12th of Never (Womens Murder Club 12) (14 page)

“I had a dream,” he said.

Conklin was rocking on the back legs of his chair. Morales brought coffee for three and left the room. I was pretty sure everyone in the squad was behind the one-way glass. We had a soothsayer in the house who had accurately predicted a fatal shooting.

It was a first for all of us.

I uncapped my coffee container and glanced at the corner of the ceiling to make sure that the camera was recording. Conklin said to the professor, “When did you have the dream?”

“It was with me upon awakening,” said Judd. “It was so real, I thought I truly was on a streetcar. When I say ‘real,’ I mean it was as if I were actually there.”

“So take us through the dream from the top,” I said.

“Certainly. I was on the F line, heading toward the Ferry Building. I go to the Ferry sometimes, on the weekends. But in my dream, if that’s what it was, it was a weekday. There were commuters and tourists, all of us packed in.”

“Morning?” I asked him. “Afternoon?”

“I can’t tell,” said the professor. He squinted as if he were trying to get the scene in focus. “Daylight, anyway. And I recognized the driver. She’s about your age,” he said to me. “A little slimmer than you are. Her hair was blond, but not like yours. She had coarser hair.”

“Have you ever seen her in real life?” Conklin asked.

“Yes. But I don’t know her name. In my vision, she was taking tickets. I was looking at the advertising above the windows. A Geico ad. ‘Save fifteen percent in fifteen minutes.’ I told you it was that real.”

“Go on,” I said.

“I held out my ticket to the driver. She was looking at me—and that’s when I heard a cracking sound. A shot. I saw the blood come from her forehead. I was staring at that hole in her head and her brown eyes were locked on mine. Locked.

“This was something out of this world, Inspectors. To see someone’s eyes just full of life—and then go utterly blank. I couldn’t have made this up. It has to be a premonition. It has to be foresight. I’m telling you, I’ve never had dreams like these.”

“So she was shot dead,” Conklin said. “You’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“What did the shooter look like?” I asked.

“People panicked,” said the professor. “The driver dropped and people jumped back, screaming. The streetcar was stopped and everyone rushed out onto Market.”

“Professor Judd,” I said. “Be there now. Look into the corners of your mind. What did the shooter look like? Male? Female? Old, young? You should have seen someone if you were there.”

“I never saw the person with the gun. I woke up. I was shocked to find myself in my own bed. I thought I had gone to sleep in my chair.”

“And when is this shooting supposed to happen? Today? Tomorrow? This week?”

“I don’t know,” said Professor Judd.

I stepped into the hallway with Conklin and the two of us talked about the professor’s dream. Then I went into the standing-room-only observation room and asked Inspector Paul Chi to join us outside.

Chi is not only smarter than all of us put together but he can also slip almost unseen into a crowd, observe minute details of behavior, put two and two together, and come up with forty-four.

“What do you make of Professor Judd?” I asked him.

“He’s enjoying this too much,” Chi said. “Someone should shadow him. I should go to the SFMTA, see if I can pull up the name and schedule of a thin, blond-haired conductor on the F line. And then I should be her bodyguard.”

“Do it,” I said.

I’VE BEEN MERE yards from the epicenter of a bus bomb. I’ve been a target in a shooting gallery in the ‘hood, and I’ve taken bullets and almost died.

But nothing was as scary or as emotionally devastating as my tiny daughter having a fever of 103.

The second I got home and read the thermometer, I called Julie’s pediatrician and insisted that she be paged, because I wasn’t getting off the phone until I spoke with her.

Dr. Gordon was very patient. She said that Julie’s fever meant that she was fighting an infection—that she could have an earache, for instance—and to give her a lukewarm bath followed by liquid Tylenol every four hours.

I made an appointment to bring Julie in to see the doctor in the morning. Then I sat in the bathtub with my baby in my lap. I desperately wanted to bathe away her fever without letting her know that I was scared out of my freaking mind.

Joe sat on the toilet seat, singing “Oh! Susanna” in the soft, slow way James Taylor recorded it. His singing was like a lullaby, but it didn’t soothe the baby.

She cried. She was limp. I wanted to take her to the hospital right then, but Joe said no.

“It’s too risky. She could pick up a worse infection in the hospital,” he said. “Let’s do what Dr. Gordon said.”

I sponged Julie down with the tepid water and when we were both wrinkled, Joe helped us out of the bath and we took her with us into bed.

Her temperature had dropped to 102. It was a change in the right direction, but still outside my comfort zone. I called Dr. Gordon again and she phoned back at just before ten that night.

“It’s probably nothing. Try not to worry,” she said.

“Right,” I said into the phone.

“If her temperature goes to a hundred and four, take her straight to the emergency room.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll see you in the morning. Try to get some sleep.”

“Thanks, Doctor,” I said.

No one slept at our house except Martha, and we were at the doctor’s office as soon as the doors opened.

Dr. Gordon weighed Julie, examined her, made notes on her chart. The doctor’s expression was so neutral I couldn’t read it, not even between the lines.

“I wish she’d put on a little more weight,” she said.

“She’s been fussy from the beginning,” I said.

“I’m going to draw some blood. Standard procedure,” said the doctor. “Just to get a baseline.”

Joe held Julie as the stick pricked my daughter’s tiny pink heel. Julie howled, of course, and I just hid my face until it was over.

I asked the doctor to tell us everything. “Don’t hold anything back.”

Finally, Dr. Gordon cracked a smile.

“She’s got a fever, but it’s not abnormal. I’ll call you when I get back her blood work. Meanwhile, you should all get some sleep.”

As soon as I hit the sheets, my cell phone rang. I read the caller ID and then told Brady, “Whatever it is has got to wait. I need four hours of sleep. Just four.”

Brady ignored me.

“Boxer, that streetcar driver on the F line?”

“What? Who?”

“Your professor said a streetcar driver was going to be shot, remember?”

“Oh. No. Don’t tell me.”

“We’ve got a female streetcar driver who took a bullet about an hour ago. Right between the eyes. Just like the professor said.”

BY THE TIME I dragged myself to the Ferry Building, at the Embarcadero and Market Street, the perimeter was in place and the building was the backdrop for a messy crime scene made worse by the stationary streetcar and the throttled morning rush.

Of the three lanes of traffic running in each direction, four were stopped cold and the other two were stalled. There is a wide median strip adjacent to the streetcar tracks, a strip of plaza between the northbound and southbound lanes. On any other day, this strip would have been busy with buskers, mimes, cyclists, and skateboarders. Now, in place of all the activity, there were black-and-white cruisers, ambulances, the crime scene mobile unit, and traffic cops.

I parked the Explorer at the edge of the pack of law enforcement vehicles and headed toward the evidence tent that had been set up on the median. I picked out Conklin and Morales, who were talking to Clapper and a stocky guy I didn’t know. He had an authoritative air and tiny little eyes.

He had to be our temporary medical examiner.

Conklin introduced me to Dr. Morse, and I said, “Pleased to meet you.” Then I asked Conklin to give me the details.

“That’s the primary crime scene,” he said, pointing to the 1940s-style green-and-cream-colored trolley.

Conklin said, “The victim is still in there. Her name is Janet Rice, thirty-four, African American, married with two children. She’s been working as a driver for sixteen years.”

“She’s black?”

“She was on her usual route,” Conklin said. “There was a shot fired. She was killed instantly.”

“Tell me we’ve got some witnesses,” I said.

“Someone pulled the door lever and everyone who could get out did. A bystander called nine-one-one. Units are canvassing now.”

I heard my name and turned to see Paul Chi and his partner, Cappy McNeil, coming toward me.

Chi had been bodyguarding a blond streetcar driver and McNeil had been shadowing Professor Judd.

Chi said, “Sergeant, the driver we identified with the blond hair is Tara Moffett. Always works the F line. I’ve been her constant companion for the last week, and Lemke took the second shifts. Ms. Moffett is a hundred percent fine. I’d say she wasn’t the target.”

The sun was beating down. There were sailboats out on the bay. This should have been a beautiful sight, but there were also helicopters overhead, news choppers. If there was anything worse than a shooting, it was a shooting that affected the city’s tourist business.

The video guys in the helicopters were getting phenomenal photos that would play brilliantly on national television. The San Francisco Bay. The bridges. The sailboats on the sun-flecked waves. The streetcar in front of the monumental Ferry Building and the buglike cruisers around the evidence tent.

McNeil said, “I watched the professor night and day. Samuels watched him when I was off duty. Professor Judd couldn’t have taken a shit without our knowing it.”

To my left, Brady was lifting the barrier tape for the mayor, then both of them came toward us.

“Brief the lieutenant, will you?” I said to Conklin. “I’ve got to call home.”

THE INSIDE OF the streetcar was crawling with crime techs in bunny suits and booties, shooting pictures, capturing prints, trying not to fall over one another or step in potential evidence.

I stood on the street, looking through the open folding doors at the front part of the streetcar, especially at the driver’s seat, where Janet Rice had been sitting before she stopped at Market to take on passengers.

A dozen feet away from me, Conklin and Morales were at the doors in the middle of the car, Conklin explaining crime scene procedure even as Claire’s stand-in, Dr. Morse, stood impatiently behind him.

Janet Rice’s body was lying across from Conklin, her head and shoulders wedged between two seats, legs in the aisle, blood pooling under her head and running under the seat behind her.

As Judd described his dream, he had been about to hand his ticket to the driver when she took a shot between the eyes. So if the dream matched reality, the shooter would have been standing behind the professor and would have fired the gun from over his shoulder.

If that was true, Rice’s killer had likely waited for the streetcar to stop. He had climbed aboard, or maybe just stood on the top step. From there, he had a fleeting clear shot at the driver and had taken it. Then, as all eyes went to the victim, he’d stepped back down onto the street and blended into the crowd.

As the ME’s techs struggled to remove the victim, I heard Morales say to Conklin, “I’m going to do my dissertation on this psychic angle. Whether the professor is clairvoyant or not, this case has all the elements of a classic serial killing.”

Conklin nodded and said, “Oh, absolutely.”

I noticed something of a frisky nature in their body language. They were standing hip to hip. Making lots of eye contact. What was going on between those two, exactly? Was this your typical workplace flirtation? Or was it something more?

I didn’t have a chance to chase down this train of thought because to my left, coming from the direction of the Ferry Building, a female voice shouted out, “No, no, nooo.”

I picked her out of the crowd.

A teenage girl in a Catholic school uniform was making a run for the streetcar. Cops grabbed her by the arms before she breached the tape, but they were having a hard time restraining her. She was determined and desperate and she was breaking my heart.

“Mom-ma,” she screamed. “Mom-maaaa.”

ONCE AGAIN, CONKLIN and I were closeted in an interview room with the little professor and his gigantic ego. Professor Judd had predicted a second murder and he could not be happier with himself.

Right then, he was drawing a diagram on a pad of paper.

“Clairvoyance means ‘clear seeing,’” Judd said. “There are several forms of clairvoyance—for instance, telepathy. With telepathy, a person reads another person’s thoughts. Remote viewing is when you can see what someone else sees, as they are seeing it.”

Judd drew circles and arrows to illustrate what he knew about extrasensory perception. If he really was clairvoyant, I had to say it was an impressive talent. Still, he didn’t seem to care that another person had died. And that his “talent” was useless unless it led to catching a killer.

“I have precognition,” Judd said. “I see events before they happen. Frankly, I don’t yet understand how I suddenly came to have this gift.”

The professor was musing. He’d gone into his head—a scary, mysterious, and also tedious place to be.

A good interrogator befriends the subject, flatters him, encourages him to talk, hoping he’ll trap himself in a lie or make a confession.

But patience was my partner’s forte, not mine.

I was overtired and in a bad mood. Also, I couldn’t stand this guy.

I slapped Janet Rice’s photo ID down on the table and said, “Do you know this woman?”

“Is this the driver who was shot?”

“Yes. This is our victim. Janet Rice. Married. Two children. Churchgoer. Taxpayer. Home owner. Employee of the city of San Francisco. Friend to many, enemy to none. Do you recognize her?”