The Fortune Teller (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 5) (9 page)

“Violet Allen died peacefully in her bed in a room that she loved in that house. She’s bound to be there because she wants to be. I anticipate no horrors in that regard.”

“And the others?”

“We won’t specifically call them, naturally. Let’s just hope they don’t materialize. So, are you in? I’ve already sold Rita on the necessity of a fourth person.”

“Is a fourth really necessary?”

“Strictly speaking, no. But you’ve already participated in a séance, so it shouldn’t intimidate you. And I believe your own, ahem, brushes with the paranormal may contribute a little something extra.”

“So that’s what this is about! You’re still convinced I’ve got an in with the Egyptian gods, or something. Some skeptic you are.”

“I don’t disbelieve,” he said, stabbing a forefinger into the air. Sparkles erupted, and he quickly put the finger down. After a moment, he regrouped and went on without making any more sudden moves. “I search for the truth. I am prepared to believe, given sufficient proof. I just haven’t seen any yet, and I’ve looked.”

“I don’t get you, Ed. You scoff at everything, and yet you think I’m possessed. Trust me, I’m not.”

He adjusted his glasses and looked stubborn. “You do have to admit that since our friend, Vesta, over there,” he gestured at her grave, not three feet away from us, “called upon her favorite goddess for help, after which your cat Bastet just happened to materialize and take possession of you –“

“I am not –“

“—decided to come and live with you – you have become embroiled in one mysterious occurrence after another, and been compelled to seek justice.”

“It could just be coincidence.”

“Oh, damn and blast,” he said, making it sound pedantic. “When are you going to admit the truth?”

“The same time you do. When I have proof.” That put a cork in his bottle. “And I am not intimidated,” I said, testily. “I’m cautious. Besides, don’t you think Purity is a fake anyway? I mean, seriously, Ed, all that Kewpie-doll make-up and baby talk, and those little-girl dresses on a forty-something woman?”

He deflated a tad. “I’m undecided about Purity. And she’s fairly typical of her ilk, so don’t hold that against her. She doesn’t particularly stand out at the paranormal conventions. Let’s just say that I’m withholding my opinion on her psychic abilities until I have more data. In the meantime, my client insists on using her.
Purity
certainly believes in herself – shut eye, you know – and so do a lot of other people. Also, I’ve had to fight my prejudice against her, since she’s the kind of psychic who . . . emotes. Her air of grandiosity offends my sense of propriety,” he said, glaring at Sparkles for some reason.

“Are you including her in your little monograph on chiromancy?”

“Yes,” he said, animating. “I had planned on contrasting her with two others: Eden, someone I suspected was just beginning to believe she was truly psychic, and a blatant fake, intentionally cheating people. Perhaps the one who stood in for Eden on Saturday night would do. As a last-minute substitute, in all likelihood she was just making things up out of thin air, but perhaps she has pretensions. Then I’d just have to find another borderline case, like Eden, and I could get down to business.”

“We have to find Kendra first. And you’re assuming she won’t be under arrest for murdering Eden as soon as they do find her.”

“That would be a nuisance. Perhaps I could interview her in prison.”

I closed my eyes and tried to endure. When I opened them again, I said, “Give me a call when you schedule your séance, and I’ll come if I’m not busy.”

“Actually, the night of Halloween would be the most propitious, though Americans are always running about being silly on Halloween night. So inconvenient. It’s hard to tell the real manifestations from the pranks.”

“I’ll be running about being silly, too, so count me out if you have to do it then.”

“Actually, I was thinking of the day after tomorrow, Wednesday night. Purity has a busy schedule around Halloween, too, and it’s the only night this week she’s free.”

“Oh, all right.”

I decided it was time to get back to the real world. I stood up and said, “Come on, Sparkles. I think it’s time for treats.”

In the two days she’d been with us, she’d already learned that word, and she popped off like a firecracker, dancing around and making it almost impossible to get hold of the collar to clip on the leash.

Once I had her, I cupped her little face in my hands and gazed into her shiny black eyes a moment. I was going to enjoy this little one while I could. Little dogs tend to be adopted quickly. Feisty as Sparkles was, I was going to be sorry to say good-bye to her. She didn’t bite. She was just extra fizzy.

We left Edson in the graveyard, enjoying the perfect food.

Back in my office, as I was booting up my computer, I remembered my promise to Asia. I picked up my phone, looked at the recent calls, and was about to call Kyle when I thought the better of it and went into my Contacts list under “B” instead.

“Hi, Bernie. Listen, I just saw Asia Brown – you know, Chrissie’s daughter? – and she wanted to know if Kyle’s office is looking for volunteers to look for Kendra.”

“I don’t think Kyle expects we’ll be finding her in a remote area under a bush,” Bernie said trenchantly.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking, too.”

“There is one thing,” she said, almost as an afterthought. “Eden’s blood alcohol was almost three times the legal limit. She must have been out cold when she was suffocated.”

I closed my eyes and tried not to get an image of that. “Listen, back to Kendra. What
are
they doing to find her?”

“Off the record? Searching her home and computer and tracking her cell phone and credit cards.”

“That’s kind of what her friends have been doing, and from what I can figure, they’ve got a better shot at finding her than the police do. They’re all hackers.”

“The cops have pretty good hackers, too, Taylor. Don’t underestimate them.”

“So,” I said, leaning back in my desk chair and putting my feet up on the desk, “have they found out anything yet, snooping around in her computer?”

“Do you really think they’d tell me? I’m a reporter, remember.”

“And the Sheriff’s best girl, so you’ve probably got inside information. What about her car? Most of them have GPS now, right?”

“It’s sitting in the parking lot of her apartment complex.”

“Oh. Darn. Listen, you don’t have to tell me anything straight out. Just let me know if I’m on the right track. Kendra worked at a bank. All of Kendra’s friends are hackers. It makes sense that Kendra was also a hacker. Bad combination. If I owned a bank, I would want computer-savvy people on my staff, but I wouldn’t necessarily want somebody with any kind of history as a hacker. So I’m guessing she’s never been arrested, but maybe she’s got a reputation around town, or maybe some kind of a record –“

“Sealed.”

Just the one word, but it was plenty. Kendra had a record, but the incident, whatever it was, had happened while she was a juvenile. Interesting. I put my feet down. Bernie was maintaining a maddening silence, and I could almost see her face smirking at the other end of the line, wondering if I’d get another bull’s eye. So I pulled myself together and took my best shot.

“And her computer shows she’s been getting into the electronic files at the bank and lifting information on their customers.”

There was a long pause, and I waited to breathe.

“No,” she said at last. Then, after another pause, “It wasn’t the bank.”

Then she hung up.

I sat at my desk staring blindly out the window for about twenty seconds, holding the dead phone to my ear.

“It wasn’t the bank,” she had said.

“Not the
bank,”
I repeated out loud. I set the phone down. “What the heck does that mean?”

My mind went about a thousand places at once, and then I muttered, “I wonder if the police have shut down her social networking pages.”

I gave Asia a quick call to let her know the police weren’t looking for volunteers. Yet. But I didn’t tell her anything else about my call to Bernie. She had said “off the record,” and I didn’t want her holding a grudge against me.

After that, I got busy with the keyboard.

An hour later, I sat back and tried to make sense of it all. I’m not claiming to be some kind of computer genius. Victor probably could have gotten what I had in about six minutes flat, and a lot more information besides. But what I had was suggestive.

While going to college, Kendra had earned extra income with a string of waitressing jobs, including some of the best restaurants in downtown St. Augustine and Jacksonville. She’d posted a lot of pictures of herself, including many with her buddies at work. After graduating, she had worked for a little graphic arts firm which seemed to have been owned by some friends of hers from college, and then she’d gotten a regular nine-to-five job at the bank. Her more recent posts had included cute little shots of her with Rusty. One included Kady. None included Eden.

So why would she want to kill Eden? Over Rusty? Eden didn’t seem to be getting in the way of her relationship with Rusty. And I’d been going on the assumption that Eden had followed Victor home from Atlanta because she was interested in him romantically. According to Kady, she was just about packing her bags to run away with him, babbling in Italian all the way.

I tried to get on Eden’s page, but it had already been taken down.

But Chrissie’s was there. I didn’t expect to find anything interesting on it, but I looked anyway. She had created a memorial for her sister, including shots of Eden as a tow-headed toddler, an awful yearbook photo, and a few pictures of Eden in her fortune teller’s costume. One was a close-up of her face as she gazed into a crystal ball, and I had a flash of memory from the fortune teller’s tent that unsettled me. Then there were a few testimonials on how accurate her readings had been.

How accurate her readings had been.

How . . . .

And then it hit me. Eden had been showing off, amazing people by bringing up things she shouldn’t have known at her sessions with the crystal ball. Things she’d probably found out by hacking around the Internet and getting into other peoples’ business. Not just public social networking pages and postings about what books people were reading, and whether or not they liked them. Non-public things, like their e-mail accounts. Their credit histories. If they’d slipped up and left evidence on the Internet of an affair. Maybe even their bank accounts – with a little help from a friend.

If you wanted to look like you had special powers, like you could read peoples’ minds, and if you knew what you were doing in cyberspace, you could find out anything you wanted and use it any way you wanted.

Eden O’Sullivan liked to show off as a fortune teller. And she’d agreed to be our fortune teller a good month before the event.

A good month, and I was willing to bet she’d spent that month hacking all around Tropical Breeze, finding out everything she could about everybody who had a computer – and who didn’t have a computer? The things teenagers put on their social networking pages are crazy, so technically, she didn’t even have to hack into anything secure, but I was betting she did. So she’d be all ready to impress the heck out of everybody in town with her psychic abilities while she gazed into her crystal ball and had a good laugh on all of us.

And, it would seem, she had managed to hack into the wrong computer, and somebody knew it.

That didn’t explain Kendra’s part in things – or maybe it did – but I was content at that point to let Kyle and the cops sort it all out. Cybercrime was way out of my league. After all, they had both Eden’s and Kendra’s computers now, and as Bernie had said, they had some pretty good hackers on the police force, too.

Rita’s speculation that it had been a man’s crime was all wrong, of course. In her drunken stupor, anybody could have suffocated Eden.

I was pretty proud of myself just then. I sat back, stretched, and said, “Pretty clever, Taylor!”

Now all I had to do was wait for the police to track the murderer down and the mystery of the murdered fortune teller would be solved.

But I figured that my life could get back to normal right there and then. Halloween was coming, and I decided I was going to relax and enjoy the last few weeks before winter.

I dress as a cat for Halloween. Always have.

When I was a yuppie back in Chicago, working downtown, single and loving it, I had a skin-tight cat suit with a long, tufted tail I could play with, and I’d wear it with spike heels, kitty ears and stick-on whiskers. I’d fluff out my long blond hair and paint my eyes like Twiggy, and strong men would go brain-dead and collapse at the knees at the mere sight of me.

Ah, those were the days. I’m more of an endangered species these days: a lioness, to be exact. Technically still a cat. I still have a tail and stick-on whiskers, but the spike heels are gone, along with a lot of other dumb things I used to have. My current cat costume has a pair of velour bootie things with lion claws, and they feel like house slippers. Ahhh. And they’re machine-washable, unlike the old designer heels. And I have a lot more fun going to Halloween parties with Michael than I ever did flying solo through the Chicago bars.

The shelter is closed to adoptions October 30 and 31, which gives Orphans the feel of a private reserve, and also gives us all time to enjoy the holiday. This year, Halloween fell on a Saturday, so we were closed for the whole weekend, starting Friday. After our big Halloween event the Saturday before, I had been a slow week, but we were about to gear up again for the Halloween party we always threw at Cadbury House for the volunteers.

So on Tuesday, while a few volunteers kept the shelter going on a basic level, I spent some time in town helping Florence at Girlfriend’s, and also being a volunteer myself.

This year, the middle school had a deal with the downtown Tropical Breeze business district for the students to do Halloween window art for all the stores. In return, the businesses were giving out freebies to the kids. So on Tuesday afternoon there I was, supervising the painting and making sure the kids got more paint on the windows than they did on each other. Next year, we’d do it earlier, so we could enjoy the artwork longer, if things went well this year.

The students actually took it very seriously, and arrived with sketches of their ideas and color schemes, and in one case, an absolute work of art showing corn stalks tied up like teepees across a field at sunset. Smoke rose in the background and took on the shapes of American natives watching over the field. It was evocative and mysterious and altogether stunning, executed in exciting swatches of red-orange and purple and indigo. It was way above the skill level of most of the drawings. The artist’s name was Scotty, and he was obviously the darling of the art teacher, though he already had that strangely self-contained air of somebody living in a different interior landscape, and only interacting with those around him to be polite.

Scotty was a precocious 13-year old with a boy-crush on Barnabas. He was fervently hoping he could copy it onto the windows of The Bookery, and when Barnabas solemnly agreed, Scotty was ecstatic. After it was finished, Barnabas came out again and formally presented the boy with a beautifully bound copy of Jules Verne’s
The Mysterious Island
. Scotty gazed at it with reverence, turning even redder than the sunset in his window art. I asked him what he was going to be for Halloween, and was surprised when he gave me a very ordinary answer: a pirate. Some years, it seems like they’re all pirates. Maybe that’s just a coastal Florida thing, but seriously: where have all the zombies gone?

“I’m surprised you don’t bandage one ear and go as Vincent van Gogh,” I said. “If you don’t have an artist’s smock, borrow one of your dad’s old shirts. And I’m sure you’ve got paint brushes and a palette you could carry.”

“I’ve got them,” the art teacher said, getting into the spirit of the thing. “An old wooden palette I never use any more, and I’ve got about a thousand old brushes. We could bundle the brushes together and glue them to the palette so you’re not dropping them all night, and if we put big blobs of acrylic paint all over the palette tomorrow, they’ll be dry well before Halloween.”

Scotty looked thunderstruck. He opened his mouth and eyes into big O’s and whispered, “I could dye my hair red.”

Uh oh. “Don’t tell your mother it was my idea,” I said.

I thanked the art teacher, and she thanked me, then I took a step back to glance down at the artwork on Girlfriend’s. Our window had been done by the cheerleading squad, and it was adorable, if not particularly artistic. Predictably, it was full of scary black cats and howling dogs, with a big orange moon surrounded by stars that were almost as big as the moon. There was only one witch and she was flying across the picture on a broomstick, and she didn’t look like me. I liked it.

I joined the crowd of parents, teachers, and reporters (Bernie, and a guy from the Palm Coast
Observer
) going up and down the street taking pictures, discussing artistic merits, and generally enjoying the community feel of the event. After my circuit, I ended up back at The Bakery, next to The Bookery.

The kids were all leaving, and Justine was closing The Bakery. As I took a picture of her window, she came outside to study the haunted pumpkin patch that had been done for her. It wasn’t the stunning mural that had been executed on the window next-door, but it was cute. As a reward, she handed out sugar cookies with orange icing that hadn’t quite set. I had to take one, too.

“Why don’t you come inside and sit a while?” she said to me. “You’ve been on your feet all afternoon out here. I’ll get you a cold bottle of water.”

Even the art teacher was gone by then, so I figured I was off duty. I thanked her and followed her inside. She locked the door behind us and turned off the neon “Open” sign.

Justine was a born fashionista. She was slim, sleek and did her model-turns unconsciously, because that’s just the way she moved. Her hair was thick and honey-blond, and her eyes were a melting brown. What she was doing up to her elbows in flour every day was anybody’s guess, but I wasn’t going to ask.

It was my first time in The Bakery, and I took a look around. It was extremely pink. It almost made my teeth ache, all that pink and white, with sweet little ice cream tables and chairs with heart-shaped backs. It looked like an oversized doll house.

“Very nice,” I said.

“I hope so. Do you know anybody who’d want to buy it? Because I’m about done here. Baking is just not my thing.”

I gaped at her. “Oh, Justine, I’m so sorry. You just opened!”

“Yeah, and now I’m going to close,” she said grimly, bringing two cold bottles of water to a table and motioning for me to sit down. “Go ahead and eat your cookie. You must be starving.”

So I had to eat it. It actually wasn’t as dry as it looked, but it was strangely bitter. While I ate and nodded and blinked, she rambled on.

“I had a meeting with my accountant and my father yesterday afternoon, and we all agree it’s time to cut our losses and look around for other opportunities. Daddy called a business broker and it’s officially going up for sale after this weekend. I have a few orders I need to fill for Halloween party cakes and platters of cookies, and then I’m outta here. I think this town is too small for my business plan anyway. I’m going to open a vegan restaurant in downtown St. Augustine, right around the corner from the Cathedral-Basilica. It’s what I should’ve done in the first place, only I figured this town needed a bakery.”

“Well, good luck with that, Justine. I’m . . . shocked.”

“Yeah, I know. But that’s me. I make a decision and I stick with it. Just like that.”

Just like she’d come up with the idea of opening a bakery when she knew nothing about baking. Still, if daddy wanted to finance her, I guess everybody was happy.

“I met your I.T. guy the other day,” I said. “Victor? He mentioned you were a client.” Actually, he said he never spoke ill of a client when he declined to comment on her sweet rolls, but I didn’t mention that.

“Oh, yeah, Victor,” she said, almost with disgust. Not the reaction I expected at all, and I had to choke back the girlish chit-chat about the hunky guy.

“What’s wrong with Victor?” I asked.

“He’s an ex-con, that’s what. That’s not even his real name; he’s using an alias.”

“What?”

“Daddy had him checked out after I mentioned I’d hired him to check out my POS system. You know, Point of Sale? I got the best there is, but it turned out to be kind of – you know – complicated. I couldn’t figure it out. I thought it had been installed wrong, but Victor got me straightened out right away. He knows way more than he should about POS systems, I think. I can’t believe I let him look at mine! Right there at the entry port for my customers’ credit cards! And he’s a hacker. I don’t know, but Daddy says that any time an I.T. guy works on a computer, he leaves what they call a ‘back door’ for themselves, so he can get in and wander around your system any time he wants. Whoever buys The Bakery, I’m going to have to warn them to have the POS checked, but from what I understand, Victor’s some kind of world-class genius. I’m not sure any of the local-yokels around this town are going to be able to outsmart him.”

I was aghast. Kady had made Victor’s youthful escapades sound so harmless, I hadn’t paid that much attention. This put things in a whole new light. I felt like a plague had been let loose in Tropical Breeze. “What about Wi-Fi? He just worked on the Wi-Fi of one of my friends.”

“He’s probably piggybacking on it right now, hiding his identity and cruising all over the Internet where he doesn’t belong. When Daddy was researching hackers, he read about a guy who was arrested for trading kiddie porn over the Internet. The cops came banging on his door at four in the morning, and there he was in his underwear with a lot of S.W.A.T. guys and dogs and everything on his front porch, telling him to come out and put his hands on his head.”

I felt like my own head was going to explode. I looked down at my napkin and realized I’d eaten the whole nasty cookie and didn’t even remember it.

“What happened?” I said.

“It was some other guy hijacking his Wi-Fi and trading porn. The poor innocent guy spent about two days being interrogated, they took his computer away and looked at
everything
in it, and it took months to get it all straightened out. So you’d better warn your friend.”

“Victor
did this?” I was horrified.

“Well, that wasn’t Victor, but it just goes to show you.”

She sat back, took a bite of one of her own cookies, all but spit it out again, made a face at it and said, “Definitely should’ve opened a vegan restaurant in the first place. I hate baking.”

“I gotta go,” I said, getting up. I looked at my sticky orange fingers, went around to the sink behind the display cases and rinsed them off, then ran to the door wiping my hands dry on my capris. It was locked, of course, but I fumbled around and managed to unlock it. Then I burst into the street like an escaped lunatic and began to run. I had to get over to Rita’s house – fast!

When I came around the corner of 5
th
Street, I ground to a halt and stood there staring. Even from Locust Street, I could see the plain white van with the logo “I.T.I.Q.” on it parked in front of the Whitby House.

The dangerous felon was there – with Rita. She was probably alone with him. I began to slowly walk again, considering my options. Then I pulled myself together and went forward, deciding to do things the simple way. I was going to confront the man. This was all my fault for recommending him without checking him out first.

When Rita opened the front door and started to say something, I brushed right by her and went into the foyer. “Okay, where is he?” I demanded.

“What? Taylor! What’s wrong with you? If it’s Victor you want, he’s in the kitchen.”

I stomped down the hall and there he was, smiling at me, nice and cozy and ready to shoot the breeze.

“All right, Mr. Smith, if that is your real name, who are you and what are you up to in my town?”

I held my had up to silence Rita as she came in behind me wanting to know what in the world had gotten into me.

He lifted an eyebrow and stared at me, still smiling. He didn’t look like he was going to pull out a gun and mow me down, and I was a little relieved, but I kept Rita behind me anyway, just in case.

“’Your town?’ Well, howdy-do, Sheriff. Did somebody report me spitting on the sidewalk?”

“I just found out that you’re an ex-con,” I said, “and I want to know what you’ve been up to in Tropical Breeze.”

I heard Rita gasp behind me, but I kept my steely gaze riveted on Victor.

“What do you think I’ve been up to?” he said, mildly amused.

“I don’t know, but I do know this. The lady who followed you here from Atlanta is dead, and another one of your friends is missing, so you’d better wipe that smile off your face and start talking.”

He wiped the smile off his face. He inhaled and exhaled. “I knew it couldn’t last,” he muttered. Then he said, “Before you haul me off to the slammer, can I at least tell you the truth? I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but I’ve never done jail time. In fact, I’ve actually worked for law enforcement.”

“And,” I guessed, “you’ve also worked
against
law enforcement.”

“That’s their take on it, anyway,” he said lightly. “Oh, come on, ladies. Come in and sit down. If I was going to make a break for it, I would’ve done it by now. And you’re right; my last name isn’t Smith. My first name really is Victor, but my last name is Pacetti.”