Their murders felt so certain, so destined, and that was unusual because the future is almost always malleable. I hoped I could change the path they were on, and stop a killer before he even got started, but how I was going to do that in a week and a half I had no idea.
“Abs?” I heard Candice call.
Turning, I saw her poking her head out of the room. Lifting my cell to wiggle it, I said, “Just hung up with the hubby.”
“How’s he doing?”
I smirked. “Devastated that I’m still here working the case.”
“Ah. Does my husband know the truth about our beach-vacation ruse?”
“He does. In fact, he called it before we did.”
She frowned. “Are we really that predictable?”
I shrugged. “Maybe when it comes to doing the right thing, we are.”
Her frown turned into a smile. “You always know just what to say.”
“It’s part of my charm.”
“Yeah, well, bring that charm along. We’re gonna go stake out Will Edwards.”
“We are?”
“Yep,” she said, handing me my purse. “I wanna get a look at this guy up close.”
“But what about lunch?” I was a little panicked, because when Candice began a stakeout, she tended not to budge for hours at a time. Not even to pee.
“We can eat after.”
“But—”
“Sundance,” she said sternly, “get in the car. I promise I have a plan that doesn’t involve listening to your stomach rumble for three hours.”
Grudgingly, I followed after her and we headed over to the corporate side of town.
Chapter Nine
• • •
Will Edwards worked in a big skyscraper that was nothing to write home about. After searching the parking garage beneath his office building for a good half hour, Candice managed to locate his car, which I thought was pretty remarkable on her part. The car itself was a silver Ford Fusion, and we watched it like a hawk for another half hour until a man approached fiddling with a key fob and his phone. “Is that him?” I asked.
Candice leaned forward, holding up her phone, where I saw that she had Edwards’s photo on the screen. “That’s him,” she said.
The guy was big. Tall, heavy in the belly, and lumbering on two legs that looked stiff at the knees. I watched him using both my intuition and my ordinary observation. There was no grace to him; he sort of shuffled along, preoccupied by too many things and missing all the important stuff. I felt that he led a distracted life; his mind was always elsewhere. You could see it in his expression, in the way he fumbled with his phone and his key, never giving either his full attention. His gaze was also a little glazed, as if he didn’t sleep well, and I wondered if the extra weight he carried was interrupting his sleep patterns. His energy seemed “thin” to me, which is what happens when people are under too much stress, don’t sleep, and make poor food choices. They run on autopilot, and it’s terrible for their health.
Will Edwards struck me as being in awful health. I could pick up his high cholesterol and high blood pressure from twenty feet away. “That guy’s on a steady march to an early grave,” I muttered.
“Yeah?” Candice asked.
“Yeah. He doesn’t eat right, doesn’t sleep, doesn’t rest, doesn’t stop, and his health is really suffering. I give him ten to fifteen years tops unless he turns it around.”
“Funny,” Candice said.
When she didn’t comment further, I tore my attention away from Edwards to ask, “What’s funny?”
“You can pick up someone else’s bad health habits, but yours don’t register.”
I felt a flush hit my cheeks. She was right. I turned back to Edwards and had to wonder if my energy looked a little like his. Could another psychic pick up my poor eating habits and my nonexistent exercise plan?
It gave me pause, that’s for sure. “Okay, so maybe tomorrow we’ll go for another run.”
“Atta girl,” Candice said, elbowing me gently in the arm.
By now Edwards had made it to his car and had managed to unlock it and slip inside. We waited until he pulled out of the slot and moved toward the exit before we took up the tail.
Candice stuck closer to him than I think she normally would’ve when she was tailing a target. No way was Edwards going to realize he had a tail. He talked on his phone and drove three to ten miles under the speed limit the entire time.
At last he pulled into an In-N-Out Burger and headed to the to-go window. “Want anything here?” Candice asked me, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know she was testing me.
“Nah,” I said. “I’m good for about another hour or so.”
We waited in the parking lot near the exit and kept our eyes on the rearview and side mirrors. The line was pretty long, so we had to wait about ten minutes for Edwards to pass us on his way out. As we pulled into traffic behind him, I felt my hopes that he’d do something suspicious on his lunch hour fade. Clearly he was heading right back to the office with his lunch.
Except that as we approached his office building, he never put on his turn signal, or slowed down. A moment later he passed the building altogether.
“Running an errand?” I asked Candice.
“Maybe,” she said.
We followed Edwards east all the way to a seedier part of town and then to a part where seedy would lock the car doors. “Well, this is getting interesting,” I said.
“And a little concerning,” Candice agreed.
Edwards pulled into the parking lot of a motel that definitely rented by the hour . . . if not the quarter hour. The asphalt in the parking lot was at war with sprouting grass and weeds, and so far, the foliage was winning. Of course, that was the scenic part of the place. The building itself had probably seen better days, likely immediately after it was built, but not a day since. Looking at it, I thought the motel could’ve been painted white at some point, but the paint was so decayed it was little more than the hint of a stain on the graying wood underneath. Doors to most of the rooms hung loosely, or didn’t seem to want to close all the way. The sidewalks were so stained with dirt and crumbling that it was hard to tell they were sidewalks, and some of the windows were covered over with plywood or, if they were merely cracked, with duct tape.
As Candice edged to a spot well away from Edwards, I exclaimed, “Gee, Candice, maybe we should go back to our hotel, pack, and move our stuff over here!”
“We’d probably save a lot on the daily rate,” she said with a chuckle. And then we both fell silent while we watched to see what Edwards would do next.
After parking, the man lumbered out of his car and headed toward the small shack-type structure attached to one end of the building, marked FFICE—the o was missing, or it’d been stolen, or sold to cover the electric bill, who knew?—and then emerged a few moments later with an orange plastic key. Heading to room number twelve, he let himself in and shut the door.
The blinds were drawn on the only window that looked in, so we had relatively little idea what he might be doing in there, or rather, maybe neither one of us wanted to think about what he was doing, but then, five minutes after he entered the room, someone approached.
I say someone because that’s kind of the only way you can describe her. She was big for a girl—hell, she was big even for a man—and she walked toward the room like a performer heading into the spotlight. She had black, somewhat wild hair, ginormous boobs, and more makeup than Gene Simmons in full KISS face paint.
In fact, KISS might’ve been the inspiration for her whole look, because there sure was a lot of leather, metal studs, and exposed skin happening.
“Um . . . wow,” I whispered.
“You said it,” Candice agreed.
We continued to watch the woman saunter toward Edwards’s room, then stop in front of it and lean a littl
e against the door frame before rapping the wood casually with the backs of her knuckles.
The door opened immediately, and Edwards stood there in his dress shirt and droopy tighty-whities.
I wasn’t sure what was harder on the eyes—his pasty legs in that diaper, or her, leaning up against the door, all Come hither.
I mean, you can’t look at something like that and unsee it, or unimagine what nasty things they’d be doing for the next half hour. “I’m suddenly glad I didn’t have lunch,” I said.
Candice nodded, a look of shock and awe on her face.
We fell silent again as Edwards’s “guest” walked into the room and he closed the door.
We didn’t speak again until the door opened exactly one half hour later, and when that door opened, both of us gasped. Now we knew it was coming, but the sight of Edwards rumpled, disheveled, and barely dressed, his open shirt revealing a large belly smeared with makeup, was enough to make anybody suck in some air, and possibly gag it back out again.
For his part, Edwards looked like he’d be giving his guest a five-star rating on Yelp. He wore a contentedly bemused smile on his face, which was the most animated expression he’d worn since we’d first spotted him. The woman looked like she just wanted to get paid and head home to take a bath, or brush her teeth, or rinse her mouth out with bleach.
He said a few words with that goofy grin while he zipped up his pants and fished through the pockets, finally producing some cash, which he handed over. She snatched the money out of his hand, tickled him under his chin with one long nail on her index finger, then turned on her heel without so much as a “Well, this was fun!”
He didn’t seem to mind the abrupt departure; he simply sighed, watched her backside for a few bounces, then quietly shut the door.
I looked to Candice, ready to ask her what we should do next, when I saw that she was shifting her gaze back and forth between the closed door and the streetwalker. “What’re you thinking?” I asked.
“I’m thinking that these two have gotten together before,” she said, motioning with her chin toward the woman, who’d stepped off the sidewalk to walk over to Edwards’s car solely for the purpose of running her finger along the trunk.
It was an interesting thing to do. The gesture spoke of both familiarity and an intimate connection. Granted, it probably didn’t get much more intimate than what they’d just done, but this was different. This was bordering on something emotional.
Candice shifted the car into gear and waited for the prostitute to exit the parking lot before she pulled out of the space. “Where’re we going?” I asked.
“We’re following her,” she said.
“We are? Why?”
“Because streetwalkers are a great source of information, and if Edwards has bragged to anybody about being involved in the bank robberies, it’d be to that woman.”
“What if she tells Edwards we’re checking up on him?”
“What if she does?” Candice said. “He’s not gonna know who we are. Besides, I doubt she’ll tell him.”
“Why do you doubt she’ll tell him?”
“Because I’m going to pay her not to.”
By now we’d reached the streetwalker and Candice slowed the rental just enough to pull up alongside her. Rolling down my window, my partner nudged me and said, “Get her attention.”
I looked at my best friend like she had to be kidding, but another (harder) nudge convinced me she was serious. “Fine, whatever,” I said, leaning out to wave at the woman, who was doing a pretty good job of ignoring us. “Excuse me!” I called.
“If you’re lost, sugar, I ain’t gonna help you,” she said, a distinct Southern lilt in the words.
“We’re not lost. We’re after some information.”
“Do I look like four-one-one to you?”
“No,” I said. “You look like a woman who expects to get paid for her time, and how that time is spent, either talking to us or . . . entertaining someone else, is entirely up to you.”
She paused and finally considered me. “You a cop?”
“Nope,” I said. When she eyed me doubtfully, I held up my little finger and added, “Pinkie swear.”
A flash of annoyed impatience crossed her features. “I ain’t got time for that shit,” she told me, and went back to walking.
At that point Candice leaned forward and whistled sharply to get the woman’s attention. “Yo! How about we take you for a bite to eat? We’ll pay you for your time, and treat you to some lunch too.”
That got the woman to cast an intrigued glance toward our car. “I am hungry,” she said.
Candice nodded, looked quickly back at the street to make sure she didn’t crash the car while inching forward to keep pace with the woman. “You look like you could use a good meal,” she said seriously.
Finally the woman stopped again and after placing one hand on a hip, she said, “Do I get to pick the place?”
“You’d better,” Candice said. “We don’t have a clue about where to eat around here.”
The woman frowned. “Cuz there ain’t no good place round here.” She then walked forward to the car and tugged on the handle. I tried to get the door unlocked before she did that, but I was a second too late and she glared at me until the lock clicked.
“Sorry,” I told her after she’d gotten the door open.
She regarded me with half-lidded eyes. “Whatever.” Once she was settled into the backseat, she said to Candice, “Head up to that light and take a left.”
Candice proceeded to drive toward the light, but before she got there, I felt something against my right arm, resting on the window frame. Looking over, I noticed it was the woman’s hand, tapping my arm. “My rate is sixty bucks an hour,” she said. “Cash.”
She’d caught me off guard, and I looked at Candice because I didn’t know what to do. Candice mouthed, Pay her!
Digging into my purse, I pulled up some cash and handed our guest three twenties. She stuffed the bills into her bra and leaned back against the cloth seats to stare blankly ahead.
Thinking it might be polite to make conversation, I squirmed around in my seat and said, “I’m Abby. This is Candice.”
Candice waved and eyed our passenger in the rearview mirror.
“Flower,” she said.
I pressed my lips together, unsure if she was pulling our leg, or if she was serious. “That’s a pretty name,” I tried.
Flower smoothed out a patch of hair on the side of her head. “It sure is,” she said. Then she seemed to take note of the road ahead. “Get onto the highway,” she told Candice. “Red Lobster is three exits down.” Candice and I shared a subtle “Ooo, boy . . .” look while Flower continued. “Gonna have me some lobster today. And some all-you-can-eat shrimp. Mmm, mmm!”
* * *
A long and painful time later we sat amid the detritus of a shellfish massacre and I glared angrily at Candice. It’d been her idea to take Flower out to eat, after all.
“Here’s your check,” said our oh-so-not-happy waitress. I bit my lip. From the moment the poor girl had appeared at our table, Flower had set about running her ragged. The poor server had been like a ball in a pinball machine, no sooner setting down a ramekin of extra cocktail sauce than being sent for more tartar sauce. Then lemons. Then extra refills on Flower’s soda. Then more shrimp, biscuits, salad dressing, extra napkins, and on, and on, and on. As a result, all of the other tables in the girl’s section had been neglected, and I know at least one table had complained to the manager.
I tried to smile reassuringly at our waitress as she set the bill down in front of me, but she simply nodded curtly and walked away. Gulping, I looked at the tab. It was more than two hundred dollars.
I tried to get Candice’s attention to get her to chip in for the bill (which, by the way, was all Flower; Candice and I had had nothin
g more than iced tea), but my partner in crime was currently picking small bits of crab shell out of her hair and patently ignoring me.
I sighed and pulled out my Amex card, setting it into the little pocket of the vinyl book the bill had come in. I’d take Candice’s half of the check out of our winnings from the office pool.
The waitress appeared again at my elbow, and after she cashed us out on a little gizmo attached to what looked like a smartphone with the Red Lobster logo on it, I handed her two twenties and a ten, and said, “Thank you so much. You were great.”
Our server took the cash, blushed a little, and finally smiled sweetly at me. “Have a nice afternoon,” she said, leaving us alone again.
“All right, Flower,” Candice said smoothly. “Now that you’ve had your fill of lobster, shrimp, and crab legs, how about we get down to brass tacks?”
Flower patted her belly and exclaimed, “Oooh! Sugar, after a meal as fine as that, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”
“Awesome. My first question is, how long have you . . . uh . . . known Will Edwards?”
Flower squinted at Candice. It was obvious she hadn’t been expecting a question about him. “Will? Hmmm, I’ve know him at least a decade or so.”
I blinked rapidly, taking that in. It seemed unfathomable. “Ten years?”
“Give or take.”
“So he’s a regular,” I said.
“He’s not my oldest client, but he’s probably the most loyal.”
“You must know quite a bit about his personal life, then,” I said next.