Deadly Forecast: A Psychic Eye Mystery (25 page)

“Do you remember his name?” Dutch asked, already documenting it in his notebook.

Amber shook her head. “No. But I have the case number on the fridge. Taylor was going
to go testify at his trial.”

“Mind if I get that from you?” Dutch asked, and he and Amber moved back into the apartment.
Candice came out onto the balcony and looked at the tree herself.

“Did you notice this apartment is the last one in the row?” she
asked me. “It’s by the stairwell too. If someone wanted to climb that tree and get
in here to abduct Taylor, he could’ve done it without risk of being seen. He also
could’ve gotten her keys from that dish,” she said, pointing back into the apartment
to a dish I hadn’t noticed sitting on the kitchen counter with a set of car keys in
it, “then pulled her car up to there”—she then pointed to a lone parking slot mostly
hidden by the mighty oak—“and put Taylor into the car without calling attention to
themselves.”

“Yeah, all that’s true, but he would’ve had to have had access to the apartment prior
to the abduction to rig it for entry later.”

Candice drummed her fingers on the top of the balcony railing for a minute. “Had to
be someone that either Taylor or Amber would’ve trusted,” she said.

“And someone that Michelle and her roommate would’ve also known and trusted,” I pointed
out.

“A college boy?” Candice asked.

I shook my head. “This seems a bit too sophisticated for a college boy, don’t you
think?”

Candice turned around to face me and crossed her arms. “College Station is a hike
from Austin,” she said. “That’s been bugging me. What’s the link between here and
there? And why was Taylor headed to a bridal boutique of all places? A mall could
be crowded, but just before noon on a Wednesday morning? Not likely.”

“That’s been bugging me too,” I said. “This feels personal, but I can’t figure out
how the two events are linked other than to involve two girls of similar age who were
abducted, strapped to a bomb, and forced to walk into a public place before said bombs
were detonated.”

At that Dutch poked his head out of the door and motioned for us to come back inside.
We filed in and stood against the wall with the TV while Dutch bent down and used
a set of tongs he
must’ve swiped from the kitchen to set the security pole back in place. “Do me a favor,
Amber,” he said. “Don’t touch that pole or the door until I get my tech here to swipe
for fingerprints, okay?”

Amber was looking at us with wide frightened eyes. I could tell that the revelation
that her sliding glass door had been tampered with was starting to put several puzzle
pieces into place and she was close to wigging out. “It never did make sense to me,”
she said, as if she’d been having an internal monologue with herself. “I mean, Taylor
had issues, but I knew she’d never do something so crazy on her own.”

“How long did you know Taylor?” I asked.

“We’d been roommates for about nine months,” Amber said, shuffling from foot to foot.
“Not quite a year.”

“You said you thought Taylor had issues—can you tell me what you mean by that?”

“She was a little bitch,” Amber said. I was a bit taken aback by the brutally blunt
description. “She was,” Amber insisted. “If Taylor didn’t get her way, or if she felt
like you got the better end of a deal, she’d find a way to get even with you.”

“Can you give us an example?” I asked.

Amber shrugged. “This one time I got home from class early, before Taylor, who usually
beat me here. We have only the one TV, and Taylor always wanted to watch her lame
network show, but my favorite show on HBO is on Wednesday nights, so that night I
already had the TV on when she came in, and she knew that I’d beaten her to the punch.
She didn’t say a word to me; she just went into her room and shut the door. The next
week it happened again—I got home before Taylor—and when I went to flip the channel,
I found out that she’d canceled HBO. I called to complain, and not only had she taken
the cable account out of our joint names, but she’d put it solely into hers with a
new password.
I had to send them a stupid copy of her death certificate to get it put back into
my name so I could get HBO back.”

“Huh,” I said. What could I say? Lots of college-age roommates had personality clashes.
Was the HBO thing so terrible to label Taylor a bitch?

“There was a lot of other stuff too,” Amber said, probably sensing that she hadn’t
convinced me of Taylor’s bad side.

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. She was just mean to people. Rude. She’d point out your flaws and make
fun of you to your face. Nobody liked her. I mean, she had like…
no
friends. When we first moved in together, I tried to introduce her to some of my
friends, but Taylor was a total bitch to them, and none of my friends wanted to hang
out here if she was going to be here too.”

“What about guys?” I asked. “Did Taylor have a boyfriend?”

Amber laughed derisively. “No guy could stand her longer than one date. Like I said,
she was a real bitch, and she was crazy needy and possessive. She’d go out with a
new guy and start texting him nonstop right after he dropped her off, about how she
already missed him and couldn’t wait to see him again and why hadn’t he called her
yet? That would be the end of that relationship.

“If she saw one of the guys she’d been out with on a date with someone else, she’d
do something psycho like walk right up to them and pretend that she’d just caught
him cheating on her. Pretty soon every guy on campus knew not to ask her out.”

“I’m assuming you guys didn’t get along so well either,” I said.

Amber scoffed. “You got that right. I was just waiting for the lease to be up in December
so I could get the hell away from her too.”

“What about Taylor’s family?” I asked. “Was she close to them?”

Amber shook her head. “Nope. After her sister died, nobody wanted anything to do with
her.”

“What happened to her sister?”

“She died in a fire. It happened about a year or so ago, I think. I tried to get her
to talk about it, you know. I was trying to be nice and draw her out a little. I thought
that maybe she was such a bitch to everybody because she was really sad about her
sister.”

“Was she?” I asked. “Sad about her sister?”

Amber shook her head. “Nope. At least not that she ever showed me. It was sort of
the opposite, actually. She seemed glad to be rid of her.”

“For real?” I pressed. Could Taylor really have been as awful a person as Amber was
painting her? I wanted to doubt it.

“I swear I’m not making this up,” Amber assured me—and the fact that my inner lie
detector hadn’t gone off once since Amber had been talking meanly about Taylor sort
of confirmed it for me. “She called her sister a big fat loser,” Amber continued.
“Taylor said her sister had only dated one guy in her life, and he was an even bigger
loser than she was. She used to joke that she thought that the two of them were both
still virgins.”

“Did they both die in the fire?” I asked. My radar was pinging. Something about the
subject of Taylor’s sister was calling me to take a deeper look.

“You mean Mimi and her boyfriend?” When I nodded, Amber said, “I don’t think so, but
I don’t know for sure.”

I socked away the info on Taylor’s sister and pressed on. “So, she wasn’t close with
her sister, but was there maybe anyone else in her family that she got along with?”

Amber shook her head. “Taylor’s mom died of bladder cancer last winter after being
sick for a long time. I told Taylor she should apply for special hardship to get a
passing grade in all her classes, but she acted like it was no big deal. She said
her mom
had suffered and was now out of her misery. She acted like her mom was an old dog
they had to put down or something. It was weird.”

“And her dad?” I pressed.
Someone
had to have been there for the girl.

Amber shook her head again. “Taylor and her dad never spoke. I lived with her for
almost a year and I never heard her on the phone with him. All I knew about her family
was that her parents split up while Taylor was still in high school. She and her sister
stayed in Austin with her mom, and her dad moved overseas to take a job in some war
zone, I think.”

My brow furrowed and I looked to Dutch. He nodded. “Mr. Greene works for Halliburton.
He was stationed in Iraq for several years, but recently he’s been reassigned to Dubai.”

“That’s why Homeland is so interested in making this a terrorist case,” I guessed.
“They think there might be a connection to Taylor’s dad.”

He shrugged, but I could tell he knew it to be true.

Turning back to Amber, I said, “When was the last time Taylor saw her father? I mean,
I know they didn’t speak while she was here, but if he’s been overseas for a few years,
do you know if they ever got together for visits?”

“She told me that the last time she saw her dad was when she was seventeen. She said
he didn’t even come home for her sister’s funeral, and I sure as hell didn’t see him
at Taylor’s funeral.”

“How do you know?” Candice asked. “He could have been in the crowd and you just didn’t
know it was her dad.”

Amber laughed. “Crowd? Lady, I was the
only
person at her funeral. There wasn’t even a wake. Just me and a priest next to a hole
in the ground where her remains were put. It was pathetic.”

“Wow,” I whispered. “Really? Nobody else came?”

“I’m not lying,” Amber said defensively. “I only went because
I felt sorry for her, but if you ask me, more people were relieved she was gone than
were sad that she’d died.”

We fell silent for a minute after that. It was a lot to take in, and the fact that
Amber had so many nasty things to say about Taylor put a whole new light on the investigation.
If she really was that mean, she likely had made her fair share of enemies, but who
would go to such lengths to exact their revenge, and once they had it and Taylor had
been killed—why strap a bomb to Michelle Padilla?

As if reading my mind, Dutch pulled out a photo of Michelle from the inside of a blue
folder he’d brought with him and said, “Amber, does this girl look familiar to you?”

Amber squinted at it, then shook her head. “No. But she does look a little like Taylor,
doesn’t she?”

I blinked and then I saw it too. From the photo I’d seen in Taylor’s file, the two
girls had looked a bit alike. I stared meaningfully at Dutch. This was no act of terrorism.
This was personal. Someone wanted to punish Taylor, even after she was dead, but for
the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what the bridal boutique and the hair salon
had to do with any of this.

Candice then asked Amber about anyone who might’ve had access to their apartment in
the days before the mall bombing. Amber shrugged. “I had a party here the weekend
before the mall thing, but Taylor sulked in her room the whole night.”

“How many people were here?” I asked.

“I don’t know, maybe twenty or thirty? You know how it is—you invite a couple of people
and they invite a couple of people and before you know it, you’re in a room with at
least a few strangers.”

“Did anybody go out on the balcony?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said. “It was totally crowded all night.”

“And do you remember locking it and setting the pole back in place afterward?”

Amber stared at the sliding glass door for a moment. “Yeah, I do. I’ve always been
nervous about that tree and Taylor saying she saw a Peeping Tom out there on the balcony.
I’m positive I locked it and put the security pole in the slot before I left the apartment
the next day.”

“Did anybody else come in here? Maybe a maintenance man, or a delivery person?”

Again Amber shrugged. “If they did, then I didn’t know about it. Usually if there’s
any maintenance work to be done, we get a note taped to our door, but Taylor almost
always got home before me, so she would’ve been the one to get the note if there was
one.”

Dutch jotted something down in his notebook again, and I suspected he was going to
check with the apartment manager to see if there had been any interior maintenance
work performed in the days prior to the mall bombing.

After that, Dutch had a few more routine questions for Amber and I took the opportunity
to head back out onto the balcony one more time. Something was bugging me about it,
but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Candice popped her head out and said, “Dutch is ready to go, honey.”

I’d been shuffling the dead leaves and debris around and with a sigh I lifted my head
and said, “Yeah, okay.”

“Something wrong?”

I shook my head. “Nope. It’s just that—”

At that moment Dutch’s head appeared over Candice’s shoulder. “I’ve got something
for you,” he said, raising a box high so I could see it.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Some of Taylor’s personal effects. Pictures and stuff that we didn’t pick up from
the first search.”

That did interest me. I could sometimes get a vibe off personal items. I moved to
the door and Candice and Dutch stepped out of the way, and then the three of us made
our way toward the front entrance, thanking Amber for her time. She nodded as if to
say, “Yeah, but don’t come back.”

After that, we piled back into Dutch’s car and made our way to the highway, where
we immediately got tied up in traffic. I looked at my watch and knew I’d never make
it to the new house in time to meet the exterminator. I called Dave and asked him
if he wouldn’t mind staying a little late.

“Aw, Abs, I’ve got plans with the old lady tonight,” he said irritably.

Dave’s “old lady” is his wife, whose actual name I still don’t know even after four
years of working with him. I had yet to meet her in fact. All those times when our
paths should have crossed had been interrupted by something or other. It’d become
this joke of sorts between Dave and me, but come my wedding day, the joke would be
over because I was determined to meet this mysterious woman. “It shouldn’t take too
long,” I told him. If I knew Dave at all (which I did), his plans involved some sort
of happy hour special, and by staying late to meet the bug guy, he’d have to pay full
price for his beer and munchies once he made it to the bar. “Come on, Dave, please?”