James Patterson - 12th of Never

Chapter 49

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.”

Chapter 50

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.”

Chapter 51

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?”

“She’s not the person I envisioned. So … what could this mean?”

“Have you seen her before?” I asked for the third time.

“No. Never.”

“Where were you this morning between eleven and twelve noon?”

“I told you, Sergeant Boxer. I was in class with thirty students,” Judd said. “We’re reading Anna Karenina .”

Conklin said, “Why do you suppose you saw a blond driver in your dream? I mean, this woman isn’t blond and she has never been blond. You think she was a victim of circumstance? She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”