I picked up the crime-scene photos and began sifting through them. “I didn’t want to stress you out in front of the others….”
Calvin made a noise in his throat.
“But can I tell you why I wrote down Sinclair as a person of interest?”
“I’d rather you just look at those knife and hone photos and then go home, sweetheart.”
“He came by the Emporium, less than two hours after the morning press conference concluded.” I didn’t look up, but I could feel Calvin staring now. “He told me he’d been trying to do an exposé on gay LEOs for months and has been getting the cold shoulder from every cop he’d reached out to.”
“I’m shocked,” he muttered, completely deadpan.
“I know, right?” I was sorting the knives and hones into two separate piles as I continued. “He said once he saw me, recognized me from past exploits, he decided that an amateur sleuth with an unrelated, curious day job was far more interesting. I told him to fuck off.”
“Good.”
“The thing is, I don’t think he’s been following me until today.”
Calvin asked, “How do you explain him watching you outside the precinct in the middle of the night?”
“Radcliff.”
“What?”
I glanced up over the rims of my sunglasses. “I think Sinclair was originally following Radcliff as a possible subject for his article. Radcliff was the detective at Sandra’s on Tuesday morning, he also showed up to the precinct in the middle of the night,andwas at the press conference. But that’s where Sinclair’s interests shifted—and fast too. He showed up at the Emporium, and I think he followed me to Hell’s Kitchen—probably asked Brad what we’d discussed during my reading. Sinclair might have followed me to Inwood, for all we know.”
“But why? If you told him to take a hike?”
I leaned to one side in my seat, pulled my phone free, and opened the text chain of photographs. I set that on the table between the knives on my left and hones to the right. “I hear myself saying this in my head and realize it sounds… unhinged. But considering the wallops we’ve been dealt in the past, maybe it’s not so out of left field.”
Calvin sighed heavily, set both feet on the floor, and turned in his chair to face me. “Let’s hear it.”
“Do you think Sinclair might be… you know, singling me out? Like, uh… a cat-and-mouse thing?”
“Like Dr. Asquith did,” Calvin stated without inflection.
“Sort of, yeah. I mean, Sinclair even made that suggestion himself—that someone wanted my attention with how odd Sandra’s murder was.” I lowered my voice a little and asked, “What if he was talking about himself?”
“But he had no idea of your official involvement until two days after Sandra’s death,” Calvin countered. “The suggestion he killed Marie and Brad for your engagement—mind you, you haven’t been singled out by name even once—might hold water on its own, but it doesn’t make sense in the case of Sandra.”
“Ask him about connections to Sandra when he comes in,” I said.
“I plan to. But I’m not sold on Sinclair being an organized, psychopathic killer whose end goal is to provide Victorian fodder that’ll encourage a sleuth to come out of retirement so he can write an article about your busybodyness.”
“Okay… well… I guess it sounds a bit fantastical when you put it that way. But I also don’t think there’s some random perpetrator embracing the media nickname, Ouija Killer, who’s really got it out for the psychic community, even if only two out of three victims were self-proclaimed mediums.”
“No, I don’t either.” Calvin drummed the tabletop absently.
“So whatdoyou think?” I asked after a moment had passed. “Because it’s not Brad. And Sinclair is my only other consideration.”
“It could be Brad.”
“Might I remind you,” I said, holding up my phone to show the photo of the fork sticking out of said man’s neck.
Calvin shrugged and said, “We have to take a look at the Habels’ wills, life insurance, bank accounts, etcetera. Brad might have hired someone to kill his wife. Maybe he didn’t take Marie into account—she was someone close to Sandra who might have been able to finger him, so he panicked and got rid of her after the fact.”
“Then he got double-crossed?” I asked.
“Maybe.”
