Lethal Outlook

by Victoria Laurie

  “Hey, cowboy!” I said, happy he was home. But then I happened to see his face and I knew it’d been a tough day.

  “Mmrrph,” he mumbled, heading straight to the kitchen.

  I followed him. “I made dinner!” I sang, hoping my good cheer would help bring him out of the grumps.

  “Mmrrph,” he muttered again, twisting the cap off a fresh bottle of scotch. Dutch went for the hard stuff only when his day was really bad.

  “It’s pizza!” I told him, my voice heavy on the enthusiasm. He didn’t even reply; he merely poured two fingers of amber liquid into a glass and downed it in one gulp. Uh-oh.

  “I’ll just warm it up for you,” I said helpfully, moving to get him a plate and put a couple of slices into the microwave.

  “I’m not hungry,” he grumbled, pouring another two fingers into the glass before taking it—and the bottle—out to the living room.

  I hit the button on the microwave, waited for the cheese to get good and gooey, then brought the plate back to the living room. Holding it in front of my sweetie, I said, “I’m guessing your last meal was around noon, right?”

  Dutch was sitting sullenly on the couch, his drink in one hand and the remote in the other. “We didn’t have time for lunch,” he said moodily.

  Since I’d seen Dutch scarf down only a slice of toast that morning, I knew that at least some of his current mood could be attributed to low blood sugar.

  I put the pizza on the coffee table and sat down next to him. “No breaks in the mall-bombing case?”

  “Nope.”

  I waited for him to elaborate, but his eyes were staring hard at the TV. ESPN was running football highlights. After a stretch of silence during which Dutch just sipped his drink and stared listlessly at the TV, I got up and brought him back a napkin, hoping he’d get the hint.

  I set it on his knee and vowed not to say another word about it. The last thing I wanted to be was one of those nagging women who treat their mates like children.

  Five more minutes passed and Dutch poured himself another two fingers of scotch.

  My finger started to tap the top of my knee.

  Ten more minutes passed; all the while Dutch stared at the TV and just sipped away at his drink.

  I played with the tassel on one of the throw pillows, ignoring the pizza, on which the cheese had now recongealed.

  Siiiip, went Dutch.

  I took an interest in the curtains. Had I picked out curtains with Dave?

  Siiiip.

  No. We’d picked out blinds. That’s right. Shutters actually, which would give the windows a great modern feel.

  Siiiip.

  What color were the shutters again? Oh, yeah, they were dark like the floors. They’d go really well with the granite in the kitchen too.

  Siiiip.

  I wondered if I should tell Dutch about wrapping up the house decor with Dave? (Siiip.) Yes. Yes, I should. That’d help lighten the mood maybe. Ease his mind that we’d be moving into the new home soon. (Siiiip.) And wouldn’t he be happy to hear that?

  Plastering a sweet smile onto my face, I turned to tell him all about it just as he was raising the glass to his lips again. “Will you please eat something?”

  Dutch jumped, spilling his drink, and then he cut me a look that could cool five-alarm chili. “Abs,” he said, his voice even and hard. “I’ll eat when I’m hungry.”

  I snatched the drink out of his hand, spilling much of the rest of it on the couch. “You want this back, you’ll eat a piece of that pizza!”

  I knew Dutch well, and I’d seen him drink a little too much on an empty stomach before, only to wake up with a killer hangover the next morning and indigestion for several days after that.

  His brow furrowed angrily, and instead of reaching for the pizza, he grabbed the bottle of scotch and took a sip right from it, glaring at me the whole time.

  “Nice,” I told him.

  “What’s with you, anyway?” he grumbled.

  “It’s not me,” I said in a raised voice as I slammed the glass on top of the coffee table. “It’s you.”

  “I’m a grown man, Edgar. If I want to have a couple drinks, I can have a couple drinks.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Of course you can, you idiot. And I will even be your personal bartender this evening if you want. But you know how you are the day after you drink on an empty stomach. You’re hungover, irritable, and suffering from indigestion for days afterward. How’re you going to be able to focus at work tomorrow, Dutch, feeling like shih tzu?”

  It took a few seconds, but the angry, defensive glint in Dutch’s midnight blues softened, and at last he inhaled deeply and let it out slowly. Then, without a word, he set down the bottle of scotch and reached for the plate of pizza.

  I turned my attention to the TV and let him eat in silence. He polished off all three pieces…surprise, surprise.

  Around ten I felt a hand gently stroke the back of my head. “Sorry, Edgar,” he said softly.

  I shifted on the sofa and cuddled up close to him. “I’m sorry you had a bad day, cowboy.”

  “Thanks, dollface.”

  “You guys are really having no luck solving your case?”

  “Nope,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Everywhere we turn, we keep coming up empty. And I’ll admit that today I came very close to breaking down and calling you for help.”

  I turned in surprise to look at him and found his expression riddled with guilt. I smoothed down a lock of his blond hair and said, “Sweetie, this isn’t a case that I’m going to solve. My crew is practically forbidding me to get involved.”

  Dutch pulled his own head back in surprise. “Why’s that?” I could see some worry in his eyes again.

  I laughed it off. “Oh, probably because there’s a danger of my leading you in the wrong direction. You know how the ether is always subject to interpretation.”

  “Huh,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Yeah, well, it could happen, you know. Anyway, I’ve already sensed that you guys will be the ones to solve the case without my help, so even though it seems like you’ve hit a roadblock and aren’t making progress, try not to get too frustrated. You’ll solve it. I know it.”

  Dutch squeezed me to him and kissed the top of my head. We sat in comfortable silence until I thought of something. “I’m guessing you haven’t had time to meet with Cat in the past day or two, huh?”

  His heavy sigh told me even before the words were out of his mouth. “No. But that didn’t stop her from leaving me eight hundred messages.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “Well, you should do what I did,” I said. “Make an appointment with her for sometime when you know you’ll be free, and tackle all the big decisions at once.”

  Dutch pulled away to look curiously down at me. “You met with Dave?”

  I grinned smugly up at him. “I did. And I picked out everything from floors to crown molding.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope. I’m done, cowboy. And our house should be ready in about three to four weeks! If the guys work hard, we can move in right before the wedding.”

  Dutch reached for the scotch again. “I knew I should’ve had you toss the coin.”

  The next week passed without a single lead in the Kendra Moreno case. I didn’t know who was more anxious about it—me or Candice. At least I didn’t know until I arrived at my office for a ten a.m. appointment with a client and found my partner hunched over her computer with several discarded cardboard coffee cups littering her desktop.

  “Hey, Cassidy,” I said cordially from the doorway. (Okay, so I said it more carefully than cordially, but only because she had a bit of a crazy look going on.)

  “Mellobby,” Candice grunted. I almost heard a “hello” and my name in there, but I wasn’t certain.

  Not knowing what to say to that, I continued to hover in her doorway, and without even taking her eyes off her computer screen, Candice blindly grabbed for one of the cardboard coff
ee cups, slugged down the contents like it was a shot of tequila, and went back to peering at her computer screen.

  “How’s it going?” I asked, still trying to feel out how nervous I should be about finding her in such a state. It looked very much like she’d slept at her desk—if she’d slept at all, which, given the copious amounts of caffeine she’d obviously ingested and the disheveled cast to her appearance, I seriously doubted.

  “Mmph,” she said.

  Walking slowly and carefully…the way you’d move around an ornery tiger, let’s say…I eased into her office and sat in the seat opposite her. “Candice?”

  “Mmph?”

  I waited for her to lift her eyes. She didn’t. Taking a deep breath, I lifted my cane, extending it slowly forward over the top of her desk, and with a quick poke I shut the lid of her laptop. “Hey!” she yelled.

  “Honey,” I said evenly, keeping my cane firmly on the top of her computer. “What’s going on here?”

  Candice’s eyes darted around the room, kinda like a wild animal looking for the nearest exit. “What?”

  “How many cups of coffee have you had?”

  Candice blinked. Then she seemed to take in the top of her desk. “A few.”

  “I count seven.” Leaning over to hook her wastepaper basket with my cane, I pulled it closer. “Make that nine.”

  “I like coffee.”

  “Honey, Juan Valdez doesn’t like coffee that much.”

  Candice rubbed her face. “I was working on something. I needed to stay awake.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  Candice sighed and leaned back in her chair. I could see that her hands were shaking from all the caffeine. “I don’t know. Since sometime last night.”

  I reached out and pulled her laptop close. Swiveling it around, I opened the lid and took a peek. “This is a spreadsheet.”

  “Yep,” Candice said quietly.

  “How many names are on here?” I asked. The spreadsheet had rows and columns of names, but why they were listed or who they were was nothing I could quickly make sense of.

  “About sixty. Maybe seventy,” she said, giving me no more detail than that.

  I cocked my head. “Wanna tell me what this means? Or would you rather continue to keep me in suspense?”

  Candice got up and stretched. “I’ve been putting together a spreadsheet of Kendra’s friends and acquaintances and cross-referencing them with Bailey’s friends and acquaintances,” she explained. “If we assume Tristan isn’t our murderer—but let me be clear: no one’s off the table here—and he is telling the truth about coming home and finding his wife missing, then we also have to assume the unlocked and partially open front door indicates that someone came to visit Kendra between the hours of eleven a.m. and four p.m. It’s light enough outside at four o’clock to see whoever’s outside on the front step; therefore, Kendra must have trusted whomever she let in the door. If there were no signs of struggle, I’m going to further assume that she was attacked pretty quick, maybe when her back was turned to lead the killer into her house. Maybe he pounced then and overpowered her right away. By drugging her with something in a syringe or hitting her hard enough in the lower back to cause some sort of paralysis, he would have been able to drag her or carry her out the back door in about a minute to a minute and a half.”

  I stared in surprise at my partner. She’d obviously been thinking this through quite thoroughly.

  “Now,” she went on in a voice loud enough to cause me to jump, “at the Moreno residence, I remember seeing a set of key hooks, and there was only one set on the hooks there,” Candice said, her movements animated and jittery. “I think the killer simply lifted Kendra up, slung her over his shoulder, and carried her out the back door, taking her keys and her car as he went. He then took her to a remote location, raped her, beat her, and smothered her; then he buried her in the woods somewhere—probably not very deep…what, maybe two or three feet if he was in a hurry?”

  I had personal experience with hurried woodland grave digging, but I held back revealing that particular top secret and allowed Candice to continue her rant. “So say it takes the killer half an hour to get to any one of the six nearby greenbelts, then find a secluded spot—we’re talking another fifteen minutes or so—park the car, get her out, do all that terrible business to her, then bury her…he could have been finished with the whole thing in, what? Two, three hours tops?”

  Candice wasn’t really asking me these questions; she was just rattling them off and figuring them out on her own. But so far I’d kept my radar attuned to what she was saying, and for the most part I found that what was in the ether wasn’t much different from what Candice was saying.

  “See, this is where Tristan’s alibi gets him into trouble,” Candice said, suddenly changing tack entirely. “According to the police report, he—”

  “How’d you get a copy of the police report?”

  Candice waved an impatient hand my way. “Brice got it for me through some connection he had. Anyway, Moreno told the police that he headed out to see a client of his in Dallas, but the client couldn’t confirm it because the client had canceled. Tristan says that he forgot his cell phone at home and didn’t notice he didn’t have it on him until he was too far away to go back without being super late for his meeting with the client. So there’s no way to track his whereabouts that afternoon. He didn’t use the GPS in his Lexus, and with no cell phone in the car, there was nothing to provide a record of pings on the drive. Sure, he could have gone to Dallas, or he could have invented the story just for the purpose of laying the groundwork for reasonable doubt should it come to that.

  “But, I’m getting ahead of myself,” Candice said, whipping around to pace back the other way. “Back to the list. Since you picked up a guilty vibe off Bailey,” she said, “I thought I’d organize a spreadsheet of people both girls have in common. Those names on the list are people connected to both girls according to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Pinterest, Foursquare, and LinkedIn, which were all the active social sites I could find accounts for in both Bailey’s and Kendra’s names.”

  “Whoa,” I said taking in the long list again. “I’m seriously impressed, honey.”

  She scowled. “Don’t be. In fact, I’m starting to really regret all that effort.”

  “Why?”

  Candice stopped pacing and sat back down with a tired sigh. In an instant it was like all that high energy seemed to seep right out of her. “Because now we’ve got at least sixty potential suspects, Abs—not including Tristan, whose alibi I just don’t.”

  I squinted at her. “Don’t what?”

  “Buy. Who’s alibi I just don’t buy.”

  I stared at her wondering what the heck to say to that.

  “It was more clever in my head.”

  I looked away. Most of what she was saying would probably have been far more clever eight cups of coffee and sixteen hours ago.

  “The point is, Abs, that there’s no way we can possibly work our way through that list in less than a month. In fact, it might take us two or more.”

  I frowned. I could see what Candice was getting at. By opening up the suspect pool to anything bigger than a half dozen people, she’d effectively made our little two-man team completely undermanned.

  “Is there maybe a way to break this list down and prioritize it?” I asked. “You know, into subgroups of close friends, not-so-close friends, acquaintances, work associates…stuff like that?”

  “I’ve already done that,” Candice said, reaching over me to wiggle her finger over the mouse pad. A moment later I was looking at another spreadsheet with about a dozen names. “These are girls Kendra and Bailey went to school with.” As I started to read the list of names, Candice hit the button again and yet another spreadsheet popped onto the screen. “And these are professional contacts from—”

  “Hold on,” I said, interrupting her. “Can you go back for a sec?”

  Candice moved the spreadsh
eet back to the previous page and I looked for the name on the list that had jumped out at me. “Her,” I said, pointing to the name I swore I recognized. “Hold on,” I added, getting up and limping quickly into my office, where I grabbed my appointment book and brought it back to Candice’s desk. Flipping through the pages, I found what I was looking for and held up the book for her to see. “Jamie Gregory. She came in for a reading August sixth, the day I came back to work.”

  “You think it’s the same girl?” Candice asked, swiveling the computer toward her to stare at the screen again. “Oh, man, Abs! If that is the same girl, then we may have just hit some pay dirt! Do you think you can call her, see if she’ll talk to us?”

  But I wasn’t really listening to her. I was trying to recall Jamie and her reading with me. I remembered my first day back and the butterflies that’d been in my stomach, which were always there whenever I took any time off from doing readings.

  But intuition isn’t one of those things that fades from nonuse, which was proved to me again when I came back to my private practice on August sixth and had three terrific sessions in a row.

  Glancing at my appointment book, I could see that Jamie had been my third client that day. Three out of four I knew had been awesome readings, but my fourth client had been a bit of a dud. Wouldn’t you know that was the only person I could recall with any real clarity? Of the other three, I only remembered the feeling of nailing the details so well that each one had gasped and stared at me wide-eyed. But those three faces tended to blend together in my memory, and for the life of me I couldn’t recall what Jamie looked like or what I’d said to her.

  “Do you remember her?” Candice asked, obviously reading my expression.

  “No,” I said, but then I thought of something and sucked in a breath. “Come with me,” I told her, turning on my heel again and heading back to my office.

  Candice followed and sat down in the chair in front of my desk while I eased into mine and opened up my laptop.