was a sharp reminder I’d been expecting him to show up and rescue me from the desert.
He looked tired, not much like a desert-searching hero, and not much like he wanted to talk to me. Neither of those was unusual, but I was oddly disappointed. After all, if he was going to feature heavily in my subconscious fantasies, the least he could do was be pleased about seeing me. Not that I had the slightest intention of telling him he was apparently my own personal champion. And not that he’d arrived on the scene to rescue me, which sort of annoyed me when I thought about it.
I slung my duffel over my back, holding on to the strap with two fingers, as if the oversized action would force my internal nattering out of mind. Morrison really did look tired, or maybe angry, his mouth a thin line and blue eyes squinted against the sun. I should’ve been used to him looking irritated, but the underlying weariness sent a pang of compassion through me. “Everything okay, Captain?”
He cut off whatever he was about to say and eyed me suspiciously for a few seconds. I tried to keep my expression neutral:
“Yeah,” he said after enough time that I wondered if he was going to answer at all. “Tomorrow—”
I got ready to blow up. Tomorrow was my day off. “—is Cassandra Tucker’s funeral,” he said. I choked on my own indignation and stared at him as he concluded, “I thought you might want to go.”
I wet my lips and looked around, anywhere but at my captain, so that I could work off being embarrassed over my near blowup. “Thank you,” I finally said, awkwardly. “I really appreciate that. Look, does that mean they know what happened to her? Because—”
“Congenital heart defect,” he said shortly. “No murder investigation. I assume you didn’t get anything from your…sources.”
For some reason, it didn’t make me at all happy to have Virissong’s explanation verified by a coroner. I stared at Morrison for a long time without really seeing him, then wet my lips. “Nothing substantially different.”
“Substantially?”
I should have known better than to put an adverb into my response. I wet my lips again and shook my head. “Someone thought it was brought on by an overload of…” I felt like Michael Keaton trying to tell Kim Basinger his secret. If Morrison would only turn around so I couldn’t see his face, I was sure I could finish saying, “Doing magic.” What I said instead was, “It doesn’t really matter, does it? The cops and the freaks are in agreement on this one.”
Morrison’s expression had gone sour as I approached the end of my first explanation, as if he knew perfectly well what I wasn’t saying. Then it changed from sour to genuinely disapproving, and I had to stop myself from backing up a step. “Don’t do that,” he said.
I hadn’t moved. “Don’t do what?”
“Belittle yourself. Or anyone else, for that matter.”
I gaped at him. “I’m sorry, Cap, but when did you get on the it’s-okay-for-Joanne-to-be-a-super-shamanic- weirdo bandwagon?”
“I didn’t,” he said very evenly. “I don’t like what you can do at all. But I like you setting yourself up for the sucker punch even less. It’s degrading, and you’re better than that. I won’t tolerate it.”
I felt like my world had taken a sharp swerve and dip to the left. “Morrison, you rag on me all the time.” He did. He said I was a pain in the ass, which was true, and to not darken his doorstep again, which I always did, and a variety of other blustery
But I couldn’t think of one single time where he’d outright insulted me, or anyone else, for that matter. I stared at him some more, trying to fit that piece of information into the Morrison-shaped prejudices I carried around, and then looked at a wall and reached for safer ground. “Do you know when and where Cassandra’s funeral is?”
“I do,” he said, still very evenly, as if the last bit of conversation hadn’t happened. “I’m going. Should I pick you up?”
My gaze snapped back to him. “
“We were the first two officers on the scene, Walker. I visited her mother.” Morrison’s voice was strained. I found myself staring at him again.
“Jesus, Cap. Shouldn’t the UW police have done that? I mean, not your juris—”
“I was the ranking officer,” he said. “It was my duty.”
My vision didn’t go all inverted again, but rather, for an instant, I saw with extreme clarity. The worst job anybody could have is telling a parent that her child is dead.
Morrison’d done it to spare somebody else having to.
Color burned along my jaw and up into my cheekbones and ears, a bewildering rush of pride to be working for this particular police captain. I swallowed and straightened my shoulders. “What time should I be ready?”
Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought Morrison relaxed almost imperceptibly. “Nine-thirty. Funeral’s at ten.”
“I’ll be ready. Morrison?”
Morrison, already turning away, went still, and looked at me like he expected the other shoe to drop.
“Thanks.”
For a few seconds he looked as if he was waiting for the follow-up smart-ass remark. Then he nodded, a short, sharp motion, and walked away.
There was no time to get laundry started. I dashed to campus, stopping at the pizzeria to buy two slices of pepperoni and olive pizza. They offered me a soda large enough to swim in for a mere sixty cents more. Being a red-blooded American, I bought it and had vague guilty thoughts about exercise.
I was still licking pizza grease off my fingers when I ducked into the room the coven had been held in two nights earlier. Contrary to the smoky gloom of that night, it was bright and well lit and distinctly empty of both torches and witches. I said, “Um,” out loud to the empty room, and stood there with my soda feeling a little foolish. That was me, Joanne Walker, the world’s sneakiest undercover cop. Not that I was undercover, because Morrison had given me permission to case these people, although I suspected I might be going further than he meant me to. It didn’t matter. This was all on my own time.
Just like Cassandra Tucker’s funeral would be.
“I thought you’d be here,” Faye said from behind me. I flinched two inches to the left and whipped around, wishing I had something dangerous and sexy in my hand instead of a sixty-four ounce soda cup. My vision blurred again for the first time since I’d seen Gary, fluorescent lights above me twisting into purple streaks, and I pressed the heel of one hand against my left eye. I could feel the under-the-skin sunburn again, as if coming out of the daylight had made it more intense.
“Sorry,” Faye said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Are you sure?” I asked petulantly. She smiled as I peeled one eye open to look at her. The light stabilized and I cautiously removed my hand from my other eye.
“Of course. I didn’t have your number to call, and you weren’t with us last night so you couldn’t know that we don’t usually meet in the same place twice in a row. I thought I’d drop by and get you.”
“I’m in the phone book.” I still sounded tetchy. Faye looked surprised.
“I didn’t think of it.”
I muttered, “Of course not,” and came back to the door, slurping my soda. “Where’re we going?”
“Ravenna Park.”
I blinked. “Not on campus?” Ah, yes. A brilliant deduction. “Won’t the park be busy?”
Faye herded me out of the room. “D’you have a car? I don’t. It’ll be busy, but no one will notice us.”
“Yeah, in the south lot. They won’t?”
Faye shrugged. “People look around magic a lot. I don’t know why. It’s like a big blind spot in humanity.” She beamed suddenly. “But we’re going to change that, Joanne. We’re going to make a real difference in the world. Starting tonight.”
There are certain phrases people like to hear. Mechanics, for example, are fond of, “The transmission’s okay, so the insurance company says fix it instead of totaling it out.” At least, they are if they don’t work for a cop shop that pays the same amount no matter how much work you do or don’t do, which wasn’t the point. “Elise will
