12th of Never

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.”