by Linda Turner
“Tucker,” she supplied shortly. “Molly Tucker. I’m the cook here at the café.” Refusing to be distracted, she gave him a steely-eyed look that would have had a lesser man shaking in his shoes. “You should be ashamed of yourself for treating that girl that way you did,” she scolded. “She was just trying to help an old lady, and all she got for it was a slap in the face.”
Wound up, she didn’t give him a chance to defend himself, but lit into him like a mother hen protecting her young. And there was nothing Sam could do but take it with good grace. Which wasn’t easy. He could almost feel his partner’s glee at the turn of events. By this time tomorrow, everyone from the lowest rookie to the commissioner would be splitting a gut over the story.
Silently groaning at the thought, he was wondering what it would take to pacify the old lady when Tanner stepped in and drew the line of fire. The minute the old lady paused for a breath, he drawled, “In Sam’s defense, we do encounter our fair share of wackos, Mrs. Tucker. Just last week, Jimmy Hoffa and Jesus Christ both came into the station to file complaints.”
“Jesus Christ!” she sputtered, wide-eyed. “But—”
“He wasn’t happy with the state of the world and wanted us to do something about it,” he continued with a straight face. “Granted, compared to that, Ms. Hart appeared downright normal, but most people don’t walk around claiming they can predict the future, either.”
“But Jennifer’s not like that!” she argued hotly. “She doesn’t talk about being psychic. Why, I didn’t even know she was until the other day when she came back from talking to Detective Kelly.”
Surprised, Sam frowned. “How long have you known Ms. Hart?”
“Six months,” she replied promptly. “She hired me right after she moved to San Antonio from Sandy Bluff.”
“And all this time, she never once predicted the future, even jokingly? Or teased the customers about telling their fortunes?”
Adamant, she shook her head. “No. Never. She’s friendly with the customers, but she’s not one of those people who likes to be the center of attention. I don’t think she would have said anything about her vision at all if she hadn’t been worried sick about that old lady.”
Unless she was trying to establish a story to explain how she had prior knowledge of the robbery, Sam thought cynically. Keeping that thought to himself, he looked past Mrs. Tucker’s shoulder to the café kitchen and baking area. “We’d like to talk to her about that if she’s here,” he said. “I have some questions I need to ask her.”
“Now?” Molly asked, hesitating. “That could be a problem. She wasn’t feeling well earlier and went upstairs to her apartment. She may not feel like seeing anyone tonight. Couldn’t you come back in the morning?”
Turner and Sam both followed her gaze to the exterior metal stairway that led to the apartment over the café. “It’s really important that we talk to her now,” Tanner insisted. “What time did she go upstairs?”
Molly frowned, trying to remember. “Oh, I don’t know. About three hours ago. We had another hour to go before we closed up, and suddenly she turned white as a sheet and said she had to go upstairs and lie down.”
Three hours ago, Sam thought, exchanging a telling look with Tanner. She’d had plenty of time to sneak out and play lookout for whoever robbed Mrs. Elliot. “Have you checked on her lately?” he asked Molly. “Her lights are still on. She must be feeling better or she’d have gone to bed.”
“We’ll just go up and see,” Tanner added easily, heading for the stairs with Sam right behind him. “If she doesn’t feel like talking to us, we’ll come back tomorrow.”
Molly snorted. “I may be forty years older than you, young man, but I still know bull when I hear it. You know you’re going to badger that girl until you get the answers you want, so why don’t you just say so, instead of beating around the bush?”
Fighting a smile at her bluntness, Sam tried to placate her. “We’re only doing our job, ma’am. We’re not going to badger anyone.”
“Then you won’t mind me listening in on your questions,” she concluded triumphantly. Huffing and puffing, she followed them up the stairs.
Short of arresting her for interfering with a police investigation, there was little they could do but grit their teeth and allow her to accompany them. Making room for her on the second-floor landing, Sam graciously motioned for her to take the lead. “After you, Mrs. Tucker.”
Her chin high and her spine ramrod straight, she pounded on the locked door and called loudly, “Jennifer? I’m sorry to disturb you, but Detective Kelly is here with his partner to talk to you. Can we come in?”
For what seemed like a good minute, there wasn’t so much as a whisper of sound from the apartment. Then, in the tense expectant silence, the dead bolt clanged free. A split second later the door was pulled open and Jennifer Hart stood before them.
She’d told him there’d come a time when he’d need to talk to her again, and it galled him to admit that she’d been right. He didn’t like I told you so’s and was prepared to tell her that when he got a good look at her face and the words died on his tongue.
Haunted. He could think of no other way to describe the look in her shadowed eyes. Deep pools of pain in her colorless face, they were the eyes of a tortured soul. And they were latched unblinkingly on him.
“It’s happened, hasn’t it?” she whispered hoarsely. “I felt it the second he grabbed her by the throat.”
His face set, he nodded. “About an hour and a half ago.”
Suddenly remembering her manners, she pulled the door wider and motioned them inside. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to keep you standing outside! It’s just been such a horrible evening. Please...come in.”
She introduced herself to Tanner and was about to get both him and Sam something to drink, but Molly would have none of it. “This isn’t a party, and you’re in no shape to be playing hostess. If anybody wants anything, I’ll get it. You sit down—you’re as white as a ghost.” Clicking her tongue reprovingly, she grabbed an afghan from the end of the couch and draped it around Jennifer’s shoulders as she sank into an easy chair. “You should be in bed. You look like you’re coming down with the flu.”
Ashen, still dressed in the bakery whites she’d worked in that day, she hugged herself and grimaced ruefully. “I wish it was something that simple, Moll, but it’s not. Anyway, I’m not the one who’s hurt.” Her eyes pleading, she turned back to Sam, who had, along with his partner, remained standing at the entrance to the living room. “How is she? Is she going to be okay?” When he hesitated, she blanched. “Oh, God, he killed her, didn’t he?”
“No,” Tanner said quickly. “At least, not that we know of.”
“He roughed her up pretty badly,” Sam added. “An ambulance had to be called to take her to the hospital. We haven’t gotten a report yet on her condition.”
“Oh, God, oh, God! I can’t stand this!” Unable to sit still, she threw off the afghan and jumped to her feet. “I have to go to the hospital and see her.” Flustered, she looked around for her keys. “Where did I put my purse?”
Tears spilling over her thick lashes, she looked small, fragile, breakable. Watching her, Sam felt something shift in the region of his heart, something he would have sworn was as hard as stone and immovable as Gibraltar. He’d always had a weakness for a woman’s tears, but this was different, stronger. He had this crazy need to reach for her, to wipe her cheeks and enfold her in his arms. Just this once.
Then he remembered why he was there, and it wasn’t to give her a hanky and console her.
Stiffening, he bit off a furious curse. He was losing his mind—he had to be! Why else would he be thinking such ridiculous thoughts about a woman who’d had prior knowledge of a vicious robbery? She was a suspect, for God’s sake, who’d greeted him at the door with the announcement that she’d known the crime had already taken place! Just because she could shed a few tears on cue didn’t make her an innocent. This entire act was no
doubt for his benefit, and he’d do well to remember that.
His jaw rigid, he moved to block her path when she suddenly spied her purse on the small table by the front door. “That’ll have to wait,” he said coldly. “Right now we need you to answer some questions for us.”
Confused, she blinked up at him. “Answer some questions? What kind of questions?”
“Where were you between seven-thirty and nine tonight?”
“Right here,” she said, surprised. “Why?”
“Because they think you had something to do with that old lady getting nearly strangled to death!” Molly deducted shrewdly, glaring at the two men. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves! She hasn’t done anything but try to warn you that this was going to happen and you ignored her. Now someone’s been hurt and you want to hang it on Jennifer. How dare you!”
“We’re not accusing Ms. Hart of anything,” Tanner said calmly. “But she did have prior knowledge of the crime, so we have to question her about what she knows. It’s just standard procedure.”
Molly eyed him and Sam as if they’d both just crawled out from under a rock. “I should have shown the two of you the door the second you flashed your badges. She doesn’t have to tell you jack squat, you know. Or even let you speak to her without having a lawyer present. I know—I watch ‘NYPD Blue.’”
Tanner, struggling with a smile, agreed. “You’re absolutely right, ma’am. She can call her lawyer if she’d feel more comfortable. And she can, of course, refuse to talk to us. But the only reason I can think of why she’d do either one of those things is because she has something to hide.”
“If I had something to hide, Detective, I would never have gone to the police in the first place,” Jennifer pointed out coolly. “Now that we’ve got that settled, why don’t you put some coffee on while I answer the detectives’ questions, Molly? I imagine this will take a while.”
Retreating to the kitchen just when things were heating up would have been difficult for anyone, but for Molly, who loved being in the thick of things, it was dam near impossible. She wanted to stay and help defend Jennifer, but she also despised interfering busybodies who didn’t know when to hold their tongues.
Torn, she finally gave in. “Okay, I know when to make myself scarce. But I don’t have to like it!”
She stormed off to the kitchen, grumbling under her breath all the way. If the situation hadn’t been so grim, Jennifer would have laughed. But her eyes were dead serious when she turned back to face her accusers. “Now, gentlemen, please sit down and let’s get this over with. What else did you want to know?”
They each took seats, but they didn’t relax. All business, Sam trapped her in the unyielding hardness of his eyes and began. “You said you’ve been in your apartment all evening. Was the café closed?”
“No. We don’t close until eight, but I felt sick and came upstairs early.”
“And that’s when you claim you knew the robber attacked the old lady in your vision? When you felt sick?”
Her stomach churning at the memory, Jennifer nodded. She could still taste the inexplicable terror that had come out of nowhere to seize her by the throat. One second she’d been perfectly fine, and the next she’d wanted to run for her life and couldn’t say why. “I knew he had to be after her,” she said thickly, “and there was nothing I could do. I didn’t know who she was or where, but I could feel how scared she was, and it literally made me sick to my stomach. I tried to lie down, but I just couldn’t.”
“Did you talk to anyone during that time on the phone?” Tanner asked, jotting notes in a small notepad he’d pulled from the pocket of his jacket. “See anyone who would be willing to confirm that you were in your apartment for the past three hours?”
“No. All my friends know I’m usually working at that time, and Molly was busy downstairs closing up.”
“You claim you’ve had these visions before,” Sam said tersely. “Do you usually get nauseated?”
“Sometimes. It just depends if the scene is a particularly violent one.”
“And when was the last time you were sick like this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a year ago.”
“So of all nights,” he concluded, “you pick tonight, when you’re up here all by yourself, to claim you were sick. And you don’t think that’s odd?”
“It’s not a claim,” she said hotly. “It’s the truth.”
“Is it? The stairs to the apartment are outside the café. instead of inside. You could have left, met with your accomplice to stand guard, then hurried back here with no one being the wiser.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Who is he?” he pressed. “Your boyfriend? Did you have a fight? Is that why you really came to the station the other morning? You had a lovers’ spat and you wanted to get back at him? But you changed your mind, didn’t you? You were with him tonight—”
“No! There’s no one. I was here all evening—”
“If that old lady dies,” he promised silkily, “I’m going to make your life a living hell, Ms. Hart. So if I were you, I’d spend the rest of the night on my knees.” Rising abruptly to his feet, he turned away as if he couldn’t stand the sight of her. “C’mon, Tanner, let’s get the hell out of here.”
Shaken, feeling as if she’d stepped back in time into a nightmare, Jennifer watched them leave and told herself this couldn’t be happening. Not again. When she was eighteen and still living with her grandparents in Sandy Bluff, she’d had a vision of the local mayor embezzling money from the town coffers. Young and idealistic and knowing it was her civic duty, she’d gone to the police. Only to live to regret it.
Six years had passed since then, but it still seemed like yesterday. Her grandparents had supported her decision, but they’d also warned her that people didn’t always want to hear the truth. And oh, how right they’d been! The mayor had always been well liked and respected, and no one had wanted to hear that he was stealing tax money like a common thief. Instead, they’d wanted to lynch the messenger.
Sick to her stomach, she tried to force the old memory back into the past where she’d thought she’d buried it, but it clung like a burr. With no effort whatsoever she could still feel the shock she’d felt when the focus of the investigation had turned on her. She was the oddball in town with few friends, the one whose grandfather had had a running feud with the mayor for the past thirty years. She was mocked and openly accused of lying and became the brunt of more jokes than she cared to remember. And when the mayor left town three years later, taking sixty thousand dollars of the taxpayers’ money with him, she wasn’t vindicated but blamed for not making people believe her when she had the chance.
Never again, she’d sworn. Never again would she open herself up to that kind of humiliation. The police didn’t want or need her help, and she didn’t care what kind of vision she had, she was keeping it to herself and minding her own business. It might be the coward’s way out, but she’d rather be called a coward than a liar.
Or so she’d thought until she’d had the vision of that poor old woman being choked by a fiend.
Shivering, she hugged herself and knew in her heart she’d had no choice but to go to the police. The road to hell might be paved with good intentions, but she never would have been able to live with herself if she’d kept the vision to herself. If Sam Kelly had a problem with that, that was his tough luck. He was just looking for someone to blame. Because he had to know that if he’d taken her warning seriously and done something, no one would have gotten hurt. As it was, an innocent person was in the hospital fighting for her life, and only God knew if she was going to make it.
The robbery made headlines the next morning and was the main topic of conversation for most of the day. Not only was the victim, Mrs. Agatha Elliot, one of an increasing number of senior citizens targeted by the lowlifes of the city, she was also the matriarch of one of the oldest families in the city. If she, with all her money, could be attacked and robbed in her own ho
me, a newspaper columnist speculated, then the rest of the city’s elderly population didn’t stand a chance.
Winding her way through the café’s tables refilling iced tea glasses and coffee mugs as the lunch crowd began to thin, Jennifer unabashedly eavesdropped as customers repeated the latest conflicting gossip about Mrs. Elliot. Someone said she had brain damage from the near strangulation and didn’t remember her own name, while at another table a bank teller confided to her companion that old lady Elliot was as sharp as a tack and had identified her attacker as the son of her gardener. On the radio her condition was reported as critical, on the TV as greatly improved. One gossip had her planning her next big charity event, while according to another, she had one foot in the grave.
Forcing a smile as she chatted with customers, Jennifer tried to convince herself that the old woman was fine. Mrs. Elliot wasn’t her responsibility and she’d done all for her that she could. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that something wasn’t right. By two in the afternoon, she knew the feeling wasn’t going to go away until she saw the woman for herself. Untying her apron, she went to the back of the café to find Molly, who was taking her lunch break.
“This is a joke, isn’t it?” her friend said when she told her where she was going. “You can’t be serious!”
“The papers said she’s at the Methodist. I won’t be gone long. Just an hour or so. Rosa will be in soon to help you if things get busy before I get back—”
“It’s not me I’m worried about,” Molly retorted. “For God’s sake, Jennifer, the police were here last night! That Detective Kelly was just itching to arrest you. What do you think he’s going to say when he hears you went looking for the same woman he thinks you robbed?”
“How will he know?” she argued. “I’m not going to stay the rest of the day with her—just make sure she’s okay. It’ll take all of five minutes. What can it hurt?”
Molly could think of a whole lot of ways it could hurt, but Jennifer had made up her mind. Promising her friend she’d be back before she knew it, Jennifer grabbed a jacket and rushed out the back door to where she kept her grandfather’s old 1968 Jeepster behind the building. Seconds later she was headed for the Methodist Hospital.