She stared at it without taking it. “What’s that?”
I tossed the envelope on the table and moved to the bed to kick off my shoes and fall backward onto the mattress. “I don’t know exactly,” I said with a yawn. “I woke up and had this feeling like there was a clue to the robberies at the La Cañada branch, and I had this overwhelming urge to go check it out. When I got to the bank, there wasn’t anything obvious, and about the time I was going to come back here, I saw someone using a flashlight at the top of the hill where the tribesman was buried. When I got to the top of the hill to check it out, someone was there, poking around the excavation site. I followed him and he led me to that address. I don’t know what he has to do with all of this, but my intuition was pushing me the whole time to find out where he lived and bring back the address to you, so something is there that’s connected to our investigation.” With another big yawn, I pulled the covers up around myself. The adrenaline rush from earlier had completely worn off, and I’d struggled to keep my eyes open the last five miles of the ride back to the hotel.
“You’re lucky I love you,” Candice growled.
I thought it best to answer her by simply rolling over and going to sleep. I’m a true friend, I know.
* * *
Around seven a.m. I felt the mattress shift violently underneath me. “Earthquake!” Candice shouted, right in my ear.
I bolted out of bed like that ninja again, sprawling on the floor and crawling in the general direction of a doorframe. I’m deathly afraid of acts of God. Hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes, wildfires, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse . . . Fear of these things keep me up at night.
Okay, so maybe they don’t exactly keep me up at night as much as they’re a snarly little voice in the back of my brain that tells me that you can’t ever get out of the way of an act of God if it’s gunning for you.
“Do we stay? Do we go?” I shouted, bear crawling first toward the door, then back toward Candice. “What do we do?” I am woefully unprepared for an earthquake. All I know is that you’re supposed to either stand in the space of a doorframe or bolt outside away from the building, but it depends on what kind of building you’re in when the quake starts, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember which option might afford me the ability not to get killed to death.
Belatedly I realized that Candice was laughing.
With a hammering heart, it finally dawned on me that she’d played a really good practical joke on me. “Aw, Sundance!” she said. “You should see your face!”
I shifted the bear-crawl stance to sit on my butt and glare up at her. “Why?” I demanded.
“Tit for tat,” she told me. “Payback for last night.”
I rubbed my face and had to consider that I might’ve had that coming. I mean, as I said, I hadn’t left her a note and I hadn’t replied to her texts. “Okay,” I said. “We’re even.”
“Not by a long shot,” she remarked. “Come on, get dressed and let’s get to the gym. You owe me some wall balls.”
I don’t know what upset me more, the idea of being hit with an actual earthquake or being hit with a wall ball.
Scratch that. Give me the earthquake anytime. And I can say that because I got hit in the face with the wall ball at least a hundred times. Which is also the number of medicine balls that Candice made me toss against a stupid, unforgiving, aiming-for-my nose-hairs wall.
And I’m not kidding. That wall had it in for me; it’s like it knew exactly where to toss back the ball for maximum punch. (There maaaaay have been a nosebleed involved.)
Still, because I hung in there and didn’t overly complain (due to being punch-drunk), Candice “treated” me to a plate of piping hot pancakes. Gluten-free, vegan pancakes, that is.
“Deese taste like feet,” I complained, my nose stuffed with cotton.
Candice was once again smirking at me over the rim of her teacup. “You’ve only had one bite. How about giving them a chance, Sundance?”
I glared at her. The smirk had quirked up a bit. “No points for rhyming.”
“Can I help it if I’m a poet and don’t know it?”
I pulled out the cotton from my nose and stabbed my fork into the center of the flapjacks, refusing to eat them. “Seriously, these suck.”
Candice sighed. “They don’t suck. They’re just not loaded with fat, gluten, or processed sugars.”
“Like I said, they suck.”
“Abby, do me a favor and look down at your lap for a second.”
“Why?” I said warily. If she was looking to sucker punch me, it wouldn’t be that hard. My eyes were nearly swollen shut.
“Just do it, okay?”
With a scowl, I looked down at my lap. And braced myself. “Annnnnd?”
“What do you see?”
“What am I supposed to see?”
“Look at your stomach,” she said.
It was my turn to sigh, but as my gaze was already pointing down, I took in my stomach. Which was flatter than it’d been the day before. Like . . . for real. It was actually flatter. “I’m less bloated,” I said, kind of amazed.
“Mmmhmm,” she said. “I’ve suspected that you were gluten intolerant for a while. And I also suspected you were lactose intolerant. One day without gluten or dairy and look at you, Sundance. You already look healthier.”
I glanced back up at her. “Candice! All of my favorite foods come with gluten and dairy!”
“True,” she said. “But maybe we can find you some new favorites.”
I pointed to my plate. “You’ll have to do better than foods that taste like feet.”
Candice shoved her quiche toward me. “Fine. You win. Try this.”
I eyed it skeptically. “What’s in it?”
“Eggs, cream, cheese, spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, and sausage.”
“Sausage?” I said, hopefully. “There’s actual sausage in here?”
Candice nodded and I took a bite. It . . . was . . . delicious. “Oh, man,” I told her. “That’s the stuff.” After devouring the quiche, I noticed that Candice still had that knowing smirk plastered onto her face. “What?”
Leaning forward, she said, “You just ate a quiche made with cashew cream instead of dairy cream, veggie cheese instead of real cheese, and soy sausage.”
“Shut. Your. Mouth.”
“It’s true, Sundance. You just ate a healthy meal, and enjoyed it.”
“I think I may be sick.”
My bestie chuckled lightly. “Come on, let’s pay the bill and get back to the hotel. I want to show you what I came up with on that address you handed me last night.”
“When did you have time to research it?” I asked.
“Right about the time you did a face-plant into your pillow after coming back from investigating on your own in the middle of the freaking night, with no backup or anyone to save you should you have gotten into serious trouble.”
“Ah,” I said, thinking maybe I shouldn’t instigate a revisit to the events of last night when I’d done my disappearing act. I mean, Candice is one tiger you definitely don’t go poking without getting a hundred wall balls tossed in your face. Holding up my hand, I motioned to our waiter. “Check, please!”
* * *
We arrived back at the hotel and I waited while Candice got settled at the desk and pulled up a screen on her laptop. I noticed right away that it was the electronic version of a data sheet, which she usually kept for people she was investigating. “The house belonging to the address you gave me is owned by Samantha and Will Edwards. They have two children: a daughter named Emma—seventeen—and a son named Trace—fifteen. Will is an engineer for a company that makes high-tech drones for various military and domestic purposes, and his wife, Samantha, is a faculty advisor for UCLA.
“Emma is a gymnast, a cheerleader, and in love with her selfie sti
ck. She’s also in love with kittens, puppies, bunnies, Athletica leggings, which are like, so the best, and Liam Payne from One Direction.”
“Who’s that?” I interrupted.
Candice waved a dismissive hand. “It’s not important. Emma’s brother, Trace, has no online footprint that I can find. But that’s probably typical of a boy his age.”
“He’s probably the kid I followed from the hill above the bank,” I said.
Candice blinked. “The person you followed last night was a kid?”
“Yeah, didn’t I explain?”
“No. No, you didn’t. You were acutely absent of a good explanation, in fact.”
“Really?” I said, all innocent-like. “My bad.” When Candice cocked an eyebrow in the silence that ensued, I quickly gave her all the details I could remember from the night before.
At the end of my story, Candice scowled at me in that way that suggested I’d done something stupid. She looked at me like that a lot, actually. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“Because when I left, I had no intention of getting out of the car.”
“So why did you?”
“I don’t know. I saw the beam of a flashlight and my radar pinged. I felt I had to go investigate it, and the trail led me to someone entering that house at around four in the morning, which, you gotta admit, for a fifteen-year-old to do that, it’s a little suspicious, right?”
Candice rolled her eyes. “God, Abby, how long’s it been since you were a teenager?” I had no reply for that . . . mostly because I was still trying to calculate the math when Candice continued with, “Maybe it was fairly innocent. Maybe Trace couldn’t sleep and he wanted to check out the place where he’d seen so much police and FBI activity the day before. Maybe it wasn’t even the Edwardses’ kid, but Emma’s boyfriend, who had to travel across the clearing to sneak into her house while her parents were sleeping. Or maybe you didn’t actually see a kid, but Mr. Edwards when he couldn’t sleep and was trying to get some fresh air. Or maybe—”
I held up my hand in a stop motion. “Okay, okay, I get it, I get it. You don’t think following that kid back to his house has relevance to the case, but I’m telling you, it does.”
Candice took a deep breath and lost the attitude. “Sorry,” she said. “Of course I believe you. I just don’t know what a fifteen-year-old boy could have to do with a series of bank robberies.”
I tapped my lip with my index finger and thought about that. “What if he doesn’t? I mean, what if he doesn’t directly have anything to do with them?” I found myself trying to sort through a very murky ether. I felt the boy was in some way connected to the robberies, but the thread linking him to the crimes was thin and fragile as a single hair.
“What do you mean?” Candice asked.
“I mean, what if he somehow saw something or knows something that could be relevant to solving the case?”
“Like he witnessed something on the day of the robberies?”
I pointed at her. “Bingo! Yes, just like that.” And then I thought of another angle. “Or maybe he’s connected in another way. Like, what if it’s less about him, and more about his dad!”
Candice drummed her fingertips on the laptop a few times. “He seems pretty clean, Abs. I already checked both him and the wife out. There’s no criminal history to speak of.”
“Yeah, but didn’t you say he was an engineer at a drone company?”
“Yes, so?”
“I don’t trust people with drones.”
“Why?”
“If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” (True story.)
“Ha. Ha,” Candice said haltingly. But then she added, “Fine, I’ll vet him a little more.”
“Good. I mean, couldn’t he have used one of the drones to conduct surveillance on the banks?”
Candice ignored me in favor of switching windows and pulling up an app on her computer. She then typed very quickly and in a few moments a photo of a man with salt-and-pepper hair and a second chin popped up onto the screen. “Who’s that?” I asked.
“Will Edwards,” Candice said. She then opened up another window on her computer and I saw that it was the video from the bank robberies. After watching it for a few seconds, she pointed to Will’s driver’s license and said, “He’s six-two and two hundred and ten pounds, Abs. No way is he one of the guys in the video.”
I frowned. “Dammit,” I said. “Why couldn’t this be easy?” Candice simply shrugged. With a sigh I sat down on the bed and closed my eyes to better focus on what my radar was trying to tell me. The tricky thing about intuition is that it can speak to someone like me in a variety of ways. Sometimes it’s through a series of images playing out in my mind’s eye. Other times it’s simply a “knowing.” Some things I just know without understanding why I know them. That’s called claircognizance, and it’s very cool because it doesn’t require a lot of work on my part. More often than not, however, it’s my clairvoyance—the pictures-in-my-mind thingie—that’s receiving and interpreting the most information. What’s difficult about using clairvoyance is that there aren’t any words to accompany the pictures, and sometimes the images are open to a whole lot of interpretation, which I usually get right, but not always.
Anyway, I was almost convinced that my claircognizance was telling me that Will Edwards was somehow connected to the robberies, but I needed my clairvoyance to confirm it. Thus, after sitting on the bed, I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, asking myself the question of just what that connection was.
The answer was a little odd. In my mind’s eye I saw two ends of a broken chain lying on the floor. Then I saw a man’s hands pick up each end of the chain, loop a new link through either end, and close it off to form one solid chain.
I felt I understood the metaphor, vague as it appeared. “Will Edwards is the missing link in solving the robbery cases,” I said, after opening my eyes. “He’s involved somehow, Candice. We just have to figure out how.”
Candice had swiveled her chair around to face me. “Okay,” she said, “but just to be clear, you’re sure it’s a connection to the robberies, and not to the girls who may get murdered, correct?”
Again I bounced that off my intuition and was surprised by the answer. In my mind the right half of the chain now appeared to have blood smeared on it, while the left part of the chain had a hundred-dollar bill stuffed into one of the links. “He’s connected to both crimes.”
Candice’s eyes widened. “To both?”
I got up from the bed to pace the floor next to Candice. I went over the image in my mind’s eye again, and knew I wasn’t wrong. “Yes,” I said at last. “Will Edwards is linked somehow to both crimes. He’s the key.”
Candice nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
She then bent her head over her laptop and began snooping into Edwards’s life. I took a shower, got dressed, and stepped out into the hallway to call my hubby.
“Abby,” he said in that deep voice that makes a slow shiver inch pleasurably up my spine. “How’s my baby doll?”
No one says “baby doll” like my husband. It rolls off his tongue as one word, smooth and seductive, like a tiger’s purr. Another delicious shiver spread out across my shoulders.
“Hey, sweetie,” I said. “Miss you.”
“Do you?” he replied, a beckoning resonance in the question. “How much?”
I laughed throatily. “A lot. Like, a lot.”
“Hmmm,” he said. “Sounds promising. When’re you coming home?”
I sighed. “Soon. I wish I could come back now, but there’s . . . some stuff I gotta do out here.”
There was a pause, then, “You and Candice are working the bank robbery cases off the books, right?”
“How’d you know?”
“You two are pretty predictable.”
I smirked. “Does Brice know
?”
Dutch chuckled. “Yep. Hell, Edgar, he knew even before the two of you did. Right after getting the call from Rivera telling him that you’d been tabled, he told me that he knew you and Candice were probably gonna come up with some trumped-up excuse to stay in L.A. and make everybody think you weren’t working the cases, while you’d really be off on your own, working it off the grid.”
I rolled my eyes. “Does anybody else know?”
“The office has a pool going on how long it’ll be before you guys solve the case and take the credit away from the L.A. bureau.”
I shook my head. “Did the money from the first pool roll into that one?”
“It did. It’s up to two grand.”
“What happened to Candice’s money?”
“We threw it in. If you guys bring it home by next Saturday, the whole pot is hers. Although she may have to split it with Gaston, who’s counting on you to come through and redeem his reputation. Of course, if you solve it by Friday, which is where I have my money, you and I can head to Bermuda.”
It was my turn to laugh. “Second honeymoon?”
“Wouldn’t know,” he said sweetly. “I’m still on the first.”
My eyes misted. Sometimes Dutch could simply level me with a beautifully romantic retort like that. I love him so much, but I’m also crazy in love with him too. He’s just so manly, strong, and confident; like G.I. Joe, he makes me feel safe and protected the way he can simply take charge—even in the direst of circumstances, he always keeps his cool. And yet, there’s this soft side to him too. He’s Steve McQueen, Han Solo, and Paul Newman all rolled into one. Swear to God he’s the perfect man. I mean, the guy even does laundry!
“Then I guess I’ll have to solve this case by Friday, babe, so that the honeymoon can continue.”
“Great,” he said. “Anything I can do to help?”
“I’m not sure, but wouldn’t that be cheating?”
“Maybe. If it means seeing you in a bikini on that pink sand in Bermuda, I’m willing to live with it.”
“Good to know,” I told him. We talked about other things for a bit, and he had Eggy and Tuttle—our two pups—bark for me so I could hear them, and then it was time for both of us to get back to doing our thing. I hung up feeling so homesick I could cry, and I thought about marching back into the hotel room to tell Candice that we were packing and catching the first flight home we could, but my conscience wouldn’t let me. I was out here for a reason that had nothing to do with proving myself to a bunch of bureau boys. There was something much bigger at stake, like the lives of three . . . possibly four girls who might someday fall victim to a serial killer.