“You aren’t kidding,” Candice said, holding her stomach again. The poor girl needed to get her butt to the drugstore soon. “I looked Velkune up after our first meeting, and the Austin American-Statesmen did a story on him and the missus after they announced their engagement. According to the paper, she comes from big oil money and he comes from a broken home. They met at some rodeo charity event where he says she wouldn’t give him the time of day, but he swears it was love at first sight.”
“I’m sure it was,” I said with a wink.
Candice bumped me with her elbow. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s what everybody else thought too, but from what I read in the article, he seriously adores her. He says that she motivated him to change his life and he got out of riding steers and put himself through college, then law school. He sent her e-mails throughout the years he was in school, telling her how meeting her had redirected his life, and they struck up a correspondence, but she still refused to date him until he graduated from UT law school. The rest is history.”
“Huh,” I said, setting aside my skepticism as we got to the car. “So true love does exist?”
Candice grinned. “Aren’t we both living proof?”
She had me there.
Around eleven o’clock that night I got a call from Candice. “You will never get to pick the restaurant again,” she moaned. She sounded terrible.
I gasped. “You okay?”
“No, Sundance,” she growled. “I’m seriously not okay.”
Poor Candice had been sick since shortly after getting home, and it hadn’t let up. I knew that Dutch was working late—he’d left me a message on my voice mail—and that probably meant that Brice would be working late too. “Have you heard from Brice?”
“He’s still at the office,” she confirmed.
“You should call him, sweetie,” I said, already moving toward the closet to grab my coat and purse.
“No,” she said weakly. “He’s busy, and I look like hell.”
“I’m on my way,” I told her.
When I got to Candice’s condo, I very nearly called an ambulance. She was so pale, she was gray, and she could barely hold her head up. She also insisted I just let her die in peace next to the commode. I called Brice immediately and told him in no uncertain terms to get his butt home. I’d never seen Candice looking so bad. I wasn’t sure if I should call 911 or not, but I certainly couldn’t help her with my stupid bum hips.
Both Brice and Dutch were at the door within ten minutes, and when Brice took one look at Candice, he threw a blanket around her, picked her up, and headed toward the door. Dutch and I followed them to the hospital and stayed with Brice until the nurse came out to tell us that Candice was suffering from food poisoning and that her kidney function wasn’t so hot. They wanted to keep her overnight for observation. I felt a small wave of relief and knew she’d be okay. I said as much to Brice, but I also knew he’d worry about her until they released her.
Dutch and I drove home around one a.m., both of us weary to the bone.
* * *
The next morning, the minute I woke up I called Brice. He said that he’d just gotten home with Candice, and for now, she was resting comfortably. I promised to check in with them later and headed downstairs.
“Did you do something to your hair?” Dutch asked, handing me a steaming cup of joe after I filled him in about Candice’s condition.
I ran a hand through my hair self-consciously. “It was Candice’s idea.”
“I like it,” he said, an amused grin on his face.
I looked closely at him and saw the dark circles under his eyes. I wondered if he’d slept at all. “When was your last day off?” I asked.
He seemed surprised by my question. “Don’t know. Maybe a couple weeks ago?”
I frowned. “You need to take a day.”
Dutch gave me a lopsided smile. “As it happens, Gaston called while you were still in bed, and he agrees with you. He’s giving me and Brice the morning off.”
“Wow,” I said flatly. “The whole morning? What will you do with all that time?”
“Tell me about your case,” he said, not so subtly changing the subject.
I took a big sip from my mug. “It’s nothing but dead ends. Everything leads to nowhere. I’ve never worked a case like it.”
Dutch chuckled. “You mean you’ve never worked a case that you couldn’t crack.”
“True,” I agreed. “And this one feels so elusive, you know?”
“How so?”
“There’s no one in the suspect pool that feels good to me for the crime.”
“No one?”
I shook my head. “Nope. And I feel like we’ve looked at just about everyone connected to Kendra that had any kind of motive to kill her.”
“What if there was no motive?” Dutch asked. “Other than just to kill her, I mean. What if she was abducted and killed by some random psychopath?”
I weighed that against my radar and shook my head. “No,” I said. “I really think she was killed by someone close to her. Someone she trusted enough to let into her home. I was in her house and I felt the energy, Dutch. She opened the door to her killer and turned her back to lead him inside. With her son in the house, she wouldn’t have done that unless she felt safe.”
“And you don’t think the husband did it, right?”
“I can’t tell. I want to say no, but he had too many motives and an anger-management issue, not to mention a terrifically flimsy alibi that anybody could poke holes in.”
“What motives?” he asked.
I began to tick them off on my right hand. “Kendra was going to leave him, she’d just taken money out of their accounts, she could also very well have been having an affair with someone else…”
“So why aren’t you sure it was him?” Dutch asked me. “I mean, all of that sounds like a prosecutor’s dream.”
I sighed. “There’s this mysterious man in a baseball cap that we can’t identify.”
“What man?”
“The neighborhood exterminator saw a man who wasn’t Tristan Moreno going into Kendra’s home the morning she went missing. He also said that he’d seen that same man on a few other occasions.”
“And he had no idea who the guy was?”
“No. And there was no car associated with this guy either—he always came on foot.”
“Reasonable doubt,” Dutch said, and I nodded. He’d just pointed out the one thing that was still really bugging Candice and me: The man in the ball cap created reasonable doubt for any of the accused unless we could definitively identify him.
“What other leads are you working?”
I filled Dutch in on the ones we’d covered, from Bailey to the creepy neighbor, and everybody in between. “You need to find out who the guy in the hat is,” Dutch said.
“There you go, stating the obvious,” I said dryly.
Dutch gave me a smart look and pulled out his cell phone. He tapped at it a few times, then put it to his ear. He then got up, squeezed my shoulder, and walked out of the kitchen without explanation.
I sighed heavily and got up to see about making some breakfast. No sooner had I pulled out the egg carton than Eggy and Tuttle appeared at my feet. Eggy got his name from his serious devotion to the incredible, edible egg.
I made a Spanish omelet for me and two little cheese omelets for Eggy and Tuttle. We had all started eating in companionable silence when Dutch came back into the kitchen. “What’s cooking?” he asked.
“My breakfast,” I told him smartly. I make a mean omelet but manage to overcook (i.e., set on fire) just about everything else.
“No breakfast for me?”
I eyed the fridge and the stove meaningfully. “Knock yourself out.”
“Ah,” Dutch said, selecting a fork from the drawer and coming to sit next to me at the table. “Is that how it is?”
I took a huge bite of the omelet and shoved it into my mouth. “Mmm-hmmm,” I told him.
“I see,” he said. “Even though I just scored you a major lead on your case?”
I raised one eyebrow skeptically. Sure he had a lead. And pigs were probably flying around our roofline right now.
Dutch raised his fork in the air like he expected me to scoot my plate right underneath it so he could have all the rest of it. “Another woman has gone missing,” Dutch said.
My eyes widened, and I swallowed the big bite of food. “Who?”
“Donna King. Missing since yesterday. The police are working the scene right now, and so far, they’ve found some blood and signs of a struggle but no evidence of a weapon or a body.”
“Why do they think it’s the same person who abducted Kendra?”
Dutch stopped eyeing my omelet and looked at me. “King lives on the other side of Decker Lake from where Kendra’s car was found, and King’s car is also missing. The clincher for you, however, is that a neighbor remembers seeing a guy with a ball cap walking up the road close to her home around eight o’clock last night.”
I gasped. “Was anybody else besides King there at her house at the time?”
“No. She lived alone. Her paralegal went to her house when she didn’t show up this morning.”
I dropped my fork. “Her paralegal?”
Dutch’s expression turned curious. “Yeah. King’s an attorney.”
I pushed the rest of my omelet at Dutch and got up from the table, making sure to give him a big old smooch and a hug before I hobbled upstairs to shower and change.
Dutch and I arrived at King’s house just as the CSI techs were finishing up. There weren’t any cops in suits around when Dutch flashed his FBI badge at the patrol officer guarding the scene. “Where’s everybody at?” he asked the beat cop.
“They’ve wrapped it up for now,” the cop told him. “CSI’s almost done too, from what I hear.”
“Mind if we go in and take a look?”
“As long as you don’t take all day, it’s no skin off my back,” the cop said with a shrug.
I loved it when Dutch made my life easy. As we moved to the door, I pointed to Dutch’s badge. “You gotta score me one of those, cowboy.”
“You get into enough trouble as is,” he told me, stopping to put on a pair of rubber gloves and blue booties before helping me into a pair of the same. Once our hands and feet were properly covered, we went inside. I walked just behind him as we made our way through the large wood door with a beautiful knocker. Donna’s home was stately and elegant and impeccably neat, except for one wall, which was a hot mess. Near the front door was a side table lying on its side and marked with little numbered evidence tags. Small bits of glass and pottery littered the floor, and I could only guess that the larger shards had been put into evidence bags already. A planter down the hall had been overturned, and dirt and leaves were strewn about as if someone were being dragged backward and was clawing at anything that might give them a hold.
In fact, as I opened up my radar, that’s exactly what I pictured; Donna being dragged backward down the hall, knowing she was going to die and fighting for all she was worth.
We followed the debris, moving past the staircase and stepping carefully to the far side of the hall. As we moved beyond the stairs, a large living room opened up, decorated in shades of soft tans and whites. Numbered tags marked where the sofa had been pulled away from its normal spot, evident by the leg indentations in the plush carpet. Pillows were missing from the sofa, but large paper bags set to the side seemed to carry their shape. Toward the edge of the couch was a spatter of blood, and two techs were working to cut out the carpet that contained the droplets.
My radar was also picking up the violence that had taken place here. Donna had fought her attacker, and I felt strongly that she’d angered him by either striking him or saying something that had caused him to lose his temper and hit her hard enough to draw blood.
My attention moved away from the techs to two beautiful windowed doors that opened up to the backyard. One of those doors was open. The doors were ornately decorated in glass and iron, but I could hardly admire them, because the energy of Donna’s struggle was building inside me and drawing me to the backyard. “Can we go out there?” I whispered.
Dutch nodded and carefully maneuvered me past the techs—who hardly looked up as we edged by them.
At the door I paused to take off the booties and happened to look down at the frame of the closed door. There was a bloody handprint there that I knew belonged to Donna by its angle and the way the blood smeared toward the edge. She’d grabbed hold here but was yanked free.
In the backyard another tech was carefully scanning the backyard with a metal detector, while yet another one bagged clumps of grass. Dutch pointed and I looked up, seeing the garage door open and the bay empty. Donna’s car was gone.
Beyond the backyard was nothing but woodland. Donna’s house backed up to the greenbelt that surrounded Decker Lake, and her closest neighbors were fifty feet away, with high fencing blocking anything that might’ve taken place here the night before.
My eye, however, kept going back to those woods, and I thought about the intuitive hit I’d gotten surrounding Kendra’s remains. “He wouldn’t bury her in Donna’s backyard, would he?” I said to myself. Even as I spoke the words, I knew they were true. What better way to keep his attorney from going to the police than by putting Kendra’s body close enough to cast the hint of suspicion on her. He could probably even claim that she’d been in on the murder, and then I wondered something else—had she? Had she been the woman I’d seen in the ether who had some sort of power over the murderer? Maybe the killer had lost his romantic interest in her and had grown tired of her as a loose thread. He could have killed her to keep her silent.
But then, if she was in on the murder, why had she come to me in the first place?
But wait—was it really her? Was Donna King really the mysterious Ms. Smith?
I went back to the door, shoved the booties on again and gimped inside. Gazing around the living room, I looked for anything that could tell me what Donna had looked like. On a side table to the far right I found a set of pictures and headed over to them for closer inspection. I picked Donna out from a group photo right away. Now that I had her image in front of me, I could recognize her chin and jawline from when she’d come to my office in her wig, hat, and sunglasses. She’d been far prettier than I’d originally guessed, with big brown eyes and wavy black hair. She’d been a stunning woman, but her image was now flat and one-dimensional to my eye, telling me with certainty that she too was dead.
“That answers that question,” I muttered, moving back to the door, doing the bootie dance again and quickly growing tired of hauling the things off and on with my aching hips. Once I stepped out to the yard again, I hedged a bit closer to the woods, scanning them for any hint of Kendra.
The sky had been overcast all morning, and a slight drizzle began to fall. The air smelled like wet dirt, and I remembered again the scents that had fluttered under my nose when I was first trying to find Kendra’s remains in the ether.
My head swiveled to the left-hand side of the yard. The energy of Kendra’s remains was faint, but it was there. I just knew it. My intuition then bumped into something else and I realized that Donna King was also somewhere in those woods.
I looked for Dutch; he was over by the garage, talking to yet another CSI guy. “Hey,” I called to him.
Dutch came over and announced, “They’re scanning the lake for her car, and they’re hoping if they find it that they’ll also find a body this time.”
“They won’t,” I told him. Then I pointed to the woods. “She’s in there. And Kendra’s body is nearby too.”
Dutch seemed surprised, but he didn’t question me; one of the many things I loved about him was that he absolutely trusted my radar. “Stay here,” he said as he moved off toward the foliage, squinting at the vegetation at the edge of the yard. Dutch then moved over to the garage again and I saw him walk right to a shovel h
anging from a peg. He turned to the CSI tech while pointing to the shovel, and they exchanged a few words before Dutch came back to me. “The shovel has fresh dirt on it,” he said.
I frowned and looked back toward the woods. “That rat bastard.”
Dutch then motioned for us to go back inside and we stopped at the rear door to once again don the booties before carefully wending our way through the house to the front door. There we found the same beat cop standing at the door. “Hey, buddy,” Dutch said in his most friendly voice. “I noticed some bent vegetation on the left side of the house and a shovel in the garage with fresh dirt on it. Did anyone bring in the cadaver dogs yet?”
“No,” the cop said, already reaching for his phone. “Which side of the yard?” he asked Dutch as he held the phone to his ear.
“The left. I think your intruder might have taken her back there.”
The cop nodded, then began to talk into the phone. “Yeah, we got a situation here,” he said. “Can you tell Captain Ramirez we may need some cadaver dogs down here?”
Dutch moved me back into the hallway out of the cop’s earshot and said, “Did you get anything else?”
I pulled him along to the back again, over to the table with King’s picture on it. Pointing to the frame, I said, “That’s her on the left.”
“You’re positive she’s…?”
“Yeah,” I said bitterly. “She’s dead.”
“You wanna take a tour around the house to see if you pick up anything else?”
I studied Donna’s photo a bit longer, feeling the knot of anger and frustration form in my stomach. If only I could have figured out some clue to her identity and reached her before this happened. I should have been looking for her. It was a serious lapse in judgment to focus on Kendra without considering how much danger the woman who’d come into my office might be in. And then I had it. “Dutch!” I said, whirling around. “I know how to find out who did this!”
“How?”
“Donna came to me just a few days after Kendra went missing, but she was in disguise when we met and she gave me a false name. She admitted to being a lawyer and said that one of her clients was responsible for murdering Kendra, but she had to protect his identity; otherwise, she could be disbarred. I think she was killed by this client of hers who also killed Kendra, and I think the reason he killed her was that he suspected she was super nervous about protecting him, and maybe she was ready to break the attorney-client privilege and go to the authorities. All the police have to do is go through Donna’s records and figure out who retained her right before she came to see me, and they’ll be able to narrow down who killed her!”
Lethal Outlook Page 26