I stopped, not because I wanted Dave to help me, but because he’d just said the word “scorpion.” He could have said “rattlesnake” and I’d have been less freaked out. “It was a what?!”
Dave didn’t answer me; he just gently turned me around and peeled my fingers off my injured arm. “Oooo,” he said, wincing a little when he took a look. “He got you good.”
Tears leaked out of my eyes although I tried like heck to fight them. I focused on Dave’s face and waited for him to say something like, “You have five minutes to live. Any last words?”
But instead he simply pulled up a five-gallon bucket, flipped it upside down, and settled me on top of it. “Why aren’t you calling nine-one-one?” I whimpered as I watched him shuffle over to a cooler.
Dave snorted. “Abs, scorpions in Texas aren’t poisonous.”
“How would you know?” I snapped. I can be a real pill when I think I’m about to die from a scorpion sting. (Okay, so I can be a real pill at other times too.)
Dave came back to me and pulled up his shirtsleeve. There were two little purple welts on his forearm. “Got stung here twice a few days ago,” he told me. Then he pulled up his pant leg and pointed to another purple welt. “That one’s about a week old.”
I stared at his wounds in horror. “I’m getting married in less than a month and a half!” I shrieked. “I can’t walk down the aisle with a big old purple welt on my arm!”
Dave lowered the leg of his jeans and stood back to regard me. Then his eyes swiveled ever so slowly to my cane on the floor at my feet. “Seems to me, you got more important things to worry about than some purple dot on your arm, Abs.”
I glared hard at him. “Feck you, Dave.”
He chuckled and returned to the cooler. Pulling out some ice and a leftover sandwich baggie, he came back to me with the improvised ice pack and laid it on my arm. Then he went and got another bucket, brought it over to set down beside mine, took a seat, and lifted the hand of my injured arm to rest on his shoulder. “Gotta keep it elevated,” he told me.
I felt like kicking him.
“That’s the spirit,” he said, reading my expression with another chuckle.
“I’m glad you find this so funny,” I said in a tone as cold as the ice on my arm.
“Well, Abs, if you’d have come out here three months ago like I asked you to, and picked out all your finishes, those scorpions wouldn’t have been all riled up from the construction and you wouldn’t have gotten stung.”
“So this is my fault?” I screeched.
Dave winced. “No,” he said patiently. “Of course not. It’s mine. And the scorpion’s. Feel better?”
If looks could kill, Dave would’ve been pushing up daisies about then, but I held my tongue and turned my eyes to the wall. After about ten minutes, I asked, “How long do we have to sit like this?”
Dave eased my hand off his shoulder and lifted the ice pack from my arm. “No swelling,” he said, examining the little bump on my upper arm. “When you get home take some aspirin. Then ice it again before dinner and once more before you turn in.”
I reached for my cane, noting that my arm still throbbed but not nearly as badly as before. Then I got up and eyed the floor warily. “Is this place really crawling with scorpions?” I asked meekly.
Dave shrugged. “Construction always kicks up a bunch of ’em, Abs. You wait, once we’re done and we get landscaping put in, you won’t notice ’em.”
I leveled my gaze at him. “That’s hardly reassuring.”
Dave shrugged again and added a smile. “Welcome to Texas, darlin’. Now, you ready to pick out which paint and finishings you want?”
“No,” I told him, still eyeing the floor suspiciously. I felt like at any moment one of the little buggers was going come right out and zap me again.
“No? Why not?” Dave asked.
“Because I don’t think I can live here.” Ignoring the perplexed look on Dave’s face, I hobbled out the door without another word.
Several hours later Dutch came home to find me sitting in the dark. “You okay?” he asked when he saw me curled up on the couch with a pooch on either side and an almost totally melted ice pack on my arm.
“We have to move far, far away from here,” I told him, getting right to the point.
Dutch hung there in the door with his keys for a minute. “Should I pack now, or can I sneak in some dinner?”
“I’m serious!”
Dutch closed the door and set his keys in the bowl on the side table. “So am I, Edgar,” he said, moving past me into the kitchen.
I pouted on the couch for a while until I heard the sound of a cork popping free from its bottle. Scooting off the couch, I went in search of sustenance. Dutch was already pouring a second glass when I reached him, and he offered it to me the moment it was half full. I took it moodily and stood there wondering how to tell him I couldn’t possibly live in a house, or a state for that matter, infested with scorpions.
Dutch picked up the other wineglass and clinked his with mine. “How was your day?” he asked (a bit drolly, I thought).
“It sucked.”
He took a sip of wine and regarded me over the rim. “Wanna tell me about it?”
I pushed my shoulder forward to display my arm. “I got stung by a poisonous scorpion!”
Dutch squinted at the small red dot on my arm before taking another sip of wine. “And yet, you’re miraculously still alive.”
And then I knew. “Dave called you, didn’t he?”
Dutch moved over to the pantry and pulled out a small Ziploc bag, which he held underneath the ice maker, waiting until the baggie was mostly full. Once he’d zipped it up, he handed it to me, pointed me toward a chair, and said, “Sit. We’ll talk while I make dinner.”
I gimped over to the table and took up a chair, but I found that I couldn’t drink the wine and do the ice pack at the same time. Your guess which one I administered first.
“I can’t live in a house with scorpions, cowboy.”
Dutch began pulling out pots and pans from the cabinet, moving slowly and methodically, the way he always does in the kitchen. “Dave tells me the work crew has stirred up a few of those,” he said, removing some lamb chops from the fridge before going back for more items.
I shuddered. “He’s got sting marks all over his arms and legs, Dutch! I mean, it’s like there’s an infestation!”
My fiancé didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t believe he wasn’t freaking out over this. I’d been sitting in the living room ever since I’d gotten home just thinking about those creepy crawlies, scuttling all over our floors, through our things, between our sheets (shudder, shudder). “And what about Eggy and Tuttle?” I demanded, wanting him to have some sort of alarmed reaction. “You can’t expect to move them into the new house with those things crawling all over the place!”
Dutch pulled his head up out of the fridge, his arms loaded with veggies for a salad. “They’re easy enough to control, Edgar. You just call an exterminator.”
It was like a lightbulb went off right over my head. “An exterminator?” I asked hopefully.
“Yeah,” he said, unloading the ingredients onto the counter. “Scorpions are a part of living on the west side of Austin, babe. Just about every licensed exterminator knows how to control the little critters.”
I stared at him with big, wide, happy eyes for a minute. “So we don’t have to move out of Texas?”
Dutch tried to hide a grin by taking a sip of his wine. “Nope.”
“You’ll really call an exterminator?”
At that, Dutch set his wineglass back on the counter and folded his arms over his chest. “Nope.”
I shook my head a little. “Wait…what? Why not?”
Dutch pointed at me. “Because you’re on house duty, sweethot. Not me. I’m on wedding duty. Remember?”
My shoulders slumped. “Crap on a cracker,” I muttered, because I hadn’t remembered. And if I called the exterminator, t
hat’d mean I’d have to go out to the house to let him in while he did his thing, which meant that I’d have no choice but to return to the scene of the sting. “You sure you don’t want to do this one teeeeeensy favor for me, sweetie?” I asked, batting my lashes at Dutch.
He laughed. But it wasn’t a nice laugh. It had an edge to it. “Do you know what your sister is making me do?” he asked.
Uh-oh. I realized I’d maybe just opened up the box labeled “Pandora.”
“What?”
“She’s having me meet with a dance instructor. A dance instructor!”
My eyes bugged. “Why?” was all I thought to ask.
Dutch downed the remains of his glass before reaching for the bottle again and pouring himself an extra-generous second glass. “Because she thinks it might be fun to choreograph our trip down the aisle with a little dance number. Or she’s thinking maybe the whole wedding party can do a little ‘Thriller’ before we cut the cake. Or she thinks it could be a boatload of laughs for the guests to learn the hustle. But one way or another, your sister is determined to bring a little Broadway to our wedding.”
For several seconds Dutch and I did nothing but stare at each other. “You’re right,” I finally told him. “I should call the exterminator.”
Dutch lifted his glass to me. “While you’re at it, see if you can find one who deals with pesky felines.”
The next morning I was out of the house early. It had less to do with ducking Cat (whom, my radar suggested, was on her way over with a cache of dance CDs and choreography suggestions) and more to do with the fact that the case with Kendra Moreno had been niggling away at me. I felt an uneasy sense of urgency that I couldn’t quite pinpoint, but I knew that I was running out of time to figure out what’d happened to her, and if Candice and I didn’t solve her case quickly, something else was going to happen. Something bad.
Candice wasn’t in when I got to the office, and that could’ve had to do with the early hour. I’d made it to the office before seven a.m.
I thought about calling my partner and asking her to come in for a little powwow, but then thought better of it, and instead, I made the trip back downstairs for a tall cup of joe before heading back to my desk to sit down with a large legal pad and a bit of determination.
There was a technique that I’d used before that I wanted to try with this case. I began by making a large circle in the middle of the legal pad and writing a question in the center: What happened to Kendra Moreno?
From there I drew a series of lines coming off the circle, so it looked a bit like a spider.
I sat there staring at the circle and the lines for a minute, drumming my fingers and sipping my coffee, and then, slowly at first, little facts started coming to me from out of the ether.
Kidnapped, I wrote on one line. Murdered, I wrote along another. Well, that much I’d already assumed.
I closed my eyes and focused on the impressions coming into my mind’s eye. They felt disorderly and disconnected, but soon I began to jot down other words.
I had a sense of feeling closed in—claustrophobic—and I jotted that word on another line. Then I felt I couldn’t breathe, like the air about my nose and mouth had been shut off—and I wrote down the word Smothered.
Other things circulated in the energy around Kendra’s murder. I felt strongly that at one point her hands were tied. I knew that at some other point she’d also been beaten, but what I felt when I tripped over that clue in the ether again was that she’d also been raped.
You bastard, I thought as I penciled that in with disgust.
After I felt I had the sequence of what had happened to her in her final moments, I backed up a bit, trying to understand how Kendra had allowed herself to be taken from her home without any sign of a struggle.
As I pondered that, I felt a very sharp and incredibly quick pain in my lower back. It was so sudden and unexpected that I actually hissed and put a hand on my spine—but in an instant it was gone.
Had she been stabbed? I wondered.
The phantom pain I’d felt was at the center of my lower back, and as I analyzed exactly what I’d felt, I also experienced a slight numbing sensation in my legs.
If Kendra had been stabbed in the lower back, then it could have impacted her spinal cord, and she’d be completely vulnerable.
“But where was the blood?” I said aloud. If she’d been stabbed, surely there would have been some trace evidence of her wound found at the scene.
I settled for creating a line that read, Possible stabbing in lower back—spine injured to incapacitate, and moved on.
Who was responsible? I asked next.
As I pondered that question, I silently cursed the fact that I’m one of those psychics who does not easily sense names. It’s very rare for me to pull a name out of the ether, as it’s simply not one of my strong suits, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t try to pinpoint a suspect.
Again I had this sense of a man whom Kendra was very familiar with; someone she knew and trusted had betrayed her in the most horrendous way. Firmly attached to this man was a female who had something to do with Kendra’s murder. The woman felt familiar to Kendra, and I could detect the animosity there, but what perplexed me was how one-sided the animosity was. All the hostility came from Kendra.
I rejected the notion at first, believing I’d misinterpreted the energy, but it replayed like a broken record over and over again and I couldn’t make sense of it.
Even more frustrating, it felt like the key to solving the case, and the clues would line up perfectly if only I could figure out the identity of this woman and what her connection to Kendra was.
I also wanted to focus on what had become of Kendra’s remains, so that’s where I targeted my radar next. I had the briefest whiff of a very earthy smell—dirt, to be exact—and I quickly drew another line and wrote, Kendra’s remains have been buried.
I refocused on that thread again, trying to get a feel for a location, and what I pulled from the ether was that she was in a shallow grave, somewhere in the woods, and on top of all that I caught another unusual smell—like wet dog.
After thinking about it for a little while, I concluded that Kendra’s remains would likely be found by someone’s pet at some point in the near future.
I wrote that all out on a few more lines, then sat back with a sigh.
The bell above the front door to the office gave a jingle. “Abs?” I heard Candice call.
“Morning!” I replied, wondering how she knew I was here; then I remembered that Candice usually parked next to me in the parking garage and she likely had seen my car.
A moment later my partner poked her head in. “You’re in early.”
I pushed my spiderweb across the desk as she came in and took a seat in front of the desk. “I’ve been working on the case.”
Candice lifted my diagram and with her finger traced the lines I’d created. After a moment she lifted her gaze to me. “She was raped?”
I nodded soberly. “Beaten and raped before being smothered.”
Candice was silent for a moment. “That’s a whole lotta rage, Sundance.”
“I know. We’re dealing with a sick motherfecker.”
A corner of Candice’s mouth quirked. “Dutch lets you get away with ‘fecker’?”
“He’s learned to pick his battles.”
“Uh-huh, and how much is in the swear jar these days?”
“About three hundred,” I told her. What I didn’t tell her was that I probably owed the jar at least double that.
Candice’s knowing smile was just a wee bit smug for my taste, but I decided to pick my own battles too and focused back on the diagram by tapping the paper in Candice’s hand. “There are parts here that make no sense to me, and I can’t find an interpretation of the little factoids I’m able to pull out of the ether that would make them line up and help us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, this female that Kendra had some animosity toward?
??in a way, she feels responsible for Kendra’s murder, but I can’t figure out what Kendra did to spark the wrath of this duo.”
“Do you think it had anything to do with her Web business?” Candice wondered.
I was silent while I considered that, trying to find the connection in the ether, but the answer eluded me. The best that I could do was say, “If it did have anything to do with the Bucket List, it was indirect.” And then, the moment those words came out of my mouth, the answer was there, very clearly in my mind. “It had to do with a secret,” I whispered.
“A what?”
I cleared my throat and spoke louder. “Kendra was keeping a secret, and I think she may have threatened to go public with it. That’s what triggered her murder.”
“What was the secret?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea.”
Candice set the diagram down on the desktop and tapped her lip thoughtfully. “So we’ll need to keep prying into her personal life to come up with whatever it was that Kendra knew that someone else wanted to keep quiet.” After another small stretch of silence between us, she pointed to my line about where Kendra’s remains were and said, “She was buried in a shallow grave?”
I nodded. “Somewhere out in the woods.”
“What’s this mean?” Candice asked, pointing to the line labeled, “Wet Dog.”
I explained that I thought Kendra’s remains would be found in the not-too-distant future by someone’s dog. “Maybe a hiker will take his dog for a walk in the woods or something, and they’ll stumble upon her remains.”
“How soon are we talking?”
I shrugged. “Few weeks maybe?”
“That’s too long to wait,” Candice said softly while she studied my diagram again. “Here’s a question for you, Abs: Where’s her car?”
I rubbed my temples. I was starting to get a headache from focusing so long on Kendra. “Not near her,” I said, “and ask me more details about it later because my head’s starting to pound.”
“No sweat,” Candice said, but there was something bugging her, I could tell.
“What?”
Candice hesitated before she said, “Why would the killer separate Kendra from her car? I mean, he could have just as easily driven her car out into the woods and dumped both of them together. Digging a grave for her then dumping the car somewhere else seems like an awful lot of work, so why go to the trouble?”