Lethal Outlook

by Victoria Laurie

  I snarled. “Which doctor did you call?” I shouted at her image. “Because the doctor I saw him receiving the call from is a female, you hateful bi—”

  “Abs?” I heard from just outside the front door as Candice knocked and opened it to smile at me from the front step.

  I muted the TV and pointed furiously at the screen. “Have you gotten a load of this shih tzu?!” (Morning ray of sun-shine…I am not.)

  “Whoa!” Candice said, rushing into the living room to take the remote out of my hand and turn the sound back on. “…believe that Tristan and his lover kidnapped my daughter and have done something unspeakable to her,” Mrs. Woodyard was saying. “And why the police haven’t arrested these two yet is simply beyond me!”

  “Did she say your name?” Candice asked.

  “Not yet. But it’s only a matter of time before one of the reporters digs it up and I become public enemy number one.”

  “Why aren’t the police shutting her down?” Candice asked next, and I knew she was asking it rhetorically.

  In the background I could see poor Mr. Woodyard looking frail, a little jaundiced, and miserable. I’d be miserable too if I were married to that wife of his. Oh, yeah, I’d also be miserable if my daughter were missing and I had cancer too. Just then I saw Mr. Woodyard lift his cell phone and answer it while his wife took questions from the reporters.

  I felt an intuitive need to keep my focus on Mr. Woodyard, and as he took the call I saw his eyes bulge and his face grow even paler before it seemed to lift with relief. For an instant I wondered if the call was from someone claiming to have found Kendra, but then I clearly saw his lips mouth, “A drug trial? Really?”

  A moment later he was excitedly trying to get his wife’s attention, but she was still too wrapped up with the reporters. “Mmm-hmm,” I said smugly, pointing at him. “I told you so!”

  “Told who what?” Candice asked.

  I took the remote from her and clicked the TV off, knowing the minute the reporters got wind of Mr. Woodyard being entered into that drug trial, they’d back off me. At least that’s what I hoped would happen. “I’ll explain in the car,” I told her, reaching for my cane. “Let’s go see this sex offender.”

  “We’re stopping by Tristan’s first,” Candice said. “I want to get to him before the news crews show up.”

  “Okay. Tristan, then the sex offender.”

  “Then we’re heading to Jamie’s,” Candice said, allowing me first out the door.

  “Why her?”

  “I keep thinking about Kendra filing for divorce after finding out that Tristan cheated on her. I’m wondering if Jamie held that part back.”

  “What part?” I asked, waiting for her to unlock the door of her car.

  “The part where she told Kendra that he and Bailey had hooked up.”

  Personally, I hadn’t detected that Jamie was holding anything back when we’d interviewed her, but I’d missed stuff before. It’d be good to check it out.

  We arrived at Tristan’s too late to avoid the news crews, who followed our car up the drive and even boldly swarmed around us as we got out. “Are you the woman having an affair with Tristan Moreno?” one of the reporters asked Candice. Apparently no one wanted to think the gimpy girl with the cane could enjoy a little roll in the hay. If only they’d peeked in my bedroom window the night before.

  Candice caught my eye and moved away from the car, drawing the pack with her to give me time to make it to the stairs and begin the climb up. I’m not sure what she told them, but it kept them busy until I reached the landing and knocked. Tristan answered, looking disheveled and even more stressed-out than he had the last time I’d seen him. “Come in,” he said, almost curtly, before seeing the pack below and yelling at them to get off his property, as they were currently trespassing. “I’m calling my lawyer and filing suit against all you parasites!” he shouted, the muscles in his neck straining and his face flushing with anger.

  He seemed to be coming unglued. “Hey,” I whispered softly. “It’s okay, buddy. They’re backing off. See?”

  Candice hurried away from the reporters and climbed the stairs, looking like she’d almost enjoyed that. “What’d you tell them?” I asked.

  Candice laughed. “I told them to ask Mr. Woodyard how soon his drug trial was starting, assuring them that your sixth sense had confirmed he was scheduled to begin one very, very soon.”

  “Do you think they’ll bite?”

  “Oh, they’ll all check it out,” she assured me. “I mean, they rolled their eyes and kept pelting me with questions, but they’re competitive enough with each other to look into it.”

  “Damn leeches,” Tristan said, moving into the house so that we could follow him.

  We went into his kitchen and sat at his table again. “How’re you holding up?” Candice asked him.

  Tristan shook his head. “Not good.” Looking at me, he said, “Kendra’s mom won’t give Colby back, and now she’s got to start this crap about you and I having…”

  He left the rest unsaid, and it made me realize that Tristan really wouldn’t cheat on Kendra. The very idea made him cringe. Still, that didn’t mean he didn’t kill her when he discovered her having an affair on him. If that was in fact what had happened.

  “Your mother-in-law has no right to keep your son,” Candice said gently. “You’ve alerted your attorney?”

  “Yes,” Tristan said. “She’s putting pressure on the police to assist me getting Colby back, but they haven’t exactly been racing to help me out.”

  “He’ll come back home,” I told him, seeing it in the ether. “Within the next few days, in fact. You’ll get your son back no later than Saturday or Sunday.”

  “You’re sure?” he asked me, and there was such vulnerability in his eyes.

  “Positive,” I assured him. Some things just felt solid in their absoluteness, and Colby’s return was one of those things.

  “Can I ask you a few questions?” Candice said.

  Tristan focused on her. “Sure.”

  “Did Kendra ever mention a creepy neighbor or the fact that she didn’t like living in a neighborhood with a sex offender?”

  Tristan blinked. “You mean Dr. Snyder?”

  Candice and I both sat forward. Doctor? “Yes,” Candice said after giving me a sideways glance.

  Tristan seemed to think on it for a minute before answering. “When we first moved in, Kendra signed up for some identity-theft-alert thing that also sent out warnings about registered sex offenders in the area, and that’s how we learned that one was living just a few houses away.

  “Kendra didn’t make a really big deal about it, but I knew she was scared living so close to him, so I checked into it. I mean, I didn’t want my wife home alone if there was a psycho around, you know?”

  I held my breath, wondering when it would hit Tristan what he’d just said. His face flushed a second later and he looked at the tabletop. “Shit,” he said.

  “What’d you find out?” Candice asked, trying to pull him back on track.

  “I had a buddy—who knows how to look up criminal records—check out the case. It turns out that Snyder had some sort of fling with the seventeen-year-old who babysat his kids. My buddy said that Snyder claimed in court that he didn’t know she was only seventeen, but I don’t think that held up. I mean, he’s a doctor, right? He should know, if the girl’s still in high school, there’s a pretty good chance she’s underage, right?”

  Candice and I both nodded.

  “Anyway, I told Kendra the story, that he’d done something stupid with the babysitter and he lost his medical license over it and his wife had left him, and he even did a couple of months in jail for it. We both thought he’d been punished pretty good for doing something so stupid, and I think that finding out about the case had eased her mind a little. Snyder wasn’t a violent rapist, just a doctor who probably had a God complex and thought he was untouchable or something.”

  Candice held her phone as Trista
n talked, and I knew she was recording the conversation again. “What kind of doctor was he?” she asked.

  Tristan shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “If he lost his practice, what does he do now?” I asked.

  “Don’t know that either,” Tristan said. “He pretty much keeps to himself.”

  I wondered if the good doctor had any knowledge about paralytic drugs—or maybe had a particular familiarity with them. It’d be good to know if he was perhaps an anesthesiologist. Losing his license meant nothing—you could easily order any kind of drug off the Internet these days.

  “What about your exterminator?” Candice asked next. “Do you know Russ?”

  Tristan nodded. “I know him,” he said. “He seems like a nice guy. Likes to read Jim Butcher novels.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, curious that Tristan had pulled that little fact out of the air.

  “He’s my favorite author too,” Tristan replied.

  Candice said, “I checked into his background. He seems pretty on the level, no criminal record whatsoever. The only thing that’s odd about him is how low under the radar he flies.”

  I eyed my partner curiously. “He flies low under the radar?” This was new information to me, and I gathered that Candice had probably woken up early to do a little research on the bug man. “Why is that suspicious?”

  “Well, it is and it isn’t,” she said. “Russ is a guy who knows a lot about bugs and what kills them. Every day, he works with poisons that affect their central nervous systems—paralyzing them and their ability to move. He’s also got to be familiar with the effect of those poisons on humans so that he can handle those liquids and powders safely—or not, depending upon what his intentions are.”

  I got the hidden meaning in that little speech, and it did send a tiny chill down my spine.

  “Also,” Candice continued, “Russ is in his mid-thirties, with almost no credit to speak of. From what I can tell, his business makes him a really decent living, but he owns no car other than his pest-control truck and no property. He rents an apartment, where he’s lived for eleven years, and doesn’t have a single credit card. He’s got no family, he’s unmarried, and he lives alone. It’s a little weird.”

  “I still don’t get why that in particular is odd,” I said.

  “Abs,” Candice told me, “the guy’s got to be cracking six figures by now. Why doesn’t he spend some of that cash?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe he’s happy living the simple life.”

  Candice nodded, but I could tell she still didn’t trust Russ’s profile or the fact that he had access to paralytic poisons, and maybe, just maybe, I was being a little defensive because I’d liked Russ and also maybe my simple below-the-radar lifestyle had been a lot like his before I’d met Dutch.

  “Do you think he had something to do with Kendra’s disappearance?” Tristan asked—a bit too quickly, I thought. “I mean, if he came to our door, Kendra would have definitely let him in. He’s been our bug guy for years, and she knew and trusted him.”

  “We don’t know anything definitive yet,” Candice cautioned him. “All we know is that Russ was in the area at the time he claims a man in a baseball cap entered your home on the twenty-eighth. He didn’t see anything and he didn’t hear anything after that.”

  Tristan’s face twisted in emotion. I could tell that not knowing what’d happened to his wife was killing him almost as much as being without her.

  Candice eyed the table and began to trace a circle with her finger. I knew that whatever she was going to ask him next was probably going to be a touchy subject, so I turned up the volume on my radar and watched the ether carefully.

  “Did you know that your wife had filed for divorce, Tristan?”

  He sighed wearily. It was clear the subject really hurt him. “I had no idea until the police told me about the papers being filed the other day and filled me in on what her divorce attorney said she said to him the morning she went missing. I mean, I’d be lying if I said I was surprised that she’d gone and done that after our fight at the top of the stairs. I deserved it too. I deserved to lose her, but it still hurt like hell to hear that she was really planning on leaving me.”

  Candice glanced my way, and I nodded. He was telling the truth. He hadn’t known she’d been to her attorney’s office and was planning to file papers. Just then Tristan’s phone rang and after looking at it he said, “Sorry, this is my attorney.” We let him take the call, which was brief. When he hung up he said, “Chelsea needs me to meet her at the police station to sign a complaint against my in-laws for not letting me have Colby back. Can we pick this up later?”

  Candice tapped her own phone and tucked it away. “Of course,” she said to him. “We’ll be in touch.”

  We left Tristan and got back in the car, nearly taking out a reporter who didn’t get out of the way fast enough. “Tristan’s right,” Candice said casually. “They’re a bunch of leeches.”

  I pulled my hand away from my eyes when no loud thump met my ears and focused on ducking low in my seat. “If this Dr. Snyder lives on the street, how’re we going to talk to him without the leeches catching on?”

  Candice cast a glance at my cane and frowned. “I knew the day would come when I’d have to carry you piggyback,” she said. Without further explanation, she made a hard right at the end of the street.

  “Why am I very worried about that statement?”

  “Relax. You’ll be fine. It’s my back I’m worried about.”

  Candice made several more turns, some right, some left, and pretty soon I was lost. “Where the heck are we?”

  Candice pointed to the GPS screen on her dash. “We’re on the block right behind the Morenos’ place,” she said. “See that?”

  I squinted. “Yeah?”

  “That’s a park. We’re gonna pull the car over to that curb near the playground and hoof it into Snyder’s backyard.”

  I picked my eyes up to scan the park as we entered the area in question. The place was nicely manicured except near the fence that backed up to the row of houses Candice was indicating. Along that particular fence line it was like a thick jungle of weeds, grass, and underbrush. “You can’t be serious,” I said, although I knew Candice definitely was.

  She didn’t answer me. Instead she parked and went right around to the trunk to collect her trusty boots. After this was over, I was definitely hiding them so she’d never get another stupid idea like this again.

  Once she had her boots on, she came around to me and opened the door. “Come on.”

  “Can’t I just stay here?”

  “Nope. I’ll need you when I question him.”

  “How do you know he’s even home?”

  “We won’t know until we knock on his back door.”

  I sighed heavily and got out, but when Candice motioned for me to hop onto her back, I simply turned and began to gimp my way straight over to that fence. She came up next to me and held gently to my elbow as I struggled to pick my feet up enough to make headway without falling face-first into the underbrush. “Of all the…,” I grunted, feeling myself working up a sweat.

  “It’s the only way,” Candice said, pulling up on my elbow when my cane got tangled around some grass.

  We reached the fence and I had to pause to catch my breath. Also, I was stalling because I had no idea how I’d make it over the top. “I miss Nora,” I said, referring to a dear friend who’d once pitched both Candice and me over a ten-foot-tall fence in Las Vegas. Nora was crazy strong.

  Candice grinned. “I miss her too,” she said. “You should invite her and Detective Brosseau to your wedding.”

  I gripped the top of the fence and pulled my hips up to sort of hang my torso over it before pulling my bottom half slightly (totally) inelegantly over the top and landing with a bit of a thud on my butt in the backyard of Dr. Snyder. Who was actually home. And on his back porch staring at us like he couldn’t believe two crazy fools like us would walk through that brush
and hop the fence into his backyard.

  “Morning!” Candice said to him as she too clambered over the fence, albeit a bit more elegantly. (Confession, a water buffalo would have clambered over the fence more elegantly…)

  “Can I help you?” he asked in that way that said, “I wonder if I should get my gun.”

  I reached up and took Candice’s outstretched hand, glaring hard at her for good measure. “Are you Dr. Snyder?” she asked while helping me up.

  He squinted at us. “Yeah?” he said, answering her with a question mark. Candice moved closer to him and he held up his hand. “Hold on,” he said. “Are you two reporters?”

  I leaned hard on my cane and walked up to Candice, letting her do all the talking. “No, no!” she assured him. “My name is Candice Fusco and this is my associate, Abigail Cooper.”

  “You look like reporters,” he insisted.

  Candice dug through her purse and pulled out her PI badge. He frowned and waved us forward. Once he’d inspected it—thoroughly—he said, “This about the missing woman?”

  “It is,” Candice said, and she seemed to spot something on the table next to Snyder because she pointed to it and said, “You a Horns fan?”

  “Isn’t everybody?” Snyder asked with a crooked smile while he reached for the item that had been blocked from my sight by a laptop. The second he put the orange ball cap with the UT longhorn logo on his head, I understood why Candice had asked.

  “Hook ’em horns,” Candice said. “Anyway, since you ask, yes, we’ve been hired by your neighbor Mr. Moreno to try to figure out what happened to his wife, Kendra, and since we know you’re one of the neighbors, we were hoping maybe you saw or heard something out of the ordinary on the day she disappeared.”

  Snyder cast her a mocking look. “You mean, did I, the only registered sex offender on this street, see anything unusual the day she disappeared, right?”

  Candice didn’t reply; she merely gave one slight nod and waited for him to elaborate.