“Ah,” I said. “Okay, so this is your ticket into the case.”
“Yes,” Dutch said. “But we’ll have to tread very carefully. We can’t interfere in the APD investigation, and if we find Dave or get a lead on where he might be, we’ll need to share that immediately with their team. For now, though, we can continue to use our resources to look into the murder of Andy Roswell.”
“Isn’t that still a conflict of interest?” Candice asked. “What I’m saying is that Andy was your client, right?”
“He was, which is also our ticket in. Andy knew that Brice and I were FBI. We disclose that to all our clients right up front just in case they happen to place certain illegal substances inside their panic rooms before we’re completely off premises.”
“Like cocaine,” Brice said with a snort.
“Ohmigod, you had a client that had coke in his panic room?” I said.
“We did,” Dutch said, shaking his head and smirking. “Luckily, Dave saw it first and ushered Brice and me out of there, but that was a close call. We almost had to arrest the dumb bastard.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked.
“Too much paperwork,” Brice said with a roll of his eyes. “Plus, the guy we’re talking about is a major putz. He’s not smart enough to be a dealer. Dave said he saw less than an ounce out in plain sight. That’s enough to get him arrested, but not enough to be worth the effort.”
“So, back to how you two telling Andy you guys were FBI is relevant,” Candice said.
“We could make the case that Andy had suggested he had updated information about the Chinese espionage incident that he wanted to pass along to us right before he was murdered, and now our business partner is missing,” Brice said. “We can investigate Andy’s murder in an effort to prove there’s a connection between the information Andy wanted to pass along and the disappearance of our trusted business partner, who appears to us to have witnessed Andy’s murder.”
“But none of that first part’s true,” I said.
“Yes, but Internal Affairs and APD don’t know that,” Brice said with a bounce to his eyebrows.
“Gaston was the one who came up with that angle,” Dutch said.
“Wow,” I said. “Go, Gaston.”
“It’s still tricky,” Dutch warned. “Dave’s bloody handprint at the scene and the path his truck took on that video make his involvement questionable. We’ll be riding the hairy edge of the line on this one.”
“Which is why we’re so glad you two have volunteered to take point on the investigation,” Brice said to us.
“Yay,” I said flatly to Candice. “We win again.”
Brice wadded up his napkin and threw it on the empty pizza box. “Yes, you do,” he agreed. “Which reminds me, did you two get anywhere with the crew?”
Candice sighed. “No. And we called everyone. I spoke to all of Dave’s friends, his sister, a couple of his cousins, his mom, and an aunt in Phoenix. No one’s heard from him. Abby talked to all the construction crew, and she didn’t get anywhere either.”
Dutch tossed his napkin on the box too. “If Dave went into hiding, he’s hid good.”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t add up. Dutch, we know this guy. Unless your wild theory about some sort of espionage act is true, and Dave is some kind of super sleeper spy, I can’t imagine how he could’ve hidden his true self from us so successfully all these years to then suddenly turn into a killer. I mean, it just doesn’t make sense!”
“People can hide their true motives for years, Cooper,” Brice said. “Everyone in this room has seen that firsthand. Over and over, in fact.”
“Yeah, yeah, but not Dave, Brice. I mean, this took planning, right? And if it took planning, then at some point on this collision course with the Roswells, he’d have to divorce himself from his fake personality, but he didn’t do that. He stayed in character until shortly before he showed up at the Roswells’.”
“How do you know that?” Dutch asked.
“Yesterday morning as he was headed off to his first appointment, he called Alejandro and asked him to repair some drywall, and then he told him a joke.”
Brice elbowed Dutch. “That guy and his jokes. Was it the one about the bullfrog?”
“No,” I said. “This one was about the crocodile and the cow.” They both cocked their heads at me, so I told the joke and everyone laughed, but we all quickly sobered. “It just doesn’t make sense,” I said again.
“Is there anything in the ether that can point us in a direction?” Dutch asked.
“Nothing I can tease out yet, and believe me, I’ve tried. The energy around Dave is urgent, but there isn’t much to go on specifically. I can tell he’s been involved in an act of violence, but it’s almost like there’s too much noise and I can’t pull out any individual sounds.”
Brice squinted at me. “And here I thought I was getting pretty good at deciphering your psychic speech. Do you mean he’s in a noisy place?”
I mocked him by rolling my eyes. Translating into English what goes on in my intuitive brain can have its challenges. Mostly my intuition speaks in pictures, physical feelings, emotions, and other, far more intangible ways. It’s like telling someone that something feels purple rather than describing it simply as, “looks purple.” How do you explain to someone that a color has a feeling beyond what it simply looks like?
“It’s like this, Brice,” I said, closing my eyes as I spoke. “When I focus on Dave, his energy is very swirly and chaotic. That’s not normal for him. Normally, his energy hums very steadily, like a gently flowing creek. But right now his energy is more like white-water rapids. When I look at him in his normal state, pulling a detail out of the ether about him would be as simple as peering into that creek, spying an interestingly shaped rock, and lifting it easily out of the water. But if I go looking for something like an interestingly shaped rock now, all I can see is the white water of the rapids. It’s too noisy and chaotic.”
“Ah,” Brice said, nodding his head. “I get it. So, will his energy calm down?”
“God, I hope so,” I said. “Otherwise, I’m not sure how much help I can be in tracking him.”
“What about you guys?” Candice said. “Did you two have any luck through your channels?”
“No,” Brice said. “We didn’t finish updating the chief over at APD about the espionage angle and our need to pursue our own investigation into Andy Roswell’s murder and Dave’s disappearance until almost six, and he was unwilling to share any details with us about where they stand, probably because he thinks our case is bullshit and he doesn’t trust us to stay out of the way.
“The truth, though, is that I’m not sure where else we can look,” Brice said, his expression frustrated and tired.
“We’re kind of out of ideas too,” Candice said grimly.
In the silence that followed, I knew we were all trying to think of what stone we’d left unturned to locate Dave, but nobody suggested something that hadn’t already been thought of.
At last Dutch stood and said, “It’s late. We should let you two get some sleep.”
I took Dutch’s hand when he offered it to help me up from the couch, and after saying good night to our dear friends, we left.
On the ride home Dutch said, “What’s on tap for you tomorrow?”
I knew he was asking about how much free time I had to help with the search, and if we’d had any solid leads to track down, I would’ve gladly given up my other work commitments and devoted the whole day to finding Dave, but not knowing where else to look, I decided to get on with my day as planned. “I’ve got clients all morning and early afternoon, but I should free up around three-ish.”
“How many on tap for tomorrow?”
“Six, no, wait . . . seven. I’ve got someone who’s doing a makeup session because I had to reschedule them from last week when I had that
killer sinus headache.”
“That’s a lot of clients, Edgar, especially after the long day you’ve had.”
Dutch’s concern for me was sweet. “Gotta bring home the bacon so you can fry it up in a pan, my man.”
He grinned and we fell into comfortable silence for a bit. Then he said, “Your honest opinion—you’re sure Dave didn’t murder those four people?”
“My gut says no, honey.”
He sighed. “Okay, then. That’s good enough for me. Dave’s innocent and in serious trouble. I’ll put my whole team on tracking him down tomorrow.”
“I thought you were going to tread lightly on this.” Putting all the agents at his bureau on the case was definitely not treading lightly.
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“But isn’t that going to get sticky for you, politically?”
“It’s already politically sticky for us, dollface.”
“So why take even more risk?”
“Because Dave isn’t just my business partner. He’s one of my best friends. And he’s in trouble, he needs me, and that means that I’ll gladly risk my job to find him and make sure he’s safe.”
I leaned my head against Dutch’s shoulder. “Sometimes, I’m so happy to be married to you.”
“Sometimes?”
“Yeah. Times like right now. And when you make your beef brisket.”
“I do make a mean beef brisket.”
“And those times when you step out of the shower and you smell so good and you’re all steamy and stuff.”
“Steamy and stuff?”
“Yeah,” I said with a yawn. “You’re like that McSteamy dude from Grey’s Anatomy, but I’m way more attracted to you.”
“But only because I make a mean beef brisket, right?”
I pointed to him. “Bingo.”
And that, my friends, is what I truly, truly love about Dutch. He just gets me.
Chapter Eight
There are days I really like being a professional psychic.
And days I really don’t. The next day went down as a check mark in the “don’t” box.
I couldn’t even blame my clients—normally I might find them all perfectly lovely people, coming to me for advice, but in light of the events of the previous day, all I could think of was how petty their problems were. And my last client perhaps exacerbated that feeling.
“Sorry to be so brief, Dana,” I said to the client across from me, after talking for only twelve minutes about the things I saw coming up for her in the next year. In my opinion, the woman had a very neat and orderly life: She was a stay-at-home mom of three grown children and a fourth still in high school. She was in terrific health, and had a devoted husband, good friends, a very secure financial future due to the retirement plan she and her husband had carefully built, with nothing much else to worry about.
Like, seriously, I couldn’t even understand why she’d come to me.
“I’ll turn it over to you for any remaining questions,” I said at the twelve-minute mark, hoping that I’d missed something big that I could talk at length about.
“My daughter, a junior, is dating a senior,” she said, as if that were something that should alarm me.
“Okay. And you have a question about their relationship?”
She leaned forward. “Yes. They just seem . . . so into each other.”
“Are you worried about them taking things too far?” I asked the question carefully, thinking, Please don’t ask me if they’re having sex, because I will have to tell you the truth, and it will freak you out.
“No, my daughter is on birth control, and she’s already told me they’ve been intimate.”
Wow, I thought. She’d seemed so accepting of that. It would’ve never entered my mind to tell my mother that I was having sex with my boyfriend. Of course, my mother wasn’t exactly loving and understanding like June Cleaver. She was more like June-wielding-a-cleaver, but I digress. “I see,” I said, focusing again on Dana’s energy and searching for the essence of her daughter.
This is the part where maybe I should explain how we psychic types look at other people’s energy. If I want to look at the significant other of a client, I use the client as a starting point, and sort of bounce off her energy to land on her SO. Think of it like on Facebook you can look at a person’s friends by first looking up that person’s profile. So, I sort of started with Dana’s “profile” and went searching for “daughter energy.” I detected three daughter figures for her, and trailed down the energy path until I “landed” on the youngest.
From there I felt out the energy of a bright, energetic, sweet soul. I kept seeing Snow White in my mind’s eye, you know, that image of her surrounded by the forest’s creatures as she sings to a little birdie. “Your daughter has a real love of animals, right?” I said.
“She does!” Dana said. “She’s always bringing home some injured squirrel or stray cat.”
“It’ll continue to be a passion for her,” I said. “She’s really, really smart, but you wouldn’t necessarily figure that out from looking at her, because I can also see that she’s quite beautiful.”
Dana beamed. “She’s been doing some modeling,” she said. “Just local stuff, but we’ve got a very prestigious talent agent who’s super interested in her. He wants her to go to New York and do a couple of shoots. He says Payton has a great look, and she does. I mean, in all the photos she looks twenty-four, not seventeen.”
“Yeah,” I said, making a face. “The problem is that your daughter isn’t that into the modeling gig. Maybe delay the New York trip.”
“She hasn’t said that to me.” Dana’s voice took a defensive tone.
“I understand,” I said lightly. “But the world of modeling can be really seedy, and not great for building self-esteem.”
“My daughter is very confident.”
But my radar said otherwise. “Has she been dropping weight lately?”
Dana shrugged. “Payton watches her diet. The agencies want the girls on the skinny side.”
Jesus. How clueless was this woman? “Okay, so, Dana, I’m gonna give it to you straight: Pushing your daughter into a career as a model is only going to make her miserable, and possibly give her an eating disorder. It’s my intuitive opinion that this is a path that’s unhealthy for her. She doesn’t want to be a model. Sure, it’s cool that she’s sought after by some bigwig modeling agency, but your daughter doesn’t dream of becoming a supermodel. She dreams of becoming a veterinarian, and in the meantime all she wants to do is study hard, get good grades, hang out with her boyfriend, and not have all this pressure on her shoulders to appear older and more sophisticated than she is. You said it yourself—she’s not twenty-four; she’s seventeen. So let her be seventeen.”
Dana was clearly unhappy with my answer. “I think it’s good for her,” she said. “If she’d just dump the boyfriend and agree to let me take her to New York, she could have an exciting life of travel and experiences before she goes off to college. And the money she makes modeling would help pay for her college.”
That last line was bullshit, because I’d already had a clear vision of Dana’s finances. They were solid. She could afford to send her daughter to any college she got into and barely feel the hit.
But as I looked into the ether a little more, I suddenly saw what was really going on here. Dana was bored. Dana wanted to travel and have a life of exciting experiences. Dana loved having a beautiful daughter to show off, because it gave her importance. And Payton’s boyfriend was probably taking up all of Payton’s free time, which meant that Dana didn’t get to show off her daughter nearly as much as she used to.
“Dana, I’m going to tell you something and I want you to hear me in this: Payton is a different kind of person than your other daughters. She’s a different kind of person than you, even. She’s not the extrovert the re
st of your family appears to be; she’s the opposite. She’s an introvert who needs quiet, and rest, and think time, and recharge time, and the company of someone who understands that . . . like her boyfriend. She doesn’t need to go to a noisy city and be rushed from photo shoot to photo shoot and paraded around in too much makeup and too little clothing. She needs a normal, non-exciting life and she needs to be able to pick her own path.
“I know that you know that, but the thing is, right now your need is so much greater. You need something to focus on. Some excitement in your life. Something to do. You need to become active in a cause that you feel passionately about. You need to meet new people, and travel, and do things that fill you up. And you need to leave your daughter’s relationship with her boyfriend alone, because I can clearly see that you’re attempting to sabotage it every chance you get.”
Dana’s mouth had fallen open midway through my speech. Her cheeks flushed and there was barely restrained anger in her eyes. “I’m fine,” she said.
“No, honey, you’re not,” I told her. “You’re in desperate need of something to do.” I sighed then, because, even after saying that to her, I saw little change in the ether. She was going to hold on to her dream of living vicariously through her daughter until it ruined their relationship, and I knew that’s exactly what would happen, because a year ahead I saw Payton moving to Toronto for school, and not coming home so much. You couldn’t get a whole lot farther away from Texas than Canada.
Still, I’d maybe pushed it as far as I dared with Dana. She wasn’t willing to listen to me anyway, and some people you just have to learn when to let go and move on. So I asked her for another question, but every single one of her remaining questions had something to do with her daughter. I finally ended the session a few minutes early, and wasn’t sorry for it. I’d probably never see Dana again, which was a shame, because if she’d been willing to listen, I could’ve helped her find out how amazing she could be.
After she left, I went to my desk and dug out a Kind bar. I ate it angrily. Then I wandered out of my office into the hallway that connected my office to Candice’s. She was there at her desk, tapping away on her computer.