accepted with a groan. Technically, I was some kind of mystical Indian tracker. My dad was Cherokee, and not even I was arguing about the mystical part anymore. The only part where the description fell down was in tracker, which I manifestly was not. I’d proven remarkably poor at hunting down mythical bad guys—at least, poor at hunting them down as quickly as I thought I should—and had no idea if that was because my schooling was incomplete, or if I was just inept. I muttered, “Shit,” and for some reason the faintest smile cracked Morrison’s glower.
Billy rappelled down beside us and got out of his harness with a great deal more grace than I’d shown. He’d lost a good twenty pounds in the last couple months—dropping the baby weight, he called it; his wife had just had their fifth child—and moved more lightly for it, even though he was still taller than both Morrison and myself. “We’ve got to find a way to catch up with this guy faster,” he said.
“Like before he kills anybody else,” Morrison said, so flatly Billy and I both looked at him a moment. I’d heard Morrison’s angry voice plenty of times—usually directed at me—but this wasn’t outrage. It was helplessness, and that wasn’t something Morrison indulged in often.
Billy recovered first, tugging his rappelling rope to let the guys at the top know he was out. The rope and harness rose into darkness as he spoke. “You know the chances are we’re already too late for that, Captain. We’ve got at least two more missing persons reported, and we’ll be damned lucky if they’re still alive. But what I’m talking about is where Walker and I can help. This guy cleans up after himself. We haven’t found any DNA to work with, so Forensics is at a loss, and unless we get to a body faster, Walker and I aren’t much good, either. Even my resources outside the department—”
Morrison lifted his hand. “I don’t want to hear about it.”
Billy hesitated, glancing at me, then nodded once. “Yeah. Okay. Look, I’m sorry, Captain. Right now we’re at a dead end.”
I breathed, “No pun intended,” and Billy gave me a dirty look. I mouthed, “Sorry,” then flinched as my hip pocket began to ring. Billy glanced at his watch and arched his eyebrows, and I shrugged, taking a few steps away from my companions to wrestle my phone out. The number was unfamiliar. “Yeah, this is Joanne Walker.”
“Hey, doll. Where are you?”
I pulled the phone away to give it a sideways look, though a smile threatened the corner of my mouth. There was one man on this earth who could get away with calling me doll. “It’s pushing five in the morning, Gary. What do you mean, where am I? Where do you think I am?”
“Well, you ain’t at home, ’cause I called that number twice. And you weren’t sleeping, ’cause you never answer that fast when you have been, and you never sound this awake. You on a hot date, Jo?”
The threatening smile broke and I laughed. “You should be the detective, not me. No, I wish. I’m at a crime scene. Morrison called me a couple hours ago. What’s up? Where are you calling from? I don’t know the number.”
“I’m at dispatch.” For anybody else I knew, that meant the precinct building, but Gary worked part-time as a cabbie. I’d climbed into his taxi almost a year ago, and my life had quite literally never been the same since. Still smiling, I listened to him rattling on, waiting for him to reach the eventual point: “I was gonna cover for Mickey’s shift ’cause his grandkids are coming in today from Tulsa, but one of the other cars just called in, Jo. He found a dead lady at Ravenna Park.”
CHAPTER TWO
I snapped my fingers and gestured Morrison and Holliday over to me before Gary stopped talking. Both men creaked through the snow toward me and I echoed Gary’s words, looking back and forth between my boss and my partner. “A driver at Tripoli Cabs just found a body across from my apartment building, in Ravenna Park. The guy’s freaked out, says the body is still warm and it looks like it’s been chewed on.”
“Who the hell’s calling to tell you th—” Morrison broke off mid-question and bared his teeth. “Muldoon. Walker, have you been spouting off about cases to your octogenarian boyfriend?”
“Septuagenarian,” I said with a sniff. “Gary’s only seventy-three.” The boyfriend part didn’t bear responding to. Half the people I knew were convinced I was dating a guy old enough to be my grandfather, and I’d given up arguing with them. On the other hand, being haughty about Gary’s age gave me an excuse to not answer the bit about whether I’d been discussing cases with people who weren’t members of the police force. Not that it mattered too much. As quiet as the department was trying to keep the killings, after six weeks of missing persons and murders, the media was starting to take notice. “Are we going, or what?”
The look Morrison gave me indicated I had in no way actually avoided the question of whether I’d been talking about the case off campus. Still, he made a sharp gesture toward the distant parking lot and got on his phone to invite the forensics team to join us. I slipped my way down the hill with Billy a few steps behind me. Five minutes later we were in his minivan, both of us hunched over the heater vents in hopes of thawing.
I caught a glimpse of Morrison’s gold Avalon pulling out of the lot, and felt vaguely self-conscious that I’d had to ask Billy to pick me up. My classic Mustang, Petite, was in the shop, though even if she hadn’t been, the increasingly snowy Seattle winters weren’t good for her low-riding purple self.
It was a long drive back to our part of town. I watched out the window and Billy kept quiet, both of us stuck with what I bet were similar ruminations. Ravenna Park wasn’t a real outdoors getaway place, not like some of the other areas we’d found bodies. It was also the first time a victim had turned up within the North Precinct boundaries. That meant we were moving back into our own jurisdiction, but it also meant any kind of pattern we might have established had been obliterated. I considered hoping it was a separate case, and then cringed at the thought. We really didn’t need two cannibalistic killers.
We came down Brooklyn Avenue, a block to the west of my apartment building. Gary, leaning on the hood of his cab like a gargoyle protecting the crime scene, waved as we drove by. He was outside a police perimeter—the North Precinct building was only half a mile away, and Billy and I were far from the first cops to arrive—but didn’t look like he minded at all. Billy pulled up and we got out, me shaking my head. “It’s a quarter after five in the morning, Gary. You’re not supposed to be hanging out at crime scenes looking like somebody gave you a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas.”
He put on a convincingly innocent expression and gestured to another cabbie, whose face looked green in the sallow amber lights as he talked with a couple of other cops. “Henley was all shook up. Thought it’d be only right to come down and give him some moral support.”
“Uh-huh. Morrison’s going to kill you, you know that, right?” I slipped up against the big old man and gave him a brief hug anyway. Gray-eyed, white-haired, and still sporting the linebacker build he’d had as a young man, Gary was essentially the kind of person I wanted to grow old to be. As far as I could tell, he’d never lost his sense of wonder. For a girl with shamanic potential lurking under her surface, I’d managed to thoroughly quench my own. Gary’d done his best to unquench it in the months we’d known each other, and I loved him for it.
He kissed my forehead. “Sure, darlin’, but some things are worth getting killed for. Hugs from pretty girls, f’rex.”
I grinned. “Did you really just say ‘f’rex’? I didn’t think people really said that.”
“You don’t
