A Grave Prediction (Psychic Eye Mystery) by Victoria Laurie Page A

“We’re at the La Cañada Flintridge target with her right now, but she’s led us to some plot next tothe bank where she says four women were murdered and buried.” There was a pause, then, “Yes, that’s correct sir. That’s what she said.”
    I rolled my eyes. I knew he had to be talking to Rivera, and the way he’d explained the situation made me sound cray-cray. A moment later, Perez handed me his phone and said, “Rivera wants to talk to you.”
    I took the phone and before he could even address me, I said, “Agent Rivera, I’m not wrong. My gut is telling me there are four young women buried here. I believe they were all murder victims.”
    “What evidence do you have to support that?” he asked me.
    “Nothing yet, sir. But the driver of the bulldozer who’s been leveling the grade has gone off to retrieve a shovel from his pickup truck.”
    Rivera sighed. “Is this like your hunch about Grecco yesterday?”
    I knew he was asking me if what I was sensing now was like how I’d sensed Grecco’s hidden wine cellar was behind his fish tank. “It’s a much stronger sense, sir. I
know
these women are buried here and that they were murdered.”
    After a long silent moment in which Rivera was obviously considering what I’d just told him, he said, “Fine. Please hand the phone back to Agent Perez.”
    I did as instructed and Perez listened to Rivera for a minute and didn’t seem to like what his boss told him. He walked off to try to argue, but either he was hung up on or Rivera shut him down quickly. He came back to Robinson and me, wearing an angry expression.
    I turned away from the agents, picked up a stick, and began to mark off where I thought all four graves were. By the time Iwas done, the driver had returned with the shovel. There was an awkward moment where we all looked at one another to see who was going to do the actual digging, and when both agents eyed me, I lifted one heeled shoe and wiggled it at them.
    Perez scowled and grabbed the shovel, handing me his suit coat and rolling up his sleeves before he began to dig. I watched him with bated breath, waiting for that awful moment when his shovel would find flesh and bone, but also dreading it as well.
    He dug steadily for a good fifteen minutes, and removed a fair amount of dirt in that time. Pausing to wipe his brow and look at me, he said, “How far down is she buried?”
    I frowned. Something was again lighting up my intuition, but not in a way that made any sense to me. I felt strongly that we were digging in the right spot, but there was something odd about the ether—something off. “I can’t tell,” I admitted. “She might be down a few feet farther.”
    Perez muttered an expletive under his breath and got back to it. His phone rang again and he stopped to unclip it from his belt, look at the screen, then toss it to Robinson.
    Robinson had been standing off to the side a bit, glowering at me with crossed arms. He seemed really irritated by the whole scene. He caught the phone, though, glanced briefly at the display, then answered it with, “Rivera? It’s Robinson. Perez is still digging. . . . No, sir. Nothing. There’s nothing but dirt.”
    I glared at Robinson.
Oh, ye of little faith,
I thought, turning away from him to focus once again on Perez.
    We all stood around for another ten minutes, and Perez had moved even more dirt by then, but I could tell he was really beginning to tire. Pausing to wipe his brow again, he looked up at me from the hole he’d been steadily digging and said, “There’s nothing here, Cooper.”
    I moved over to stand beside the hole he’d made and put my hands on my hips. Something again felt off and I was now feeling the pressure of the fact that we hadn’t found a body, even though Perez was about six feet down. The truth was that I hadn’t expected Perez to need to dig so deep. It’d initially felt like the girls were only two or three feet under the surface, but now there seemed to be