“I told you, I can’t summon my powers at will. What was in there?”
He got up to go. “Sorry, we’re not releasing that information.” I still can’t fully explain what happened the next morning. My Himalayan, Whitman, was napping on a sunny windowsill when something—a feline nightmare, perhaps—startled him from a sound sleep. He bolted from his perch and knocked a potted plant to the floor, where it shattered on the hard tile. As I was vacuuming up the soil, I heard a loud clattering in the machine that let me know I’d sucked up something metallic. I turned off the vacuum and gave it a vigorous shake to loosen the offending article.
A tiny key bounced onto the floor. From its round, hollow shaft and single notch, I recognized it as the key to a handcuff. Immediately I thought:
Before getting carried away, I looked for a logical explanation. After all, I did own a pair of handcuffs. I went to the closet and opened the box in which they were stored. The handcuffs were there, complete with the accompanying pair of keys. Wherever it had come from, the key in the vacuum cleaner wasn’t mine.
A candle and incense burner on a cabinet in my upstairs bedroom serves as my humble altar. I walked upstairs, placed the mystery key by the candle, and studied it for several minutes. I was wondering if I might be witnessing a case of telekinesis—mind over matter—similar to an incident from the crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261 in January 2000. The daughter of one of the crash victims had made a pact with her father: the one who died first would send a signal that all was well on the other side. After the plane went down in the Pacific, fishermen found Bob Williams’s red-and-gold Masons ring on debris they pulled from the ocean. That the ring was recovered at all seemed miraculous. The fishermen returned the ring to the victim’s daughter, who felt certain it was a signal from her deceased father.
Could this handcuff key be a message from Wendy Woskowicz? Lighting the candle, I said a prayer for her.
I fully expected to hear back from Detective Baxter, and prepared to be called up for duty as a witness in the Wendy Woskowicz murder case. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the next morning’s paper reported that police were considering the possibility of suicide. The idea struck me as ludicrous.
This time it was my turn to drop in unannounced on Baxter, who worked at SDPD headquarters downtown. Having done a lot of business there over the years, I was on a first-name basis with the receptionist. She didn’t hesitate to give me a building pass—a plastic name tag on a cord that I draped around my neck.
I found Baxter talking on the phone in his eighth-floor office. When he hung up I said: “What’s this about suicide? You guys honestly thinking of ruling it that way?”
He ran a hand through his thick silver hair. “Not thinking about it. We already have. How’d you get up here?”
I flashed my pass at him. “May I ask why suicide?”
“Several reasons. One, the victim left a suicide note. Two, she had a history of depression. Three, the autopsy found a whopping 2.1 alcohol level in her bloodstream. Four, the day before she died, she gave her pet pig to her brother and asked him to take care of it. These are the things a person does before committing suicide.”
I took a minute to add it all up. “I’m sorry, I just can’t see a woman handcuffing herself underwater,” I said.
“That’s because you’re not mentally ill.” He kept a straight face but his eyes were laughing. “You’re weird, maybe, but not certifiable.” He motioned me to sit. “Where’d you get that building pass?” he asked as I lowered myself into a nearby chair.
“Oh, this?” I glanced down at the pass around my neck. “I cast a spell and materialized it out of thin air. Since when does a history of psychiatric problems automatically mean a person committed suicide?”
“We’re looking at her overall state of mind. It wasn’t just depression. She was losing a battle with alcoholism too.”
“But I can’t imagine—”
“Of course you can’t. It’s impossible for you or me to imagine doing what she did. But when someone has an extreme death wish, even horrifying suicide methods start to look good. The way they see it, life’s a lot more painful than the brief suffering they’ll go through as they die.”
“Why am I not convinced?”
“Look, if she’d been tied down there with a rope, that would concern me. Tying yourself up is pretty hard to do. But it’s easy to handcuff yourself.”
“That’s weak, Baxter.”
“There were no bruises on her body. No signs of a struggle. And no one in the area saw anything unusual.”
“Of course they didn’t. The newspaper reported her time of death between four-thirty and five that morning. Not a whole lot of people up at that hour. Plus, it’s barely light out.” I thought back to the redness I’d seen on her wrists. “What about the lacerations under her handcuffs? Don’t they indicate a struggle?”
“Sad to say, but it’s likely she changed her mind after it was too late.”
I chewed on that for a while. “Where would a woman living out of her van get handcuffs?”
He shrugged. “Anywhere. They weren’t police quality. More like cheap imitations from a small manufacturer. Maybe she found them at a porn shop, who knows.”
He really was convinced, so much so that it was almost convincing me.
“So, about that leather pouch around her neck,” I said.
“What about it?”
“Did you find a handcuff key inside?”
I’d hit a nerve, because Baxter froze. “So you looked in the pouch when you were down there,” he said.
