12th of Never (Womens Murder Club 12) (5 page)

Brady was saying, “You’ve heard of Jeff Kennedy?”

Yuki poured coffee into Brady’s mug.

“Basketball player.”

“He’s a 49er, sweetie. His girlfriend turned up dead in her car, couple miles from his house.”

“Homicide? And you think this Niner is the doer?”

Brady laughed, shook his head. “You’re a tough talker.”

Yuki put her hands on her hips and grinned at him. “It’s been said more than once that I’m one tough cookie.”

Brady took a sip of coffee, put the mug in the sink, put his arms around Yuki, and said, “Kill ‘em in court today, Cookie. I’ll call you later.”

He kissed the center part in her hair and went for the door.

AT NINE THAT morning, Dr. Perry Judd walked through the swinging half door at the entrance to the homicide squad room and demanded the attention of a detective, saying, “I want to report a murder.”

Rich Conklin had walked Dr. Judd back to Interview 2 and had been trying to get a straight story ever since.

Dr. Judd said that he taught English literature at UC Berkeley. He was fifty, had brown hair, a goatee, and small eyeglasses with round frames the size of quarters. His jacket and button-down shirt were blue, and he wore a pair of khakis with a pleated front.

He had seemed to be a solid citizen.

“I was going into Whole Foods on Fourth Street last night,” Judd said. “There was a woman right in front of me and it just happened that I followed her into the store. She said hello to one of the cashiers. I got the feeling she was a regular there.”

The professor then described the woman in extraordinary detail.

“She was blond, about two inches of black roots showing. She was about forty, a ‘squishy’ size ten, wore a white blouse with a ruffled neckline and a necklace. Green beads, glass ones.”

Judd had gone on to say that the woman had been wearing sandals, her toenails painted baby blue.

Then the professor had gone completely off-road. He began quoting from obscure books, and although Conklin seriously tried to get the connection, the guy sounded psycho.

Conklin liked to let a witness lay out the whole story in one piece. That way he could shape and sharpen his followup questions and determine from the answers if the witness was telling the truth or talking crap.

Dr. Judd had stopped talking altogether and was staring into the one-way glass behind Conklin’s back.

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.”

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.

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.”

It was almost impossible to believe that such a bright, vivacious young woman was dead, her promising life just … over. Had someone taken her life? Or had she killed herself?

I kept reading.

The article went on to say that Faye Farmer lived with football great Jeffrey Kennedy, who was not a suspect and was cooperating fully with the police.

I’d watched Jeff Kennedy many times from the stands at Candlestick Park. At twenty-five, he was already the NFL’s best outside linebacker. His defensive skills and movie-star looks had made him an immediate fan favorite, and at a guaranteed thirteen million dollars a year, he was the league’s fifth-highest earner.

Faye Farmer had been photographed with Kennedy frequently over the last couple of years and had been quoted as saying she was going to be married—“to someone.” The way it sounded, she wanted to get married to Kennedy, but he wasn’t at the until-death-do-us-part stage.

I was dying for more information. This was what’s termed a suspicious death, and my mind just cannot rest until a puzzle is solved. Of course, from where I was sitting at the kitchen counter, I had no more information than anyone else who had read the
Chronicle
’s front page this morning.

I was just going to have to tamp down my curiosity and get over it.

I put down the paper, then dressed quickly and quietly. I leashed Martha and went down the stairs, thinking I’d start off slowly, see if I could run a half mile, melt off a little of the twenty-five pounds of baby fat I’d added to my 5-foot-10-inch frame. I’d always been a bit hippy. Now I was a bit hippo.

Not a good thing for a cop.

The sun was still coming up over the skyline when I locked the front door behind me. But as I was about to set out, my attention was caught by a woman who was sitting behind the wheel of a rental car parked at the curb. She spotted me, too, got out of the driver’s seat, and called my name.

I had never met her, never wanted to.

And now she’d waylaid me.

There was no place to go. So I stood my ground.

I DIDN’T KNOW June Freundorfer, but I knew who she was. My eyeballs got small and hard just looking at her in the flesh.

She wore a slim gray custom-tailored suit, had perfect wavy brown hair, and a smile as bright as if she soaked her teeth in Clorox. In brief, she was an attractive forty-five-year-old power babe and she had history with my husband.

Here’s the history.

Agent Freundorfer had been Joe’s partner at the FBI. She was promoted to the FBI’s Washington field office about the same time Joe was hired as deputy director of Homeland Security, also in Washington, DC.

June still lived in DC and until recently, Joe had been flying there regularly to see his government-agency client.

I hadn’t known about June, but a few months ago, while I was pregnant with Julie, a photo of Joe and June appeared in the
Washington Post
’s society page. June was looking up at Joe with twinkling eyes, a flirty look, and they were both in evening wear.

Joe insisted that there was nothing to the photo, just a charity benefit he’d gone to under pressure. He’d caught a flight back to San Francisco that same evening.

Then June called Joe’s cell phone and I picked up. I announced myself, asked a couple of pointed questions, and June admitted that she was involved with Joe, but that Joe really did love me.

I went bug-nuts.

Joe said that June was lying, that she was trying to make trouble for us out of jealousy, and I can honestly say she wasn’t just trying, she succeeded.

I threw Joe out of the house and changed the locks. He slept in his car, which he parked outside the apartment, just about where June’s car was parked now.

It took a while for me to believe in Joe again, but I love him and I had to trust him. And I totally do.