Free 12th of Never by James Patterson Page A

to take her temperature. I asked him a lot of questions: Was she hot? How did she look? Did he think maybe a run to the hospital was in order? Joe talked me down, and then I called Brady.
    “You need a senior team on this,” I told him. “We’ll take over again after we interview our person of interest.”
    Once again, Conklin and I bucked the crowd outside the food store on our way to the squad car.
    “What are your thoughts?” I asked my partner as we pulled out and headed east toward Brannan Street.
    “It’s crazy, Lindsay. The scene is exactly what the professor said he dreamed—except for one thing. He dreamed that the victim was shot dead in the store.
    “He didn’t get that right, but he nailed everything else, down to the green glass beads and the blue paint on her toenails. What the hell are we dealing with? A guy reports that he’s going to kill someone—and then he does it?
    “He’s crazy or he’s messing with us, one or the other,” Conklin said. “Right?”
    He leaned on the horn, then switched on the siren. It was as if the traffic were welded into one piece.
    “Right,” I said.

Chapter 28
    I’D LEFT THE house this morning whistling heigh-ho, heigh-ho. Three hours, a sick baby, and one bad crime scene later, Conklin and I were sitting across the table from the squirrelly Professor Judd.
    My mind was only half in the moment. I opened my phone and put it on the table, staring at it as if staring would make it ring. While we waited for coffee, Conklin warmed up our person of interest with softball small talk.
    Judd was at ease, blathering to Conklin about a book he was reading. He didn’t seem surprised or alarmed or even aware that he was in our interrogation room because he had predicted a murder twenty-four hours before it had happened.
    I tried to picture this neat and bookish man as a killer, and it didn’t quite compute. Mackie brought coffee and left the room, stationing herself behind the one-way glass.
    “We need to go over a couple of things, Professor,” Conklin said. Have I said that Conklin has mastered the art of being the “good cop”? Most of the time, being sweet and a good listener gets suspects to tell him the truth. If sweetness doesn’t do the trick, he’s got me.
    “Sure,” said Perry Judd. “How can I help you?”
    “Can you tell us where you were at seven thirty this morning?”
    “Sure. Absolutely. I was in my office. Three of my students missed the second semester final and I was giving them a makeup exam before class. Why do you ask?”
    “And how long did it take them to do the test?” Conklin asked. He sugared his coffee. Gave it a stir.
    “I can tell you exactly because it was a timed test. Forty-five minutes.”
    “Were you in the room the entire time?”
    “Oh, sure. Not that I don’t trust the kids, but if you leave them alone, they’re bound to converse. Another way of saying, ‘They’ll cheat.’”
    “And all three of them will say you were in the room from seven thirty to eight fifteen?” asked Inspector Rich Conklin, the good cop to my bull in the china shop.
    “You bet they will.”
    I butted in, not because my partner wasn’t doing a perfect interrogation. He was. I did it so I could keep my mind in the room, and maybe get this a-hole to confess to premeditated murder.
    “Professor. The woman you described from your dream was shot and killed this morning in the frozen-foods section of Whole Foods. Just like you said. How did you know about the shooting? Or did you make a plan, report it, and then execute it?”
    “She was really shot?”
    Perry Judd seemed to be very pleasantly surprised. In fact, as I watched him, his face brightened from his goatee up to his hairline.
    “Really? You’re saying it actually did happen?”
    I scowled. “Middle-aged white woman, blond hair with dark roots, green beads, sandals, and blue toenail polish. Just the way you described her to my partner yesterday.”
    “Good God. It’s true; it’s