Lethal Outlook: A Psychic Eye Mystery (14 page)

Candice nodded, came around to the back of my chair again, and tipped the whole thing forward. I barely got my
hands out in front of me before she dumped me out onto the floor. “If you truly want to walk without that cane, Sundance, then it’s time to start practicing.”

“Why
are you being so mean to me?”
I shrieked when she grabbed hold of the chair and shoved it back down the hallway away from me.

“I’m not being mean,” Candice said, finally turning away from me to pick up her purse and walk casually into the elevator. Putting an arm out to hold the doors, she said, “For the past month I’ve barely seen any improvement from you, even though I know you’re going to all your physical therapy appointments. You should’ve let go of that cane two weeks ago, Abs. It’s time to walk, honey.”

My lower lip was quivering and I was on the verge of tears again. Candice had once trained me into shape, and I’d quickly discovered that her methods were all drill with equal parts sergeant mixed in.

And I knew that this was another form of her tough-love method, but the truth was that she had really struck a nerve. I’d thought the exact same things she had about my slow recovery. I’d plateaued and wasn’t making any further progress. I wanted to let go of the stupid cane so badly, but I felt too unsteady on my feet without it. But maybe she had a point. Maybe all I had to do was let go and take a chance.

“Fine,” I said. If Candice believed in me, then I knew I could do it. Slowly, using the wall, I stood up straight and tall, and Candice gave me a nod of encouragement. Squaring my shoulders and fixing my gaze on her, I lifted my right leg, felt my left hip go out, splayed my arms wide for something
to grab onto, and, finding nothing, went headfirst straight into the back of the elevator, striking it headfirst with a loud
whump!

Once the stars clouding my vision cleared, I was able to make out Candice’s half-amused, half-concerned face hovering above me. “Wait here,” she said. “I’ll be right back with your cane and an ice pack.”

“I
s there a bump?” I asked, holding the sad excuse for an ice pack she’d brought me to my forehead as Candice weaved her way through traffic.

“No,” she said without looking.

I narrowed my eyes at her but found that hurt, so I relaxed them immediately. I now had a killer headache. Pulling down the visor, I gazed at my wound in the vanity mirror. I had a pretty good welt and a slight scratch hovering over my right eye.

“That’s just great,” I grumbled. “Something to go with my scorpion sting.”

Candice finally decided to look guilty. “Do you want me to take you to the doctor?” she asked sweetly.

I pushed the visor back into place. “No. Thanks, though.” Then I focused on our mission and asked, “How do you want play this? Did you want me to keep the psychic guns holstered?”

Candice drummed her fingers on the top of the steering wheel, and I, for one, was most relieved to see her hands actually
on
the steering wheel. “I don’t think so. I’m going to say that with Mr. Moreno we should be blunt and honest.”

My brows shot up (mistake!) and I put the nearly melted ice pack against my bump again. “You really want to tell him I’m your psychic sidekick?”

“Yes.”

“But that shut down Kendra’s parents,” I said, already wondering why I was fighting her on this.

“Yes,” Candice repeated before she elaborated. “Obviously, Kendra’s parents didn’t abduct her.” I saw her eyes then dart sideways to me. “They didn’t, did they?”

“I highly doubt they had anything to do with her murder.” There hadn’t been a hint of that in the ether.

“Right,” my partner agreed, turning her gaze back to the road. “People who aren’t guilty can afford to be skeptical of your abilities. People who are guilty can’t.”

“Ahhhh,” I said. “I get it. If I go in, all psychic guns blazing, we can see how nervous or interested that makes him.”

Candice pointed a finger gun at me. “Bingo,” she said. “But only show off your skills if he asks for a demo, Abs. I just want to inform him about your superpowers and see what he gives up first.”

“Got it.”

We arrived at the Moreno residence five minutes later, and I was relieved to see the news crews had abandoned the area for the time being. Still, Candice parked down the street in front of another house and said, “Don’t want some nosy
reporter running my plates and leaking that Moreno is meeting with a private eye,” she said. “We should try to keep as low a profile as possible for the time being.”

I shrugged and got stiffly out of the car. Between my physical therapy and that stint in the elevator, it was a miracle I was still ambulatory. “You okay, Sundance?” Candice called over the top of the car. I thought it was nice that now that I’d managed to give myself a hematoma, she was finally showing some concern.

I winced and hobbled around to her side. “Ducky,” I said, not really meaning it, but for the time being I thought I could suck it up.

Candice walked nice and slow, thank God, and we went up the Morenos’ driveway and around to the back. “Tristan told me to come to the rear door,” Candice explained. “He’s stopped answering his front door altogether.”

I felt a twinge of empathy for the guy. I mean, at this point we didn’t really know if he had anything to do with Kendra’s disappearance or not, and if he didn’t have anything to do with it, then he had to be suffering not only the loss of his wife, but also all the unwanted attention and accompanying innuendo from the press corps.

Still, as we waited for him to answer Candice’s knock on the back door, I worked to push that aside and gather my impressions of him with an open mind.

Tristan Moreno wasn’t at all what I had expected. Tall, broad shouldered, and surprisingly handsome, he answered the door with a polite but wary smile. “Miss Fusco?”

Candice stuck out her hand. “Please, call me Candice,”
she said, then turned to me. “Tristan, this is my partner, Abigail Cooper.”

Tristan shook my hand, and I found it warm and dry. “Please come in,” he said, stepping to the side.

We entered the cozy pale blue kitchen, with white chair-rail molding, matching white cabinets, and travertine tile floors. The space was large and inviting, and the atmosphere still had a residual warmth to it.

That, to me, was important, because so often when I enter a home where a couple is having problems, I can pick up on the energy of their arguments. I looked for any telltale signs of that in the ether but felt more a sense of neutrality in the space. If this couple argued, they either did it quietly, or they did it in a room other than the kitchen.

I eyed Tristan again with curiosity. Although he was still smiling politely, I could see the slight strain about his eyes. There was also this underlying fear that he was trying hard to conceal, and yet he wasn’t nervous about meeting us. That was evident from his dry palm and the energy surrounding him.

He offered us a seat at the table and asked if we wanted coffee. This time, Candice accepted and Tristan busied himself quietly for a moment, his movements slow, methodical, reminding me a bit of my fiancé.

When our host set down two steaming mugs and some cream and sugar for us, Candice dove right into the interview. “As I told you on the phone, Abby and I are investigating your wife’s disappearance.” I noticed she distinctly didn’t mention that no one had yet hired us.
Smart,
I thought. Better to save it till we could feel him out.

At the mention of his wife, Tristan’s eyes closed tightly for the briefest of seconds, as if hearing out loud that Kendra had vanished hurt him deeply. “Yes,” he said, his voice never betraying what I suspected he was feeling. “Can I ask, though, who hired you?”

Candice offered him a sly grin. He’d seen right past her dodge. “We’re working on behalf of someone concerned for your wife,” she replied evasively.

Kendra’s husband took a seat at the table, his expression puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

Candice’s eyes flickered to me, and I knew she was looking for a way out of answering the question directly. “You see,” she said, “my partner here is a professional intuitive. She’s done work with several police departments, and she currently holds a position as a civilian profiler with the FBI here in Austin. She consults with them on some of their most difficult cases.”

Tristan’s gaze shifted to me, and I found only curiosity in his pale gray eyes. But then I saw something more, and those eyes narrowed and he looked more closely at me. It made me uncomfortable until he said, “You’ve got a welt on the top of your forehead. Did you fall or something?” His eyes then slid down to my cane, and he seemed to assume that’s exactly what had happened.

I put a hand up to cover the welt. “It’s nothing,” I assured him. “Really, I’m fine.”

Tristan got up and moved to his freezer. Pulling out a package of frozen peas, he brought them over to me along with a clean dish towel. “Here,” he said.

I took them gratefully but felt my cheeks heat up with embarrassment. “Thank you. I bumped my head in the elevator right before we came here.” I made sure to sneak in a dirty look at Candice, which she pretended not to see.

Tristan took his seat again and kept his focus on me. “Are you really a psychic?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what happened to my wife?” Tristan’s gaze never left mine.

I cleared my throat and dropped my eyes to the table. “I think so, Mr. Moreno. Yes.”

For a long moment there was only silence, and when I glanced up again, I could see that Tristan’s eyes were glistening with tears. “You think she’s been murdered, don’t you?”

I had the urge to look at Candice, but I resisted. My sense was that Tristan knew intuitively that his wife was dead and he was simply looking for someone to agree with him. Still, I kept my answer a bit elusive. “I can’t be sure. It’s only a feeling, but, to answer your question, yes, I do suspect the worst may have happened to her.”

Tristan put his fist to his mouth, and he seemed to struggle mightily against a tide of emotions. There was another pause, during which no one said anything, and when Candice opened her mouth to speak, I reached out and squeezed her arm. I wanted to give Tristan a moment.

At last he got up and went to the sink. Turning the water on, he just let it run for a few seconds, and then he put his hands under the cool water before splashing a small handful onto his face.

He cleared his throat several times, then wiped his face with a paper towel and came back to the table. “Kendra would
never
have left Colby alone in the house,” he said, his voice hoarse and a bit choked.

“Colby’s your son?” I asked him.

Tristan nodded.

“Can you tell us what happened that day, Tristan?” Candice asked gently. “The day Kendra went missing. Can you take us through the moment you came home to find her missing?”

Tristan wiped his face again with the paper towel before speaking. “I came home around six,” he said. “The first thing I noticed was that the house was dark. Kendra’s always got a light on, you know; it’s one of those things she does. I leave the cap off the toothpaste and Kendra’s a hog with the electricity.” I saw an amused look come over Tristan’s face before he seemed to remember that Kendra wouldn’t be leaving the lights on ever again, and that amused expression faded away like smoke on the wind.

He took a small sip of his coffee and I saw that his hand was shaking slightly. “Anyway,” he said, closing his eyes as he continued. “I came up the back stairs and I saw that the kitchen door was open, and not just a little open—wide-open. I didn’t think that was weird at first. I mean, I remember wondering if Kendra hadn’t noticed that it was open, and the wind blew it or something. But, what hit me right after that was that she wasn’t in the kitchen and there was no dinner on the stove.”

“Your wife is a good cook?” Candice asked when it appeared that Tristan was getting choked up again.

He swallowed hard and nodded. “Yeah. She loves to cook. Usually when I get home, dinner is ready and we eat a little early so that we don’t keep Colby up too late.”

“But that night there wasn’t anything prepared on the stove?” I asked. Tristan shook his head. “What about ingredients on the counter?” I pressed. If it was obvious that Kendra was preparing dinner, then it might help us pinpoint a time when she was murdered.

But Tristan only shook his head again. “There was nothing on the counters,” he said. I noticed then that Candice had discreetly set her phone down on the table, and although it was lying on its face, I suspected the phone was recording the entire conversation.

“Then what?” she asked him.

“Well, I called out to her, but she didn’t answer me, and somewhere upstairs I could hear Colby crying, so I called out to Kendra a couple more times, but again she didn’t answer. So on my way toward Colby’s room, I passed by the front door, and something about it caught my eye and I stopped to look at it.”

“What was it?” I asked.

“It was unlocked and open just a crack.”

“You noticed that?” Candice asked.

Tristan gave a small nod. “Yeah. I know it’s a weird thing to notice, but the dead bolt is always lined up linear, and as my eyes passed the door, I could see that it was horizontal. It was something that was out of place and made me take a pause. Neither of us ever went through the front door because it sticks a little and it’s hard to close once it’s been
open, so we just keep it shut and locked unless we have company over or we have a package delivery or something like that.”