Page 25 of Spirit Dances

Except there wasn’t any lingering trace of magic in the square. The West Precinct’s squad was doing its job with focused efficiency, auras touching and blending so they became a single creature with many parts, all bent on the same ends. Lynn Schumacher was the quiet point at the center of their work, but I couldn’t see ghosts at all, and he had no residual marks of power left on him. “I’m starting to think most magic just doesn’t track well. Unless there’s some kind of significant ritual or major physical upset, it’s there and then it’s just gone, poof.”

“Can’t be. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

I was about to argue that magic by definition wasn’t physics, then remembered the backlash of my powers reawakening and silenced my own protests. “So I’m just a lousy tracker.”

“Nobody’s perfect. The good news is that old-fashioned police work gets the job done, too, Walker. This could just be a wild dog.”

“Yeah.” But Naomi Allison’s death hadn’t been, and I was the only person who had any chance at all of solving that. “All right.I’ll ask Doctor Reynolds to try to get a copy of the autopsy report and until then I’ll assume this is a perfectly ordinary wild dog killing in downtown Seattle. In the meantime?—”

“Detective Walker?” Rita Wagner, looking less haggard than she had earlier, appeared at my elbow. “Detective, I thought of something that might not be important….”

“About Lynn?”

“No. Just about the Underground.” She gave Billy a cautious look, but went on, apparently trusting that if neither Monroe nor I had busted her for camping out in the lost parts of Seattle, Billy wasn’t likely to, either. “Or about the people who stay there, I guess. Some of them have disappeared.”

A mixture of sorrow and resignation filled my chest. “I hate to say it, Rita, but…”

“I know. We’re vagrants. We disappear, we move on, we end up like Lynn. But the population down there is pretty steady. Like I said, we keep an eye out for each other.”

I’d already promised the woman I wouldn’t dismiss her or her concerns, so I nodded, determined to at least hear her out. She smiled, but it faded fast. “Even when we do take off, it’s not usually in clumps. Maybe two or even three, but it’s five, Detective Walker.”

“All from the Underground? How recently?”

“I’ve been staying there lately, so I wouldn’t know about anywhere else. In the last ten days or so, though. One every couple days. It’s too many.”

“But no murders? Nothing like what happened to Lynn?”

Rita shook her head and I puffed my cheeks. “That’s something, I guess. All right. I’ll try to look into it, Rita. Missing persons aren’t my department.”

“I know. I just thought maybe I should mention it.”

“Mention it to Detective Monroe, too. Just to cover my ass, so he can’t say I’m hiding anything from him, okay?”

She gave an unenthusiastic nod and went to shadow the crime scene’s edge, clearly waiting to be worthy of notice. Billy watched her, his mouth twisted with uncertainty. “Somebody like that could get more attention from this one incident than she’s had for years. I hope she’s not making things up to stay in the spotlight.”

I didn’t want Rita to be lying, but my partner had a point. “I’ll come back down here tonight, on my own time, to ask around about missing people.”

“And right now?”

“Right now I’d really like to go home and put some pants on.”

Unfortunately for me,I actuallyhadtagged along with Billy instead of driving Petite downtown, in order to make my presence at the scene slightly more acceptable. Women in miniskirts climbing out of purple classic Mustangs were not likely to be taken seriously at a crime scene. So he brought me back to the precinct building, where I followed him upstairs to Homicide in hopes of bumming a ride back to the Hollidays’ house from somebody going off-shift.

Jim Littlefoot was waiting for me when I got there. I had a brief vision of myself: cropped hair a mess from the hat I’d been wearing, winter-weight police jacket unzipped to show my sweater hanging over the silly knit skirt and my bare legs poking out until heavy boots enveloped my ankles. It wasn’t, overall, a particularly flattering picture.

It was still a hell of a lot better than Littlefoot looked. I knew I hadn’t slept, but he obviously hadn’t, either, and his dancer’s stamina did nothing to alleviate the bags under his eyes. I almost yawned, looking at him, and did make my eyes water by fighting the yawn off. “Mr. Littlefoot. I didn’t expect to see you. This ismy partner, Detective Billy Holliday.” I gestured to Billy and got out of the way so they could shake hands.

They spent about five seconds trying not to do the obvious: Billy struggling not to look at Littlefoot’s feet, and Littlefoot fighting the urge to ask if this was live or Memorex. Nobody much cared that it had been Ella Fitzgerald on that recording. She and Billie Holiday were contemporaries, and that was close enough.

When they’d both manned up, gotten past impulses and shaken hands, I offered Littlefoot a seat, took my own and said, “What can I do for you?”

“You can come to tonight’s performance.” Littlefoot pushed a pair of theater tickets across the desk toward me. Billy’s eyebrows rose with interest, and he pulled a chair over from nearby, thumping down to listen in. Littlefoot glanced at him, then turned his attention back to me. “The troupe decided this morning that the only way to honor Naomi’s memory was to continue the show.”

“You have someone who can…” I didn’t want to saytake her place, because that sounded needlessly callous. “Who can dance the part? You said it had been hard to find the right people for the troupe.”

“Two understudies. You can’t go on a tour this long with out a more-than-full complement. The understudies are as much a part of us as the primary dancers. And they under stand the risk they’re taking.”

It tookmea minute to catch up to the risk, and then I straightened in my chair. “This isn’t just about the show must go on, is it? You’re hoping to draw another attack.” It was exactly the kind of thing I would do. I had a disconcerting moment of heart-lifting admiration combined with gut clenching fear, and wondered if that’s what people around me felt when I charged off on some particularly stupid campaign against evil. I didn’tdare look at Billy for fear of finding just exactly that expression of accusation on his face.

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