Lethal Outlook

by Victoria Laurie

  He offered us a seat at the table and asked if we wanted coffee. This time, Candice accepted and Tristan busied himself quietly for a moment, his movements slow, methodical, reminding me a bit of my fiancé.

  When our host set down two steaming mugs and some cream and sugar for us, Candice dove right into the interview. “As I told you on the phone, Abby and I are investigating your wife’s disappearance.” I noticed she distinctly didn’t mention that no one had yet hired us. Smart, I thought. Better to save it till we could feel him out.

  At the mention of his wife, Tristan’s eyes closed tightly for the briefest of seconds, as if hearing out loud that Kendra had vanished hurt him deeply. “Yes,” he said, his voice never betraying what I suspected he was feeling. “Can I ask, though, who hired you?”

  Candice offered him a sly grin. He’d seen right past her dodge. “We’re working on behalf of someone concerned for your wife,” she replied evasively.

  Kendra’s husband took a seat at the table, his expression puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

  Candice’s eyes flickered to me, and I knew she was looking for a way out of answering the question directly. “You see,” she said, “my partner here is a professional intuitive. She’s done work with several police departments, and she currently holds a position as a civilian profiler with the FBI here in Austin. She consults with them on some of their most difficult cases.”

  Tristan’s gaze shifted to me, and I found only curiosity in his pale gray eyes. But then I saw something more, and those eyes narrowed and he looked more closely at me. It made me uncomfortable until he said, “You’ve got a welt on the top of your forehead. Did you fall or something?” His eyes then slid down to my cane, and he seemed to assume that’s exactly what had happened.

  I put a hand up to cover the welt. “It’s nothing,” I assured him. “Really, I’m fine.”

  Tristan got up and moved to his freezer. Pulling out a package of frozen peas, he brought them over to me along with a clean dish towel. “Here,” he said.

  I took them gratefully but felt my cheeks heat up with embarrassment. “Thank you. I bumped my head in the elevator right before we came here.” I made sure to sneak in a dirty look at Candice, which she pretended not to see.

  Tristan took his seat again and kept his focus on me. “Are you really a psychic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what happened to my wife?” Tristan’s gaze never left mine.

  I cleared my throat and dropped my eyes to the table. “I think so, Mr. Moreno. Yes.”

  For a long moment there was only silence, and when I glanced up again, I could see that Tristan’s eyes were glistening with tears. “You think she’s been murdered, don’t you?”

  I had the urge to look at Candice, but I resisted. My sense was that Tristan knew intuitively that his wife was dead and he was simply looking for someone to agree with him. Still, I kept my answer a bit elusive. “I can’t be sure. It’s only a feeling, but, to answer your question, yes, I do suspect the worst may have happened to her.”

  Tristan put his fist to his mouth, and he seemed to struggle mightily against a tide of emotions. There was another pause, during which no one said anything, and when Candice opened her mouth to speak, I reached out and squeezed her arm. I wanted to give Tristan a moment.

  At last he got up and went to the sink. Turning the water on, he just let it run for a few seconds, and then he put his hands under the cool water before splashing a small handful onto his face.

  He cleared his throat several times, then wiped his face with a paper towel and came back to the table. “Kendra would never have left Colby alone in the house,” he said, his voice hoarse and a bit choked.

  “Colby’s your son?” I asked him.

  Tristan nodded.

  “Can you tell us what happened that day, Tristan?” Candice asked gently. “The day Kendra went missing. Can you take us through the moment you came home to find her missing?”

  Tristan wiped his face again with the paper towel before speaking. “I came home around six,” he said. “The first thing I noticed was that the house was dark. Kendra’s always got a light on, you know; it’s one of those things she does. I leave the cap off the toothpaste and Kendra’s a hog with the electricity.” I saw an amused look come over Tristan’s face before he seemed to remember that Kendra wouldn’t be leaving the lights on ever again, and that amused expression faded away like smoke on the wind.

  He took a small sip of his coffee and I saw that his hand was shaking slightly. “Anyway,” he said, closing his eyes as he continued. “I came up the back stairs and I saw that the kitchen door was open, and not just a little open—wide-open. I didn’t think that was weird at first. I mean, I remember wondering if Kendra hadn’t noticed that it was open, and the wind blew it or something. But, what hit me right after that was that she wasn’t in the kitchen and there was no dinner on the stove.”

  “Your wife is a good cook?” Candice asked when it appeared that Tristan was getting choked up again.

  He swallowed hard and nodded. “Yeah. She loves to cook. Usually when I get home, dinner is ready and we eat a little early so that we don’t keep Colby up too late.”

  “But that night there wasn’t anything prepared on the stove?” I asked. Tristan shook his head. “What about ingredients on the counter?” I pressed. If it was obvious that Kendra was preparing dinner, then it might help us pinpoint a time when she was murdered.

  But Tristan only shook his head again. “There was nothing on the counters,” he said. I noticed then that Candice had discreetly set her phone down on the table, and although it was lying on its face, I suspected the phone was recording the entire conversation.

  “Then what?” she asked him.

  “Well, I called out to her, but she didn’t answer me, and somewhere upstairs I could hear Colby crying, so I called out to Kendra a couple more times, but again she didn’t answer. So on my way toward Colby’s room, I passed by the front door, and something about it caught my eye and I stopped to look at it.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “It was unlocked and open just a crack.”

  “You noticed that?” Candice asked.

  Tristan gave a small nod. “Yeah. I know it’s a weird thing to notice, but the dead bolt is always lined up linear, and as my eyes passed the door, I could see that it was horizontal. It was something that was out of place and made me take a pause. Neither of us ever went through the front door because it sticks a little and it’s hard to close once it’s been open, so we just keep it shut and locked unless we have company over or we have a package delivery or something like that.”

  Candice seemed to hit on that. “Were either you or your wife expecting company or a package that day?”

  “No. At least, I wasn’t.”

  Candice nodded. “Okay, so you noticed that your front door was open; then what?”

  Tristan ran a hand through his hair. I thought he looked nervous about telling us the story of that day, and I wondered why the change in him, as he’d been so relaxed until now. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know why, but I stopped to pull the door open and look out on the front porch. I didn’t see anything, but the fact that it’d been left open like that, along with the back door, and Colby upstairs crying without any sign of his mother…I just had this bad feeling and I remember getting this cold chill up my spine. I don’t know how to explain it other than I knew things weren’t okay.”

  “Then what?” Candice asked when Tristan paused.

  He was rubbing the side of his coffee cup with his thumb and still staring at the tabletop absently. “I went upstairs to Colby’s room,” he said. “The poor guy was hot and damp. I don’t think he’d been changed in hours. So I got him out of the crib and called for Kendra one last time, hoping that she was just outside or something. But even then I knew. I knew she wasn’t going to answer me. So I took Colby all around the house to search for Kendra, but she wasn’t anywhere inside or out
and her car wasn’t in the garage—”

  Candice interrupted him, “You didn’t notice her car was missing when you pulled in?”

  Tristan shook his head. “Since the driveway’s kind of narrow and I’m always the first one to leave in the morning and the last one home at night, she always takes the garage and I park in the driveway.”

  Candice nodded before getting back to what he’d said earlier. “You were saying that you did a cursory search for Kendra and didn’t find her. Did you see anything else unusual—besides both the front door and the back door being unlocked?”

  Tristan shook his head, and his expression was so sad that it tugged at me. “No,” he said. “I mean, the house was just like it always was—neat and clean. Kendra’s a neat freak. She likes everything in its place.”

  I jumped in again, asking, “And you’re sure there was nothing out on the kitchen counter in the way of food preparation?” My radar kept pinging that there was a clue there.

  “No,” he said, eyeing me curiously, “but there was an empty jar of peanut butter and a small plate in the sink. I figured that was left over from Colby’s snack time. He loves peanut butter crackers.”

  “What time is snack time?” I asked, hoping to narrow the time window.

  Tristan sighed and ran a hand over his hair again. “He has two snack times a day. One at around ten a.m. and one at two p.m. It’s hard to say which one was in the sink because right after his snack he’s usually a little sleepy, so Kendra puts him down for a short nap at eleven and then again at three.”

  “And since you found Colby in his crib, it’s hard to say which nap time he’d been put down for,” Candice pointed out.

  “But it does narrow the window a little,” I said. “What time would Colby get up from his afternoon nap?”

  “Usually around four,” Tristan told me.

  I turned to Candice. “So because Tristan found Colby still in his crib, we can assume that Kendra went missing sometime between eleven a.m. and four p.m.”

  “Five hours is a big window,” Candice said, but didn’t comment on it further. Instead, she changed topics. “Tristan, after you searched the house, what’d you do next?”

  “I called the police.”

  Candice cocked her head. “Did you call around to any of her friends first or maybe the neighbors?”

  “No. When I found Colby wet, alone, and looking like he’d been crying for hours, I was positive something bad had happened to my wife. Kendra just wouldn’t ever do something like go off and leave him like that. Plus, with both the front door and the back door being open and unlocked, and her car being gone, it all added up to something bad.”

  “What’d the police say?” Candice asked next.

  “They didn’t say much,” he said gruffly. “Mostly they looked around and tried to convince me that she was probably out running an errand, or maybe she was taking a break at a friend’s house and she’d be back in a few hours. That’s when I called my attorney and asked her to speak to them. I couldn’t get the police to even take photos or dust for prints or anything until Chelsea—that’s my attorney—showed up.”

  My brow lifted and I saw the surprised look on Candice’s face too. “You called your attorney to get the cops to take you seriously?”

  Tristan nodded. “I’ve known Chelsea since high school. We even went to prom together, and she’s a really good friend of ours. She knows Kendra wouldn’t go off and leave Colby willingly. She came here, made a few calls, and got someone to finally send two detectives over. They took my statement and gave us the song and dance about needing to wait twenty-four hours before we could file a missing-person’s report, but Chelsea kept hammering at them, and eventually, after we’d called all of Kendra’s relatives and friends and found out that no one had seen her, the cops finally decided to get serious and an hour later CSI showed up, but from what Chelsea tells me, no unknown prints have been found.”

  Candice’s face was now a blank, but I could feel her energy buzzing. “That’s why our contact at the police station said you had lawyered up.”

  Tristan blinked. “I didn’t ‘lawyer up,’” he snapped defensively. “I called a really good friend of mine who just happens to be an attorney, and she helped me get the police to take Kendra’s disappearance seriously.”

  Candice cocked her head. “Let me ask you straight up, Tristan,” she said. “Have you retained Chelsea as your lawyer?”

  Tristan’s face flushed bright crimson. “Yeah. But only because the police have made it pretty clear they think I might’ve had something to do with Kendra’s disappearance. It was Chelsea’s idea even. She said that if we didn’t find Kendra soon, the police might start to look at me suspiciously, and Chelsea also told me that she could keep the focus off me and on the effort to find my wife if I retained her.”

  “When did the police start to think you had something to do with Kendra’s disappearance?” Candice asked next. “And I’m only asking because it seems weird that a guy who pushes to get two detectives over here to look for any evidence of foul play would so quickly become the person of interest in the investigation.”

  “I think that tide turned the minute they finished talked to Kendra’s parents,” he said, and I caught a hint of something in the ether that wasn’t apparent in Tristan’s body language. He didn’t much care for the Woodyards. At all. I could see the discord swirling around in his energy. The fact that he was working to hide it was what was interesting to me. “They’re so worried about her that they’re having a hard time believing I don’t know where she is.”

  “Ah,” Candice said in that way that suggested she didn’t quite believe he was telling her everything. “I have a personal question to ask you,” she said next, “and I hope you don’t mind, but were you and Kendra getting along okay?”

  Tristan didn’t seem surprised that she’d asked that. “We were,” he said.

  I picked up on the lie right away. I decided to call him on it. “You’re sure?” I asked.

  He didn’t reply verbally. He simply nodded. Interesting.

  “No arguments or fights that might’ve caused Kendra to take a break from her married life for a little while?” Candice said, picking up on the fact that I’d pressed Tristan on the issue.

  He shook his head, and I knew he was concealing something, but I also could see his determination to keep us from knowing what. I made a small motion with my hand for Candice to drop it before he stopped talking to us altogether, and she moved on.

  “This next question, Tristan, is even more invasive, and I’m so sorry to have to ask you this, but in your relationship with Kendra, did things ever get…heated?”

  He cut her a sharp look. “Heated?” he repeated, his tone holding an edge.

  Candice pretended not to notice how her question had affected him. “Yeah, you know, was there ever a time when you two maybe had an argument and things escalated a little too far?” She asked that like they were just enjoying a nice chat over coffee.

  Tristan’s gaze dropped to his hands. “No.” My radar, however, said otherwise.

  “You’re lying,” I told him bluntly. I couldn’t help the accusatory tone. He wasn’t doing himself any favors by lying to us, and if he had also lied to the police when they asked him this same question—as I had no doubt they already had—they would find a way to use it against him even if he’d had nothing to do with his wife’s disappearance.

  Tristan glared at me. “No, I’m not.”

  Liar, liar, pants on fire…, the familiar phrase sang in my mind. “Yes,” I said evenly. “You are.”

  He continued to look stonily at me for a beat, and then his eyes cut back to Candice. “You know, you never answered my question, Candice.”

  “What question was that, Tristan?”

  “Who hired you to look into my wife’s case?”

  “No one,” she confessed, keeping her voice even and cool.

  Tristan’s face registered both his surprise and alarm, and his de
fensiveness only got worse. “Then what the hell are you two doing here?”

  I knew we were pushing him, and I may have believed he was innocent of foul play right up until he’d started lying to us. “It was my idea,” I told him. “We saw Kendra’s story on the news, and as I’ve worked as a consultant on quite a few missing-persons cases for the FBI, I thought Candice and I could be useful to the investigation.”

  “Right now we’re just getting a preliminary feel for the case,” Candice said quickly. “But I believe we might be able to contribute to the investigation, and, if you’d like to hire us, I can assure you that our rates are quite reasonable.”

  I felt my insides tighten. I didn’t like pushing our services on other people—it felt weird. And Candice’s offer hung awkwardly in the air until Tristan shook his head slowly back and forth and added a sort of laugh, but it held no real mirth. “I think you two should go.”

  Candice and I both sat there for a beat, maybe hoping he’d change his mind.

  “Now,” he added, his tone flinty.

  Candice stood, and with a bit of effort, so did I. Setting the frozen peas to the side, I said, “Thank you, Tristan. And I’m so sorry for what’s happening to you and your family right now.”

  He only gave me a stony look, and with that we left him.

  As we were making our way down the drive, I could tell Candice was silently beating herself up for her final statement to Tristan. I was about to comfort her and tell her not to worry about it when I happened to catch sight of a truck parked at the Morenos’ neighbor’s house. On the side of the vehicle were the words “Russ’s Pest Control.” To the side of the truck was a big guy in gray wellies tugging on a hose that extended from the truck to the front lawn.

  I grinned. The universe was watching out for me again. “I’ll be right back,” I told Candice, and limped over to the guy in the wellies. After introducing myself and discovering that he was Russ, I told him about my scorpion problem.