The energy I touched on when I focused my radar at Trace was that of just such an individual. I knew it as certainly as I knew my own name. He was seriously disturbed, and given the chance, he’d continue to grow up and do evil things.
I watched the house anxiously, but I couldn’t tell you why. I didn’t like that he was in there with his sister and her friends. It unsettled and upset me and I wanted so much to march up to that house and do something to get him out.
And as if Trace’s sister (what was her name?) had the same bad vibe that I did about her brother, two minutes after he went inside, the garage door opened yet again and the girls came out. Quickly. Two of them peeking over their shoulders even.
Trace’s sister opened the passenger’s side door of the car, but before getting in, she looked back angrily at the house, then shook her head and motioned to the other girls, and within a few moments they were in the car and zipping away, leaving Trace alone.
I glanced up at the second story and saw the curtains part as the girls drove away. It gave me the shivers.
Almost at that exact moment, Candice pulled up and leaned over to open my door. I got up stiffly and hobbled over to the car.
Even before I had the seat belt on, she handed me a water bottle. “It’s a little warm,” she said. “But drink as much as you can. I think you got overheated, Sundance.”
I took a huge swallow. It was warm, but it was heaven. “Thanks,” I told her. “Let’s get out of here.”
We made our way to a smoothie shop and Candice told me to sit tight while she went inside and brought out that awesome banana/peanut butter delight. I wanted to tell her about Trace, but she told me to shut up and focus on replenishing my glucose levels, so I did that for a bit.
“Can I talk now?” I asked when I was feeling almost normal.
“Yes,” she said.
“I saw Trace Edwards this morning.”
“Where?”
“He came home from somewhere—I don’t know where.”
“The kids can leave campus for lunch,” Candice said. “I wish we’d thought about that before we came up this way.”
“You didn’t get caught, did you?”
She shook her head. “No. I was climbing back down the tree when I heard the car pull into the driveway.”
“So, that’s how you got in, huh? The tree up to the second story?”
“Yep,” she said with a wicked smile. “Trace has nailed a couple of handholds into the trunk to make the climb up and down easier. It was child’s play.”
Thinking about him returned me to my earlier point. “His sister and her friends don’t like him.”
Candice’s face pulled down in a frown. “If he was your brother, would you?”
“No,” I said, shuddering again. “That kid is so damn creepy, Candice.”
“Especially if he really did kill Trevor,” she said. Then she eyed me sideways and added, “You should see his room.”
“What’s it like?”
“The walls are black, along with the curtains, bedspread, and area rugs. For light he’s got a black lightbulb in the only lamp in the room, but to make things a little homier, he’s decorated with small collectible torture devices like thumbscrews and tongue clamps, and put an impressive collection of Japanese swords on the wall.
“And don’t even get me started about what’s on his hard drive. The kid has a fascination with executions and carnage. His Web browser’s history is disgusting. He likes beheadings the most, the aftermath of bloody car crashes second, and an assortment of other gruesome photos and history.”
“Wow,” I said flatly. “He sounds like someone you’d want to bring home to Daddy.”
“The kid’s a sick fucker,” Candice said.
My eyes widened. Candice didn’t roll out the f-bomb unless she was good and disgusted. Or pissed off. Or a little of both.
“By contrast, Emma’s room is amazing,” she continued. “That girl has more trophies and awards than most high school trophy cases. She’s Mensa smart, a National Merit Scholarship recipient, led a team of other teens who won some huge robotics award for a robot that can actually swim underwater, and she’s already been accepted into Stanford.”
I squinted at Candice. “The cheerleader?”
Candice nodded. “The captain of the cheerleading squad. And the debate team. And the gymnastics team. And the senior class treasurer. And the Model UN. And she volunteers at a local animal shelter. The girl is everywhere achieving everything.”
“Huh,” I said. “That must be an interesting dynamic at the dinner table.”
“Well, you can see how it must be,” Candice said. “The mom probably dotes on the daughter, and the dad is completely disconnected, and so the son—who, as I said, is already a sick fucker—resents the hell out of Emma getting all the attention and praise, so he stalks and kills Trevor Hodges just to make himself feel powerful.”
I thought about seeing Trace approach his house just a short time ago, and how his entire demeanor had changed when he saw the car belonging to his sister’s friend. But then, I also felt that even if Trace had been showered with attention, he would’ve turned out the same way. He was born demented. It wafted off him through the ether like the scent of decay, foul and abhorrent to my intuitive senses.
“We have to figure out how to get him out of society,” I said. “We have to take him off the streets.”
Candice gripped the steering wheel a little tighter—a determined look on her face. “We’ll find a way,” she said. “And we’ll find a way to solve the bank heists too. I poked around in Edwards’s home office. I’m pretty sure he’s short one computer.”
“Really?” I asked. “What makes you think that?”
“It’s his workstation,” Candice said. “The man’s a slob. I don’t think he’s dusted his home office in years, and on his desk there’s a rectangle free of dust, in exactly the size of a small laptop.”
“What if that’s his work computer and he takes that to the office every day?” I asked.
Candice shook her head. “Nope. The guy has three desks arranged in a U. His primary desk has a twenty-seven-inch Mac. The one on the left is where he keeps his work laptop—there’s a docking station and cables to pull up the screen on the big monitor, and that desk is fairly free of dust, mostly because I think he uses it quite a bit. The workstation on the right, that’s the one that has the most dust, so it’s been used the least, and now that computer is gone.”
“Candice, he could have that with him,” I said, but then I felt my radar sort of home in on what she was trying to tell me. That the sudden absence of the computer was somehow connected to the bank heists.
“He could have it with him,” she said. “Or he could’ve ditched it because there was evidence of his involvement with the bank heists on the hard drive.”
“You think he would’ve thrown away a perfectly good computer?” I asked, just to play devil’s advocate. “Couldn’t he have simply deleted the files?”
“I think that anybody who knows anything about computers knows that evidence is very, very difficult to delete completely from a system’s hard drive. If Edwards was worried after our visit, then he’d be smart to have raced home, unplugged the computer, and tossed it somewhere in the mountains in a place where no hiker was likely to find it.”
“That would explain the dirty car the other night,” I said.
“It would.”
“So what do you think was on the computer?”
“Evidence,” she said.
“So how’re we going to nail him for the bank heists?”
“Well,” she said, in that way that indicated that she’d done something sneaky. “I’m sort of hoping that he and the wife talk about it. They had one hell of an argument the other night, and maybe Mrs. Edwards will bring that up again.”
“How’re we going to know what they discuss?”
Candice took a hand off the steering wheel to hold up her phone and wiggled it. “I set up a bug,” she said.
“A bug,” I repeated. “You mean, like a bug to eavesdrop in on their conversations?”
“Yep.”
“That’s kind of genius, but totally illegal,” I warned.
“Said the girl who was my lookout for today’s B and E.”
“Hey, that was against my better judgment.”
“And yet, you agreed that it was our best option to dig up more evidence to bring to Hart,” she said.
I made a face. “Okay, so you’ve got me there. I guess I’m not looking forward to spending all my free time listening to the Edwards family, hoping our boy Will says something incriminating.”
“We don’t have to waste any of our free time, Abs,” Candice said. “The bug I planted comes with an algorithm to record all of the conversations in the kitchen, and send an alert to an app on my phone anytime somebody says the word ‘bank,’ or ‘heist,’ or ‘hit,’ or even ‘robbery.’”
“Really?” I said hopefully.
“Really. Apps like that make my job so much easier.”
“Huh,” I said. “Technology is so cool. But even if Edwards does blurt out that he was involved in the heists, it’s not like we can use that, or even give it to the Feds. Kelsey would have a cow if she knew we’d bugged their house.”
“Kelsey doesn’t have to know,” Candice said with a stern look at me. “If Edwards talks about the robberies, he might drop a hint about where the missing computer is, or point us to a name that we can use. Like one of the robbers. Hell, he might even get a call from one of them and we can then follow the trail from there.”
“It’s still pretty unlikely that Edwards is going to talk about the heists, though,” I said, feeling so frustrated. I was convinced that this family was a menace, and needed to be locked up, but they were also obviously very clever and had, thus far, covered their tracks well. “We should have Kelsey look into Mrs. Clawson,” I said, remembering that connection again.
“I can look into her again too,” Candice said. “That dream of yours was disturbing, Sundance. The sketch bothers me.”
“It was creepy,” I said. “I know there’s more to it, but I’m having a hard time connecting all these dots.”
“We should go back to the hotel and draw it out. Maybe putting it in front of us will reveal something.”
“I like that idea,” I said.
My phone chirped and I looked at the display. “Kelsey just freed up some time. She wants to meet. Should I tell her to come by the hotel?”
“Yeah. Let’s rent out one of the conference rooms if they’re available. We need a whiteboard and some thinking room.”
“And an area for snacks,” I said.
Candice grinned. “It’s such a pleasure having a partner so deeply connected to her stomach.”
“Speaking of stomachs, have you seen mine lately?” I pulled up my shirt and showed Candice my noticeably reduced midsection. In just a few days off the sugar, dairy, and gluten, I now had the abs I’d had in my twenties.
“Lookin’ good,” she said, before pulling up the bottom of her shirt too. “Soon we’ll have you sportin’ some of these.”
I lowered my lids with disdain for Candice’s well-toned six-pack. “Show-off,” I muttered.
Candice just laughed.
Thirty minutes later after a quick shower and a gathering of snacks (Candice had insisted on dried fruit and nuts . . . killjoy), we were huddled around a fairly small table in a private conference room at the hotel.
Kelsey and Candice both had their laptops and I was in command of the whiteboard.
“Okay!” I said, pulling off the cap of a purple marker that smelled like grapes. (I love markers that smell like food.) “Let’s take it from the top, shall we?” Turning to the whiteboard, I drew a box and labeled it Bank; then I drew a much larger square and labeled it Grave Sites, including four headstones around the section of the clearing where I’d seen them in my mind’s eye. Then I drew an arrow that pointed to the right, and sketched out something that looked like a house, labeling it The Edwardses, and followed that with an arrow down to another house and labeled that The Clawsons. I filled in a few other houses nearby to make it look like a neighborhood, and then made a very quick copy of the sketch I’d created on paper of my dream. Finally, I put in some mountain ranges to the far right, and what I hoped looked like a computer among them with an arrow that was labeled Missing Computer.
When I turned back around, I saw that Candice’s face had gone red and she was staring at the final sketch I’d drawn and shaking her head subtly.
My eyes widened, especially when I saw Kelsey squinting at that section of the whiteboard. “What missing computer?” she asked.
Dammit. Sometimes, I’m an idiot. I opened my mouth to try to answer, but no words came out. Candice looked ready to kill me. Still, it was she who managed to keep her head on straight, and she casually said, “We peeked into the Edwardses’ windows this morning when they weren’t home. One of the windows I looked in was to Edwards’s home office. It appeared to me—although I can’t be sure because I was outside—that one of his three computers has been removed from the home. Abby and I believe he had evidence on it that might implicate him in the robberies.”
Kelsey stared at Candice like she knew a bullshitter when she saw one, but all she said was, “Ah.”
I took the opportunity to get us back to the basics. “It seems obvious to me how all of these are now related,” I said. “I think that Trace Edwards is a violent psychopath, and last year he murdered Trevor Hodges. I know that sounds like a huge leap, but, Kelsey, if you saw this kid up close, you’d see what I’m talking about. He gives off this . . . vibe. It’s evil. He’s like, Michael from Halloween creepy.”
“How old is he again?” Kelsey asked.
“He just turned fifteen,” Candice said.
Kelsey typed something into her computer, then looked up at me. “Can you give me anything other than saying he’s got a creepy vibe that might help connect him to Trevor’s murder?”
I shook my head. “Nothing, I’m sorry. When I saw his picture in the La Cañada middle school yearbook, there was this look in his eyes—you know the look that some psychopaths give off? That Charles Manson sort of evil glint and that smirk?”
Kelsey nodded. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“Yeah, this kid’s photo perfectly captured that, which prompted me to focus on his energy to see what I could get off it, and it was clear to me then that he’d killed before and was anxious to do it again.”
“The photo she saw of Trace was taken by Trevor,” Candice said, lending a tiny ounce of credence to my theory.
“So, they were classmates?”
“Yes,” Candice said.
Then she pointed back to me. “Didn’t you say you followed him home a couple of nights ago?”
“I did. He was poking around the excavation site.”
“And did he give off a vibe then?”
I shrugged. “He might’ve, and I might’ve picked up on it if I hadn’t been so focused on keeping out of sight as he led me to his house. Honestly I was more concerned with the clue I’d come looking for, which was one for the bank robberies, so I flat-out missed the opportunity to point my radar at Trace and pick up on the psychopath vibe.”
“Okay,” she said, seemingly satisfied with my answer. “What else?”
“I think that Trace is the one who’ll be responsible for the three dead girls I saw in my vision when I first came up to that clearing where they planned to put that development. I think he’s taunting us by putting a few of Trevor’s bones in the pit with the tribal remains, wondering if we’ll identify Trevor, and he’s gotta know we won’t be able to
prove that it was him.”
“We won’t?” Kelsey said.
I shook my head. It made me mad as hell, but my gut said Trace would continue to get away with it. “I’ve looked and looked and looked into the ether on this, Kelsey. He’s never convicted of Trevor’s murder.”
“It makes sense,” Candice said. “According to your medical examiner, Trevor’s bones had been in the ground at least two years. Any physical evidence we could’ve had linking Trace to Trevor’s death is probably long gone by now, and if the kid truly is a sicko, there’s no way he’s going to confess to the crime.”
Kelsey frowned. “Any case that rests entirely on loose circumstantial evidence is a tough one to convince the prosecutor to bring to trial.”
“Yep,” I agreed. “There’s no smoking gun here. No clue I can pull out of the ether that I can lead you to that’ll be the nail in the coffin. He’s gotten away with it—at least, as far as I can see, he has.”
Kelsey seemed very troubled by my words. “I don’t know that I can simply give up on looking for more evidence just because you say we won’t find the smoking gun, Abby.”
“Oh, I don’t think we should give up,” I said, quick to clarify. “I can be wrong. Kelsey. It’s rare, but it happens.”
“Good,” she said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and he bragged about it to someone.”
I shrugged, but I knew that a kid like Trace had kept his mouth shut. He got more satisfaction out of knowing no one was onto him than he did out of bragging about it. “Anyway, along with keeping an eye on Trace, we’ll need to work the bank heists and target Trace’s father, Will Edwards.”
Kelsey sat back in her chair and considered me skeptically. “Why not just turn our suspicions over to Perez and Robinson?” she said. “After all, they’re already working the case, and it would free us up to pursue Trace for Trevor’s murder, which, I should remind you, is the directive Rivera gave us anyway.”
I thought about that for a minute. I actually did want to hand it over to Perez and Robinson, but something was niggling at me and I couldn’t let it go. “No,” I said after a bit. “There’s still more that we can uncover that Perez and Robinson won’t. We’re wrapped up in the case for a bit longer yet.”
A Grave Prediction Page 24