Spirit Dances

CHAPTER TWELVE

The feeling lasted all the way back to the crime scene. Billy accepted his coffee with a grimace instead of a thanks, which didn’t bode well. I barely got a look at the body before he herded me across the street, where we had a semblance of privacy. “Not much to tell,” he informed me grimly. “The victim’s name is Lynn Schumacher, but that’s just about all he remembers. I don’t think the medical examiner has pinpointed a time of death yet, but it was more than two hours ago and its violence isn’t triggering enough need for retribution that his ghost is hanging on with any strength.”

“That probably means his own perception is that it wasn’t murder, right?” Mostly the dead passed over to The Other Side, whatever other side you chose to believe in, without much fuss. Violent deaths tended to leave ghosts behind, sometimes because the spirits were simply so shocked they didn’t know they were dead. Other times they knew very well they were dead and were in search of some kind of vengeance. Experience indicated those were not nice ghosts to deal with. More often, though—from what Billy said— ghosts lay between those two extremes: they had some idea what had happened, and were hoping to impart a little information or be satisfied that someone sought justice on their behalf.

Billy nodded and I sighed into my coffee cup, blowing amaretto-scented steam into the street. It was good for Lynn that he wasn’t traumatized by having his throat ripped out, but not terribly useful for us. “Does he have any information at all?”

“Not much more than we can glean ourselves. Dog attack of some kind. He thought it had yellow eyes.”

I crossed my eyes as if to see them, much like Morrison had done the night before and with about as much success. I wasn’t calling on the Sight right now anyway, so they wouldn’t be gold, but I wondered what color they’d been when I shapeshifted. Coyote’s were always gold in his coyote form, but then, coyote eyes were gold. I dug my cell phone out of my coat pocket and tapped in Billy’s home number. “Dogs, domesticated dogs, don’t have gold eyes very often, do they?”

“Not the ones I see. Of course, the ones I see don’t rip people’s throats out very often, either.” We exchanged dirty looks, and Billy added, “Seattle’s got coyotes, though. I never heard of anybody seeing any downtown, but it was a rough winter.”

“I don’t think coyotes rip people’s throats out very often, either, for that matter. I don’t think they usually att—hey, Melinda? This is Joanne. Don’t worry, everything’s fine, I just have a weird question. What color were my eyes when I shifted?”

Melinda Holliday could take anything in stride. She barely missed a beat before saying, “Yellow, which I didn’t even think about until you asked. Snake eyes are black. Why?”

“Just a data point. Maybe a totally useless one, but I wanted to know. Thanks.”

She said, “Sure,” and hung up, leaving me to bump my phone against my lips until I remembered I had a much tastier coffee to sip. “I was saying, coyotes usually won’t attack adult humans, either, unless they’re cornered.”

“Well,” Billy said dryly, and gestured to where Lynn Schumacher’s body had been found. “Technically that’s a corner.”

I whacked his shoulder and he grinned. “Why’d you ask Mel about your eyes?”

“Because I’m paranoid that everything I come in contact with anymore is supernatural.” I was only half kidding, and Billy gave me a sympathetic smirk. A little more seriously, I said, “Because Rita said there are no paw prints around the body, even though there’s blood everywhere. A dog could have gotten really lucky, maybe, but since I just shapeshifted for the first time last night I’m wondering if other people at the dance concert could’ve been similarly affected. Maybe it’s ‘I have a hammer so everything is a nail’ syndrome, but I did have Morrison there to pull me back. What if somebody else went through a metamorphosis and just panicked?”

“You are getting paranoid,” Billy said, but somehow it sounded like a compliment. “You think that’s a possibility?”

“I think it’s as likely as a coyote or mad dog attacking somebody off Pioneer Square.” I had to be quiet for a minute after that, just to stand there and appreciate how topsy-turvy my world had gone in the past fifteen months. Then my phrasing caught up with me. “It’s an animal attack, so the M.E. will check for rabies, right? Maybe I really am paranoid and it’s just a mad dog.”

“Maybe. Are you going to proceed as if it is?”

“You mean am I going to proceed on this case which isn’t in my jurisdiction and may have nothing to do with the paranormal and so can’t possibly be justified to my ill-tempered boss who has already, and with good reason, suspended me from duty, much less some other precinct’s captain?” I finished my coffee, threw the cup away and shrugged. “Yes, I am, and no, I’m not going to assume it’s rabies, not until the M.E. says as much. I wonder if I can get Reynolds to nab a copy of the autopsy report.”

“Paranoid and devious,” Billy said with admiration. “We’ll make a detective of you yet.”

“Not if I get busted for treading in other peoples’ territory when I’m not supposed to be working at all.” I finally triggered the Sight as I spoke, looking for…

Well, I didn’t really know what I was looking for. Signs of magic having been done, or some helpful flash in a pan that suggested some other poor sap had gotten hit with the same theater whammy I had. Coyote’d said changing without intent was dangerous. I’d gotten lucky, but if someone else hadn’t, I might be able to help them get back to normal.

Except there wasn’t any lingering trace of magic in the square. The West Precinct’s squad was doing its job with focused efficiency, auras touching and blending so they became a single creature with many parts, all bent on the same ends. Lynn Schumacher was the quiet point at the center of their work, but I couldn’t see ghosts at all, and he had no residual marks of power left on him. “I’m starting to think most magic just doesn’t track well. Unless there’s some kind of significant ritual or major physical upset, it’s there and then it’s just gone, poof.”

“Can’t be. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

I was about to argue that magic by definition wasn’t physics, then remembered the backlash of my powers reawakening and silenced my own protests. “So I’m just a lousy tracker.”

“Nobody’s perfect. The good news is that old-fashioned police work gets the job done, too, Walker. This could just be a wild dog.”

“Yeah.” But Naomi Allison’s death hadn’t been, and I was the only person who had any chance at all of solving that. “All right. I’ll ask Doctor Reynolds to try to get a copy of the autopsy report and until then I’ll assume this is a perfectly ordinary wild dog killing in downtown Seattle. In the meantime—”

“Detective Walker?” Rita Wagner, looking less haggard than she had earlier, appeared at my elbow. “Detective, I thought of something that might not be important….”

“About Lynn?”

“No. Just about the Underground.” She gave Billy a cautious look, but went on, apparently trusting that if neither Monroe nor I had busted her for camping out in the lost parts of Seattle, Billy wasn’t likely to, either. “Or about the people who stay there, I guess. Some of them have disappeared.”

A mixture of sorrow and resignation filled my chest. “I hate to say it, Rita, but…”

“I know. We’re vagrants. We disappear, we move on, we end up like Lynn. But the population down there is pretty steady. Like I said, we keep an eye out for each other.”

I’d already promised the woman I wouldn’t dismiss her or her concerns, so I nodded, determined to at least hear her out. She smiled, but it faded fast. “Even when we do take off, it’s not usually in clumps. Maybe two or even three, but it’s five, Detective Walker.”

“All from the Underground? How recently?”

“I’ve been staying there lately, so I wouldn’t know about anywhere else. In the last ten days or so, though. One every couple days. It’s too many.”

“But no murders? Nothing like what happened to Lynn?”

Rita shook her head and I puffed my cheeks. “That’s something, I guess. All right. I’ll try to look into it, Rita. Missing persons aren’t my department.”

“I know. I just thought maybe I should mention it.”

“Mention it to Detective Monroe, too. Just to cover my ass, so he can’t say I’m hiding anything from him, okay?”

She gave an unenthusiastic nod and went to shadow the crime scene’s edge, clearly waiting to be worthy of notice. Billy watched her, his mouth twisted with uncertainty. “Somebody like that could get more attention from this one incident than she’s had for years. I hope she’s not making things up to stay in the spotlight.”

I didn’t want Rita to be lying, but my partner had a point. “I’ll come back down here tonight, on my own time, to ask around about missing people.”

“And right now?”

“Right now I’d really like to go home and put some pants on.”

Unfortunately for me, I actually had tagged along with Billy instead of driving Petite downtown, in order to make my presence at the scene slightly more acceptable. Women in miniskirts climbing out of purple classic Mustangs were not likely to be taken seriously at a crime scene. So he brought me back to the precinct building, where I followed him upstairs to Homicide in hopes of bumming a ride back to the Hollidays’ house from somebody going off-shift.

Jim Littlefoot was waiting for me when I got there. I had a brief vision of myself: cropped hair a mess from the hat I’d been wearing, winter-weight police jacket unzipped to show my sweater hanging over the silly knit skirt and my bare legs poking out until heavy boots enveloped my ankles. It wasn’t, overall, a particularly flattering picture.

It was still a hell of a lot better than Littlefoot looked. I knew I hadn’t slept, but he obviously hadn’t, either, and his dancer’s stamina did nothing to alleviate the bags under his eyes. I almost yawned, looking at him, and did make my eyes water by fighting the yawn off. “Mr. Littlefoot. I didn’t expect to see you. This is my partner, Detective Billy Holliday.” I gestured to Billy and got out of the way so they could shake hands.

They spent about five seconds trying not to do the obvious: Billy struggling not to look at Littlefoot’s feet, and Littlefoot fighting the urge to ask if this was live or Memorex. Nobody much cared that it had been Ella Fitzgerald on that recording. She and Billie Holiday were contemporaries, and that was close enough.

When they’d both manned up, gotten past impulses and shaken hands, I offered Littlefoot a seat, took my own and said, “What can I do for you?”

“You can come to tonight’s performance.” Littlefoot pushed a pair of theater tickets across the desk toward me. Billy’s eyebrows rose with interest, and he pulled a chair over from nearby, thumping down to listen in. Littlefoot glanced at him, then turned his attention back to me. “The troupe decided this morning that the only way to honor Naomi’s memory was to continue the show.”

“You have someone who can…” I didn’t want to say take her place, because that sounded needlessly callous. “Who can dance the part? You said it had been hard to find the right people for the troupe.”

“Two understudies. You can’t go on a tour this long with out a more-than-full complement. The understudies are as much a part of us as the primary dancers. And they under stand the risk they’re taking.”

It took me a minute to catch up to the risk, and then I straightened in my chair. “This isn’t just about the show must go on, is it? You’re hoping to draw another attack.” It was exactly the kind of thing I would do. I had a disconcerting moment of heart-lifting admiration combined with gut clenching fear, and wondered if that’s what people around me felt when I charged off on some particularly stupid campaign against evil. I didn’t dare look at Billy for fear of finding just exactly that expression of accusation on his face.

“Only if you’ll help us,” Littlefoot said, therefore showing far more wisdom than I was ever inclined to. “You said last night you’d been unable to track the attack after the fact. What if you were prepared for it?”

“I might be able to, then.” After today—after the wendigo, after a whole series of failures to track or recognize bad guys when I thought I should be able to—I wasn’t going to make any promises. “What I can almost certainly do is protect you all from the attack. It’s psychic, which means I should be able to shield you from it.”

Relief shadowed Littlefoot’s dark eyes. “We all understand the concept of shielding, but the ghost dance—the entire program—is about sharing, not shielding. I’m not sure we could change our intent fast enough, even after last night, to protect Winona. Naomi’s replacement,” he said to my brief incomprehension, though he and I both winced at the choice of word. “Naomi’s understudy.”

I nodded, then had to say it, just to be sure: “You realize this is a completely insane risk you’re taking here, right?”

A smile flickered across his face. “Not if I’m right about trusting you. I have to get back to the theater, Detective.

You’re welcome to join us as early as you like. The tickets are a formality, in case you want to be in the audience, but I don’t know what you’ll need to do.”

“I’ll be there early enough to meet everyone. That’ll make shielding them easier.”

“Good. Thank you.” Littlefoot stood and so did I, with Billy, who’d remained suspiciously silent, coming to his feet a moment later. We shook hands with Littlefoot and as he left, I reached for the tickets he’d put on my desk.

Billy snatched them up. “Bet Mel and I can find a babysitter for tonight.”

I took them out of his hand. “I have to go tell Morrison about this.”

He took them back. “It’s Saturday. He’s not in. Call him.”

Thwarted, I shrugged my coat off and rooted around for my cell phone, dialing Morrison’s number. I had finally learned how to save numbers in the damned thing, but still feared the atrophying of my brain if I didn’t make myself memorize and dial phone numbers.

On the other hand, Morrison’s slightly impatient, “What do you want, Walker?” made me think phones as a whole were overrated, never mind their anti-atrophy potential.

Resentful, I said, “I said I’d let you know if I had anything interesting. Jim Littlefoot just gave me two tickets for tonight’s dance performance. I thought maybe it qualified.”

“What time?”

I took the tickets back from Billy and checked the performance time. “Same time. Eight o’clock.”

“Fine. I’ll be there.” Morrison hung up.

I stared at my phone. “I do not understand that man.”

“What’d he do?” Billy lunged for the tickets and I made a clucking noise of disapproval as I held them out of the way.

“He says he’ll be there. You’d better call the theater if you want to bring Mel tonight.”

“Oh, Mel gets trumped by Morrison? She’ll get a kick out of that.” Billy got his own cell phone out, looking pleased.

I snorted. “No, you get trumped by Morrison. Melinda can have the other free ticket.”

My partner gave me a credible look of heartfelt betrayal, at which I laughed. “Don’t worry. Maybe he’ll be just as disappointed as you are to find you’re his date for the evening. Why’s he even coming?”

Billy’s expression slid from heartfelt betrayal to sly knowledgability. I didn’t kick him, but it took so much restraint not to that I had to stomp out of Homicide and down to the locker rooms, where instead of finding a change of clothes— I’d already used my spare set this week—I found a sink so I could splash water over my face and a mirror to glare into.

I was bad at relationships. I was bad at reading between lines, at figuring out what people really meant if they didn’t actually say it, and at being charming or flirty or whatever it was, exactly, that women were supposed to do to attract men. My skill sets lay along the lines of taking apart car engines, drinking grown men under the table and—more recently—solving esoteric murders. I was therefore equipped to deal with men who liked those things, not off-limits police captains who got equal parts protective and pissy about me. I wished the affair with my coworker Thor hadn’t ended so abruptly, or that Coyote actually lived in Seattle.

The facts that I apparently hadn’t really trusted Thor and that I’d refused to go with Coyote to Arizona were completely beside the point. At least I knew how to relate to them. With Morrison it was just one run of bewildering incidents after another.

I said, “You could talk to him about it, you know,” to the mirror, and the faintly scarred woman reflected in it looked intensively skeptical. I sighed, backed up until the end of a locker room bench caught me in the knees and sat with my face in my hands. A nap would probably restore my equilibrium, but I didn’t see one in my immediate future, so hiding in the locker room was as good as it would get.

Inevitably, of course, the door swung open and someone came in. There were actually comparatively few female officers in the precinct—in the whole Seattle Police Department, for that matter—but there was some kind of law of averages which said if you needed a minute to breathe, that was when a parade would march by.

In this case it wasn’t a parade. It was a friend of mine, Jennifer Gonzalez, who worked upstairs in Missing Persons.

She passed by the lockers aisles at the far end of the room, visible only in reflection, then backed up. “Joanne? Are you all right?”

“Just tired.”

Evidently I wasn’t convincing, because she came down the aisle and sat behind me, hunched forward so I could see bits of her image in the mirrors. I half expected her to rub my back, simply because she always shook hands with somebody when they came into the room, so being greeted without some kind of physical contact was unusual. “You haven’t dropped by lately.”

“Missing Persons gives me the creeps.”

“And yet you work Homicide. So what’s wrong?”

Jenn, like everybody else I had a passing acquaintance with at work, had long since recognized Morrison and I had some kind of Not A Thing going on. I was reasonably certain it was a topic of gossip that managed to stay mostly out of earshot, but once in a while I’d said something about Morrison and gotten a resounding, “Ah,” in response, the sort of “Ah” that said, “Well, everything I suspected has now been confirmed.” Jenn had used that kind of “Ah” on me. So it would be perfectly reasonable for me to tell the truth, and have a nice little vent about totally failing to understand men in general and that man in specific.

So of course I said, “Is it even possible to file missing persons reports on the homeless? I mean, does it do any good at all?” instead.

Jenn’s reflection turned its head to arch an eyebrow at me. She’d gotten glasses recently, and I thought they made her look saucy, since she was a little too strong of jaw to be quite cute. “Not much,” she said after a moment. “The handful of homeless actually reported as missing tend to turn up again as homicides or suicides. But the population’s itinerant and even though Seattle’s winters are mild—or they used to be—there are plenty of people who head south and never come back. Do you need me to look somebody up?”

“Maybe tomorrow.” I frowned. “No, wait. It’s Saturday. What’re you doing in?”

“I forgot my gym bag here last night.” Jenn got up, patting my back after all. “If you’re fretting over the guy who gave you the earrings, stop fretting and go for it. Life is short.”

Oh, yes, I was so very sneaky I’d slid that right under her radar, all right. I touched the coyotes dangling from my earlobes, then looked over my shoulder at her. “What if I’m fretting about somebody else?”

She got that “Ah” look in her eyes and smiled. “Then wear a different pair of earrings next time you see him.”

And for some reason, that made perfect sense.