Without Foresight

by P. D. Workman

  “Then I don’t want to sit in the back. I’ll sit in the front. And you can take the handcuffs off.”

  The cop rolled her eyes. “Not a chance, Miss Rawlins. Totally against department policies. No one in the front. And no one transported without handcuffs.”

  “Come on. If it was a ride-along, you wouldn’t make me wear handcuffs.”

  “This isn’t a ride-along.”

  “How is it any different? If I’m not under arrest, then I can leave anytime I want to. And I want to now. Take off the handcuffs and I’ll go home.”

  “We still need to take your statement.”

  “I can drive myself to the police station.”

  “You can’t have your car. That is needed for evidence until it has been processed.”

  “Then I’ll walk,” Reg said stubbornly. “Take off the handcuffs.”

  The woman eyed her warily, as if she might throw a tantrum or suddenly break free of the restraints. But Reg didn’t. She wished she could, but she couldn’t. Her powers were strangely restricted, and she wasn’t sure what she could and couldn’t do. She wasn’t about to start experimenting in front of an audience.

  “Just… stay here for now. I’ll try to get things worked out. But we really can’t release you without a statement.”

  “I’m a witness. That’s all. And I didn’t even witness anything except that there was a body on the grass. If you are going to treat me like a suspect, then I’m going to have to call a lawyer, and I’m not going to tell you anything.”

  “Why are you being so difficult?”

  “Why are you treating me like a suspect?”

  “Reg,” the cop’s tone changed to a wheedling note. “Reg, you know I can’t show my friends any favoritism. And I’m already in enough trouble from letting things slide on other investigations. I have to act professionally and go above and beyond the rules or they’re going to think that I’ve intentionally messed something up. So please, just cooperate, come to the police station and make your statement. Then you can go home.”

  Reg wondered what kinds of things the cop had let slide before. Her partner would be watching her closely and making sure she couldn’t get away with anything. And he might just decide that Reg was a criminal trying to get police favors rather than an innocent citizen.

  She looked into the back of the police car. “How long am I going to have to stay here?”

  “I’ll officially hand off the scene as soon as the homicide detectives drag their butts over here, and then we’ll go. No longer than I can help. All right?”

  Reg sighed. “Fine. But you’d better not be jerking me around.” She obediently slid into the seat.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Reg awoke abruptly. She straightened up and hit her head on something solid. She blinked, looking around. She was in a car. In the back seat of a car, and it looked suspiciously like a police cruiser.

  What was she doing in the back of a police car?

  Had she been sleepwalking? She couldn’t even remember leaving the house. Maybe she had been kidnapped. Maybe the witches who had been vandalizing the house and conjuring spells had gotten so bold as to try to remove her from Black Sands by force. Reg didn’t know how. She supposed they could have put something in her coffee or tea to make her sleep and then stepped in once she was unconscious. Though how they would do that with the wards set in the house and in the yard, she had no idea. They shouldn’t have been able to get past them without permission, especially if they had evil intentions.

  Unless Sarah was also involved. She could get past the wards, most of which were her own, without any problem. Reg had allowed her free access at all hours of the night and day, whether she were home or not. There was nothing to keep Sarah from getting into the cottage.

  But Reg didn’t think that anyone had kidnapped her, with or without Sarah’s help. She wouldn’t be sitting in a police car if she had been abducted.

  So what did they have on her?

  Reg peered out the window, trying to make sense of the scene. She saw her own car parked outside of the tall iron gates, and lots of other vehicles around, most of them with flashing lights. It was enough to make her dizzy.

  Something big, then, or there wouldn’t be so many emergency vehicles. And Reg hadn’t been sleepwalking if her car was there. Sleep driving, maybe, but not sleepwalking.

  She had seen the bars of the iron gate before. At first, she couldn’t think of anything but old horror movies, ghostly mansions surrounded by premonitory fences. Fences that would keep the visitors in as well as keeping intruders—or rescuers—out.

  It took a few minutes to realize that she was at the cemetery. Which was not any better than her first thought. She would rather be at a haunted mansion than the cemetery.

  Why had she gone there? Was it because of her dream? She knew she had dreamt about being there, but she hadn’t thought it to be second sight. She had been to the cemetery before, so she assumed that it was a memory. Or a mishmash of memories and dream imagery, all the things that had been stressing her over the past few days.

  “Reg.”

  Reg turned her head toward the voice and saw Jessup through the grille that divided the back seat from the front. She sounded impatient. She was probably the reason Reg had just awakened. Reg tried to rub her head where she had bumped it, to indicate to Jessup that she had been hurt and to give her a bit of a break. At least time to wake up and answer. But she couldn’t raise her hand to her head. Her hands were restrained behind her back and she had lost all feeling in her fingers.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry for being so long. We can go to the police station now.”

  “Uh… okay.”

  “Are you okay? I didn’t think you could sleep back there.”

  “No, you wouldn’t think so, would you?” Reg rubbed her bump against the plastic surrounding the door, where she had clearly bumped her head. She touched the sore part to the window, which was cool and helped to soothe the bruise. “What happened?”

  “Nothing happened. I just had to wait for the homicide detectives. They are here now, so I can take you in and get your statement.”

  “My statement?”

  “About why you were at the cemetery and what you saw.”

  “Oh. Right.” Reg considered. “But I didn’t really see anything. Do you think I could get out of it?”

  “No. They’re not going to give me any latitude on this. I have to do everything by the book. And that means getting statements from everybody at the scene. And that is you.”

  “I’m not feeling very well. Do you think we could do this tomorrow?” By that time, maybe she would be able to remember something of what had happened. Or she would have had some time to think up a pretty good story based on what she could glean from gossip and media.

  “Reg, please. I know you don’t want to do this, but let’s just get it over with. We need to put it to bed.”

  Reg leaned against the side of the door, closing her eyes. “Fine. But I don’t have anything to tell you.”

  “You’re going to have to answer some questions anyway, even if you don’t think you know anything of value.”

  “It isn’t what I think. I know I don’t know anything.”

  Jessup turned around so that she was facing the front again and turned her key in the ignition. Her partner, Devaughn, got into the shotgun seat. He looked over his shoulder at Reg briefly, but said nothing to her.

  Jessup took a direct route to the police station. Reg wouldn’t have minded more of a scenic tour in order to get her story straight. But since she didn’t have anything to work with, it didn’t really matter.

  “Okay,” Jessup shut off the engine and forced cheer into her voice. “Here we are. It will be quick and painless, I promise.”

  Reg knew it wasn’t going to be quick or painless.

  Not one bit.

  She waited until Jessup made her way around to the door and opened it, then struggled out of the seat, putti
ng her feet on the pavement and standing up. Jessup put her hand on Reg’s handcuffs and guided her into the building. Reg was relieved that they did not immediately book her. That was a good sign, anyway. Once Reg was in the interview room, Jessup removed the handcuffs. Reg sat back in an uncomfortable plastic seat and looked around. Not much to see. Walls that had been painted over many times due to the number of people who had spit, vomited, or peed on them. Cheap, difficult-to-damage furniture, anchored to metal loops cemented into the floor. There would be a camera somewhere in the ceiling, along with a microphone to record everything that happened there.

  Not the kind of place that you took someone who was just a witness. Not unless all the other conference rooms were booked.

  But at least Jessup had removed her handcuffs without any prompting.

  “I don’t know anything,” Reg warned again.

  “We just need to know your movements tonight. Can you tell me what you were doing this evening?”

  Reg thought back to what she could remember. “I had a guest. We talked, did some errands, went home, and talked to his brother on the phone. That’s it. I went out to… look for something.”

  “Look for what?” Jessup asked, her pen hovering over her notebook.

  “Uh… I don’t know. That wasn’t important; I just wanted to get out for a while. You know, get my own space.”

  “Because you had a guest.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who is your guest?”

  Reg eyed her. “No one you know.”

  “Not a certain warlock?”

  Corvin. Sheesh. “No. I said it was someone you don’t know.”

  “First and last name, please. We’ll need to cross check.”

  “Uh… no.”

  “Reg. You promised you were going to cooperate.”

  Reg knew she had promised no such thing. She would never promise to help with a police investigation. She would find out what the least she had to say was, and go with that.

  “I don’t think it’s relevant to your investigation.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that. Just give me the information, and we’ll decide what is relevant or not.”

  Reg shook her head. “No one you know. He’s not from around here. He didn’t have anything to do with… what you’re investigating.”

  Reg hoped for a little more guidance in precisely what they were looking for. It was difficult trying to guess. There had been many police vehicles and what looked like an ambulance, so she had to assume that someone had been hurt or even killed. But what did that have to do with her?

  “We’ll come back to this,” Jessup said slowly. She made a note in her notepad. “So you went out to get some space. Where did you go?”

  “I don’t know. Here and there. I wasn’t really going anywhere in particular, just wasting some time.”

  “How long were you out?”

  “I’m not sure. Not long.”

  “Why did you go to the cemetery?”

  “They just… such interesting places. I thought it would keep me occupied for a while, walking around, looking at the tombstones, maybe talking with some ghosts.”

  Jessup’s eyes flickered over to her partner, and she gave a bit of a laugh. “Sure, of course.”

  Her laugh warned Reg not to say anything else about her psychic abilities. Her partner wasn’t part of the paranormal community in Black Sands. That was going to make it a lot harder to provide any kind of statement.

  But Reg advertised services as a psychic. So it would still be in keeping with her role in the community, even if Devaughn didn’t believe in psychic phenomena himself.

  “I do that, you know,” Reg said, emphasizing the point Jessup had just warned her away from. “I’m a medium. I talk to the ghosts of those who have passed on.”

  “Right. As part of your psychic services business. Your entertainment business,” Jessup emphasized.

  Reg shrugged like it didn’t matter. “Some people believe in it.”

  “I’m sure they do. I’m not sure I believe that you just wanted to walk around in a cemetery to blow off some steam. That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  “You’re not a medium.”

  “Why did you go in when you knew the cemetery was closed?”

  “I didn’t know it was closed.”

  “We’ve already been through this, Reg. You parked outside the locked gate. You knew very well that it was closed and locked. You chose to climb over the gate. Why?”

  “I told you. I just wanted to walk around.”

  “Maybe you could walk around a park that was still open. Or you could leave your communing with the dead for another day. Why the closed cemetery?”

  “Best place to go if you’re looking for ghosts. And the best time to reach them is when they are strongest. At night.”

  Jessup tried to stare Reg down, but didn’t succeed. She looked away, consulting her notes again. “What did you see when you got there?”

  “Not a lot. It was getting dark. There was no one else around. I thought I was alone.”

  “You thought you were alone?” Jessup repeated.

  “Yes.” Reg tried to think of what might have happened at the cemetery and what she could tell Jessup that she would believe.

  “I heard something when I was there. Like… footsteps. But I could have been wrong.” She gave a shrug. “You know how I have such an active imagination. Sometimes, the dark plays tricks with you, especially in a place like that. So full of potential.”

  “I’m sure we’ve all had the experience where our imagination got away from us. Describe the footsteps.”

  “Uh… footsteps. What else can I tell you?”

  “Fast or slow? How close? Was it someone big or small? Carrying or dragging something? You must have had some kind of impression.”

  “Uh… no. It just all happened so fast. I didn’t know what to think. It was very… fleeting. Just a sense that someone else was there. Maybe it was the wind or an animal.”

  “Did you call out? Call ‘hello’ to see if there was someone else there?”

  Reg raised her brows. “Would you? No. No way. I wouldn’t call out in a creepy cemetery. I don’t want to run into someone else there in the dark.”

  “I guess not. And then what did you see and hear?”

  “Nothing else, really. It was just like… when you… well, you know how it was…”

  “It was just like it was when we found you?”

  Reg shrugged.

  “Did you know the victim?” Jessup demanded.

  “The victim…?” Reg thought about it. She couldn’t remember anything Jessup was talking about, so she had to be very careful. “It was dark… and I was confused.”

  “You said you didn’t get a good look at him in the dark.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  Jessup nodded to her partner. Devaughn pulled out a small tablet and rested it on the table. Without looking at Reg, he tapped the unlock code into it and pecked at the screen with fat, clumsy fingers. Eventually, he turned it around and showed Reg a picture.

  Then Reg understood what the questioning was all about. A dead man in the cemetery. Not one of the ranks of the buried dead, but lying out in the open under the moon, waiting for someone to find him. And Reg had been that lucky someone. Had the sight been so traumatic that her brain had refused to process anything else, leaving a memory blank? Or was it just coincidental?

  It didn’t seem like wandering into a cemetery on a whim and finding a body was a coincidence. Something had drawn Reg there. Something had called to her, pulled her into the cemetery to find the body. Was it the man’s ghost? A spell? Had someone told her to go there and meet them? She couldn’t imagine that she would have just left Etienne at the cottage and gone off to meet someone in a cemetery. Even if it were someone she knew well, that was just… a bit too spooky for her liking.

  Where was Etienne? Reg assumed that he had not gone with her. That it wasn’t anything to do with him, and she hadn�
��t asked him to accompany her.

  He wouldn’t have been a bad guard, if she had asked him to go with her to ensure her safety. But if she had done that, then where had he gone when the police showed up? Would he just run?

  “I don’t recognize him,” Reg said, after examining the picture closely, trying to glean all the clues from it that she could. She swiped the tablet to look at the next and previous pictures, and Devaughn pulled it back before she could get too far. Only far enough to see the body from a few different angles. But even that was helpful. “I’m sorry. I don’t know him, and I can’t tell you anything else about what happened. It wasn’t anything I was involved in. I just happened to be… the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “You’ve never seen this man before.”

  Reg shook her head. She reviewed the man’s features mentally. Bald crown, aging, twisted fingers, old tattoos. Someone that she would expect to have known if she had seen him before. But then, she wouldn’t have expected half her night to be missing from her memory, either.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t know him. If I’ve ever met him before, I don’t remember it.”

  “He’s pretty distinctive.”

  “I know. And I don’t remember him. I didn’t know him. We just happened to cross paths…”

  “At the end of his life.”

  “Yeah. I can’t help that. It wasn’t planned.”

  “Did someone call you and tell you there was a body in the cemetery? Were you looking for him?”

  “No.”

  “Or looking for a client that had asked you to meet them there?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Reg, help me out. I know there was a reason you went to the cemetery. That isn’t somewhere you just go to on a casual car ride. You don’t go there without a reason.”

  “Well, this time, I did. I just wanted some time and space to myself. It seemed like a good place to get some peace and quiet. I didn’t think anyone would bother me there.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t. What would you have done if we hadn’t shown up?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You find a body on your little walk in the park. What would you have done?”