Her long, blond hair undulated with the tide. Looking down at her, I couldn’t see her face. For one hopeful moment I thought she might be a mermaid, unencumbered as she was by scuba gear. But mermaids don’t wear bikinis, and they don’t have ghostly white legs. Her arms stretched in front of her as though reaching for some treasure at the bottom of the sea. Moving closer, I saw the dull glint of metal at her wrists. She wasn’t reaching for anything; she was handcuffed to a heavy chain that was anchored to the ocean floor.
It was terribly quiet. I remembered to breathe, and soon heard the reassuring sound of oxygen rushing through my air hose, followed by my own carbon dioxide bubbling toward the surface.
I knew from the woman’s rigid form that she was past saving. I swam around her body and looked into a face so likeable that it broke my heart. She hadn’t been in the water for long. Her skin was smooth and unblemished, except for some redness where her wrists chafed against the handcuffs. Her mouth was open to the sea that filled her lungs. Her wide green eyes seemed to be staring at a small leather pouch on a thin leather strap that floated loosely around her neck.
Feeling an urgent need for fresh air, I followed the chain up to the surface, where it attached to a buoy floating about three hundred yards from shore. Treading water, I removed my mouthpiece and took several grateful breaths.
A crowd had gathered on the beach to watch the activity offshore. Coast Guard officers in small boats had been posted around the crime scene to keep swimmers away as divers searched for evidence.
“What time did you find the body?” Carlos Rico, one of the officers who’d responded to my 911 call, had been interviewing me for some time. We’d already covered this question. My answer didn’t change.
“Sometime between seven-ten and seven-fifteen.”
“You seem pretty sure about that.”
I shrugged. “Occupational habit. I’m an investigator.”
He made a note on his report. “Private?”
“Yeah.” I fished a business card out of the backpack I’d retrieved from my truck and handed it over. The type read, Elizabeth Chase, Psychic Investigator. Rico studied the card for a moment before attaching it to his clipboard. If he thought there was anything peculiar about my title, he didn’t let on.
“You say you got here about ten minutes to seven and went in the water a few minutes after seven. Can anyone confirm that?”
I looked around to see if I recognized anyone on the beach, someone who might have seen me go into the water.
“Not really. My dive partner was supposed to meet me here, but I guess she couldn’t make it this morning.” Shivering in my damp bathing suit, I watched Rico print my statement word for word. The sudden blaring of car horns and screeching of brakes made us both look up.
The uncommon sight of police and emergency vehicles in the posh La Jolla neighborhood had caused a nasty traffic jam on Coast Boulevard, the road that snakes along the shoreline. Residents in the high-rise condominiums facing the ocean had come out onto their balconies to see what the ruckus was all about. Some of them looked cranky. They’d plunked down several million dollars for their homes. Klieg lights and crime scene looky-loos were not the view they’d bargained for.
The Motorola on Rico’s hip spit out a static-filled message. I only caught part of it, something about moving the body. I felt a sudden stab of protectiveness toward the dead woman, as if my discovering her somehow made me responsible for her too.
“Where are they taking her?” I asked.
“The lifeguard station in Quivera Basin.”
That made sense. Quivera was a fairly remote location at the mouth of Mission Bay. Far from the beach-going masses, it would be a good place to examine and identify the body.
Rico’s female partner, an officer several years his senior, took over the questioning. By the time we were done, my bathing suit was dry. She took one last look at my business card.
“Is this information up-to-date?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Okay, you’re free to go. A case investigator will be in touch with you soon.”
Heading back to my truck, I had the uneasy feeling that comes over me when I sense I’m being stared at. I looked up at the condominiums clinging to the cliff. If someone was peering down at me, I couldn’t tell. The reflected sunlight in the windows of the ocean-facing condos made them impenetrable as one-way mirrors.
Later that afternoon, the case detective rang my doorbell as I was working in my home office. I checked him out in the CCTV monitor above my desk, the one that’s fed by a hidden security camera and microphone on my front porch. His thick silver hair, dark eyebrows, and sharp features were reminiscent of Sean Connery, but his wrinkle-free pants and unfashionable jacket screamed undercover detective. He was whistling a haunting rendition of “Stairway to Heaven” and looking vaguely bored. Like any good investigator, he hadn’t called in advance to announce his visit. I closed the file I was working on and went to the door.
“You Elizabeth Chase?” He was holding the business card I’d given to the patrol cop that morning.
“Yeah, and you’re Detective …” I drew the word out, waiting for him to fill in the blank.
“Baxter.” He looked at me with a face that made me want to confess, even though I hadn’t done a damn thing wrong. I wondered how many years he’d been perfecting that trick.
I led him into my office, where he did a quick survey of the room. His eyes scanned my P.I. certificate and my doctoral diploma—a PhD in parapsychology from Stanford—and lingered on a framed letter from San Diego’s chief of police. The letter was a commendation for a kidnap case I’d cracked last fall.
“Your business card says you’re a psychic,” he said as he continued to read the framed letter.
“For lack of a better word.”
“You don’t like that word?” he asked.
“Hate it. Every time I hear it, I see embarrassing images of scam artists and phony hotline counselors. Don’t you?”
He was staring directly at my face now, studying me through narrowed eyes.
“They say you’re the real thing.”
“I am. I don’t tell people what they want to hear. And when I draw a blank, I don’t make stuff up.”
“If that’s true, I’m eager to hear what happened to the woman in the cove.” He stepped closer to get a better look at the books on my shelves. He was slightly shorter than me but exuded an easy confidence. No Napoleon complex here.
“Afraid it’s not that simple,” I said.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so. How do you work the psychic angle?”
“It’s more accurate to say that it works me. I don’t control my psychic experiences, I just receive them. If I don’t receive anything, I’m as clueless as the next Joe.”
He arched a thick black brow. “You can’t summon visions at will, like they do on TV?”
“Receive, yes. Summon, no. Most of the time I have to investigate the methodical way, like everybody else. I can tell you how I found the body.”
“Okay.”
I repeated for Baxter everything I’d told the patrol cops earlier that morning. He sat in my guest chair and took notes on a small spiral pad. When I was done, he read the notes silently to himself as he chewed on the top of his pen.
“Anything else you know about this?” he asked.
“I know that the victim’s name was Wendy Woskowicz. She was a college dropout with a history of mental illness. She hadn’t had a permanent address for at least three years. Lived in an ’82 Dodge van with a pet pig named Tiny. Let’s see … she had a rap sheet of sorts … misdemeanor drunk-in-public and animal-control violations, mostly. Guess she and her pet pig had a habit of disturbing the peace.”