Conklin was a patient guy, but there were eleven open case files on his desk, all of them pressing, and Perry Judd was a waste of time.
Conklin said to the professor, “You said you teach writing. You’re also a creative writer, right?”
“I write poetry.”
“Okay. So I have to ask you—no offense—but did this murder actually happen? Because we have had no reports of any kind of homicide at any supermarket last night.”
“I thought I had said I dreamed it last night. It hasn’t happened yet,” said Perry Judd. “But it will happen. Have you read Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre?”
Conklin tossed his pen onto the table, pushed back his chair, and stood up.
He said, “Thanks for your time, Professor. We’ll call you if we need to talk with you again.”
There was a knock on the mirrored glass.
Conklin got up, stepped outside the room.
MacKenzie Morales, the squad’s extremely attractive summer intern, looked up at him and said, “Rich, could I talk to Dr. Judd for a minute? I think I can get to the bottom of this.”
Chapter 9
MACKENZIE MORALES, A.K.A. Mackie, was twenty-six, the single mother of a three-year-old boy. More to the point, she was smart, going for her PhD in psychology. She was working in the homicide squad for no pay, but she was getting credit and doing research for her dissertation on criminal psychopathy.
Conklin was finished with Perry Judd, but what the hell. If Morales wanted a shot at making sense out of crap, okay—even though it was still a waste of time.
Morales took a chair next to Dr. Judd and introduced herself as Homicide’s special assistant without saying she was answering phones and making Xerox copies. She shook Judd’s hand.
“Do I know you?” Professor Judd asked Morales.
“Very doubtful. I was going through the hallway,” she said, pointing to the glass, “and I heard you mention Sartre’s novel—”
“Nausea.”
“Oh, my God, I love that book,” Morales said. “I’m a psych major, and the protagonist in Nausea is the very embodiment of depersonalization disorder, not that they called it that back then.”
“Depersonalization. Exactly,” said the professor. He seemed delighted. “Separation from self. That’s what this dream was like. If it was a dream. The imagery was so vivid, it was as if I were having an out-of-body experience. I watched a woman die. I had no feelings about it. No horror. No fear. And yet I know that this dream is prescient, that the murder will happen.”
Judd was hitting his stride now, saying intently to Morales, “Do you remember in Nausea when the protagonist says about himself, ‘You plunge into stories without beginning or end: you’d make a terrible witness. But in compensation, one misses nothing, no improbability or story too tall to be believed in cafés’?”
“Are you saying this has happened before?”
“Oh, yes. But I never reported those dreams. Who would believe that I saw a future murder? But I had to report this one or go crazy. Because I think I’ve seen the victim before.”
“Tell me about the victim,” Morales said. “Do you know her name?”
“No. I think I’ve just seen her at Whole Foods.”
Conklin sat back and listened for any changes in the tall story he had heard before. Dr. Judd told Mackie Morales about the woman with the blond hair with roots, the sandals, and the blue-painted toenails choosing a pint of chocolate chip ice cream before she was gunned down—at some time in the future.
“I heard the shots but I didn’t wake up,” said Judd. “This woman put her hand to her chest, then took it away and looked at the blood. She said, ‘What?’
“And then her legs went out from under her and she slid down the door of the freezer, but she was already dead.”
Morales said, “And do you have any idea why she was—I mean, why she will be shot?”
“No, and I don’t think she saw the person who shot her.”
Perry Judd sighed deeply, put his hand on Morales’s arm, spoke to her as though they were alone together in the room.