C.E. Murphy - Demon Hunts

Morrison waited for me to regain my balance, then folded his arms over his chest in expectation. The searchlights did him no favors, turning his silvering hair white and making the lines of his face deeper and more haggard. Even his eyes were pale and hard, as though deep blue river water had frozen into ice. "Am I wasting time pulling you two out here, Walker?"

Steam clouded around my head as I breathed out, an excellent physical approximation of the exasperation shooting through me. "Not any more than it wastes the forensics team's time, boss. They haven't found jack shit, either, but nobody thinks they shouldn't be here." I winced, not exactly an apology for my tone, but at least recognition that I should modulate it. I wasn't at my best at four-thirty in the morning, which didn't excuse mouthing off to my captain.

Fortunately, almost half a decade of mutual antagonism mixed up with more recent emotional complications had, if not inured Morrison to my smart mouth, at least prepared him for it. He managed to both ignore and respond to me, which took some doing. "Forensics works in this world, Walker. You're supposed to have some insight into another one."

I honestly didn't know which of us was more astounded that he'd be saying something like that. Billy had always been an I want to believe freak, but until recently, all Morrison and I had had in common was a sarcastic dismissal of all things paranormal. Truth was, my boss had come around faster than I had. Less than two months after my first encounter with the world of weird, Morrison had demanded I do what I could with the Sight to help solve a series of ritual murders. I'd kept dragging my feet for months after that, trying to make my magic go away, but the captain had chinned up and expected me to use all the talents at my disposal.

I stood there gazing at him and trying to squeeze that revelation into my rigid little world view. I'd known he was too good a cop to ignore my skills if they might be useful, but somehow I hadn't quite grasped the idea that he'd accepted my power before I had. Every smart-ass comeback I had died on my lips. "I'm sorry, boss. Everything's frozen, even what the Sight can see. I'm not some kind of mystical Indian tracker."

Morrison gave me a sharp look that I accepted with a groan. Technically, I was some kind of mystical Indian tracker. My dad was Cherokee, and not even I was arguing about the mystical part anymore. The only part where the description fell down was in tracker, which I manifestly was not. I'd proven remarkably poor at hunting down mythical bad guys—at least, poor at hunting them down as quickly as I thought I should—and had no idea if that was because my schooling was incomplete, or if I was just inept. I muttered, "Shit," and for some reason the faintest smile cracked Morrison's glower.

Billy rappelled down beside us and got out of his harness with a great deal more grace than I'd shown. He'd lost a good twenty pounds in the last couple months—dropping the baby weight, he called it; his wife had just had their fifth child—and moved more lightly for it, even though he was still taller than both Morrison and myself. "We've got to find a way to catch up with this guy faster," he said.

"Like before he kills anybody else," Morrison said, so flatly Billy and I both looked at him a moment. I'd heard Morrison's angry voice plenty of times—usually directed at me—but this wasn't outrage. It was helplessness, and that wasn't something Morrison indulged in often.

Billy recovered first, tugging his rappelling rope to let the guys at the top know he was out. The rope and harness rose into darkness as he spoke. "You know the chances are we're already too late for that, Captain. We've got at least two more missing persons reported, and we'll be damned lucky if they're still alive. But what I'm talking about is where Walker and I can help. This guy cleans up after himself. We haven't found any DNA to work with, so Forensics is at a loss, and unless we get to a body faster, Walker and I aren't much good, either. Even my resources outside the department—"

Morrison lifted his hand. "I don't want to hear about it."

Billy hesitated, glancing at me, then nodded once. "Yeah. Okay. Look, I'm sorry, Captain. Right now we're at a dead end."

I breathed, "No pun intended," and Billy gave me a dirty look. I mouthed, "Sorry," then flinched as my hip pocket began to ring. Billy glanced at his watch and arched his eyebrows, and I shrugged, taking a few steps away from my companions to wrestle my phone out. The number was unfamiliar. "Yeah, this is Joanne Walker."

"Hey, doll. Where are you?"

I pulled the phone away to give it a sideways look, though a smile threatened the corner of my mouth. There was one man on this earth who could get away with calling me doll. "It's pushing five in the morning, Gary. What do you mean, where am I? Where do you think I am?"

"Well, you ain't at home, 'cause I called that number twice. And you weren't sleeping, 'cause you never answer that fast when you have been, and you never sound this awake. You on a hot date, Jo?"

The threatening smile broke and I laughed. "You should be the detective, not me. No, I wish. I'm at a crime scene. Morrison called me a couple hours ago. What's up? Where are you calling from? I don't know the number."

"I'm at dispatch." For anybody else I knew, that meant the precinct building, but Gary worked part-time as a cabbie. I'd climbed into his taxi almost a year ago, and my life had quite literally never been the same since. Still smiling, I listened to him rattling on, waiting for him to reach the eventual point: "I was gonna cover for Mickey's shift 'cause his grandkids are coming in today from Tulsa, but one of the other cars just called in, Jo. He found a dead lady at Ravenna Park."

I snapped my fingers and gestured Morrison and Holliday over to me before Gary stopped talking. Both men creaked through the snow toward me and I echoed Gary's words, looking back and forth between my boss and my partner. "A driver at Tripoli Cabs just found a body across from my apartment building, in Ravenna Park. The guy's freaked out, says the body is still warm and it looks like it's been chewed on."

"Who the hell's calling to tell you th—" Morrison broke off mid-question and bared his teeth. "Muldoon. Walker, have you been spouting off about cases to your octogenarian boyfriend?"

"Septuagenarian," I said with a sniff. "Gary's only seventy-three." The boyfriend part didn't bear responding to. Half the people I knew were convinced I was dating a guy old enough to be my grandfather, and I'd given up arguing with them. On the other hand, being haughty about Gary's age gave me an excuse to not answer the bit about whether I'd been discussing cases with people who weren't members of the police force. Not that it mattered too much. As quiet as the department was trying to keep the killings, after six weeks of missing persons and murders, the media was starting to take notice. "Are we going, or what?"

The look Morrison gave me indicated I had in no way actually avoided the question of whether I'd been talking about the case off campus. Still, he made a sharp gesture toward the distant parking lot and got on his phone to invite the forensics team to join us. I slipped my way down the hill with Billy a few steps behind me. Five minutes later we were in his minivan, both of us hunched over the heater vents in hopes of thawing.

I caught a glimpse of Morrison's gold Avalon pulling out of the lot, and felt vaguely self-conscious that I'd had to ask Billy to pick me up. My classic Mustang, Petite, was in the shop, though even if she hadn't been, the increasingly snowy Seattle winters weren't good for her low-riding purple self.