Lethal Outlook: A Psychic Eye Mystery (38 page)

If he killed Kendra before dumping the car or after was something I was left to wonder about. My guess was that he’d hauled her to Seely’s, probably hiding her in the garage, where he’d hog-tied and gagged her before heading out to dump her car in the lake. He’d then hurried back to finish her off. The reason I thought this was that he was a sick fecker, he enjoyed torturing women, and he’d mentioned to me that he’d gone back to retrieve his cattle prod from the garage, which was when Seely had seen him.

Donna King’s car was never found, but I suspected that if the area lake levels dropped low enough during a summer drought, it’d show up. The police didn’t really need it anyway. They had Velkune’s cattle prod, which perfectly matched the burn marks on her body.

There was also the testimony of three very pretty girls from small towns along the Texas rodeo circuit from several years back who’d been attacked in their homes by a man with a cattle prod. Their statements all described the same thing—a man in a ball cap had knocked on their doors, claimed that his truck had broken down, and he’d asked to use their phones. The moment their backs were turned, he’d zapped them with a cattle prod. He’d then taken them out to the woods, tied them up, and raped them. None of the poor girls had been murdered, thank God, but all of them remember their rapist as looking remarkably like Velkune. DNA from at least one of the rape kits was sure to be a match, I figured.

All in all the DA had a solid case, thanks to the team of Fusco and Cooper, but did they thank us? No. Some minds are just locked up tight, I guess.

Still, we did discover one ally—the newbie detective Dutch had befriended was fast discovering that I was a pretty good resource, and he made a point to send me flowers and a note of appreciation. I showed the card to Candice, who grinned and said, “I guess we found our reliable source at APD.”

I smiled too. “Yeah, but I’ll miss Purcell.”

Candice laughed. She was looking better and better since her bout with the bad shrimp salad.

Over the course of the next week, things really settled down, which I was very grateful for—except for one tiny thing that blew up quite unexpectedly the following Friday. I received a frantic call from my sister—which I actually took for a change—and at her urging flipped on the news. There
on the screen lit up like a bonfire was the venue for our nuptials—completely ablaze. Cat was actually crying into the phone, and it took me about an hour to calm her down.

Dutch called me too, right after I hung up with Cat. “Did you hear?” he said.

“I’m watching it right now,” I told him.

“It was a grease fire in the kitchen,” he told me. “The old place went up like a dried-out Christmas tree. They were lucky no one was hurt.”

“So I guess we’re back on for an elopement?” I asked hopefully.

Dutch laughed. “I like how your brain works, Edgar.”

My phone beeped and I looked at the display. “That’s Cat, cowboy; she’s pretty upset. Let me call you back.”

I hung up with Dutch and clicked over to Cat. “Great news!” she said, and the switch from distraught to happy was so fast in her that it took me a minute to catch up.

“What?” I asked. “What’s great news?”

“I found another venue!”

I blinked. “How? I only hung up with you ten minutes ago!”

“Money can make things happen fast, Abby,” Cat said. “Anyway, we’ll have to move the date up to October thirty-first—”

“Are you crazy?” I said to her. “I can’t get married on Halloween!”

“Oh, pish!” she scolded. “Abby, it’s just a date on a calendar. We don’t have to have a Halloween theme or anything.”

But Halloween had never been a good day for me. Bad
things always seemed to happen to me at the end of October. “Cat—,” I tried, but her bulldozer was in high gear.

“I have to go,” she said. “I’ve got to call the caterer, the band, the flower shop, the photographer, etcetera, etcetera. Thank God those wedding invitations didn’t go out yet. I’ll have to change the date on those right away to get them out in today’s mail.”

“Cat—,” I tried again, but she’d already hung up.

Well, that confirmed it. I’d felt something very bad was going to happen at my wedding, and the venue burning down and the date being moved to Halloween pretty much counted as “very bad.”

The thing of it is, however, that on that morning in late October, I didn’t even know the half of it yet.

But that’s another story…