Nothing.

He walked quietly back into the kitchen, and shook his head at Julia. She whispered, “Freddy’s hissing toward the front of the house now.”

Cheney moved quickly toward the front hallway, pulled up, and listened again. He heard the front door rattle, then open. He heard footsteps, heard men speaking, then a woman’s voice.

They weren’t trying to be quiet. They were coming toward him.

Cheney came out of the kitchen, raised his SIG and said, “All of you, hold it right there.”

The woman threw up her hands and shrieked.

One man tumbled over the over, both of them nearly stumbling onto the Italian tiles.

The woman yelled, “Oh God, it’s the man who’s trying to murder Julia! Mrs. Masters told me all about you the minute we got home. Is my poor Freddy all right? I’m his mother!”

To Cheney’s surprise, both men rushed forward, the woman right behind them, swinging her big red purse. He ducked.

Julia yelled, “No, no, don’t hurt him. He’s an FBI agent!”

SFPD Officers Blanchin and Maxwell burst through the front door after them. Everyone simply froze where they stood. What had taken the cops so long? Cheney wondered. After all, they’d been assigned to watch the house.

Not long after Blanchin and Maxwell withdrew, their guns back in their belts, muttering between them, Julia sitting in the living room, cozy on one of the sofas next to an older man she’d introduced to Cheney as Wallace Tammerlane. Tammerlane was holding her hand, whispering quietly to her. Thankfully, Freddy’s mother, still clutching her huge red purse, and Freddy himself had left right after the two officers.

Julia introduced both of the men as psychic mediums. Great, just great. Psychic mediums, which meant that in addition to the woo-woo, they also claimed to speak to the dead. More like con artists. The older man, Wallace Tammerlane, looked up, studied Cheney’s face and frowned, then said something quietly to the other man, a younger man, about Julia’s age. They looked like father and son, both wearing casual designer clothes, shooting him looks to kill.

Cheney had heard of Tammerlane. He’d had a TV show a couple of years back, had written some books, and he lived right here in the city. He evidently wasn’t married since he kept easing his tall lanky body closer to Julia’s. He looked about fifty, hard to tell since his face was smoother than a streambed rock. The other man, Bevlin Wagner, Cheney hadn’t heard of, which fact he said aloud, with the result that the man looked at him like he was dumber than a turkey and put his thin nose into the air. He was lanky like Tammerlane, who really did look like his father, down to his large dark eyes. But when junior tried to look brooding and intense, he only managed to look like he wanted a drink.

Cheney grinned at him. “You need to practice that in front of a mirror. That’s the ticket,” to which Bevlin Wagner replied in a voice not quite as deep as Tammerlane’s, “You’re not in a good place, Agent Stone. I see conflicting shades of black around you.” He shook his head and poured himself some coffee from a beautiful silver carafe.

“My dear Julia,” Wallace Tammerlane said, voice low, flicking a look toward Cheney, “I was distraught about what happened last night, nearly worried myself into a psychic block. Are you all right, my dear girl?”

“Yes, Wallace, I’m fine, really.”

He gave her a longer brooding look. “And this nonsense a few minutes ago, this man waving around a gun.”

“He’s here to protect me, as are the two police officers who came rushing in.”

Tammerlane said, “Let me get rid of Bevlin and this philistine agent fellow, unnecessary, both of them. I’m with you now. I can protect you. We can go over to Cecile’s for an espresso. I need to talk to you, take you away from all this. Perhaps August will have something to say.”

Cheney said, “If August Ransom is ready to check in, Mr. Tammerlane, perhaps he can tell you who killed him.”

Mr. Tammerlane raised dark intense eyes. “It isn’t like that, Agent Stone, isn’t like that at all. August doesn’t concern himself with the past, with what came before—”

“He doesn’t care that someone cut his life short? That the same person may be trying to kill his widow?”

Wallace said patiently, “Agent Stone, when a person has crossed over, all his past pains, past insults, all of it ceases to be important. Indeed, all of life’s difficulties cease to exist. However, the truth of it is that August doesn’t know who killed him. Whoever it was came at him from behind. He told me only that he heard movement behind him, but he didn’t have time to turn around. He’d been taking cocaine, a regrettable habit of his, but he said it helped him focus, made him understand things he couldn’t have otherwise, and it slowed his reflexes, flattened any fear he might have felt. August felt only a sudden awful sharpness in his throat, then immense cold. That was the end of it, and he crossed over and everything changed. He was in The After.