C.E. Murphy - Walking Dead

“No. By next week he’ll have talked himself out of the truth anyway. I might as well give him something to hang his hat on. Left here, then upstairs.”

I prodded her toward Homicide—the department, not the act—and she gave me a dubious look, but took the stairs two at a time before stopping at the top and saying, “You should’ve told him the truth.”

“Suze.” I scrubbed a hand through my hair, then turned what I hoped was an earnest but serious face on her. “Suzy, you’re atypical. You went through a lot of weird and horrible crap in January, and you came out of it believing everything that had happened. I’ve spent most of the past year watching people rationalize away the things that happen when I’m around. Half my best friends aren’t anymore, because they can’t quite convince themselves that what they saw wasn’t real, and it makes them afraid of me. Doherty’s going to be happier thinking he got caught up in a movie production than he is thinking zombies are actually rising on Halloween night. Trust me on this.”

She stuck her arms akimbo and thrust her jaw out. “So how come I believe it all?”

“Aside from the premonitions you can’t shake?” I spread my hands. “I guess you’re just happier knowing the truth. You’re tough. A lot tougher than I am. C’mon, I need to talk to Billy and see if he’s gotten anywhere on our murder case.”

Suzy hung back, frowning. “I’m not tougher than you. You’re a real hero. You saved me. You help people.”

God save me from the faith of innocents. I looked at the granddaughter of a god and knew that even if she preferred knowing the truth, I stood in one of her blind spots.

What the hell. Everybody needs heroes. I pulled her into a rough hug, promised, “I’m trying, anyway,” and only then did we brace ourselves and walk through the doors into chaos.

Monday, October 31, 5:57 p.m.

I’d have hated to be on emergency dispatch right then. Halloween night was always nutty, and the department put extra people on in preparation for that, but nobody’d been given a primer on what to do with dozens of calls reporting that poor dead Fido had risen from the backyard grave and was trying to get inside the house, or that Goldy the fish was working her way back up the toilet drain. Grim-faced detectives were responding to unsolved homicides in which the dead were returning home, and I bet Missing Persons was suffering from exactly the same kind of deluge. It wasn’t the kind of scene anybody in their right mind would take a fourteen-year-old into, but I didn’t have anywhere better to bring Suzanne, and she was rather literally the only thing standing between me and certain death. I had no intention at all of bringing her on the case with me tonight, but storing her somewhere safe where I could communicate with her seemed like a good idea.

My desk was in the middle of the uproar, though. Not exactly the most peaceful place to sit and wait out a zombie attack or a cauldron search. I picked up the receiver on my desk to phone Morrison, and Billy pushed the call button down with a thick finger. “Want to tell me why there’s an insurance adjudicator downstairs gibbering about zombie movies?”

I put the phone over my collarbone and groaned. “Because the other explanation was too unpalatable. Do you think if he loses his mind they’ll just give me my money?”

“Detective Walker’s having a bad day.” Suzanne inserted herself into the conversation with a bright smile and an offered hand. “I’m Suzanne Quinley. We talked on the phone. Hi.”

Billy said, “Hi,” and shook her hand sort of automatically, but he didn’t take his gaze off me. “How bad?”

“My bad day doesn’t really matter, Billy. Did you talk to Sandburg?” I couldn’t believe it was still Monday. I hadn’t even gotten up twelve hours ago, but the day had been going on forever. We were only about five hours short of the forty-eight hour mark since Jason Chan had died and the cauldron at my party had awakened. Time was running out, and that didn’t even include Suzy’s premonition.

“I brought him in for questioning. Completely rattled him. I think he would’ve confessed to anything if it meant getting out of there, but either I’m the worst judge of character in Seattle or he was genuinely offended at the idea he might be involved in trying to sell the cauldron. I ended up sending him home again. The guy’s got no hint of being a runner.” Billy hitched himself onto the edge of my desk, arms folded across his chest. “The flip side is our tech guys say the security-tape loops started Friday just after the close of business. Everything matches up with the loop from three weeks ago perfectly. That means somebody with fantastic hacking skills or easy access is probably responsible.”

“Redding or Sandburg.” I pressed my fingertips against my eyelids. “I have a question I’m going to regret asking. Could somebody be manipulating Sandburg through magic so he didn’t even know he was involved in anything illegal?”

Billy stared at me a long moment. “Occam’s razor says no. Could you do something like that?”

Creepy-crawlies ran over my skin, reminding me of the unpleasant shock of slamming weaponized magic into Cernunnos. “I don’t think I could, but witchcraft might be able to. Faye Kirkland magicked Gary into a heart attack. Seems like if you can do that, you might be able to affect people’s actions.”

Billy tipped his head back and glared at the ceiling. I couldn’t swear to it, but I was pretty sure he was counting to ten. When he reversed his gaze again, it was to fix it on me like I’d become a bug for collecting. “I don’t know, Walker. My department is ghosts. Do you think it’s a real possibility?”

“I still think the cultural anthropologist is more likely than the security guard. Redding’s probably dead by now. If I were stealing a cauldron to bring somebody back to life, I’d want to do a test run first.” My stomach, which didn’t know a cue when it heard one, rumbled ferociously. I had no idea when I’d eaten last.

Suzy, voice small, said, “I could look and See.”

“See?” Billy frowned at her. “See what?”

“If that man is dead. I can…” She faltered, looking at me.

“Suzy can see the future,” I said matter-of-factly. “Ever since January and the thing with Herne and Cernunnos.”

Now, if somebody’d said that to me, I’d have gotten all skeptical. Billy didn’t even blink. “We’ve got some of his personal effects in the evidence lockers. Would that help?”

Suzanne’s eyes widened, then lit up. “I don’t know. I never tried. Do you think it might help me control it? Because that would be awesome.”

Billy said, “Using tangible objects belonging to the subject is a time-honored way of honing focus,” which I was pretty sure meant “yes.” Two minutes later we were downstairs opening an evidence locker while a bored recruit looked on. I wondered if he’d get a flashy show that would wipe away his boredom, and couldn’t decide if I thought that would be good or not.

Suzy fluttered her hands over the handful of things with Redding’s name sticky-taped to them: a glasses case, a pair of civilian shoes, a long raincoat and hat, and an ink sketch of his wife and children, “A. Redding” printed in small letters in the lower right-hand corner. It was a head-and-shoulders image of all of them, his daughters in pigtails and his wife’s hair in an upswept Gibson-girl style. I saw women on the street occasionally who still wore their hair like that: members of a small church I didn’t know the proper name of, but which I thought of as the Church of the Ladies with Hair. Those women usually wore long skirts and blouses, and Redding’s wife had the slightly puffed sleeves I associated with that look. The building manager out in Ballard had mentioned the bingo group, but not a church. Then again, it wasn’t like I knew whether my neighbors went to church, either.