Gradually—actually rather quickly, but it seemed slow because of the ache in the air—the few who’d come to say a specific goodbye rejoined the circle at large. Others obviously wanted to take their place, say goodbye individually, but Naomi was visibly fading, Billy’s grip on her loosening.
They began to sing, a Native American song I imagined was a mourning tune from Naomi’s tribe. That was how the bulk of them would say goodbye, by overriding their own desires so I would have a chance to ask my question. I joined Billy again, knowing what I owed them and still reluctant: Naomi seemed relatively at peace, and I was afraid what I had to ask would shatter that calm.
On the other hand, I didn’t see that I had much choice. The killer’s trail had gone cold, and while going out hunting Morrison was a worthy cause for the remainder of the night, it wasn’t going to render the dance troupe safe from another attack. “Naomi, can you show me where your killer is?”
Naomi Allison withered, shrieking, and spun skyward to rush out of the theater, every goddamned bit as untrackable as the killer’s trail had been.
The circle broke up around us, dismay crowing from every throat as dancers scrambled to their feet in Naomi’s wake. Rebecca was in tears, hiccups of “But she was fine, she was okay, she was fine,” clearer than most of the other babble. Littlefoot pulled her against his chest, scowling over her head at me. Not blaming me, I didn’t think. Just angry and frustrated and probably scared because he didn’t understand what had happened.
Neither did I, exactly, except I’d been relatively sure asking about her killer would upset her. I’d hoped she might do something mundane like point in the right direction, or better yet, give me an address, though I’d thought the former more likely. Zipping off into the ether was really no help at all, though it was a little hard to condemn the ghost of a murdered woman for not wanting to consider the means or perpetrator of her death.
“I’ve got it.” Billy sounded as thick as he’d sounded light before, like a sinus headache had suddenly taken up all the space and comfort in his head. “I can see her trail. Almost. Close enough to follow, anyway.”
Breath whooshed out of me, and the hubbub fell silent as everyone absorbed that. Rebecca sobbed one more time, a short sharp noise, but this time there was relief in it: maybe Naomi’s horrible departure had a purpose. Even I thought that somehow made it better.
I grabbed Billy’s hand, said, “Sorry, I’m stealing him,” to Mel, and started tugging him toward the door. “Where? Which way? I can’t follow a trail very long and I don’t know how long a ghost trail might last. Where do we need to go?”
“Joanne!” Melinda’s voice cracked across the stage and I turned back, electricity jittering down my spine. She softened a little, though her voice remained serious: “Be careful.”
I gave her a weak smile, nodded and hauled Billy out of the theater. He shook off the deepest part of his malaise as we got outside and cleared his throat. “Keys.”
I dug them out of my pocket as I scurried along, and he thrust his hand at me. I frowned at it. “What?”
“Give me your keys. I’m the one seeing ghost trails.”
A little bubble of astonishment popped at the very bottom of my soul. It gave rise to lots more, like soda fizzing in a glass. The closer they got to the top, the more they exploded with tiny bursts of outrage instead of astonishment. “You want to drive Petite?”
“Everybody wants to drive Petite, Joanne. She’s a beautiful car. People who don’t drive want to drive her.”
“And nobody gets to!” One person. One person besides me had driven my baby since I’d rescued her from a North Carolina barn over a decade earlier, and I’d torn into that person with the unholy vengeance of a thousand paper cuts. I had put blood, sweat and soul into my big purple beauty, and nobody got to drive her but me.
Billy, with infinite patience, said, “Don’t be an idiot. Give me the keys.”
I clutched them against my chest, eyes wide with indignation. “Do you even know how to drive a stick?”
“Walker!”
Sullen, I said, “You sound like Morrison,” and tried to hand over the keys. I did. I really tried, but my hand wouldn’t uncurl from my chest, nor would my fingers unclench from around the keychain. “I can’t.”
“You can’t hand over your keys.”
They cut into my fingers, I was holding them so hard. It hurt enough that I was starting to want to let go, but my crimped fingers wouldn’t loosen. “I really don’t think I can. Nobody drives Petite, Billy. Nobody but me.”
My partner flung his hands into the air—a remarkably melodramatic and impressive act, in his bright blue zoot suit—and stomped around the car. “Morrison is right. Your relationship with your car is pathological, Walker. If we lose this trail because you miss a turn, I will haunt you for the rest of eternity. Do you understand me?”
I said, “Yes,” in a tiny voice, and even believed him, but it was still me who got in the driver’s seat.
Billy alternated between giving directions and cursing me, all the way downtown. I parked Petite at the all-night garage on Pine Street, grumpily aware that I wouldn’t get to write off the parking fee because I wasn’t officially on a case. Billy stopped swearing once we were safely parked, sat silent a minute or two, then started up again. “I can’t see the trail anymore. We need to go south from here.”
“I don’t know if there’s any overnight parking south of here and I’m not leaving Petite on the street.” I got out of the car, locked my door, and waited for Billy, cursing all the while, to do the same.
“Is this what it’s like when you try to track?”
“Yes.”
“No wonder it pisses you off.”
“You got us a hell of a lot farther than I have.” We headed for street level. “I don’t know. Maybe if I shift into a coyote again I could pick up the trail.”
“You’ve been hit by a truck once already tonight. Why don’t we try something else first? We’re in the right ballpark.
Let’s go talk to your friend Rita Wagner. If I were down town working a major spell, I’d want to be well out of the way. Maybe she’ll have some ideas on where.”
“Why not the Olivian?” I jerked a thumb northeast, toward the high-rise apartment building a block or two away. “I mean, that’d be plenty out of the way, plus a nice penthouse view. There’s no reason to assume a power-stealing madman is hiding in the down-low and dirty parts of town.”
“Except it was a homeless guy who was murdered down town yesterday morning, not a business executive in a high-rise.”
“Yesterday?” I looked at my wrist, where I’d taken to wearing my copper bracelet instead of my watch. The brace let was prettier, but much less good at telling time. But Billy was right: it was probably past midnight, so Lynn Schumacher had died yesterday. “Okay. Yesterday. God. Long day. Okay. You were saying?”
“I was saying, assuming they’re connected—”
“And why would we do that?”
“Because you’re at the center of it all.”
I shut my mouth so hard my ears popped. Billy waited for me to come up with an argument, but all I could manage was a silent, not especially creative litany of bad words.
There was a non-zero probability that he was wrong. It was possible Rita Wagner had come back into my life simply to pass on her gratitude for us saving her life. It was possible someone within her sphere of influence had died horribly out of pure random hideous circumstance, shortly after she re-entered my orbit. And it was possible there was no connection at all between that death’s physical location and the generalized area Melinda had been able to point us at for our magic-stealing-murderer’s location. It was possible.