A Grave Prediction

  “Shit,” Candice muttered under her breath.

  I couldn’t have agreed more.

  We turned as one and walked out the door, because there was no way we were getting any information out of that kid . . . ever.

  After we got back into the car, Candice made a little sound of irritation. “I went in too hard. I never should’ve mentioned a lawsuit.”

  “I thought it was clever,” I said, even though I privately agreed that she should’ve eased off the legal threats.

  Candice turned the car on, then sighed heavily. “His dad will tell him to alert everyone with a pay grade above his, and before you know it, there’ll be a wall of corporate lawyers surrounding the place and keeping any info out of reach, unless someone actually filed suit or came in with a warrant.”

  “We could tell Kelsey about what we suspect happened to Phil and have her follow up on it. She’ll probably get a lot further if she flashes that badge.”

  Candice sighed again. “No, I blew it, Abby. By tomorrow morning any official who calls will be forwarded to the corporate office attorney, who’s gonna ask for a warrant if we want a peek at their employee records.”

  Candice and I stared out the front window of the car while it idled. Neither one of us seemed to know what to do or where to go next. “This case sucks,” I said, leaning my head back against the seat to close my eyes.

  “Yep,” Candice agreed. “I wish we could come up with one solid piece of evidence to solve even one part of this case.”

  “Me too.”

  “At least you were able to give Kelsey a name for the missing boy’s remains.”

  I frowned. “Only a first name. There might be half a dozen Trevors who’ve gone missing out of six thousand kids,” I said.

  “Now, that was a depressing statistic.”

  “It really was. You have to wonder how many of those teens are runaways, living on the streets. They’re probably close to home but unable to turn back, you know?”

  “I do,” she said. “And you gotta believe it’s something that affects the whole community when a youth goes missing. I mean, not just the parents, but the kid’s friends and teachers too.”

  My eyes popped open and I sat forward. “Whoa,” I said.

  “What’s ‘whoa’?”

  “What if Trevor was a local?”

  “You mean a kid from around here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then he shouldn’t be too hard to track down,” she said.

  “You’re right. And I know just how.”

  “How?”

  I pointed across the street to the library. “Right there.”

  We walked into the library and over to the help desk. I inquired about where I could find the La Cañada Flintridge school yearbooks, and the resource librarian motioned me to follow her. Candice came along, of course.

  Heading over to a section void of other people, the librarian took us down a row of stacked books to the end and pointed to a lower shelf. “The elementary schools start on the left, the middle schools are in the middle, and the high schools are on the shelf above.”

  We thanked her and she left us to it.

  I started with the La Cañada seventh- and eighth-grade yearbooks and Candice got busy with the high school. We took two volumes each, one from the previous year and another from the year before that, and headed to a table to sift through them.

  I found Trevor four minutes into the search. “Here,” I said, swiveling the book around so that she could see the photo I was pointing to.

  Candice leaned over to look at him. “Trevor Hodges. You’re sure he’s the one?”

  “He’s the only Trevor dead on this page,” I said. One of my rather unique talents is that when I look at a photo of someone who’s passed away, he or she appears sort of flat and two-dimensional to my eye. It’s subtle, but the dead person always stands out, especially when there are other people in the photo who are still alive.

  “He fits the description you gave to Kelsey too,” she said.

  I brought the yearbook back around toward myself to really look at the image. The young man was a cutie-pie. He had the brightest smile, lots of freckles, front teeth that were too big for his mouth, and collarbones that poked painfully out of his shirt collar. He’d been thin and wiry—perhaps in the middle of a growth spurt at the time the photo was taken. “Poor guy,” I said, smoothing my hand over his image. “What happened to you, huh?”

  Candice took out her phone and typed in Trevor’s name. She pressed her lips together when she hit on something and turned the screen toward me. The headline read, “La Cañada Youth Missing.” The date on the article was a year and a half ago.

  “I should call Kelsey,” I said.

  “We should,” Candice said, taking the responsibility off just me.

  “His poor parents,” I whispered. “I can’t even imagine what they must be going through after all this time.”

  Candice got up and put a hand on my shoulder. I was still staring sadly at Trevor’s photo. So much promise in a face like that. It was hard to believe such a bright future had been extinguished so brutally. “You stay here,” she said softly. “I’ll go outside to make the call.”

  Candice left me alone and while she was outside trying to reach Kelsey, I flipped through the pages of the yearbook to see if there were any other images of Trevor.

  I found two more photos of him: one where he was up at bat for the baseball team, and another when he was singing in the chorus of some musical production put on for the parents.

  I was about to put the book away when I flipped one final page without even thinking and felt my heartbeat tick up when I spotted the image there.

  A young man with the most sinister eyes I’d ever seen stared into the camera, a wicked and—dare I say it?—cruel smile on his face. There was something about this kid, something that sent a solid shiver down my spine. And I mean, it was almost ridiculous, because it was only a photograph and who’s to say that the lighting wasn’t casting dark shadows in exactly the right way to make him appear sinister? . . . But I’ve been working with law enforcement for nearly a decade and I’ve stared directly into the eyes of more than my fair share of violent psychopaths, so I know one when I see one. Especially this kid. It was more than the predatory look in his eyes. Close up, his image projected a single intuitive note into the ether, one that made me catch my breath. He’d killed before. And he was hungry to do it again.

  Now, I know that may sound crazy, but that clairsentient sense of mine wasn’t just whispering it to me—it was practically shouting it. Glancing down at the name of the young man pictured there, I nearly fell out of my chair.

  “Trace Edwards,” I whispered. Every hair on my forearms and the back of my neck stood up on end. I remembered the young man I’d seen shining a flashlight into the pit of the excavation site. He’d been too far away for me to have a good look at him, and I hadn’t really thought to project my feelers out to his energy while he was hunched over the excavation site. I’d been more concerned about not being seen, and then keeping up with him as he led me to his home. If I’d had my wits about me then, I might’ve assessed him intuitively and could’ve seen what I was getting off his image now. That he was a born killer.

  But had he had anything to do with Trevor’s murder? One look to the side of the photo hinted at a clue. Photo credit for the image of Trace Edwards was given to none other than Trevor Hodges . . . who, along with being in the chorus and on the baseball team, was also a member of the yearbook staff.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said, as if that settled it.

  “Sundance?” Candice said. My head whipped up. She was just coming back to the table. “You okay?”

  I turned the yearbook toward her and waited for her to get close enough to look at it. “Whoa, who’s the creepy-looking kid?”

  ??
?Trace Edwards.”

  Candice’s brow rose. “Yikes. I mean, seriously, that glint in his eye. The kid looks like something out of The Shining.” Then she glanced at me and added, “You followed him home in the dark?”

  “Yes, but that’s not the important part; look at who took the picture.”

  “Fuck,” she breathed.

  “I saw him poking around the excavation site the night the tribesman’s remains were discovered, Candice,” I said. “I think he was scouting out the pit as a dump site for Trevor’s bones.”

  Candice took a step back to look at me in shock. “Whoa, you’re thinking that, at the age of thirteen or barely fourteen, Trace killed Trevor?”

  I eyed the image of Trace Edwards again. “When I look at him intuitively, I can tell that he’s killed before.”

  “Wait, what? He’s killed before?”

  “Yes.”

  “Killed what?”

  “What do you mean, what?”

  Candice took that step forward again and pulled out a chair to sit down. “Can you tell if he’s killed a person, or a thing, like an animal?”

  “I . . .” For a moment I felt stumped. Candice’s question was really valid. I was absolutely positive that the vibe coming off Trace Edwards was that of a psychopath, but as to whether he’d had anything to do with Trevor Hodges’s murder, or perhaps that of a defenseless animal, I couldn’t be sure until I focused my radar on that specific question.

  So I closed my eyes and let whatever image was going to come to give me the answer form in my mind’s eye. What I saw was a grave with the cross, or rather the T, at the head of it, and next to it I saw a black backpack with a bone sticking out of it and I had my answer. “Trace did it,” I said. “He carried the bones from the original grave site in his backpack and tossed them into the pit on one of his nightly prowls.”

  “You’re positive,” Candice pressed.

  “I’m interpreting what I see in the ether,” I said carefully, “but do I know I’m right about that interpretation? Yes. I know I’m right.”

  Candice put her elbows on the table and laced her fingers together. “I’m inclined to believe you, but I don’t know that anybody else will if we can’t prove it.”

  I shuddered to try to shake the shivers. It almost worked. “He’s taunting the authorities by placing a few of Trevor’s bones in the pit. He wants to see if we’re smart enough to even figure out who they belong to. As to proving that he did it, I don’t know how we’ll be able to do that. No one’s connected him to Trevor’s disappearance so far, and no one has stepped forward now to say that they saw him throwing the bones into the pit. I think he’s going to get away with it.”

  “There has to be a way to link him to the crime,” Candice said. I both liked and appreciated that she didn’t add, “assuming he did it.” She was taking my word for it, and maybe she was one of only two or three people in the world who would in a case like this.

  “We saw him walking back to his house last night,” I said. “He was probably checking to see if the bones had been collected.”

  “That’d be my guess.”

  And then something else occurred to me. The way the graves had first appeared in my mind’s eye: four graves, three of them occupied by young girls and the fourth feeling less defined . . . That all made sense to me now. I knew that my intuition was trying to point me to Trace as the killer of all four. But why he was linked with the robberies I still couldn’t be sure. “Candice,” I said. “I think Trace is the future killer of those three other girls. I think he’s got his sights set on murdering again, especially now that he thinks he’s gotten away with Trevor’s murder, and I think he’ll make a ritual out of their deaths. He’ll bury them next to where he put Trevor’s remains.”

  Most psychopathic serial killers develop rituals for their murders. The style in which they kill their victims, how they pose them, where they bury or leave the remains—these can all become ritualized. Something about the pathology makes them gravitate to repeating patterns in a specific sequence, and I didn’t think that Trace was going to deviate from that mold.

  Candice wore a deep frown as she considered what I’d just said. “If that’s true, with the fact that nobody’s going to build on the site for at least a few years, he’s got the whole area to play with. It’s cleared land, elevated above the road below and surrounded by trees on almost all three sides. It’d be easy to dig a grave in the middle of the night, cover it up, and get out of there before anyone sees.”

  My shoulders slumped. “I handed him that patch of land on a silver platter.”

  “Or,” Candice was quick to say, “you made it easy for us to figure out that the subdivision has a serial killer in the making. Abby, we’ve got to find a way to stop him. Can your radar point to how we do that?”

  I started to shake my head but then stopped. My mind’s eye held an image of the video of the bank robbery and refused to let it go. I had the distinct feeling that the way to deal with Trace was to solve the robberies. “He could’ve been involved with the bank robberies,” I said.

  Candice’s brow furrowed and she pulled the yearbook close, flipping to the index page and scrolling down with her finger. She then moved to a page toward the front and scanned it before pointing out Trace among a group of other eighth graders. “He’s thin enough and short enough to have been one of the robbers,” she said. “The masks covering the lower half of their faces could’ve hidden his features too.”

  “So, who were the others?” I said.

  We both looked again at the photo of Trace with a group of students, but it was obvious even in that photo that he was the interloper. The other kids all had their arms slung over one another’s shoulders, and there was an obvious camaraderie between them, and yet Trace stood to the side, looking bored and disdainful. How he’d ended up in the photo of the group was a mystery. My guess was that he’d been passing by when he was stopped and asked by the person taking the picture to stand near the group. At least, to me that’s what the image said was happening. Trace just didn’t look like he fit in, or wanted to, or like anyone else wanted him to either.

  “I can’t see this kid leading three others in a crime spree like this,” Candice said, voicing what I was thinking too. “Plus, Abs, the robberies were sophisticated. The robbers moved with a fair amount of synchronicity. No one missed a step. It was almost like a well-orchestrated dance, and I just don’t see this kid able to pull that off.”

  “I agree,” I said, with a sigh. Then I remembered where Candice had just been. “Did you get ahold of Kelsey?”

  “I did. She got caught up in something for the Grecco case, and hadn’t had a chance to look into the missing kid named Trevor, so she was very happy that we’ve done some legwork for her. She’s going to walk the info in to Rivera and get back to us as soon as she can.”

  My radar pinged and I pointed to her phone. “Three, two, one . . .” Candice’s phone rang.

  She started and eyed me keenly. “I love when you do that.”

  I bounced my eyebrows and got up from the table, grabbing the yearbooks, as Candice spoke to Kelsey in hushed tones. I then headed toward the exit, not even bothering to see if Candice was following. I knew she was.

  When we got to the car, I said, “I need to stop for coffee before we head into the bureau offices, and not at the Starbucks we just left either.”

  Candice smirked. “You knew she’d ask us to come in, huh?”

  “I did.”

  “Okay, but caffeine is probably not a good idea this close to bedtime, Sundance.”

  “I’ll get something decaf. It’s not really that I want the coffee. It’s that I want to make a point.”

  “What point is that?” she asked as she started the car and I buckled up.

  “That I always get my way in the end,” I told her, adding a wicked snicker.

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; * * *

  I walked into the bureau offices feeling really full of myself, and with my puffed-out chest and giant-sized cup of coffee, pretty much everyone knew it. Perez and Robinson especially knew it—mostly because I made sure to take a BIG slurp of the coffee before sitting down at the conference table.

  So what if I burned my tongue? Worth. It.

  “Thanks for coming in,” Rivera said to me when we were all seated.

  I put a hand on the back of Candice’s chair just to let him know that she was with me on this and no way was he gonna get my cooperation if he chose to ban her from the building again. “I didn’t come in for you, Agent Rivera,” I said. “I came in because Agent Hart asked me politely . . . and I actually like her.”

  Okay, so maybe I was a bit bitter about the whole being-asked-to-leave thing.

  Rivera smiled tightly at me, while Kelsey ducked her chin to hide a smile. “Dr. Catalpa is comparing the jawbone to the X-rays supplied by Trevor’s dentist,” he said.

  Candice pulled her chin back. “You got his dental records that fast?”

  “Agent Hart called Trevor’s parents. Mrs. Hodges’s brother was Trevor’s dentist. He e-mailed the X-rays to Dr. Catalpa ten minutes after Hart hung up with Mrs. Hodges. The X-ray comparison to the lower jaw removed from the pit shouldn’t take long.”

  My radar pinged and I sat up straight and pointed to Rivera. “Is your phone on?”

  His brow furrowed. “Yes.”

  I grinned. “Three . . . two . . . one . . . ,” I said, then pointed at him. The moment I pointed, his phone chirped and he startled just like Candice had.

  Pulling up his phone, he looked at the display, his eyes going wide. He answered with, “Dr. Catalpa. Do you have the results?”

  I shifted my gaze to Robinson and Perez, who were doing their level best not to seem surprised. With a smug smile I took another loud slurp of the coffee and smacked my lips. “Mmmmm,” I said, rubbing it in. Candice snickered and they glared.