Deadly Forecast: A Psychic Eye Mystery (22 page)

“We’re dealing with an unsub here,” Candice said, using bureau jargon for “unidentified
subject.”

“Yes,” I told her. “And I think that we’re only dealing with one person here. A male
unsub with psychopathic tendencies who’s got some sort of sick agenda he’s working
through. There’s a reason the girls were sent where they were. I don’t believe the
locations were chosen at random, and I believe they have meaning to this guy. It’s
a puzzle that we have to figure out.”

“But how could he force these girls to go anywhere with a bomb strapped to their chests?”
Candice asked. “If it were me, I’d lunge for the unsub and not let go until he defused
the bomb.”

I felt my mouth quirk, because only Candice would think of something so smart in a
situation like that. Dutch was the one who answered her, though. “The explosives expert
who analyzed the parts that remained of Taylor Greene’s bomb suspects that the bomb
went off five minutes early. He says that, given the clock on the footage from the
mall, and what he was able to tell from the only piece of the digital display on the
bomb that was intact, that the bomb was supposed to detonate at noon, not eleven fifty-five.
He theorized that the bomb could have been wired to receive a signal from a remote
control detonator.”

My jaw dropped. “The unsub set off the bomb early?”

Dutch nodded. “He could have abducted and restrained Taylor, strapped the bomb to
her chest, and told her to head to the mall. He might’ve promised her that once she
got there, he’d defuse the bomb remotely, but if she tried anything tricky, like if
she asked anyone for help or went to the police, he’d set off the bomb.”

I bit my lip. “So, when that elderly couple reached out to Taylor, he saw that as
her trying to get help?”

Dutch shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe he’s just a sick son of a bitch and he set it off
just because he could.”

Candice tapped the table with her fingers. “If there really was a detonator, then
it also suggests that he was watching her.”

Dutch nodded. “We’ve looked and relooked at every piece of footage both inside and
outside that mall. No one jumps out at us as anyone who was watching Taylor except
the mother with the toddler and the elderly couple.

“The thing we’re still trying to understand,” Dutch continued, “is why the girls were
instructed to go to the mall and the beauty shop in the first place. I mean, I can
see the mall—this unsub might’ve wanted to kill as many people as possible—but a beauty
shop? I can think of a lot of other places that would give him more bang for his buck.”

Candice and I both stared aghast at him. “Bang for his buck?” Candice repeated. “Seriously,
Dutch?”

He held up a hand in apology. “No pun intended, ladies, I swear.”

“Horrible pun aside,” I said, “I think the oddity of choosing to detonate a bomb at
a beauty shop cinches the fact that he has an agenda. Dutch is right; there’re a dozen
other places I can think of—like a crowded office building, or the university, or
the capitol building—where this guy would probably have killed a
whole lot more people and made an even bigger statement. No, there’s something personal
here, some message this guy is trying to send.”

“So we need to figure out what the message is before this unsub moves on to another
girl and another location.”

I stood up. “Exactly. And we start with that mother who was injured in the bombing.
Then I want to interview Taylor’s parents. I just can’t let go of the idea that this
guy knew both girls, and maybe by probing a little we’ll find the connection.”

We filed out of the conference room, nodding to Brice in his glass office on our way
out, but I stopped at Rodriguez’s desk. “Cooper,” he said cordially. “What can I do
for you?”

Agent Oscar Rodriguez was a favorite of mine. He’d been hard to win over when we’d
first met, but since I’d proved myself to him, he’d been my most loyal work buddy,
next to Dutch and Brice of course. “Oscar, have you had a chance to look up the phone
records on our friend Jed Banes?”

He swiveled slightly to the left side of his desk and retrieved a short printout of
numbers. “I did. Banes cooperated and we got these on a rush. Turns out the number
that came into his machine was exactly two hours before the beauty shop explosion.
There was another number that came in on the day of the mall bombing, but that was
an hour and fifty-five minutes before. Not exactly two hours.”

I had several questions in light of that information. “So the calls came in from two
separate locations?”

Rodriguez shrugged. “Hard to say. The numbers are linked to disposable cell phones—they
can’t be traced. We’re trying to triangulate the towers where the signal might have
bounced off of, but that could take a while.”

“How long’s ‘a while’?”

“A week…maybe longer. It’s not like in the movies where
you can just pull up a number and trace it to a location that has cameras on every
corner.”

I nodded and asked my next question. “So, we know that the first bomb was likely remotely
detonated five minutes early, but what we don’t know is, why?”

“Does it really matter?” Rodriguez asked me in return.

I thought about that. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “But what I do know is that this
unsub has to have been watching Taylor for him to actively detonate the bomb. He’s
got to be somewhere on the footage, Oscar.”

He shook his head and sighed. “I’ve been all over it, Cooper. There’s just no one
driving around the parking lot or walking near Taylor that’s keeping an eye on her.”

But my radar wasn’t letting go of it. “Could it have been one of the mall employees?”
I asked. I knew I was reaching here, but I was convinced the unsub had been nearby
when the bomb went off.

Oscar swept a hand through his thick black hair. “We ran all the employees through
our databases and there’s nothing worse than petty theft and a DUI on the record of
any mall employee.”

“Yeah, but were any of them
looking
toward Taylor when she entered the mall?”

“Not that I could see,” he said. I wondered if Oscar was so tired that he maybe hadn’t
looked especially close at the footage of the surrounding shops from the mall cameras.

“Will you look one more time?” I asked him. He frowned at me, so I added a smile.

“Fine,” he groaned. “I’ll look one more time. But you owe me a coffee or a doughnut
or something, Cooper.”

“You got it, Oscar. We’re headed out to the mall at College Station right now to look
around, and we probably won’t be back till late, so can I bring you breakfast tomorrow?”

“Sure,” he said with a lopsided grin. “I’ll text you my order in the morning.”

I squeezed him around the shoulders and hurried to catch up with Dutch and Candice.

Two hours and twenty minutes later we were wandering around the charred-out ruins
of the mall—which was mostly still closed—when I paused at the spot that had been
ground zero.

I can’t fully describe how terrible the ether was in that roughly five-foot square
space, but suffice it to say that I felt like hurling the entire time I stood at its
center. There was this wrenching sense of terror, mixed with what I can only describe
as a horrible, sudden, and violent expansion of energy—the actual explosion.

I’d felt something similar many years earlier when I’d done a stint for the
Detroit Free Press
one Halloween where they’d asked me to walk around to a few local haunts with a reporter
and tell her what I was feeling. We’d entered a library, which supposedly had a librarian
that just didn’t know when to quit (she is still shelving books there forty years
after her death), and while I hadn’t picked up on her, there were some artifacts on
display from a World War II retrospective. I’d stood next to a glass case that housed
a set of personal items from a young soldier who’d been killed when his own grenade
had malfunctioned and blown up in his hand. I remembered the weird feeling of being
engulfed by a ball of fire and feeling nothing but confusion and shock.

This was similar to what Taylor Greene had experienced in the moment the bomb had
detonated. It’d been too quick for her brain to even register, but those moments leading
up to the bomb going off…those had been the worst kind of panic and dread imaginable.
I felt firmly that she knew she was about to die. I also felt firmly that she’d had
nothing to do with detonating the bomb. It’d gone off remotely, just like I suspected.

“Hey, Abs,” Candice called.

I looked up and saw that she was just inside the store where Taylor had been heading
on that fateful day.

“Yeah?”

“Take a look at this.”

With my cane I carefully navigated my way over to her and as my foot stepped on a
slippery bit of ash and paper, I was surprised that I didn’t fall.

“Careful,” Dutch said, reaching out to steady me.

“I’m okay,” I told him. The truth was that I wasn’t nearly as unsteady on my feet
as I had been even a week ago. I couldn’t readily explain it, but I suspected an incident
I’d had at the end of the last case I’d worked had inadvertently helped the nerves
that controlled the muscles in my legs regroup and function better.

When I stood next to Candice, she pointed and I followed her finger. The fire had
caused a great deal of damage to the shop where the store owner had been killed, but
some of the things in the back were still recognizable. And then I felt a sort of
“ping!” go off in my mind and I realized why something about this place had felt so
familiar.

“It’s a bridal store,” I said, as a trickle of unease crept up my spine.

“Yeah,” Candice said. “Weird, huh?”

I had the urge to turn around and look at Dutch. He was using his foot to shuffle
aside some of the debris on the floor. I felt that trickle of unease strengthen. That
fear I had for his safety bloomed big and large in my mind.

I shifted my gaze to Candice. There was danger around her too—but it was more subtle,
as if it was farther away…as if she could avoid it.

And then I wondered quite seriously about my own safety. If there was so much foreboding
energy swirling around Dutch and Candice, might it also be swirling around me?

There was no clear way to tell—one of the great drawbacks about being psychic is that
it’s a skill that can only be projected outward. In other words, I’m able to clearly
see other people’s futures, but looking at my own can be a bit nebulous. It’s like
living in a world without reflection; I can easily describe what someone else looks
like, but what my own countenance holds is a mystery without a mirror.

Turning back to the mall, I scanned the area, suddenly unnerved and wary. At the end
of the long hallway was a huge plastic curtain. No one but police and the Feds were
allowed through to where we stood, and beyond the sheeting, I didn’t know whether
someone was currently watching us, but I was pretty creeped out and shuddered again.

“You okay, Sundance?” Candice asked.

I jerked at the sound of her voice. “Yeah. I’m fine. Let’s get out of here, though,
okay?”

Candice stared at me with a puzzled expression. She knew I wasn’t “fine,” but she
didn’t press it. Instead she helped me cover my rattled nerves for Dutch.

“Hey,” she called to him. “Abby’s ready for lunch. What say we get something to eat
and then go interview our first witness?”

Dutch nodded without even looking my way, and I sent Candice a grateful smile. “Thanks,”
I whispered.

“Of course,” she said easily. Then, as if reading my mind she added, “This place gives
me the creeps too.”

*   *   *

I
didn’t eat much at lunch, even though Dutch had opted to take us to a burger joint.
I’m not a huge fan of the hamburger, but any place that serves them almost always
has some other form of junk food that I find quite appetizing. Still, I was too worried
about the feeling I’d gotten in the mall to do more than pick at the meal.

Candice covered for me again by keeping the conversation light and focused on a neutral
topic. “So when’s the new house ready for move in?”

Dutch raised his brow and turned his head pointedly to me. “That’s Abby’s detail.”

“Aw, crap!” I said. I was supposed to call Dave, our handyman/construction manager/adoptive
uncle the day before. Pulling out my phone, I dialed quickly and he picked up on the
third ring.

“Yo!” he said by way of greeting.

“It’s me. I’m sorry I forgot to call you yesterday.”

“No worries, Abster. Your house is almost ready.”

I cocked a skeptical eyebrow. Dave’s “almost” could mean “Tomorrow,” or “In a week,”
or even “Maybe in a month or two.”

“Can you give me a date?” I asked, already shaking my head and making a face for Dutch
and Candice. Dave would never commit to something so specific. “We have to be out
of our house by the thirtieth, so I need to know how long Dutch and I will be homeless
after we come back from our honeymoon.”

“How’s next Tuesday work for you?”

I nearly dropped the phone. “Wait…what?”

Dave chuckled. “Tuesday. We should be able to do the final walk-through on Monday,
and you guys can close on the house Tuesday morning if that works for you.”

I looked at my watch—not that I had a calendar there or anything, but I was so surprised
that it was more a reflex. “For reals, Dave?”

“What’s he say?” Dutch asked.

“For reals,” Dave told me. “The guys have been putting in
extra time since they all got invited to your wedding. That’s their gift, by the way.
To give you two a completed house two weeks early.”

Mentally, I threw around some expletives like a drunken sailor. I’d forgotten about
the wedding invites. “Awesome,” I squeaked.

“Oh, which reminds me—I need your landscaper and that bug guy to come back,” Dave
added.

I’d hired a great landscape architect to take care of the front garden beds and trees,
which I thought had looked a little sparse for the gorgeous home. The man I’d hired,
Tom Hester, had been a sheer genius and he’d transformed the yard into something truly
lush and magazine-cover worthy. “You need Tom to come back?” I asked, already sensing
that something had happened. “What’d you do?”