12th of Never

my left, Brady was lifting the barrier tape for the mayor, then both of them came toward us.
    “Brief the lieutenant, will you?” I said to Conklin. “I’ve got to call home.”

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.”

Chapter 51
    ONCE AGAIN, CONKLIN and I were closeted in an interview room with the little professor and his gigantic ego. Professor Judd had predicted a second murder and he could not be happier with himself.
    Right then, he was drawing a diagram on a pad of paper.
    “Clairvoyance means ‘clear seeing,’” Judd said. “There are several forms of clairvoyance—for instance, telepathy. With telepathy, a person reads another person’s thoughts. Remote viewing is when you can see what someone else sees, as they are seeing it.”
    Judd drew circles and arrows to illustrate what he knew about extrasensory perception. If he really was clairvoyant, I had to say it was an impressive talent. Still, he didn’t seem to care that another person had died. And that his “talent” was useless unless it led to catching a killer.
    “I have precognition,” Judd said. “I see events before they happen. Frankly, I don’t yet understand how I suddenly came to have this gift.”
    The professor was musing. He’d gone into his head—a scary, mysterious, and also tedious place to be.
    A good interrogator befriends the subject, flatters him, encourages him to talk, hoping he’ll trap himself in a lie or make a confession.
    But patience was my partner’s forte, not mine.
    I was overtired and in a bad mood. Also, I couldn’t stand this guy.
    I slapped Janet Rice’s photo ID down on the table and said, “Do you know this woman?”
    “Is this the driver who was shot?”
    “Yes. This is our victim. Janet Rice. Married. Two children. Churchgoer. Taxpayer. Home owner. Employee of the city of San Francisco. Friend to many, enemy to none. Do you recognize her?”
    “She’s not the person I envisioned. So … what could this mean?”
    “Have you seen her before?” I asked for the third time.
    “No. Never.”
    “Where were you this morning