Now You See Her (32 page)

But now where she was going to sleep was a moot question, because it looked as if she wasn't going to be getting any sleep for quite a while. That was assuming her next bed wasn't in a jail cell.

“Here,” she said, going over to the painting. The two detectives ranged themselves slightly behind and on either side of her, in case she tried to do something stupid, like run. She didn't look at them as they studied the painting. She knew exactly what they were seeing, and what they were thinking.

“Ms. Sweeney.” Detective Ritenour's tone was flat. “Would you like to tell us how you knew the details of the murder scene?”

“You won't believe me,” she said helplessly.

“Try us.”

“I didn't.” She stood as still as a small animal with a wolf sniffing at the entrance to its lair. “I painted it in my sleep.”

Fleeting
Yeah, sure
expressions went over their faces. “We'd like you to come down to the precinct with us. This painting will be taken as evidence . . .” Aquino's voice droned on, but Sweeney didn't listen. She tried to beat down the panic that threatened to choke her. They couldn't prove she killed Candra, because she hadn't done it. She tried to hang on to that thought.

“I painted it in my sleep,” she repeated stubbornly. “I walk in my sleep sometimes, and when I wake up, I find that I've painted something. Wait—there's another painting I did, of a hot dog vendor who was killed several days ago. His name was Elijah Stokes. There was a witness who saw a man running away, so I couldn't have had anything to do with that murder.” She hurried to the closet and took out the painting, carefully not looking at the face that had always worn the sweetest expression God had ever put on a human being, and now never would again.

Ritenour took that canvas and grimly examined it. “I'm not familiar with this case,” he said. “We'll have to check it out.”

They didn't believe anything she said. Belatedly she realized she might find herself charged as an accessory in Elijah Stokes's murder, if she didn't manage to do something. She had been deliciously
warm all day, but now a faint chill raced up her back. Automatically she hugged her arms, rubbing them.

“This isn't the only weird thing that's been happening.” They weren't listening, their minds closed off to any explanation she could give except the obvious: she had been at the scenes. Panic congealed into a cold lump and settled in the pit of her stomach. She had to keep trying anyway.

“Please get your shoes and purse,” Detective Aquino requested.

She did, and a coat to go over her sweatshirt, though they gave her disbelieving glances. The high that day had been in the eighties, and the late afternoon was still warm. She couldn't feel any internal heat, though, just the spreading chill of terror. She tried to control it, tried to keep calm, because that was the only way she had of helping herself.

Aquino took her purse and looked through it, then gave it back to her and took her arm.

“Listen to me,” she said in as calm a tone as she could manage. “When we get in the car, pay attention to the traffic signals.”

“We always do,” Ritenour said with heavy irony as they escorted her from the apartment.

“No, I mean to what happens.” She was trembling like a leaf, her breath hitching. “You won't have to stop. The lights will turn green when we get close. They always do for me. And there'll be an empty parking space right in front of the station for you.” She felt as if she were babbling, but she couldn't stop.

“If that's so,” said Aquino politely, “then people would pay you a fortune just to ride around in their cars with them.”

They put her in the backseat of a nondescript sedan. She noticed there weren't any door handles in back, but at least there wasn't a wire cage in front of her. The paintings were placed in the trunk. She forced herself to stillness, imposing a tiny bit of control on a world that was coming apart around her. Had she been officially arrested, or were they just taking her in for questioning? She didn't know the procedure, didn't know what came next. She should probably call a lawyer, she thought, but who she wanted to call was Richard. She needed him. But the cops had already had him in for questioning, and calling him would just drag him back into this mess.

The traffic light at the corner turned green. “Did you see that?” she asked. “It turned green.”

“Yeah, they do that occasionally,” Aquino said sarcastically.

The next one turned green, too. And the next one. Sweeney sat very quietly, not pointing out the obvious again. They would notice every light now.

The traffic cleared from in front of them, cars switching lanes, turning down other streets. The sedan didn't have to slow, but kept a steady pace. As the seventh traffic light turned green at their approach, Ritenour turned in his seat and gave her an unreadable look, but neither he nor Aquino remarked on the phenomenon.

As they drove up to the precinct house, a car
pulled out of a parking space directly in front of the building. She thought Aquino said, “Shit,” under his breath, but she wasn't certain.

The precinct was boiling with humanity. Peeling green paint, metal desks and filing cabinets, shouts and curses and laughter all running together, armed men and women in blue uniforms: Sweeney's impression of all this was a blur. Soon she was sitting in a very uncomfortable chair in a dingy little room, thoughts roiling in her mind, but no bright ideas on how to prove herself popped out of the cauldron.

Chills roughened her skin, and she began shivering. She pulled her coat on and huddled in it. So it was shock, just as Richard thought, her body's reaction to something upsetting. Probably when she painted the scenes she was at least partially protected by sleep, but when she woke up, the reaction hit with a bang.

“Ms. Sweeney, where were you night before last?” Ritenour was staring at her, pale eyes hard, his tone cold.

“At home.” Her teeth chattered. “The weird stuff started happening about a year ago. Little things. Traffic lights changing, the parking spaces, things like that. I didn't notice at first. Like you said, lights turn green all the time. Everyone catches a green light occasionally. And my plants began to bloom out of season.”

“Ms. Sweeney.” Ritenour's voice had gone as hard as his eyes. “Do I look like I care about your plants?”

No, he looked as if he had wanted to add a copulatory adjective in front of “plants.”

She opened her mouth to tell him about the ghosts, then shut it. That wouldn't help her case at all. “I began the painting several days ago; I don't know exactly when. I don't keep track of days. When I woke up, I found I had painted shoes. Two of them, a man's and a woman's. Every morning I'd find s-something new added.” She clamped her teeth together to control their chattering.

“Would you like some coffee?” Aquino asked, and she nodded gratefully. He left the little room. Sweeney looked back to Ritenour.

“After a c-couple of days, I knew I was p-painting a murder scene, but I didn't know who—I hadn't gotten to the f-faces. Yesterday m-morning, when I got up, I saw I had painted C-Candra. I tried to c-call her, to warn her—at the gallery, but no one answered. Her home number is unlisted. S-so I called Richard's office, to get her number, and his assistant told me Candra was d-dead.” She was shaking violently, teeth chattering. Her bones and muscles began to ache. Her hands, resting on the table, had turned a transparent bluish white, as if she had no blood in her body.

“If all that's so, why didn't you tell us about it this morning?” Despite himself, Ritenour was interested. People came forward all the time claiming to have special, prior knowledge of crimes, calling themselves psychic and looking to get their names in the news. In his experience, they were usually the perps. People were weird.

“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.”

C
HAPTER
    T
WENTY

T
he 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.