Deadly Forecast: A Psychic Eye Mystery (35 page)

“And we’ve got the key to getting it back for them if we can just get word to Brice.”

“Yep.”

I sighed and glanced at Candice’s phone, which she’d put in the little cubby under
the dash. “I wish he’d call.”

“He will, Abs. Not to worry. Now, where’d you like to go for lunch?”

I shrugged. “You pick.”

She turned her head to look at me quizzically. “Hey, are you feeling okay?”

“Yeah.” Candice cocked an eyebrow. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind.”

“There’s a new food truck on South Congress. Supposedly they have the best chicken
sandwich and fries in Austin.”

That perked me a teensy bit. “I’m game.”

We ate at a picnic table in relative silence. The day was cold and overcast, so we
ate quickly and got back in the car to head over to Jed Banes’s place. On the way
Candice glanced a few times up at the darkening clouds. “Have you seen the forecast
for the week?”

“No, why? Is it bad?”

“There’s a pretty big storm cell that’s moving in from the northwest. They say it’s
going to be here through the weekend.”

I leaned forward to look up at the moody sky. “You mean it’s gonna look like this
the whole week?”

“’Fraid so, Sundance.”

“Craptastic,” I groused. “Fecking craptastic.”

“Maybe it’ll clear up and be nice on Saturday.”

“I don’t have that kind of luck.”

Candice smirked. “Way to look on the bright side.”

We arrived at Jed Banes’s residence, which was no more homey than the last time we’d
seen it, although there were perhaps a few more leaves on the sidewalk, and he hadn’t
picked up his Sunday paper from the day before. Candice rang the doorbell and we waited
to hear sounds of movement from inside, but nothing but the TV blaring came to our
ears. Candice then gave the door three hard knocks. We waited some more, but nothing.

“Maybe he’s not home,” she said, but I was starting to get a prickly feeling at the
base of my neck. I leaned over to my right and took a peek through the window, as
the blinds were open. The fact that it was overcast outside made it easier to see
into the interior. A light was on across the room, and it was illuminating
Jed’s ugly green sofa. A brown afghan was strewn over the right half of it and something
about its shape caught my attention. Shuffling a little farther to the right, I cupped
my hand around my eyes and really peered in.

“See him?” Candice asked me.

I stood up fast. “Kick the door in!”

Candice just stared at me in alarm.

“Kick it in!”

Candice snapped out of her surprise and backed away from the door. Raising her booted
foot, she kicked hard and fast and the door shot inward. We both rushed forward and
saw Jed Banes on the couch, bent double at the waist and slightly sideways, his face
a sickening shade of grayish blue. “Jesus!” Candice said, rushing to his right side
to feel for a pulse.

In the meantime I was digging through my purse, trying to find my phone. At last I
had my hands on it, but when I pulled it free, my fingers were shaking so hard I found
it almost impossible to dial. “He’s unconscious but still alive!” Candice said, and
gently she eased him down to the floor, placing the oxygen mask by the side of the
sofa over his face and cranking up the dial.

I finally had the emergency dispatcher on the line and begged for an ambulance, but
I got thrown when the dispatcher asked me for an address. I had to head back outside
and look at the number on the side of the house, but I couldn’t remember what street
we were on. “Hamlet Street!” Candice shouted from inside when I called to her.

We waited the anxious four minutes for the ambulance to arrive, and Banes’s condition
hadn’t improved since Candice put on the oxygen, but at least he hadn’t died on us.
We then had to fill out a report for the police when they arrived, and there were
lots of questions regarding our presence there in the first place and why we’d kicked
in the door. Candice flashed her PI license
and I flashed my FBI consultant’s badge, but that did little good to dissuade the
suspicious cop from perhaps thinking we were clever would-be robbers posing as a PI
and an FBI consultant. (I didn’t say he was the sharpest tool in the shed.)

I finally made a call to Agent Rodriguez at the bureau and he vouched for us, which
got us off the hook and on our way a mere hour and a half later.

Once we were back in the car, Candice looked smartly at me and said, “What trouble
can we get into next?”

“Well, the day is still fairly young, so I’m thinking plenty.”

“You wanna head over to the hospital?”

I checked the ether on Jed Banes. His energy looked very bad, and I thought back to
my first encounter with him—that he wouldn’t live through November. Maybe he wouldn’t
even make it through the end of October. “I’m thinking we should let the doctors do
their thing, Candice. We can check on his condition later, but I’m not sensing that
he’ll come back out of the hospital now that he’s gone in.”

“What do you think happened?” she asked me.

My radar
bing
ed. “Stroke,” I said. “I think he had a stroke.”

Candice’s mouth turned down distastefully. “All that chain-smoking finally caught
up with him.”

“Yep,” I said. If smokers could sense what I could when I sent my radar out to assess
their health, they’d never pick up another cigarette.

“Okay, so the hospital is out for now. Where do you want to go instead?” she asked
me.

I sighed heavily. “At some point we do have to face the music and go meet with my
sister.”

Candice’s shoulders tensed.

“
Or
we could head back to Jamba Juice and see if Debbie is back from her meeting.”

“Jamba Juice it is!” Candice sang, steering the car into the left turn lane and relaxing
her shoulders.

We arrived back at the smoothie store and were both relieved to find the parking lot
mostly empty. Heading inside, we found a different clerk behind the counter. Her name
tag read HALEY. “What can we get started for you today?” she asked us brightly.

“Actually, we’re here to speak to Debbie,” I said. “Is she around?”

Haley’s perky little mouth turned down in a frown. “No, sorry. I think she’s at a
meeting.”

Candice tapped her finger on the counter. “Do you know if she’ll be back today?”

“No, sorry,” Haley said.

Candice and I exchanged a frustrated look. We were really striking out today, and
the only person left on my list of must-sees was my sister. Turning back to Haley,
I said, “Can I have one of those Pumpkin Smashes?”

Candice rolled her eyes, but she was also smiling. “I’ll take a Berry Bitten smoothie,”
she said when I nudged her.

Haley rang us up and then moved over to make our drinks. While she filled the prep
cups with fruit, flavoring, and tons of empty calories, I chatted her up a bit. I
asked her how long she’d worked there. Did she like it? Was she in school?

I discovered that Haley was working her way through the nursing program at ACC, and
at that point Candice picked her head up from her phone and asked, “Did you know Mimi
Greene?”

Haley’s mouth turned down into that sad frown again. “Yeah,” she said. “Mimi was so
sweet. I still can’t believe she’s gone.”

Candice and I exchanged another look. This one said, “Jackpot!”

“So…you two were friends,” I said, less question than statement.

Haley nodded and handed me my pumpkin-flavored frozen-smoothie concoction that looked
and smelled like heaven. “We were friends. I really liked her.”

“Did you guys hang out much?” Candice asked.

Haley cocked her head at Candice, suddenly suspicious. “Why are you asking about her?”

“We’re investigating her death,” I said, keeping it simple because it wasn’t far from
the truth and I didn’t want to scare Haley off with a lot of talk about bombs and
killers and such. I also flashed her my FBI ID to show her that my questions were
legit.

“She died in a fire,” Haley told me, her eyes widening a little at the plastic badge
in my hand.

“Do you know how the fire started?”

Haley shrugged. “I heard it was an accident. Her stove got left on or something.”

“Did Mimi talk to you about her personal life?” I asked next.

Haley handed Candice her drink and said, “What do you mean?”

“Well, we heard she had a boyfriend who dumped her. Do you know anything about that?”

Haley’s brow rose. “You mean Buzz?”

I nodded eagerly, hoping she’d elaborate.

“Buzz didn’t dump her,” Haley said.

“Really?” Candice said. “I thought he did.”

Haley shook her head. “No. Mimi dumped him.”

“Do you know why?” I asked.

Haley shrugged again. “I think she got scared. Her sister, Taylor, kept telling her
that Buzz was a loser, and that she could do better, but I’m not sure that Mimi really
believed it. But then he got so serious so fast, and I think that freaked her out.
So she broke it off with him, and then she really regretted it.”

My radar hummed with urgency. Haley was finally giving us the information we’d been
searching for. “How serious was he?” I asked, working to keep my voice casual.

“Well, he proposed,” Haley said. “And Mimi told me that he wanted to get married right
away. Mimi accepted the proposal, and they started going crazy planning the wedding.
I think they had the whole thing set up in, like, a week. It was crazy fast.”

“So what happened?”

Haley bit her lip. “Her sister happened. Mimi wanted Taylor to be her bridesmaid and
went up north to pick out a dress with her, but while she was visiting her sister,
Taylor started playing with her head. Mimi came back home with a lot of new doubts
about Buzz.

“And then she was even more on the fence because our manager Debbie offered her a
promotion. Debbie really liked Mimi, and she wanted to train her as an assistant manager
here so she could make enough money to pay for her tuition and stay in school. But
Mimi told me that Buzz wanted her to quit her job and the nursing program. He was
older than her and he said that he wanted her to get pregnant right away. Can you
believe it? Like there are guys that actually want their wives to be all barefoot
and pregnant in this day and age.”

Candice and I exchanged a look. Mimi had gotten herself involved with a control freak.

“Anyway,” Haley continued, “it was all a little too much for Mimi, I think, and she
just couldn’t go through with it. She told me that on the day of the wedding she just
didn’t show up.”

I blinked. “She left him at the altar?”

Haley nodded sadly. “Sort of. Mimi told me that she’d asked her sister to go to the
church and tell Buzz, but then she found out that her sister never left College Station.
Taylor just let Buzz wait there for, like, two hours or something until it was pretty
obvious nobody from Mimi’s side of the family was going to show up.”

I felt a jolt of electricity go through me, and Candice and I exchanged meaningful
looks. Buzz had waited two hours for his bride to show up. The clock on the bombs
was set to two hours, and old Jed Banes always got a call two hours before the bombs
went off.

“Did she and Buzz talk much after the wedding was called off?” I asked Haley, wondering
if maybe Buzz had had a hand in Mimi’s suicide after all.

Haley shook her head. “Only once, and that wasn’t even face-to-face,” she said. “Mimi
heard what her sister had done and she sent Buzz a really long e-mail trying to explain,
but she felt so bad that she couldn’t bring herself to call him or take any of his
calls when he tried to phone her.”

Something in the back of my mind was trying to surface, but I was too focused on Haley
to pay it much attention. Still, it nagged at me, like a fly buzzing against the TV
screen. “When was this?” I asked.

“Last year. Right around this time, actually. And then Mimi died in that fire a month
later.”

A chill ran up my spine. “Haley, did you ever meet Buzz?”

“Oh, sure!” she said. “He used to come in here all the time.”

“But he hasn’t been in lately?” Candice pressed.

“No. Not since Mimi broke up with him.” Haley opened her mouth to say something else,
but she hesitated.

“What?” I asked her.

“Well, you might think this is weird, but there were a few times when I swore that
I saw Buzz sitting in his car in the parking lot.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“Not long after Mimi died. It was only a few times, but it sort of gave me the creeps.”

“But Buzz knew you, and he knew you were friends with Mimi?”

“Yeah,” she said. “She and I used to study together. We had a lot of the same classes.”

The hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end, and I glanced at Candice, who
was also looking at Haley in alarm. I knew what she was thinking. People close to
Mimi were being abducted and forced to wear bombs for the last two hours of their
shortened lives.

“What?” Haley said, and I could tell we were starting to make her nervous.

“Nothing,” I assured her. “We’re just surprised because we didn’t think that Mimi
had any friends.”

Haley hung her head a little. “Yeah. I was pretty much her only friend. Mimi was really
shy.”

“Do you happen to remember Buzz’s last name?” I asked next.

Haley shook her head. “No. Mimi just called him Buzz, which wasn’t even his real name.”

I cocked my head. “Come again?”

“Buzz is his nickname. I know she probably told me his real name once, but I don’t
remember what it was. Anyway, she just always called him Buzz.”

Candice walked subtly out of the shop and I could see her dial her phone and lift
it to her ear. I knew she’d be calling Brice.

To put Haley at ease, I sat down at the table nearest the counter and changed the
subject, asking her what her favorite smoothie flavor was.

We made chitchat until Candice returned. She sat down and
gave me one curt headshake, and I knew she hadn’t been able to get ahold of Brice.
Some customers came in at that point and Haley went to wait on them, which gave Candice
and me a minute to talk.