Page 28 of The Psychic

“You don’t have to meet with him, you know,” Brandy said as they walked back to Ronnie’s car. “He can’t arrest you or anything.”

“Yeah, but I’ll just be putting off the inevitable. They’re going to want to know how I knew.”

They climbed into the Escape and Ronnie backed out of the drive. Sloan’s black SUV was just pulling out of sight around a corner as they reached the county road.

“How did you know?” asked Brandy.

Ronnie stared straight ahead. “I had a vision.”

“Yeah?” She was trying to sound interested, but she was still reeling from seeing Mel. Ronnie felt much the same way, though she’d been somewhat warned by her visions.

“I saw a woman’s body in a clearing, her wrists … bloody. Head turned away, dirt and ice and rain …”

“You said she was strangled.”

“And marks on her neck … I couldn’t see them today. We were too far away, but I know they’re there. I know that’s what killed her.”

Brandy squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “You are creepy, Ronnie. You know that, right?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“So, she died at the hands of someone, literally.”

Ronnie nodded.

“I just want to cry, but I don’t know that I can for some reason.” She looked out the window, then said, “Sloan Hart. Jesus, what a hard-ass. You sure you’re going to marry him?”

Humor. Good. “I gave that idea up a long time ago. When I’m right, I’m right. But when I’m wrong, I can be way off.”

“You were right this time.” Melancholia flavored her words.

“I thought she might be alive. I thought maybe there was movement.”

“It wasn’t Clint. I’m a broken record, I know, but it wasn’t him. You think I should’ve told Sloan about Hugh?”

“You’ll get your chance.” Brandy would likely be next on Sloan’s acquaintance list. This was a murder investigation, and the authorities would be checking and rechecking everyone connected to Mel.

“What are you going to say?”

“The truth. And they’ll all think I’m lying.”

“Don’t mention Clint, okay? Let me do that.”

“I’m only going to tell him what I know.” What I saw.

At the hospital, Brandy unbuckled her seat belt, then stopped in the act. She looked at Ronnie. “I don’t know if I can go back to work. I can’t think about anything but Mel.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to see if I can cut this short. I’ll call you later,” she said, then shut the car door and walked through the gloom to the brightly lit hospital.

Ronnie took a moment before heading to the police station to meet Sloan. She’d turned her phone off and now picked it up and checked the screen. Six calls. Three from her father. Two from Shana. Maybe she’d made a mistake in exchanging numbers with her. One from Mrs. Langdorf.

She exhaled heavily. Aunt Kat’s advice to not call her father was still good. She couldn’t tell Jonas what was going on without it pushing every one of his buttons over his concern for her career, her life, her psychic ability, not necessarily in that order.

And Shana … ?

It was pretty clear that her interest in Ronnie had to do with her relationship to others: her soon-to-be ex and Sloan Hart, both of which weren’t really anything.

As for Marian Langdorf, Ronnie wasn’t certain she was up to the pressure right now.

There was no good reason to call her back because she wasn’t going to become her private guru, psychic or Rasputin.

She pulled into the station’s front lot, which was where Sloan had parked again.

Great.

Stepping from the Escape, she saw he was already outside his own SUV, turning back to remote lock it.

His hair was a bit windblown and it made her wonder what her own looked like.

She fought the desire to finger-comb her tresses in this rare moment of respite from the rain, knowing he would see.

Let the wind do its worst. She wasn’t here for a fashion contest.

Still, her shoes were still pretty muddy and her clothes felt damp and cold under her raincoat.

“You don’t park in the back,” she observed as he waited for her to walk toward him as he was closer to the front door.

“Back parking lot is a mud pit.” He half smiled.

“You’ve taken Detective Haynes’s position?” she asked.

His brows lifted as he fell in step beside her and then held the front door for her to enter first.

“You know Haynes?”

“A little. I helped Detective Verbena on a case. Detective Haynes was her partner,” she explained.

“Will be again. I’m a temp.”

In the vestibule in front of the glassed-in reception area, Sloan gave Colleen behind the desk a high sign and she nodded, then buzzed them through.

Sloan held the door and Ronnie preceded him into the squad room.

She wasn’t fooled by his gallantry. He was seething beneath his manners, undoubtedly certain she was lying to him.

Her eyes turned toward Detective Verbena’s desk. No one there today. She expected Sloan to be taking over Detective Haynes’s desk, but he took one back a row and invited Ronnie to take the seat across from it.

She sat down on the visitor chair’s edge, facing Sloan, and only then became aware of other officers walking in from the rear of the building. She knew there was an interrogation room down the hall as she’d been there before. Now she almost wished for the privacy.

Sloan asked, “This okay with you?”

“I’d rather be more private.”

He glanced around and she sensed he was feeling much the same. Or, maybe he just wanted to hide the fact that he was interviewing the whack job because he said, “There’s a room down the hall, or … we could go somewhere else.”

“Like where?”

He shook his head. “Coffee shop?”

“You want to go to a coffee shop?”

He leaned a bit closer to her, to where she could see those gray striations in his eyes. She had an almost visceral memory of that day at The Pond. “I want to go somewhere where I can learn what you know. If that somewhere is outside of the station, then—”

“There’s a Starbucks close to my apartment.” She forced herself not to pull back from the charged space between them.

“Where is that?”

She gave him her address and explained where the store was in relation to it.

“I’ll follow you there.” He leaned back, still holding her gaze.

“Okay,” she said around a suddenly dry throat.

She hardly remembered the drive. She spent the trip in a nervous state, vacillating from grief to misery to a kind of suspended fear over being with Sloan.

Entering the coffee shop, she smelled the familiar, faintly burned scent of the grounds and heard the constant pfffssttt of specialty drink preparation. Behind the counter three baristas were busy taking orders and preparing drinks.

“Tom,” one of them called as he placed a large paper cup on the pickup counter and turned back to his next duty. A man with rain-dampened hair and a gray rain jacket scooped up the drink and headed for the door.

Sloan came up behind her. “What’ll you have?”

“I don’t need anything.”

“Latte? Mocha? That pink thing?” He’d pulled out his wallet. “Maybe something to celebrate the season. Peppermint or crème br?lée or—”

“I’m fine.” Was he actually teasing her or just being nice? Considering how he’d treated her earlier, she was wary.

“I’m buying.”

“Okay, then. Black coffee.”

He flicked her a look and then ordered two of the same. Within seconds the barista had poured them each a cup. No waiting.

There was a two-top in the corner, away from the populated tables and chairs.

Even with all the other people in the place, it felt a hell of a lot more intimate than the squad room.

“Thank you,” Ronnie murmured, cradling the warm cup in her still chilled fingers.

In fact her whole body was still chilled.

She wasn’t sure if this was further reaction to the grim scene at the clearing, or the fact that she was so close to Sloan Hart, who’d haunted her thoughts in a way like no other. Silly, but true.

“So, tell me how you knew about the strangled woman we found today.”

“You know how.”

He snorted. “I want to hear you tell me exactly how you knew.”

“You want me to tell you about my vision?”

He leaned back in his chair, the cup in one hand, and opened his arms wide, inviting her to just go ahead.

She blew across her cup, then said, “I saw her. I saw the whole tableau, actually. The dark, wet scene, the shed … and Mel.” She swallowed. “I didn’t know it was my Aunt Kat’s place until today.”

“After you asked me to help you find a missing person.”

“If I’d known yesterday I would have gone without asking for help,” she said, vaguely aware of the barista calling out customer names.

“So, the place just came to you?”

“No, I figured it out.”

“Explain that.” He took a swallow of coffee.

Drawing a breath, she told him about going to the hospital and seeing the watercolor and Brandy saying it was Mel’s work and suddenly knowing the woman in the clearing was Mel and then Aunt Kat calling and telling her the police were already there.

“We haven’t determined that it was death by strangulation,” said Sloan once she’d finished.

“I thought you just said it was.”

“ You said it was strangulation,” he corrected, “but there’s no way you could see that from where you were standing.”

“It will be. There were marks on her neck, weren’t there?”

He didn’t deny it.

“You think I’m involved in this crime somehow, or that I heard about it, or something, but it’s none of those things. I saw it. Call it a vision, a dream, a message from another dimension … hocus-pocus or a sign from the universe. It happens to me sometimes. Kinda runs in my family, actually.”

He didn’t change expression. “You’re all psychics.”

She thought about Aunt Kat … her mother. She shook her head. “It just sometimes happens that I get a message. And I’m not always right.”