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

“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 Macbeth. No, going back to the Greeks. The Iliad. Cassandra, who prophesied doom, but no one would believe her. It’s like schizophrenia, to have foresight and at the same time to be powerless to prevent tragedy.”

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.’”