Deadly Forecast: A Psychic Eye Mystery (16 page)

I shook my head again. “I have no idea.”

Candice put the cassette tape in the little well under her dash and started the engine.
“Let’s get back to your fiancé and fill him in. I’d feel better if someone could pull
Banes’s phone records ASAP.”

I took my phone out of my purse and called Agent Rodriguez. “Hey,” I said when he
answered. “It’s Abby. Candice and I just met with Banes. Did you happen to pull his
phone records before calling the lead in to Agent Rivers?”

“Not yet,” he said. “Harrison ordered us all out of the office to comb through the
Padilla girl’s residence.”

“Are you at the best friend’s house or Michelle’s mom’s?” I asked him.

“The friend’s place.”

“Okay, we’ll meet you over there after we pick up Dutch.”

There was a pause, then, “Agent Rivers is here, Cooper.”

“WHAT?”
I shouted.
“You put that man on the phone this instant!”

There was another pause (Rodriguez was probably trying to repair his eardrum) before
I heard Oscar say, “Agent Rivers! Cooper would like to talk to you, sir.”

Yet another (much longer) pause, then, “Now don’t get excited, sweethot—”

“Don’t you dare tell me not to get excited, Roland H. Rivers!”
Next to me, Candice was wincing and leaning all the way over to her left.

“Abigail?” I heard next, and I realized the phone had been passed to Director Gaston.

I was so mad and so startled that I couldn’t really speak. “Sir,” I said after a moment.

“I personally picked Agent Rivers up from Mrs. Padilla’s office. He’s been under my
protective watch ever since, and he’s wearing his vest. Are you on your way?”

I cleared my throat. “Yes, sir. We’re en route. We’ll be there in…?” I looked at Candice.

She eyed me with a calm smile. “Tell him fifteen minutes.”

“In fifteen minutes, sir.”

“Now ask him for the address.”

I cut Candice an angry look. I might have to murder someone myself by the end of the
day.

We arrived at the house Michelle had shared with her best friend almost exactly fifteen
minutes later. As she parked next to another fire hydrant, Candice grinned at me in
that “told you so” kind of way. I wondered if it annoyed her as much as it did me
when I was right about stuff and grinned like that.

We got out and headed toward the small one-story home, painted bright white with lime
green shutters. As we came up the walk, I had to watch my step—it was littered with
dead crickets, as was the porch. An iron security door was propped open by a folding
chair and inside the house was swarming with agents.

I walked inside and felt a chill travel down my spine. I didn’t like the energy in
the house. My attention had been focused on finding Dutch, but as I walked through
the entry and felt that chill, I paused to really take in my surroundings.

The first room we entered was a spacious living room, with the kitchen off to the
left. To the right was a half bath and next to that was a hallway, which I assumed
led to the girls’ rooms.

The place smelled sharply of spices—cloves, ginger, and coriander. I assumed either
Michelle or her best friend was a decent cook.

I moved over to the kitchen, separated from the living room by a half wall, and lifted
the lid of a large tin set atop the wall.
The tin was loaded with small Baggies of various exotic spices. Looking around the
kitchen, I saw the sink piled high with dirty dishes and the counters splattered with
food stains and crumbs, while a shiny layer of grease coated the stove and the microwave
above it. Beside the stove was a garbage can overflowing with trash and I shivered
again, barely suppressing the urge to flee the interior.

Instead, I walked behind the half wall and something crunched underfoot. I knew even
without looking down that I’d just stepped on a bug, because in the light of the kitchen,
I could see that there seemed to be a dead bug in every corner. I shivered anew.

Candice came up next to me. “
How
do people live like this?” she whispered. Candice was an even bigger neat freak than
me, and her mouth was turned down in a frown of disgust. “There’re dead bugs all over
the living room carpet too.”

I swallowed hard and turned away from the kitchen. “Well, at least they’ve tried to
take care of the problem,” I said, waving my hand at the ones on the counter. “Obviously
someone’s been out to take care of the critters.”

“Yeah, but until you clean the place up, the critters will keep coming back.” At that
moment I spotted Dutch coming out from the hallway leading to the bedrooms. He wore
a similar look of disgust. “Cowboy,” I called.

His head snapped in my direction and he crooked his finger at me. We went over to
him and he said, “This place is a shithole.”

I had once woken up to find Dutch’s side of the bed empty and odd sounds coming from
the kitchen. When I’d gone to investigate, I’d found him scrubbing a roasting pan
that’d been left to soak before we’d headed upstairs for the night. He’d confessed
that he’d been unable to sleep knowing the pan was in the sink. It was something his
veteran of the navy father had impressed
upon him—never leave a kitchen in less than pristine condition.

“I take it the bedrooms are just as bad as out here?”

“Might be worse,” he said. “These girls are pigs.”

“They’re also young and crazy busy,” I reminded him. I didn’t think I’d been the neatest
person in my twenties either. Then again, I was certain I hadn’t lived like this.

Dutch nodded, but I think he did so just to move on. “You get anything from in here?”
he asked me.

I looked around again, not at the mess but with the eyes of an intuitive. “There’s
a bad vibe in here.”

“What kind of bad vibe?”

I shook my head, moving away from him and over to the living room. There was a sliding
glass door mostly covered by venetian blinds. Pulling the cord to open the blinds,
I hesitated in front of it. Dutch came over to me. “What?” he asked.

I saw that he was wearing gloves and pointed to the handle. “Try that, would you?”

“It’s locked,” he remarked, pointing to the small metal lever, which was in the upright
position indicating the door was locked.

“Try it anyway,” I said, my radar buzzing like crazy. Dutch did and he let out a breath
when the door opened easily. Bending down to inspect the catch, Dutch called out,
“Cox!”

Another agent came over to us, and Dutch pointed to the handle and the lock. “This
has been tampered with. Get the techs to fingerprint the whole door.”

Agent Cox nodded and went in search of a fingerprint tech.

I moved away from the door and noticed that Candice was keeping a watchful eye on
me. I smiled at her—she always had my back—before moving toward the hallway leading
to the bedrooms. I walked slowly and had to move out of the way twice so that agents
could get past me. Stopping at the first bedroom, I
let my radar extend outward, but I already knew that wasn’t the room to investigate.

I then moved on down the hall to the end, stopping in front of the open door that
I knew marked Michelle’s room.

The bedroom was a mess. Clothes were strewn all over, and whether they were clean
or dirty was anyone’s guess. The bed was unmade and there was something else, something
that gave me the chills. The room had a sense of violence in it. I scrutinized the
walls, the ceiling, the closet doors. No blood splatter or marks to indicate that
a struggle had gone on here, but I was convinced one had taken place…recently.

I was also pretty sure that Dutch and his team simply looked at this space as a young
woman’s messy bedroom, but not me. “Something happened in here,” I said.

“What?” Dutch asked. I’d felt him come along behind me as I navigated my way into
Michelle’s room.

“There was a struggle. Michelle lost.”

“Someone attacked her?” Dutch asked. I looked at him over my shoulder. His gaze was
roving all up and down the walls.

“Someone took her.”

Dutch put a hand on my shoulder. “You think she’s been kidnapped?”

I nodded.

Dutch scratched his head. “Then she’s not our bomber?”

“No, she’s our bomber,” I said. The dental records would take at least twenty-four
hours to be matched with the body in the morgue, but I
knew
that Michelle was the girl from the beauty shop.

Dutch sighed. “None of this makes sense.”

“Tell me about it.” Turning on my heel to go back out into the living room, I found
Cox there with the fingerprint tech and the sliding glass door was now covered in
gray powder.

“Anything?” Dutch asked Cox when he joined me there.

Cox shook his head. “The door’s been tampered with, but other than a broken lock,
we got nothin’, Agent Rivers.”

Candice was inspecting the handle herself and she had a quizzical look on her face.
“Which is pretty strange, don’t you think?” she said. “There should be a few prints.
Some from the two girls at the very least.”

My brow rose. “The handle has been wiped clean?”

“The handle and the wall next to the handle,” Candice said, waving her hand at the
area beside the door handle, which was just one big black smudge.

“Abby thinks there was a struggle in the bedroom.”

“What kind of a struggle?” Cox and Candice said together.

“The kind that didn’t end well for Michelle,” I told them. “I think she was abducted.”

Dutch rubbed his face. He looked tired and stressed-out. His phone buzzed and he took
it out to look at the display. With a groan he showed it to me. My shoulders slumped.
I took his phone and answered it for him. “Hey, Cat,” I said, knowing my sister had
likely called my own cell a half dozen times before trying Dutch.

“Where are you two?” she demanded.

“I’m fine. You?” I said.

“I didn’t ask how you were,” she snapped, completely missing my sarcasm. “I asked
where
you were! You guys are twenty minutes late!”

I was tempted to hang up on her. She’d been driving Dutch and me crazy with all this
wedding stuff. Cat was our unofficial wedding planner. Unofficial only in our minds,
however. My sister was taking the role very officially. “We’re at a crime scene,”
I told her. “And we can’t break free.”

“What?”
she exclaimed. “Abby! You do know you’re getting
married in two weeks, right? I can’t keep rescheduling these appointments!”

“What’re we late for now?” Dutch asked.

“I have no idea.”

“I have the caterer, the cake baker,
and
the photographer here! You have to come!” Cat shouted. “And where is Candice? She
was supposed to be at her final fitting appointment ten minutes ago too!”

I turned to Dutch. “Cat has the—”

“I heard,” Dutch said, waving at me to give him the phone. “We’ll be there in twenty
minutes, Cat.”

“You want to leave?” I asked him when he’d hung up. “Now?”

Dutch looked around at his team. “There’s nothing here,” he said. “We’ve searched
through everything, and there’s no bomb-making equipment, no incriminating notes,
printouts, or books, and there’s nothing on Michelle’s computer except the usual college-girl
stuff. I’ll have the techs go over her room to try to find any sign of a struggle,
but for now, there’re no leads here, and I could seriously use a break from this.”

I eyed him doubtfully. “Do you think Gaston’s gonna let us go?”

“Go where?” asked a voice behind me.

I jumped a little and turned to see the director standing right behind me. “Dutch
and I have an appointment for our wedding to go to, sir.”

“Ah, well, you shouldn’t miss it. Go on, you two, we can handle this.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll keep my phone on,” Dutch promised. “Call if you need us back.”

Gaston nodded and said, “Take the afternoon, Rivers. We’ll handle it from here today.”

Candice led the way out of the house and I was still pretty
surprised that the director had let us go so easily. “That was nice of him,” I said
as we piled into Candice’s car.

“He knows he’s going to have to give you two up to the wedding soon anyway,” Candice
said. “I mean, it’s not like he can ask you to postpone the nuptials.”

Dutch snickered like he thought that was funny. “I’m surprised he hasn’t asked us
to do just that.”

Candice laughed. “Me too.”

But I looked out the window, trying to hide my disappointment that the director hadn’t
asked. If he had, I knew I’d have taken him up on the offer, and that troubled me
more than I could say….

S
tanding next to his car at the top of the hill, Dutch looked so pale and shaky that
M.J. worried he might be ready to faint. Instinctively she moved closer to him and
placed a steadying arm under his. “Stay with me,” she told him. “Breathe, okay?”

“How did this happen?” he muttered. And then he lifted his chin and searched M.J.’s
face pleadingly. “Can you tell me where she is?”

M.J. bit her lip. She knew what the answer would be, and yet she asked his dead cousin
anyway.
Chase,
she said,
can you see where Abby is?