her toenails. What the hell are we dealing with? A guy reports that he’s going to kill someone—and then he does it?
“He’s crazy or he’s messing with us, one or the other,” Conklin said. “Right?”
He leaned on the horn, then switched on the siren. It was as if the traffic were welded into one piece.
“Right,” I said.
Chapter 28
I’D LEFT THE house this morning whistling heigh-ho, heigh-ho. Three hours, a sick baby, and one bad crime scene later, Conklin and I were sitting across the table from the squirrelly Professor Judd.
My mind was only half in the moment. I opened my phone and put it on the table, staring at it as if staring would make it ring. While we waited for coffee, Conklin warmed up our person of interest with softball small talk.
Judd was at ease, blathering to Conklin about a book he was reading. He didn’t seem surprised or alarmed or even aware that he was in our interrogation room because he had predicted a murder twenty-four hours before it had happened.
I tried to picture this neat and bookish man as a killer, and it didn’t quite compute. Mackie brought coffee and left the room, stationing herself behind the one-way glass.
“We need to go over a couple of things, Professor,” Conklin said. Have I said that Conklin has mastered the art of being the “good cop”? Most of the time, being sweet and a good listener gets suspects to tell him the truth. If sweetness doesn’t do the trick, he’s got me.
“Sure,” said Perry Judd. “How can I help you?”
“Can you tell us where you were at seven thirty this morning?”
“Sure. Absolutely. I was in my office. Three of my students missed the second semester final and I was giving them a makeup exam before class. Why do you ask?”
“And how long did it take them to do the test?” Conklin asked. He sugared his coffee. Gave it a stir.
“I can tell you exactly because it was a timed test. Forty-five minutes.”
“Were you in the room the entire time?”
“Oh, sure. Not that I don’t trust the kids, but if you leave them alone, they’re bound to converse. Another way of saying, ‘They’ll cheat.’”
“And all three of them will say you were in the room from seven thirty to eight fifteen?” asked Inspector Rich Conklin, the good cop to my bull in the china shop.
“You bet they will.”
I butted in, not because my partner wasn’t doing a perfect interrogation. He was. I did it so I could keep my mind in the room, and maybe get this a-hole to confess to premeditated murder.
“Professor. The woman you described from your dream was shot and killed this morning in the frozen-foods section of Whole Foods. Just like you said. How did you know about the shooting? Or did you make a plan, report it, and then execute it?”
“She was really shot?”
Perry Judd seemed to be very pleasantly surprised. In fact, as I watched him, his face brightened from his goatee up to his hairline.
“Really? You’re saying it actually did happen?”
I scowled. “Middle-aged white woman, blond hair with dark roots, green beads, sandals, and blue toenail polish. Just the way you described her to my partner yesterday.”
“Good God. It’s true; it’s really true.”
“What’s true?”
“It’s in literature going back to
I was worried about my baby. I snapped.
“Professor, what the hell are you talking about?”
“I have precognition,” he said. “I’m clairvoyant. I can see the future.”
Chapter 29
I HUDDLED WITH Brady in the break room and relayed the few facts we had about the late Harriet Adams, who’d picked a bad day to buy ice cream. She was divorced, had no children, had worked at Union Bank as a teller for the last seven years, and lived three blocks from Whole Foods in a one-room apartment on Zoe Street with her live-in boyfriend. The boyfriend was not a beneficiary of her five-thousand-dollar life insurance policy and he had a solid alibi for the time of the shooting.
Harriet Adams didn’t have a rap sheet. She’d never disturbed the peace, jaywalked, or tossed a candy wrapper on the sidewalk. She was clean.
I said, “Conklin is looking at the surveillance tapes taken from the two cameras in Whole Foods. One was trained on the manager’s office, the other on the bank of cash registers. Neither would have picked up the shooting, so if the shooter didn’t go through the checkout line with his gun in hand …”
“And the professor?”
“His alibi checks out. Three kids said he was breathing down their necks at the time of the shooting. Professor Judd says he’s clairvoyant. Maybe he is. But I’ve assigned a team to tail him, anyway.”
I left Brady, went down the fire stairs and out the back of the Hall, then took the breezeway to the ME’s office. The receptionist’s voice came over Claire’s intercom as I passed through her open office door.
“Dr. Washburn? Sergeant Boxer just bulled her way past me.”
Claire was stuffing files into a cardboard box. She had another box on her desk already full of personal items—doodads and her diploma, awards certificates and framed photos.
A picture of the Women’s Murder Club was on top of one of the boxes—Claire, Yuki, and Cindy looking bright and cheery; me, the tallest one in the group, brooding about something or other. As usual.
“What is this?” I said, indicating the packing. “What’s going on?”
“I’ve been benched,” Claire said. “Haven’t you heard?”
She looked awful—scared and mad and like she’d been kicked in the gut. I stretched out my arms and she came from around her desk and we hugged. A long minute later, I dropped into the side chair and Claire went back behind her desk. She put her feet up next to the phone.
All eight buttons on the phone console were blinking.
Claire drew a long sigh, then told me, “The city administrator said, and I quote, ‘You may occupy your office for now, but I’m relieving you of your command.’”
“I didn’t know Carter was in the military.”
“He’s a World War Two buff. That jerk. My access to my computer is blocked. Sheila is taking my calls out front, and it’s just as well. Ninety-nine out of a hundred calls are from the tabloids. And then there are the calls from next of kin wanting to check that their loved ones hadn’t been sold to body shops for spare parts.”
“This is so wrong.”
“When Dr. Morse arrives, I’m supposed to give him administrative assistance until—”
“Dr. Morse?”
“Retired ME from Orange County. Last time he held a scalpel was in 2003. I don’t know if he can even manage the paperwork, let alone the actual job. Anyway. He can have my desk,” Claire said with a sigh, “until we find Faye Farmer’s body.”
“What’s your gut say happened to her?”
“My guts are, like, taking Lombard Street at ninety miles per hour, at night, without headlights—and no brakes, either. So I’m not consulting my gut.
“But listen, Lindsay. I do have an idea who could have had something to do with it.”
