Now You See Her Linda Howard(79)

"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 20


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The three contestants filed out and took their their places, with the voice-over giving 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 popped up on-screen, but she always made it. Contestant number three was on a roll; even if she didn't ring first, she was always ready in case one of the other two stumbled. By the time the first commercial break rolled around, she had twice as much money as the other two combined.

"I think we've seen enough," said Aquino, getting to his feet.

"Maybe you have," replied one of the other detectives. "I want to see the rest of the show."