Lethal Outlook: A Psychic Eye Mystery (33 page)

“Sorry for the last-minute intrusion,” Candice said, “but by any chance is Mr. Velkune available to see us for a few quick questions about Kendra Moreno?”

The girl’s eyelids fluttered as she took in Candice’s request. “Actually, I believe he and his wife were just about to leave,” she said.

At that moment we heard a woman’s amused laughter waft down the hallway and we all turned to see Garrett Velkune and a woman holding his arm come down the corridor. I was a little taken aback by Mrs. Velkune because she was a bit of a mismatch. Dressed smartly in a beautiful chocolate suede jacket with a cream silk blouse, paisley scarf, black leggings, and riding boots, she looked incredibly well put together. Especially when I took in the Chanel leather handbag and elegant jewelry, I figured her outfit alone cost at least ten grand. But although her hair was cut and styled in soft ash blond waves, it couldn’t hide a most unattractive face. Mrs. Velkune had puffy round cheeks, a weak chin, small beady eyes, and an unfortunate underbite. The poor woman looked like a Pekinese.

Still, Velkune was looking at her like he’d never seen anyone
so beautiful, and that moved me. Most guys as good-looking as Velkune would’ve gone for a model type like Bailey, but he’d obviously fallen in love with Mrs. Velkune the person, and I gave him big props for it.

When Velkune and his wife saw us, they both were brought up short. “Hi,” he said awkwardly. “Are you two here to see me?”

“Yes,” Candice said before stepping forward to extend her hand to Mrs. Velkune. “I’m Candice Fusco, a private investigator working on the Kendra Moreno case,” she explained.

Mrs. Velkune eased her arm from around her husband’s and shook Candice’s hand. “Oh, that poor girl,” she said. “I know Garrett’s been so torn up over her disappearance. I’ve been following the story on the news, and I can’t imagine what her poor family must be going through! I hope you’re helping the police make a case against the husband?”

My eyes flashed to Garrett, who seemed surprised by his wife’s statement. Candice, however, handled it with ease. “We’re just following the truth wherever it leads us. We all want to know what happened to Kendra.”

Mrs. Velkune nodded like she and Candice were totally on the same page. “I can wait out here, Garrett,” she said, moving over to take a seat. “You help these women and we’ll go to dinner when you’re done.”

For a moment Velkune seemed reluctant, but in a flash that was gone and he pushed a smile to his face and invited us into his office. “How can I help you?” he said when we’d all gotten comfortable around his desk.

As usual, after subtly turning on the recording app on her
phone, Candice took the lead. “Mr. Velkune, we just met with Bailey Colquitt and she said that she is also represented by you.”

He nodded. “Yes, I’ve been retained by Mrs. Colquitt.”

“She told us that even before she filed for divorce, you had advised her to take out as much money from any joint accounts she shared with her husband as she could get away with.”

Velkune’s face flushed and he laughed nervously. “She told you that?” he said, shifting in his seat. “I think she may have misinterpreted what I said. As I remember it, I asked her to start
saving
as much cash as she could before she officially moved forward with divorce proceedings. And I might have suggested that she keep that cash in a safe place so that she would have it handy when she moved out of the home she shared with her husband. I knew she’d need some money for living expenses and the like.”

“And your retainer, right?” Candice pressed.

Again, Velkune blushed. “Yes. I do require a retainer to begin divorce proceedings.”

“How much?” she asked him.

“It varies, but usually I ask for twenty thousand up front.”

My brow shot up. Twenty grand? Man, divorce was expensive.

“Were you aware that Bailey drained one of the Colquitts’ joint savings accounts?”

Velkune’s eyes widened, but my radar pinged. “No,” he said. “I had no idea.”

I tugged on my earlobe and I saw that Candice caught the
move. Velkune was lying. He knew all about what Bailey had done.

Candice then told him about what’d happened at the Starbucks. “That’s terrible!” he said. “I’ll call Mrs. Colquitt as soon as we’re finished and check on her.”

“When we left her, she was shaken but unhurt,” Candice assured him. “Still, that incident got me thinking about something else Bailey said when we sat down with her.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“She said that you had given the same sort of advice to Kendra before she filed.”

Velkune flushed red for a third time and cleared his throat. “Ms. Fusco, can I speak frankly?”

“Of course.”

“When clients come to me suggesting that they might be in some sort of physical danger from their spouse and talk to me about the necessity of moving out of the family home, I do on those rare occasions suggest that they have access to any resource they can use to see them through the many months or years it may take to get divorced. While frowned upon by many courts, in making that kind of a suggestion, I have done nothing legally, ethically, or morally wrong.”

Candice sat back in her chair and studied Velkune for a minute before commenting. “Yes, Mr. Velkune, I know you haven’t done anything illegal, and I’m on your side, I swear, but what worries me is that Kendra might have taken your advice and drained one of the joint savings or checking accounts, and that could have triggered a violent reaction from her husband just like what nearly happened today between
Bailey and Chase Colquitt. And if he in fact isn’t responsible for his wife’s disappearance, the minute a prosecutor figures out what you told Kendra to do, he’ll have even more evidence to send Tristan away for murder. What you advised Kendra to do really complicates things. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

Garrett leaned his elbows on the desk and ran his hands through his hair. “Do you think that’s what happened?” he asked. “Do you think that Kendra drained one of their accounts and Tristan reacted violently when he found out?”

“I don’t know,” Candice told him. “But we have to research every possible scenario. And when you said that Kendra came here the very morning she went missing, I’m quite positive that you were one of the very last people to see her alive. Did she come here with your retainer and can you think of anything that might help us figure out what she was thinking or planning to do next?”

Velkune sat back in his chair again. “Yes,” he said, “that morning she did have some cash on her. It wasn’t nearly enough for my full retainer, but it was enough to get us started. To be honest, she was in such a state of distress that I didn’t press her on it.”

“What was the state of distress about again?” Candice prompted.

“Well, she was of course worried for herself physically, but I believe her biggest fear was that she and her son would be separated. She had a sort of premonition and she felt strongly that Tristan would end up with Colby.”

“So she was worried about custody?” Candice asked.

“Yes. She was intent on leaving her husband and the home, but she was very worried about what people would think by her doing that. She knew they’d talk and gossip and speculate, and she was concerned about how that might affect what people thought of her long term.” Velkune then sighed and shook his head sadly back and forth. “She appeared to me to be very worried about everything, Ms. Fusco. I know I should have taken her fears more seriously, or given her more time that morning, but I had a wedding to get to. Still, I know I should have advised her to go to her parents’ house or the police, but when she came here she had worked herself up into hysterics, and I wasn’t sure how much of what she was saying was fact or fabrication. I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you that her visit to my office that morning left me confused and upset. I didn’t quite know what to think.”

I listened with an intuitive ear to everything that Velkune had said and found that it all rang true. But I still wasn’t convinced that Tristan was responsible, and none of it told us who the man in the baseball cap was.

Candice looked at me then and said, “Anything you want to ask?”

At first I almost said no, but then I thought back to that mysterious woman who had come to my office and first presented the case to me. I had a sudden desperate need to find her and attempt to convince her to tell us who had abducted and killed Kendra. She alone knew who was responsible, and while I could understand her situation and need to protect the attorney-client privilege, I wanted to find a way around that, a loophole that would allow her to hint at who’d done
it so that we could bring Kendra home and never again allow this man to tear another family apart. “Mr. Velkune,” I said, “can you tell me a little about the attorney-client privilege as it relates to keeping the secrets of someone you know to be guilty of a felony?”

Velkune pulled his head back and seemed confused by the change of topic. “I’m not sure I understand your question, Ms. Cooper.”

I didn’t want to reveal anything about the woman who’d come to see me. If I was going to protect her and her career, then I had to make sure I didn’t even hint that we’d been visited by this female attorney. I decided to speak in hypotheticals. “Say you’ve been retained by someone you know has committed murder,” I began. “But the police don’t know that your client’s done anything wrong, and you suspect that your client may do something violent in the future or even repeat that same crime again. Do you have the ability to break privilege and go to the police if you suspect the public at large is in danger?”

Velkune scratched his five-o’clock shadow. “That’s tricky,” he said. “You’d have to be more than just suspicious that the person was a threat to the public. And you’d need to have some sort of proof to back up and justify breaking the privilege, like a psychiatrist’s analysis, or a letter from your client making threatening statements. Something concrete. It couldn’t be subjective.”

I frowned. That’s what I was afraid of. “So if I was an attorney, and someone came to me, retained me, and said that they’d murdered someone but gave no concrete evidence of
the crime and I had nothing factual to show the authorities, there’d be nothing I could do to alert the police to investigate the crime?”

Velkune shook his head. “Right,” he said. “That’d definitely get you disbarred.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to word my next question just right. “What if you mentioned it to a friend, like, what if the attorney told someone they trusted and that friend went to the police. What would happen then?”

Velkune appeared amused by my hypothetical attempts to get around privilege. “That would still get the attorney disbarred and would definitely send the whole case into mistrial if it ever got out. I know it seems unbalanced and unfair, but our laws were created to protect the few innocent people caught up in the system. To protect the innocent you’ve also got to protect the guilty by extending everyone the same ironclad attorney-client privilege. Lawyers must be bound by that oath—to keep their clients’ secrets and reveal them to no one—in order for the system to work. Otherwise, clients would never be able to trust their attorneys, and then they couldn’t be assured the best defense.” Velkune then subtly checked his watch and I knew he was anxious to get out of there and go to dinner with his new bride, so I stood up and thanked him for his time.

We passed Mrs. Velkune in the lobby and she wished us a good evening. “They’re an odd couple,” I said when we were outside and safely out of earshot.

“You aren’t kidding,” Candice said, holding her stomach again. The poor girl needed to get her butt to the drugstore
soon. “I looked Velkune up after our first meeting, and the
Austin American-Statesmen
did a story on him and the missus after they announced their engagement. According to the paper, she comes from big oil money and he comes from a broken home. They met at some rodeo charity event where he says she wouldn’t give him the time of day, but he swears it was love at first sight.”

“I’m sure it was,” I said with a wink.

Candice bumped me with her elbow. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what everybody else thought too, but from what I read in the article, he seriously adores her. He says that she motivated him to change his life and he got out of riding steers and put himself through college, then law school. He sent her e-mails throughout the years he was in school, telling her how meeting her had redirected his life, and they struck up a correspondence, but she still refused to date him until he graduated from UT law school. The rest is history.”

“Huh,” I said, setting aside my skepticism as we got to the car. “So true love does exist?”

Candice grinned. “Aren’t we both living proof?”

She had me there.

A
round eleven o’clock that night I got a call from Candice. “You will never get to pick the restaurant again,” she moaned. She sounded terrible.

I gasped. “You okay?”

“No, Sundance,” she growled. “I’m seriously
not
okay.”

Poor Candice had been sick since shortly after getting
home, and it hadn’t let up. I knew that Dutch was working late—he’d left me a message on my voice mail—and that probably meant that Brice would be working late too. “Have you heard from Brice?”

“He’s still at the office,” she confirmed.

“You should call him, sweetie,” I said, already moving toward the closet to grab my coat and purse.

“No,” she said weakly. “He’s busy, and I look like hell.”

“I’m on my way,” I told her.

When I got to Candice’s condo, I very nearly called an ambulance. She was so pale, she was gray, and she could barely hold her head up. She also insisted I just let her die in peace next to the commode. I called Brice immediately and told him in no uncertain terms to get his butt home. I’d never seen Candice looking so bad. I wasn’t sure if I should call 911 or not, but I certainly couldn’t help her with my stupid bum hips.

Both Brice and Dutch were at the door within ten minutes, and when Brice took one look at Candice, he threw a blanket around her, picked her up, and headed toward the door. Dutch and I followed them to the hospital and stayed with Brice until the nurse came out to tell us that Candice was suffering from food poisoning and that her kidney function wasn’t so hot. They wanted to keep her overnight for observation. I felt a small wave of relief and knew she’d be okay. I said as much to Brice, but I also knew he’d worry about her until they released her.