Lethal Outlook: A Psychic Eye Mystery (27 page)

“Yes.”

“Would you also be able to sense the argument I had with my wife at the top of the stairs?”

“If it was a heated argument, then yes.” I could see the hesitation and anxiety forming in his eyes, so I added, “Tristan, if something violent did happen to your wife later that day, and you weren’t the cause of it, I might be able to actually detect the difference between your energy and the perpetrator’s. That would go a long way with us,” I said, pointing back and forth between Candice and me. “Right now we want to believe you, but until I can feel out your home, there’s still some room for doubt as you no doubt can understand.”

Tristan seemed to consider my request for a moment. Finally he got up and said, “Let’s go.”

T
ristan parked his car in the drive behind the house and we pulled up behind him. Out front there was at least one news crew, but they’d let us enter the drive without blocking us or trying to take our picture, which was a relief. Still, we moved into the house quickly to get out from under prying eyes.

After unlocking the back door, Tristan held it open for us and we moved inside, coming into the familiar cozy kitchen. I set my purse down and looked at Tristan, who motioned with a wave of his arm that I was free to go anywhere I wanted. Leaning heavily on my cane, I moved past the kitchen into a hall with a bathroom off to the right and the dining room on the left. I paused at each spot but couldn’t pick up much other than the normal steady energy that fills most houses.

I continued down the hall, hearing Candice’s heels clicking in time with my cane. We moved into the living room,
which was decorated in a light turquoise blue with pale yellow accents.

The living room was nestled off to my right, and to my left were the stairs. Directly opposite the main staircase was the front door, but the door was up two steps from the living room.

I moved to the living room first, holding out my free arm to act as an antenna for any residual energy there. I felt something near the sofa, which was positioned with its back to the front door. Moving to the spot directly behind the couch, I closed my eyes and focused. At the edge of my energy I could feel that something violent had taken place right behind where I stood. I opened my eyes and followed the thread away from the sofa and up the two steps to the front door, and in that eight-foot span between the door and the back of the couch, I knew exactly where Kendra had been attacked.

I glanced over at Candice and found both her and Tristan watching me closely. “She was attacked here and she fell or was pushed down to the floor over there,” I said, pointing to the area behind the sofa.

Tristan’s lips pressed together, and I found it hard to look at him. There appeared to be genuine pain in those eyes.

Turning my back to the door, I extended my arm out again, feeling around the ether, but I found it cumbersome to get a true feel for the little space while holding on to my cane. Setting the walking stick aside, I extended both arms out, closed my eyes, and let the energy settle around me. At first I had to sort through a lot of impressions of badges and
lab coats (police and crime techs) and worked to go back just a teensy bit further.

And then I felt her; I felt Kendra’s energy. I could almost see her right after opening the door to her attacker, then moving away from him down the steps to lead him into the living room. She’d seemed surprised but not unhappy to see her visitor. And then, quite suddenly, there was a terrible, acutely sharp pain that went up and down my spine, and for an instant I couldn’t feel my limbs—my whole body felt paralyzed, which caused me to lose my balance, and that sent me stumbling forward. My legs simply gave out, and I let go a small, frightened squeak as I started to pitch forward down the stairs. My arms were slow to move; in fact, in that second I didn’t feel like I could move them either, and just as my body was about to slam hard into the wood floor, I was grabbed by firm hands and held a mere foot off the ground. “You okay?” Tristan asked, and I realized he’d lunged forward to catch me and was now holding me in his arms.

“I’m…I’m…fine!” I said, a little breathless. I kept thinking about how bad that fall could’ve been. But then I was overcome by a small wave of dizziness. We hadn’t eaten lunch yet, and my blood sugar was dropping fast. “Okay, maybe I don’t feel so good after all,” I said when my forehead broke out in a cold sweat and I started to feel a touch queasy too.

“I’ll get some water,” Candice said from behind Tristan, and her heels clicked quickly out of the room.

Tristan shifted his hold to turn me around toward him
and lift me all the way into his arms. “You look really pale. Maybe you better come sit down.”

I was about to insist that if he’d just hand me my cane I could walk to the sofa but was stopped when we both heard the sound of the front door lock being turned, and a second later it grated as it was pushed opened. Craning my neck to look behind me, I could see Kendra’s mother standing there in stunned surprise, holding a large canvas bag in her hands.

For a split second, no one moved or spoke. We all just stared at each other in shock until Mrs. Woodyard snapped, “What’s going on here?”

Tristan replied tersely, “What’re you doing entering my house without permission, Nancy?”

“I came to get some things for Colby,” she replied, looking at us with obvious suspicion.

Tristan set me down next to the banister, and I smoothed out my clothing and felt my cheeks grow hot. I was embarrassed even though the whole thing was quite innocent.

“What is this?” Mrs. Woodyard demanded, pointing back and forth between Tristan and me.

Her son-in-law didn’t answer her. Instead he stepped forward to block me from her view and said, “Where’s Colby?”

“He’s with his grandfather,” she told him, setting her hands on her hips. “And I demand to know what’s going on here, Tristan! Why did you have another woman in your arms?”

“She fell,” he said, leaning around the door to pick up my cane and hand it to me.

Mrs. Woodyard’s hands came off her hips and she crossed
her arms. “Sure she did. What did you do to my daughter, Tristan?” she asked, her voice cold and mean.

“Nothing, Nancy,” he told her levelly.

Mrs. Woodyard leaned out to stare hard at me, and in her gaze I saw pure hate. “Was it you? Did
you
have something to do with her disappearance?”

I shook my head vigorously. “No! Of course not! I came to your house and tried to offer you my help, remember?”

Those hate-filled eyes narrowed to slits. “Help?” she scoffed. “I think you came into my home with the intent to throw the investigation off track! I think you might’ve had a reason to point the police in a different direction away from the obvious person responsible!”

“Stop it, Nancy!” Tristan commanded, pulling her attention back to him. “Go home, get my son, and bring him back here. The police are finished questioning me for now, and I want Colby to come home.”

But Nancy Woodyard only glared at her son-in-law. “No.”

Tristan’s spine stiffened. “No?”

“I’m keeping him.”

“Like hell you are,” he growled, taking a step toward her, and although his back was to me, I had a feeling the look on his face was angry enough to scare Mrs. Woodyard, because she took a step back and put her hands up defensively.

Tristan stopped his advance. I saw him work to lower his shoulders, and then he said very firmly, “I want Colby back, Nancy. He’s
my
son and you have no right to keep him. If you won’t bring him here, then I’ll come get him.”

Mrs. Woodyard made a noise that sounded like a half
growl, half snarl. “Don’t you dare set foot on my property, Tristan Moreno! I’m calling the police and my lawyer. You’ll get Colby back when hell freezes over!”

With that she turned and pulled the door closed hard behind her.

“What just happened?” I heard behind me. I turned and saw Candice standing there with a glass of ice water and a protein bar.

“Nothing good,” I admitted.

Tristan stood staring at the door for a full half minute. He then turned with a determined look on his face and pulled his phone out of his back pocket. “Would you two excuse me? I have to call my lawyer.”

Candice looked from me to Tristan as if waiting for one of us to explain, but I waved her back toward the kitchen to give Tristan some privacy. “We should go,” I said.

“What happened in there?” she asked me, setting down the water and following me to the door.

“Mrs. Woodyard showed up.”

When I didn’t elaborate, Candice said, “And?”

“I was a little dizzy, and Tristan picked me up to take me over to the couch. Unfortunately at that exact moment Kendra’s mom came through the door and saw us.”

“Uh-oh,” she said, following me closely as I moved with gimpy haste toward the car. I wanted to get out of there because I had a feeling that the longer I stayed, the worse I was going to make things. “What happened then?” Candice asked.

“Thinly veiled accusations and threats from both parties.”

“What kind of threats?” she pressed, clicking the button on her key fob to unlock the Porsche.

“She’s going to try to take custody of Colby; he’s going to go over there and get his son if he has to.”

Candice’s eyebrows rose high on her forehead, but she didn’t say anything else. She and I got into the car, strapped in, and began to exit the drive.

The moment we hit the street, I felt my mouth go dry. Standing in the middle of the road was Mrs. Woodyard, flapping her yap to a reporter as she pointed angrily at the house. Then she spotted us and the finger moved to Candice’s car. I saw a television camera swivel in our direction and I panicked. “Jesus!” Hit it, Candice!”

Candice did, and in the next three seconds we’d sped all the way down the street. “I’m wondering if that just made us look guilty,” Candice said, glancing nervously in her rearview mirror.

“I’m pretty sure we’re already there,” I muttered.

My partner sighed as she turned the corner heading back toward the main road. “Were you able to pick up anything in the house at least, Abs?”

“I was,” I said. “There was a lot of residual energy near the door. That’s what made me go down, actually. It wasn’t my hips as much as it was what happened to Kendra.”

“Was it like what you’d picked up before? That she got hit in the base of her spine?”

“It was exactly that, but thinking back on it, when I stood near the front door, I felt an acute sharp pain, and then my legs simply went numb.”

“So we’re back to the theory that she was stabbed in the back?”

I took a deep breath as I thought about that. It hadn’t felt like a stab wound. I’d been stabbed before (yet another story), and as the knife had entered my flesh I remembered the searing hot feel of it. This hadn’t felt like that—it’d felt sharper, more acute in a way. “I don’t think her killer used a knife,” I said. And then I mentioned something else that had bugged me about our knife-in-the-back theory, even more than the lack of blood at the scene. “The other thing I can’t figure out, Candice, is even if the killer had struck Kendra in the back with something that caused her to become paralyzed, say, from the waist down, she could still have screamed her head off. We know that Russ was outside at the Crawleys’ house right across the street—why didn’t he hear her?”

“He could have been the killer,” Candice said, eyeing me over the rim of her sunglasses.

I rubbed my temples. “Okay, so assuming he wasn’t the killer, and this account from him of a man in a baseball cap entering her home is true—again, why didn’t Russ hear her? Even if the killer struck her unconscious, she should’ve been able to get out at least one cry for help, right?”

Candice seemed to think on that. “What about my earlier theory that she was given some sort of injection with something that paralyzed her completely?”

Something about what Candice had just said rang a bell for me. “Yeah,” I said, nodding, remembering how my whole body had gone numb on the steps in the Morenos’ home. For Kendra to have been taken out like that so quickly—before
she could even scream—something had to have completely incapacitated her, head to toe. “What kind of a drug would that be?” I asked. Were there even drugs that worked that quickly?

Candice shrugged. “Don’t know, Sundance, but I have a doctor friend who’s an anesthesiologist. I’ll call her when I get a free minute and maybe she’ll be able to point me in the right direction.”

We were both quiet for a few seconds, until Candice asked, “Were you able to clear Tristan from the man who attacked Kendra?”

“You mean did I pick up another man’s energy?”

“Yeah.”

I shook my head. “I didn’t have enough time to analyze it,” I told her. “All I know is that whoever was at her door surprised Kendra, but not in a bad way. Her energy felt receptive to whoever came to her door.”

“Would she have been receptive to Tristan after their fight?”

“I don’t know. His account was that she was pushing his buttons—and maybe she was. Maybe she liked this other guy better and was looking for a valid excuse to leave her husband.”