It was also possible that a wendigo had just happened to take up hunting in my neighborhood, or that the right pieces to shatter an ancient, powerful death cauldron had come into play around me coincidentally. It was possible. It just wasn’t very damned likely.
“I’m like that woman,” I said after a long time. “Angela Lansbury in that TV show. No one in their right mind would be friends with her. No one in their right mind would be in the same town as her. No one should ever, ever go to a cocktail party with me. Or on a road trip. Or—”
“So we’ll go see Rita.” Billy gestured me out of the garage, and I shuffled toward Pioneer Square, wondering how the hell to escape being a danger to my friends and coworkers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The soup kitchen was closed by the time we got there—the Pine Street parking garage was a mile away—but a few stragglers were still making their way out the door. Billy caught the door behind one of them and I ducked under his arm into a long pale-floored room that reminded me of a school cafeteria, right down to the narrow brown tables with built-in colored benches. Rita hauled pans from the food service area, showing more strength in her small form than I’d have expected. The door creaked as it shut behind us, and she, along with another half-dozen volunteers, called out variations on, “Sorry, we’re closed, come back at seven tomorrow morning!”
My conditioned response was, “We’re the police,” except I thought that would get entirely the wrong reaction, so I said, “Actually it’s Joanne Walker,” as if my very name was excuse enough to barge in after hours.
Fortunately I was right. Rita put her pans down with a bang and turned to gape like she’d never expected to see me again. I was equal parts pleased to confound her and guilty that it had taken Billy’s reminder to get me back to Rita and her case. Guilt beat pleasure and I mumbled, “Could you use a hand cleaning up?” which made Billy shoot me a look suggesting I would die slowly and painfully, later, for having volunteered.
Rita, though, exchanged glances with another one of the women, then pulled her apron off and came around the counter. “It’s okay. You came back. Did you find out anything about Lynn? I think the detective this morning just wants to write it off as a dog attack. I heard on the radio tonight people had seen a wolf. Can you imagine? A wolf? In Seattle? It must’ve gotten loose from the zoo.”
My heart did a sick lunge into my stomach and churned it up. “What else did the radio say?”
“Just to call it in if anybody saw it, that Animal Control and the police were tracking it. They didn’t say anything about Lynn. Do you think it was a wolf attack?”
I bit back a bile-filled burp and very carefully didn’t look at my partner. “No. The wolf only…got loose…around nine o’clock tonight. Did they say where they’d seen it last?”
“On the West Seattle Bridge, heading for the viaduct.”
“The we—what the hell’s he—” I broke off, looked at Billy this time and said, “That’s northeast of where it was last sighted,” as carefully as I could. “Why would he head downtown?”
Billy, aggrieved, demanded, “You’re asking me?”
“Well, who else am I supposed to ask?” If I were a sensible shapechanged human, I would slink home and wait for somebody to come rescue me. That would be easier, in theory, for Morrison than it would be for me, as he owned a three-bedroom house with its own small plot of land, whereas I was still renting the fifth-floor apartment I’d moved into my sophomore year of college. At either location, the doors would be a problem, though Morrison might be able to manage the garage door at his house. I really wanted him to be holed up there, gnashing his teeth over the situation I’d gotten him into.
But all of that assumed some level of human intellect and not just a panicked animal running down whatever streets looked least threatening. Not that the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which was also Highway 99, was exactly non-threatening, even at midnight on a Saturday.
I put my head in my hands, trying to press my thoughts back into a more useful order. “One crisis at a time, Joanne. Take it one crisis at a time. All right. Rita.” I looked up, and she came to attention like I was a drill sergeant. “My partner here thinks a bunch of unrelated things are actually related. I’m going to go out on a limb and say your missing friends are related, too.”
“Why?”
I flexed my jaw, making cords stand out in my throat. “I don’t suppose you’d just take it on faith.”
Resignation deepened lines around her eyes. She would take it on faith, obviously, but I got the feeling it made her a little bit less of a person, somehow. I said, “Okay,” very softly. “It’s just usually easier for people to not really pay attention to what’s going on around me, but you might be an exception. You know how you said you being alive was a miracle?”
“I said you saving me was a miracle,” she corrected. “Me being alive, that’s a gift I don’t want to screw up.”
I couldn’t help smiling. I’d screwed up so much myself it was nice to come across somebody else trying not to blow it, too. Kindred spirits, we, not that I’d have ever imagined such a thing. “Ever heard of shamans?”
“Like medicine men, right? Indian medicine men?”
“Native American, yeah, although a lot of cultures had, or have, shamans. Anyway, they’re healers. We might call them magic-users.”
“And you are one, and that’s how you saw me get attacked and called it in before I died?”
My jaw flapped open and Rita shrugged. “What else were you gonna say, with that kind of lead-in? What’s the difference between magic and a miracle, Detective?”
Billy came to my rescue while I continued to wave my jaw in the wind: “From the outside, probably not much. From the inside, I don’t know that I want to get into the theology of it.”
Rita smiled. “I don’t think it matters. So there’s something magic going on?”
“How is it that everybody else is much calmer about that idea than I’ve ever been? I mean, doesn’t it seem incredibly unlikely? Like, totally preposterous?” My voice rose, and Billy very sensibly herded us out of the soup kitchen as I said, “I mean, magic. People don’t believe in magic. It’s like believing in fairies and unicorns and, and, and—”
“And other magical things,” Billy finished. I gave him a dark look, but nodded.
Rita folded her arms around herself and peered up at me. “If you’d asked me three months ago I’d have said you were hitting the bottle too hard. But then I got stabbed and should have died, but instead a bunch of cops and ambulance people showed up because somebody who wasn’t even there sent them on ahead to save my life. If something like that happens to someone like me, you start to have a little faith in something bigger. I don’t know if I believe in magic or miracles all the time. But I believe in you, Detective Walker. I believe in you.”
Jeez. I felt like Tinkerbell. My nose stuffed up and my vision got all bleary and for some reason I snuffled a couple times as I patted Rita’s shoulder. “Okay. Okay, fine, I guess you told me. All you people are just a lot cooler than I am.
So anyway, basically Billy thinks I’m being pulled where I need to go.” The very phrase made fishhooks sink into my belly, insistent tug that felt, somehow, like it came from a long way off. I rubbed my stomach and went on. “If he’s right, then a murder Friday night and Lynn’s death Saturday morning are related, and your missing friends might be, too.”
Hope lit Rita’s lined features. “So you’ll help me look?
Even if it’s not your case or your jurisdiction?”
I smiled feebly. “No reason to get hung up on technicalities at this late stage of the game.” Besides, though I didn’t want to say it aloud, exploring the possibility that I was a nexus of some kind was probably kind of important. It might mean those retirement plans to the top of a remote mountain would get moved to sooner rather than later, but it also seemed like if it was an unpleasant reality I was aware of, I might be able to mitigate the fallout somehow. “Maybe you could take us down below and we could…”