Lethal Outlook: A Psychic Eye Mystery (31 page)

“Can’t I just stay here?”

“Nope. I’ll need you when I question him.”

“How do you know he’s even home?”

“We won’t know until we knock on his back door.”

I sighed heavily and got out, but when Candice motioned for me to hop onto her back, I simply turned and began to gimp my way straight over to that fence. She came up next to me and held gently to my elbow as I struggled to pick my feet up enough to make headway without falling face-first into the underbrush. “Of all the…,” I grunted, feeling myself working up a sweat.

“It’s the only way,” Candice said, pulling up on my elbow when my cane got tangled around some grass.

We reached the fence and I had to pause to catch my breath. Also, I was stalling because I had no idea how I’d make it over the top. “I miss Nora,” I said, referring to a dear friend who’d once pitched both Candice and me over a ten-foot-tall fence in Las Vegas. Nora was crazy strong.

Candice grinned. “I miss her too,” she said. “You should invite her and Detective Brosseau to your wedding.”

I gripped the top of the fence and pulled my hips up to sort of hang my torso over it before pulling my bottom half slightly (totally) inelegantly over the top and landing with a bit of a thud on my butt in the backyard of Dr. Snyder. Who was actually home. And on his back porch staring at us like he couldn’t believe two crazy fools like us would walk through that brush and hop the fence into his backyard.

“Morning!” Candice said to him as she too clambered over the fence, albeit a bit more elegantly. (Confession, a water buffalo would have clambered over the fence more elegantly…)

“Can I help you?” he asked in that way that said, “I wonder if I should get my gun.”

I reached up and took Candice’s outstretched hand, glaring hard at her for good measure. “Are you Dr. Snyder?” she asked while helping me up.

He squinted at us. “Yeah?” he said, answering her with a question mark. Candice moved closer to him and he held up his hand. “Hold on,” he said. “Are you two reporters?”

I leaned hard on my cane and walked up to Candice, letting her do all the talking. “No, no!” she assured him. “My name is Candice Fusco and this is my associate, Abigail Cooper.”

“You look like reporters,” he insisted.

Candice dug through her purse and pulled out her PI badge. He frowned and waved us forward. Once he’d inspected it—thoroughly—he said, “This about the missing woman?”

“It is,” Candice said, and she seemed to spot something on the table next to Snyder because she pointed to it and said, “You a Horns fan?”

“Isn’t everybody?” Snyder asked with a crooked smile while he reached for the item that had been blocked from my sight by a laptop. The second he put the orange ball cap with the UT longhorn logo on his head, I understood why Candice had asked.

“Hook ’em horns,” Candice said. “Anyway, since you ask, yes, we’ve been hired by your neighbor Mr. Moreno to try to figure out what happened to his wife, Kendra, and since we know you’re one of the neighbors, we were hoping maybe you saw or heard something out of the ordinary on the day she disappeared.”

Snyder cast her a mocking look. “You mean, did I, the only registered sex offender on this street, see anything unusual the day she disappeared, right?”

Candice didn’t reply; she merely gave one slight nod and waited for him to elaborate.

He sighed. “I was home, working all day,” he said. “I didn’t see nothin’ and I didn’t hear nothin’.”

“What is it that you do exactly?” Candice asked him.

Dr. Snyder seemed to bristle. “I work for WebMD,” he said tersely.

Candice was holding her phone in her hand with the display away from Snyder, but I could see that her recording app was on. I thought she’d comment further, but she didn’t. She just stood there looking at him expectantly.

The intervening silence went on and Snyder seemed to grow impatient. “It’s the same thing I told the police,” he said. “And if they get a warrant to search my house, they’ll see all the e-mails I sent from my home computer on that day, which were a lot.”

“You’ve already checked?” Candice asked him. I knew she was thinking that he was offering up his alibi pretty quick, like he had a reason to have it handy.

“Once you get into the system, you learn to make sure your ass is covered when something bad goes down.”

Well, that was interesting.

“Did you ever speak to Kendra?” I asked, homing in on his energy, which I found shifty and untrustworthy.

“Once or twice,” he said.

“And the day she went missing,” I pressed, “did you speak to her that day?”

Snyder’s lips compressed, and I knew he was close to telling us to go to hell. “Yeah,” he said. “That morning I passed her while I was walking my dog. Colby really likes Ziggy.”

It was then that I noticed the sleeping old Labradoodle lying in the sun on Snyder’s porch.

“When did you learn that Kendra was missing?” Candice asked next. So far my lie detector hadn’t gone off, but that didn’t mean that Snyder was telling us the whole truth; he might have just stuck with those parts that wouldn’t give him away if he was the killer.

Snyder snorted derisively, and I was positive that he was about to tell us off when from the side of his yard the gate opened and in walked a woman in a skimpy negligee. “Yoo-hoo, David!” she called as she turned to close the gate leading directly into the yard to the right of Snyder’s. “I’m here, honey. Oh, I thought that husband of mine was never gonna—”

The rest of the woman’s sentence hung in the air as she finally realized that the good doctor had company on his back porch. Her face flushed the color of beets and she crossed her arms over herself, trying to hide the skimpy negligee. “Oh, Lord!” she cried, and turned back around to the gate, but not before I caught sight of the rather large diamond ring on her left hand. In another second she was back on the other side of the fence and out of our view.

Candice pointed to the house next door. “She part of your alibi too, Dr. Snyder?”

Snyder glared hard at Candice for all he was worth before tugging on the brim of his ball cap, getting up, and whistling to his dog. Without a backward glance, he opened the screen and stepped into his house. “You have ten seconds to get off my property,” he said to us before sliding the glass door closed.

Candice turned to me. “Well, that went well.”

We made it back to the car and discussed Snyder at length. “He’s a doctor with knowledge about drugs,” Candice said, ticking off the list of suspicious things associated with him on her fingers. “He works from home. He wears a ball cap,
and
he’s having an affair with at least one of his neighbors.”

I nodded. “If he was also having an affair with Kendra, and she found out about the next-door neighbor, that could be what I caught in the ether about another woman being involved but indirectly.”

“Exactly,”
Candice said, pointing at me like I’d just put the final nail in Snyder’s coffin. “I like him for the killer. You?”

I wasn’t sure. “Stuff fits,” I said, “but then it doesn’t. I mean, Candice, he’s been in the system before and he had to know that the police were going to look into him at some point. Why risk it? And what could have possibly made him so angry? I mean, everything I got from the energy during Kendra’s murder points to rage. What could she have possibly known that would have set him off so much?”

Candice tapped the steering wheel with her fingers. “It doesn’t all have to fit perfectly, you know, Abby.” I could tell she was starting to grow weary of this case with all these unanswered questions leading to ever more questions.

“See, that’s where you’re wrong,” I told her. “I think it does have to make sense, because if we can’t explain these things, then we may be focusing in on the wrong guy.”

Candice sighed. “Fine. On my list of things to do when I
get a free minute will be to look very carefully into Snyder’s background, and I’ll also check out his neighbor’s wife while I’m at it.”

“Good,” I said, giving her a pat on the arm. “I know there’s something we’re still missing here, and I won’t feel comfortable pointing the finger at anybody until we figure out what that is.”

We were silent the rest of the way to where Jamie worked. I remembered from her reading that Jamie was a hairstylist at a place called the Black Orchid on South Congress Avenue. When we walked in, I self-consciously smoothed out my hair. I was really overdue for a new do. After inquiring with the receptionist, we found out that not only did they take walk-ins, but Jamie would be free in the next hour or so. Candice told the girl that we’d take the one-o’clock slot, and at first I thought Candice was only booking the appointment to justify taking up Jamie’s time, but when she had the receptionist take down my name, I suddenly realized I’d been hoodwinked.

I shot my partner an evil look, and in response she lifted up one of my locks and said, “Oh, please. We’re practically having a hair emergency here.”

She must have felt a little bad, though, because as we were leaving she looped her arm through mine and said, “How about if I let you pick where we’ll have lunch?”

That perked me up. There was a new hot-dog place I wanted to try as I continued my pursuit to find the Texas equivalent of the Detroit-style Coney dog. So far I’d struck out at every hot-dog place I’d tried, but that hadn’t deterred
me from the quest. With only a small sigh Candice agreed and we were soon happily seated at an adorable joint where I ordered the Coney dog, a side of chili fries, and a mambo Coke.

Candice ordered the shrimp salad and an iced tea.

I frowned and adopted a mocking grin. “Eating like that’s gonna kill you.”

Her mouth quirked at the edges. “Talk to me in ten years when you’re being wheeled in for bypass and my heart’s as smart as a fifth grader.”

“Ha, ha!” I said. “Good one.”

We ate our meal and went over the case, mindful of the hour and getting back to the salon in time for my appointment. Mostly we just complained that so many leads didn’t seem to lead us anywhere but round and round in circles. I felt the truth was staring us in the face if only we could arrange all the little bits of information we’d gotten in a way that pointed definitively to Kendra’s killer. It seemed that when we focused on any one of our suspects—Tristan, Russ, Dr. Snyder, Bailey—we could find enough there to suggest that he—or she—had either murdered Kendra or arranged for her murder. There was also the possibility that we hadn’t yet identified the real killer, and that was the one thing that kept niggling away at me. I knew I was missing something obvious—but what? What hadn’t I seen yet that I needed to?

A bit later we arrived back at the salon, and Jamie appeared quite surprised to see us, but not in a bad way. “Can you do something with this?” Candice asked, again lifting up one of my locks until I slapped her hand away.

Jamie giggled and assured both of us that she could work a miracle, and within about ten seconds she and Candice had me wrapped in a smock with my butt in a chair. Jamie moved off to gather some foils and bleach for highlights, and the minute she came back she asked, “How’re you two coming along with the investigation?”

“Not great,” Candice admitted, sitting in the empty seat next to me. “Kendra’s mom is now convinced that Abby and Tristan are having some kind of relationship.”

Jamie paused as she combed out my hair. “You’re kidding!”

Candice filled her in on what’d happened the day before and then casually segued into asking Jamie more about what she’d seen the night of Tristan’s bachelor party. “The reason I ask,” Candice said, “is because we heard you told Kendra that Tristan had cheated.”

Jamie stopped brushing bleach on the section of my hair she was about to wrap in a foil and just stared at Candice. “Who told you that?”

“Tristan,” Candice said, which wasn’t
exactly
a lie, but it sort of wasn’t the truth either.

Jamie shook her head vigorously. “I didn’t!” she said. “And Tristan never knew I’d seen him making out with Bailey! How could he possibly think I’d tell Kendra that?”

“He seemed to think his wife told him you’d confessed to seeing him with Bailey on the night of the bachelor party,” Candice said.

I began to tap my foot nervously. I wished Candice hadn’t chosen to ask Jamie about all this during the highlighting period…or
the cutting period…or the blow-drying period. Then I realized there wasn’t much period left after all that and maybe I should just cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Jamie blinked a few times, and I knew her mind must be a tumble of thoughts. “No one knew I’d seen Tristan and Bailey together except Bailey,” she said. “And I can’t see Bailey telling anybody else who might’ve told Kendra. I mean, Bailey begged me to keep it a secret, and I did. I never told anyone. Well, except you two, but that’s only because Kendra’s missing and all.”

“Do you think Bailey told Kendra?” Candice asked, and I wondered why I hadn’t thought of that.

Jamie’s brow furrowed even more. “Why would Bailey do that?” she said; then she seemed to put the pieces together. Still, she shook her head. “No. If Bailey told Kendra that she’d hooked up with Tristan, then she would have ruined both her friendship with Kendra and any chance she would’ve had with Tristan if he and Kendra split up. He’d never forgive Bailey for telling his wife that they’d hooked up right before the wedding.”

“Did someone else maybe see Tristan and Bailey making out?” I asked.

Jamie shook her head. “Not that I could see. But who knows what happened after I left? Maybe one of the other guys saw them together and let it spill, or told one of their girlfriends and she eventually told Kendra. I don’t really hang with that crowd anymore, so I couldn’t tell you who’s been saying what anymore.”

We all fell silent then for a few seconds before I asked, “Jamie? Did you know that Kendra was having an affair?”

Jamie dropped the bleach brush right on her shoe. “Dammit!” she swore. I could see in the mirror that she was wearing beautiful suede boots, both of which were now splattered with white goop. “I just bought these!” she grumbled, grabbing some paper towels and trying to mop up the mess. “Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” she added when all she managed to do was smear the goop even more into her shoes.