As Candice drove us over to Banes’s house, I kept glancing at the digital clock on the dash. I was nervous about leaving Dutch alone to chase down some weird lead that no one else had time for, and I’d wanted to leave Candice with him, but as my BFF candidly pointed out, no one drives her car but her.
We made it to Banes’s residence in only ten minutes and Candice parked in the drive behind an old Buick. We got out and I looked around the scrubby yard, which smelled like dog urine, and up at the house, which was in need of some major upkeep.
A large pecan tree stretched out over the weedy lawn and feebly lifted its limbs to hover over the house. The wind made the limbs moan and rub against the rusty gutters and I could almost sense the fatigue in the old tree. We walked up the dirty walkway, then the front steps, and the smell of cigarette smoke drifted out to us from inside. I made a face as Candice rang the bell, and together we waited for the door to open.
Several seconds ticked by and Candice rang the bell again. “Who the hell is it?” a gravelly voice croaked.
“Candice Fusco and Abigail Cooper with the FBI, Mr. Banes,” Candice called.
There was a grunt and then we heard heavy footsteps and a high-pitched creaking sound. The door was yanked open with a squeak and there stood a man with a grayish complexion, three-day-old chin stubble, and eyebrows as big as woolly caterpillars. Protruding from his nose were thin plastic tubes that snaked their way down to a green oxygen tank on wheels at his side. That explained the creaking.
Squinting at us from the doorway, he said, “Got some ID?”
I fished around inside my purse, but Candice was more prepared. She flipped her wrist neatly to unfold the leather case she kept her credentials in. Banes leaned forward to study her ID and I caught a terrible whiff of tar and nicotine. The man smelled like an ashtray.
“PI?” he grumbled. “You’re not with the Feds.”
Candice delicately tapped the plastic photo ID just under the one he’d been studying.
He made a face. “FBI consultant. What the hell is this? A joke?”
“No, Mr. Banes,” Candice said in that way that suggested he might want to take her seriously. “We were sent by Special Agent in Charge Brice Harrison, to talk to you about the lead you called in to Agent Rodriguez.”
“Why’d they send you and not the real thing?”
I could sense Candice bristling, but outwardly she kept her cool. “Every available agent is currently working on other leads, sir.”
“What other leads?” he said. Banes seemed to me to be the kind of guy who enjoyed being a pain in the ass.
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
Banes began to close the door. “You tell your buds at the FBI that when they send the real deal, I’ll talk to them about my lead.”
Candice put her foot in the door. “Mr. Banes, I can assure you, the next person from the bureau who comes here to speak with you will not be nearly as pleasant as the two of us.”
I flipped my hair a little. “Or as cute.”
Banes’s eyes cut to me and I gave him my most winning smile.
The guy actually chuckled and eased up on the door. “Since you’re already here,” he muttered, turning to shuffle back into the interior of the home, wheezing and squeaking as he went.
The house was cluttered and smelled…bad. So bad it made me long nostalgically for the fragrance of smelly ashtray coming off just Banes out on the porch. “Have a seat,” our host said, waving to a rickety-looking love seat set at a right angle to an even ricketier-looking sofa.
“We’re good,” Candice said, taking out her iPhone to tap at the screen. “Is it okay if I record this?”
Banes shrugged from his place on the couch. “Makes no difference to me,” he said, right before lighting a cigarette.
I eyed his oxygen tank nervously. Then I scanned his energy. In my mind’s eye I saw an hourglass with the sands just about out of the top chamber—my classic sign for someone who is terminally ill. A month also came to mind. November. He’d be dead in a few weeks.
“What happened to you?” I heard him say, and it took me a minute to realize he was looking directly at me, or more specifically—my cane.
“She was injured in an undercover assignment,” Candice said before I had a chance to reply.
Banes smiled like he thought that was funny. “Playing with the big boys comes at a price, huh, little lady?”
I shrugged. “You should see the other guys.”
Banes’s bushy brows rose, and he chuckled again. “Yeah, yeah. So ask me what you need to ask me so I can get back to my show.”
I swiveled slightly and saw that Banes’s old TV was tuned to Judge Judy. He’d muted it for our benefit.
Candice tapped her phone to begin recording. “Agent Rodriguez said that in your call you stated that you’d been notified that the bombs were going to go off prior to the explosions. Is that correct?”
Banes nodded. “It was on my answering machine. Thought it was some crackpot the first time, but the second time…the second time I knew it was legit.”
Banes was looking at something behind me and I swiveled to my right to see a small table with a nicotine-coated telephone and an ancient answering machine. The red light was blinking on it ominously. “May I?” I asked him, edging over to it.
He waved his cigarette at me. “Knock yourself out.”
I depressed the play button and a robotic voice echoed out from the speaker. “Hello again, Banes. The clock is ticking. You have two hours.”
I felt goose pimples line my arms, but behind me Candice said, “That’s it?”
“Yeah,” Banes said sharply. “What’d you expect? A full confession?”
Candice ignored that and asked, “Is there another message as well?”
“Naw, I erased it.”
“And when did this call come in?” Candice asked, moving over to me to study the answering machine.
Banes gave her a withering look. “Two hours before the bomb at the beauty shop. Man, they don’t hire you consultants for your brains, do they?”
Banes’s withering look intensified. “I doubt that guy’s own mother would recognize his voice.”
Candice pushed the play button and we listened to the recording one more time. She then picked up Banes’s phone—which was one of those older push-button numbers with no digital readout screen. “You don’t have caller ID?” she asked.
“Nope,” Banes said (a bit defensively, I thought).
Candice turned back to him. “Why are you so sure that the caller was alerting you to the bomb?”
Banes rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Are you dense?”
I could feel my fists clench. Old man on oxygen or not, this guy was about to get a thumping if he kept it up.
But Candice could take care of herself. “Oh, come off it, Banes!” she snapped. “You heard the tape. There’s nothing there that definitively ties it to the bomb. So some jerk calls you and leaves a cryptic message about clocks ticking and two hours. You only have one recording, and no caller ID for me to identify if the call actually came in two hours before the blast. Were you even home when the message was recorded? I mean, how do you even know the recording is referring to the bomb?”
“Because I was home!” Banes yelled, then started to cough. We had to wait for him to catch what little breath he had left before he could add, “I didn’t pick it up because nobody but telemarketers ever calls me anymore. But I was here when the call came in, and I heard it record.”
Candice frowned. She didn’t look like she believed him. “What time was that exactly?”
“I already told you!” he hollered. “Two hours before the blast!”
Her frown deepened. “How did you know the blast went off?” she asked.
Banes pointed behind him and to the right, and I realized he had a police scanner on his kitchen countertop. I hadn’t noticed it among the clutter.
Candice sighed heavily, and I could tell she suspected he was putting this whole act on just to make himself relevant again. “I see,” she said.
“No, you don’t,” he grumbled. He could read her pretty well.
She shrugged. “Well, even you’ll have to admit that this”—she paused and pointed to the answering machine—“isn’t much to go on. I mean, all I have is your word, and that’s not worth a whole heck of a lot these days, is it?”
What Banes said next would cost me a quarter to repeat, so suffice it to say that he was not really pleased with her comment.
Candice simply stood there and eyed the old crotchety guy with impatience. “What do you want me to do?” she asked him.
“I’m not lying,” he growled. “Look up my phone records if you don’t believe me! See for yourselves!”
I leaned in and whispered in Candice’s ear. “He’s telling the truth, and I think the tape is legit.”
Candice turned to me with raised brow. “Really?”
I nodded.
She sighed again. I knew she didn’t like Banes, and she’d been hoping the lead wouldn’t pan out so that we could get the hello Dolly out of there. “Okay, Mr. Banes, we’ll take you up on your offer to look into your phone records, but first, let me ask—why you? I mean…did you even know these two girls?”
“What girls?” he asked.
“Taylor Greene and Michelle Padilla. The two girls we suspect as the bombers.”
Banes scoffed. “Girls don’t blow themselves up, Miss Private Investigator FBI Consultant. Boys do that.”
I was starting to hate Dutch for sending us here. This guy was a total pain in the asterisk. But the thing I couldn’t shake was that the recording had given me the serious chills. I knew that whoever had called Banes had something to do with this case. But why the caller had reached out to this crotchety old geezer, I couldn’t fathom.
The police scanner called my attention again. There was something there too.
“In your time on the force, did you ever work a bombing case similar to this one, Mr. Banes?” Candice asked. I gave her big-time brownie points for keeping her cool throughout the interview, ’cause I would’ve socked this guy in the nose long before now.
“No,” he said.
“Anybody you might’ve arrested in the past like to play with explosive devices?”
“Not that I can think of,” Banes said, his attention firmly back on Judge Judy.
Candice moved over to stand right in front of the TV. “Okay, then tell me, why would someone call you to give an alert that a bomb was about to go off in two hours?”
Banes shrugged. “Ain’t that a question for you guys to figure out?”
Candice simply stared at Banes with a look that could’ve frozen an Eskimo’s keister.
Banes rolled his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said gruffly. “If I did, I would’ve told your Agent Rodriguez when I talked to him. I don’t know who that is on the machine, and I don’t know why they called me, okay?”
Candice turned away from Banes and came back over to the answering machine. Pushing the eject button, she took out the tape and held it up. “May I take this to have one of our guys analyze it?”
Banes shrugged like he couldn’t care less. “Suit yourself. But put another tape in, would ya?”
Candice and I looked around the small table and Banes told us we could find one in the drawer. I tugged it open and found several cassettes there. Slotting one in, I closed the lid and we headed out with the promise to be in touch soon.
“Wow,” I said, once we were back outside.
Candice chuckled. “Right?”
“Dutch is lucky I don’t leave him for that charmer.”
“I saw him first,” Candice mocked. We got in the car and my partner added, “So tell me what you picked up in there.”
I blew out a big breath. “What’s to tell? The guy’s a mean old grouch, who won’t see Christmas.”
Candice’s eyes widened. “He’s dying?”
“Of course he’s dying,” I said. “What? Did you miss the sallow complexion, the hacking cough, the wheezing, or the oxygen tank on wheels next to the lit cigarette?”
Candice squinted toward the house. “Oxygen tanks do like to explode around fire….”
“He’s not responsible for the bombs,” I told her quickly. “That much was also clear to me in the ether. Everything he told us was true. He doesn’t know who Michelle or Taylor are, and he doesn’t know why someone would call to alert him to the bombs.”
“It could be tied to his past,” Candice said. “To someone he arrested and who wants a little revenge.”
I shook my head. “So…what? A master criminal forces two young women Banes has never met to strap on a bomb and head to the local mall and a beauty shop? How is that revenge against a crooked cop and an all-around awful human being like Banes?”
Candice rubbed her eyes tiredly. “Don’t know,” she said. “But there has to be a connection. Otherwise, why would this mystery person call Banes in the first place?”
I shook my head again. “I have no idea.”
Candice put the cassette tape in the little well under her dash and started the engine. “Let’s get back to your fiancé and fill him in. I’d feel better if someone could pull Banes’s phone records ASAP.”
I took my phone out of my purse and called Agent Rodriguez. “Hey,” I said when he answered. “It’s Abby. Candice and I just met with Banes. Did you happen to pull his phone records before calling the lead in to Agent Rivers?”
“Not yet,” he said. “Harrison ordered us all out of the office to comb through the Padilla girl’s residence.”
“Are you at the best friend’s house or Michelle’s mom’s?” I asked him.
“The friend’s place.”
“Okay, we’ll meet you over there after we pick up Dutch.”
There was a pause, then, “Agent Rivers is here, Cooper.”
“WHAT?” I shouted. “You put that man on the phone this instant!”
There was another pause (Rodriguez was probably trying to repair his eardrum) before I heard Oscar say, “Agent Rivers! Cooper would like to talk to you, sir.”
Yet another (much longer) pause, then, “Now don’t get excited, sweethot—”
“Don’t you dare tell me not to get excited, Roland H. Rivers!” Next to me, Candice was wincing and leaning all the way over to her left.
“Abigail?” I heard next, and I realized the phone had been passed to Director Gaston.
I was so mad and so startled that I couldn’t really speak. “Sir,” I said after a moment.
“I personally picked Agent Rivers up from Mrs. Padilla’s office. He’s been under my protective watch ever since, and he’s wearing his vest. Are you on your way?”
I cleared my throat. “Yes, sir. We’re en route. We’ll be there in…?” I looked at Candice.
She eyed me with a calm smile. “Tell him fifteen minutes.”
“In fifteen minutes, sir.”
“Now ask him for the address.”
I cut Candice an angry look. I might have to murder someone myself by the end of the day.
We arrived at the house Michelle had shared with her best friend almost exactly fifteen minutes later. As she parked next to another fire hydrant, Candice grinned at me in that “told you so” kind of way. I wondered if it annoyed her as much as it did me when I was right about stuff and grinned like that.
We got out and headed toward the small one-story home, painted bright white with lime green shutters. As we came up the walk, I had to watch my step—it was littered with dead crickets, as was the porch. An iron security door was propped open by a folding chair and inside the house was swarming with agents.
I walked inside and felt a chill travel down my spine. I didn’t like the energy in the house. My attention had been focused on finding Dutch, but as I walked through the entry and felt that chill, I paused to really take in my surroundings.
The first room we entered was a spacious living room, with the kitchen off to the left. To the right was a half bath and next to that was a hallway, which I assumed led to the girls’ rooms.
The place smelled sharply of spices—cloves, ginger, and coriander. I assumed either Michelle or her best friend was a decent cook.
I moved over to the kitchen, separated from the living room by a half wall, and lifted the lid of a large tin set atop the wall. The tin was loaded with small Baggies of various exotic spices. Looking around the kitchen, I saw the sink piled high with dirty dishes and the counters splattered with food stains and crumbs, while a shiny layer of grease coated the stove and the microwave above it. Beside the stove was a garbage can overflowing with trash and I shivered again, barely suppressing the urge to flee the interior.
Instead, I walked behind the half wall and something crunched underfoot. I knew even without looking down that I’d just stepped on a bug, because in the light of the kitchen, I could see that there seemed to be a dead bug in every corner. I shivered anew.
Candice came up next to me. “How do people live like this?” she whispered. Candice was an even bigger neat freak than me, and her mouth was turned down in a frown of disgust. “There’re dead bugs all over the living room carpet too.”
I swallowed hard and turned away from the kitchen. “Well, at least they’ve tried to take care of the problem,” I said, waving my hand at the ones on the counter. “Obviously someone’s been out to take care of the critters.”
“Yeah, but until you clean the place up, the critters will keep coming back.” At that moment I spotted Dutch coming out from the hallway leading to the bedrooms. He wore a similar look of disgust. “Cowboy,” I called.
His head snapped in my direction and he crooked his finger at me. We went over to him and he said, “This place is a shithole.”
I had once woken up to find Dutch’s side of the bed empty and odd sounds coming from the kitchen. When I’d gone to investigate, I’d found him scrubbing a roasting pan that’d been left to soak before we’d headed upstairs for the night. He’d confessed that he’d been unable to sleep knowing the pan was in the sink. It was something his veteran of the navy father had impressed upon him—never leave a kitchen in less than pristine condition.
“I take it the bedrooms are just as bad as out here?”
“Might be worse,” he said. “These girls are pigs.”
“They’re also young and crazy busy,” I reminded him. I didn’t think I’d been the neatest person in my twenties either. Then again, I was certain I hadn’t lived like this.
Dutch nodded, but I think he did so just to move on. “You get anything from in here?” he asked me.
I looked around again, not at the mess but with the eyes of an intuitive. “There’s a bad vibe in here.”
“What kind of bad vibe?”
I shook my head, moving away from him and over to the living room. There was a sliding glass door mostly covered by venetian blinds. Pulling the cord to open the blinds, I hesitated in front of it. Dutch came over to me. “What?” he asked.
I saw that he was wearing gloves and pointed to the handle. “Try that, would you?”
“It’s locked,” he remarked, pointing to the small metal lever, which was in the upright position indicating the door was locked.
“Try it anyway,” I said, my radar buzzing like crazy. Dutch did and he let out a breath when the door opened easily. Bending down to inspect the catch, Dutch called out, “Cox!”
Another agent came over to us, and Dutch pointed to the handle and the lock. “This has been tampered with. Get the techs to fingerprint the whole door.”
Agent Cox nodded and went in search of a fingerprint tech.
I moved away from the door and noticed that Candice was keeping a watchful eye on me. I smiled at her—she always had my back—before moving toward the hallway leading to the bedrooms. I walked slowly and had to move out of the way twice so that agents could get past me. Stopping at the first bedroom, I let my radar extend outward, but I already knew that wasn’t the room to investigate.
I then moved on down the hall to the end, stopping in front of the open door that I knew marked Michelle’s room.
The bedroom was a mess. Clothes were strewn all over, and whether they were clean or dirty was anyone’s guess. The bed was unmade and there was something else, something that gave me the chills. The room had a sense of violence in it. I scrutinized the walls, the ceiling, the closet doors. No blood splatter or marks to indicate that a struggle had gone on here, but I was convinced one had taken place…recently.
I was also pretty sure that Dutch and his team simply looked at this space as a young woman’s messy bedroom, but not me. “Something happened in here,” I said.
“What?” Dutch asked. I’d felt him come along behind me as I navigated my way into Michelle’s room.
“There was a struggle. Michelle lost.”
“Someone attacked her?” Dutch asked. I looked at him over my shoulder. His gaze was roving all up and down the walls.
“Someone took her.”
Dutch put a hand on my shoulder. “You think she’s been kidnapped?”
I nodded.
Dutch scratched his head. “Then she’s not our bomber?”
“No, she’s our bomber,” I said. The dental records would take at least twenty-four hours to be matched with the body in the morgue, but I knew that Michelle was the girl from the beauty shop.
Dutch sighed. “None of this makes sense.”
“Tell me about it.” Turning on my heel to go back out into the living room, I found Cox there with the fingerprint tech and the sliding glass door was now covered in gray powder.
“Anything?” Dutch asked Cox when he joined me there.
Cox shook his head. “The door’s been tampered with, but other than a broken lock, we got nothin’, Agent Rivers.”
Candice was inspecting the handle herself and she had a quizzical look on her face. “Which is pretty strange, don’t you think?” she said. “There should be a few prints. Some from the two girls at the very least.”
My brow rose. “The handle has been wiped clean?”
“The handle and the wall next to the handle,” Candice said, waving her hand at the area beside the door handle, which was just one big black smudge.
“Abby thinks there was a struggle in the bedroom.”
“What kind of a struggle?” Cox and Candice said together.
“The kind that didn’t end well for Michelle,” I told them. “I think she was abducted.”
Dutch rubbed his face. He looked tired and stressed-out. His phone buzzed and he took it out to look at the display. With a groan he showed it to me. My shoulders slumped. I took his phone and answered it for him. “Hey, Cat,” I said, knowing my sister had likely called my own cell a half dozen times before trying Dutch.
“Where are you two?” she demanded.
“I’m fine. You?” I said.
“I didn’t ask how you were,” she snapped, completely missing my sarcasm. “I asked where you were! You guys are twenty minutes late!”
I was tempted to hang up on her. She’d been driving Dutch and me crazy with all this wedding stuff. Cat was our unofficial wedding planner. Unofficial only in our minds, however. My sister was taking the role very officially. “We’re at a crime scene,” I told her. “And we can’t break free.”
“What?” she exclaimed. “Abby! You do know you’re getting married in two weeks, right? I can’t keep rescheduling these appointments!”
“What’re we late for now?” Dutch asked.
“I have no idea.”
“I have the caterer, the cake baker, and the photographer here! You have to come!” Cat shouted. “And where is Candice? She was supposed to be at her final fitting appointment ten minutes ago too!”
I turned to Dutch. “Cat has the—”
“I heard,” Dutch said, waving at me to give him the phone. “We’ll be there in twenty minutes, Cat.”
“You want to leave?” I asked him when he’d hung up. “Now?”
Dutch looked around at his team. “There’s nothing here,” he said. “We’ve searched through everything, and there’s no bomb-making equipment, no incriminating notes, printouts, or books, and there’s nothing on Michelle’s computer except the usual college-girl stuff. I’ll have the techs go over her room to try to find any sign of a struggle, but for now, there’re no leads here, and I could seriously use a break from this.”
I eyed him doubtfully. “Do you think Gaston’s gonna let us go?”
“Go where?” asked a voice behind me.
I jumped a little and turned to see the director standing right behind me. “Dutch and I have an appointment for our wedding to go to, sir.”
“Ah, well, you shouldn’t miss it. Go on, you two, we can handle this.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll keep my phone on,” Dutch promised. “Call if you need us back.”
Gaston nodded and said, “Take the afternoon, Rivers. We’ll handle it from here today.”
Candice led the way out of the house and I was still pretty surprised that the director had let us go so easily. “That was nice of him,” I said as we piled into Candice’s car.
“He knows he’s going to have to give you two up to the wedding soon anyway,” Candice said. “I mean, it’s not like he can ask you to postpone the nuptials.”
Dutch snickered like he thought that was funny. “I’m surprised he hasn’t asked us to do just that.”
Candice laughed. “Me too.”
But I looked out the window, trying to hide my disappointment that the director hadn’t asked. If he had, I knew I’d have taken him up on the offer, and that troubled me more than I could say….
Standing next to his car at the top of the hill, Dutch looked so pale and shaky that M.J. worried he might be ready to faint. Instinctively she moved closer to him and placed a steadying arm under his. “Stay with me,” she told him. “Breathe, okay?”
“How did this happen?” he muttered. And then he lifted his chin and searched M.J.’s face pleadingly. “Can you tell me where she is?”
M.J. bit her lip. She knew what the answer would be, and yet she asked his dead cousin anyway. Chase, she said, can you see where Abby is?
His answer came without pause. “He says he can see her, but he doesn’t know where she is. For the moment he thinks she’s alive.”
Dutch staggered backward to lean heavily against the car. “How much time do we have?” he asked.
M.J. asked, but Chase didn’t know. Dutch then shouted down the hill to someone named Rodriguez, and he came running up to them. “Who’s monitoring Banes’s phones?” he snapped.
Rodriguez blinked. “At the moment, no one, sir.”
Dutch put his hands on Rodriguez’s lapels. “I need you to find out if a call has come in to his line, Rodriguez. Do it. Do it right now!”
The poor FBI agent paled, and held up his phone. “Yes, sir. Right away.”
They waited anxiously while Rodriguez talked on his phone with his back to them. At last he turned around, his expression grave. “A call came in approximately fifty-five minutes ago, sir. It was from an unlisted number. Sounds like it was another one of those disposable cells.”
Dutch closed his eyes and M.J. knew he was battling mightily to keep it together so that he could think. She didn’t know what was going on until Candice said, “That means we have only one hour to find Abby before the bomb goes off.”
Dutch’s eyes flew open. “How the hell do we find her? Jesus, Candice! How do we get to her in time?”
Candice was silent, and M.J. knew she was trying to think quickly, but she’d already been through a lot that afternoon herself.
“This has something to do with the big case Abby wanted me to help you with, right?” M.J. asked them.
Dutch pulled his gaze away from Candice to focus on M.J. “Yes. So far, three other women have been abducted, forced to carry a bomb to a public location, and the bombs were then detonated, either remotely or by the device running out of time. The sick son of a bitch orchestrating this always puts two hours on the clock. And he always calls an ex-cop to warn him that the clock has been activated.”
“Then I think the place to start is at the beginning,” M.J. said. “Tell me everything as quickly as you can. Bring me up to speed and maybe I can use the info to fish out a clue about where Abby is.”
Candice and Dutch exchanged a look before Candice pointed shakily to the blue Mini Cooper at the bottom of the drive. “My valise is in the trunk of Abby’s car. I’ve got copies of everything in it.”
Gilley handed M.J. back her shoes. “You stay,” he said to Candice. “I’ll get it.”
No sooner had Gil taken off to retrieve the files than Dutch began to debrief M.J. He spoke quickly and efficiently, and midway through his speech when Candice was rifling through her valise pulling up files and photos, M.J. suddenly had another spirit enter the picture. Holding up her hand, she said, “Who’s Brody?”
Dutch blinked. “He’s a kid loosely connected to this case.”
M.J. shut her eyes to concentrate. “I don’t know if you guys will know this, but is there an older female connected to him—someone from the other side—with the first initial R? Like Roseanne, or Reanne?”
“Rita,” Candice said.
M.J. opened her eyes and saw that Candice had pulled up a photo of the deceased woman’s driver’s license. “And her middle name was Anne!”
M.J. nodded. “I have to talk to Brody,” she said. “Now!”