Lethal Outlook: A Psychic Eye Mystery (37 page)

“Brice is calling in the search on any perps with Tasers,” she said. “Can I call you back in two minutes?”

“No!” I told her, glaring angrily at the front door. Cat and her stupid timing! The doorbell rang again, and I impatiently got up to open it. I’d give her a piece of my mind the moment after I told Candice my news. “I know who did it!” I said, trying to juggle my cane and the cell and the door at the same time. “Hang on, though,” I added as I pulled it open. I’d been so sure that the alarm pinging in my head was to warn me about my sister that I hadn’t even considered that the alarm might be for someone else altogether, and as the person standing on my doorstep was revealed, I realized my horrible mistake.

“Abby?” Candice said. “You there?”

Kendra Moreno’s killer grinned wickedly at me as I stared at him, my mouth agape and frightened down to my toes. “Hey there,” he said casually, his eyes peeking out from under a Texas A&M ball cap. “Funny catching you here all alone, huh?”

“Abby?” I heard Candice say, more urgently this time.

I began to tremble and felt my knees grow weak. I dropped the phone and took a step back, unable to speak or scream or plead.

The friendly smile vanished, and out from behind the killer’s back appeared a long thin rod ending in a forked prong. I shrieked and whirled around, but my hips gave out and I went crashing to the floor.

In the next instant I felt the most god-awful hot sting of an electrical current pulsing up and down my spine. It hurt so much and was so consuming that I couldn’t even breathe. I just felt my whole body seize, and the torturous sensation seemed to go on and on.

Finally the current subsided and I was left to weakly draw in oxygen but otherwise lie there completely helpless. In the background I heard the faint sound of Candice’s shouts through the phone. Garrett Velkune picked up the cell with a gloved hand and chucked it so hard, it hit the wall, smashing into a thousand pieces.

“So you little bitches figured it out, huh?” he said, leaning down to pull my head up by the hair. “I got a visit from a newbie detective this morning. The runt said he heard that some psychic lady was working the case, and she had a hunch that Donna had been murdered by one of her clients. He said the psychic had told him right where to find Donna’s body, along with another woman who’d been missing for a couple of weeks now. He saw my name on Donna’s client roster, and he also saw an invitation to my wedding stuck to her fridge. He said he’d already spoken to one of the wedding guests—turns
out I was a half hour late to the big event, and he wondered what I’d been doing that’d made me so late to my own wedding.”

I tried to scream…to move…to kick…to do
any
thing, but my body refused to cooperate. I was rocked by spasms that left me utterly helpless and completely vulnerable.

“I knew you and your girlfriend were close to the truth,” he hissed, slamming my head down violently into the floor and splitting my lip in the process. “I just needed a little more time to convince my wife to move with me out of the country someplace with no extradition. There’re plenty of cozy little islands you can set yourself up on, you know,” he said, picking my head up again to glare angrily into my eyes.

Tears leaked down my cheeks and my ears rang with the pain of the head slam. “Puh…puh…puh…,” I stuttered. It was the only sound I could make. I couldn’t even get the word “please” out. Not that it mattered. Garrett was way beyond mercy at that point.

With a look of disgust, he pushed my head away and stood up. “You couldn’t just let the police go with Tristan, could you?” he snapped, kicking me hard in the leg. I felt nothing, and that terrified me. “Do you know how hard I worked to win Seely over?” he said next. “I
love
my wife, okay? And before I got married, I wanted one last little fling with no strings attached, and who better to have a fling with than a woman who’s about to leave her husband?”

Kendra. He’d had an affair with Kendra. I could see it all in the ether around him, how he’d seduced her and slept with her and thought nothing of it until she’d shown up in his
office the morning of his wedding and told him that she was pregnant. And he hadn’t lied to us in the interviews. He’d been totally honest. The last time he’d seen Kendra, she had been terrified and afraid for her life. And she’d been equally terrified about leaving her son, and her home, and having no one realize what’d happened to her. Velkune could state all those facts clearly because he’d been there, listening to Kendra plead for her life. A plea he’d ignored.

“That little bitch wanted to ruin everything!” he growled. “She waltzes into my office on my wedding day and announces that she’s pregnant and she’s leaving her husband. She wants me to know she’s going to file for child support. She says the kid is mine, and she wants me to be a part of its life. She then tells me that she wants me to leave Seely for
her
! Like I’d ever leave my angel Seely for a whore like that! I knew what she was up to too. If I went through with the wedding I could tell she was going to tell my wife about the kid! Seely would have left me in a hot second!”

Garrett was so angry that he kicked me in the thigh again. I knew the blow was bad, but I still felt nothing. I was close to losing it until I realized I could wiggle my fingers. Dutch was on his way home, and if I could keep Garrett talking, maybe, just maybe, Dutch could get here before it was too late.

Garrett grabbed me by the back of my shirt, lifting my torso completely off the ground. I could see the cattle prod in his right hand and I prayed like I’ve never prayed before that he wouldn’t use it on me again. “Donna was one of Seely’s bridesmaids. I knew she’d be at the church all morning
helping Seely get ready, and she’s got all those woods behind her house to hide a body in. I broke into her garage, borrowed her shovel, and buried that bitch. Then all I had to do was drive Kendra’s car around the back side of the lake and let it slip into the water.

“The whole thing would’ve gone off without a hitch too if I hadn’t left the cattle prod at Donna’s. When I went back to get it, Donna was there. She came back for a steamer because Seely’s dress was wrinkled or some bullshit. She saw me coming out of the woods, dirty, sweaty, carrying the cow prod, and with a fair amount of blood on my shirt. I knew right then that the only way to keep her from talking was to retain her on the spot as my attorney and hope she kept her mouth shut—but she obviously didn’t, because she came to see you, didn’t she?”

I realized that Velkune had put all my little hypotheticals together, and he’d known that Donna had come to me. That’s why he’d killed her. I’d been the one to seal her fate, and that was an awful thing to realize.

I sucked in a ragged breath and closed my eyes. I had to think, and I couldn’t do that with the horrible feelings of guilt, fear, and pain all threatening to overwhelm me.

Garrett shook me hard, forcing me to open my eyes and look at him. “I had it all worked out too,” he said. “On our honeymoon I talked Seely into moving overseas, but she wanted to come back home for the holidays, and I knew she’d get suspicious if I pushed too hard, so when we got back, I drafted up that motion for Kendra’s divorce the second I could. I figured that’d throw the suspicion permanently onto
Tristan, but then you and your bitch of a partner had to keep picking away at things, didn’t you?” He snarled viciously at me, shaking me one last time before dropping me again. My body landed with a hard thud on the floor. Garrett then stepped over my still-twitching form. He headed toward the kitchen. “Where’re your keys?” he demanded.

I wiggled my fingers and managed to move my hand.

“Keys!”
he shouted from the kitchen.

I closed my eyes, and more tears leaked down my cheeks. Candice would send help, but once Garrett found my keys, we’d be out of here in less than a minute. And although it felt like a lifetime, really only about two minutes had passed since Velkune had come into the house. Candice would’ve called me back before calling the police. Their response time was good, but was it two minutes good?

I heard footsteps approach and I opened my eyes just in time to duck my chin as he kicked me in the back. That one I felt because it just about knocked all the air out of my lungs.
“KEYS!”

Somehow I managed to whisper, “Up…,” and point with one shaking finger toward the stairs. Garrett swore and tore up the steps. My keys weren’t up there, however; they were in my purse resting on a hook in the front hall closet. I knew that Garrett would do a quick cursory search of the upstairs looking for my keys, and when he didn’t find them, he’d come downstairs and kill me. I also knew why he’d picked me over Candice. Candice lived in a crowded high-rise condo, and Garrett would never catch her alone and isolated. But I was a different story. He could lie in wait on a day like
today and easily catch me alone. If he killed me, it would devastate her. Two birds, one stone.

The second he’d bolted up the stairs, I knew what I had to do. I set my sights on the coffee table. My body was still convulsing and shaking violently, but I knew I had only one chance left. If he came down those stairs before I reached my goal, I was dead.

Gritting my teeth, I reached out and clawed at the floor, pulling myself only a few inches as I listened to him stomping around upstairs. Focusing with all my might, I tried again, and this time I was able to pull myself several feet. My heart hammered in my chest when I heard furniture being toppled, and I reached again and again, frantic now to get to the beech-wood box resting peacefully on top of the table.

I heard footfalls on the landing and knew Velkune was about to descend the stairs. I clawed again and got to the table. His footsteps started to descend, and I reached up and pulled at the box. It toppled down on top of me, striking me in the cheek, but I barely winced. The latch flipped up and the box cracked open. Garrett was midway down the stairs.

My hand was now shaking so hard, I could barely wedge it into the opening. “You think you’re so smart,” he was saying as he reached the last few steps. “Sending me on a wild-goose chase upstairs, huh?”

I curled myself around the box, willing my fingers to clutch the grip of the gun and pull it free. “You ever wonder what it’s like to be electrocuted, Abby?” he asked as he reached the landing and began to make his way back over to
me with that cattle prod held out in front of him sending little blue currents between the two prongs of the fork.

I tore my eyes away from it and focused on the gun.

“If you get hit with one of these at the base of your neck, they say that you can hear the blood in your brain boil before you die.”

I clenched my jaw so tight it hurt and rolled to the side just as he raised the prod to jam it into my neck. The rod went into the floor and three bullets went into Garrett Velkune.

He dropped to his knees and stared at me as if he couldn’t believe I’d actually shot him. Then he fell over backward and was still.

I managed to squirm over to the sofa and prop myself up against it so I could lay the gun on my belly, still pointing it feebly at Velkune’s body, worried that someone that evil might actually thwart death and get up to attack me again. The sound of sirens finally came to my ears, and just then Dutch burst into the room, gun drawn and looking as shaken as I’ve ever seen him. His eyes darted about the room, spotting first Velkune, then me, then going back to Velkune.

“What the hell happened?” he shouted, his face pale and frightened as he looked again at me.

I managed to wave the gun a little in Garrett’s direction. “He brought a cattle prod to a gun fight,” I said, and then I actually laughed. It wasn’t a good healthy laugh, more like a “I can’t believe I just survived that” laugh. It still felt good, either way.

Dutch holstered his weapon and came forward, and just as he got to me I heard someone else’s voice coming up the
steps. “Dutch? Your car’s parked all caca in the driveway. I could barely get my Mercedes to fit and I didn’t want to leave it in the street. Those sirens sound like they might be coming this way. I wonder what all the fuss is about?”

And then my sister’s face appeared in the door, and she dropped her wedding binder the moment she took in the scene. It made a loud thud, but not as loud as the shriek that erupted out of her when she saw us. Guess that’ll be the last time she drops by unexpectedly.

Meanwhile Dutch bent down and picked me up into his arms. “Sweet Jesus!” he whispered as he cradled me close. “Candice called me and said you were being attacked. I heard the gunshots from down the street and I thought…” He didn’t finish his sentence; he just held me close.

When he finally let me go a little, I wiped the moisture from his cheeks and managed a weak smile. “Thanks for the wedding present, cowboy,” I told him. “On our anniversary, could you maybe get me a holster?”

I
was sent to the hospital along with Garrett Velkune, who, miraculously, had survived the three bullets I’d pumped into him. If there was any justice at all to be found that day, it was in the fact that one of those bullets had permanently paralyzed him from the waist down.

The police began to put together the pieces of the Moreno and King cases, and they took a lot of the confession Garrett had given to me to lead them through the discovery of evidence, because Velkune wasn’t talking.

His ever-faithful wife had hired the best defense lawyer money could buy, but I doubted it would get him anything other than maybe a life sentence instead of the chair. That was better in my book. I wanted him to suffer for as long as possible.

DNA on Kendra’s fetus came back positive to Velkune, and everyone from his wedding remembered him being late to the big event. Someone at Decker Lake also remembered seeing a guy in a ball cap pass by driving a silver Toyota Camry along the lake road, but then later seeing the same man jogging the other way on that road with no sign of the car. Investigators found a path through the woods behind Donna’s house that led to that part of the road, and they knew that was likely the route that Velkune had taken back to Seely’s after dumping the car.