A Panicked Premonition

by Victoria Laurie

  The funny thing was, I felt so strongly she wasn’t glaring at us as a group. No, I felt so certain she was instead looking meanly at me.

  So I looked meanly back. I mean, fuck her, right? She offered me her middle finger, and I will admit to having a moment where I almost lost my cool and went marching back through the front door to give her a sample taste from my personal can of whoop-ass, but then I remembered the yeti inside, and considered that, mad and pumped up with new muscle as I was, I still probably couldn’t take him on.

  “We might want to take a look at her security guy,” I said, purposefully turning away from the window to focus on the riddle at hand. “He seems like just the guy you’d hire to cut a couple to ribbons with an AR-fifteen.”

  “What was his name again?” Brice asked as he pulled out his phone to make a note.

  “Sasquatch,” I said.

  “Gustavo,” Candice corrected with a friendly nudge to my shoulder.

  “He did look like he’s related to a yeti,” Dutch agreed.

  I beamed at him. “I love that you get me.”

  He wrapped an arm around me and I leaned into him, lifting my chin back to the window to offer Murielle a smug smile.

  She puffed out a big plume of smoke and turned her back to us.

  “I think we should get going,” Dutch said when the front door opened and the yeti stuck his head out like he couldn’t believe we were dumb enough to still be standing around in Murielle’s driveway.

  “Fine by me,” I said, heading to Candice’s car. For once I didn’t mind her speedy getaway.

  We all met back at our offices and came up with a game plan. “So our focus is going to be on Murielle,” Brice said. “She’s the most likely suspect in this scenario.”

  “Did you see the look she gave me when I asked her about the video?” Candice said. “We’re all lucky to have made it out of her estate alive.”

  “I saw that,” I said supportively. “That woman is totally capable of killing. Or at least hiring someone to kill.”

  “And her motive is, what? The video?” Brice said.

  I sat forward when a small ping to my radar went off in my mind. “Ohmigod, do we even know where the video is?”

  Candice’s brow furrowed. “It’s probably on Robin’s cell phone.”

  “Okay, so where’s her cell phone?”

  Everyone looked at one another.

  Dutch pulled out his own phone and said, “I’ll call my buddy at APD. It’ll be inventoried unless the killer or killers took it with them when they robbed the place.”

  I put a hand on his arm to keep him from dialing the phone just yet. “Does APD know exactly how much cash was taken out of the Roswells’ safe room, Dutch?”

  “Want me to ask?”

  “Yes, please.” There was something that was nagging me about the crime scene. Something that I couldn’t quite place, but wanted to.

  Dutch got up and went to make the call while the rest of us talked about Murielle as a suspect.

  Candice moved to her computer and began to poke around in Murielle’s social media accounts. “Whoa,” she said almost right away.

  “What?” Brice and I asked.

  “Come here, you two,” she said. “Look at this.”

  Brice and I moved to just behind Candice’s shoulders and peered at her screen. She indicated a photo on Murielle’s Instagram, which mostly showed the heiress posing alluringly in front of the camera, but behind her were two familiar faces. “That’s Robin and Andy Roswell,” I said of the couple in the background, who were actually glaring at Murielle.

  “It gets better,” Candice said, and she began to scroll forward through the pictures. Time and time again when Murielle was taking a selfie, Robin and Andy could be seen in the background. The settings and outfits varied, so that we knew these were all taken on different nights at different places, and the hashtags associated with each photo indicated that Murielle, Andy, and Robin frequented the VIP rooms of all the hottest Austin nightspots.

  “It almost looks like they’re stalking her,” I said.

  Candice winked at me. “That would be the obvious point here, Sundance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Murielle is making it look like she’s the one being stalked by Andy and Robin, not the other way around. See how she always gets one shot where she’s rolling her eyes with the camera pointed mostly over her shoulder at them? She’s creating a visual story to tell people of that social circle that she’s the victim.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “That’s like . . . diabolical.”

  “Do we know that’s not the truth?” Brice asked. We all stared blankly at him. “What I’m saying is, do we know that they weren’t stalking her to every bar in town?”

  Candice shrugged. “No, but you’ve met her, Brice. Do you think she’s someone worth stalking?”

  “Hell no,” he said, then nodded to his wife. “Okay, point taken. Also, I wouldn’t want to mess with her because rumor has it that her family’s connected to the mob.”

  “How come you guys decided to do business with her if she’s supposedly connected to the mob?” Candice asked. “Doesn’t that cross your line of Boy Scout ethics or something?”

  Brice smiled at his wife. “It does, and trust me—before we agreed to work with her, we did our homework. She came up squeaky clean on our background check. If she’s involved in something illegal, no federal branch has any record of it. There was no reason to deny her a contract for the safe rooms.”

  Dutch came back to us, pocketing his phone before sitting down. “Sorry that took so long. I was on hold a while. APD has Robin’s cell. It was on the counter in the kitchen.”

  “Have they checked the photo library?” I asked. “Is the video of Robin dumping Murielle there?”

  “APD is still going through the evidence,” Dutch said. “My contact said he’d check for us, though.”

  I frowned. “I’m not sure that it matters if it’s there or not.”

  “Why wouldn’t it matter?” Candice asked.

  “Because even if it’s not there, and Murielle’s motive for killing Andy and Robin was revenge for Robin leaving her, recording their breakup, and taking two members of her staff, Murielle couldn’t know that there wasn’t a copy of that video on Robin’s cell or up in the cloud somewhere, right? At the very least, whoever killed the couple should’ve grabbed the cell and turned it off—especially since these days all you need to alert nine-one-one is to give a shout-out to Siri.”

  Dutch eyed me thoughtfully and nodded. “You’re right.”

  “And another thing,” I continued. “The killer should’ve taken the phone and forced Robin to give up her password to the cloud, so that, if it was backed up there, the video could’ve been erased on both the phone and the cloud. In other words, no way would Murielle’s hired killer leave Robin’s cell behind.”

  “I agree,” Dutch said while both Candice and Brice nodded.

  I got up to pace the room then, because so much wasn’t making sense here and I was getting all sorts of weird, mixed signals. It was hell trying to untangle them. “As much as I hate to admit it, I’m not sure I’m buying the story of Murielle seeking revenge for being dumped and made a fool of. The Roswells’ murders feel like overkill. It’s as if the killer or killers didn’t just want them dead—they wanted them annihilated. Obliterated. Disfigured, dismembered, and destroyed.”

  Brice crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s what happens when you bring an AR-fifteen to the party. No one ends up in an open casket.”

  But I shook my head. “No, it’s more than just that, Brice.” I stopped pacing to stand still and close my eyes to better concentrate. “The people that did this to the Roswells, they don’t feel connected to them, you know? Like there’s a level of removal with them.”

  “Hadn’t
we already established that if Murielle is the killer, she would’ve hired someone to kill Robin and Andy?” Candice said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, frowning and opening my eyes again. “But that’s not what I mean. I’m trying to say that this was a pretty sloppy job when you think about it, right?”

  For effect I looked at Dutch, Brice, and Candice with meaning. I wanted them to feel what I felt in the ether so that maybe they’d understand what I was trying to get at.

  Brice offered me a slight one-shoulder shrug. “Like I said, it wasn’t the cleanest of hits.”

  I went with that and made my next point, which was what was really bugging me. “Not only wasn’t it the cleanest of hits, Brice, but there was a shit ton of evidence left behind, including Robin’s cell phone, and all of that speaks to an amateur job.”

  “I guess I still don’t understand your point, Edgar,” Dutch said.

  I turned to him. “Murielle doesn’t strike me as tolerating sloppy, babe. She strikes me as the type who’d hire a professional to get the job done right. She sure as hell wouldn’t let a trail lead back to her, and she had to at least suspect that there might be video on Robin’s cell phone or up in the cloud somewhere where we in law enforcement could eventually find it. If the Roswells were murdered on Saturday, and Candice and I didn’t discover the bodies until Sunday, that would’ve given Murielle plenty of time to send the killers back to the house and retrieve Robin’s cell phone.”

  “That’s true,” Candice agreed.

  “Right,” I said. “So why didn’t she?”

  “Good question,” Brice said.

  “Also,” I said, pacing again because I was on a roll, “this whole connection to Dave is really weird. I mean, why would Murielle want to either recruit Dave or frame him for the murders?”

  “To throw suspicion off her?” Candice tried. “He would’ve had easy access to the property. The Roswells knew him.”

  “Yeah, but how would that matter to Murielle? She knew a lot of people who knew them. She floated in their same circles, after all. And she was constantly showing up where they were, so she had to have known a little bit about their schedules.”

  And then I snapped my fingers and pointed to Dutch. “And how was it that Murielle came to Safe Chambers, anyway? You think it was a coincidence that she decided to use the very same builder as the one that Andy and Robin used?”

  “She floated in the same social circles,” Candice reminded me. “I’ll bet you that Robin bragged about her new safe room to some mutual friend or posted something about it on her social media page and Murielle picked up on it and made the call. Plus, to your earlier point, if Murielle knew the Roswells’ schedules—and it seems like she knew their schedules enough to continue to stalk them across the Austin area club scene—then she could’ve easily figured out or found out that they were home on Saturday.”

  I frowned. “Okay, so even if she did know they were home, why would she pick Saturday afternoon of all times to send in her hit squad? My point is, she’d be far more likely to schedule something for after an event she was certain they had all attended, both to create a legitimate alibi for herself and to easily track the two of them back to their place. The timing of the actual hit suggests that at best she’d have to guess that Andy and Robin would be home, and she’d have to hope that her hit man or hit men didn’t make too much noise, and if they were bringing AR-fifteens, then of course they’d be making some noise. No, this type of hit makes more sense for the early morning hours on Saturday, not one o’clock in the afternoon in broad daylight.”

  Everyone was silent for a few moments before Brice said, “While persuasive, all of that still doesn’t mean that Murielle isn’t behind the hit, Abby.”

  I sighed and sat down. “You’re right, Brice.”

  “Is your intuition saying that she didn’t have something to do with it?” Candice asked gently.

  I shook my head. “I gotta admit, this thing is so muddled and so complicated that I can’t tell which end is up. Did Murielle order a hit on Robin and Andy? I have no idea. I just can’t tell. What I can say is that this thing isn’t nearly as simple as we want it to be.”

  Dutch nodded toward me. “To Abby’s point about it being complicated, now that Robin and Andy are dead, we need to ask ourselves how Dave was mixed up in all this, and why was Gwen kidnapped?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “We all believe Dave is innocent and that he’s being used against his will, which is the only reason it would make sense to kidnap Gwen. The killer or killers need something from Dave, and they’re using Gwen to control him.”

  “So what could Dave do for them?” Candice asked.

  Across from me, Brice’s face drained of color and he looked sharply at Dutch, who also looked shocked and upset. “He could open doors,” Dutch said softly. “He probably knows the security codes to dozens of our customers.”

  It was Candice’s turn to look alarmed. “Which means he could open doors to some of the wealthiest houses in Austin.”

  “Dammit!” Brice swore, before getting quickly to his feet. “We need to call all our clients.”

  What followed was several hours of somewhat panic-driven phone calls to every client Safe Chambers had ever had. We couldn’t reach a lot of them, which wasn’t really surprising because this was a class of people who were probably too busy to answer their own phones, or were jet-setters, off in the world somewhere, yachting and working on their tans.

  The fact that we couldn’t reach almost half of them bothered me. A lot.

  Still, we left everyone messages and asked them to call us, day or night. We got a few immediate calls back, which was good, but there were still about twenty people on the list whom we couldn’t reach.

  “What are we telling people?” I asked, my hand covering the microphone on my phone when I’d gotten my first client on the line.

  Dutch appeared in the doorway to my office. “Tell them we’ve recently let an employee go who may have accessed our client’s private security data. They’ll need to change their security system codes immediately, just as a precaution.”

  I jotted that down on the notepad in front of me and said it to every person I spoke to. No one seemed particularly upset or alarmed, which also bothered me. I wanted them to be worried enough to change their security codes ASAP.

  As darkness settled onto the city, the four of us met back in Candice’s office. Brice, Dutch, and Candice each wore a frustrated, worried expression—likely mirroring my own. “I feel like we haven’t done enough,” I said.

  Brice paced the room like I had an hour earlier. “We need to consider calling APD about this.”

  “I agree,” Candice said.

  “Me too,” said Dutch.

  “Me three,” I agreed, and everyone looked at me. “What?”

  “Nothing,” Dutch said. “I just didn’t expect you to be on board with getting APD involved before we’ve had a chance to track Dave down.”

  I shook my head. “We’ve got to protect these people, honey. And I don’t like how the ether is feeling right now.”

  “How’s the ether feeling right now?” Candice asked.

  “Bad,” I admitted. I’d had the most anxious feeling creep over me the past hour and a half. Something terrible was going to happen, or maybe it’d already happened; I couldn’t tell.

  “I’ll make the call,” Dutch said, tapping his phone to pull up his source at APD.

  “Call Detective Grayson,” I said before he could place the call to his buddy.

  Dutch paused with his finger over the screen of his phone. “Grayson?”

  “Yes. Call her.”

  Dutch clicked back to his contacts list, but before he found her number, his screen lit up with an incoming call. “Whoa,” he said, holding it up so that we could see. “It’s Grayson.”

  I moved to a chair
next to Candice and sat down heavily. “Then it’s already happened,” I said.

  “What?” Candice said as Dutch answered the call.

  “Whatever terribleness comes next,” I whispered.

  Chapter Twelve

  Dutch hung up the phone and we all stared hard at him, trying to piece together what’d happened from the snippets of conversation he’d had with Grayson, which was impossible, because mostly Dutch had stuck to cursing under his breath and putting a hand up to his forehead in distress.

  “What’s happened?” Candice asked.

  I felt my stomach muscles clench. I almost couldn’t stand to hear what he was about to tell us.

  “Who had Chris Wixom on their list tonight?”

  I glanced at the piece of paper Candice had printed off with a list of Safe Chamber’s clients. “That would be me,” I said, remembering the name as someone on the list I’d set up an appointment for on the previous Saturday—the same guy whose house we’d driven by on Sunday right before we discovered the victims at the Roswell residence. “I marked him as unavailable, but I left him a message.”

  Dutch’s expression was unreadable, but his eyes held such worry, I almost couldn’t take it. “Earlier tonight, Chris was shot in his home by Dave McKenzie,” my husband said, his voice rough with anger.

  Brice sucked in a breath and Candice let out a small gasp. “How do they know it was Dave?”

  “Chris is still alive. Before being taken away in an ambulance, he identified Dave as the shooter.”

  A disconnected feeling washed over me at the news. It was almost as if this reality was too much for me to handle, and I mentally backed away from it. Whatever Candice, Dutch, and Brice discussed after that, I don’t remember, because I was too busy trying to deny what I’d just heard. “It’s not possible,” I heard myself say after a bit. And just like that, I mentally checked back in again.

  To my surprise, I realized that Dutch was squatting down in front of me, concern in his eyes. “It’s true, dollface,” he said, reaching up to tuck a lock of my hair behind my ear. “And we’ve got to get to the crime scene. I’d have Candice drive you home, but I think I’m gonna need you there, unless you really don’t want to come?”