Deadly Forecast

  Janice sat back against the cushions. I could tell this was exhausting for her. “Carly owned that boutique since I was in high school. Her daughter and I even graduated together and we were pretty good friends too. But when I was planning my wedding, one of my bridesmaids and I had a falling-out, and I asked Carly if I could return the dress, which hadn’t even been altered yet, and she said no, and she insisted that all sales were final. I would’ve gotten someone else to wear it and gone with my original plan to have five bridesmaids, but the friend I had a falling-out with was a size two—no way could any of my other friends fit that size. And I heard she was like that with a lot of other customers too.” I wondered if Janice knew that Carly had been killed in the blast. I held back mentioning it because Janice was in such a fragile state that I didn’t want to risk further upsetting her.

  About then I saw Candice subtly point to her watch, and I knew we were going to run short on time if we stayed much longer with Janice. We had other people to talk to before we got back on the road, and I stood up, knowing I’d gotten something from the conversation, but I didn’t quite know what. I then dug through my purse and pulled out two cards. The first was my business card, and I offered it to her and said, “I’d really like to give you a free reading, Janice. I think you’ve got a few challenges coming up on top of all that you’re dealing with right now, and I’d like to offer you some insight about how to handle it.”

  She eyed my card with a mixture of surprise and wariness. I hadn’t told her I was a psychic.

  “Think about it,” I told her gently before pointing to the other card. “That’s the name of a really great therapist I know. I’ve sent him a ton of clients and he’s awesome, patient, and an incredibly understanding guy. If you can’t physically go to him, he’ll be happy to conduct your sessions over Skype. And he can even talk you through how to set that up if need be.”

  She studied that card with a bit more enthusiasm and far less wariness. “Thanks,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about trying to find someone. I know I look bad.” Janice then gazed around at the piles of mess in her living room. “And all this looks bad,” she added.

  “Then call him first. And when you’re ready, think about calling me.”

  With that, we left her.

  * * *

  We arrived at Taylor Greene’s apartment about twenty minutes later. Taylor and her roommate shared a bland-looking apartment just off campus.

  We had no idea if Taylor’s roommate would be home, but luck was with us and a mousy-looking brunette greeted our knock with a cautious, “Yeah?”

  Dutch flashed his badge and introduced the three of us, then reminded her that he’d spoken with her on the day after the mall bombing. “Oh, yeah,” she said, reaching up to twirl her hair nervously. “I remember.”

  I saw Dutch’s gaze flicker to his notes. “Can we come in and talk, Amber?”

  Her eyes narrowed and as nervous as she was at the sight of Dutch showing up at her door flashing his badge and wearing his Kevlar, I knew she was a little ticked off about something. She hesitated in the partially opened doorway for a moment before she said, “The last time I let you guys in, you tore this place apart. I’m still waiting for you people to reimburse me for the couch.”

  “Did you submit form E-four-seven-six?” he asked.

  I turned my head to glare at him. There was no form E476. This was just what the bureau boys told people who got uppity while their homes were being torn apart during the execution of a search warrant. Dutch ignored me, and Amber said, “I couldn’t find that stupid form! I looked all over your Web site and it never came up. If you ask me, there is no stupid form, and you guys are making it up.”

  “I’ll mail you one,” Dutch assured her.

  She looked at him doubtfully. Amber wasn’t stupid.

  I peeked through the door and could see a portion of said couch. It had a large blanket over it, but underneath I could tell there were lumps from the stuffing coming through the tears that I knew the bureau boys had put there.

  Reaching nimbly into Dutch’s back pocket, I lifted out his wallet before he could stop me. Opening it quickly, I withdrew about three hundred in twenties and held them up for our witness to see. “Let us come in and we’ll reimburse you off the books, Amber. We really need to talk to you.”

  Amber opened the door wider but stood in the way, holding out her hand for the cash. I placed it in her palm and she stepped to the side. We filed in and I looked around.

  The place was fairly Spartan, but neat. Well, as neat as it could be after being ransacked by the Feds. The lumpy couch was set against the shortest wall in the room, and against the long wall was a smallish flat-screen TV. There was a cheap patio chair in the corner next to the TV and one of those tall floor lamps that looked like it could tip over at the slightest breeze. A sliding glass door, partially hidden by a set of venetian blinds, led out onto the balcony, and I noticed that Candice immediately moved to the far left side of the blinds. With her jacket covering her hand, she tugged on the door. It slid open easily.

  The three of us exchanged a knowing look.

  “How did that get open?” Amber asked, a note of alarm in her voice.

  Candice didn’t answer; instead she pulled on the cord next to the door and slid the blinds all the way open. We saw that Amber or Taylor had put one of those long wooden security poles in the ridge of the inner pane, but the pole had been moved to just outside the metal frame, allowing the door to easily open.

  Candice then bent down and examined the clasp. “It’s been tampered with,” she said.

  Meanwhile Amber was standing slack-jawed in the middle of the room. I could tell that she was freaked-out to discover that her back door had been monkeyed with.

  Dutch moved to the door, nudging it open with his knee before stepping out onto the balcony. I followed him and peered down over the side of the railing. The apartment was on the second floor, so there was a fifteen-foot drop to the ground, but a huge live oak tree crowded against the outside wall. Dutch pointed to a low-hanging branch, then to another one within half an arm’s length of the balcony. “It wouldn’t take a lot of effort to climb this tree and sneak onto the balcony.”

  “Which is why we always keep it locked,” Amber said. She was standing next to Candice in the doorway. “Taylor caught a creepy-looking guy out on our balcony last June, and that’s when we got that security pole.”

  “There was a guy on your balcony in June?” I repeated.

  Amber nodded. “Yeah. A Peeping Tom. He’d been seen looking into a bunch of apartments here in the complex. The police finally caught him in August.”

  “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.”

  “Wo
w,” 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?”