12th of Never (Womens Murder Club 12) (9 page)

The judge told the clerk to strike Goodfriend’s last comment from the record. Then he instructed the jury that the witness’s characterization of Mr. Herman and his further opinion that his life was in danger were not evidence and that the jurors were not to consider it during their deliberations.

Yuki controlled herself, but she was elated. Nicky Gaines nudged her. He was grinning like a jack-o’-lantern. Another point for the prosecution. Hey: Team Yuki was on a roll.

I LEFT BRADY’S office and crossed the fluorescent-lit, twenty-by-thirty-foot bull pen/obstacle course, getting hugs and high fives from cops I’d known for a long time. At the front of the room were two gray metal desks butted head-to-head. One of those desks was mine. The other belonged to my partner.

A cute young woman with dark wavy hair, wearing a white T-shirt and tight jeans, was sitting in my chair. She was in deep conversation with Conklin, who got to his feet when he saw me.

“Boxer,
hey
. Good to see you.”

He gave me a gender-neutral hug, but a good one, and then said, “Meet Mackie Morales, our summer intern. Mackie, my partner, Sergeant Lindsay Boxer.”

Morales got out of my chair and reached out to shake my hand. She said she’d heard so much about me, and then she told Conklin she’d be in the file room.

He said, “Wait, Mackie. I’m going to bring the sergeant up to speed on the Faye Farmer case. Stick around for that.”

“Sure,” I said. “Stay.”

It’s rare to meet someone you like immediately, but I felt good about Mackie Morales. She had an open smile, a good handshake, and apparently Conklin approved of her.

“Thanks,” she said. She pulled a spare chair up to our desks, and I asked Conklin what he had on Faye Farmer.

“I was just on my way to notify her parents. Ask them about my list of her friends, her devotees, and her detractors,” Conklin said. “CSIU is down in the ME’s office now, going over the premises for trace after the body went missing.”

“The
Chronicle
just broke the story online,” Morales told me. “We’ve got phone calls, tweets, e-mail, and our website is swamped.”

Conklin said, “While Mackie runs down the phone leads—”

He never got to finish his sentence. Brady came out of his office, strode toward us, and then loomed over our desks. He said to Conklin, “Remember that weirdo professor, dreamed about a murder?”

“Dr. Perry Judd,” said Morales.

“The woman he described yesterday was gunned down in Whole Foods an hour ago. Same woman, down to the green-bead necklace and the roots growing out of her blond hair. Conklin, you and Boxer check out the scene. Then go pick up the professor. Talk to him again.”

Morales leaned over my shoulder and pulled up the professor’s contact info on my computer while I called Joe.

I didn’t like the sound of his voice when he answered.

“Joe, what’s wrong?”

“It’s going to be okay, honey, but Julie has a little fever.”

My stomach clenched and the blood left my head. I thought I might be sick all over my desk.

“How little is little?”

“It’s a hundred and three. It’s not unusual for a baby to have a fever, so I’m just letting you know. Don’t worry about this. I’ll see you later.”

“Joe, you’ll see me in twenty minutes. I’m leaving now.”

“Lindsay, no. I’ve got her. Everything is under control.”

“How do you know that?”

Conklin said, “Boxer, you okay?”

Joe said, “I’ve seen this before. I looked it up online, and I also put in a call to Dr. Gordon. Please, Lindsay. Let me handle this. I’ll call you if we need you.”

I had to say, “Okay,” and I did. I hung up, and the blood returned to my head. I told Conklin that I was ready, and the two of us headed downstairs to the parking lot behind the ME’s office.

I got into the passenger seat of the squad car and tried to get my mind on my two cases.

But I kept hearing my little girl cry.

BY THE TIME Conklin and I arrived on 4th Street, the CSIU van and half a dozen squad cars had blocked a lane of traffic and run up on the hundred-foot stretch of sidewalk in front of Whole Foods. Morning commuters beat on their horns and shouted out their car windows, but no amount of yelling moved the stalled traffic.

Conklin double-parked and we exited the car into the wall of bystanders who were packed behind the barrier tape, sending a gale of tweets and snapshots out to the Web.

Officer Tom Forcaretta was at the front door. He was new on the force, but appeared to be coping well with the chaos. I signed the log and asked him to tell me what he knew about the crime.

“The shooting happened between seven thirty and seven thirty-five,” he said. “The vic is Harriet Adams, white female, thirty-eight, looks like she took three bullets—right arm, neck, right chest. She was alive, but barely conscious when I got here. She told me her name. That was all. Ambulance took her to Metropolitan but she was DOA.”

“How many witnesses?” I asked.

“Two semiwitnesses. A stock boy and a customer, but neither of them got a look at the shooter. They heard breaking glass and saw the victim go down. Both of them were interviewed and released.”

“And where are the other customers?”

“The ones we could stop from leaving are in the stock-room. A team from Robbery is interviewing them, then releasing them through the rear door.”

“How many customers are we talking about?”

“Too many to count, Sergeant. Over a hundred, prob’ly.”

“And the people who work here? Could be an employee went postal.”

“Yes, ma’am. Employees are in the manager’s office. Bambi Simmons, that’s the manager, said our vic was a regular customer and maybe a pain in the butt. She returned opened cans and so forth.”

“I take it the weapon hasn’t been recovered.”

“No, ma’am.”

“And the surveillance tape?”

“Yes, ma’am. We’ve got it, such as it is.”

Automatic doors slid open and Conklin and I stepped into the thirty-thousand-square-foot crime scene. It wasn’t Columbine, but it was freaking overwhelming, anyway. Crime techs were all over the place, putting down markers, snapping photos. If they didn’t turn up two million unique fingerprints, it would be amazing.

Conklin and I were directed to the far right-hand side of the store, where Charlie Clapper, head of our crime lab, was shooting pictures. He did a double take when he saw me.

“Good God, Lindsay. Aren’t you on leave?”

“I was. This is my welcome-back party.”

“Good to see you, kiddo,” he said. “And here’s what we’ve got for you: a violent death in a humongous haystack. No idea if there’s a needle in here or even what a needle would look like. Did you hear? No witnesses, no weapon, no robbery. Just ‘bang, bang, bang.’ It’s a real who-freakin’-dunit.”

THE DAPPER CHARLIE Clapper was a homicide cop before he became director of forensics, and we were lucky to have him. He was thorough, insightful, and after he pointed out the evidence, he got out of the way.

Now he led us to the frozen-foods section, and Conklin and I got our first look at the primary scene.

Blood spatter, mostly of the arterial kind, had sprayed the contents of the freezer and the doors on both sides of the shattered glass. There was a long smear of blood on the unbroken bottom half of one door, showing where Harriet Adams had slid down after taking those shots.

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.

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 predicted 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?”

“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.”

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.”