I move toward the back deck, but I don’t get far before Officer Andrews says, “Whoa. I don’t think so, Ashwell. You are not going inside that house. I’ve overlooked a lot, but I’m not letting this slide.”
Overlooked what exactly? He watches me like a hawk and calls me out on everything. “I don’t think this place is even locked up,” I say, more to Mitchell than Officer Andrews.
“There’s a dead body in there. I can feel it.” It says a lot that feeling dead bodies is a thing now. That’s not exactly a sense I’d been hoping to expand upon, yet here I am. I sniffed out two dead bodies better than Harry did.
“Do you seriously let her get away with this? All because you’re dating her?” Officer Andrews asks, and that’s about the last straw I can take.
“Unlike you, Mitchell is not an idiot. He doesn’t dismiss a lead, especially one this huge. And whether or not Mitchell and I are dating is no concern of yours. You should spend a little more time worrying about your failing marriage. Keep your pointy nose out of my personal life.”
He steps toward me, but Mitchell places his hand on his chest to stop him. Officer Andrews quickly swats it away. “You never showed me the same curtesy, Ashwell. I don’t owe you anything.”
“Don’t—”
I hold up my hand to stop Mitchell. “He’s right. This one’s on me.” I inhale deeply. “You’re right, Officer. I was out of line when I read you against your will. I understand why you’ve never forgiven me for that despite the times I’ve helped you out. And I’m sorry. I invaded your privacy, and I shouldn’t have. You have my apologies for that.” I stress the last word. “But I will not apologize for following the leads my abilities give me. This is how I work. It’s how I save people. If you have a problem with that, then it’s something you’re going to have to learn to deal with because that’s on you.”
“Seriously, how can you hold such a grudge after all she’s done for you,” Mitchell asks him.
Officer Andrews narrows his eyes at me. “You told him, didn’t you? The one time I actually came to you for help, and you couldn’t keep your mouth shut. You ran off to tell your boyfriend.”
I know Mitchell was trying to help, but he just made things so much worse. “You know what, it doesn’t matter. Nothing I do matters because you’re always going to hate me. You hate what I can do because it makes me a better detective than you’ll ever be.” I whip my arm out in the direction of the sliding glass door. “I know there’s a body in that kitchen, just like I know there’s a body in the yard there. You can continue to resent me for having a gift I never asked for, but if you ignore what I’m saying now, you’re the one who’s going to look like an idiot when the press finds out you discovered one body in the backyard and never thought to search the house.”
“Oh, we are searching that house,” Mitchell says. “The second we find that body, we have an obligation to search that house for clues as to who did this.”
“Wilson McDonald did this,” Officer Andrews says.
“Then why is he dead?” I ask.
“You’re the only one claiming he is.” Officer Andrews crosses his arms, continuing to block my path into the house.
“Brennan, Andrews,” Officer Wallace says, “we’ve got a body.”
Mitchell pushes past Officer Andrews and grabs for the handle on the sliding glass door. Like I thought, it slides right open.
“The murderer couldn’t lock the door behind him,” I tell Officer Andrews. “Just in case you need help piecing this together. Feel free to take notes.” I move around him to follow Mitchell inside.
The body is next to the kitchen island. The pool of blood by the victim’s head indicates he was hit with a blunt object, cracking his skull. I look around, and my eyes land on a frying pan on the stove.
Officer Andrews walks into the house and curses.
“Believe me, I’m just as sorry as you are that I’m right.” I hate finding dead bodies. “This happened recently,” I say.
I’m sure Officer Wallace called the coroner once he found Amelia’s body, so there’s no reason to call this in, too. I walk around the island to the stove. We may need to lift fingerprints off the handle of the frying pan, so I can’t exactly pick it up and read it right now. “I’m pretty sure this was the murder weapon,” I say.
Officer Andrews beats Mitchell to me. “Don’t touch it.”
“I’m not an idiot.” I meet Mitchell’s gaze. “Once it’s analyzed for prints, I’ll need to read it. I can find out exactly who killed this guy.”
“The prints will tell us that,” Officer Andrews says.
“If there are any other than Wilson’s.” The killer we’re dealing with is smart. He wouldn’t be careless enough to touch the frying pan without gloves. Or if he was reacting in a heated moment, he’d at least think to wipe his prints off the handle with the dish towel.
Mitchell bends down to examine the body. “Who do you think this guy is? I mean, Amelia Crane is buried in his backyard, yet he can’t be her killer.”
“First of all, we don’t have a clue who is in that backyard,” Officer Andrews says. “Second, we have every reason to believe that Wilson McDonald did kill whoever it is.”
“I suppose he hit himself over the head, put the frying pan back on the stove, and then walked back over to the island where he collapsed dead on the ground,” I say. “Great theory, Officer.”
“I want her out of here,” he tells Mitchell. “She might be working the Spencer case, but there’s no connection to either of these bodies, so she has no reason to be here.”
“I wholeheartedly disagree,” I say. “It’s all the same killer.”
“You have nothing to prove that. I want you out of here, Ashwell. Now.”
Dad walks into the house and immediately glares at Officer Andrews. “Problem, Andrews?”
“Thomas, you aren’t on the force anymore. You have no seniority over me.”
If I didn’t already love my father as much as humanly possible, I would now as he literally laughs in Officer Andrews’s face.
“Kurt, the day I allow you to kick my daughter off a crime scene is the day it’s my dead body being discovered. And even in that instance, I’d get my ghostly soul up out of my corpse and haunt your sorry ass for the rest of your life. Am I making myself clear?”
Mitchell clears his throat to cover up a laugh. He’s been a bad influence on my father.
Even with Dad and Mitchell sticking up for my right to be here, I have no reason to hang around. I’ve already seen what I need to from this crime scene. What I do want is to read something that belonged to Wilson McDonald before I leave. I step out of the kitchen, letting the men work out this dispute without me. The garage is connected to the kitchen, so I slip in there without anyone noticing I’m gone. A black Lexus is parked in the center of the garage, and that will do just fine for me.
I walk over and place my hand on the door handle.
Wilson opens the car door, cell phone between his face and his shoulder. “I need to cancel my weekly appointment.”
“May I ask the reason?” the woman on the other end of the line asks.
Wilson gets in the driver’s seat, placing his briefcase on the seat beside him, and starts the engine. “My yard doesn’t look any better than it did. It’s been years, and I still have that wonky patch of grass in the back. You guys assured me they’d fix it, but they haven’t and I pay too much to still be dealing with this problem.”
When I open my eyes, Mitchell is standing next to me. I jump and place my hand on my chest. “You scared me.”
“Sorry. I was trying not to disturb your vision. Did you see anything useful?”
“Wilson was talking to the landscaping company he used. He was calling to cancel the service because he wasn’t happy with his backyard.”
“Well, I guess that means he didn’t know about the dead body,” Mitchell says.
“Agreed, but that can’t be all my vision was trying to show me.”
“Okay, then walk me through it. Maybe together we can figure out what you’re missing.” He leans on the front of the car and faces me.
“I didn’t see anything else. He just called them and said he wanted to cancel his service. Maybe I should try to read the car again.”
“Well, that might have to wait. I got a call from Chief Johansen. He wants all of us, you and your dad included, to come to the station. And the call came right after Andrews got off the phone with him.”
“You don’t think he’s really going to try to bring trespassing charges against me, do you?”
“Honestly, I have no idea what this is about.”
“All right. I’ll go grab Dad and see you there then, I guess.”
Mitchell starts to walk away but then turns back to me. “Don’t forget we’re supposed to look like a couple, so try not to roll your eyes at me too much while we’re there.”
I smirk and roll my eyes.
“Good idea. Get it out of your system now.” He smiles and walks back into the kitchen.
I exit through the door on the side of the garage and walk around to Dad’s car. He’s already inside it, waiting for me. “Ready to face the firing squad?” I ask him as I get in and click my seat belt into place.
“Are you kidding me?” Dad starts the engine and winks at me. “I’m not sure Chief Johansen is ready to face the Ashwells.”
Thirty minutes later, I’m back at the Weltunkin PD despite my earlier assertion that I wouldn’t meet with Chief Johansen. Officer Wallace is still at the crime scene with the rest of the CSI team, which means friendly faces are hard to come by. Not even Officer Gilbert is around.
Chief Johansen comes out of his office. “Andrews, you first,” he says.
Officer Andrews walks past Mitchell and me with a smile on his face. Of course, he wants to tell his side of the story first. I’m sure he’ll attempt to discredit anything Mitchell and I will say before we even get in there.
Mitchell and I sit down at his desk as we wait our turn. Dad, on the other hand, is drinking water by the water cooler as if this were any other day. I admire his composure. If only it would rub off on me the way people’s anger tends to.
Fifteen minutes later, Officer Andrews walks out of the chief’s office with a big grin on his face. “Your turn,” he says to Mitchell and me.
“Ashwell,” the chief yells, and Dad starts toward the office. “Just Piper,” the chief adds.
Dad looks like he’s going to storm in there anyway, but I shake my head at him. I’m not about to let the chief think I need my daddy to fight my battles for me.
I walk into the office and sit down as if I don’t have a concern in the world. “Afternoon, Chief.”
“Ashwell, Andrews has informed me that you entered a property on a hunch without a warrant and without trying to contact the owner. Is that true?” His face is void of all emotion.
“Hmm, not exactly. I don’t operate on ‘hunches.’” I make air quotes. “My senses were drawn to that property because I’ve read something of Amelia Crane’s. It was her that I sensed. Being that she’s dead, I figured I should look into that.”
“I see. And what did you do upon arriving at the property?” he asks, still showing zero emotion.
“Well, I figured ringing the doorbell of a possible killer probably wasn’t the smartest idea, so my father called Detective Brennan to inform him of where we were and to request backup. I was drawn to the backyard, and after peeking over the fence, I noticed one area of grass looked healthier than the rest, as if it was being fertilized more. My senses zeroed in on that, so I had my father request Officer Wallace and Harry’s assistance. It was then that Officer Andrews decided it was okay to check out the property. I can only speculate as to what changed his mind since he initially refused to come.”
Chief Johansen leans back in his chair. “By all means, speculate.”
“Okay, I believe Officer Andrews didn’t trust my senses at first, but when Harry was asked to come confirm my suspicion, Officer Andrews decided he should be there to unearth the body in a case that was previously his.”
“It still is his, Ms. Ashwell.”
“Fair enough,” I say.
“Please continue.”
“While I was in the backyard, I sensed another body inside the house. That’s when I realized we weren’t at the killer’s place of residence. We were merely at Amelia’s burial site.”
“What can you tell me about Wilson McDonald?”
It’s clear Chief Johansen has already looked into McDonald and is testing me, which means I need to read a hell of a lot into that one small vision I had. “From what I saw, McDonald was a busy man. His job kept him away from home most of the time, which made it impossible for him to keep up with caring for his yard. Therefore, he hired a landscaper. The problem was that the landscapers couldn’t seem to stop that one area in the backyard from growing more than the rest of the yard. After paying an astronomical fee every week for years, McDonald had enough and called to cancel the service.”
“And how does McDonald tie into the case of Amelia Crane?”
I knew the question was going to come up, and I still don’t have an answer. If Mitchell were in here with me—or Dad for that matter—we could possibly play the game to see what else my senses will reveal. But I’m on my own. Or am I? “Chief, I’d like to demonstrate something to you, but it will require your assistance.”
“Go on.”
“I need you to ask me a series of questions, starting with mundane things and working up to the question you just asked about McDonald and Crane.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“You don’t have to. I just need you to ask me the questions. I promise it will make sense once we’re through.”
He sighs but sits forward and clasps his hands on his desk. “Okay, how old were you when you found out you had psychic abilities?”
I close my eyes. “Twelve.”
“Was it scary working on the Belinda Maxwell case at that age?”
“Yes.”
“Is Brennan a good detective?”
“Yes.”
“Did you do something to make Officer Andrews so angry with you?”
“Yes.”
“How does McDonald factor into the Crane case?”
“He’s seen the killer.”
“Was he working with him?”
“No.”
“Were they friends?”
“No.”
“Is there evidence in McDonald’s house that will lead us to the killer?”
“Yes.”
“Can you find it for me?”
“Yes.”
“Are you really dating Brennan?”
I laugh and open my eyes. “I think we’re finished here.”
The chief cocks his head. “How do you do it?”
“I honestly don’t know, Chief.”
“I have one more question for you, Ms. Ashwell.”
“Shoot.” I’m feeling much more at ease with the chief now that he seems genuinely interested in my abilities.
He stares me right in the eye. “Should I request a transfer for Officer Andrews?”