living when we met. I was found on the lake’s muddy bank. That dirt never washed off. By the time I left for good, I was the mud.
But, I had answers that could help solve my case, even if I didn’t realize it.
After our first meeting, where he asked questions to help fill in the gaps, Rhys returned to Quantico and across the distance, we worked tirelessly on my case.
He re-interviewed witnesses from the Dock House and the Uber driver. He spoke with the local PD in my hometown, questioning the detectives assigned my case. He pored over the images of my attack. He memorized my wounds. The placement, the degree of the injuries, the depth of every laceration. Each contusion and the abrading on my skin.
Near the three-month mark of the reopened investigation, Rhys knew my scars as well as I did.
But despite our exhaustive search, we were no closer to solving the mystery as to why I was targeted one night in March. It appeared I was a victim of chance. Although the facts of the case did pull up similar MOs across the country, Rhys theorized that I might have been the perpetrator’s first victim. A stranger selected because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
It was possible that, if I had been the first, the killer’s MO had since changed.
I can’t admit aloud how hopeless that possibility makes me feel.
On the one-year anniversary of my attack, Rhys convinced me to return to Silver Lake.
I had vowed never to go back…not until my attacker was apprehended…and it was a painful vow to break. We retraced my steps. From the campus to the driveway of Drew’s previous home (where Chelsea told me about the pregnancy). From the apartment I shared with my roommate (where Drew and I argued and the police took my statement) to the Dock House (where my roommate tried to help me forget). Then, to the pier of the lake, not far from the Silver Lake community where my parents still live.
Rhys and I stared at the rippling reflection of the crescent moon on the water.
Lotuses blanketed the lake with a iridescent sheen.
I listened to the crickets’ chirr, a haunting melody that I had no memory of from that fateful night. The wicked sound of frogs croaking filled the otherwise calm air. A desolate and eerie quietness that froze my bones.
That was the moment I revealed him to Rhys. The secret I’d kept from everyone—that twisted belief I had wrestled with, wanting to believe in my phantom hero some days, to deny his existence others.
The man who pulled me from the water.
The only memory—real or not—that I had from the night of my near demise.
In that moment, I wished I had Rhys’s training. I wanted to look at his face and read what he was thinking. But then, I was also terrified to know.
His actions have always spoken louder than his words. His silence sliced at me like the weapon used to carve my body all those nights ago. His weighted stare bled right through me, and when he cupped my face and placed a kiss to my brow, I dissolved under that comfort.