Deadly Forecast

by Victoria Laurie

  Still, as I pulled out of the drive on my way over to Cat’s offices, I had an icky feeling that Bruce was going to go back into the house after I’d gone just to see what was still inside. “Bastard,” I muttered, knowing I couldn’t wait around to catch him in the act. Cat would kill me if I was even a minute late.

  Twenty minutes later I pulled into a parking space in the front lot of Cat’s building, letting out a sigh of relief. Candice’s Porsche was neatly tucked into a slot a few spaces down. As I got out of the car, she appeared at my side, startling me. “I thought you’d be inside,” I told her.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m not heading into the lion’s den alone, Sundance.”

  I grimaced. Cat was going to be difficult. Even more difficult than normal, because I knew she’d still be mad for my having blown her off the day before. “I should’ve bought her a gift or something,” I said.

  “A peace offering?” Candice asked.

  “Yeah.” I looked at my watch; it was eleven twenty-five. “No time for shopping. I’ll just have to win her over with my perky personality.”

  Candice eyed me doubtfully. I frowned at her and we went inside. Jenny Makeanote met us at the elevator. “Good morning, Ms. Cooper. Oh, and hello, Ms. Fusco. Mrs. Cooper-Masters has been detained in a meeting, but she asked me to show you to the conference room and she’ll join you as soon as her meeting is over.”

  “Awesome!” I said, already practicing the perky.

  Jenny Makeanote squinted oddly at me, then proceeded to lead us through the large suite. I noticed a few more people in residence since last I was there—maybe Cat had been on a hiring jag.

  Jenny opened the door to the conference room, and we were shown in. The place looked just like it had the other day, save for a dress rack in the corner with a garment bag I recognized. “She picked up my dress?” I asked.

  “Yes, ma’am. Mrs. Cooper-Masters had me collect it on Saturday. She’d like for you to try it on and make sure it fits. If we have to call the seamstress, I’ll need at least an hour’s notice.”

  Once the door was closed, I moved immediately to the garment bag and unzipped it, sighing with satisfaction at the sight of the beautiful dress. I’d had it modeled after the one worn by Carolyn Bessette Kennedy at her wedding to John Kennedy Jr., because I’d always loved the simple elegance of the bias-cut, silk slip dress.

  Candice whistled appreciatively while I took it out of the garment bag. “It’s so you, Sundance,” she said, when I held it up against myself.

  I smiled before tucking in to the restroom to try it on. Thankfully, it fit like a glove (probably because I hadn’t had lunch yet), and I came out to parade myself in front of Candice. “Beautiful, honey,” she said, her hand over her heart. I was touched to see a slight mist in her eyes.

  After I’d changed into my regular clothes again, Jenny Makeanote came back into the conference room, carrying a tray of salads and refreshments. “Mrs. Cooper-Masters apologizes,” she said. “Her meeting is taking much longer than expected. She’s asked me to bring you lunch and see if there’s anything else you’ll need.”

  “We’re fine,” Candice assured her as I looked over the salads (hunting for something more substantive, like potato chips).

  As she was leaving, my phone buzzed with an incoming text at the same time Candice’s phone gave a small chirp. I felt a jolt of anxiety go through me, and Candice and I both snatched our phones and took a look.

  The text was from Agent Rodriguez, and it was alarming to say the least. Little Haley Nolan had apparently slipped her protection detail, and on top of that, Oscar noted that he’d seen a blip on the phone logs for Jed Banes. A call had come in about an hour and a half earlier from an unknown—and untraceable—number. He was in the process of sending one of the agents over to retrieve the tape in Banes’s answering machine.

  “Shit,” Candice whispered.

  I eyed my watch. It was twelve thirty. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this, Candice.”

  She grabbed her purse. “I’m heading over there to see if there’s anything I can do.”

  I grabbed my purse too. “I’m coming with you.”

  That’s when we saw Jenny Makeanote still standing in the doorway. “What? No! Ms. Cooper, you can’t leave!” she said, looking a bit desperate.

  We both ignored her and marched toward the door. Jenny spread her arms and legs, trying to prevent us from leaving. Candice stopped right in front of her and glared hard, and that was enough to get Jenny to gulp loudly and step aside. As we passed her, I called over my shoulder, “Tell Cat I’m dealing with an emergency at work, and I’ll try to come back later.”

  “She’ll be very upset!” Jenny said (a bit shriekishly, I thought).

  “She’ll get over it,” I muttered, trying to get my legs to move faster to keep up with Candice.

  We drove separately to the bureau, which meant that Candice (the speed racer) got there a few minutes ahead of me. When I got upstairs and through the door, the first thing I saw was Oscar, sitting in his chair with his head down and the phone pressed to his ear. Cox stood nearby looking like he’d been kicked in the gut, and Brice was in his office pacing angrily with a phone pressed to his ear.

  Candice was in with him, and I knew better than to go in there, so I sidled up to Cox and asked, “Any word?”

  He nudged his chin toward Rodriguez. “Oscar’s on the phone with her parents. They haven’t seen her.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  Cox shrugged and sighed at the same time. “She went into the bathroom to take a shower and after a half hour of the water running, we got nervous and knocked on the door. No answer led us to break it down, and that’s when we found the bathroom window open.”

  “Why would she run?” I asked.

  Cox rubbed his face tiredly. “My guess is that she got scared, and took off to a boyfriend’s or something.”

  “She’s got a boyfriend?”

  Cox nodded again to Rodriguez. “That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  I eyed my watch. It was five minutes to one. “Any word on the answering machine?”

  Cox pointed over his shoulder. “Brice has been trying to get a judge to sign a search warrant to retrieve it for the past twenty minutes. With Banes still alive and in a coma, he’s not having the best luck with it.”

  “We’re almost out of time,” I growled. “We need to know if the call on Banes’s machine is another warning.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir,” Cox told me. “But if it is another warning, there’s not much we can do about it in the four minutes we’ve got left.”

  Rodriguez hung up the phone, his face hard as granite. “Her parents haven’t seen or heard from her,” he said. “But they did say that Haley’s been dating a guy who lives on campus at UT.”

  “They give you a name?” Cox asked.

  “Bill Reid. I’m calling campus police to have them check his dorm room.”

  Rodriguez picked up the phone and began dialing when Brice poked his head out of his office, waving a paper in the air. “I’ve got the warrant and I’ve e-mailed it to Donovan at Banes’s house. Cox, I’ll need you to pick up the original and meet Donovan with it in case someone calls the police on us.”

  “On it,” Cox said, grabbing his coat and hurrying out of the room.

  I looked at my watch again. It was one o’clock. All around me the remaining agents in the room seemed to sense the hour, and a hush fell over the room. Only Rodriguez’s strained voice remained at full volume as he explained whom he was looking for, and where he hoped they’d find her.

  Five more tense minutes went by, and then several phones rang, including Brice’s. I watched him through the window as he grabbed up the phone. I then watched the color drain from his face, and I knew. I knew we were too late. Another bomb had gone off.

  * * *

  We drove to the crime scene in Brice’s sedan. All we’d heard was that there’d been some kind of explosion at
a small strip mall on the south side of town. Through the window I could see a rise of thick black smoke as we drew close. The area was also swarming with police, fire, and rescue trucks, not to mention news vans from every local station and a few from the national ones too.

  Brice waved his badge at several police officers to gain us access to the area closest to the detonation. Brice parked on the street and we got out and followed him over to a cluster of police and men in dark suits—no doubt Homeland Security had been alerted and gotten there too.

  Gaston appeared as if out of nowhere, and he and Brice broke away from Candice and me to talk privately. Rodriguez came up beside me. He looked terrible. “It’s not your fault,” I told him, but I might have saved my words. He stared hard at the smoldering remains of a storefront like he hadn’t even heard me.

  Nearby I saw a man with a camera clicking away, and something about him struck me. The press were always kept at a safe distance, so how the heck did he get through the barricades and up so close? “Hey!” I yelled, moving toward him full of piss and vinegar. “Who the hell let you in here?”

  The man blanched and backed away from me. “Sorry!” he said, but I also noticed he took a few more shots of the scene.

  “Yo!” I yelled loudly. “Stop taking pictures or I’ll have you brought up on obstruction charges!” I had no authority to bring anyone up on any such charges, but I was angry and he was a convenient scapegoat.

  He took another step back, and that’s when I noticed that Candice had come around him from the back, and laid a firm hand on his arm. Nimbly lifting his camera out of his hands, she said, “The lady asked you a question, buddy. Who let you in here?”

  By now I was in front of the guy. He was a slight man with a face like a rat and a thick brown mustache. “Nobody let me in here,” he said angrily, trying to take back his camera. “I own that shop.”

  My gaze lifted to the storefront at the end of the row. It was a photography studio. “Well, you should have evacuated with the rest of the tenants!” Candice snapped. She was being a little rough on him too.

  “Can I have my camera back?” he asked meekly.

  “Nope,” Candice told him, waving to one of the crime-scene techs. “We’re keeping it as evidence. You’ll get it back when we’re through investigating.”

  The guy puffed his chest up. “You can’t do that!”

  Candice handed the camera over to the CSI. “Wanna bet?” she said, before instructing the tech to log the camera into evidence. She then took the photographer by the collar and pulled him over to a nearby cop. “This suspicious character was taking photos of the scene,” she said. “I’d like you to hold him in your custody until we can question him.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  Fully alarmed now, the photographer began to struggle with the cop. Bad idea. He was quickly twisted into a choke hold and stuffed into the back of a cop car.

  “Doofus,” Candice growled as she came back to me.

  “We really should check him out,” I said. “I mean, who sticks around after an explosion next door to take photos?”

  Candice thumbed over her shoulder. “That idiot. But yeah, I agree. That is a little suspicious.”

  We walked over to Rodriguez, who was pacing back and forth with his phone once again pressed to his ear, a strange expression on his face. “You’re sure?” he asked the caller. Then, he wiped his brow and let out a breath. “Yeah, that’s her. Where is she now?”

  Candice and I waited a bit impatiently for him to disconnect. “They have her,” he said, wiping his brow again.

  “Who?” we both asked.

  “Haley. Campus police grabbed her at her boyfriend’s dorm.”

  “Wait,” I said, completely dumbfounded. “Haley’s alive?”

  He nodded.

  I pointed behind him at the smoldering ruins. “Then who the hell did that?”

  We had our first clue several hours later when we were back at the bureau. Several witnesses had stepped forward to suggest that they saw a woman in her late thirties wearing a uniform of some kind approach the strip mall on foot looking terribly distraught and wearing what looked to be a big backpack strapped to her chest. The minute she’d made it to the parking lot in front of a FedEx store, she’d ducked behind a car and they saw her trying to shimmy out of the backpack. In the next instant the witnesses were knocked flat by a terrible flash and an explosion. Sparks from the initial blast had caught the roof of the FedEx building on fire, and with all that paper inside, it’d become completely engulfed in under five minutes. The only good news was that all the employees and patrons had made it safely out the back of the store. No one but the bomber had been killed.

  Cox had also confirmed that Banes’s answering machine had recorded a warning from our unsub, and while questions and leads continued to pour in, I kept going back to the description of the woman.

  She was described as between five feet five and five feet seven inches tall, 140 to 160 pounds, brown-haired, and wearing a maroon or brown uniform.

  Something tickled the back of my mind and after having a brief chat with Candice, I carried one of the reports back to Brice’s office, where he was talking with Gaston and one of the Homeland guys. “Excuse me,” I said after knocking. “But I have a question.”

  Brice leaned back in his chair and waved his hand at me to proceed.

  “Sir, did you ever talk with Debbie Nunez?”

  Brice’s brow furrowed. “Who?”

  “The manager from the Jamba Juice. Did you ever get ahold of her?”

  Brice blinked a few times. “Uh…no, Cooper. I never did. Why?”

  “Has anyone heard from her?” I pressed.

  Brice picked up his cell phone and scrolled through several screens of what I assumed were voice mails. “No. She never called me back.”

  I stretched out my arm holding the description of the victim to him. “Candice met Debbie the other day. She said she looked a lot like the description given of our bomber. We went back to talk to her yesterday at the shop, but one of the employees had said that Debbie wasn’t there, and when we pressed for her whereabouts, I remember the employee saying that she thought Debbie must be in a meeting, but I don’t remember that that was ever confirmed. Also, Haley mentioned that Buzz wanted Mimi to quit her job after they got married, but Debbie had already offered Mimi a promotion as assistant manager. I had the feeling that Mimi didn’t like the idea of staying home barefoot and pregnant, and her job might have offered her some independence and freedom. A control freak like Buzz would’ve felt threatened by Mimi’s promotion, and I’m betting he probably blamed Debbie for playing a role in his breakup with Mimi.”

  For several seconds, you could have heard a pin drop in that office. “Shit,” Brice swore. “You mean to tell me we had the wrong girl in protective custody?”

  I nodded, feeling almost physically sick over it. I was the one who hadn’t put it together, and I’d been the one to set the protective detail on Haley because I’d been so sure that she was Buzz’s next target.

  Gaston held his hand out for the report and the Homeland guy leaned over to read it with him. Brice then pointed to me. “Take Fusco and Rodriguez over to Debbie’s house and see what you can find out.” I left his office before the expletives really began to fly.

  Agent Rodriguez drove Candice and me to Debbie’s house. The mood in the car was somber. Oscar had been pulled off any further protective detail for Haley, something I was pretty sure he was still smarting from. Her parents had insisted that she come home to their house and two APD officers had been assigned to stand guard out front. Two Homeland Security agents had also been quietly assigned to walk the block periodically and monitor the street to make sure Haley didn’t leave and that nobody suspicious got too close.

  Candice was also very sullen. I suspected she might be feeling personally responsible for not thinking to protect Debbie. I knew exactly how she felt.

  How had we missed that? I kept asking m
yself. And I knew with intuitive certainty that Debbie had been the latest victim in this madness.

  We found Debbie’s town house after twice passing it by. Her home was a rather indistinctive place; nothing about it stood out or made it different from its neighbors to the right or to the left: just a brown, drab home without flowers or fanfare.

  We walked to the door and rang the bell. It gonged hollowly and we waited even though not one of us expected the door to open. Oscar pressed the bell again just to be thorough, while Candice eyed the street. There were several cars parked out front—impossible to tell offhand which one might belong to Debbie.

  I could tell that Oscar was about to turn away from the door, but I had an impulse. “Did you hear that?” I asked.

  “What?” Candice and Oscar both asked.

  “I swear I heard a cry for help coming from inside,” I said, feigning concern.

  The corner of Candice’s mouth quirked, and she looked at Oscar expectantly. When he wavered, she added, “You know, I think I heard it too. Someone’s clearly in distress in there.”

  But Oscar was playing it by the book. “We’ll get a warrant,” he said, pulling out his cell—about to call Brice, no doubt.

  Candice made a derisive noise and bent down to tug up the corner of the welcome mat at our feet. She stood up triumphant with a key in her hand. “Fusco…,” Oscar warned, but Candice wasn’t listening. She inserted the key, turned the handle, and called out, “Hello? Debbie? It’s Candice Fusco. We talked the other day and we have reason to believe you may be in danger! If you’re afraid for your life, don’t call out. If you’re fine, please shout to us!”

  Rodriguez rolled his eyes, but both Candice and I ignored him, moving into the foyer to look around. In front of us was a set of stairs. Candice pulled out her gun and slowly made her way up them. I sensed no danger, so I went around the stairs to the living room, which looked to be furnished by Ikea, and poked around a little. Debbie had a landline, and it appeared she’d missed eight calls—all from the previous few days. I found a photo of her on the half wall leading to the kitchen. She was being hugged by an older gentleman—I assumed he was her dad—and her flat plastic image smiled out at me. Debbie was dead.