“Hey,” I said, knocking on her door.
“Sundance,” she sang without looking up. “I heard your last client leave.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I think the whole floor heard her leave,” she added, with a smirk.
“Who knew our door could slam that loud?” I said.
Candice chuckled and sat back in her chair. “You really know how to make friends and influence people.”
I walked forward and plopped down across from her. “It’s a gift.”
“One among many. Care to talk about it?”
“Ugh, no. And you know I can’t.” Keeping my clients’ readings privileged was kind of sacred to me. “But her reading did give me an idea.”
“Do tell.”
“Well, she had asked me to tune in on a family member, and I got a great sense of that family member by bouncing off her energy onto the relative. I think I might be able to do the same thing for Dave.”
Candice blinked, clearly confused. “You want to bounce off Dave’s energy to look at one of his family members?”
“No, sorry, I meant the opposite. I want to bounce off Gwen’s energy to try and get a line on Dave and hopefully discover a clue about where he might be.”
Candice sat forward quickly. “Could that work?”
“It could,” I said. “As long as Gwen’s willing.”
Candice shoved her phone toward me. “Call her.”
I did and was lucky enough to reach Gwen right away. She seemed to be holding it together pretty well, given the fact that the police had just left her house after conducting a thorough search of it in their efforts to find Dave. “I’m hoping to bounce off of your energy to find Dave,” I explained.
“What do I need to do?” she asked me.
“Nothing. Just focus on him and I’ll do the rest.”
“Now?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay,” she said, a quiver in her voice. I took a deep breath and focused first on Gwen while Candice eyed me intently from across the desk.
For a few moments I said nothing; I just got centered and connected to Gwen. As I searched out her energy for Dave, though, some really weird stuff started to come at me from the ether. It was like that rushing white-water feeling I had for Dave had somehow affected her energy too. “Gwen?” I asked.
“Yes?”
“Are you okay?”
And it was like I put a giant crack in her dam and she dissolved into a puddle of tears. “Nnnnnoooo!” she cried.
Candice winced, and mouthed, Poor thing!
“Hey,” I said, knowing right now Dave’s wife needed a hug in the worst way. “Gwen, listen, you sit tight. Candice and I are on our way over to your house, okay?”
Gwen simply cried harder, and I motioned to Candice, who was already up and reaching for her purse.
We got to the McKenzie residence about twenty minutes later. There was a black latex glove on the lawn, the only evidence that the police had been there to search out the house. I’ve seen search warrants conducted; the police are under no obligation to put things back the way they found them, so I could only hope they’d been kind to poor Gwen.
“The door’s open,” Candice said as we approached up the walkway.
“She’s probably inside cleaning up after the search,” I said.
We paused at the door and Candice knocked lightly. “Gwen? It’s us.”
There was no answer from inside, so we moved into the foyer. “Gwen?” I called, looking into the doorways off the hall. “It’s Abby and Candice.”
Still there was no answer and Candice and I traded a confused look. I started to notice how utterly silent the house was. There was no music playing, no TV in the background, just . . . quiet.
And then my Spidey sense kicked in, and I started to feel really anxious about where Gwen was. “Gwen?” I called urgently, moving toward the kitchen. “Gwen!”
Behind me I heard Candice’s heels on the wood floor. She was moving quickly, and I figured she was covering the other rooms.
Meanwhile I scanned the kitchen. There was no sign of Dave’s wife. I moved next to the den at the back of the house, and still no sign of her, even though I kept calling her name. At last I turned back toward the kitchen and saw Candice come from the hallway, shaking her head. I motioned with my chin toward the back door, and we both went to it and out onto the back deck. “Gwen!” I shouted. A knot had formed in my stomach. Something was wrong. She wasn’t here—I knew that intuitively just as surely as I was seeing it for myself.
“What the hell?” Candice said after we’d taken in the whole backyard without any sign of Gwen.
“She’s not here.”
“But the front door was wide open.” And then Candice seemed to think of something and she hustled back inside. I followed behind her all the way over to a door off the kitchen, which I suspected led to the garage. Candice unlocked the door and opened it so we could step through. The overhead light came on immediately—probably triggered by a motion sensor. It revealed a silver Ford Focus, which I thought must’ve been Gwen’s car.
Candice walked over to the car and peered inside. Then she opened the door and half sat in the front seat, fiddling with something on the dash. A moment later the trunk opened and I looked at Candice in alarm. “We have to be thorough,” she said, walking past me to check the trunk.
I held my breath as she rounded the car and looked inside the trunk. “Empty,” she said. I exhaled with relief. Still, as glad as I was that Gwen wasn’t dead in her trunk, that didn’t change the fact that she wasn’t anywhere in the house. “Maybe she just went for a walk or something,” Candice said.
I considered that that was possible. I sometimes took walks to help cool down when I was upset about something, or just needed to clear my head. Poor Gwen had been having the worst few days, and she had to be exhausted and at her wits’ end. Especially after the cops showed up to search her home for any sign of her husband, whom they had no doubt pegged for a crazed killer.
Pulling up my phone, I said, “I’m calling her.”
I listened while the other line rang once, then twice, and then I heard a jingle coming from the kitchen. Candice and I again traded looks before moving back inside. Gwen’s phone was on the kitchen counter, ringing away.
I clicked off the call and went to her phone. “Why would she leave her phone here if she was only going for a walk? Especially if she hasn’t heard from Dave. Wouldn’t she keep it glued to her side at all times?”
“I don’t know, Abs,” Candice said softly. I glanced at her. She’d squared her shoulders and pressed her lips together. I knew that look. That was a look that said she was braced and ready to kick some ass.
I knew then that we were both thinking the same thing. Gwen wasn’t here, not because she didn’t want to be. She wasn’t here because she’d been forced to leave. Pointing to a nook under the far left cabinet, I said, “That looks like her purse.”
“Check to see if her wallet’s there,” Candice said.
I moved to retrieve the purse and dug inside. Pulling out Gwen’s wallet and keys, I said, “Shit.”
Candice immediately lifted her own phone and as she dialed, she said, “Don’t touch anything else.”
“Who’re you calling?”
Candice held up her index finger to let me know to hang on a sec. “Hey, babe,” she said almost casually into the phone while her eyes roved the entire area of the kitchen. “We’re at Dave’s house. We were supposed to meet Gwen here, but something’s off. She’s not here, but her car, purse, and phone are. I think she’s met with some trouble.” There was a pause, then, “I don’t know. Let me check.” Putting a hand over the microphone, Candice said to me, “What’s your radar say?”
“Danger, Will Robinson.”
Candice frowned,
and went back to Brice. “Abby thinks she’s met with trouble too.” Another pause, then, “Okay. We’ll wait out front for you.”
Twelve minutes later Brice’s car roared up the street and braked hard. The car was barely in park when both of our husbands jumped out, along with Oscar Rodriguez—one of the agents at the bureau and a close friend of ours.
All three men had their right hands hovering over their sidearms, and bronze badges swinging from metal chain lanyards around their necks. They approached us quickly, but their eyes roved over every inch of the front yard and house. “Did you touch anything inside?” Dutch asked us.
I held up Gwen’s phone and her purse. “I might’ve put my hand on a door handle or two,” I admitted.
“Any signs of a struggle inside?” Oscar asked.
“None,” Candice replied. “When we got here, the front door was ajar, though.”
“Sit tight,” Brice told us, before motioning for Dutch and Oscar to move with him inside.
Candice and I waited maybe three or four minutes before the three men came back out to us. “Have you searched the neighborhood?” Brice asked Candice.
I knew he might’ve been thinking that maybe Gwen went for a walk and just hadn’t gotten back yet. “I took a jog around the block,” Candice told him. And she had while I waited in the driveway to watch the house. “There’s no sign of her.”
“Can I see her phone?” Oscar asked me. I handed it to him. He scrolled through a few screens and said, “Her last couple of calls were from Abby. No incoming calls since yesterday other than that, and nothing outgoing either.”
“She probably wanted to keep her phone line free in case either Dave or one of us called.”
“Texts?” Dutch asked Oscar.
He shook his head. “Just three, sir, and all three are to someone named Terry.”
“That’s Dave’s sister’s name,” I said.
Oscar nodded. “The texts from her are asking if there’s any news, and Gwen responds, ‘None,’ each time.”
“So she didn’t set up a meet with someone,” Dutch said.
“It doesn’t look like it,” Oscar said.
The five of us stood in the driveway for several seconds and looked around the area, as if we could spot the place where Gwen might be hiding. “Let’s knock on some doors and see if anybody saw anything,” Brice said.
We fanned out in pairs, with Oscar going by himself. Dutch led the way across the street and we started to knock on the doors of the McKenzies’ neighbors. Dutch and I found someone home at the house directly across the street. The door was opened by a woman in leggings and a long sweater. She looked like we’d woken her up from a nap. “Hi,” I said. “We’re looking for Gwen McKenzie.”
“Who?” the woman said, blinking and rubbing at her eyes.
“Your neighbor across the street,” Dutch said, pointing to the home.
“Oh, I don’t know them,” she said. “But this morning there were a bunch of cop cars over there. Was there a fight between them or something?”
“No, ma’am,” I said. “But we’re interested in knowing if you’ve seen Gwen since this morning. Maybe an hour or so ago?”
The woman looked at the watch on her right wrist. “Oh, wow. I’ve been out for a while. I was on a flight back from Sydney yesterday and my clock is all screwed up. I’ve been asleep on the couch for the last four hours.”
Dammit, I thought. “Okay, thank you,” I said, and we took our leave.
We tried three more doors and only one other neighbor was home to talk to us. He said that he’d been watching TV and hadn’t heard or seen a thing. He didn’t even seem to know that there’d been a police presence at Dave’s house earlier in the day.
Heading back to the McKenzie driveway, we waited for the others, and Oscar arrived first. He shook his head when Dutch asked him if he’d had any luck. “You guys?”
“No,” I said, that knot of worry for Gwen getting a little more rope in the pit of my stomach.
Candice and Brice came back a minute later, and they looked like they had news. “The guy next door saw Dave’s truck in the driveway about forty-five minutes ago,” Candice said.
My eyes widened. “Seriously?”
“That’s what he said,” Brice confirmed.
I glanced at my phone. I’d hung up with Gwen about fifty-five minutes earlier. “He must’ve come home right after I got off the line with her.”
“So where are they?” Dutch asked.
“No clue,” Brice said.
“We should go back inside and see if either of them packed any of their belongings,” Oscar suggested.
Candice frowned and glanced at me. I knew what she was thinking. “No way would Gwen pack stuff and leave behind her purse and phone,” I said.
“She might’ve if they were interested in staying off grid,” Oscar replied. “You can trace a cell phone, and if they were going off grid, there’d be no need to take any identification or credit cards.”
He had a point there. Still, I opened Gwen’s wallet and took mental note that there was about two hundred dollars there. My thinking was that someone who’s about to go on the lam isn’t going to leave behind any cash, no matter how small. She’d need every penny, but then, I wasn’t sure what Dave had said to her to get her to leave so quickly. “Okay,” Candice said. “Let’s go and check it out.”
Brice held up his finger to stop us and moved to his car. After retrieving a box of black latex gloves, he said, “Nobody touches anything.”
It felt oddly comforting that he was treating the house like a crime scene. We had nothing overtly suspicious in there, except for the fact that Gwen was gone, someone had seen Dave’s truck in the driveway, and Gwen’s purse and phone had been left behind. It was hardly enough to look more than a bit suspicious, but it was all we knew.
We spent the next ten minutes opening closet doors and searching for any signs that someone had come to collect clothes or personal effects, but there was no indication that anything like that had occurred.
It was obvious that Gwen had spent some time putting things back after the search warrant was served, and I suspected it’d been a task that’d helped her cope. The house overall was neat, orderly, and clean.
The two guest rooms were the only spaces that’d still shown the effects of a police presence, as both duvets had been pulled off the beds, and the closet door and the dresser drawers hung open. Those closets were mostly empty, containing just a few storage items, and the dressers had what looked like excess clothing, mostly for cold weather. Otherwise, nothing much looked out of place.
The five of us met back in the kitchen and Brice said, “We found two sets of luggage in the master bedroom. They’re empty.”
“The closet and dressers don’t look like they’re missing any clothes,” Candice added.
“The bathroom is stocked with his and her toiletries,” Oscar said next.
“Nothing’s missing,” I said. I knew it in my gut.
Oscar pointed to me. “Can you use your radar to get a bead on what happened to Gwen?”
“Maybe,” I said, because I didn’t know. Still, I stepped away from the fridge, where I’d been standing, and moved to the center of the kitchen. Closing my eyes, I focused on Gwen. I’d talked to her just a little over an hour before, and I’d been focused on her energy, so maybe it’d be simple to get a bead on her now.
What I felt was a shock. There was this . . . echo in the ether. The only way I can describe it is that it was violent and quick. I felt so strongly that Gwen had been struck down. Like someone had physically punched her and knocked her to the floor, and he’d done it almost exactly where I was standing.
The power of the energy was so strong, in fact, that I stumbled forward and bent down to steady myself with my hands on the floor. “Abs?” I heard Dutch say. Both he and Candice w
ere next to me in a hot second.
“Holy shit!” I whispered, gripping his arm. “Someone punched Gwen!”
“Punched her?” Candice said.
“Yeah,” I said. Getting unsteadily to my feet, I let Dutch support me while I looked around. “She was standing here, and I feel like her heart was racing. She was excited, I think, and then all of a sudden she was hit. Hard.”
“By who?” Dutch asked me, and there was a flare of anger in his eyes. He had no tolerance for violence against women.
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling a little woozy. I knew it was the leftover effect of what’d happened to Gwen. I closed my eyes again to try to get closer to the imprint of violence in the ether. I was hoping to discover a clue, but all I could pick up was Gwen’s emotion and physical discomfort. I could feel an almost phantom pain in my lower jaw on the left side, and it really did feel like I’d had my own bell rung. There was a faint ringing in my ears, and my balance was off, like I was trying to walk after being on a Tilt-A-Whirl. I also felt as if I were being pulled forward violently. Opening my eyes again, I half stumbled forward toward the front door. And I saw that it was closed, but I swore that it’d been open when Gwen was knocked around.
Dutch stood close to me the whole time, his hand under my elbow to support me should I lose my balance again. There was a lot of sensory input going on in my mind, and I did my best to process it, but it was damn hard. Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes one more time and started from the beginning.
“Gwen had been excited about something,” I said. “She was standing in the kitchen, and she was . . . happy?”
“Happy?” I heard Candice say.
I shook my head, then nodded. “There’s a mix here. Something made her feel excited and happy, and then—pow! She got knocked to the floor and I think dragged out of here before she had any chance to fully come to her senses.”
“So, Dave came home, then roughed her up and took her with him?” Brice asked.
I opened my eyes, my temper flaring. I wanted to yell, “NO!” because sweet, gentle Dave would never hurt a woman, especially not the woman he loved. But then, I’d never believed Dave would murder someone either, and the four bullet-riddled bodies at the Roswells’ house were suggesting otherwise.