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By this time, I’d grown bored enough to be distracted, so I jumped when he said, “Hmmm, Miss Chandler, can you describe the incident in question for me?”
“You are referring to the Case of the Floating Bus, aren’t you? Not the Case of the Bridal Brawl?”
“The Bridal Brawl will be a separate form. We’ll get to that one later.”
“Oh, goody,” I said under my breath. “Okay, then, we—Owen Palmer and I—were leaving work yesterday, shortly after five, and we were discussing choosing flowers for our wedding. The walk light was red, and we stopped. I wasn’t really paying that much attention because we had a list of florists to visit and I was looking at that. I glanced up, and a guy was walking across the street in the middle of the block, against the light, when a city bus approached. It might have hit him, but it levitated over him and landed after he was out of the way. I didn’t see who did it, and I didn’t feel any magic being used near me. Any veiling spell wouldn’t have worked on me, but it was pretty clear that other people saw it. That’s about it.”
“Hmmmmmmm.” His hum was longer, and he kept it going as he finished writing. At least he stayed on pitch the whole time, only going a bit flat toward the end when he must have run out of breath. I got the impression he didn’t even realize he was doing it. I doubted he’d appreciate being clued in. Finally, he looked up. “You’re certain that Owen Palmer had nothing to do with it?”
“Yes. I’m accustomed to the way his magic feels, and I didn’t feel it. He was as shocked as anyone by what happened.”
The corner
s of his mouth drooped a bit, and a small crease formed in his forehead while he finished filling out the form, giving the impression that he was disappointed. Had he hoped I’d rat out Owen once we were no longer in the room together? “Is there anything else you recall about the incident? Do you remember seeing the person from the video with his hand outstretched?”
“Really, it’s all a blur. I don’t think I could identify anyone, not even the jaywalker.” No sooner had I said it than I recalled one of the photos on the blog. Maybe I was just adding details in my mind now that I knew about the pointing man, but I had a mental image of a man with a similar posture in one of the blog photos. I’d assumed at the time that he’d merely been pointing at the strange event, but maybe there was something else there. I didn’t want to say anything now because that would mean talking about the magic watchdogs. I figured we could always send the Council an update later if we discovered anything. I tried to keep my face blank, so it wouldn’t be obvious that I was withholding information, but he was too busy filling out the form to look at me, which told me he was more of a paper pusher than a real investigator.
“Now, about the incident you have so succinctly described as the Bridal Brawl.” He shuffled papers and came up with another form, filling out all the information yet again. It seemed to me that he could have done that afterward rather than wasting my time. On the other hand, he really did have amazing handwriting. I wondered if he was available for addressing wedding invitations.
I didn’t wait for him to finish and ask me a question before I said, “I’m not sure how much I can tell you because I didn’t see anything. I know there was a commotion, but I didn’t see the people involved. I wasn’t even sure it was magic until later. I was busy shopping for a wedding gown, which is an all-consuming task.” Feeling like I was throwing Trix under the bus, I added, “Trix, the receptionist, was there, and she may have seen more than I did.”
He made a few notes, then said, “Hmmm, I don’t think that will be necessary.” Which I considered proof that this was more or less a witch hunt against Owen, making sure he wasn’t going rogue. While the bus incident was flashier, the bridal brawl had made the television news. “Thank you for your time, Miss Chandler. We will contact you if we have additional questions.”
When I finally got back to my office, I pulled up the blog again and clicked on the picture I’d recalled, which did show the pointing man. Actually, it showed his hand. His face was blocked by someone else’s head. And he definitely wasn’t pointing. His hand was formed into an odd shape, so odd that it was extremely unlikely that he’d just happened to hold his hand like that when pointing at a strange event. I printed a copy of the photo and took it to Owen’s lab.
“What do you make of this?” I asked, dropping it on Owen’s desk.
“That’s the guy from the bus incident?” he asked, bending over to examine it.
“His hand. I’ll have to see if there’s a shot that shows his face. But he’s not pointing.”
“No, he’s not. He’s doing a levitation spell—not the one I would have chosen, but I guess it works if you don’t mind a huge energy expenditure. It’s a formal spell, which kills the untrained wizard trying to be a superhero theory.”
“So that means it’s someone who knows what he’s doing, doing it on purpose.”
He leaned back in his chair. “I don’t think it’s all that ominous. After all, he did save a life. If he really wanted to expose magic, wouldn’t he have been a bit more visible and obvious, taking credit for it? My guess is that it was just someone who panicked in the moment, saved the guy, then realized he screwed up. Your rank-and-file wizard isn’t used to doing big things like that. Coordinating a veiling while levitating a bus using that spell would be beyond most people. I’m not sure I’d have had the energy to do both.”
Sighing and shaking his head, he added, “Really, I should have had the presence of mind to veil what he was doing as soon as I spotted it. That’s where I messed up.”
“I hope you didn’t say that to the Spanish Inquisition. He was after dirt on you. I don’t think he cared at all about these public magic events.”
“If they’re having to dig that hard, then I must be doing something right,” he said with an attempt at a smile that I thought looked a bit pained. “And since I know I’m not doing these things, I don’t have anything to worry about.”
I wished I could be as optimistic as he was.
I’d barely made it back to my office when I got summoned to another meeting. It wasn’t in the boss’s office or in security, but rather in a place I hadn’t visited yet, and I thought I knew this building fairly well. I found it easily enough, but I hesitated outside the door, wondering what this was all about. More dealings with the Council? Something to do with my Collegium case?
Taking a deep breath, I opened the door and entered a room that looked like the bullpen of a newspaper in an old movie, except there were computers instead of typewriters on the desks. An unshaven man leaning back in his desk chair noticed me entering and called out, “Favorite fantasy animal, favorite part of town?”
“Excuse me?” I replied.
“Answer the questions.”
“Um, dragon, Central Park.”
He sat up, leaned over his computer, and typed for about a minute before leaning back again. “Okay, that’ll work. Now, what can I do you for?”
“I was told to come here. I’m Katie Chandler.”
