Lethal Outlook: A Psychic Eye Mystery (6 page)

Then I thought of something. “You know, she did say that her
firm
had been retained, Candice. She didn’t say that she specifically had been hired to represent the murderer.” In fact, she’d made sure to let me know that it was her firm that’d taken on the client and because she was the best litigator, the case might be assigned to her.

I told Candice as much, and she said, “That could have been a bit of a smoke screen, Abs.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if I was taking a huge risk by coming to see you and putting my career on the line, I might create a little smoke so that you wouldn’t look into my identity too hard, by telling you that it wasn’t actually my client, but my firm’s.”

“That’d make her pretty crafty,” I replied.

“Or a natural-born attorney,” Candice countered.

She had a point there. “I think we have to assume it could be either scenario,” I said after thinking about it.

Candice nodded and clicked a few keys to navigate her browser to the home page for Turner, Kramer, and Marr, attorneys at law. The photo on the home page was of a very large building, and the side menu selections indicated that these guys did it all, from divorce to personal injury, tax law, and criminal defense.

My eyes bugged. “How many attorneys at this firm?”

“Forty-two,” Candice said with a sigh. “And, unfortunately, only the three male partners list their photos online.”

“So we’re back to square one,” I said.

Candice motioned to the seat opposite her and I sat down holding in a grimace. “Not entirely. I mean, we still have your magical ability to pull all kinds of stuff out of thin air.”

I laughed. “Nice way to butter me up.”

“It’s true,” she insisted. “And as we have nothing but our suspicion that your client from yesterday was here about Kendra Moreno, I think we should go for it.” Candice then placed her iPhone on the desk between us. I knew she’d want to record this. “I’m going to avoid softball questions, if that’s okay with you?”

“Good,” I said, loving that Candice really got how my intuition worked more like a tool than a party trick. “Bring it on, Cassidy.”

“The first question I have is: What happened to Kendra Moreno on the afternoon of September twenty-eighth?”

I closed my eyes and focused on the name Kendra Moreno.
Names normally don’t mean anything to me, but I’d seen her picture on the news, and I’d also picked up that she was dead, so I thought I had a pretty good bead on her energy. “She never saw it coming,” I whispered.

“What’d you say?” Candice asked.

I opened my eyes. “I feel like Kendra knew and trusted her killer.”

“She knew her husband,” Candice said. “Whether she trusted him remains to be seen.”

I focused again on that feeling of betrayal. “I definitely think the killer was a male, and I definitely think he came to her house alone. I get this sense like she might have even been glad to see him, but the moment her back was turned, things got ugly…fast.”

“So she was attacked from behind?” Candice asked.

I nodded. “Yes. I feel like it came as a quick and sudden shock to her that he would be so violent against her.”

Candice’s expression turned pensive.

“What?”

She sighed. “It’s the fact that there was no sign of a struggle that really has me bothered. If he attacked her violently, something should have been out of place, shouldn’t it? Or a fingerprint should have been left behind. I mean, if the killer showed up wearing gloves, Kendra would have sensed something was wrong. And even if he attacked her from behind—with her kid in the house, don’t you think she would have put up a fight?”

I sighed. “Maybe he shoved a gun into her back,” I said. “Maybe he threatened to hurt her son if she so much as flinched.”

Candice’s finger tapped the desktop. “Okay,” she conceded. “That’s a good point. What else you got?”

“I don’t know. Ask me some more questions,” I said, closing my eyes again. I didn’t want to be led by any assumptions; I wanted to pull the answers from the ether.

“You’re positive that Kendra’s dead?” Candice asked.

I sighed sadly. The answer was so clear. “Yes.”

“How did she die?”

I felt a slight pressure over my nose and mouth and I shuddered. That feeling always creeped me out. “She was smothered.”

“Not shot or stabbed?” Candice asked.

I knew why she was asking about the manner of Kendra’s death. If our theory about catching Kendra unawares from behind was correct, then the most obvious way to render someone compliant was by shoving a gun or another kind of weapon into her back. But I felt quite certain that Kendra hadn’t been shot or stabbed—she’d been smothered. I said as much to Candice.

“Well, that complicates things,” Candice said grimly. “If the killer had had a gun or a knife with him when he abducted her, he would have shot or stabbed her to finish her off. Smothering someone takes energy and time.”

“There’s more,” I said feeling another series of impressions against my energy. “I think she was beaten too. Severely beaten.”

“That suggests either rage or a serious psycho.”

I nodded, holding my eyes closed and waiting for Candice’s next question.

“Can you describe the killer?”

This was a much harder thing to extract from the ether. The violent energy of Kendra’s death clouded over a lot of the details, but I was able to tweeze out some clues. “He was tall and athletic,” I said.

“Why do you say athletic?” Candice asked.

I shrugged. I hadn’t thought about it. The answer had just come to me. “Some things you just know,” I said.

“Okay, what else?”

“He feels unassuming in some way,” I told her. “Like, he may present himself as mild mannered to most people, but this guy has a crazy dark side.”

“Do you think he acted alone?”

When she asked that question I got a little stumped. I wanted to say no, mostly because Ms. Smith hadn’t mentioned anything about an accomplice, but I couldn’t ignore that I was sensing some other energy alongside this murderer, and that energy felt distinctly female. I said as much to Candice before trying to tweeze the truth of it out, like working to unravel a tangled knot of string. “There’s some sort of attachment between this man and woman,” I said. “I feel like the woman is the boss; she rules the relationship in some way and he’s all about acting to protect or to please her. I also feel like he has very strong romantic feelings for her, and Kendra’s murder was a result of his acting to protect that romantic relationship.”

I opened my eyes and looked at Candice. She was frowning. “So this female was either an acquaintance or an accomplice?”

I focused again on the energy of this couple, but it was so confusing and muddled that it was hard to make sense of it. “Yes, but I can’t tell which.” Then I tried to approach it from a different angle and I came across something interesting. “You know what, Candice? I feel like Kendra and this woman had some sort of connection and that there may have been some discord between the two. When I look at it from Kendra’s point of view, I can definitely see some anger and maybe even some jealousy there.”

“This woman is an enemy of Kendra’s?” Candice asked.

I shook my head. That didn’t quite fit. “No, it’s more like Kendra was the enemy of this woman. It feels weirdly one-sided.”

“Huh,” my partner said. I knew how she felt. I was stumped too.

I opened my eyes, sat back in the chair, and rubbed my temples. “I know it doesn’t make much sense.”

So often the language of intuition won’t translate well into actual words. Much of it is based on feelings, sensations, moods, and a deep knowing that can be very difficult to put into English. Even when I successfully could put it into words, oftentimes many of the puzzle pieces seemed to be missing and only time would work to reveal them.

“You’re wincing,” Candice said, eyeing me critically again.

“I’ve been sitting for too long. My hips are really bothering me.”

Candice shut off the recorder on her phone and stood up. “Come on, partner. Let’s get you something to eat.”

Once in her car, I directed Candice to a row of food trailers
on South Congress in downtown Austin. To her credit, she didn’t protest. Much.

I figured the lunch spot was the best way to accommodate both our food preferences. Candice liked Thai, and there was an amazing Thai trailer called the Coat and Thai, and I got my meal at the Mighty Cone, which serves all its food in cute paper cones. I ordered the famous chicken sandwich with the deep-fried avocado and their amazing French fries. Candice came to the picnic table area with something that looked like it’d grown out of the vacant lot next door.

I figured between the two of us we’d balance out the food pyramid pretty well.

Candice was a little quiet during lunch, and I figured she was thinking about the case. “You looking for an angle?” I asked. I knew my partner wouldn’t work on the case without at least trying to get hired by someone close to Kendra.

“Yeah,” she said, taking a sip of her iced tea. “I think we should approach the husband first.”

That shocked me. “The
husband
? Are you crazy? What if he’s the one who killed her?” I didn’t know if he’d had anything to do with it, but the guy had lawyered up pretty quick, which indicated that he was nervous about something.

Candice was unfazed by my outburst. “If we approach him and he tells us that he’s not interested in hiring us, it’ll give you a chance to meet him and read his energy. We’ll also have more evidence that he’s trying to avoid any additional scrutiny into his wife’s disappearance.”

“What if he says no because he doesn’t have the money to pay for us?” I asked.

Candice seemed to consider that. “I’ll work up a credit report on him when we get back to the office. If I discover that he’s struggling financially, then we can offer to work the case either at a reduced rate or—if you’re in agreement—pro bono.”

“He could still say no even if he has the money because he’s cheap, you know.”

“He had enough to hire a lawyer,” Candice countered. “And in going to him we can ask about his representation, and pin down if his attorney, Ms. Gagliano, is the same lady who came to your office the other day or if this mysterious Ms. Smith could be someone else at Gagliano’s law firm.”

My eyes bugged and I held up a hand in protest. “Whoa, Candice, you
can’t
mention anything about his attorney to him!”

“Why not?”

“Because when Ms. Smith came to me there was this threatening energy lurking around her. I could tell she came to me at considerable risk, and if we mention her to Moreno and if he did in fact murder his wife, then he might put two and two together and go after her!”

Candice frowned. “Okay, okay,” she conceded. “That’s a good point. I won’t mention anything to him about his legal counsel. If Moreno turns us down on our offer to investigate, we’ll approach Kendra’s parents. They should be able to give us plenty of access to Kendra’s background along with some insight into her husband’s temperament.”

“You’re sure you don’t want to approach her folks first?”

“No. I want to give the husband a chance to show his true
colors. His answer to our proposition is gonna tell us a lot, Sundance. If he stonewalls us, acts suspicious, or turns us down outright, we can go to the parents knowing we should probably keep our focus on their son-in-law.”

“You think Kendra’s parents will hire us?” I asked. I was used to people coming to us for our services. It felt weird going to them.

Candice smiled like I’d said something cute. “Of course they’ll hire us,” she said easily. “I mean, we bring the whole package, right? A PI
and
an FBI psychic? We’re a dream team, Abs.”

I thought she was maybe a little too confident, but I held my tongue. After lunch Candice and I got back into her car and she checked a text on her phone. “Brice wants to know if we’re free to stop by the office and say hello to Director Gaston.”

“Is Dutch there?” I was still nervous about getting yelled at for leaving him with Cat.

“Probably,” she said, already tapping out a response.

I sighed. “I have to face the music sometime.”

Candice gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “That’s my girl.” And we were off.

We arrived at the FBI’s Austin bureau—which isn’t really a normal bureau, but one devoted almost exclusively to solving cold cases—and I entered the building playing up my limp for all it was worth. Dutch could hardly yell at a cripple, right?

“May I have a word with you?” he said the second he saw me. Unfortunately he’d been on his way out at the exact
moment we were on our way in, and the three of us met in the doorway. To thwart any efforts I might make to escape, he firmly latched his hand onto my upper arm.

“Abby took a bit of a tumble this morning,” Candice said quickly, moving protectively to my other side. “She seems to be okay, but she’s been in some pain ever since.”

I held very still, certain I’d give the ruse away if I moved.

Dutch immediately changed his demeanor. Moving his other hand to my shoulder, he stared at me with concern. “Are you okay?”

I bit my lip and managed to get my eyes to water a little. “I think so,” I said in a pained whisper.

“Did you take her to the ER?” Dutch asked Candice.

“There’s a doctor who works in our building,” Candice lied. “He checked her out and said there didn’t appear to be any broken bones, but he wants her to take it easy for a day or so.”

If Dutch hadn’t been watching me closely, I would have given Candice a thumbs-up. “Aw, dollface,” he said to me, letting go of my shoulders to lead me by the hand. “Come on, let’s get you into a chair, okay?”

Dutch moved me into the first chair he saw—which was already occupied by one of his agents, who moved only when my fiancé glared at him. I felt bad. But not bad enough to confess and face the music.

“Where did you fall?” Dutch asked as he carefully eased me into the chair and squatted down in front of me.

“At the office,” I said at the same time that Candice said, “At the coffee shop.”

Dutch’s chin lifted and he eyed us sharply.