the phone. She expected it to be Celia, returning her earlier call, but it was Shannon.
“Hey,” she greeted the other woman, lifting her camera again and taking a few snaps of the good-looking uniformed officers just for fun before starting off down the street. She wasn’t going to learn anything more from the crime scene, but once she figured out who the victims were, she would be able to use her Karma Division app to track down their intended karmic paths. From there, she could start to rebuild all of the other paths that had been disrupted when these three were killed off-schedule. “Did you hear about the shooting in Midtown West this morning?”
“Jade, you found him!”
“Found who?” she asked blankly, and heard Shannon laugh.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t recognize him when you saw him!”
“Saw
who
, Shannon?” Jade persisted, her patience starting to wear thin.
“Your soulmate. My app just pinged me to say that you passed within five feet of each other.”
“What?”
“You found your soulmate, Jade! God, don’t tell me you’re standing on a busy corner with six dozen guys or something. It’ll take you forever to figure out which one he is.”
“No, I–” She trailed off, turning around to glance back in the direction of the crime scene she’d just left. It was in front of a tenement building, but she hadn’t passed within five feet of any of the apartments. The only people she’d been that close to in the last ten minutes were the cops guarding the crime scene and the two detectives who’d refused to talk to her. “Oh.”
“Oh?
Oh
?” Shannon sounded apoplectic. “Is that all you have to say? Jade, who is he?”
“He’s a cop.” She thought about that for a moment, then shrugged. She had no objections to falling in love with a cop, and she was willing to admit to a weakness for men in uniform, although she would’ve preferred someone who didn’t risk his life on a daily basis.
“My app says his name is Luke Jackson. That’s a good name. Gruff. Manly. I like it.”
“I was at a crime scene, Shannon,” she said dryly. “I didn’t ask for the cops’ names.” The shorter detective had been ‘Aaron,’ though, so he was out of the running unless he went by his middle name. “What does your app say he looks like?”
“Um… six foot two, 190 pounds, dark hair, brown eyes. Hang on, there’s a picture.” There was a brief silence, and then Shannon whistled. “Oh, Jade, this one was totally
worth the wait.”
One of the cops at the barricade was blond and another was too short, but one other uniformed officer was still in the running, as was the tall detective. She briefly considered going back to the crime scene to check the cop’s nametag, even though there were a million other things she should be doing, but then she realized she didn’t need to.
“I took their pictures,” she told Shannon. “Look, I have to get to work fixing the disaster this shooting caused, but are you free for lunch? We can compare pictures and you can tell me all about the lucky guy.”
“Deal,” Shannon agreed. “Meet me for sushi at one, at that place on Restaurant Row.”
“See you then.”
She wasn’t sure how she felt about her soulmate finally turning up. She’d fantasized about it for years, but now that it was actually happening, all she could think was
not now
. After taking so many years to show up, couldn’t he have waited just a few more weeks?
Her phone rang again before she could put it back into her bag, and she glanced at it, expecting it to be Shannon calling back with some vital piece of data about her soulmate’s shoe size. It was Celia, though, and the sight of her boss’s name helped to put all thoughts of cute cops and soulmates right out of her head.
“Celia, what’s going on?” she demanded, stopping in the shade of a high-rise building to talk uninterrupted. “There was a sentinel event—”
“Yeah, no kidding.” Her boss sounded even
J. S. Cooper, Helen Cooper
Joyce Meyer, Deborah Bedford