Lethal Outlook

  “What is this?” Mrs. Woodyard demanded, pointing back and forth between Tristan and me.

  Her son-in-law didn’t answer her. Instead he stepped forward to block me from her view and said, “Where’s Colby?”

  “He’s with his grandfather,” she told him, setting her hands on her hips. “And I demand to know what’s going on here, Tristan! Why did you have another woman in your arms?”

  “She fell,” he said, leaning around the door to pick up my cane and hand it to me.

  Mrs. Woodyard’s hands came off her hips and she crossed her arms. “Sure she did. What did you do to my daughter, Tristan?” she asked, her voice cold and mean.

  “Nothing, Nancy,” he told her levelly.

  Mrs. Woodyard leaned out to stare hard at me, and in her gaze I saw pure hate. “Was it you? Did you have something to do with her disappearance?”

  I shook my head vigorously. “No! Of course not! I came to your house and tried to offer you my help, remember?”

  Those hate-filled eyes narrowed to slits. “Help?” she scoffed. “I think you came into my home with the intent to throw the investigation off track! I think you might’ve had a reason to point the police in a different direction away from the obvious person responsible!”

  “Stop it, Nancy!” Tristan commanded, pulling her attention back to him. “Go home, get my son, and bring him back here. The police are finished questioning me for now, and I want Colby to come home.”

  But Nancy Woodyard only glared at her son-in-law. “No.”

  Tristan’s spine stiffened. “No?”

  “I’m keeping him.”

  “Like hell you are,” he growled, taking a step toward her, and although his back was to me, I had a feeling the look on his face was angry enough to scare Mrs. Woodyard, because she took a step back and put her hands up defensively.

  Tristan stopped his advance. I saw him work to lower his shoulders, and then he said very firmly, “I want Colby back, Nancy. He’s my son and you have no right to keep him. If you won’t bring him here, then I’ll come get him.”

  Mrs. Woodyard made a noise that sounded like a half growl, half snarl. “Don’t you dare set foot on my property, Tristan Moreno! I’m calling the police and my lawyer. You’ll get Colby back when hell freezes over!”

  With that she turned and pulled the door closed hard behind her.

  “What just happened?” I heard behind me. I turned and saw Candice standing there with a glass of ice water and a protein bar.

  “Nothing good,” I admitted.

  Tristan stood staring at the door for a full half minute. He then turned with a determined look on his face and pulled his phone out of his back pocket. “Would you two excuse me? I have to call my lawyer.”

  Candice looked from me to Tristan as if waiting for one of us to explain, but I waved her back toward the kitchen to give Tristan some privacy. “We should go,” I said.

  “What happened in there?” she asked me, setting down the water and following me to the door.

  “Mrs. Woodyard showed up.”

  When I didn’t elaborate, Candice said, “And?”

  “I was a little dizzy, and Tristan picked me up to take me over to the couch. Unfortunately at that exact moment Kendra’s mom came through the door and saw us.”

  “Uh-oh,” she said, following me closely as I moved with gimpy haste toward the car. I wanted to get out of there because I had a feeling that the longer I stayed, the worse I was going to make things. “What happened then?” Candice asked.

  “Thinly veiled accusations and threats from both parties.”

  “What kind of threats?” she pressed, clicking the button on her key fob to unlock the Porsche.

  “She’s going to try to take custody of Colby; he’s going to go over there and get his son if he has to.”

  Candice’s eyebrows rose high on her forehead, but she didn’t say anything else. She and I got into the car, strapped in, and began to exit the drive.

  The moment we hit the street, I felt my mouth go dry. Standing in the middle of the road was Mrs. Woodyard, flapping her yap to a reporter as she pointed angrily at the house. Then she spotted us and the finger moved to Candice’s car. I saw a television camera swivel in our direction and I panicked. “Jesus!” Hit it, Candice!”

  Candice did, and in the next three seconds we’d sped all the way down the street. “I’m wondering if that just made us look guilty,” Candice said, glancing nervously in her rearview mirror.

  “I’m pretty sure we’re already there,” I muttered.

  My partner sighed as she turned the corner heading back toward the main road. “Were you able to pick up anything in the house at least, Abs?”

  “I was,” I said. “There was a lot of residual energy near the door. That’s what made me go down, actually. It wasn’t my hips as much as it was what happened to Kendra.”

  “Was it like what you’d picked up before? That she got hit in the base of her spine?”

  “It was exactly that, but thinking back on it, when I stood near the front door, I felt an acute sharp pain, and then my legs simply went numb.”

  “So we’re back to the theory that she was stabbed in the back?”

  I took a deep breath as I thought about that. It hadn’t felt like a stab wound. I’d been stabbed before (yet another story), and as the knife had entered my flesh I remembered the searing hot feel of it. This hadn’t felt like that—it’d felt sharper, more acute in a way. “I don’t think her killer used a knife,” I said. And then I mentioned something else that had bugged me about our knife-in-the-back theory, even more than the lack of blood at the scene. “The other thing I can’t figure out, Candice, is even if the killer had struck Kendra in the back with something that caused her to become paralyzed, say, from the waist down, she could still have screamed her head off. We know that Russ was outside at the Crawleys’ house right across the street—why didn’t he hear her?”

  “He could have been the killer,” Candice said, eyeing me over the rim of her sunglasses.

  I rubbed my temples. “Okay, so assuming he wasn’t the killer, and this account from him of a man in a baseball cap entering her home is true—again, why didn’t Russ hear her? Even if the killer struck her unconscious, she should’ve been able to get out at least one cry for help, right?”

  Candice seemed to think on that. “What about my earlier theory that she was given some sort of injection with something that paralyzed her completely?”

  Something about what Candice had just said rang a bell for me. “Yeah,” I said, nodding, remembering how my whole body had gone numb on the steps in the Morenos’ home. For Kendra to have been taken out like that so quickly—before she could even scream—something had to have completely incapacitated her, head to toe. “What kind of a drug would that be?” I asked. Were there even drugs that worked that quickly?

  Candice shrugged. “Don’t know, Sundance, but I have a doctor friend who’s an anesthesiologist. I’ll call her when I get a free minute and maybe she’ll be able to point me in the right direction.”

  We were both quiet for a few seconds, until Candice asked, “Were you able to clear Tristan from the man who attacked Kendra?”

  “You mean did I pick up another man’s energy?”

  “Yeah.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t have enough time to analyze it,” I told her. “All I know is that whoever was at her door surprised Kendra, but not in a bad way. Her energy felt receptive to whoever came to her door.”

  “Would she have been receptive to Tristan after their fight?”

  “I don’t know. His account was that she was pushing his buttons—and maybe she was. Maybe she liked this other guy better and was looking for a valid excuse to leave her husband.”

  “Gives more credence to Velkune’s account that she came to see him and was afraid of her husband, right?”

  “It does,” I said. Still, I had my doubts about pegging Tristan as the killer. Maybe it was because when I’
d fallen from those two steps, he’d lunged to help me, and while he held me in his arms, he’d been very gentle. Nothing in his energy spoke of trying to fake some genuine concern for me. I just didn’t buy him as the man who had beaten, raped, and murdered his wife in cold blood.

  I said as much to Candice, and she sighed. “This case has way more questions than answers. I mean, we don’t know what caused Kendra to go down so fast without letting out even one scream, or who this mysterious man in the ball cap is, or where her remains are buried, and for that matter, where the hell is her car?”

  “Underwater,” I said.

  “What?”

  I sat bolt upright. That answer, like the one about her lover, had come out of my mouth without my thinking about it. “It’s underwater!” I said, focusing my attention on the car.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes!” I said, aiming my radar straight at Kendra’s car and holding on tight while I sorted through the intuitive clues.

  Candice pulled into a Target parking lot. Turning to me, she said, “Can you find the car?”

  I closed my eyes. “I think it’s east of a main highway.”

  “Mopac? Three-sixty? One-eighty-three? I-thirty-five?” Candice rattled off most of Austin’s major thoroughfares in rapid-fire succession.

  I squeezed my eyes shut even tighter, waiting for the ether to give up its clues. And that’s when I saw a double-decker bus in my mind’s eye.

  “Crap,” I said, trying to push the image out of my head so that I could figure out which highway we needed to focus on.

  “What’s crap?”

  I growled with irritation. The bus just kept appearing in my mind’s eye. “I’m trying to figure out which highway, but all I keep seeing is a double-decker bus.”

  “A what?”

  “Double-decker bus,” I said meekly.

  “Is that a clue?”

  My eyes snapped open. “It must be!”

  “About the highway we need to find?”

  I concentrated on the red bus, which I could see so clearly in my mind. It moved down the road and stopped at the foot of a lake. “No,” I said. “It’s a clue to where the car is. It’s a clue to a lake. The car is in a lake and there must be a bus depot or something to do with double-decker buses and the lake. The association is too strong for me to ignore.”

  Candice pulled out her iPhone and began to poke at the screen. I could see her trying several searches, until suddenly she gasped and swiveled the phone to me. “Decker Lake!” she exclaimed before I could even read it.

  “Yes! That’s it! I know that’s it!”

  Candice set her phone aside and pulled back on the gearshift. “The lake is just east of Highway one-eighty-three,” she told me. “About ten minutes from here.”

  I tapped my fingers on my knees the whole way there. I was so anxious to see if I was right that I couldn’t hold still. As we came up to the lake, however, I could see Candice’s mood shift from excited to frustrated in an instant. “It’s huge,” she said, eyeing the large body of water.

  But I now had a clear bead on Kendra’s car. It was drawing me like a beacon. “That way,” I said, motioning to the right.

  Candice cast me a surprised look, but she didn’t hesitate to pull the car to the right and follow the road around the east side of the lake, while I sat forward and scanned both the ether and the area. “Keep going,” I said when Candice began to slow down.

  She pressed the gas again, and the road got bumpy. We passed a campground and an abandoned bait shop, and the road got worse as we went along. I knew Candice was gripping the wheel and gritting her teeth—her Porsche clearly wasn’t made for terrain like this—but she kept going until I suddenly yelled, “Stop!”

  For a few seconds we both just sat there and gazed out the windows. The area we were in was a bit off the lake, which was just visible through the trees. I checked my radar and had the feeling I needed to get out of the car and take a look around.

  I did, and Candice got out too. Coming over to stand next to me, she seemed to be waiting for me to say something. “Her car is somewhere nearby,” I said. I could feel its presence. I limped over to the left side of the road and poked with my cane at the underbrush for any sign that a car had been hidden there or had been pushed through the vegetation on its way into the lake. Nothing but thick foliage stared back at me.

  “Maybe it’s up the road a bit more,” Candice suggested.

  I shook my head. I knew it wasn’t.

  Easing back down the road, I kept my eyes peeled, and about ten feet away from Candice’s Porsche, I shouted, “Yes!”

  Candice hurried to my side, and I lifted my cane to point down the short slope at the barely visible tread marks, which had flattened the grass and foliage. “See that?” I said, waving my cane at a slight arch between several trees. “The car went in through there.”

  I made to follow the tracks when Candice caught my arm. “Hang on,” she said. “We don’t want to disturb the crime scene.”

  I moved back to the road. “Right. Still, shouldn’t we make sure that Kendra’s car did go into the lake through here before we call in the cavalry?”

  Candice nodded and moved to her own car. Opening the trunk, she pulled out a pair of leather work boots. “I keep these on hand just in case,” she said, slipping out of her heels.

  After tucking in her pant cuffs, she moved to the far side of the tracks and began walking parallel to them, keeping her eyes trained on the ground. I saw her ease into the underbrush and all but disappear from view.

  “Candice?” I called after not hearing from her for a bit.

  “I’m here!” she replied. And then she was back in my line of sight and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “What’d you find?” I asked.

  She moved back up the slope next to me before answering. “It’s hard to see, but I did manage to glimpse the car,” she said.

  My eyes widened. “I was right?” I mean, I knew I could be, but it was still kind of freaky that nothing but my intuition had led us straight to Kendra’s car.

  “You seem surprised,” she said, grinning at me while she pulled her phone from her jacket.

  “Hey, even we psychic types get surprised when we take a shot in the dark and it finds the mark.”

  Candice nodded again and held up a finger. “Hey, handsome,” she said into the phone.

  My brow rose. I hadn’t counted on her calling Brice first.

  “I’m with Abby out by Decker Lake on the east side, and I think we might have a bit of a situation on our hands…”

  I let Candice talk to Brice without interrupting, but I could already tell he wasn’t going to rush out with a bunch of agents to dredge the lake. When she hung up, she looked frustrated. “Dammit,” she grumbled.

  “He wants you to call APD, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah. He’s knee-deep in the mall bombing case and he can’t spare any guys. Plus, he did point out that it’s not exactly his jurisdiction.”

  “It isn’t his jurisdiction yet,” I said wistfully. “It’d be so much easier if the FBI got involved.”

  “It would,” Candice agreed as she tapped the screen on her phone again. She then placed it to her ear and said, “Yes, hello, dispatch? Can you please connect me to the homicide unit?”

  Several hours later, Candice and I stood behind yellow “crime scene, do not cross” tape, watching a tow truck ease Kendra’s wet car up to the road by a long cable. Hordes of police, CSIs, and homicide detectives swarmed the scene, along with the first of what was likely to be several TV news crews.

  The hour was growing late and I was once again light-headed with hunger—no surprise there. I wanted to leave, but we’d been specifically told to wait right where we stood because the detectives had more questions for us—no surprise there either.

  At last the lead detective on the case, Jan LenDale, came toward us, motioning for another suit to follow her. “Here we go,” I muttered as they approached. I watche
d their faces closely. There wasn’t a hint of warmth in either of their expressions. I felt myself brace for what was to come.

  “Ladies,” LenDale said when she’d stopped in front of us. “This is my boss, Captain Ramirez.”

  Candice and I both nodded to the middle-aged man in front of us with a moody and highly skeptical look on his face. “Which one of you is supposed to be psychic?” he asked.

  Apparently he wasn’t so fond of formalities. “Me. I’m Abby Cooper and I’m a professional intuitive.”

  He studied me for a minute, the skepticism in his eyes increasing.

  I tried not to squirm.

  “So…what?” he finally asked. “You had a vision about where to find Kendra Moreno or something?”

  I tamped down the irritation his derisive tone sparked and simply pointed to the dripping car moving slowly up the incline. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “Right,” he said, adopting a mocking smile.

  “It might help you to know that Abby is on the FBI payroll,” Candice said evenly.

  That got Captain Attitude’s attention. “She’s a fed?”

  “I’m a consultant to the bureau’s cold-case squad here in Austin,” I said, digging through my purse for my ID.

  I had just located it when we heard, “Captain! Detective LenDale! Over here!”

  All four of our heads snapped in the direction of Kendra’s car, where one of the CSIs was standing next to the now open trunk.

  Captain Attitude turned back to us. “Stay put.”

  I had the urge to salute smartly, but Candice must have noticed I was close to making a wisecrack because she squeezed my arm and said, “We wouldn’t dream of leaving, sir.”

  LenDale and Ramirez trotted away, and when they reached the trunk they both peered inside as the CSI who’d called them over pointed to something. “Do you think Kendra’s body is in there?” Candice asked me.

  I shook my head. “No. Her body’s somewhere else.” The feeling that she had been buried out in the woods in a shallow grave was as strong as ever, so if there was something of interest in the trunk of that car, it wasn’t Kendra’s body.

  We watched LenDale and Captain Attitude question the CSI for a bit; then all three looked our way, and I could tell they were about to come back to us when a car came barreling down the road, plowing through the crime scene tape before braking hard. Out of the door flew Mrs. Woodyard. “Did you find her?!” she yelled frantically. “Did you find my baby?!”