“I knew you wouldn’t believe m-me.”
No shit, he started to say, but controlled himself. What in hell was wrong with her? She acted like they had her in a freezer, huddling in that damn coat when it had to be at least seventy-five degrees in here. She wasn’t faking, though; even her lips were blue.
He frowned and left the room without explanation. Aquino was just coming back with the coffee. “Something’s going on with her,” Ritenour said to his partner. “She’s freezing cold. I’m beginning to think we might have to get the medics to treat her for hypothermia.” He was only half-joking.
“Shit.” A medical condition would bring the questioning to a halt. Of course, all she had to do was ask to see a lawyer and they wouldn’t be able to ask her any more questions unless the lawyer was present, but for some reason she hadn’t done that. “Maybe the coffee will warm her up.”
They reentered the room. She was sitting exactly as Ritenour had left her. Aquino put the coffee down in front of her. She tried to lift the cup, but her hands were shaking so violently the hot liquid slopped over on her fingers.
“We got any drinking straws around here?” Ritenour muttered. Aquino shrugged. They both watched as she wrapped her hands around the polystyrene cup and leaned forward, awkwardly trying to sip the coffee with the cup still sitting on the table. Aquino was a real hard-ass, but, glancing at him, Ritenour saw that his partner was looking a little concerned.
The coffee seemed to help her a little. After a couple of sips she was able to lift the cup without sloshing the coffee all over her.
Ritenour began again. “Ms. Sweeney, were you aware that Mr. and Mrs. Worth had signed a prenuptial agreement?”
“No,” she said, bewildered. “Why would I be?”
“You’re involved with Mr. Worth. A man’s financial situation would normally be of interest to a woman, especially if she thought he stood to lose half of everything in a divorce.”
“I—We—” Sweeney stammered. “We’ve just begun seeing each other. We haven’t—”
“You’re involved enough that you spent last night with him,” Aquino said. “Money’s the reason behind a lot of things people do.”
“But Candra had agreed to sign the papers.” Sweeney looked up at them. “I knew she wasn’t happy about the settlement because she wanted me to get Richard to increase the amount, so even though I don’t know the exact amount of the settlement, it c-couldn’t have been half of everything he has.”
That at least was logical. She could see them acknowledge the point.
Ritenour rubbed his jaw. He wore an interesting wristwatch, the kind that let you check the local time in Timbuktu, with all sorts of buttons and gadgets. Sweeney stared at it, an idea glimmering.
“What time is it?”
Ritenour glanced at the watch. “Six forty-three.”
“I can prove I’m—” She couldn’t say psychic. She shrank from it herself, and she could tell they automatically rejected anything connected with the word. “You saw what happened with the traffic lights. You saw. And it happens every time. But there’s another way I can show you I . . . know things ahead of time.”
“Yeah? How?” They looked skeptical, but at least they hadn’t rejected the notion out of hand.
“Is there a television here? Jeopardy! will soon be on.”
“So?” Aquino asked.
“So it isn’t a rerun. There’s no way I could already have seen it. Agreed?”
Ritenour shrugged. “Agreed.”
“What if I can tell you everything that’s going to happen before it does?” She drained the last of the coffee. She was still shivering, but at least her teeth had stopped chattering. “Will you at least admit then that there’s a possibility I could have done the painting without having actually been at the scene?”
“You want to demonstrate your ‘psychic abilities,’ huh?”
Her temper flared. She was tired and cold and sick with worry, and almost at the end of her rope. “No, I don’t,” she snapped. “What I want is to go home and go to bed, but I’m afraid when I do, I’ll get up in my sleep and paint something else. I’m tired of dealing with this. If you want to know who killed Candra, you’ll give back that damn painting and let me finish it, maybe tonight.”
They looked at her in silence. Defiantly she stared back. Then Aquino jerked his head toward the door and they left again. Sweeney leaned her head on her hands, wondering how much longer she could hold out.
Aquino and Ritenour stood outside the door. “Whaddaya think?” Aquino asked.
“What will it hurt? Let’s watch Jeopardy!”
“What will that prove? That she’s a good guesser?”
“Like she said, it’ll prove whether or not it’s at least possible she has some psychic ability. I’m not saying I believe in the crap. I’m saying . . . I’m saying this is interesting. We don’t have to accept everything she tells us, but we do need to check it out. It isn’t as if the painting is all we have to go on; the lab’s working on the fiber analysis, and once we have that, we can tell for certain whether or not any of the fibers came from her apartment.”
“So what you’re saying is, you like Jeopardy! and want to watch it.”
Ritenour shrugged. “I’m saying, it won’t hurt anything to let her watch it. Let’s see what she can do.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
The three contestants filed out and took their places, with the voice-over giving their names and places of residence. Alex Trebek came out and announced that all three contestants were newcomers, as a five-time champion had retired on yesterday’s show. “Number three,” Sweeney said, holding another cup of coffee under her nose and inhaling the steam. “She’ll win.”
The two detectives merely glanced at her. They were seated on dilapidated office chairs with pieces of foam padding coming out of the cracked vinyl seats, in a small, messy, dingy room littered with coffee cups and soft drink cans. A coffee machine, candy machine, and soft drink machine took up a lot of space and underlaid the silence with an incessant humming. The television was a thirteen-incher, receiving only off its bunny ears, but the picture and audio were fairly clear.
They weren’t the only three in the room. Cops being a naturally nosy bunch, whoever had a few minutes free found an excuse to see what was going on. Three uniforms and two more suits had joined them. When Aquino growled that this wasn’t a damn circus, one of the suits shrugged and said, “Hey, we like Jeopardy! too.”
Alex read off the categories. “Inventors.”
“Cyrus McCormick,” said Sweeney.
“Little Movies, and the quotation marks mean the word ‘little’ will appear in each answer.”
“Little Women,’” Sweeney said.
“I coulda guessed that,” said a uniformed officer.
“Then why didn’t you?” asked someone else.
“Quiet!” Aquino barked.
“Colleges and Universities.”
“Tulane,” Sweeney said. She gripped the cup tighter. Doing this in her apartment wasn’t the same thing as getting it right this time, when it was important. Maybe she had just been making lucky guesses.
“Business and Industry.”
“Three-M.”
“Math.”
“Prime numbers.”
“And finally, Highways and Byways.”
“I-Ten, and I-Ninety,” said Sweeney, and waited tensely for the first contestant to make her choice.
“Math, for a hundred,” said contestant number one.
Alex read the clue. “These numbers are evenly divisible by only the number one and themselves.”
Number three was hot with the button, ringing in even though the other two were frantically pushing theirs, too. “What are prime numbers,” she said.
Silence fell in the dingy little room in the police station. One by one other choices were made, and each time Sweeney gave the correct answer. Sometimes she barely had time to get the answer out before the clue pop
ped up on-screen, but she always made it. Contestant number three was on a roll; even if she didn’t ring first, she was always ready in case one of the other two stumbled. By the time the first commercial break rolled around, she had twice as much money as the other two combined.
“I think we’ve seen enough,” said Aquino, getting to his feet.
“Maybe you have,” replied one of the other detectives. “I want to see the rest of the show.”
Shakily Sweeney rose and followed Aquino out of the room, with Ritenour right behind her.
“All right.” Aquino growled when they were once again in the interrogation room. “So you can do that. And that thing with the traffic lights. I’m impressed, but I ain’t convinced. Convince me.”
She stared helplessly at him. “Convince you, how? I can barely believe it myself, and I’m living it. I can’t tell you what’s going to happen tomorrow, and I can’t read your mind. I paint in my sleep and I see ghosts—oh, damn,” she finished weakly, seeing those looks they were giving her again. She hadn’t meant to mention the ghosts. There was no way to prove she saw them, because she was the only one who did. If she hadn’t been so tired, she would have had better self-control.
“Ghosts,” repeated Ritenour.
“Forget I said that.”
“Uh-huh. I’m going to forget to eat for the next week, too.”
She wished he hadn’t mentioned eating. She had been trying to ignore her hunger, which was just one more discomfort added on to being cold and exhausted. She made a dismissive gesture. “No one else sees them, so it doesn’t matter. They don’t bother anyone; most of the time they don’t even say hi. Although Elijah Stokes did tell me his sons’ names so I could send a sketch to them.”
“Elijah Stokes.”
“The hot dog vendor who was killed. The other painting. Have you checked on that yet?”
“I’ll see what I can find. Some other precinct probably handled it. Where was he killed?” asked Ritenour.
“I don’t know, but one of his sons could tell you. Their names were ...” She searched her memory. “Daniel . . . no, David. David and Jacob Stokes. They’re both attorneys.”
Ritenour left the room. She leaned back in the uncomfortable chair and closed her eyes, rubbing her forehead where a headache was beginning to form.
“Does anyone else know about that painting?” Aquino asked, and she opened her eyes to find his shrewd gaze on her. “Besides Mr. Stengel.”
“Ste—? Oh, Kai.” She had heard his last name only a couple of times, and most of the time it escaped her.
“What about Mr. Worth? He’s been in your apartment. Has he seen the painting?”
Not mentioning Richard was one thing; lying to a cop was something else entirely.
“Yes,” she said, her voice so weary it was almost inaudible. “He’s known about it from the beginning.”
Aquino’s eyebrows rose. “From the beginning . . . as in several days ago?”
“That’s right.”
“I wonder why he didn’t see fit to mention this to us yesterday.”
“He didn’t want to implicate me. He knew this would happen,” she whispered. “He said that when I finished the painting and we knew who the murderer is, or at least have a description, he would somehow point you in the right direction.”
“Big of him,” said Aquino furiously “I don’t like civilians deciding for me how I should do my job.”
Sweeney slapped her hand down on the table, suddenly as furious as he. “Just what would you have said, Detective, if Richard had come to you and said, ‘Oh, by the way, the woman I’m seeing has some psychic ability and she’s doing a painting of the murder’? Would you have believed him, any more than you believe me?”
He put both hands on the table and leaned toward her, aggressiveness in every line of his burly body. “It isn’t my job to believe everything I’m told.”
“No, but it is your job to recognize the truth when it’s staring you in the face!” She leaned forward, too, bringing her nose as close as possible to his.
To her surprise, he raised his eyebrows. “As far as that goes,” he said mildly, “I’m inclined to believe you.”
Talk about taking the wind out of her sails. Sweeney sat back, feeling herself go flat without the puff of indignation. “You do?”
“You proved the possibility to me,” he said. “I didn’t think you could, but you proved everything you said. Traffic lights turn green, parking spaces open up, and you could make a killing playing Jeopardy! What you did is way beyond the law of averages. So if you can do all that, then ...” He shrugged. “The painting is possible.”
She couldn’t think of anything to say. For a second she thought she might cry, but the urge went away. She was too tired to make the effort.
“Tell me something. Why didn’t you call a lawyer?”
“I would have, if you actually arrested me. I haven’t been arrested, have I?”
“No, but if it hadn’t been for that Jeopardy! thing . . . probably.”
“I would like to make a call, though.”
“You want a lawyer now?”
“No,” she said. “I want to call Richard.”
“I think I’ll place the call myself,” he said.
While they were waiting for Richard, Ritenour returned with a copy of the investigative report on Elijah Stokes’s murder, complete with a diagram of the scene. The clothing description matched that in Sweeney’s painting, as did the head wound, and the body’s location and position. A nineteen-year-old punk had been arrested, and blood splatters matching Elijah Stokes’s blood type had been found on a shirt under the kid’s bed.
The painting was eerily accurate, and there was no way Sweeney could have come by the knowledge other than the way she described.
* * *
Richard didn’t arrive making angry comments and loud demands; he was too smart for that. Nor did he bring in a high-powered lawyer with him, though Sweeney had no doubt he could have one there on a moment’s notice. He was dressed in a suit and tie, which at that hour made her think he must have been with Candra’s parents, making the final arrangements or perhaps even receiving friends who came to offer their condolences.
He shook hands with both detectives, but the entire time his gaze was on Sweeney, and when he saw how she was bundled in her coat, he made no effort to hide his worry. She had stood when she saw him, and now he stepped toward her, unobtrusively opening his suit jacket. When he folded her in his arms, she was wrapped inside the warmth of the garment, her cold hands sliding around to rest on his back at waist level. She buried her face in the curve of his shoulder, so relieved by his warmth and presence, the knowledge she was no longer alone, that she almost sagged against him.
“You should have called,” he murmured.
“And you should have told us about the painting yesterday” Aquino pointed out.
“I would have, if I had thought it would spare her this.”
“Do you verify you saw the painting in progress, days before Mrs. Worth was murdered?”
“Yes. I saw it from the first, when she had completed only two shoes.” He glanced up at the detectives. “I wasn’t at the scene, and you still have what Candra was wearing that night, so you’ll have to tell me if the clothing Sweeney painted was accurate. The dress was black, full-skirted, and the shoes were black pumps with little gold balls set in the heels. Right?”
“Right.”
He had just verified everything she had told them, Sweeney realized. He hadn’t been to her apartment since Candra’s death, so there was no way he could have seen the painting after the murder. What he had just described had been painted prior to the murder. They knew he hadn’t seen the clothing anywhere else.
“Okay, okay,” Aquino said, rubbing his bloodshot eyes. “Unless you two conspired to commit murder, for God only knows what reason, since you have no motive that I’ve been able to find, Ms. Sweeney is clear.”
“What about the painting???
? Richard asked. “Do you want her to finish it?” She felt his arms tighten around her as he asked the question, and knew he worried about what she went through but couldn’t see any other option.
“By all means,” Ritenour said, after an agreeing nod from Aquino. “The painting is in no way admissible as evidence, but we do have some trace evidence that would provide the link, if we can identify the guy.”
“What if neither of us recognizes him?” Sweeney asked.
“With a good physical description, we should be able to match him to the surveillance tape, which shows the date and time. By matching the time to the guard’s signature log, we’d have him cold.”
Richard looked thoughtful. “I might recognize someone, if I saw the tape.”
“We didn’t,” Aquino said. “We’ve managed to get photos of most of the guys on the list—”
“What list?” asked Sweeney.
They ignored her. “—but the guard didn’t recognize any of them, and we couldn’t match any of them to the tape. We’re still tracking down the people who did register as visitors, but so far they’ve all checked out.”
“The painting’s our best bet right now,” Ritenour said.
Richard nodded. “I’ll stay with her tonight. I don’t want her to be alone. Kai has probably spread the news about the painting all over town, and whoever killed Candra could already know about it. Not only that, I can call you immediately if she finishes the face.”
Something in Richard’s voice must have alerted the detectives. “Mr. Worth,” said Aquino, “if you’re thinking about any heroics, I have to tell you I don’t think that’s such a good idea. If by any chance Ms. Sweeney should be in any danger, you should concentrate on getting her to safety and leaving the apprehension of a criminal to us.”
“Taking care of her is my prime consideration,” said Richard, and Sweeney wondered if they noticed he hadn’t necessarily agreed with them.
* * *
Edward was driving that night. “We’re taking Ms. Sweeney home.”