Flash Point

“Check around with some of the shop owners and residents, find out which street musicians usually hang out around here,” Jack instructed, recalling the statement Sarge had taken from the woman, in which she’d claimed there was music playing on a nearby corner. “Question them, see if anyone remembers seeing or hearing something that seemed odd—even for Halloween.”

“Yes, sir,” the police officer said. “Anything else?”

“No, you’ve got enough to keep you busy for a while. Get back to me or Detective Jerevicious if you find anything.”

“Yes, sir.”

Once the beat cop was gone, Jack walked over to Leon, who had already questioned the woman who had reported the abandoned car with the body and was now conferring with the crime-scene team. “Find out anything new?”

“Not really. Looks like a robbery-homicide. They’re dusting the vehicle for prints now.”

“M.E. give a time of death yet?” Jack asked.

“I asked and she nearly bit my head off. Figured I’d let you charm her and see if she’ll give you an answer.”

Jack strolled over to where the medical examiner was finishing up her preliminary look at the victim. “Nice seeing you last night, Doc. I almost didn’t recognize you in that red number you were wearing.”

“You didn’t look so bad yourself, Callaghan,” Dr. Jordan Winston declared as she checked the vic’s pupils. She flicked off her penlight and motioned for the body to be loaded into the coroner’s van.

“What can you tell me about the vic?” he asked.

“White male, probably late sixties, two gunshot wounds to the heart delivered at close range. Small caliber weapon, probably a .22. I’ll let you know for sure when I get the bullets out.”

The doc was good, Jack thought, because he’d already figured the gun was a .22 himself. “Any idea on the time of death?”

“Based on lividity, my best guess is sometime between eleven o’clock and one o’clock this morning. I’ll be able to narrow it down once I get him back to the lab and run some tests.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

“By the way, Callaghan, I liked your lady friend. Very classy. And smart.”

“Yes, she is,” Jack said, deciding there was little point in denying that Alicia had been his date last night since everyone—including his mother and Alicia herself—had placed them together as a couple. With any luck, last night he had finally got the message across, at least to Alicia, that they weren’t meant for each other.

“She put me onto a sweet little Victorian that’s about to go on the market. If the place is half as good as she says it is, I’ll be giving her a call and making an offer on it.”

“I’m sure Alicia will appreciate your business. You’ll let me know when you can pinpoint the exact time of death on our John Doe?” he asked, eager to change the topic.

She gave him a pointed look, as though she knew exactly what he was doing. “Check with my office this afternoon.”

As Jordan Winston returned to her team, Leon walked over to him. “Any luck on getting an ETD?”

“Piece of cake. I don’t know what your problem is with the lady,” Jack teased, knowing that it had taken him years to establish an easy relationship with Jordan Winston. The lady took a long time to warm up to people and she was still putting Leon through hoops. “She couldn’t have been more cooperative. Maybe you should try changing your cologne.”

“There’s not a damn thing wrong with my cologne. The woman just flat-out doesn’t like me,” Leon fired back, and grumbled something about female doctors who had a thing for blue-eyed men. “So are you going to tell me the time or not?”

“Between 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m.”

“Well, what do you know. According to the captain, Sarge’s psychic came in around midnight,” Leon reminded him.

“Yeah, I know,” Jack replied as he recalled the description given of the woman named Kelly Santos who’d come into the station last night. He knew in his gut that it was the same Kelly Santos who had gone to school with his kid sister Meredith—the same teenage girl he had rescued from punks in the park years ago. The same girl who had spooked him when she’d announced that he should ditch law school and become a cop if that was what he wanted to do. Since he’d been wrestling with that dilemma for months and hadn’t breathed a word about it to anyone, not even the woman he’d been engaged to marry, he hadn’t known what to make of her. Nor had he known what to make of her telling him that she was sorry, but his fiancée wasn’t going to stand by him. Only months later did he recall that the girl had been dead right on both counts.

“Kind of weird, don’t you think?”

“What’s weird?” Jack asked, pulling his thoughts from the past back to the murder scene at hand.

“You know, that woman claiming to have had a vision of a man being murdered in a car and then a stiff meeting her description turning up dead in a car just like she said.”

Jack shrugged. “I guess so. Strange things happen sometimes.”

“Come on, Jackson. Don’t tell me it hasn’t crossed your mind that the woman knocked the guy off and then came into the station and fed Sarge that line of bull about having some kind of vision to cover her ass.”

While Leon’s comments made perfect sense, the idea of the sad-eyed girl he remembered killing anyone didn’t set well with him. “It’s a possibility,” he conceded. “But if she did kill the man, it seems the smart thing would have been to just keep quiet.”

“Like I said,” Leon began as they headed down the street toward the car. “Maybe she did it to take suspicion off herself.”

“Or maybe she really did see him get offed,” Jack offered.

“Don’t tell me you believe in this psychic shit.”

“I’m trying to keep an open mind,” Jack informed his partner.

They both stopped on the corner, waiting for traffic. “Then try opening your mind to the possibility that the lady might have killed the vic, decided to make up all that crap about a vision to cover her tracks, and to drum up some business for herself at the same time.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about this so-called psychic stuff. Come on, man. You’ve seen how many of them are lined up around the Square. Imagine how many people would be flocking to this Santos woman if word got out she’d predicted a murder.”

“She’s not one of those scam artists,” Jack defended as they crossed the street.

“Hang on a second,” Leon said, catching his arm and stopping them both in the middle of the block. “You telling me you’re buying her story? That you think this Santos dame really did have some kind of vision?”

“I’m not saying any such thing.” Jack jerked his arm free and resumed walking. “All I know is that we’ve got a dead body and a witness who says she saw the murder.”

“In a vision,” Leon reminded him.

“Vision or not, right now she’s the only lead we’ve got,” Jack told him as he unlocked the car. “So I say, let’s go interview our witness.”

But interviewing their witness proved more difficult than he’d anticipated, Jack conceded later that afternoon. The lady had been out when they’d arrived at the Regent Hotel and had yet to return. Not that he and Leon hadn’t been busy. They had. In between calls to the hotel, they had spent the better part of the day chasing down leads in the murder investigation. And so far, they’d come up empty. He told himself it was the reason he was more determined than ever to nail down the interview with Kelly Santos. He hit the redial button on his cell phone.

“Good afternoon, the Regent Hotel.”

“Has Ms. Kelly Santos returned to the hotel yet?” Jack asked.

“One moment, sir,” the operator said. Seconds later, she came back on the line. “Yes, sir. She has. Would you like me to ring her room for you?”

“No, thanks,” Jack said, and ended the call.

“She still out?” Leon asked, some of the frustration they were both feeling echoing in his voice.