Walker,” and hung up the phone to leave me standing next to a giant concrete troll. I stared up at his hubcap eye, and thought if he winked it wouldn’t be any more startling than my boss telling me I’d done well.
He didn’t wink, and after a minute I reeled back toward the minivan. Ray and the others had this one under control; no need for the Paranormal Pair to hang around getting in the way of a perfectly ordinary assault investigation. “I think this puts us back at Joanne Walker as bait. Unless you’ve come up with something better.”
Billy said, “I think I have,” and a Channel Two news van came whipping down the road and screeched to a halt in front of the ambulance.
Laurie Corvallis jumped out of the van like she was on the verge of a huge news story. To the driver’s credit, he pulled the van back out of the paramedics’ drive path before dragging a camera out and following Laurie. She was already halfway to where I was struggling to yank the minivan’s door open. Billy had locked it. Very safe of him. Annoying, but safe. I jerked at the handle, then put my back against the vehicle like I had enemies approaching from all sides. “What in God’s na—”
Wrong approach. I thrust my jaw out, trying to rewrite my internal dialogue, and tried a second time. “Can I help you with something, Ms. Corvallis?”
“Just going where the stories are, Detective Walker. Do we have another cannibal victim here?” Her blue eyes were eager in much the same way a piranha’s were. I wondered why I kept comparing her to carnivorous fish.
“We have a completely unrelated incident here. Go away.” I winced. “I mean, sorry you came out for nothing.”
“Now, Detective.” Corvallis’s voice went from eager to warm, even condescending, like we were old friends and I was being silly over something unimportant. “I saw how you went tearing out of the Seattle Center. Do you really expect me to believe it’s over nothing?”
“You were following me?”
Her cameraman got the camera up and running as I asked, and I found myself suddenly blinking into its brilliant light. It was a gray Seattle day already, and under the bridge it bordered on dark, but the floodlight seemed like overkill. I shielded my eyes with one hand and squinted toward the camera guy. “I fed you a burger and fries this summer. Is that enough of a bribe to get you to turn that thing off if I ask you to?”
He gave me a bright smile. “Maybe once.”
“Right.” I didn’t ask, and his grin broadened. Corvallis gave him a dirty look and he wiped the smile away, but he winked when she turned back to me.
“To answer your question, yes, I was following you. I think you’re where the action is, Detective.”
Billy, on the far side of the minivan, snorted over the clunk of the doors finally unlocking. “You’ve obviously never checked her social calendar, then.”
“You’re not helping.”
“Want me to?” Ray stumped over to us, looking Corvallis up and down with an expression that lay between lascivious and threatening. I had a sudden vision of him asking me if she needed her balls busted while the cameraman was filming, and blurted, “This is Ray Campbell, the officer on this case. He’s the man you’ll want to talk to, Ms. Corvallis. Thanks for your interest. I’m sure your superiors are eager for an in-depth report on the plight of the homeless in Seattle. We all need our social awareness raised.”
I pulled the door open and fell into the seat, hauling my legs up in my haste to escape. Ray planted himself front and center between the minivan and Corvallis, and she gave me a daggered glare over his shoulder before putting on a reporter-playing-nice smile and stuck her microphone in Ray’s face. Billy hopped into his side and closed the door behind him. “That woman’s going to get you in trouble someday.”
“You mean more trouble than the Seattle Slaughterer thing this morning?” I put my seat belt on and tried not to look over my shoulder as we left the scene a few seconds behind the ambulance. “I know. Worse, though, she’s going to get herself in trouble. Look, this whole Magic Seattle thing, the whole world of the other and all that. How do you keep people from getting in over their heads and getting hurt?”
“Lobotomization.” Billy grinned at my expression. “You can’t keep people from getting hurt, Joanie. You can warn them, but somebody like Corvallis isn’t likely to leave the hunt unless something throws her off the scent. You’re doing a good job of leaving a scent.” He thumped his hand against the steering wheel and muttered, “That analogy might’ve gotten out of control.”
I laughed. “You think?” My humor slipped away. “I just don’t want people getting hurt on my account.”
“Laurie Corvallis won’t get hurt on your account. She’ll get hurt on the story’s account, but never on yours.” He shook his head. “We do the best we can. You did good today. You just saved somebody’s life. That’s about all we can ask for.”
“That and a break on the cannibal case.”
Billy eyed me. “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back, there, Joanne. You just pulled off a miracle. What’s the problem?”
I rubbed my thumb over my palm, then cracked my knuckles, feeling like I was trying to discharge the healing power that had sprung to life. “I don’t know. I wanted that to be our cannibal.”
“So did I, but come on, Walker. What’s it take to make you happy? First you don’t want to be a shaman, now you’re hitting it out of the park and you’re not satisfied because it’s a different ball than the one you were watching? Give yourself a little credit.”
“Okay, okay, I’m happy, I’m happy!” I wrinkled my nose at the traffic and said, more quietly, “I’m glad she’s alive, Billy, and maybe you’re right. Maybe I should be elated. It just feels like in the grand scheme of things this is what I should be doing all the time, so it doesn’t feel like…enough.” By the time I got to the end of that, I was smiling again, ruefully. “I need some serious work on my perspective, don’t I?”
“You sure as hell do.”
“Arright.” A little bubble of delight burst inside me, like that healing power had figured out what to do with itself after all. I’d saved somebody. That was, in fact, pretty cool. Good thing I had people like Morrison and Billy around to beat that into my head. “Okay. Can we head back up to the Needle? We kind of bolted out of there, and I can’t think of anywhere better for a perspective adjustment.”
It wasn’t perspective I was after so much as trying to map out Seattle’s hot and cold spots, magically speaking. The good news was, our brief dash to the Troll had given me enough time to digest lunch. Turning the in-depth Sight back on didn’t upset my tummy again. Triumphant, I ordered us each another one of the amazing chocolate desserts. Billy pulled his cell phone out and sat down to wait for them while I took a slow meander around the restaurant.
I wanted my city to be a bastion of light and happiness. What I could See, with the initial shock of looking into darkness reduced, was that it looked pretty well-balanced. It was no shining city upon a hill, but neither was it one drawn into despair. Pockets of brilliance matched patches of darkness closely enough that I actually let go a sigh of relief. Sonata’s concern about the city, maybe the world, being pulled out of whack was very likely a valid one, but at least it wasn’t going to all come tumbling down tomorrow. Reassured, I turned my focus on Ravenna Park,
