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“Thanks for your opinion,” Miguel said in a quiet, firm tone of dismissal. The time for fun and games was over. He needed to talk seriously with his brother. “We’ll call you if we need anything else.”
“Enjoy your pie.” She turned on her heel and flounced back toward the counter.
“A psychic,” Dylan grumbled as he dug into his pie. “You interrupted my day to talk about a psychic.”
“I was skeptical, too.” Miguel kept his voice low so Annie wouldn’t come running back over to them. “You know I don’t like things that can’t be explained by logic or science.”
“You were always the smart brother. El Ganso.” He smirked. “El Nerdo Supremo.”
“Because I think with my head, not my huevos.” Miguel fixed his twin with a cool gaze. This wasn’t a time for joking. “I took the psychic—actually, she’s a medium—back to the crime scene where Aspen Meadows disappeared. She had a vision that turned up an important piece of evidence.”
Though Dylan continued to eat his pie, Miguel sensed that his brother was interested. “The sheriff still doesn’t have any leads on the missing woman?”
“Not yet. I don’t have much hope. Somebody who’s missing for over a month is either dead or doesn’t want to be found.” He frowned. “But Emma Richardson is certain that Aspen is alive. They’re cousins, and Emma is the guardian for the baby.”
“The father hasn’t come forward?”
“Not yet.” Miguel took out the piece of paper Emma had used to make her notes from the vision. He spread it on the table in front of his brother. “She drew the design of the leather necklace we found at the scene. And also, she drew this.”
Dylan picked up paper. His eyes narrowed. “VDG. Vincent Del Gardo.”
“There was a symbol like this on that map you showed me—the map that Agent Grainger sent before she died.”
Miguel and everybody else in the crime lab had tried every way possible to decipher that map. From satellite GPS to old-fashioned cartography, no one could make sense of those weird twists and turns. It didn’t match any known roads. The map could have been the path of a spreading river. Or trails through the forest.
At the counter, Annie was joking and laughing too loudly with a guy who had been sitting there since Miguel came in. He overheard the word psychic and glanced toward them. They had to be talking about Emma, and that bothered him. He checked out the guy so he’d remember what he looked like. He wouldn’t be easy to forget. Though big and barrel-chested, he was a sharp dresser in a fringed leather jacket with a turquoise yoke. The band around his cowboy hat was snakeskin with the rattles still attached.
Dylan tapped nervously on the tabletop. His voice went low and quiet. “What does this part of the note mean? A tall woman in an FBI jacket.”
There was no easy way to say this. “Emma’s spirit guide for this vision was Julie.”
“She saw Julie?”
“In the same sense that she sees everything. In her head.”
“If this is true,” Dylan said, “it means that the missing woman is connected to Vincent Del Gardo. Connected to Julie’s murder.”
“Sí, I know.”
“This is big. It opens a whole new line of investigation.”
“Are you still searching for Del Gardo?”
Dylan nodded. “And for the money he’s got stashed away.”
Miguel had heard that Del Gardo’s illegal fortune was in excess of fifty million dollars. Not an amount that could be tucked away in a tidy little suitcase. “Your map with the VDG symbol might lead to both.”
“Let’s see if your psychic can point us in the right direction.”
BEFORE BABY JACK showed up on her doorstep, the bathroom in Emma’s house had been tidy with feminine decorative touches. Now, she had no time for long baths, scented candles and fresh flowers. Her mosaic-tiled countertop held a variety of baby products. She’d known that her life would be different if a man moved in, but she hadn’t expected pacifiers and butt wipes.
Confronting her reflection in the mirror, she dabbed a glob of spit-up off the shoulder of her beige turtleneck and ran a comb through her chin-length brown hair. Miguel had called and asked if he and his FBI brother could stop by and ask a few questions.
Miguel. She sighed. Miguel Acevedo. She wouldn’t mind having him as a houseguest. He was definitely handsome with those green eyes and strong features, but his greater appeal came from his quick mind. She had to be alert when she was around him. He was a challenge.
Also, she needed him to find Aspen. To follow the trail. But where was this trail? Discovering the necklace in the snow was a start, but Emma had no idea what came next.
In the mirror, standing beside her, was Grandma Quinn. The resemblance between her and this blue-eyed, elderly lady made her smile.
Grandma said, “Why don’t you change that shirt, dear?”
Emma didn’t need fashion tips from the other side. “You know I had a vision about Aspen.”
“About time.”
“I’m supposed to follow a trail or a path. Do you know anything about that?”
“Change the shirt.”
Grandma faded and vanished, leaving Emma frustrated. All too often, her spirit visits were cryptic hints and vague impressions instead of direct instructions. Why couldn’t Grandma Quinn give her a street address or a phone number?
Grabbing the baby monitor, she hurried to the front door and onto the porch to wait for Miguel and his brother. Jack had finally fallen asleep, and she didn’t want the baby wakened by two grown men tromping through the house.
When the car pulled into her driveway, a shiver of anticipation went through her, making her realize how glad she was to be seeing Miguel again. He gave her a lopsided grin that made her heart beat a little faster.
His twin brother resembled him, but she would never confuse these two men. There was something about Miguel that drew her closer. His was a healing presence, like the words inscribed on the back of his silver Chimayo medal.
As she shook hands with Dylan—whose handsome face was somehow enhanced by the scar on his chin—she had the impression that he was kind of scary. His eyes looked haunted. Not in the sense that he had ghosts hanging around him, but he had secrets, many secrets. And he had seen terrible things.
“I hope you two don’t mind,” she said, “but I’d rather stay outside. The baby’s asleep, and I don’t want to wake him.”
She directed them to a flagstone path that led to the covered patio behind her house. The afternoon sun warmed this western exposure, and there were only a few patches of snow left behind from the blizzard. Within the month, she hoped to start planting her vegetable garden. Most of her other landscaping was shrubs and annual flowers, indigenous to the high plains so they didn’t need much watering in drought years.
She sat at the round wrought-iron table with one twin on either side. Miguel held the piece of paper upon which she’d written her impressions from her first vision this morning. “We wanted to talk about the VDG symbol,” he said.
With the V standing for Virgin? She sucked in a breath to keep from blurting an embarrassing comment. “I really don’t know where that came from.”
“How does that work?” Miguel asked.
“It’s called automatic writing,” she said. “Another way the dead communicate through me. I’m holding the pen, but they are directing the strokes. Some people call it channeling.”
Watching her intently, he asked, “Does the name Vincent Del Gardo mean anything to you?”
She probed her memory and shrugged. “Nothing comes to mind.”
“He’s from Las Vegas.”
“I’ve only been there twice.” The memory made her smile. “I went to visit Aspen while she was going to college there. She thought, because I’m a medium, that I might be able to beat the odds at gambling. We tried roulette, craps and blackjack. I was lousy at all of them.”
Dylan leaned forward. “Your cousin might have mentioned Del Gardo. He had interests in several casinos. Maybe she worked for him.”
“I don’t recall.” In her mind, she repeated the name. Vincent Del Gardo. “Are you looking for him? Is he missing?”
“Maybe you can find him,” Miguel said. “When you do that missing persons thing with the sheriff, what’s the process?”
“Everything I see or hear in a vision comes from someone on the other side. When I’m asleep, they come to me as if in a dream. When I touch something connected with a missing person, I sometimes intersect with the psychic energy of someone close to them who has passed away. I see them. And hear them.”
“Give me specifics,” Miguel said. “Last fall, when you told the sheriff that the missing boy was with his father in a motel in Durango, how did you do it?”
“I touched some of the boy’s clothing. My vision came from his dead grandmother. She showed me a vision of the room, a wagon wheel and the number seven.”
“You’re a medium,” Dylan said. “The FBI works with mediums. I get it.”
Miguel asked, “Were you always like this?”
“When I was ten years old, Grandma Quinn appeared to me. I was old enough to know that my grandmother was dead and to understand what that meant.”
“What did she look like?” Miguel asked.
“Just the way she looked in life. But not solid. The best comparison I can make is a hologram. Grandma Quinn wasn’t scary, she hadn’t come to frighten me. She gave me a warning. It saved my life.”
Grandma Quinn had told her there was danger, told her that Emma and her mother had to leave the house. Though ten-year-old Emma wept and pleaded, her mother wouldn’t listen.
Later that night, when her mother’s abusive boyfriend came home, Emma fled. She ran next door to the neighbor’s and hammered on the door. Remembering caused her hands to draw into fists. Sobbing, Emma had begged them to call the police.
They arrived too late. There was a fire in her mother’s bedroom. Both she and her boyfriend were killed.
“Emma,” Miguel said, “what are you thinking about?”
“A memory.” She met his gaze and saw his struggle to accept what she was saying. “A real-life memory. I’m not crazy.”
“We get it,” Dylan said loudly, demanding her attention. “You knew the missing woman. Aspen Meadows.”
“I grew up with her. After my mother died, I went to live with my aunt Rose on the rez.” She gestured to her brown hair and blue eyes. “I didn’t fit in with the other kids. Aspen used to tease me, and she resented that I was taking Aunt Rose’s attention away from her. My main goal in life was to get off the reservation. I studied hard and got a full scholarship to University of Colorado when I was sixteen.”
“You sound like my brother,” Dylan said.
“El Nerdo Supremo,” Miguel said.
“Perfect description.” She laughed on the inside. “Anyway, Aspen and I got along better as adults. I kept pushing her to go to college, and she had finally finished her studies. She was coming back to the rez to be a teacher.”
A cry from the baby monitor alerted her. “Excuse me? It’s almost time for Jack’s feeding. I need to get a bottle of formula ready.”
She hurried into the house through the back door. Still listening to the baby monitor, she went through the motions of preparing the bottle and measuring the formula. Vincent Del Gardo. A casino owner from Las Vegas.
She glanced through the kitchen window. Beyond the patio where the twin brothers sat in conversation, she saw a third person—a man with a shaved head and a white beard. A ghost.
When he looked toward her and waved, she saw his black-framed glasses. He returned to his task, digging with a spade in the area where she would soon plant her garden. The hole grew quickly. He reached inside and pulled out a handful of gold coins.
She blinked, and he was gone.
The noises from the baby monitor grew more insistent, but she rushed outside to the patio table. “Buried treasure. Does Del Gardo have something to do with treasure?”
Dylan stood. “What did you see?”
“An old man with a shaved head and white beard. Thick glasses. He dug up a handful of gold coins.”
“That description doesn’t fit Del Gardo,” Dylan said. “To the best of our knowledge, he’s not dead.”
“Maybe it wasn’t him. The man I saw didn’t seem like a crime boss. He was kindly. Like a favorite uncle.”
“Do you know his name?” Dylan asked.
“No.” If she’d known something as obvious as a name, Emma would have mentioned it. She didn’t much care for Dylan’s attitude. Though he’d been quick to accept her abilities as a medium, he seemed hostile.
“I want to show you the other VDG symbol,” he said. “After I return to headquarters to pick up that evidence, I’ll be back with my other colleagues.”
“Not tonight,” she said.
“What?” His tone was abrupt. Apparently, Dylan wasn’t accustomed to having his decisions questioned. “Why not?”
“If this symbol leads to other evidence, I need to be free to follow the trail.”
“The trail?” Dylan glanced toward his brother.
Miguel explained, “A trail of evidence that might lead to Emma’s cousin.”
“Tonight,” she said, “I need to stay with the baby. Tomorrow morning, I have someone who comes in to watch him.”
“Tomorrow morning, nine o’clock,” Dylan said, turning on his heel and stalking along the flagstone path toward the front of the house. “Let’s go, Miguel.”
He rose slowly. His gaze focused on the formula bottle in her hand. “If you want, I can stay. I can help with mijo.”
Though it would be wonderful to have his help, she shook her head. “It’s better for me if you go with your brother and calm him down. I don’t want him to come back tomorrow with a dozen federal agents. I can’t let this turn into a sideshow.”
He gently took her free hand. “Dylan plows straight ahead like a powerboat and throws up a big wake. You need a more quiet approach. Like a silent canoe across the waters.”
She smiled, appreciating his imagery. A silent canoe.
It had taken five long weeks for her to get any hint about Aspen’s disappearance, and she didn’t want to jeopardize this tenuous connection with a huge fanfare and many curious eyes watching her. “I want you to come back tomorrow with your brother. Only you.”
He gave her hand a squeeze, and she felt a pleasant ripple chase up her arm.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “You have my cell-phone number. Call me if you need anything.”
She watched as he sauntered along the flagstone path, and she was tempted to call him back. Miguel made her feel safe and protected. She wanted him to stay close to her.
But there wasn’t time right now to indulge in such a fantasy. She returned to the house and went directly to her bedroom where Jack’s bassinette sat beside her four-poster bed. His little face scrunched up as he let out a loud cry.
