Deadly Forecast

Dutch scratched his cheek. “We couldn’t find any accounts registered to her. Her computer came up missing when we searched her apartment, so it’s possible that she had an account registered in a different name, but there’s no real way to track it without her hard drive.”

  “Her computer came up missing?” I asked.

  “She took it with her to class,” Dutch said. “She could have dumped it, lost it, or it could’ve been stolen. Hell, her roommate could’ve hocked it for Taylor’s portion of the rent money once she realized her roommate was dead. All we know for sure is that it’s not among her possessions.”

  “This roommate sounds like a stone-cold bitch,” Candice remarked.

  Dutch shrugged. “She didn’t like Taylor—that much was clear. But I’m not sure it was entirely one-sided. Everyone we interviewed who knew Taylor said she wasn’t very outgoing. Most people we talked to thought she was aloof and stuck-up.”

  “When was the last time Taylor was seen before entering the mall?” I asked, curious about the timeline the day of the bombing.

  Dutch pointed to the file. “Her roommate remembers seeing Taylor the night before when she came back from an evening class, but she doesn’t know if Taylor was out of the apartment when the roommate left for class the following morning. She says she only remembers that Taylor’s bedroom door was shut—but I guess it was usually shut, so we have no timeline for the abduction other than the first time any security camera captures her is at the mall right before noon.”

  “And it’s where she was in between that we really need to know,” Candice said.

  “What about her car?” I asked.

  “Found in the mall’s parking lot. We dusted for prints, and the odd thing was that it came back completely clean. Not a print on it either inside or out.”

  “Any cameras in the parking lot that would give you a view of the car?” Candice asked.

  “It was parked in the very back of the lot out of range of the exterior cameras, which are all set over the entrances of the mall. We canvassed the area, but no one remembers seeing Taylor wandering through the parking lot with a bomb strapped to her chest. She could have easily driven herself to the mall, parked at the back, rubbed down the car, and avoided pedestrians as she made her way to the mall’s entrance. Traffic there was pretty light that day, so it’s possible that she could have gotten away with it undetected.”

  I turned my attention away from the file I was thumbing through and focused on Candice and Dutch. “Can I ask you two a favor?”

  They looked at me curiously and nodded.

  “From here on out can we operate under the assumption that both Taylor and Michelle were as innocent as the other victims in the explosions? I’m telling you that no one coerced or brainwashed these two girls into strapping on a bomb and targeting a public place in an act of terrorism. My radar says they were abducted and forced to wear the explosives.”

  “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 re
ally 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?”

  “It wasn’t me!” Dave said quickly. “One of the guys smunched a few of your flowers with the Bobcat. He’s really sorry, and we’ll pay for them to be replaced.”

  I put my hand over my eyes. There had been several large turquoise clay pots artfully placed in every bed. If the flowers had been smunched, that meant that at least one of the pots was damaged too.

  “Where?”

  “The bed on the left side of the house. And some of the middle bed too. Also, maybe some of those clay pots you had out there got broken.”

  “Dave!”

  “Abs, he’s really sorry! It was his first time driving the Bobcat and it kinda got away from him.”

  “Dude!” I yelled. “What the hell?”

  Dave was silent for a minute. “You can tell Dutch that I’ll pay the quarter for that one. We deserved it.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose and took a deep breath. “You better not tell me who did it,” I warned him. “If I know, I’m gonna disinvite him to the wedding.”

  “He feels so bad he won’t show,” Dave assured. “Probably.”