My finger started tapping against my thigh. I gave it up as a bad job and let my toe go back to it.
“Siobhàn,” Morrison said carefully. He hadn’t had a problem with the name earlier, when it belonged to the little girl, but attaching it to me appeared to take some serious thought and consideration. “Siobhàn Walker?”
I tilted my head back, looking at the ceiling of the car. Black fuzzy mat, nondescript and able to hold in the summer heat.In for a lamb, I thought, and said, deliberately, “Siobhàn Grania MacNamarra Walkingstick.” That was the full name written out on my Irish birth certificate. I honestly had no recollection of ever saying it aloud before. Part of me wondered why Morrison got to be the Father Confessor. The rest of me didn’t want to know.
Morrison didn’t say anything else. He turned the key in the ignition, put the car in Drive, and drove me home in silence.
Monday, June 20, Noon
I felt as if I deserved the bawling out Morrison had failed to give me on the way home. That, perversely, was my excuse for going down to the station after changing out of my dress uniform. I was off-duty, so I wore shorts and a tank top, and wished my skin didn’t ache like it was sunburned.
The precinct building’s air-conditioning was out. It seemed like the whole city’s air-conditioning was out. The heat was oppressive, as if it was deliberately trying to crush the life out of anything that breathed. I wasn’t sure if it was compounded by the coven’s activities the night before, or if it was just my very own personal screwed up power loop. I was afraid it was me.
Morrison’s door was open and he stood by the windows in shirtsleeves, talking on the phone. I tapped on the door and he scowled, but gestured me in. I sat and took slow deep breaths of the still air, trying to shake off the feeling of suffocation.
“What do you want, Walker? It’s your day off.” Morrison came back to his desk and dropped the phone in its cradle.
“I know.” I leaned forward, putting my forearms on my thighs, and then wished I hadn’t. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to unstick from the position. “I just wanted to talk about Cassandra Tucker, Cap.”
Morrison folded his arms over his chest, leaning against his desk as he looked down at me. “What is this ‘Cap’ thing, Walker?”
My train of thought derailed and I frowned at him. “Sir?”
“Sir is fine,” he agreed. “Captain is fine. You used to call me Morrison, or boss, when you really wanted to rub it in. Now it’s Cap. What is that?”
“It’s an abbreviation for Captain,” I muttered, but that wasn’t what he wanted to know, and all things considered, I felt like I should tell the truth. The problem was I hadn’t noticed me calling him Cap until he pointed it out. I moved my gaze to his kneecaps, and talked to them. “Pretty much I feel like I’m kissing your ass if I call you Captain or sir.”
“They’re my job title and an honorific worthy of the position,” Morrison pointed out dryly. I looked up from his kneecaps.
“Yeah, but this is me…” I couldn’t help it. A little grin slid into place, and I finished the sentence with, “Cap.” He didn’t smile back and I looked away again. “You always look like you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop when I use Captain or sir,” I said with a shrug. “I guess I was just trying to find a way around that. Look, Morrison, about Cassandra Tucker…”
“The case is closed, Walker. It’s closed, and she’s buried. Leave her alone.”
“It’s just that I feel like there’s more to it.” My tongue and throat struggled over what to call him at the end of that statement, and couldn’t agree on an answer, leaving me feeling like I’d cut it off too abruptly. Christ. I was going to have to start calling him Michael, now that he’d made me self-conscious about all the other names I used for him.
I could not for the life of me imagine calling him Michael.
“There isn’t.” There was a flatness to Morrison’s tone, a lack of curiosity and a whole lot of barely controlled impatience. “The case is closed. Let her rest, and get out of my office. It’s your day off, and God knows I need it.”
I left feeling out of sorts, sticky, and a little confused. It was marginally cooler outdoors than inside, although I could feel heat radiating off the sides of buildings as I walked by. A bus rambled up in front of me and while I didn’t want to get on it, it made me notice the waiting bench it stopped at. I sat down, waving the vehicle on, and rubbed my eyes. My contacts were as sticky as I felt. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d taken them out. I wore the extrapermeable extended wear types just for that reason, but most days I remembered to take them out in the evenings. I was pretty sure I’d had them in for three days straight now. I wondered if I could manage to heal my own near-sightedness, then found myself rubbing the thin scar on my cheek. “Arright, yeah,” I muttered to myself. “Some things don’t need healing.”
A white-haired old woman on the far end of the bench looked at me nervously and scooted another scant inch or two away. “Sorry,” I said to her. “I’m not crazy. Of course, that’s what a crazy person would say, isn’t it?”
She got up and left.
Maybe I was crazy. It was possible. It was also possible Cassandra Tucker had had a heart attack brought on by too much use of magic, but the idea just made me itch. I’d been to the Dead Zone before. The bit with the snakes and the god-awful serpent monster was all new, and I didn’t believe Cassie’d died of something as ordinary as a heart attack. Not with that kind of welcoming committee on the other side. Even though Coyote told me my method of investigating the Dead Zone potentially opened me up to anybody who wanted to have a go at me, I still didn’t believe Cassandra’s death was natural.
I actually laughed out loud, looking up at the sky. “Satisfied?” I asked my invisible spirit animals. I couldn’t feel them with me, but I assumed they had to be around somewhere. “For once, I’m the believer. I’m the one who thinks something kooky’s going on when the perfectly mundane explanation makes everybody else happy. I’m getting good at this acceptance thing, huh?”
I was also getting worryingly good at talking to myself. Out loud, no less. A surly faced pair wearing black leather—which had to be really uncomfortable in this weather—took the long way around me, trying not to meet my eyes. I shrugged an apology and unstuck myself from the bench, heading back to Petite. I had two days off. I might as well see if I could prove myself right.
CHAPTER 21
“Hey, legs!”
I recognized Billy’s voice behind me, but it didn’t occur to me to turn around. He sprinted—for some value of “sprint;” the extra ten pounds made his solid footfalls sound heavy enough to shake the sidewalk—the few yards to catch up with me and dropped a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, legs. What, you’re not talking to me anymore?” He let out a puff of air and fell into step beside me as I wrinkled my forehead at him.
“You were talking to me?”
“You see anybody else with Julia-Roberts-inseam legs walking around here?” he demanded. I glanced down at my pale knees and my pair of really comfortable men’s sandals. Then I looked around at the passersby. Plenty of them were in shorts. Most of them weren’t women a smidgen under six feet tall.
“I guess not. You never said anything about my legs before.”
“Two reasons.” Billy steered me into the Missing O, where I hadn’t been planning to go. “One.” He lifted a finger. “Melinda’d kill me. Two.” Another finger. “It’s sexual harassment. Three.”