12th of Never

Chapter 28

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.”