to help Naomi.” A third person interrupted, the man from the troupe who’d carried Naomi’s body offstage. He was, at a glance, more Native American than me, with coppery skin tones and dark brown eyes. He was also wound as tightly as anyone I’d ever seen, exacting enormous control over his emotions. I wanted to hug him, just to offer him a release, but I doubted he’d appreciate the effort right then. He was probably doing his best to hold himself together for the troupe. “Thank you for that. I’m Jim Littlefoot.”
I couldn’t help it. I looked at his feet. He made a sound that said everybody did that, and offered his hand as I looked back up. “Naomi’s older sister Rebecca and I founded this troupe a few years ago. She’s the one holding Naomi now. You said you were a healer.”
“Not much of one today,” I said unhappily. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Littlefoot. She was gone before I could do anything.”
“She was gone before you got to her,” Littlefoot said very steadily. “We all felt it, Ms….?”
“W-w-wah, Walk. Er.” I knew my last name. I really did. It was just that the one on my birth certificate and the one I used in day-to-day life weren’t the same. I had, over the past decade, chosen to use the former about six times, and I was in no way prepared for the impulse to use it now. “Uh. Walker. Detective Joanne Walker. This is, uh. This is my boss, Captain Michael Morrison of the Seattle Police Department.” I gestured to Morrison, who stared at me so hard I thought my hair might light on fire. He knew the other name, the one I’d inherited from my Cherokee father, and he clearly recognized I’d just had the impulse to use it. I was going to get grilled later for that. Well, fair enough. I kind of wanted to grill myself. Maybe with a nice teriyaki sauce.
Standing eight feet from a dead woman while talking to someone who’d been closer to her was not the time or place to notice a growing hunger in my tummy. Jim Littlefoot shook Morrison’s hand, but turned his attention back to me.
“What kind of training do you have?”
“Shamanic. Your first act nearly turned me into a coyote.”
Wow. I hadn’t meant to say that, either. I hastily withdrew into myself for a moment, imagining my greening garden, then reinforcing the shimmering silver-blue shields that kept it safe from outside intruders. With no offense meant to Mr. Littlefoot, people who made me blurt details about a magic I preferred to keep quiet could be highly dangerous. I’d found that out the hard way. It wasn’t a road I wanted to go down again.
A mixture of curiosity and apology came into Littlefoot’s eyes. “It’s meant to prepare the audience for a transformative experience in the second act, not literally change people. I’m sorry.”
“I know. It wasn’t your fault. It’s just the amount of po…” My brain caught up to what he was saying. “So it’s deliberate. I mean, it had to be, with the amount of power you were generating, with the focus, but—but you do know what you’re doing. What you’re creating.”
A fleeting smile crossed his face. “We do. We spent nearly two years perfecting these pieces, getting the right dancers, before we took it on the road. Even one cynic among the troupe can destroy the synergy. It hasn’t been an easy program to develop.”
“How long have you been touring?”
“Since last September. We wrap up in May in Chicago.” Littlefoot cast a glance over his shoulder, then looked back at me with his mouth a thin unhappy line. “Or that had been the plan. I don’t know what we’ll do now.”
“Since September.” Dismay coiled through me, cool and loathsome. “So this attack could have be—”
Littlefoot interrupted, “Attack?” and paled, like he hadn’t thought through all the possibilities behind Naomi’s death.
I said, “I’m sorry,” and turned to my boss. “This could have been months in the planning, Captain. Can we get the list of credit-card purchases for the tickets to tonight’s show? The theater was packed, there must’ve been five hundred people here, but it’s a place to start investigating.”
“Walker.” Morrison drew me back a step, though it wasn’t really an attempt to take me out of Jim Littlefoot’s hearing range. “You already said they’re not going to find anything to provoke a murder investigation. She’ll be autopsied, I’m sure, but—”
“Are you really going to tell me not to investigate this, boss?” I took a breath, steadying myself. “Do you really think I’ll listen if you do? Because I—I need to, Captain.”
Morrison’s expression softened just slightly. I sort of felt like I’d thrown a low blow, given the circumstances of the day, but I was willing to take any bend I could get.
“Hey.” One of the paramedics lifted his voice, clearly not talking to us, but garnering our attention anyway. I was just as glad: backstage at the theater probably wasn’t the place to argue with Morrison over what my duties as one of Seattle’s only paranormal police detectives entailed. Then the paramedic uttered seven little words that invalidated my concerns about being allowed to investigate.
“Hey,” he said, “don’t you think this looks weird?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
There were puncture wounds over Naomi Allison’s heart. Five of them in an arc of about two hundred and forty degrees, like somebody had sunk extremely pointy fingernails into her flesh. They got worse as we watched, deepening until her chest started to cave in.
Morrison drew breath to speak and I snapped a hand up, fingers rigid, to silence him. To my astonishment, it worked, though I’d probably pay the price later. But I had a good idea of what he’d been going to say—something along the lines of “No signs of murder, Walker?”—and I was a lot more interested in watching Naomi’s degradation than I was in being scolded.
Besides, I’d been right. When I’d said there were no obvious signs of foul play, there hadn’t been. That, however, had been a whole two minutes earlier, and lots could change in two minutes. I’d gone from being a mechanic to a shaman in that time. Stranger things could happen. Around me, they usually did.
“It’s a physical manifestation of the power drain. Somebody sucked the energy out of her so fast it’s taken a couple minutes for the corporeal damage to catch up. But I bet dollars to doughnuts there’s somebody out there whose visualization on this is ripping her heart out.” I put my fingertips over the wounds, which were now deep enough to start bending around the heart. There was very little blood, given the depth and the fact that I could see torn arteries. Postmortem injuries were like that. No heartbeat to pump the blood, so the best it could do on its own was ooze and pool.
Jim Littlefoot said, “Why?”, the paramedic said, “What the hell are you talking about?” and Morrison, in a low, dangerous voice I’d become accustomed to, said, “Walker…” all at more or less the same time. I ignored the latter two and shook my head at Littlefoot.
“It’s not personal, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s the power you’re generating. Someone wants it, and they’re using the idea of the heart as the soul’s center to focus their desire. They weren’t after Naomi. This would have happened to whoever was the lead dancer tonight.” It was so clear to me I could almost See it, though the Sight itself wasn’t offering much. I was a day late and a dollar short: if I’d chased the black whirlpool of magic when it had fled Naomi’s body, I might have followed it back to the perpetrator.
