Deadly Forecast: A Psychic Eye Mystery (27 page)

“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 explain. 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.

“Did you have any luck on the case today?” I asked, tucking a paper-covered platter
into a box.

“None,” he said irritably. “I called the management on Taylor’s apartment and the
reason the complex is under new management is because the old manager kept no records.
At all. On anything. The new manager is still trying to get organized, and he’s got
no idea if Taylor and Amber’s apartment was visited by the maintenance crew in the
days before the bomb. I managed to track down one of the maintenance guys at the complex,
and he tells me he’s so overworked he can’t remember the apartments he visited yesterday,
let alone last month.”

“But you ran a background check on him all the same, right?” I asked.

Dutch nodded. “He checks out. No priors, no history of violence, or substance abuse.
He’s worked for the complex for six years without any record of complaint to the local
authorities.”

“What about this Peeping Tom Amber was telling us about?”

“Sherman Knocks. He’s got a solid alibi,” Dutch told me. “He’s currently serving time
for a parole violation, and he’s been locked up for the past three months.”

“How about Taylor’s sister? Did you get anything on her?”

Dutch rubbed his face tiredly and poured another two fingers into his scotch glass.
“Mary Greene. She went by the nickname Mimi. That’s about all I have on her,” he said.
“Candice has been digging into her personal life, but I managed to find out that she
worked at a Jamba Juice in the few months before she died. Her manager remembers her
as sweet but shy. A little sad, she said. That was about all she could tell me. She
wished she could’ve gotten to know her better, but Jamba Juice is a pretty busy place,
or so she says. Not a lot of time for chitchat between the employees.”

I frowned. “That’s it?”

“That’s it,” he said.

“Did the manager remember the name of the guy that Mimi was going out with before
she died?”

Dutch blinked. “I didn’t ask her,” he said. “Was I supposed to ask about him?”

I smiled. I didn’t think I’d given Dutch any specifics beyond digging into the girl’s
past. “No, don’t worry about it, cowboy. I’ll call the manager when I get back on
the case. Which Jamba Juice is it?”

“The one in south Austin, near Mimi’s last known address at an apartment off Seventy-one
and Bee Cave.”

I scoured my internal map of Austin to locate the intersection. “Hey, that’s not far
from Rita’s beauty shop, right?”

Dutch shrugged. “It’s about a mile give or take,” he said. “You thinking there’s a
connection between Mimi and the salon?”

My skin felt tingly, like I’d hit on something, but I couldn’t quite figure out what.
And the truth was that my radar was running on empty after a long day of clients and
obligations. I sighed tiredly. “Maybe. Maybe not. But I’m feeling like we should learn
more about Mimi. I can’t shake the feeling that she’s connected to all this.” Then
I thought of something else. “Did you get ahold of the girls’ father?”

Dutch sighed. “No. Homeland has officially taken over the case, and they’ve got him
locked up.”

“They put him in
jail
?”

Dutch smiled at me. “No, doll, they’ve instructed him not to talk to anyone but them
while they root around in his past to see if there’s any connection between him and
this terrorist group in Yemen. I can’t make contact with Greene without raising all
kinds of red flags.”

“Well, that sucks,” I grumbled.

“We’ll just have to work around it,” Dutch replied as he lifted up a container of
Bubble Wrap. “Meanwhile I better help you pack.”

I sighed again. “I’ve been working on this kitchen for the past two hours and I feel
like I’ve hardly made a dent.”

Dutch chuckled and reached out to wrap me in his arms. His shirt was still damp from
wearing the Kevlar all day. “Thanks for keeping your vest on,” I told him.

“I’m getting used to it,” he said, rocking with me in a slow dance around the kitchen.
Just then his foot clunked against my cane, which had been propped against a chair.
Looking down at it, he asked, “How’re the hips?”

I smiled up at him. “I barely used it today. I swear I’m more balanced than I’ve been
in months.”

“You think you can make it down the aisle without Fast Freddy?” Fast Freddy was Dutch’s
pet name for my cane.

“Maybe,” I told him. “But tell Milo to do some extra workouts with that left arm.
I’ll probably be leaning hard on him.”

“Speaking of which, you think we can get this house packed, moved into the new digs,
and
get hitched in one week?”

“Do we have a choice?”

“We could always postpone it,” he said. My heart lifted. He was willing to postpone
the wedding? “I mean, we don’t
have
to move into the new digs right away.”

My hopes sank back down. He’d meant postpone the move.

“Yeah, but honey, Bruce said we had to be out by the thirtieth,” I reminded him.

Dutch sighed. “You’ll have to do a lot of this on your own,” he told me. “I’m gonna
be stuck at the office all weekend.”

I squeezed my arms around him tightly. What he didn’t know yet was that as of Monday
he’d officially be on vacation and under orders to butt out. “Please don’t go anywhere
other than the
office. If I have to be here, I’ll go crazy if I know you’re out in the field.”

He kissed me on the top of the head and said, “I promise to stick close to home, babe.
Maybe Gaston will give me a break. It’s not like we’re making progress on this. Maybe
I can work some of the leads from home this weekend and help you out too.”

I looked up at him again. “Have I told you lately that I lurve you?”

He grinned. “You better, Mrs. Rivers.”

I felt my eyes bug and the breath catch in my throat. “Wha…what?”

“Oh, sorry, maybe I should save the Mrs. Rivers until after the ceremony. Speaking
of which, you should do some research on filing for a legal name change.”

Was he serious? Since when had I agreed to change my name to his? Had we talked about
this? And if we hadn’t, why hadn’t we? “Uh…Dutch?”

“Hmm?” he said, still dancing with me and holding me close to nuzzle against my neck.

“About the Mrs. Rivers thing…”

“Which reminds me, I need to put in the paperwork to get you a new badge. Don’t let
me forget to do it on Monday, okay?”

I felt my heartbeat quicken. Oh, God…he was serious. I stopped dancing and stepped
back. For a moment I couldn’t figure out how to tell him, and he eyed me curiously.
“You okay?”

I wrung my hands and stammered some words, still trying to begin. “I…uh…see, the thing
is…it’s not like I don’t…”

Dutch reached out and put a hand on my upper arm. “Edgar, what is it?”

I squared my shoulders and looked him directly in the eye. “I don’t want to be Mrs.
Rivers.”

To say that Dutch looked stunned would be an understatement. In truth, he looked like
I’d just slapped him in the face. Hard. “Ah,” he said, letting that hand fall to his
own side.

I took a deep breath, about to explain that while I couldn’t wait to marry him, I’d
been Abby Cooper for so long that I hardly knew how to be anything different. Plus,
professionally it wasn’t a great idea for me to change my name, not with so many clients
now scattered in two separate states. But before I could say any of that, Dutch had
backed away from me, and without another word he turned, picked up his keys, and left
the house.

I was so shocked by his abrupt departure that I just stood there, slack-jawed, for
several seconds. I then moved to the front door, half expecting him to be on the front
steps waiting for me to come after him, but all I saw was his empty space in the driveway
and taillights already winding their way down the street.

With tears in my eyes I went to my phone and called him immediately, only to hear
the sound of ringing coming from the kitchen. Walking there, I found his phone on
the counter next to the barely touched glass of scotch. And then I saw his Kevlar
draped across the back of one of the chairs in the living room and my heart skipped
a beat. “Dammit!” I swore. And I was so angry with myself I didn’t even vow to pay
the swear jar later.

Instead I grabbed his vest and his phone and my own keys and headed out the door as
fast as my hobbly legs would carry me. I drove in the direction Dutch had gone, but
once I hit the top of the sub, I had no idea which way he’d gone. I flipped on my
radar and turned right. I followed my intuition all the way to downtown, but where
he’d gone within the confines of the city I couldn’t figure out. He could’ve checked
his car into any one of the parking garages and gone into any one of the bars on Sixth
Street or Congress Avenue. There had to be at least fifty to choose from.

By this time I was crying like a little girl. I’d hurt Dutch’s feelings and I had
no idea how to make that up to him. He almost never registered such emotion. He almost
always met my angry or thoughtless words with stoic calm. In the nearly four years
I’d been with him, I’d never seen him react that way. And I’d had no idea that taking
his name meant so much to him. But when I thought about it, should it? I mean, wasn’t
that a bit old-fashioned and also wasn’t that a bit presumptuous?

Still, that look he’d given me. That hurt, wounded, rejected look haunted me, and
I kept driving the streets searching and searching for him.

Finally I made it back home, hoping against hope that he’d come back too, but the
driveway was empty and all the lights were still on from when I’d dashed out of the
house.

Carefully I climbed up the steps—I’d left Fast Freddy at home—and as I turned the
key, I heard a phone ringing. Quickly I pushed my way inside, nearly tripping over
Tuttle, who rushed to greet me, and I scooped her up as I grabbed for my phone, which
I’d also stupidly left behind. “Hello? Hello?” I gasped. I hadn’t even looked at the
ID on the screen—I was so anxious to hear from Dutch.

“Abs?”

Dammit. Screw-the-swear-jar take two. “Hey, Candice,” I said, choking back a sob.

“Wanna talk about it?”

I wiped my eyes and slumped down on the couch. “Not really.”

“Okay,” she said. “No worries. Just wanted you to know that I took Dutch’s car keys
away from him the moment he and Brice broke open the scotch.”

I sat forward. “He’s there?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, and not in a way that suggested she was
particularly happy about it. Belatedly I remembered that Candice had told me she had
planned a special date night out with her fiancé to help him relax after so many weeks
of working so hard.