CHAPTER

26

PETRA WONDERED IF she’d ever feel warm again. She turned the thermostat up to eighty and clicked on the fireplace remote before settling on the hearth to absorb the heat of the gas flames. The doctor had suggested she stay in the hospital longer for observation, but what was the point? Her core body temperature was back to normal, she was rehydrated after drinking too much vodka, and everything was fine. A little brush with death was nothing new to her. Nothing at all.

She’d been stupid. And she felt guilty. The Level I trauma center she’d visited had more pressing things to worry about than a tranquilized, half-drunk woman, who’d been careless enough to wander out in a dangerously cold night to pass out on a park bench. It wouldn’t happen again. When she needed to drink vodka, take lorazepam, and pass out, she would stay home.

She didn’t feel any different mentally, and didn’t know if she should. Maybe there would be some lingering shock or distress, some incapacitating post-traumatic manifestation that would plague her later. But those feelings were so normal to her, she probably wouldn’t be able to determine which trauma was the culprit. The overall emotion she felt now was vacancy: loneliness.

Lonely people checked their phones, so she did. There were no messages, just texts: one from Martin, saying how nice it had been to see her, two from her bank, alerting her that automatic payments had been made to her mortgage and credit card. The third and final one was from early this morning: Blanca, asking her to call back as soon as she could.

Sweet, crazy Blanca. No doubt she’d had some kind of a vision and would exhort her to come in for a Tarot reading or some other ouija board nonsense. But she loved Blanca, loved her cozy, disorganized shop filled with strange objects she swore held magical properties. Aside from Martin, she was the closest thing to a friend Petra had, and that was exactly what she needed right now.

Petra called her, left a message, then sent a text. While she waited for a response, she made tea and wandered around her house, grateful she’d survived to brush dust from neglected surfaces and pick lint from the rugs after her two weeks abroad. She had Roadrunner to thank for that and wondered if she could construct a new friendship with him. Maybe it was something to explore in the future. They were neighbors, after all.

Her suitcase was still sitting at the foot of the stairs. She unzipped the outer pocket and took the file Martin had given her to the sitting room, where she curled up on the sofa in front of the fire. The flames were mesmerizing, rising from a bed of pumice stones, and nearly put her to sleep before she’d even opened the file. But after reading the cover page, she was wide awake. Martin had undersold his work, because there was good information here.

He’d finally tracked Peter Praljik’s illegal entry into the United States under false refugee status in 1996, something they hadn’t known before. Another thing they hadn’t known was his last-known alias, Peter Saveride, and his last-known address, in Forest Lake, Minnesota, where the trail had gone cold in 2008. Now she had a real place to start, and right in her backyard.

Her hands became unpredictable flighty things, trembling like butterfly wings as she punched Martin’s number into her phone. She unconsciously resurrected a bad habit and gnawed on her thumbnail while she listened to a robotic female voice telling her to leave a message.

“Damnit, Martin, I just started reading the file and now you’re not answering. Call me back as soon as you can.”

Petra returned to the file and immersed herself in it to the exclusion of everything else. She was unaware of time passing, of the sun making its downward trek in the winter sky, filling her house with gloom. Even the knock on her door didn’t dispel her focus—whoever it was, they would go away soon, because it was too cold to stand outside anybody’s door, begging for a signature on a petition or hawk whatever they were trying to sell.

It suddenly occurred to her that nobody did door-to-door anything in January, yet they kept knocking, more insistently. And that finally shattered her concentration. She stomped irritably toward the door, then saw the yellow daisies on the foyer table, which moderated her mood. She had absolutely no reason to believe or hope it might be Roadrunner, but they had a connection now and she was certain he’d felt it, understood it, so she couldn’t eliminate it as a possibility.

It wasn’t Roadrunner. It was two men, one a short, slight redhead, the other an imposing African American who dwarfed his companion. They looked ridiculous together, but not dangerous. “Can I help you?”

They both presented police shields. “Minneapolis detectives McLaren and Freedman. Are you Petra Juric?”

Police? “Yes.”

“We’d like to speak with you about Blanca Szabo.”

“Blanca? Is something wrong?”

“May we come in?”

Petra’s throat tightened. Something was obviously very wrong. “Of course.” She ushered them inside and closed the door, shivering with the chill that had followed them in. “Tell me what’s happened.”

The redhead spoke. Was he McLaren or Freedman? “I’m sorry, ma’am, Blanca Szabo was murdered in her shop sometime early this morning.”

She gasped reflexively, but there didn’t seem to be any air in the room. “I need to sit down.” She retreated to the living room and took her place on the sofa as if nothing had happened, because what the detectives had just told her was impossible. They’d made a mistake. Surely they’d made a mistake.

“We’re here because you were listed as her emergency contact on her phone.”

That, more than anything, brought her back to reality and made her eyes sting with tears.

“Are you family?”

“No. Blanca doesn’t have any living family, but she is an old friend.”

“She sent you a text late last night, asking you to call her. You hadn’t had contact with her for a while before that.”

Petra felt herself withdrawing to the familiar mental sanctuary where nothing could reach her. “She didn’t communicate often. Not with living humans, anyhow. She was a medium and dwelled in a different realm. You obviously have her phone.”

“We do.”

“So you probably know I didn’t respond until recently.”

“Is there a reason you didn’t respond earlier?”

“I didn’t get the text until a few hours ago. I was in the ICU at Hennepin County Medical Center. Hypothermia. Things might be different if I’d gotten to it earlier.” She saw pity in their faces and looked away.

“So you think she might have been calling you for help?”

“She never has before, she’s never needed help, but considering she was murdered … yes. It’s a possibility.”

“Were you aware of any troubles, any concerns she had for her safety?”

“Not at all. Blanca didn’t have issues with anyone. Her life was with her spirits—she barely had contact with the outside world. Except for me, she had no friends. And if you don’t associate with people, you have no enemies, either. You don’t believe it was random?”

“We don’t think it was a robbery. She had a box of cash in her office that was untouched, and she was wearing a gold necklace that looked very valuable.”

Her amber necklace. Her great-grandmother’s. “It is very valuable. It’s a family heirloom.”

“There wasn’t a computer at her shop. That’s the only thing that might have been stolen.”

“She didn’t own a computer. Her phone was her only concession to modern communication.”

The detectives both raised their brows. “Did she ever mention any troubles with clients?”

“Never. She had a very loyal clientele. She was loved.”

“She also accepted walk-ins.”

“She did, but I can’t imagine you’re looking for a walk-in client who was so disenchanted by their psychic reading that they were driven to kill over it. If you believe in that sort of thing, it wouldn’t be very good karma, would it?” She pressed her hands against her temples, trying to hold things inside. “I’m sorry, Detectives, I didn’t mean to sound dismissive. I’m just very upset.”

“You have every reason to be.”

Her words were sounding so hollow, so bereft of the sorrow and regret she felt. Two pairs of sympathetic eyes watched her, but they were also gauging her expressions, her moves, assessing everything she did, as if she was a suspect. And, from a cop’s point of view, she probably was. “How was she killed?”

The two detectives shared an uncomfortable look. Then the African-American man spoke softly, in a rumbling, smooth bass that hit a rare frequency in the human range. “We really can’t discuss details at this point, ma’am.”

“I’ll find out eventually, along with everybody else. I have to know.” She was surprised by the urgency in her voice. “This may sound strange, but I owe it to her to know what her last moments were.”

Petra felt the resistance, still there but weakening. “What you say won’t surprise me or shock me, Detectives. I’m well-acquainted with human wickedness. Blanca was, too.”

His eyes softened, his expression changed, and so did his partner’s. They knew human wickedness, too. It was part of their job to know it, just like it was part of hers.

“The details won’t be released until the investigation is complete …”

“I certainly won’t share them. Even if I had someone to share them with, what would be the point?”

“The cause of death is uncertain right now. Her neck was broken, but she also had duct tape covering her mouth, nose and eyes, so she may have been suffocated. We won’t know which came first until the autopsy.”

Petra felt her face cooling as the blood leached out of it. It was such an odd feeling, and she wondered where all that blood had gone. The detectives’ sympathetic eyes were now curious, hopeful, maybe even suspicious.

“Does that mean something to you, ma’am?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? It could help us if it does.”

“I’m sure. It’s just shocking. Either way, a horrible way for my friend to die.”

They stayed silent, waiting for her to say something more. But there was nothing else to say, so she waited them out.

“Ms Szabo came to City Hall to speak with some detectives yesterday morning. She said she’d had a vision of a homicide. Would you know anything about that?”

Petra shook her head sadly. “No, but Blanca has … had visions all the time. She genuinely believed she had a special gift, but I knew her for a very long time, and the visions were always amalgamations of past experiences or sometimes based on dreams she’d had. Even though they weren’t grounded in reality, they seemed very real to her.”

“So she was delusional?”

“Not in the clinical sense, no, I don’t believe so. She simply lived in a world of her own creation. She didn’t want to be a part of this one.”

“Okay, thanks for speaking with us.” They stood and gave her their cards. “Please call us if you think of anything that might help.”

She nodded and her head felt heavy, a strange, leaden thing on the stalk of her neck, as she walked them to the door. When they drove away, she retreated to the warmth of the fire and called Martin again. He still wasn’t answering, so she left another message with the infuriatingly soulless robot.

“Martin, Blanca was murdered. I think Peter Praljik is still here.”