He sighed. “I’d be stepping in where people are hard at work already. I don’t know that I could find out anything new.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe you could do something. Before somebody else gets killed. That’s just it, Joe. Someone else could die.”
It was strange, but just then Kathryn, their waitress, came by, her eyes wide. “Man, what a night for the bizarre!”
“Why? What happened?” Genevieve asked.
Joe was studying Kathryn with apprehension.
The waitress shook her head. “There’s always one in every crowd, you know? Someone who just has to stick their nose in and make a tragedy worse.”
“What are you talking about?” Joe asked.
“The psychic,” Kathryn said.
“What psychic?” Joe demanded.
“Go look at the television,” Kathryn said disgustedly. “There’s a reporter talking to her right now, actually. Just turn around and you can see. It’s that Robert Kinley, and he’s with some so-called psychic named Lori Star, who claims that some guy named Sam Layman or Latham or something was supposed to die in the accident, and that it was the Poe Killer behind it.”
“How could she know that?” Joe asked, his expression darkening.
Kathryn shrugged. “She said she just knows it. And she says she knows more, too.”
“See?” Genevieve said.
“Oh, please!” Joe said.
“Joe, I’m telling you, it makes sense. That’s why I’m afraid,” Genevieve pressed.
“She is convincing,” Kathryn admitted. “She says that in a few days, someone else will die.”
“A Raven?” Genevieve breathed.
“She didn’t say. Just go watch. All she said was that the Poe Killer will murder someone else.”
Genevieve slipped out of the booth first, but she was quickly followed by Joe.
The woman, who was at the accident scene talking to the well-known anchor, was attractive enough. She just seemed to be slightly…rough around the edges. Her voice was clear, though, and her grammar was good. She didn’t have an identifiable accent.
She also seemed to know how to play to the camera. She was direct and dramatic, without overplaying her cards. “It’s true,” she whispered to the camera, wide-eyed.
“Most people would say that’s impossible,” the anchor told her. There was slight scoffing in his voice. Nothing direct. He was too professional for that.
“It was as if I were there,” the woman said. “As if I were driving.”
“And you said that you felt heat and anger?”
“Yes. It was as if I were someone else, and I could feel that person’s feelings.”
“Were you a man or a woman?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. But as I said before, I do know this. It was the Poe Killer. And I know this, as well. He, or she, intends to kill again—soon.”
“Thank you, Miss Star.” The anchor turned his full attention to the cameras. “Truth or fiction? What’s in store for New York? Well, first things first. The police are busy cleaning up the FDR, and it’s going to be a long ride home for anyone on that highway tonight.”
Another anchor picked up from the studio, and Genevieve turned to look at Joe, but he was already turning away.
“Kathryn, I’ll take another beer, please,” he called.
CHAPTER 3
Before he even opened his eyes, Joe winced.
His head was pounding.
What in the hell had made him drink so damned much beer? He hadn’t even gone for the hard stuff, which he should have. No, he had just started inhaling the beer because of…
The accident.
It was ridiculous. He’d seen lots of accidents. He should have felt good; a little girl had been saved because of him.
But he didn’t feel good.
He felt unnerved.
Because a dead man had spoken to him.
And things hadn’t gotten any better after that.
A psychic. A self-proclaimed psychic solving the whole damned thing while somehow not solving anything at all.
Lori Star? Like hell. She might as well have called herself Moonbeam.
He went ahead and groaned, thinking that voicing his pain might make him feel a little better. It didn’t.
Hell, no. Because he’d awakened thinking.
And all he could think about was the fact that a dead man had spoken to him, and then, as if that hadn’t been bad enough, the news had dragged a damned psychic out of the woodwork. She knew, she just knew, that the driver of the car had been after Sam Latham.
No, they hadn’t dragged her out of anywhere. She’d come forward, claiming to be eager to help the police.
She couldn’t identify the car, of course. Because it was as if she had been the one driving it. She had been in his would-be head as he—or she—went after Sam Latham’s car. And then she’d finished up with the dramatic revelation someone else would be murdered within days.
Later newscasts had delved into the truth about the woman, but too late for him. Genevieve had looked at him with her huge blue imploring eyes. And he’d known right then that he was on the case.