Deadly Forecast: A Psychic Eye Mystery (15 page)

Candice’s jaw fell open and she staggered backward. Turning to Dutch, she gasped,
“Oh, God, Dutch! She’s wearing a
bomb
!”

A
s 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?”

“Do you recognize the voice?”

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?”