Seeds of Malice: A Psychic Vision Novel (Psychic Visions Book 11) Read online

  “Yes. My GPS will confirm the date, time, and mileage involved.”

  “Did you sleep alone here at the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you talk to anybody on the phone? Did you send any emails from your laptop? Was anybody here? Did you see the neighbors? Were you outside?”

  “No phone calls. I might’ve sent some emails, but that doesn’t prove I was actually at the house. No neighbors saw me nor was I outside.” By the time they were done, she was exhausted. “Are you trying to help Stefan or me?”

  “Both.” He ripped off the top page. “And Stefan said one other thing.”

  She stared at him. “What?”

  “You got an email from Reggie?”

  The color drained from her skin. She closed her eyes for a moment, then said, “Damn, I was hoping to forget all about that.”

  “I need to see it.”

  She nodded mutely, stood and walked to the side counter, where she grabbed her laptop, took it to the table and brought up the home page. She quickly clicked on the keys to get to her email program and opened the message from Reginald. When it was onscreen, she turned it around so he saw it.

  He pulled it closer, then asked, “May I?”

  She nodded.

  He read it through and checked the time and date when it came in. “I need to forward this to my own. May I?”

  “Whatever you need to do.” By now fatigue had set in. She was so done with all this. She wanted to go right back to England and stay there. She got up and went to refill their cups. She was almost out of coffee. She had only bought a little bag of beans, not sure how long she’d be in town. She could pick up another package tomorrow. She sat back down and asked, “Does it tell you anything?”

  “Not yet, outside of the obvious.” He pulled out his phone, checked to make sure the email had arrived and showed it to her briefly. “You know this could get you off the hook.”

  “Or they can assume I worked on my computer skills to get me off the hook.”

  He laughed. “You really don’t trust anyone, do you?”

  She glared at him. “Do you blame me?”

  *

  Back at the office, London dropped into his chair and stared across the room. He wished he could get to the bottom of what Dr. Sartain had to do with any of this. London understood the doctor’s various companies were looking for intel on the poisons. But would anything he found in this way be admissible in court? Surely none of it was.

  Steve walked in with several others to all find their seats in the bullpen. Steve held two coffee cups in his hand. He nodded at London, placing them on his desk. “The coroner says poison, but he has to run tox screens to find out exactly what type.”

  London nodded. “Of course it would be poison.”

  “Too obvious?”

  “Way too obvious. She wouldn’t make that mistake.”

  Steve dropped in a nearby chair and leaned forward. “Do you think someone’s trying to pin this on her?”

  “Well, it’s suspicious that she just got back, and somebody else drops dead of poison.”

  “And how does any of this relate to the other two deaths at the conservatory?” Steve asked.

  “Not sure it does.” London tossed his pen on his desk and took a sip of the coffee. He winced, stared at it. He loved his brew but couldn’t drink this cop version. “I need to see those files again. We can’t know for certain they are connected, but, since we have a new victim, we need to look at all the cases from the beginning again.”

  “I can help with that.” Steve walked to his desk and picked up a large stack of files, then dropped them on London’s desk. “These are the conservatory deaths since the beginning.”

  London bolted forward. “Why did you have them? Let me see those.”

  “I figured we’d go back to the beginning.” Steve passed a file over, then took the next one for himself.

  Just as London settled in to go through them all, his phone rang. It was his brother. “Hey, what’s up?”

  “Is she really back in town? What’s this about the current head of the department being missing? Is she crazy?” Derek’s voice rose to almost a choirboy pitch at the end. “Why hasn’t she been picked up yet?”

  London pinched the bridge of his nose. “She’s back, yes. The head of the department is missing, and, no, we don’t know anything about it. And, again no, there is no proof she had anything to do with it.”

  “Well, we already know having that doesn’t do any good because she got off last time. There was plenty of proof then,” Derek snapped accusingly. “I still think you did something to get her off.”

  “So you told me in the past,” London said quietly. “Did you have a reason for calling other than to start another fight?”

  “Right. Typical London. Always being critical. Has no time for his brother.” He half snorted. “Unless it’s to spend time with my fiancée.”

  “Ex-fiancée. Remember you’d already broken up with her.”

  “But you knew I was trying to get back with her.”

  “So you say. That’s not what she said.”

  “She’s a liar,” Derek snapped. “That little bitch. She’s nothing but cancer—a disease.”

  “Whatever. I’ve got to get back to work. I’ll talk to you later.” London ended the call and tossed his phone on his desk.

  Steve asked, “That was Derek?”

  London raised his gaze to his partner and nodded. “Yeah, you could say that. Not the Derek I grew up with, nor the one you knew in college. This is an angry, vitriolic, depressed, even suicidal Derek—probably off his meds again—who blames Fern for damn near everything in his life.” He shook his head. “And me. Let’s not forget that he blames me for what’s going on in his life too.”

  “Sorry, dude. Once he headed down that path, it was hard to get him to see straight anymore.”

  London nodded, but didn’t answer. There wasn’t anything else to say.

  He opened a folder. The first of the recent deaths at the conservatory was a heart attack. Everybody was fine with that diagnosis until poison was brought up when the second man died. It turned out the heart attack patient had an extremely high level of an odd form of digitalis in his system. His wife had been on a walk with him at the time. They’d gone on a morning tour, and, halfway through it, he’d looked sick. Forty-five minutes later, he was shaking and sitting down. They called 9-1-1, but, by the time the EMTs had arrived, the man had died from heart failure.

  The wife never blamed the conservatory. But the question remained, could his wife attribute it to her husband’s absentmindedness? He could have overdosed on purpose. Or had he been given the amount in some other way, shape, or form by a third party?

  It remained an open case. Complicating the matter was the fact the wife was a good twenty years the man’s junior, and had inherited a sizable sum. But the police had no forensic evidence, so they couldn’t prove wrongdoing.

  London opened the second folder. This man had been poisoned. A younger man in his early thirties had collapsed at the conservatory and was pronounced DOA at the hospital. He’d been a maintenance worker and was found with an odd form of cyanide in his system.

  Ben Kimball, the former head of the conservatory, had died less than two years ago, sparking the media frenzy and subsequent trial of what eventually became four victims. These two had died in the last six months. Reginald was missing, and the most recently murdered, identified as Reggie’s long-term girlfriend, was Pam Akers. If they could find Reginald, they’d have more than a few questions answered.

  “London?”

  He looked up to see Grant Sutherland walking toward him. “Long time no see.”

  “I just came from speaking with Fern Geller. She has quite a story to tell.”

  London snorted. “Of course she does. And?”

  Steve laughed from the other side of London’s desk. “London has a bit of history with Dr. Death. No doubt she has a sad story. She believes she’s
been badly treated. At least by him.”

  London hated the heat rising on his neck, knowing the growing color there would give away his thoughts. He shrugged off the snickers and studied Grant. “What’s your relationship to her?”

  Grant’s smile had an edge to it. “Let’s just say a friend asked me to step in and speak with her, see if everything was okay.”

  A friend? London nodded. “As it is, we’ve hardly spoken.”

  “She doesn’t feel she can trust you. In fact, according to her, she might as well murder a dozen people as you’ll find her guilty anyway.”

  “We’re not that bad,” London said carefully. He didn’t know Grant well, but he had the respect of everyone in the FBI. He could make a lot of trouble for London.

  “Yet enough that she’s too scared to tell you that she got an email from Reginald today.” Grant pulled out his phone and clicked a few buttons.

  London’s email program popped up with the notification. He leaned forward and brought up the new email and read it with dread sinking to his stomach. “Why did she give it to you?”

  “Because I’m not you,” Grant said with a hard smile. “And she trusts our mutual friend.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d mind telling me who that is?” London asked, studying Grant’s face carefully. Not Sartain. London would stake his, and Grant’s, reputations on that.

  “Not now,” he said smoothly. “Maybe later, if necessary.”

  “And if we do need it?” Steve asked in a low ugly tone.

  Grant barely glanced at London’s partner before focusing on London again. “Obviously I’ll be happy to produce it.” He leaned forward so only London could hear. “At the same time, I’ll ask why you went to 345 Royalton Avenue and stayed for an hour today.” He straightened and walked away.

  London glared at Grant’s back. What the hell was going on, and how had Grant found out about London’s visit to Dr. Sartain?

  That was supposed to be top secret. No one should know.

  Chapter 5

  Alone once again, Fern wandered around her small place and tried to work out what her next step. She grabbed a notepad and started jotting down what she knew so far.

  The big issue was finding Reggie. She didn’t know what Grant was going to do with the email. She hoped there’d be a way to track Reggie through it. She hadn’t seen his laptop anywhere in his office or any of the other many places he would normally hide it.

  If she had gone into his house that would just give London more ammunition against her. Knowing he had and they found somebody was a little disconcerting. She’d smelled death as well as the poison. Hard not to. She wondered if she should call her lawyer, Jerry Solange. They’d kept in touch with brief phone calls and emails, more because he’d been concerned about her.

  Realizing she owed it to him to let him know what was going on, she quickly brought up his email address. In the subject, she typed it’s happening all over again. Then she took the time to give as much information as she could get down before she hit send. At that point, feeling a little on the shaky side, she got up and opened the fridge.

  Not having been home for very long and not sure if she would even be staying, she hadn’t done much shopping. She had bread, peanut butter, and tuna, but no mayonnaise. Nothing that appealed. She could walk to one of the corner shops and get something, or she could drive to the market and pick up fresh food, including coffee.

  Still contemplating food, she sat with a thud. Returning to England appealed more and more every day. But she couldn’t do anything until she knew for sure where Reginald was. For a lot of reasons, he might not have been able to stop that alert. Him being dead was only one.

  She’d tried calling, but hadn’t been able to connect, so she sent him a warning email instead. Now she worried that she hadn’t done enough. After all he was missing now, and she couldn’t help but feel guilty.

  Originally she had even hoped to talk to Reggie about setting up a death garden within the US conservatory. They had discussed it before, and that starting one here would be no big deal. She was qualified for such a project. She certainly had a great response from the visitors in England. Nobody there mentioned the court case, murders, or her acquittal as she’d feared. And, as her name and presence had brought in notoriety and, therefore, tourists there, it would do the same here.

  As time went on, she had enjoyed her interaction with the UK public. She got to work with her plants, but it was limited to the gardening level as she didn’t have research money or the funding to do more.

  Here in the States she could do so much more. She’d had funding before, until it had all been yanked when she’d been charged with murder. So many new plants she would like to work on, but she needed money and a lab to do so. Previously, when she’d worked full time at the conservatory, she had spent her evenings and weekends on her personal research at her rented lab space. It had been her name and position that had helped secure the lab space she’d used for years.

  If she could get a research grant, then the same lab might give her space in their facilities again. She pondered the options of contacting them. She had been acquitted of all charges, but she didn’t know if that was enough to make them open their doors to her once more. They’d been inundated with bad press during the trial too. That couldn’t have been good for their business.

  Even without taking a huge hit with lawyer fees leading up to her trial, as well as being mostly unemployed, she really needed big money backing her. A ton of it was available for research, but getting it wasn’t the easiest. She’d been doing quite well in that department up until the murder charge. She had no idea what response she’d get now.

  She did want to continue her work, and that required funding. She had money of her own, and had invested a lot of it to complete her projects at the time, but couldn’t afford to keep that up.

  She looked forward to getting more into that part of her life again, once this nightmare was over.

  As far as she was concerned, especially since reading Reggie’s email, there was only one killer. Likely somebody close to her or at least professionally jealous of her. He had to have a lot of motivation to set up these scenarios—or hate.

  Who would have either a personal or professional problem with her? At the top of her list was Derek. Second would be London. How sad that her ex-fiancé and his brother were the only ones she could think of. She had had problems with a few people at the conservatory. She’d had to fire one because he’d been stealing plants for his own garden. She didn’t remember his name.

  There had to be a complete file on the theft as well as on all the employees somewhere in the conservatory’s office.

  Which brought up the issue with her security card not giving her access to the buildings anymore. She grabbed her phone and contacted Reggie’s admin. Rebecca still had no word from Reggie. Fern didn’t share Reggie’s latest email with Rebecca. She would only worry more. With Rebecca on the line, Fern asked, “Any chance I can get a new access card for the conservatory? I’m still on the board of directors.” Rebecca agreed to take care of it. “And, before you go, is it possible to email me all the employee records?” When Rebecca paused, Fern added, “I know this must be a strange request, but I am on the board. And, in Reggie’s absence, I think it warrants a closer look at all the employees.”

  “I agree,” Rebecca said.

  “I’ll put my request in writing and email it right over. That way you are covered. I’ll take any blame.”

  “Give me a few hours.”

  Who else might hold a grudge against her? She didn’t have much in the way of friends, back then or even now. And she eliminated them as suspects quickly anyway.

  Some had been fascinated with her profession. Of course her nickname hadn’t helped either. When the murder charges had been filed, everybody had completely disappeared from her life. She’d never felt lonelier than when she had walked into the courtroom that morning at the start of the trial, realizing the audience was
n’t there to support her, but to watch her, with avid fascination, get crucified. And yet why should she have been surprised? She was used to being alone, unfortunately.

  Without her lawyer, she would have been lost. Stefan had been around, but he couldn’t handle the type of energy that a court case would bring in. He did testify often in lawsuits as an expert, but had said something was wrong about this one. It was very hard for his energies to be balanced. He also hadn’t been able to come in as a defense witness for her because there had been no reason to call him. He knew she was not a liar because he saw the truth in her energy. She snorted at that. The jury would have had a field day with that statement. They’d crucify him and her.

  She dredged through her memories, looking for more people who might have a problem with her. It was hard to remember anymore as she’d been so vilified by the media that she had no one left now from her former life. Hopefully Reggie was still alive. Then with the court case, she had met Stefan. Eventually Dr. Maddy. Brent. Otherwise she’d been alone for most of her life. Deliberately isolated.

  After being charged, she’d received death threats and nasty emails. Her house and property had been damaged. Her gardens at home destroyed, and her life had collapsed. But, after the acquittal, it had gotten much worse for the couple weeks she’d stayed here. She’d received horrible letters in the mail. Initially, she’d turned everything over to the police, but they didn’t seem to really care, almost like they wanted somebody to attack her because their hands were tied. Still they’d been forced to go to several people who had made death threats to warn them to stop their actions before they were charged themselves. Which meant the cops should have a list of everyone who hated her enough to do something like this. She certainly didn’t.

  Besides, few of the letter-writers had identified themselves.

  Stefan had kept telling her everything had to happen for a reason, and in its own time, that she needed to have patience and tolerance to get through this.

  She had asked why the trial was happening. He just looked at her with a sad smile and said the whys were not part of the human experience. She had pondered that statement for many months. It still didn’t make a lot of sense to her. She reminded herself that the letters were just vicious words on a page. Maybe someone should check into them. Grant?