Lethal Outlook: A Psychic Eye Mystery (13 page)

“I know. We’re dealing with a sick motherfecker.”

A corner of Candice’s mouth quirked. “Dutch lets you get away with ‘fecker’?”

“He’s learned to pick his battles.”

“Uh-huh, and how much is in the swear jar these days?”

“About three hundred,” I told her. What I didn’t tell her was that I probably owed the jar at least double that.

Candice’s knowing smile was just a wee bit smug for my taste, but I decided to pick my own battles too and focused back on the diagram by tapping the paper in Candice’s hand. “There are parts here that make no sense to me, and I can’t find an interpretation of the little factoids I’m able to pull out of the ether that would make them line up and help us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, this female that Kendra had some animosity toward—in a way, she feels responsible for Kendra’s murder, but I can’t figure out what Kendra did to spark the wrath of this duo.”

“Do you think it had anything to do with her Web business?” Candice wondered.

I was silent while I considered that, trying to find the connection in the ether, but the answer eluded me. The best that I could do was say, “If it did have anything to do with the Bucket List, it was indirect.” And then, the moment those words came out of my mouth, the answer was there, very clearly in my mind. “It had to do with a secret,” I whispered.

“A what?”

I cleared my throat and spoke louder. “Kendra was keeping a secret, and I think she may have threatened to go public with it. That’s what triggered her murder.”

“What was the secret?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea.”

Candice set the diagram down on the desktop and tapped her lip thoughtfully. “So we’ll need to keep prying into her personal life to come up with whatever it was that Kendra knew that someone else wanted to keep quiet.” After another small stretch of silence between us, she pointed to my line about where Kendra’s remains were and said, “She was buried in a shallow grave?”

I nodded. “Somewhere out in the woods.”

“What’s this mean?” Candice asked, pointing to the line labeled, “Wet Dog.”

I explained that I thought Kendra’s remains would be found in the not-too-distant future by someone’s dog. “Maybe a hiker will take his dog for a walk in the woods or something, and they’ll stumble upon her remains.”

“How soon are we talking?”

I shrugged. “Few weeks maybe?”

“That’s too long to wait,” Candice said softly while she studied my diagram again. “Here’s a question for you, Abs: Where’s her car?”

I rubbed my temples. I was starting to get a headache from focusing so long on Kendra. “Not near her,” I said, “and ask me more details about it later because my head’s starting to pound.”

“No sweat,” Candice said, but there was something bugging her, I could tell.

“What?”

Candice hesitated before she said, “Why would the killer separate Kendra from her car? I mean, he could have just as easily driven her car out into the woods and dumped both of them together. Digging a grave for her then dumping the car somewhere else seems like an awful lot of work, so why go to the trouble?”

The answer came to me quickly. “Bodies are smaller than cars, and easier to hide in the woods. Plus, you leave a body in a car, you’ve definitely got a murder on your hands, but if someone recovers Kendra’s car soon, then there’s still this question of where she might be. Or even if she could still be alive. Until you have a body, you have no hard evidence of murder.”

It was Candice’s turn to nod. “And you leave less trace evidence behind without a body in the trunk,” she said. “This guy, whoever he is, really thought this through. And he’s smart.”

“Which makes him even more dangerous.”

Candice didn’t comment, because something else on my diagram caught her attention. “Hold on, here, Sundance—you think Kendra was stabbed in the back?”

“Oh, that I couldn’t pinpoint exactly either, Candice. I know that she was taken by surprise from behind, and when I first focused on her initial attack, I felt that she thought she was in the presence of someone she trusted, turned her back to him, then was struck by something sharp from behind.
The area where I think she was struck was at the small of her back, and her legs immediately went out from under her. She felt somehow incapacitated—paralyzed even—by that first blow.”

Candice’s brow furrowed. “But the police found no trace evidence of blood at Kendra’s house.”

“I know, which is why I can’t say with any certainty that she was actually stabbed with a blade.”

“Could it have been a shot?”

I blinked. “You mean like from a gun?”

“No. Like from a syringe. Maybe the killer stuck her with a syringe filled with a paralyzing agent.”

I mulled that over for a moment. “Possibly,” I said. It made sense in a way, as it would explain the lack of blood splatter found at the scene. Even if the killer had cleaned up after himself, he was likely to leave behind at least a drop or two that the CSI techs would have discovered. “The one thing I can tell you is that how Kendra was immediately incapacitated is the biggest clue in fingering her murderer,” I said.

Candice cocked her head. “Say what?”

“I feel like this guy may have tried this before with another girl,” I explained, feeling out the energy as I went. “There’s a pattern here.”

Candice eyed me keenly before she shot out of the chair and hurried through the door. I got up a little more slowly and headed into her office, where she was already tapping on her keyboard. “I’m sending Brice an e-mail,” she said without looking up. “I’m asking him to check his database for
missing women who fit Kendra’s profile within the past three years.”

I hovered in the doorway until she was finished. When she looked up, I asked, “Now what?”

“We wait,” she said.

And wait we did. An hour went by and I busied myself by playing Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook. Candice did something equally productive—she played Scrabble.

Another hour went by and we finally got an e-mail reply from Brice. “He’s sent the list,” she told me, pressing the print command and moving over to her printer. After looking at it, she frowned and handed it to me.

“Eight women,” I read, “all reported missing from their homes in the middle of the day, but all their cases except three have been solved and the perps are either dead or in jail. Well, at least we’ve got three unsolved cases to possibly match to Kendra’s.”

“Not so fast, Sundance,” Candice told me. “Look again at the location of those three unsolved.”

“Two in Laredo and one in El Paso. Yeah, so?”

“Border towns,” Candice said. “Kidnapping is big business these days in places like that.”

“And most of the others are from high-crime cities like Houston and Dallas,” I remarked. “None of them are from Austin or Travis County.”

“We live in a nice safe city, Abs.”

“That’s probably what Kendra thought too.”

Intuitively I knew that none of the names on the list from
Brice were connected with Kendra’s killer, but I’d felt so strongly that I’d been onto something. I just
knew
the person responsible for killing Kendra was following a pattern. And then I thought of something. “What if he recently moved here?” I said.

“Who?”

“The killer!” I was getting excited. “Can you have Brice check the national database?”

Candice’s eyes widened. “Abs, that’s gonna come back with literally
dozens
of names.”

My shoulders sagged, and Candice took the sheet from me. “Listen,” she said, “how about I have Brice run the list and we keep it handy while we work the case. We can compare any suspects we develop against the list to see if there’s a match and go from there, okay?”

“Yeah. Okay. That’s a good compromise. And speaking of suspects, did you get a chance to look into Kendra’s BFF?”

Candice returned to her desk and motioned for me to sit too. “I did,” she began, “but I didn’t find much in her financials or her credit report to indicate Bailey might have been motivated to kill Kendra to gain control of the Web site and take all the profits for herself.”

“What’d you come up with?” I was convinced there was some sort of Bailey connection to Kendra’s disappearance, but what that was I hadn’t quite figured out yet.

“Well, for starters, Bailey likes to shop. In fact, Bailey likes to shop
a
lot
. But for the most part her credit is clean, and she pays the minimum on all her credit cards each month on time.”

“You mean her husband pays them on time,” I muttered.

Candice grinned. “Probably. Still, it appears that Bailey comes from money. Her former address before she got married puts her in the heart of some very pricey real estate. Even assuming she lived with her parents, you can’t find anything in that Dallas neighborhood for under two million.”

I whistled appreciatively. “There’s more you found out.” I was reading Candice’s expression.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “We were wrong to assume that Bailey doesn’t have a job besides what she earns from her half of the Web site. Mrs. Colquitt is a model for a local modeling agency here in town. And she does pretty well for herself, actually. She’s not quite at six figures, but she’s not far from it. Plus, I did a few calculations and made some calls last night to some of Kendra’s sponsors, and according to my figures, the Web site can’t be bringing in more than sixty to seventy thousand a year. Especially not in this economy.”

I sighed. Why couldn’t any of this be easy? “And yet,” I insisted, “I still think Bailey had something to do with all this. There’s a link in the ether that keeps connecting Bailey to what happened to Kendra.”

“Is that thread anything your radar can pin down?” Candice asked me.

I stared at the floor for a long couple of seconds, but, try as I might, I couldn’t pull the thread close enough to put words to it. “The best way I can describe it is that whatever happened to Kendra started with Bailey. Other than that, I’m sorry, but it’s too nebulous for me to define.”

Candice closed the lid to her laptop and rested her elbows on top of it. “Okay,” she said. “We’ll put Bailey on the back burner for now. If you get any more insights that point to her, we’ll take another look in her direction.”

“Sounds fair.” I got up to stretch and relieve the pain in my hips.

“How’s your physical therapy coming along?” Candice asked, obviously catching my stiff rise from the chair.

“Oh, crap!” I exclaimed, turning my wrist to check the time. I’d completely forgotten about my appointment that morning.

With a hasty wave I left Candice’s office in search of my purse and keys. Even if I made every light, I’d still be ten minutes late.

A
n hour and a half later I walked painfully back into the office. My hips were killing me and I was grouchy after my session with my physical therapist—who’d decided to pack an hour’s session into forty-five minutes.

“Hey, there, Hopalong,” Candice called as I gimped past her office on the way to mine.

I muttered something (it might’ve contained an expletive) and kept on trucking. Just as I was about to settle into my chair, Candice appeared in my doorway. “Don’t sit down,” she ordered.

I stood there, half bent, ready to plop my butt into the chair, and stared at her. “I seriously need to take a load off, Cassidy.”

“Then sit down in the car. I’ve managed to arrange a meet and greet with Tristan.”

Although it sounded familiar, my brain at first had a hard time making a connection. “Who?”

“Tristan Moreno. Kendra’s husband.”

I rolled my eyes and eased myself into the chair—“Defiant” is my second middle name. “Can’t you just go talk to him?” I asked wearily.

“Of course I could.”

I exhaled happily, leaned back in the chair, and closed my eyes. “Good,” I said. “Thanks, partner.”

No sooner had I gotten that out than I detected a slight movement behind me, and as I snapped my eyes back open, the chair was nearly pulled out from underneath me. “Hey!” I cried when I was roughly rolled away from the desk and pushed forward toward the door at an alarming rate of speed. “What the freak are you doing, Candice?!”

“As I said,” she told me, the strain of pushing my chair making her voice tight, “I
could
go talk to Tristan alone. But I’m not going to. I need that radar of yours to feel him out, Sundance, and letting you sit here and grouse about your hips all day isn’t going to help anyone. Including you.”

At the door Candice whipped me around and I almost flew out of the seat again. “Quit it!” I yelled, but it was no use; Candice was tugging me backward through my office door, and even though I reached out for the doorframe, she was too quick for me and all I grabbed was air.

Once we were through the door, Candice whipped me
around again, and she pushed me down the short hallway at breakneck speed.
“Are you crazy?”
I shouted. “What the hell has gotten into you?”

Candice ignored me and said not a word until we reached the front lobby. She stopped only long enough to spin me around backward yet again, yank open the door, and drag me out into the hallway.

“Candice!”
I cried, really alarmed now, because if I tried to launch myself out of the chair I’d most certainly hurt myself. “Quit. It!”

“Nope,” she replied in that most annoying determined tone she often took with me.

“My cane!” I protested, trying to claw the air behind me. “Just let me go back and get my cane at least!”

But I’d obviously touched a nerve with my partner, who continued to propel me all the way down the hallway, right up to the elevator. Only then did she let go of my chair and step in front of me while pushing the
DOWN
button. “You want to walk without your cane at your wedding, Abby?” she asked as the bell above the elevator dinged and the doors opened.

I didn’t say anything. I knew where this was headed.

Candice put her purse against the door to prevent it from closing, while waiting for me to answer.
“Well, do you?”
she demanded when I continued with the silent treatment.

“Yes,” I said meekly.