12th of Never (Womens Murder Club 12) (21 page)

Joe and I both put out our arms.

“You two, flip a coin,” the nurse said with a smile.

Joe stood up, took Julie from the nurse, thanked her, and handed our baby to me.

Oh, my God. I almost swooned again at the smell of her, at the sight of her sweet face.

Julie
couldn’t
die. She just couldn’t die.

I HELD JULIE and tried not to crush her with my maternal love. She fussed, and so I cooed and cradled her, pushed her dark curls back from her face. Her skin was warm but not overheated. She opened her beautiful dark eyes and looked at me.

I don’t know how much a four-week-old baby can sense, but I didn’t want her to know how scared I was. How scared we were.

I said, “Hi, sweetie. How’s my girl?” “I want a second opinion,” said Joe.

“What do you mean, Joe? We shouldn’t do the chemo?”

“I want someone else to see her, to do the tests again, see if we get the same results.”

“But that could waste valuable time. Maybe that loss of time would just tilt the odds from fifty–fifty to sixty–forty against her. I
like
Dr. Dwy. I
like
this hospital.”

Joe said, “May I hold her?”

I gave the baby to my husband and he held her against his shoulder the way he likes to. He walked around the small room with her, rubbed her back. She closed her eyes and started to breathe rhythmically until she was in a deep sleep.

I thought about my mother’s cancer, what a tenacious bitch it was, and how, despite the chemotherapy, the radiation, the surgery, and my mother’s strong will to live, she had died.

I heard Dr. Dwy in my mind saying, “These acute leukemias move very quickly.”

“I want to take her to Saint Francis,” Joe said. “I’ve done a lot of research. There’s a very highly regarded hem-onc there.”

“A what did you say?”

“Hematologist-oncologist. I want to bring Julie to Mark Sebetic. He’s busy. He’s famous. He’s well guarded by his staff. I’m going to knock down whatever doors I have to. I won’t accept ‘no’ for an answer. I’ll sleep outside his office if that’s what it takes.”

I was torn right down the middle of my heart. I didn’t want Julie to go through the sickness and discomfort of chemotherapy, but I also didn’t want to delay treatment that could save her life.

My husband is older than me, has been uncle to more than a dozen children, and has made life-and-death decisions for other people his entire professional life. But we loved Julie equally. We had to agree on the best course of treatment for our baby.

We had to decide together what was best for her.

CONKLIN TURNED AWAY from the dead man’s partially submerged body and saw Claire Washburn coming toward him in the watery gloom. Her scene kit was in hand and three techs trailed in her wake.

“Hey, cowboy,” she called out. “Where’s your partner?”

Conklin said, “You got me. She’s a mom first these days. I keep getting her voice mail. So what happened, Claire? You ducked out the back door and Dr. Morse doesn’t know you’re missing?”

“If we didn’t have a ten-car smashup on the freeway, he’d be here instead of me. Hey, Charlie,” she said. “How goes it?”

“What I love about this job is that it’s always different. Take a look at that.” Charlie Clapper pointed to the hole in the wall, six feet off the ground, water flowing through it as though it were a fire hose. He said, “Could be that the shot went wild, or could be it was deliberate, so that everyone’s mind would go to the six hundred million gallons of water coming into the tunnel, not to the vic or the shooter.”

“I hope someone’s going to put their finger in the dike,” Claire said, looking at the stream. “Meanwhile, I need to get a look at the DB.”

Conklin stood beside Claire as she photographed the body and the wound. He said, “I think I know this guy.”

“You do? Tell me about it,” she said.

“This English professor came in to see us a couple of weeks ago. He said he’s been having these dreams.”

Claire moved around the body, got another angle on the head wound. “What do you mean, ‘dreams’? I’ve been a little out of the loop since Faye Farmer was boosted from my freezer.”

“This professor had dreams of people being murdered. First time, it was a woman who liked to shop at his local grocery store. He described her down to her toenail polish. Bang, she takes a hit in the ice cream section. Just what he dreamed.”

“So you’re saying this professor sees dead people? But he sees them when they’re alive?”

“Something like that. So a few days after the supermarket hit, the professor comes in again. This time he’s dreamed that a female streetcar driver on the F line took one through the forehead. He described her as blond-haired. Even described advertising inside the car.”

Claire said, “Richie, if you’re waiting to ID this man, let me put your mind at rest. I’m not turning the body in this swamp. Lyle, call Henry, tell him to hurry up with that stretcher.”

“Just turn his face,” Conklin said. “I’ve got to see if this man is the professor.”

“You’ll get your chance later. I’m gonna process this body by the book, and that means back at the office.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“If you must. So the blond-haired streetcar driver was murdered like the professor dreamed?”

“Well, that’s the weird thing. The victim was a streetcar driver. She did take a shot right between the eyes, but she wasn’t blond. She was a black woman, had black hair.”

“So he got it wrong, but at the same time not that wrong,” Claire said.

“Correct,” said Conklin. “Then he came in yesterday with another dream; this time his dream takes place right here. He’s moving along the walkway, then he hears a gunshot. But he tells me he didn’t see anyone get hit. So I say, ‘This isn’t a murder case.’ And he said that if I wasn’t going to help him, he was going to come to the aquarium and see if he could pick the shooter out of the crowd before he pulled the trigger.”

“Maybe he did see the shooter, huh? And that’s why he got shot.”

“From behind?”

“Well, maybe the killer recognized
him
.”

Clapper trudged through the water, past the guys on a tall ladder and under the divers who were inside the tank, pressing something that looked like a piece of neoprene against the hole in the glass.

Charlie held the butt of a gun with his gloved fingertips.

He said, “Inspector, look at this. We found it at the far end of the walkway. It’s drenched, but I can still smell that it’s been fired. This is going to be our murder weapon.”

“Excellent,” said Richie. “Good job.”

“Unless, of course,” Clapper said with a wink, “I’m dreaming.”

CONKLIN SPOKE TO Sheila, who was answering phones at the front desk at the medical examiner’s office.

“I’m expecting Mackie Morales from Homicide. You can send her in when she gets here.”

“If Dr. Washburn says okay.”

“She already did.”

And then Morales appeared at the glass door.

“And here she is,” Conklin said.

He opened the door for Morales, who was looking terrific in tight jeans, a man-tailored shirt, and a fitted camel-hair jacket. Her dark hair was loose and bouncy. She had a very fresh and inviting look about her. An all-American girl by way of Scotland and Mexico. She smelled good, too.

“Did the victim turn out to be Professor Judd?” Morales asked Conklin. She stood close enough for Conklin to see down into her cleavage.

“It’s him,” Conklin said. “If you believe this psychic stuff, then Perry Judd dreamed his own death. He didn’t see the shooter in his dream, because he was shot from behind.”

“I’m on the fence about precognition,” Morales said. “But I believe that Professor Judd believed it.”

“I’m open to other ideas,” Conklin said.

He held the door to the autopsy suite for Morales, then followed her in. Claire was weighing Perry Judd’s liver when they got there.

Once again, Conklin felt the cold shock of guilt. A day ago he had been sitting with Perry Judd upstairs in Interview 2. Now the little guy’s chest was open like a book and his guts were overlapping the rim of a stainless steel bowl.

Morales said, “Dr. Washburn, I’ll run that bullet out to the lab for you. Save some time.”

“It’s in the envelope on the table over there,” Claire said. “Thanks for helping out.”

“Happy to do it,” said Morales. “See you later, Rich.”

Morales left with the semimangled round Claire had taken out of Perry Judd’s skull. Claire said to Conklin, “The shooter was standing three to five feet behind the victim when he fired. There was no stippling around the wound.”

“Can you confirm that the cause of death was the gunshot wound to the back of the head?”

“Yes. I can say that—conditionally,” said Claire. “It’s still off the record until I finish here, in about six hours.”

Conklin nodded at Claire, then went back upstairs to the squad room. He was transferring his notes to the case file when Charlie Clapper called him on his cell phone.

“Here’s something that will make your ears stand up,” Clapper said. “The round fired from the gun matches the one Claire took from Perry Judd’s head, so we definitely have the murder weapon. And I’m not done yet.”

“Go ahead,” Conklin said. Brady appeared out of nowhere and was standing over him, looking frayed and impatient.

“The murder weapon is registered to the victim,” Clapper said.

“What? You’re sure about that?”

“Yes, I am sure. A hundred percent sure.”

“Any prints? Please say yes.”

“Wiped clean.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Conklin ended the call, said to the lieutenant, “Perry Judd was shot dead with his own gun. And no, he didn’t shoot himself in the back of the head. The killer was three to five feet behind him. But it still makes no sense. The professor dreams his own death without knowing it. And then someone shoots him with his own gun.

“What do you make of this, boss?” Conklin said. “Because it seems way off the hook to me.”

“This just came from the aquarium,” Brady said, putting two disks down on Conklin’s desk. “Let’s go to the video.”

CONKLIN SAT AT his computer, screening the surveillance footage from the aquarium.

He was looking for the moment that the professor was shot, and it was hard to see very much. The surveillance camera was old and its focal point was indeterminate. The dark areas of the aquarium were lit with pin lights that burned hot spots in the video and made the unlit areas seem even darker.

Conklin skimmed the footage, running it forward and back, looking for the professor. Then he saw him.

Professor Judd was on the walkway, wearing a herring-bone jacket and khakis—the same outfit Conklin had seen on the DB. Judd was gazing around in all directions, probably looking for a shooter or someone he had seen in his dream. He touched the bulge at the back of his waistband, as though he were assuring himself that his gun was there. In every way, he was doing just what he had told Rich he was planning to do.

One minute he was walking alone, then a moment later, he was eclipsed by a group of people who were walking faster than he was, and they were closing in on him. As the group encompassed him, Judd suddenly jerked, stiffened, and fell facedown on the walkway.

Some people in the crowd stopped to see the fallen body, but within a few seconds the walkway was emptied of living people.

Conklin backed up the video, pushed in on the shooting, added fill light. Then he scrutinized the people who were around Perry Judd when he dropped.

He printed out fuzzy stills of the bystanders: an elderly man and a young boy who could be his grandson, three teenage girls, hands to their mouths, probably shrieking. And there was a slim guy in jeans, a dark blue Windbreaker, and a baseball cap, walking behind the others.

Conklin backed the video up another thirty seconds, to the point where the professor entered the field of view, hands in his pants pockets, turning his head from side to side as he glided forward on the walkway. Then the group of tourists that had been moving faster than the professor surrounded him—and Rich saw the guy in the cap join the group.

Conklin stopped the video and let it feed forward a frame at a time. He watched the ball-cap guy bump into the professor and snake his hand under the back of the professor’s herringbone jacket. It was a classic pickpocket maneuver called dipping. Then the guy in the cap lifted his hand and aimed the gun that he had removed from the back of Judd’s pants.

Conklin saw the flare as the ball-cap guy fired on Professor Judd.

The professor jerked, fell. Then the guy in the cap raised the muzzle and fired again. This time the bullet went into the Plexiglas wall.

It was clearly a diversion.

Water spouted. People glanced at the body, turned away, sprinted up the walkway.

Conklin pressed the forward button and watched the jerky image of the man in the cap. The assailant never looked up, never looked at the camera. After he threw his two shots, he disappeared into the shadows at the end of the walk. He had probably wiped and ditched the gun there, but that was a supposition. And while Conklin was sure that the ball-cap guy was the killer, he hadn’t seen the man’s face.

Conklin ejected the disk from the DVD drawer and slipped in the second disk, which had been shot by a camera at the aquarium’s entrance.

This time he knew whom he was looking for.

Another hour went by as Conklin scanned the video and found the images of the guy with the cap, a guy who was starting to look familiar. He watched him go past the security guard, hold out his ticket to be punched, and enter the dark hole that was the entrance to the exhibit.

The shooter was a pro. He had kept his face hidden at all times. Conklin had no image to compare with those of known criminals.

So the questions remained. Who was the guy in the ball cap? How had he known that the professor was carrying a weapon at the back of his trousers? Why had he targeted the professor? And had he killed the two women the professor had seen in his dreams? If so, how had
that
happened?