A Grave Prediction (Psychic Eye Mystery) by Victoria Laurie

graves! The women have been murdered and you’re destroying evidence!”
    The driver’s eyes widened in shock and he got out of the cab, stepping onto the tread of the wheel to look out over the shovel of his truck.
    I ran forward to the front to point to the remaining grave, but when I rounded the rig, I came up short. In front of the shovel, the dirt was perfectly flat. “Dammit! You ran over the fourth one too!”
    “Cooper!” came that voice again. Now that the bulldozer was silent, I could tell that it’d been Perez who’d been shouting to me.
    “Shit!” I swore, and moved quickly to the other side of the shovel to look underneath the big truck, but it was too dark to see anything.
    By now the driver had jumped down from the tread and hadcome around to my side. “Lady, what graves are you talking about?”
    “There were four mounds of dirt here!” I said, in a bit of a panic about them. “How could you not see them?”
    The driver took off his ball cap and squeezed it nervously. “I didn’t see any graves!”
    “What’s going on?” Perez demanded, coming around the bulldozer.
    I was actually a little relieved to see him. “There’re four women buried here,” I said.
    He looked down at the ground, then back at me. Robinson came around the bulldozer at that moment too. “What do you mean there’re four women buried here?” Perez said. That made Robinson skip a step.
    “When I was in the bank, my intuition kept pulling me up here, and when I crested the hill, I saw the bulldozer about to run over the graves of four young girls.”
    Robinson, Perez, and the driver looked down to where I was pointing, which was right in front of me. I could’ve sworn the fourth grave was there, but again I figured it was underneath the dozer’s shovel. “You need to move this thing,” I said, hitting the shovel with the flat of my hand.
    The driver nodded and started to walk toward the cab, but Robinson called to him with, “Hold on a second. Somebody explain to me what the hell this is all about.”
    I moved away from the shovel, past Robinson and Perez, without pausing to explain. When I was clear of the bulldozer, I motioned to the driver to get up into the cab and back the thing up. I figured the explanation would come when I could see the graves more clearly, if they weren’t already smunched level.
    Luckily, the driver seemed to think I might have more authority than Robinson (although why he thought that was anybody’s guess), and he moved up to the truck, hopped in, and started the engine. Perez and Robinson came to stand next to me, and as the bulldozer was very loud, it prevented them from yelling at me.
    We all waited until after the bulldozer had backed up several meters and then the driver cut the engine again and came back down to us. I moved over and stared at the ground. There was a tugging sensation in my gut and I pointed to a section of dirt. “There,” I said.
    “There what?” Robinson asked, his tone low and even with barely veiled fury.
    I directed my answer to Perez. “There are four women buried here,” I said. “Murder victims.”
    Perez looked at me like he thought I was crazy. “Says who?”
    “Says my intuition,” I told him.
    Perez turned to the driver. “You see any dead bodies around?”
    The driver got even more nervous and fidgety. “No, sir! No, I didn’t see anything. I’ve been leveling off the grade here all morning, and I didn’t see nothing.”
    Perez looked from the driver to me, then back again. “You got a hand shovel we could borrow?” he asked.
    “Back at my pickup,” the driver said. “It’ll take me a couple of minutes to get it.”
    “Please do,” I told him. If the only way to convince these clowns was to dig a little into the dirt, then I was willing.
    The driver nodded to me and took off at a slow jog. I was grateful for his help at least.
    Perez’s phone buzzed and he answered it immediately. “Yes, sir,” he said into the phone.