Never Saw It Coming: (An eSpecial from New American Library) by Linwood Barclay Page A

robe, doing something with it, like it was a mound of clay he was shaping into something. Keisha watched as he took a few steps one way, then the other. It struck her that this was how he formed his thoughts, by making these little journeys around the room.
    “You
are
very clever, I have to give you that,” he said.
    Keisha said nothing. She was starting to get an inkling of what was going on. She should have caught on a little sooner.
    “Very, very clever,” he said, stepping over to one of the living room windows, peering through the slats of the blinds to get a look at the street. This put him off to one side and slightly behind Keisha, and she had to twist around in her chair to see him. “I’d like to apologize. Forget what I just said. Why don’t you carry on, let me hear some more about your
vision
.”
    “Mr. Garfield, I’m not sure—”
    “No, no, please, go on.”
    Keisha put her purse back down on the carpet and rested her hands by her thighs on the seat cushion. “Would you like me start again with the ice, or move on to something else?”
    “Why don’t you just say whatever comes into your head.”
    Keisha had a bad feeling. She’d never dealt with anyone like this before. Garfield was all over the map. At one point, he’d lost interest in what she had to say, then wanted her to leave, and now he seemed to be having a change of heart, asking her to tell him more.
    He didn’t care what she had to say, but he didn’t want her to leave.
    Something was very wrong here. She thought she had it figured out.
    It’s him. He did it.
    It explained everything. Keisha wanted to kick herself for not realizing it sooner. She’d been at this long enough, of course, to know that when a wife was murdered—or went missing—the husband was always a prime suspect. It wasn’t very often people were killed by strangers. They were killed by people they knew. Wives were killed by husbands. Husbands were killed by wives.
    The man had moved away from the window, and was taking a route behind Keisha’s chair. She was going to have to turn around to keep her eye on him.
    “On second thought, sure, tell me about the ice.”
    What threw her off was the televised news conference. She’d figured, first of all, that if the police strongly suspected that Garfield had offed his wife, they’d never have let him go before the cameras. Would they? She had to admit, he was good. Those tears looked real. The way he took his pregnant daughter into his arms to comfort her, that was pretty darn convincing, too.
    Not that it had never occurred to Keisha that the people she preyed upon could be something other than innocent. Guilty people often made the best targets. They could be so eager to prove they were as much in the dark as everyone else that they leapt at the chance to pay to hear what she had to say.
    Telling themselves, I look so innocent. A real murderer would never pay a psychic for help, right?
    Maybe that explained why Garfield, at first, had agreed to listen to her. But something had happened during their conversation. The ground had shifted. He’d grown increasingly anxious. Had she actually hit on something? By accident?
    Was it when she said his wife was cold? When she said something about the car being off the road? Had those comments been close enough to the truth to make Garfield think she actually knew what had happened?
    It was time to bail. Maybe—and she couldn’t believe she was even thinking of this—even give him back his money. Say something like, “You know what? Whatever vision I may have had, it’s gone. I’m not picking up anything. The signals have faded. The flashes, they’re over. So I think the best thing to do would be for me to return your money and I’ll just be on my—”
    But just then, a flash of pink before her eyes. Not a vision this time, though. It was the sash, from the robe.
    And now Garfield was looping it around her neck and drawing it tight.

Thirteen
    Milford police