A Grave Prediction (Psychic Eye Mystery) (20 page)

Now, I know that may sound crazy, but that clairsentient sense of mine wasn’t just whispering it to me—it was practically shouting it. Glancing down at the name of the young man pictured there, I nearly fell out of my chair.

“Trace Edwards,” I whispered. Every hair on my forearms and the back of my neck stood up on end. I remembered the young man I’d seen shining a flashlight into the pit of the excavation site. He’d been too far away for me to have a good look at him, and I hadn’t really thought to project my feelers out to his energy
while he was hunched over the excavation site. I’d been more concerned about not being seen, and then keeping up with him as he led me to his home. If I’d had my wits about me then, I might’ve assessed him intuitively and could’ve seen what I was getting off his image now. That he was a born killer.

But had he had anything to do with Trevor’s murder? One look to the side of the photo hinted at a clue. Photo credit for the image of Trace Edwards was given to none other than Trevor Hodges . . . who, along with being in the chorus and on the baseball team, was also a member of the yearbook staff.

“Son of a bitch,” I said, as if that settled it.

“Sundance?” Candice said. My head whipped up. She was just coming back to the table. “You okay?”

I turned the yearbook toward her and waited for her to get close enough to look at it. “Whoa, who’s the creepy-looking kid?”

“Trace Edwards.”

Candice’s brow rose. “Yikes. I mean, seriously, that glint in his eye. The kid looks like something out of
The Shining
.” Then she glanced at me and added, “You followed
him
home in the dark?”

“Yes, but that’s not the important part; look at who took the picture.”

“Fuck,” she breathed.

“I saw him poking around the excavation site the night the tribesman’s remains were discovered, Candice,” I said. “I think he was scouting out the pit as a dump site for Trevor’s bones.”

Candice took a step back to look at me in shock. “Whoa, you’re thinking that, at the age of thirteen or barely fourteen, Trace killed Trevor?”

I eyed the image of Trace Edwards again. “When I look at him intuitively, I can tell that he’s killed before.”

“Wait, what? He’s killed before?”

“Yes.”

“Killed what?”

“What do you mean, what?”

Candice took that step forward again and pulled out a chair to sit down. “Can you tell if he’s killed a person, or a thing, like an animal?”

“I . . .” For a moment I felt stumped. Candice’s question was really valid. I was absolutely positive that the vibe coming off Trace Edwards was that of a psychopath, but as to whether he’d had anything to do with Trevor Hodges’s murder, or perhaps that of a defenseless animal, I couldn’t be sure until I focused my radar on that specific question.

So I closed my eyes and let whatever image was going to come to give me the answer form in my mind’s eye. What I saw was a grave with the cross, or rather the
T
, at the head of it, and next to it I saw a black backpack with a bone sticking out of it and I had my answer. “Trace did it,” I said. “He carried the bones from the original grave site in his backpack and tossed them into the pit on one of his nightly prowls.”

“You’re positive,” Candice pressed.

“I’m interpreting what I see in the ether,” I said carefully, “but do I know I’m right about that interpretation? Yes. I know I’m right.”

Candice put her elbows on the table and laced her fingers together. “I’m inclined to believe you, but I don’t know that anybody else will if we can’t prove it.”

I shuddered to try to shake the shivers. It almost worked. “He’s taunting the authorities by placing a few of Trevor’s bones in the pit. He wants to see if we’re smart enough to even figure out who they belong to. As to proving that he did it, I don’t know how we’ll be able to do that. No one’s connected him to Trevor’s disappearance so far, and no one has stepped
forward now to say that they saw him throwing the bones into the pit. I think he’s going to get away with it.”

“There has to be a way to link him to the crime,” Candice said. I both liked and appreciated that she didn’t add, “assuming he did it.” She was taking my word for it, and maybe she was one of only two or three people in the world who would in a case like this.

“We saw him walking back to his house last night,” I said. “He was probably checking to see if the bones had been collected.”

“That’d be my guess.”

And then something else occurred to me. The way the graves had first appeared in my mind’s eye: four graves, three of them occupied by young girls and the fourth feeling less defined . . . That all made sense to me now. I knew that my intuition was trying to point me to Trace as the killer of all four. But why he was linked with the robberies I still couldn’t be sure. “Candice,” I said. “I think Trace is the future killer of those three other girls. I think he’s got his sights set on murdering again, especially now that he thinks he’s gotten away with Trevor’s murder, and I think he’ll make a ritual out of their deaths. He’ll bury them next to where he put Trevor’s remains.”

Most psychopathic serial killers develop rituals for their murders. The style in which they kill their victims, how they pose them, where they bury or leave the remains—these can all become ritualized. Something about the pathology makes them gravitate to repeating patterns in a specific sequence, and I didn’t think that Trace was going to deviate from that mold.

Candice wore a deep frown as she considered what I’d just said. “If that’s true, with the fact that nobody’s going to build on the site for at least a few years, he’s got the whole area to play with. It’s cleared land, elevated above the road below and
surrounded by trees on almost all three sides. It’d be easy to dig a grave in the middle of the night, cover it up, and get out of there before anyone sees.”

My shoulders slumped. “I handed him that patch of land on a silver platter.”

“Or,” Candice was quick to say, “you made it easy for us to figure out that the subdivision has a serial killer in the making. Abby, we’ve got to find a way to stop him. Can your radar point to how we do that?”

I started to shake my head but then stopped. My mind’s eye held an image of the video of the bank robbery and refused to let it go. I had the distinct feeling that the way to deal with Trace was to solve the robberies. “He could’ve been involved with the bank robberies,” I said.

Candice’s brow furrowed and she pulled the yearbook close, flipping to the index page and scrolling down with her finger. She then moved to a page toward the front and scanned it before pointing out Trace among a group of other eighth graders. “He’s thin enough and short enough to have been one of the robbers,” she said. “The masks covering the lower half of their faces could’ve hidden his features too.”

“So, who were the others?” I said.

We both looked again at the photo of Trace with a group of students, but it was obvious even in that photo that he was the interloper. The other kids all had their arms slung over one another’s shoulders, and there was an obvious camaraderie between them, and yet Trace stood to the side, looking bored and disdainful. How he’d ended up in the photo of the group was a mystery. My guess was that he’d been passing by when he was stopped and asked by the person taking the picture to stand near the group. At least, to me that’s what the image said
was happening. Trace just didn’t look like he fit in, or wanted to, or like anyone else wanted him to either.

“I can’t see this kid leading three others in a crime spree like this,” Candice said, voicing what I was thinking too. “Plus, Abs, the robberies were sophisticated. The robbers moved with a fair amount of synchronicity. No one missed a step. It was almost like a well-orchestrated dance, and I just don’t see this kid able to pull that off.”

“I agree,” I said, with a sigh. Then I remembered where Candice had just been. “Did you get ahold of Kelsey?”

“I did. She got caught up in something for the Grecco case, and hadn’t had a chance to look into the missing kid named Trevor, so she was very happy that we’ve done some legwork for her. She’s going to walk the info in to Rivera and get back to us as soon as she can.”

My radar pinged and I pointed to her phone. “Three, two, one . . .” Candice’s phone rang.

She started and eyed me keenly. “I love when you do that.”

I bounced my eyebrows and got up from the table, grabbing the yearbooks, as Candice spoke to Kelsey in hushed tones. I then headed toward the exit, not even bothering to see if Candice was following. I knew she was.

When we got to the car, I said, “I need to stop for coffee before we head into the bureau offices, and not at the Starbucks we just left either.”

Candice smirked. “You knew she’d ask us to come in, huh?”

“I did.”

“Okay, but caffeine is probably not a good idea this close to bedtime, Sundance.”

“I’ll get something decaf. It’s not really that I want the coffee. It’s that I want to make a point.”

“What point is that?” she asked as she started the car and I buckled up.

“That I always get my way in the end,” I told her, adding a wicked snicker.

*   *   *

I
 walked into the bureau offices feeling really full of myself, and with my puffed-out chest and giant-sized cup of coffee, pretty much everyone knew it. Perez and Robinson especially knew it—mostly because I made sure to take a BIG slurp of the coffee before sitting down at the conference table.

So what if I burned my tongue? Worth. It.

“Thanks for coming in,” Rivera said to me when we were all seated.

I put a hand on the back of Candice’s chair just to let him know that she was with me on this and no way was he gonna get my cooperation if he chose to ban her from the building again. “I didn’t come in for you, Agent Rivera,” I said. “I came in because Agent Hart asked me politely . . . and I actually
like
her.”

Okay, so maybe I was a bit bitter about the whole being-asked-to-leave thing.

Rivera smiled tightly at me, while Kelsey ducked her chin to hide a smile. “Dr. Catalpa is comparing the jawbone to the X-rays supplied by Trevor’s dentist,” he said.

Candice pulled her chin back. “You got his dental records that fast?”

“Agent Hart called Trevor’s parents. Mrs. Hodges’s brother was Trevor’s dentist. He e-mailed the X-rays to Dr. Catalpa ten minutes after Hart hung up with Mrs. Hodges. The X-ray comparison to the lower jaw removed from the pit shouldn’t take long.”

My radar pinged and I sat up straight and pointed to Rivera. “Is your phone on?”

His brow furrowed. “Yes.”

I grinned. “Three . . . two . . . one . . . ,” I said, then pointed at him. The moment I pointed, his phone chirped and he startled just like Candice had.

Pulling up his phone, he looked at the display, his eyes going wide. He answered with, “Dr. Catalpa. Do you have the results?”

I shifted my gaze to Robinson and Perez, who were doing their level best not to seem surprised. With a smug smile I took another loud slurp of the coffee and smacked my lips. “Mmmmm,” I said, rubbing it in. Candice snickered and they glared.

Rivera was oblivious to our shenanigans; he was too focused on the call. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said, then set his cell down to consider me. “Catalpa is convinced of the identity,” he said. “We’ll do a DNA test on the other bones to make sure they’re from him as well, but it looks like the jawbone is definitely a match to Trevor Hodges.”

“Duh,” I told him. I was being snarky for sure, but I figured he had it coming.

Rivera didn’t seem to like the snark. “Ms. Cooper, I’ve asked you here as a courtesy. . . .”

Hmmm. Seems I’d gotten his dander up. “You asked me here because I delivered for you, Agent Rivera. Even without your requesting it, I still delivered you a win. After all,
you’re
the one who’ll get to take credit for identifying Trevor within hours of discovering his remains—not me. The FBI doesn’t publicly admit that they consult with psychics, now, do they?”

Rivera drummed his fingers on the conference table. I knew I was causing him to be pretty conflicted. He looked very much like he was considering kicking me out again, and that’s exactly
what I wanted. If he was going to ask me to come back and work for him, he’d have to eat a little crow to do it. If not, then screw him. So far, Candice and I were doing pretty well working this case on our own.

As Rivera and I were silently glaring at each other, Agent Hart leaned forward and said, “Sir, if it’s all right by you, I’d like to take up the investigation into how Trevor’s bones ended up at the excavation site.”

Rivera’s gaze slid to Hart. “LAPD will want to loop in on this, Hart. The bones were probably moved there by Trevor’s killer.”

“Understood, sir. And I’d also like to enlist the help of Ms. Cooper and Ms. Fusco. After all, they’ve been instrumental in helping us identify the young man.”

“Aren’t you wrapped up with the Grecco case?” Perez said. I wanted to slap him.

“I am,” she said. “But we’ve collected enough evidence to keep the crime techs busy for a while. I can take a few days off that case to do a preliminary investigation into this one.”

Hart was going out on a limb here, for sure. No way did she really have room in her schedule to work on Trevor’s case, but she was doing it anyway, and it didn’t take a genius to understand that she was doing it to act as a buffer between me and Rivera, Perez, and Robinson. It made me like her all the more, and it also made me ease back on the attitude. “We’d be happy to help,” I said.

“We would,” Candice agreed.

Rivera inhaled deeply and turned to Perez and Robinson, as if to ask them what they thought. “If they want to take it on,” Robinson said, “let them.”

Perez nodded and Rivera turned back to us. “Fine. But this is the only case you work, Cooper. Understood?”

I thought Rivera had a lot of gall, but I kept myself in check.
“Perfectly understood,” I said sweetly. I then got up without being excused, lifted my coffee cup in toast to Agent Hart, and said, “Call me.”

“I will,” she said.