Lethal Outlook: A Psychic Eye Mystery (10 page)

“Huh,” Candice said, starting the car and pulling away from the curb. “And here I thought that what’d irritated you was his comment about not believing in psychics.”

In the past I
might
have shared a complaint or two (twenty) with Candice about the personal insult of that particular dig. “I may have been a little put off by that too,” I admitted.

“Hey,” Candice said when I took to staring out the window.
“Sundance, you gave that man an amazing gift just now. Granted, you probably also should have told him about what happened to Kendra, but he looks to be a man who hasn’t had his fair share of happiness in life, and he’s probably way overdue for something positive. You gave him that. And you gave him a measure of hope. No one can fault you for that.”

I offered her a grudging smile. “Yeah, yeah,” I said, already trying to put it behind me. “Where to now?”

“Well,” said Candice, taking a moment to think about it. “I doubt we can get to Moreno with all that press around, but we may try taking a more circuitous approach.”

“Extended family?” I was only guessing. I was still feeling a little sluggish this morning and longed for a caffeine pick-me-up before we tackled plan C.

“Maybe we’ll try extended family, or maybe we’ll get lucky and find a willing partner among Kendra’s friends,” Candice replied cryptically. She didn’t elaborate, and we drove in silence for only a few more minutes before she pulled to a stop in front of a nearby Starbucks.

I clapped with glee. “It’s like you read my mind!” I hurried out of the car and gimped into the cool building. We got in line, and while we waited Candice tapped at the screen of her smart phone. I peered over her shoulder to look and saw that she was on Facebook. “Updating your status?”

“No,” she said, thumbing through the screens. She didn’t say anything more; in fact, she was so engrossed with her phone that I had to order for her. It got downright annoying once I paid for our drinks and moved over to a table, leaving
Candice still standing next to the counter tapping at her screen.

“Yo, Cassidy!” I called to get her attention. Candice lifted a finger in one of those “hold on” moves, and I rolled my eyes and dove into my frozen caramel Frappuccino with extra whipped cream.

“Not the smartest choice for a woman a month away from fitting into her wedding dress, is it?”

I looked up. Candice had finally decided to join me. “Be nice to me or I’ll have Cat swap out your bridesmaid dress for that puffy purple number with the big bow.”

Candice smirked and tore open a packet of Splenda for her herbal tea. “Hey, take a look at this, Abs,” she said, once she’d finished stirring. She lifted her phone so I could see the screen.

I peered down. “The Bucket List,” I read. “Wasn’t that a movie?”

Candice turned the screen back to her. “It was. And a good one. But this isn’t related to that. It’s the Web site for Kendra’s business.”

I blinked. “I thought she was a stay-at-home mom.”

“She was. But she was also a fledgling entrepreneur.” My partner scooted her chair closer to me and propped up her phone so we could read it together. “Kendra created a profile questionnaire,” she explained. “Basically she set it up to ask you about thirty multiple choice questions, and after you submit the answers, the site sends you a personalized bucket list of your own.”

“You got a list, didn’t you?” I asked, knowing Candice too well.

She grinned. “Yeppers,” she said, switching over to her e-mail. “And I have to hand it to Kendra—the site’s good.”

“What’s in your bucket?”

Candice read a few off her list. “Snorkel the Great Barrier Reef. Run the Boston Marathon. Learn Italian.”

I cocked my head. “How do any of those things fit you?”

“Are you kidding? These are all things I’ve always wanted to do!”

I blinked. “Really?” Apparently, I didn’t know my best friend nearly as well as I thought I did. “You want to learn Italian?”

“Brice and I were thinking of Tuscany for our honeymoon.”

“Huh,” I said. I hadn’t even thought about our honeymoon. The CIA was paying for it, and my former handler at the agency was keeping it a well-guarded secret. I was suddenly regretting allowing him that indulgence. Maybe I wanted to go to Tuscany too.

“Anyway,” Candice said, pulling me back to Kendra’s Web site. “The other really cool thing about the personalized list Kendra sends you is that all the items on it have links to other sites where you can book whatever’s in your bucket. And if you book something through one of those links, Kendra’s site sends you a customized bucket of stuff to take along.”

That intrigued me. “Like what?”

“Well,” Candice said, tapping her screen again. “If I were
to book a trip to the Great Barrier Reef, I’d get a snorkel, a beach towel, a mask, sunscreen, Ray-Ban sunglasses, and a book on the history of the reef and the best places along it to snorkel. All of that would show up on my doorstep in this cool big beach pail, see?” Candice swiveled her phone so I could see the screen again.

“I like it,” I said, because I really
did
think it was a great idea. “So how did Kendra make money?”

“She must’ve had a deal worked out with all the sites she’d linked to. It also looks like she was pulling in a little advertising cash too.”

“Hey, Candice?”

“Yeah?”

“If Kendra’s dead, like I suspect, who’s running the site?”

Candice winked at me. “That’s exactly what I wanted to know.”

“You already found out, didn’t you?”

She took a demure sip of her tea. “Yep. It’s all there on her Web site under the ‘About us’ tab.”

“Should I guess who it is?”

She laughed. “No, sorry, I like drawing out the suspense. Kendra built, designed, and ran the site with her best friend, Bailey Colquitt. They’ve been BFFs since high school.”

“And we’re about to go pay Bailey a visit,” I said, already getting up.

“We are,” Candice agreed. But then she hesitated, eyeing me in that I-have-something-to-say-to-you-that-I-don’t-think-you’re-gonna-like kind of way.

I sighed. “What?”

Candice tapped the side of her cup. “You know I love you, Abs, right?”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, come on, Cassidy, just spit it out. What do you want me to do that I’m not gonna like doing?”

“It’s not so much what I want you to do; it’s what I don’t want you to say.”

I arched an eyebrow. “What don’t you want me to say?”

“Anything. Or rather, say nothing.”

“Shocking,” I said drolly.

Candice tossed her cup in the trash and swung her arm around my shoulders. “It’s just that the Woodyards seemed to me to be pretty conservative—”

“Wow, Sherlock, nothing gets by you, does it?” (Sarcasm is my middle name…)

“And,”
Candice continued like I hadn’t interrupted, “I think that same conservative viewpoint may have extended to their daughter and her friends. If we go in there all psychic guns a-blazing, well, you never know who we’ll turn off before we even get to ask our first question.”

“Fine. Whatever,” I said moodily, tossing my own empty cup in the trash. Thank God I’d had the dose of sugary, caffeine goodness, or I might’ve been a little more disagreeable.

“It’s not you,” Candice insisted.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said with a wave of my hand. “I know. It’s everybody else. Can we just go? I want to practice my silent treatment in the car.”

The drive over was a bit chilly, and I’m not talking about the air-conditioning. I think I was ticked off because I knew darn well that Candice was right. Still, I wasn’t able to let her
off the hook for being the messenger—it’d been a crappy morning, and maybe the both of us needed to be miserable to get along for the rest of the day.

Still, I will give Candice a whole lot of credit, because at the end of the drive she parked in front of a set of three edgy-looking townhomes that had to be worth half a million each, and let the engine idle for a minute. “Maybe this was a bad idea,” she said.

“Coming here or getting involved in the case?”

“Getting involved in this case. We’re a team, Abs, and maybe if these people won’t have
you
, then they won’t have
us
, you know?”

I shook my head and chuckled softly. “Don’t beat yourself up,” I said, opening the car door. “This isn’t about you—or me. It’s about Kendra. And we need to remember her no matter who we end up working for. Even if none of her family or friends hire us, or help us by giving up information, we can still work this case and bring Kendra some closure by nailing her killer. That we can do just for her, okay?”

Candice squeezed my arm. “Okay, Sundance. Thanks for the reminder.”

We got out of the car and headed up the walk to the middle town house, and I asked, “How’d you know where Bailey lives, anyway?”

“I had to root around a little, but I found it in tiny print at the bottom of the Bucket List.”

“I guess the girls weren’t making enough off the site to afford a professional office yet.”

Candice shrugged. “Why would they ever need one? I
mean, as long as they had enough room to prepare and send off their buckets, everything else could be run from a personal computer and a printer.”

I let Candice step in front of me, and she rang the bell. The front door had an outer rim of wood, but the inner door was mostly beveled glass, and it allowed us to make out shapes inside.

We saw someone approach—a shadowy figure at first, but then she took on a clearer form. I could see a slender build and long blond hair, but once she’d pulled open the door, I couldn’t help but be a little surprised; Bailey Colquitt was truly lovely. “Hello?” she said, welcoming us with a question.

Candice introduced herself formally as Candice Fusco, private investigator, then motioned to me without looking and said, “And this is my associate, Abby Cooper.”

Bailey’s long eyelashes fluttered while she, no doubt, tried to make sense of our appearance on her doorstep. “Ah,” was all she said, while her eyes continued to bounce back and forth between Candice and me like she was watching a tennis match.

Candice decided to be helpful. “We understand that your best friend, Kendra Woodyard, is missing.”

More eyelash fluttering followed by a jerky head nod.

“And my partner and I are considering taking the case,” Candice added, no doubt hoping that would get the dialogue flowing.

“Uh…?”

My partner and I exchanged a quick look, and I could see that Candice thought the same thing I did, namely, that
Bailey Colquitt was really lucky she was pretty, because we were laying odds that she was no mental giant.

“May we come in and talk to you about Kendra?” Candice asked after an awkward silence.

Bailey’s brows rose even higher on her smooth, unlined forehead, and it was like you could hear the gears in her head turning before she finally exclaimed, “Oh! Oh, yes! Please, y’all, come in.”

Bailey stepped aside as we entered. The first thing I noticed were the moving boxes. They were stacked everywhere—some open and erupting with white packing paper, others closed and bulging.

Candice and I exchanged another quick look. This one said, “Innnnnteresting.”

“Sorry the place is such a mess!” Bailey apologized, closing the door behind us and motioning with her hand for us to head down the hallway. “I’m in the middle of packing.”

“Moving somewhere close?” Candice asked.

“Sorta,” Bailey called over her shoulder as we reached the kitchen. “We’re…I mean,
I’m
moving closer to my folks in Dallas next month.”

I kept my mouth shut but made a point to raise my brows at Candice. I knew she caught that whole “We…I mean I’m…” thing too.

Bailey indicated two seats in front of the kitchen island, and I had to move a small box to take my seat. “Can I get you something to drink?” our host asked politely. “I’ve got soft drinks and water and iced tea. Or if you’d like I could squeeze some lemons for lemonade. Or I could make y’all some coffee?”

That’s one thing I really liked about living in the South—most everyone’s got good old-fashioned manners. “Thank you,” Candice said. “But we just had some coffee. I think we’re fine.”

Bailey nodded again and fidgeted with a dish towel on the counter. She seemed nervous to me. “Well, I’ll just get myself some iced tea, then.” Bailey turned away from us to get herself some refreshment, and Candice and I exchanged a whole new series of knowing looks.

Once we had Bailey’s attention again, Candice got right down to business. “As I said, we’re looking into the disappearance of your best friend, Kendra, and it’s come to our attention that you two were in business together. Is that correct?”

Bailey took a big ol’ sip of tea before she answered. It almost seemed like she was stalling. “The Bucket List was mostly Kendra’s idea,” Bailey told us. Right away I caught how she used the past tense, but I wasn’t sure if she meant it for Kendra or the Bucket List. “She came up with it right after she saw that movie, and before I knew it she’d hired a guy to design the Web site, and then she did all the research and the marketing and stuff that she needed to do to get it off the ground. Really, it was her baby all the way.”

“And yet,” Candice said, pretending to refer to her notes, “according to the Web site, the headquarters for the Bucket List are located here at your house.”

Bailey seemed surprised that we’d figured that out. Her fidgeting took on a whole new energy. “Well, yeah. That’s true. See, Kendra was real sweet, you know? She always wanted to include me in everything she did, so she convinced
me to be her business partner. I wasn’t really interested in it, but she swore it’d make money, so I went along with it.”

Again Bailey was using the past tense to describe her friend, and that made me wonder how she knew that Kendra was dead. I started to feel out her energy and tapped into a mix of stuff, much of it surprising.

Discreetly digging through my purse, I came up with a small notebook and began scribbling in it so I wouldn’t forget anything.

“So did it?” Candice asked after jotting down her own notes.

“Did it what?” Bailey asked.

“Did the site make money?”