Now You See Her Read online

  “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