12th of Never (Women's Murder Club 12)

An open handbag lay at the edge of a puddle made up of water, blood, and ice cream. The pool had been entirely corrupted by the EMTs’ attempt to save Harriet Adams’s life.

Conklin and I gaped at the number and assortment of footprints, drag marks, handprints, and gurney-wheel tracks running in and out of the pool.

“Textbook example of EMTs—evidence-mangling technicians—at work,” Clapper said. “Unless there’s a signed death threat in the victim’s handbag, we’ll never solve the case out of this.”

Conklin said to Clapper, “You have a picture of the victim?”

“The hospital just sent it,” he said. He pulled up a photo on his mobile phone. I took a look.

Harriet Adams was on a metal table with a sheet pulled up to her chin.

Conklin asked Clapper, “Can you make a call? Find out what she was wearing? Find out if she wore toenail polish?”

“I’ll be back,” I said.

I called Joe from the soup-and-nuts aisle. He said Julie was sleeping. He didn’t want to wake her to take her temperature. I asked him a lot of questions: Was she hot? How did she look? Did he think maybe a run to the hospital was in order? Joe talked me down, and then I called Brady.

“You need a senior team on this,” I told him. “We’ll take over again after we interview our person of interest.”

Once again, Conklin and I bucked the crowd outside the food store on our way to the squad car.

“What are your thoughts?” I asked my partner as we pulled out and headed east toward Brannan Street.

“It’s crazy, Lindsay. The scene is exactly what the professor said he dreamed—except for one thing. He dreamed that the victim was shot dead in the store.

“He didn’t get that right, but he nailed everything else, down to the green glass beads and the blue paint on 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 pred

icted 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?”