Deadly Forecast

by Victoria Laurie

  Amber stared at the sliding glass door for a moment. “Yeah, I do. I’ve always been nervous about that tree and Taylor saying she saw a Peeping Tom out there on the balcony. I’m positive I locked it and put the security pole in the slot before I left the apartment the next day.”

  “Did anybody else come in here? Maybe a maintenance man, or a delivery person?”

  Again Amber shrugged. “If they did, then I didn’t know about it. Usually if there’s any maintenance work to be done, we get a note taped to our door, but Taylor almost always got home before me, so she would’ve been the one to get the note if there was one.”

  Dutch jotted something down in his notebook again, and I suspected he was going to check with the apartment manager to see if there had been any interior maintenance work performed in the days prior to the mall bombing.

  After that, Dutch had a few more routine questions for Amber and I took the opportunity to head back out onto the balcony one more time. Something was bugging me about it, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  Candice popped her head out and said, “Dutch is ready to go, honey.”

  I’d been shuffling the dead leaves and debris around and with a sigh I lifted my head and said, “Yeah, okay.”

  “Something wrong?”

  I shook my head. “Nope. It’s just that—”

  At that moment Dutch’s head appeared over Candice’s shoulder. “I’ve got something for you,” he said, raising a box high so I could see it.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Some of Taylor’s personal effects. Pictures and stuff that we didn’t pick up from the first search.”

  That did interest me. I could sometimes get a vibe off personal items. I moved to the door and Candice and Dutch stepped out of the way, and then the three of us made our way toward the front entrance, thanking Amber for her time. She nodded as if to say, “Yeah, but don’t come back.”

  After that, we piled back into Dutch’s car and made our way to the highway, where we immediately got tied up in traffic. I looked at my watch and knew I’d never make it to the new house in time to meet the exterminator. I called Dave and asked him if he wouldn’t mind staying a little late.

  “Aw, Abs, I’ve got plans with the old lady tonight,” he said irritably.

  Dave’s “old lady” is his wife, whose actual name I still don’t know even after four years of working with him. I had yet to meet her in fact. All those times when our paths should have crossed had been interrupted by something or other. It’d become this joke of sorts between Dave and me, but come my wedding day, the joke would be over because I was determined to meet this mysterious woman. “It shouldn’t take too long,” I told him. If I knew Dave at all (which I did), his plans involved some sort of happy hour special, and by staying late to meet the bug guy, he’d have to pay full price for his beer and munchies once he made it to the bar. “Come on, Dave, please?”

  “Yeah, okay,” he said grudgingly. “But you owe me a free beer and a plate of wings.”

  “Put it on my tab,” I told him.

  After hanging up with him I rooted around in Taylor’s box. Not much was there: some pictures, cards, and kitschy little items. I sorted through the pictures. Most of them were of Taylor alone and standing in front of something of interest—a football stadium, the Grand Canyon, the steps of her high school with her diploma. Only two were photos of her family. One obviously taken when she was young, about eleven, and next to her was a girl maybe fourteen or fifteen, and behind them was a slight man in his late forties and a woman in her late thirties or early forties. Must be her sister and her mom and dad, I thought. I also noticed the flat plastic look of the mother and sister along with Taylor. This is how dead people often appear to me in photographs. Their image takes on a slight distortion and it becomes flat and almost waxy. The dad in the photo was the only “normal-looking” one. I felt a keen sense of sadness for the man. Even if he hadn’t come home to attend his daughters’ funerals, I knew he had to care about them. Maybe he just had a hard time showing it.

  The last picture I looked at had been pushed to the bottom of the box, and it was curious for two reasons. The first was that it wasn’t of Taylor. It was of her sister. The second reason it stood out to me was that Taylor’s sister had been posing in that sort of couple’s pose with a man only a few inches taller than her, hugging her from behind, and both of their faces had been mostly obscured by a felt-tipped pen. Mimi Greene had blacked-out teeth and a big dorky bow on the top of her head, and the man she was standing next to had had his countenance almost completely obscured by a drawn-in pair of glasses, thick mustache, clown nose, blacked-out teeth, and giant clown hat. Next to the image was the word Losers!

  “Nice,” I said with a frown.

  “What’s that?” Dutch asked from the front seat. I showed him the picture. “Maybe Amber wasn’t kidding when she described Taylor,” he remarked.

  I stared at the photo a bit longer. My radar kept pinging off it. “You know,” I said, “I’d like to find out more about Taylor’s sister. Do you have anything on her, Dutch?”

  He glanced at me over his shoulder. “I’m sure I could come up with something given a name and a last known address. Why?”

  “Call it a gut feeling.” A bad gut feeling, I thought. And with that, I tucked the photo back into the box and vowed to follow up on it the next day.

  T-Minus 00:40:32

  “M.J.!” Gilley squeaked, tugging on her arm as Dutch’s car sped away from the two handcuffed police officers. “I have a really bad feeling about this!”

  “Quiet, Gil,” she replied, trying to hold Brody’s attention, but it was too late. His eyes had just lifted to the rear window and when M.J. looked behind her, she could see the cops were already on their feet and being helped by Brody’s friend. They’d be after them in a minute.

  “And I have to pee!” Gilley squeaked as Dutch’s black sedan squealed round the corner.

  “Quiet!” Dutch barked. M.J. could see the tension on his face in the rearview mirror. Next to him Brody sat stiffly. The kid was scared. It was wafting off him in waves.

  But then he blinked and seemed to focus. “The fight you’re talking about wasn’t between my mom and Margo,” he said to M.J. “It was about some guy who came into the shop right after my mom bought it, and he said she owed him some money, but my mom said that he needed to go see Margo about it. He didn’t believe that she’d just bought the shop, and he scared my mom so bad that she called Margo and told her to watch out for this guy ’cause he was, like, crazy or something.”

  “Who was this man?” M.J. asked. Brody’s mom was filling her mind with the sense that this was the man that they needed to find in order to save Abby.

  Brody shrugged. “I don’t know. But I do know where Margo’s new shop is, if you want to go ask her. It’s not far from here.”

  “It’d be faster if we called,” Candice said.

  Brody turned in his seat. “I’m really sorry, but I don’t know the name of it. I just remember Mom taking me there when it opened. It’s not far from here, I swear.”

  “Point the way, kid,” Dutch said, punching the accelerator even before Brody could give him the first set of instructions.

  M.J. eyed the clock on the dash. Already they’d lost three whole minutes. She had a terrible feeling that they weren’t going to find Abby in time, and, by the same token, she couldn’t imagine what would happen if they did. Could they remove the bomb before it exploded? How the hell were they going to save her with only thirty-some-odd minutes left?

  Candice seemed to be thinking the same thing, because when M.J. looked over at her, she could see her lids closed and her lips moving. She was praying. And then her eyes snapped open and she had her phone out again. “Brice?” she said above the squealing of tires as they took another turn too tight. “Listen to me. I don’t have a lot of time to explain. I’m with Dutch. Abby’s only got thirty-seven minutes left. We’re on our way to get a name, and we
think it could be the name of the bastard we’ve been hunting for. When I call it in, you’ll need to put every resource you have available to finding this son of a bitch.” At that moment the sound of sirens somewhere behind them lit up the tense quiet of the car. “Oh, and call off the police before Dutch hurts somebody, okay?”

  Chapter Nine

  “You okay?” Rodriguez asked as I handed him the bag containing his breakfast burritos. “You look like you’re ready to hurt somebody.”

  I pushed a smile onto my face and tried to relax the stiff set to my shoulders. “Yeah, yeah,” I said to him. “It was crazy crowded at the restaurant, traffic was awful, and I’m late getting to my office. I’ve got a full list of clients today.”

  Oscar was nice enough to look chagrined. “Sorry, Cooper,” he said, opening the bag to peer inside. “If I’d known you weren’t coming in today, I wouldn’t have sent you my breakfast order.”

  “It’s cool,” I assured him. “A deal’s a deal. Speaking of which, did you take another look at that footage?”

  Oscar pulled out one of his burritos from the bag and nodded. “Take a look at this,” he said. Scooting his chair over to his computer monitor, he clicked the mouse and set a section of security footage in action. I peered at the screen, but all I saw was a little bit of light mall traffic and the fuzzy image of a guy tending to the plants in the mall’s atrium.

  Then the footage ended. “That’s it?” I asked.

  Oscar rewound the footage a little and magnified the view of the guy tending the plants. “See him?” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said squinting. It was hard to make out anything other than a guy in what looked like a green or brown shirt and shorts spraying plants with a mister.

  “This camera sits at the mall’s atrium, which has a good view of the south entrance. But this guy isn’t a mall employee or a contractor. I checked, and the management says that the crew that comes in to take care of the plants does it every Monday at eight a.m., and the crew is mostly female. This guy isn’t on their roster.”

  I sucked in a small breath. “That’s our unsub!”

  Oscar nodded. “Now watch what happens right here,” he said. Oscar closed the window of that footage and opened another. From a different and even more obscured view we watched the guy among the plants pause, set down his mister, and look toward the mall’s south entrance. The clock in the bottom of the screen indicated that the bomb would detonate in ten seconds, but for all of that ten seconds the unsub just stood there and looked toward the south entrance. Then there was a bit of movement with his arm, and all of a sudden the camera shook and bits of small debris scuttled past the lens. Everyone in the mall shops began running out, but the plant guy simply bent down to retrieve his mister and hurried away with the rest of the crowd.

  “That’s definitely him, Oscar,” I said, suppressing a shudder. “Did you catch that move with his hand? He did set off the bomb remotely.” Oscar nodded.

  I squinted at the frozen image of the unsub moving into the crowd. He’d been so cold as he’d looked on toward the south entrance. I knew he’d seen the older couple approach Taylor, and he’d just set off the bomb anyway. “Is there a way to get a better view of him?”

  Oscar frowned. “I’ve pored over all the tapes, Cooper, and these are the two best images of this guy we have. It’s like he knew where the cameras were and kept just out of view the whole time he was in the mall.”

  “What about enhancing the footage to get a close-up?”

  “I’ve sent that first section to the photo tech at the D.C. lab, but he’s already e-mailed me this morning to tell me he doesn’t think he’ll be able to get much more than we already have. The guy’s too far away and there aren’t enough pixels to work with.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, okay. Listen, show this to Dutch and Candice when they come in, would you?”

  Oscar looked around. “I’m surprised they’re not with you.”

  “Candice is babysitting Dutch for the day,” I told him. “They’re both ecstatic about it.”

  Oscar laughed. “I’ll bet. Okay, Cooper, thanks again for breakfast and have a good day with your clients.”

  The rest of day was a long one for me. I had clients booked through the afternoon, and I had to meet the landscaper at the new house that evening to go over what could be done to fix the destruction from the wayward Bobcat.

  Plus there were a whole lot of other things that needed to get done before Dutch and I could move into our house the following Tuesday. Namely, packing. By some miracle Dutch was able to find a moving company who could come out that weekend to load up the portable storage units, but that would need to be monitored, and I knew he’d never get the time off work to do it, so it would fall to me.

  If I took the time to tend to all these things, I’d have to leave Dutch’s side, and that bothered me no end. Candice came to my rescue when she said she promised to stick to him like glue.

  Around four thirty that evening I met Tom, my landscape architect, at the top of the driveway where he’d parked.

  Tom’s a fairly nondescript man of about thirty-five. He was an airline pilot for a few years until an auto accident caused him a case of sciatica that wouldn’t allow him to sit longer than a few hours at a time. Unable to fly commercially anymore, he dove into his second passion, landscape architecture. He had a smooth, nonconfrontational quality about him, but even for me he was often hard to read. When he saw the damage to the clay pots (three of them had been all but demolished, and the beds of carefully planted flowers had been mushed beyond recognition), his tone never conveyed that he was ticked off.

  My tone, however, was a completely different story.

  Shortly after arriving, we watched Dave’s truck pull up and hesitate next to us. I saw him mouth, “Uh-oh,” then hide it quickly. He then headed to the bottom of the drive and Tom and I came down after him on foot. At least Dave had sense enough not to try to duck us by doing a quick U-turn and hightailing it out of there. “Abby!” he said brightly.

  “Dave,” I replied. (This is the part where my angry tone comes into play.)

  He cleared his throat and rocked on his heels. “Thought you two were coming by later.”

  “Nope.” I glared hard at Dave. As foreman he was supposed to make sure accidents like the one in my front garden didn’t happen.

  “I don’t know if I can get three more urns like those,” Tom said, pointing to the broken clay pots. “I mean, they came imported from Peru.”

  “Could you find something close?” I asked.

  Tom nodded, looking at his watch. “Yeah. If I leave here in the next twenty minutes, I can swing by Miguel’s on my way home and see what’ll work. It’ll be a little pricey, though.”

  “How much?” Dave asked, squirming in his boots.

  “Four to six hundred,” Tom said, and Dave looked relieved until Tom added, “Apiece.”

  Dave’s face fell into a hard frown. “Yeah, okay. Roberto can work it off in overtime. I’ll front the money for him until he’s even.”

  Angry as I’d been, I suddenly felt bad. I mean, it was an accident after all. “Keep it at or below three hundred apiece, Tom,” I said. “We can use the remaining urn as a centerpiece and cascade some smaller ones around it.”

  Dave shot me a grateful smile and Tom nodded like he approved of the game plan. We walked over toward the front door, talking about how to rebuild the look we wanted, and I couldn’t help but make the suggestion that Tom not put the urns in place until after Dave’s team was completely finished. “If you want to pick ’em up tomorrow, Tom, you can store them in the garage,” Dave offered. “We’ll be out of here by Saturday night if you want to have your crew here to put them in place first thing Monday morning.”

  Tom nodded. “That’ll work,” he said.

  Dave then moved over to a can of paint set oddly on the front step, and lifted it to retrieve a key. I stared at him curiously, and he blushed a little when he caught my eye, but he didn’t ex
plain. Instead he handed the key to Tom and said, “If I’m not here, just let yourself in and hit the button in the garage for the door. You can leave the key under that can of paint if I’m not here when you’re through.”

  “Got it,” Tom said, pocketing the key, and with a salute to me he was off to walk back up the drive toward his truck.

  “Wanna take a peek inside?” Dave asked when Tom had moved away.

  “Sure,” I said, following him to the front door, where Dave fumbled through the keys on his key ring trying to find the one that fit our door. “Should we call Tom back?” I asked after much jangling.

  “Naw,” Dave said, “I’ve got one on here somewhere.”

  I waited patiently through more flipping and twirling of the keys until Dave finally came up with the one that unlocked the door. We went inside at last, Dave holding the door for me, and I nearly came up short when I saw the gorgeous interior. “Whoa!” I said. The last time I’d been in the house had been when the dark wood floors were just being laid. Now the house looked finished, pristine, and oh-so-gorgeous. It also smelled of fresh paint, new carpet, and something else I couldn’t quite identify.

  Curiously, Dave squatted down next to the wall and ran his hand about six inches above the molding.

  “What?” I asked him.

  Dave stood with a satisfied look on his face. “Your guy was out here last night spraying the walls and it was leaving a yellow residue. He promised it’d evaporate and wouldn’t leave a stain.”

  It took me a minute to remember that I’d had Russ come by the night before to spray for crickets, or as I liked to call them—scorpion snack food.

  I listened and didn’t hear any chirping, so Russ must have been as successful with the crickets as he was with the scorpions.

  “Come on,” Dave said, waving to me to follow him into the interior. “You gotta see the kitchen.”

  Three hours later Dutch found me packing up our own kitchen. The moment I saw him walk through the door and tug at the Velcro that locked his Kevlar vest in place, I knew that Candice had done her job of protecting my fiancé very well, because he headed straight for the scotch and suggested that I might want to get a new, less annoying best friend, because she was driving him crazy.