Hector Davila has more seniority than anyone in the department.

The joke is that he has more seniority than everyone put together, but it’s not a great joke, and definitely not one that anyone actually says to Hector’s face. Hector does not have a great sense of humor about his age, and yet he still seems young enough to kick anyone’s ass.

Nate tells me that Hector is fifty-six, and has been in the department for thirty-four years, the last twenty-eight as a detective. Obviously, he could have retired with a full pension a while ago, and just as obviously he likes what he’s doing enough to want to keep doing it. I have my doubts that I’ll follow Hector’s career path.

Hector was the lead detective on the Carlisle case; I worked under him. The reason I was the arresting officer, again as Nate tells it, was strictly a matter of being in the right place at the right time. It was Hector’s case all the way. Of course, I may be relying too much on Nate to tell me things that went on in the past; he doesn’t really seem like the historian type.

The only way that Hector might be sensitive to the reopening of the Carlisle investigation is if he happens to be like every other cop in America, me included. In his mind, like everybody else’s for the last three years, the case has been solved, and the guilty party is in prison.

To question that is to invite Hector’s wrath, and Hector gets very few wrath invitations. He’s a scary guy. That’s why Nate and I flipped a coin to see who gets to talk to Hector.

I lost.

“I hear you’re reopening Carlisle,” he says, before I am even settled in his office.

“Looks that way,” I say, wishing that I had left his office door open behind me. I might need to make a quick getaway.

“Good.”

Obviously, I’m surprised. “Why is that good?”

“Why wouldn’t it be good?” he asks.

“I don’t know; I figured you might not be happy about the possibility that you … we … got it wrong the first time.”

“If I got it wrong, I’ll be pissed,” he says, emphasizing the “I.” This is not a guy who shirks responsibility. “But that’s still better than it staying wrong. There’s a guy sitting in jail for it.”

“I think that’s a great attitude.”

“I live to please you. Now what do you want?”

“Nicholson told me that Rita Carlisle told him she couldn’t see him anymore, and that’s what the argument was about. He thought she might be having an affair.”

“So?”

“So he said she seemed stressed about something, maybe even afraid.”

“I know. I was there for this, remember? Oh, that’s right … your mind is a blank.” He doesn’t say that in a nasty, sneering way; it’s more a statement of fact.

I nod. “This unfortunately falls into my dark period.”

“We knew all that; Nicholson’s lawyer made it very clear. And we followed up on it.” He frowns at the memory. “But not maybe as hard as we should have.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Nicholson was perfect for it. He was there, he was pissed at her, and he went after her. There were traces of her blood in his car.”

Nicholson claimed that she had torn a nail while in his car a few weeks earlier, and that was the source of the blood. Quite obviously we didn’t believe him, and the jury didn’t, either.

Hector continues. “So we treated everything he said as bullshit, and didn’t try to confirm it as hard as we might have. And if that was a mistake, it’s my mistake. Because from the beginning something didn’t feel right.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing, Nicholson was too easy for it; it was all laid out there for us. For another, he never had any history of violence. For a guy like that to kidnap and kill a woman because she broke up with him, or whatever the reason, didn’t ring completely true.”

He pauses for a moment, remembering. “But most of all, what happened after she left the bar didn’t make sense to me. At least not in my gut.”

I’m very surprised by his attitude; I expected him to be much more defensive about his actions, and more certain that he got it right.

“Tell me about that,” I say. “Please.”

“She was pissed at him, or at least that’s how she was acting. She ran out of the bar. He chased after her and grabbed her when they got outside, but she pulled away. At that moment, she wanted no part of the guy. We have that on video.”

“Right.”

“But there were people on that street; a few people came forward and said they saw live what we saw on the video. Yet no one saw anything after that; no one actually saw her go with him, or get into his car.”

“So?” I ask.

“So her behavior that we could see was such that she wouldn’t have just gone along; there would have been some kind of struggle, some kind of argument. Somebody would have seen something, or heard it. But she just disappeared. She wouldn’t have walked away; her home was twenty miles from there. She would have called a friend, or a cab, and waited to get picked up.”

I see what he’s saying, but I can’t say I find it terribly compelling. “Maybe he talked her into getting into the car.”

“Maybe. There’s one more thing,” he says. “There’s no audio on the videotape; it’s silent. But when he grabs her, she says something to him. Look at it; I think you’ll be able to read her lips.”

“What do you think she’s saying?” I ask.

“I’m pretty sure she’s saying ‘I can’t.’ Not ‘leave me alone,’ or ‘I don’t want to,’ or ‘get your hands off of me.’ She’s saying, ‘I can’t.’”

“And you think someone was stopping her?”

He nods. “I think it’s possible. And I also think it’s possible that the person who was stopping her was waiting for her. And that’s the car she got into.”