Deadly Forecast: A Psychic Eye Mystery (26 page)

“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.

“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?”

“Y
ou 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.”