James Patterson: 12th of Never

Conklin said, “Dr. Judd. Please go on.”

The professor snapped back to the present, then said to Conklin, “I was thinking about The Stranger . You know, by Camus. You’ve read it, of course.”

Conklin had read The Stranger when he was in high school; as he remembered it, the story was about a murderer who had separated from his feelings. Not like a psychopath who didn’t feel—this killer had feelings, but was detached from them. He watched himself commit senseless murders.

What could this 1940s novel by Camus possibly have to do with a woman shopper at Whole Foods?

“Dr. Judd,” Conklin said. “You said there was a murder?”

“This woman I described went to the frozen-foods section, and I was going there myself to get a spinach soufflé. She reached into the case and pulled out a pint of chocolate chip ice cream. She was turning back when three muffled shots rang out. She was hit in the back first, then she whipped around and was hit twice more in the chest. She was dead by the time she hit the floor.”

“Did you call the police?”

“No. I didn’t think to do it until now.”

“Did you see the shooter?”

“I did not.”

“Were there any other witnesses?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Judd said.

Conklin was a patient guy, but there were eleven open case files on his desk, all of them pressing, and Perry Judd was a waste of time.

Conklin said to the professor, “You said you teach writing. You’re also a creative writer, right?”

“I write poetry.”

“Okay. So I have to ask you—no offense—but did this murder actually happen? Because we have had no reports of any kind of homicide at any supermarket last night.”

“I thought I had said I dreamed it last night. It hasn’t happened yet ,” said Perry Judd. “But it will happen. Have you read Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre?”

Conklin tossed his pen onto the table, pushed back his chair, and stood up.

He said, “Thanks for your time, Professor. We’ll call you if we need to talk with you again.”

There was a knock on the mirrored glass.

Conklin got up, stepped outside the room.

MacKenzie Morales, the squad’s extremely attractive summer intern, looked up at him and said, “Rich, could I talk to Dr. Judd for a minute? I think I can get to the bottom of this.”

Chapter 9

MACKENZIE MORALES, A.K.A. Mackie, was twenty-six, the single mother of a three-year-old boy. More to the point, she was smart, going for her PhD in psychology. She was working in the homicide squad for no pay, but she was getting credit and doing research for her dissertation on criminal psychopathy.

Conklin was finished with Perry Judd, but what the hell. If Morales wanted a shot at making sense out of crap, okay—even though it was still a waste of time.

Morales took a chair next to Dr. Judd and introduced herself as Homicide’s special assistant without saying she was answering phones and making Xerox copies. She shook Judd’s hand.

“Do I know you?” Professor Judd asked Morales.

“Very doubtful. I was going through the hallway,” she said, pointing to the glass, “and I heard you mention Sartre’s novel—”

“ Nausea. ”

“Oh, my God, I love that book,” Morales said. “I’m a psych major, and the protagonist in Nausea is the very embodiment of depersonalization disorder, not that they called it that back then.”

“Depersonalization. Exactly,” said the professor. He seemed delighted. “Separation from self. That’s what this dream was like. If it was a dream. The imagery was so vivid, it was as if I were having an out-of-body experience. I watched a woman die. I had no feelings about it. No horror. No fear. And yet I know that this dream is prescient, that the murder will happen.”

Judd was hitting his stride now, saying intently to Morales, “Do you remember in Nausea when the protagonist says about himself, ‘You plunge into stories without beginning or end: you’d make a terrible witness. But in compensation, one misses nothing, no improbability or story too tall to be believed in cafés’?”

“Are you saying this has happened before?”

“Oh, yes. But I never reported those dreams. Who would believe that I saw a future murder? But I had to report this one or go crazy. Because I think I’ve seen the victim before.”

“Tell me about the victim,” Morales said. “Do you know her name?”

“No. I think I’ve just seen her at Whole Foods.”

Conklin sat back and listened for any changes in the tall story he had heard before. Dr. Judd told Mackie Morales about the woman with the blond hair with roots, the sandals, and the blue-painted toenails choosing a pint of chocolate chip ice cream before she was gunned down—at some time in the future.

“I heard the shots but I didn’t wake up,” said Judd. “This woman put her hand to her chest, then took it away and looked at the blood. She said, ‘What?’

“And then her legs went out from under her and she slid down the door of the freezer, but she was already dead.”

Morales said, “And do you have any idea why she was—I mean, why she will be shot?”

“No, and I don’t think she saw the person who shot her.”

Perry Judd sighed deeply, put his hand on Morales’s arm, spoke to her as though they were alone together in the room.

“Miss Morales, this is what it is like for me, exactly what Sartre wrote in the voice of Antoine Roquentin: ‘I see the future. It is there, poised over the street, hardly more dim than the present. What advantage will accrue from its realization?’ You see? This is how it is for me.”

Conklin was disgusted. This whole story was about Dr. Judd. He was a flaming narcissist, a diagnosis that didn’t require a degree in psychology to make.

Conklin said, “What’s the address of the store?”

Dr. Judd gave the address in SoMa, only a few blocks away from the Hall, definitely a case for Southern District—if the murder ever really happened, or would happen.

For the second time in ten minutes, Conklin thanked Dr. Judd and told him that if they needed to speak with him again, they’d be in touch.

“He’s a hard-core nutcase, right?” Conklin said to Morales when Perry Judd had left the squad room.

“Yep. He’s delusional. Could be he’s crazy enough to kill someone, though.”

Conklin thought Morales made a fair point. But if Judd was getting ready to kill someone, there was no way to stop him. You can’t lock someone up for having a dream.

Chapter 10

MERCIFULLY, JOE AND the baby were both sleeping. In the same room. In the same bed. At the same time. It was unbelievable, but true.

I filled Martha’s bowl with yummy kibble and brought in the morning paper from the hall.

The headline read: FAYE FARMER DEAD AT 27.

I didn’t stop to make coffee, just spread the paper out over the kitchen counter. The shocking story had been written by my great friend Cindy Thomas, charter member of the Women’s Murder Club, engaged to marry my partner, Rich Conklin, and a bulldog of a reporter.

Unrelenting tenacity can be an annoying trait in a friend, but it had made Cindy a successful crime reporter with a huge future. Her story on Faye Farmer had shot past the second section of the paper and was on the front page above the fold.

Cindy had written, “Fashion designer Faye Farmer, 27, known for her red-carpet styling and must-have wear for the young and famous, was found dead in her car last night on 29th Street and Noe.

“Captain Warren Jacobi has told the Chronicle that Ms. Farmer had been the victim of a gunshot wound to the head. An autopsy has been scheduled for Tuesday.”