A Panicked Premonition

  “Oh, we do,” Candice said, all friendly pretense gone. Focusing on Hekekia she said, “We’re going to nail you. And we’re going to tie your wealthy benefactor to the crime as well, but she’ll probably evade the death penalty, because, you know, she’s got big money. But you . . . now, you’re gonna take the fall. You know what the state of Texas does to murderers like you, right?” For emphasis, Candice slid one finger across her throat.

  I watched Hekekia closely. He stared at Candice with half-lidded eyes, but I could see she’d gotten to him. At least a little.

  “I’m assuming charges are coming soon?” Maldonado said impatiently.

  “In the morning,” Nikki said. “Both state and federal.”

  With that, she got up and headed out the door. Candice and I followed without another word. Or a look back.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We gathered in the larger conference room to commiserate on the disaster that Hekekia’s interview had been. “I fucked it all up,” Nikki said miserably.

  “Not true,” Brice was quick to say. “You had no chance with him, Detective. His lawyer was too good, and he’s too seasoned a criminal to give you much even without Maldonado’s coaching.”

  Nikki offered Brice a grateful smile, but I could tell she was still disappointed in herself.

  “So where do we go from here?” Oscar asked.

  “We press charges for what we do have,” Brice said simply. “It’ll be enough to get him locked up, and maybe we can work on him in the meantime. There’s nothing like jail to make a criminal think about bettering his situation.”

  “We don’t have that kind of time,” I said, knowing for certain we didn’t. “It’ll be too late by then to help Dave and Gwen.”

  “So what do we do, Abs?” Dutch asked gently. I glanced at him and saw that he wasn’t so much asking for my personal opinion as asking for my intuitive guidance.

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, trying to feel out a solution. “We’re missing something,” I said as a series of images started to fill my mind’s eye. I noticed almost immediately that they were memories of the images I’d seen when scrolling through Murielle McKenna’s Instagram account. Focusing on the memory of the photos I’d seen, I just allowed my intuition to speak to me in its own language, which is a combo of images and flashes of insight along with simply “knowing” something without an actual context.

  The vision appearing in my mind’s eye was pulled directly from my memory banks the day before, right after we’d met with Murielle and we’d been gathered in our office, snooping through her Instagram. The pictures scrolled across the screen in my inner eye, one after the other, like a speedy slide show, without ever really forming into solid detail. And then two interesting things happened. The photos began to spin around, almost like pinwheels, but they also continued to slide on by. Occasionally, one of the images would stop spinning, and come to rest upside down, but the detail of what was in the photos was still just out of my reach.

  The other interesting thing was that out of the void producing the photos emerged a big, black iron key. It simply appeared, fully formed, and floated to the space above the pinwheels. The key captured my immediate attention, because it was accompanied by a strong sense of urgency. And then, almost abruptly, the spinning photos disappeared, and my mind’s eye was filled with the image of what I’d seen in the safe room at Robin and Andy’s home. Mentally recoiling at the memory, I was still able to take note that the big iron key hadn’t gone away. It continued to float there above the bodies of Andy and Robin and I worked hard to piece together the clue it was offering.

  Once I thought I had it, the scene in my mind changed one last time, morphing into the image of Dave and Gwen’s house. The key moved to the front door, then floated down to the keyhole and inserted itself, twisting in the lock until the door clicked open.

  After it swung wide, instead of the inside of Dave and Gwen’s house, the interior was just one large, empty, and windowless room, with a lone full-length mirror propped up on the wall facing the door.

  Perhaps because it was the only thing in the room, I focused on the mirror, and to my surprise, Dave’s reflection appeared there. He was so vivid in my mind’s eye that I could see him as clearly as if I were peering at him through a peephole in a wall. But seeing him there brought me no relief, because he was a terrible sight to behold.

  For starters, he was pale, sweating profusely, and bleeding from the hip. Seeing him propped against the wall opposite the mirror, I could tell that his chest was heaving while he tried to suck in enough oxygen, but his lungs didn’t seem to be able to hold on to any of the air he was sucking in. Then there was the terrible look of pain pulling at his features, which caused me to literally wince and wish that I could reach through the ether to find him and get him some help.

  But the image was already losing its clarity, the edges of the vision softening and Dave’s features becoming blurry.

  Frantically, I tried to hold on to the image, to look at it for the clues I knew it wanted to offer up, but it continued to fade until Dave was nothing but a fuzzy patch of light in a nondescript room. That sense of urgency that had hit me in the gut when it first showed up in my mind’s eye also came back in full force.

  The iron key, however, made one last appearance in my mind’s eye, emerging from the mirror and zipping over to the right, past my nose, and forcing my perspective to turn with it as it sailed by me, back out the front door of Dave and Gwen’s. In my mind’s eye I moved forward to follow it out onto the front porch. From there I saw the key float over to the side yard, then to the back of the house. I waited on the porch for it to come back, but it didn’t.

  At last I opened my eyes, seeing that everyone had been silently watching me, waiting for me to speak about what lay in the ether. I thought about telling them all of what I’d seen, but I decided against it. The vision had contained three separate components, which I felt needed to be pursued in order. Giving the group the full report of what my intuition had shown me might only confuse and muddle things. We couldn’t afford any more delays; of that I was certain.

  “There’s something in the photos from Murielle’s Instagram that is the key to this whole case,” I announced into the expectant silence.

  “You mean how Murielle took so many photos with Andy and Robin in the background?” Candice asked.

  I shook my head. “No. No, there’s something else there. There’s a clue in the images that can help us.”

  Candice got up from her chair. “Okay, give me a few minutes. I’ll be back.”

  After she left our presence, Dutch tried to push my cold dinner in front of me again. I’d shoved it away as soon as we’d all sat down. I was no longer hungry, and certainly not for cold chicken and rice. “I can warm that up in the microwave,” he offered when I made a face at the food.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. My mind was still buzzing with the images from Murielle’s Instagram. Something within those photos was out of place. Or maybe, I thought, completely upside down. “I think we’re looking at this case all wrong.” As I spoke those words, I had a bit of a eureka moment.

  “What’s that mean?” Oscar asked.

  “I don’t really know,” I confessed. “But nothing about this case is actually what it seems. That’s the only thing I can say. How we’re looking at it is all wrong.”

  “How are we looking at it?” Nikki asked me.

  I shook my head. I didn’t yet know. What felt right side up was actually upside down, only I didn’t know how to translate that for the rest of the group.

  “But you still think Gudziak and Hekekia killed the Roswells, right?” she pressed.

  “Oh, yeah,” I assured her. “Of that I have no doubt.”

  “Then how could we be looking at it all wrong?” Dutch asked.

  “It’s not about who did it,” I said, trying to puzzle
out what I intuitively knew to be true. And then I had it. “It’s not the who we need to focus on. It’s the why. It’s about motivation.”

  “Money?” Nikki said.

  “No,” I told her, staring off into space for a moment to call home what I thought the case actually revolved around. “It’s about revenge.” And then I thought about it some more, and added, “Okay, yeah, it was about money too, but revenge first and foremost. Revenge was the driving force, the reason for the crime, but the money figures into this too. I just don’t know how.”

  “Revenge,” Dutch repeated. “Makes sense, I guess. We’ve been assuming that Murielle wanted revenge against Robin for leaving her.”

  And that was the part that bothered me. It fit, but it didn’t. There was something else. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  Candice came back into the room at that moment, carrying a large stack of printouts. “Here,” she said, laying out the photos she’d printed from Murielle’s Instagram account. “I’m printing off all of Murielle’s photos from the past three months leading up to the Roswell murders. These are the first ones off the printer.”

  I scanned the pile of photos she dumped onto the conference room table. “There’s more than this?” There had to be a couple hundred pages in the pile.

  “This is just the first two and a half weeks,” Candice said with an annoyed shake of her head. “There’re thousands of photos. The woman is a true narcissist.”

  My shoulders slumped. “Great,” I muttered as everyone in the room gathered a small stack to study.

  “So, what’re we supposed to be looking for here?” Oscar asked me.

  I sighed and grabbed the last handful. “I have no idea. But I’ll definitely know when I see it.”

  “Abs?” Candice asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s cool that you’ll know, but . . . will the rest of us?”

  I lifted my head to see everyone looking at me expectantly. My shoulders slumped again and with a weary groan and a wave of my fingers to call their pages forward, I said, “Probably not.”

  Everyone began to put their pages back into a center pile in front of me, their relief evident because looking through Murielle’s selfies was gonna be sooooooo boring. And annoying. And maybe even a little depressing.

  When the pile was back together, once again everyone looked at me as if to say, “What’re we going to do next?”

  I inhaled deeply, trying to think, but it was late and it’d been a long-ass day. I was damn tired. Not to mention that Candice’s push-up bra was really starting to dig into my rib cage.

  “Let’s call it a night,” Dutch said, like he was reading my mind. “We’ll pick this up fresh in the morning.”

  “Detective,” Brice said to Nikki as the rest of us grabbed up our things. “You’re sure you can keep this case with us for a day or two?”

  “I’m gonna give it my best shot, Agent Harrison,” she said, and I knew she would. “Still, I’ll probably need one of you to make the case for temporary jurisdiction to my CO after I give him my pitch.”

  “Hey, Oscar,” I said, before Brice could speak. “How about you meet Nikki at the substation tomorrow, and make our case to her superiors?”

  Oscar’s mouth was open a little, and his eyes moved nervously between Brice and Dutch—his superiors and the two men who by rights should’ve been there to make the pitch to APD in the morning.

  Hedging off any protest, I added, “My gut says Oscar and Nikki will be able to convince APD to give us the case for a day or two.”

  Dutch and Brice exchanged a look, but then Dutch shrugged. “If Abby thinks it’s better for Rodriguez to be on point in this, I’m good.”

  “Fine,” said Brice, but I could tell he knew I was up to something. Of course, the slight smirk his wife was wearing didn’t help any. Nor did the red tinge to Oscar’s cheeks. Or Nikki’s suddenly flushed face.

  Matchmaker, matchmaker . . . , I thought, with a slight smirk of my own.

  Chapter Nineteen

  We heard early in the morning that Oscar and Nikki had been successful in getting us forty-eight hours to have Hekekia all to ourselves without their interference. As a bonus, Nikki had been reassigned to focus on Chris Wixom’s attempted murder and ordered to work alongside our bureau while building her case. It couldn’t have worked out better, actually.

  Nikki and Oscar met us at our offices after the meeting with APD’s brass, and they found me and Candice sitting on the floor in Candice’s office, going through pages, and pages, and pages, of Instagram photos.

  We’d been poring over the photos for hours, but nothing was jumping out at me. It was beyond frustrating. I kept waiting for my eye to hit on that “thing” that would ignite a PING! from my intuition, but there’d been nothing in any of the photos so far that seemed to tug at my radar in a “This is it!” kinda way.

  And yet, I knew I was on the right track. There was something we were missing. Something vital.

  “You guys gonna look through those all day?” Oscar asked, after holding the door open for Nikki, who was looking radiant in a sleek charcoal suit and long silver earrings.

  I let the photos in my hand fall to the floor and then I lay down on my back and rubbed my temples. “This sucks,” I groaned. “Whatever is in here, I’m not seeing it.”

  “Maybe it’s because we’ve been at it for three hours straight,” Candice said, continuing her slow, meticulous observation of each photo in her stack.

  “How many pages did you print out?” Nikki asked, squatting down next to me to poke at some of the photos.

  “Three thousand, six hundred, and thirty-eight,” Candice said.

  “Whoa!” Nikki said. “That’s a lot of selfies.”

  “A lot of self-love,” I muttered. “God, I hate that woman and her obsession with herself.”

  “So you guys are gonna keep going with the photos, huh?” Oscar said again.

  I sat up. “No. I need a break. And I need to come at this thing from a different angle.”

  “I thought that’s what we were doing?” Nikki said, indicating the photos.

  “True. Then we need a different-different angle.”

  “What’d you have in mind, Sundance?” Candice asked.

  I shook my head, recalling the vision I’d had the night before. The first thing that came to mind was the memory of the Roswells’ murder scene. Lying back on the floor again, I swept an arm over my eyes, knowing what I needed to do. “I think we’ve got to revisit the murder scene.”

  “The Roswells’ place?” Candice asked me.

  I nodded. I didn’t want to give a verbal yes, because the thought of going back to that house and recalling that scene was almost more than I could bear. I didn’t want to stand in that energy, or soak in that ether, or experience any of that horror. Ever. Again.

  But I was starting to feel very strongly that I had to go back.

  “You guys haven’t released the scene yet, right?” I heard Candice ask Nikki.

  “No,” Nikki said. “I checked in with Sienna right before we came here. She said she can stall through today, but after that, she’ll have to order up the release or her ass is going to get chewed out by the brass.”

  “Good,” Candice said. “Can you get us in to have a look around?”

  “I can, but it could be tricky depending who’s been assigned to keep watch over the house. Let me make a call.”

  Nikki stepped out into the lobby to make a call and I sat up again. Oscar had also squatted down next to me and was poking at the photos strewn out on the floor. “It’s a shame, you know,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  Oscar held up a photo of Murielle, staring into the camera with lowered chin and a come-hither expression, as if she was trying to seduce the whole world in that one photo. “All looks. No substanc
e.”

  I watched while Oscar set the photo back down and turned his attention to where Nikki’s muted voice was floating back to us from the lobby.

  “Whereas she’s the whole package,” I said, thumbing over my shoulder toward the detective.

  Oscar grinned and winked at me like I’d winked at him the night before. It was nice to see him with a light on again behind those heartbroken eyes.

  “Am I missing something?” Candice asked us.

  Oscar’s grin only widened, and I laughed. “Definitely!” I said.

  Nikki came back into the room again. “I know the patrol officer. We’re good.”

  “Great,” I said, getting up and not even bothering to neaten up the photos on the floor. Candice looked at me pointedly, so I added, “I’ll pick these up when we get back.” Her pointed look continued, so I bent down and sort of squished them into one big pile and let that be enough.

  We arrived at the Roswells’ home and were met by an APD officer who was parked at the foot of the entrance to the drive. He leaned into Nikki’s open window and said, “Detective Grayson. You’re on this case?”

  “Hey, Baker,” she said. “I’m wrapping up a lead before the house gets turned over to next of kin. Can you let us in?”

  “Sure,” he said. “But I’d hurry. Someone was here about ten minutes ago, royally ticked off that she wasn’t allowed inside.”

  I leaned over in the passenger seat to address the officer. “Who was it?” I asked.

  Officer Baker looked at me as if to ask who the hell I was. Nikki said, “This is Abby. She’s on the Feds’ team. We’re doing a joint investigation.”

  “Fed?” Baker said, his brow shooting up. “I didn’t know it’d gotten into all that.”

  “It’s complicated,” Nikki told him. “Who was here to take over the house, Paul?”

  Baker turned slightly, as if looking for whoever had come to try to gain entrance to the home. “The wife’s sister,” he said. “She said she’s been waiting for the scene to be released for the past couple of days. She tried to give me a lecture about how I work for her when I told her the house wasn’t going to be released until tomorrow and I couldn’t let her beyond the yellow tape.”