DISCLAIMER: The Sentinel and the characters therein are the property of: 
Danny DeMeo and Danny Bilson, and Pet Fly Productions. Kung Fu and Kung 
Fu: The Legend Continues are likewise the property of some Americans. 
"Breeze By The Sea" is taken from Susan Foster's Learning Curve Series, 
Witt's End is taken from the book Absolutely Positively by Jayne Ann 
Krentz. No money is being made from this fic, no infringement of copyright 
is intended. All Original characters in this fic are the property of C.D. 
Stewart, and may not be used by DeMeo, Bilson, Pet Fly Productions or 
anyone else on the entire planet without the express permission of 
C.D.Stewart. SUMMARY: See Seven Dials and Shields, respectively #1 and 
#2 in the Telempathy Series©. Yes, this is number three…  


PERSPECTIVE


The eyes of Jim Ellison, Sentinel of the Great City, snapped open and he 
lunged bolt upright in his bed like a 1950s Hammer House of Horror B-movie 
"cursed mummy" even as he whipped away the eye sleeping mask he 
customarily wore and jerked his legs up towards his torso. "Ah-hah!"

At the bottom of his bed stood the puppy, and on it's back balanced the 
hell-kitten, currently in a pose of studied nonchalance as if to say, Me? 
About to attack those vulnerable pinkies poking from under the duvet? 
What a ridiculous notion!  Jim glared at them, though it seemed to have no 
discernible effect, and slowly worked himself up to the task of getting out 
of bed. Normally he was up and doing his 30 minutes of PT and callisthenics 
before his morning shower but he hadn't got to bed till gone 1:00am after 
the Major Crimes drug bust netted an unexpectedly large fish and got the 
Feeble Bullies of Incompetence all excited. Today he was in a "slow and 
stately" mode. 

The kitten continued to look innocent atop its perch on the puppy's back, 
something that fooled James Joseph Ellison not an iota. The damn thing had 
proved itself way smarter than anything that small had the right to be. The 
day after Jim's nocturnal discoveries of his two strays, Blair had purchased 
one of those childproof gates for the foot of the spiral staircase up to Jim's 
loft. Childproof maybe, but it failed when faced with cunning cats. 
Sometime over the subsequent week the kitten had discovered that by 
balancing perilously on the narrow gate top bar on three legs and batting 
repeatedly at the bolt with one curled paw would eventually draw the bolt 
back and allow the gate to swing open. Of course neither Jim nor Blair had 
any idea of this at the time.

Jim's Sentinel senses had, understandably, catalogued the kitten and puppy 
as "no threat" within a few hours. Therefore, he had been blissfully asleep 
when, early one morning, the deadly duo had opened the gate and come a-
calling. His senses had not warned him as they wandered around his loft and 
up into his bedroom. Awareness of danger had come a split-second after the 
attack kitten from hell had pounced on the exposed Ellison foot that 
protruded too temptingly from under the quilt, sinking it's claws at least 
ten inches deep – "Jim, his claws are soft and they're only a few 
millimetres long"...my ass! - into tender Sentinel flesh. The air had been 
turned a sapphire shade as Ellison hopped around the bedroom trying to 
clutch one foot and kick the blasted beast into the middle of next week with 
the other at the same time whilst Sandburg tried to calm his Sentinel down 
whilst maintaining a straight face – both of them failing miserably. The 
kitten who sported a small white smudge of fur on his chest, like a blurred 
thumbprint, giving rise to the logical name of "Smudge", was instantly 
renamed "Dastardly" by the irate Sentinel, and the broadly grinning puppy 
now answered to "Muttley". 

Now he got out of bed with one final glare at the duo. Stretching till he 
heard his joints crack, he yawned and paused at the top of the stairs, 
shoving one hand down his boxers and having a good scratch. Dastardly 
recoiled, looking at him with a horrified expression that clearly said, Good 
God man, don't you realise you look just like Homer Simpson!
 
"Eat my shorts!" Jim retorted and went downstairs, ignoring the patter of 
clawed feet behind him.

Stripping off the boxers and tossing them with Sentinel-reflex precision into 
the linen basket, Jim stepped into the shower. He washed his hair, 
massaging the scalp, then worked up a thick lather with the special 
sandalwood and herb soap that Blair bought especially from Kwai Sun 
Herbal, as many ordinary soaps, packed with chemicals and perfumes, 
irritated sensitive Sentinel skin. He lathered up a second time, using the 
soft-bristled back scrub to reach his spine and the middle of the back. Jim 
had to admit that while his "Sentinel side" was still not enthralled about his 
Guide no longer being so near to him, the rest of him was seeing the 
advantages of Blair moving to his "own place", even if it was only a few feet 
below; being able to use all the water in the tank for his own shower 
currently being his favourite advantage. 

Abruptly tilting his head to one side, Jim suddenly whipped back the shower 
curtain to catch the kitten poised in pre-launch mode. Dastardly quickly 
recovered by turning the pouncing crouch into an exaggerated back stretch. 
Jim snorted and stepped out of the shower, rubbing water from his face and 
deliberately dropping the towel on the kitten. "And you can forget the doe-
eyes," he told Muttley, who was sat in his usual position of mouth open, 
little pink tongue hanging out, "'cos you weren't exactly barking any 
warnings were you?"

Sensitive nostrils suddenly acquired the scent of percolating coffee and 
sizzling bacon from the apartment below, so Jim went to the washbasin and 
made haste to lather up. He had electric and battery operated shavers, but 
these would remain for camping trips, vacations and emergencies from now 
on. Blair, obviously worrying about Jim's ambivalence towards the fact that 
he had moved out of the loft, even if only by a few feet, had shyly given 
him the gift-wrapped box containing an "old-style shaving set" with the 
joking remark that it was in honour of Ellison finally getting his bathroom 
back. 

Jim had been touched and deeply suspicious as his Sentinel eyes picked up 
the superb craftsmanship of the gift that Blair had been so vague about. His 
suspicions had been confirmed when he took the shaving set to be appraised 
for insurance and the jeweller had practically drooled all over it. Pointing to 
the tiny, worn crowned crest on each of the items, the man had revealed 
that Blair's "old-style" shaving set had been made specifically for none 
other than His Royal Highness, Prince Adolphus Frederick Ludwig, 1st Duke of 
Cambridge, youngest son of the British King George III, younger brother of 
Kings George IV and William IV, paternal uncle of the great Queen-Empress 
Victoria. The jeweller estimated the set to be worth "only" about $600 
dollars as Adolphus had been the least well known of the prince brothers for 
the simple reason that, out of the lot, he was the only one who possessed 
any morality and social conscience instead of being an out and out lecherous 
womanising drunkard. 

The shaving set now had pride of place in Jim's bathroom. To be honest, 
Jim found it a great deal more pleasant to use than his electronic shaver – a 
wet shave always suited Sentinel skin far more than a dry one. The biggest 
"downside" to having super-senses was the sheer number of modern things 
that brought him out in a rash or made his skin red and sore, not to mention 
all the things had made him sick, dizzy, itchy and so forth. Cough medicine 
that made him blind, washing detergent that brought him out in hives, 
supermarket soap that turned his skin tomato red, food additives and 
preservatives that gave him diarrhoea, constipation, nausea or vomiting 
depending on what they were. The one area of the Sentinel-Guide 
relationship that Jim had never had any problems with was letting Blair 
decide what food they bought when shopping, what detergents they used 
around the loft and to clean to their clothes and their cars with. 

Finishing his shave and deciding that he had drip dried nicely, Jim carefully 
rubbed in plenty of that cocoa butter moisturising lotion that Blair – again – 
had talked him into buying with the explanation that modern industrial 
pollutants, automobile emissions, air fresheners and conditioners, etc., 
etc., would all dry out/irritate his already sensitive flesh. Automatically 
checking to see that Blair wasn't there, even though his Guide's heartbeat 
was clearly downstairs, Jim used his foot to give the tiled bathroom floor a 
quick and lazy wipe with the towel (that the angry kitten had managed to 
crawl out from under) before flicking it into the wash basket for later. 
Hurrying back out, he dressed and made his way down to the apartment 
below.

Blair looked up and smiled as Jim came down the spiral stairs followed by 
Dastardly and Muttley; his own hair was still damp, but he was acutely 
aware of what time Jim had come in last night. He had been at a faculty 
meeting at Cascade Community College, which whilst long-winded in the 
extreme had finished in time for him to be tucked up in bed by 10:30pm. 
Since he always worried about Jim when the big cop was out using his senses 
without Blair physically around, he had only dozed fitfully and had noted 
the time when he finally heard Jim come in, just brushing with gentle 
telepathic comfort against Jim's weary mind. The Sentinel had sleepily 
acknowledged him and crawled under the covers to go out like a light. 

Since Blair had bought the apartment below the loft, the two men had 
fallen into a routine of alternating apartments; one day they would have 
breakfast and dinner in the loft, the next in Blair's apartment, with the 
resident doing the cooking. Today was Blair's turn anyway, but knowing Jim 
would be up early despite his late night, Blair had got up and showered 
before making large quantities of Happy Sentinel Meal – bacon, sausage, 
ham, eggs, biscuits, beans, hash browns, waffles, toast, fresh coffee, 
biscuits, bacon, ham, sausage, eggs, beans, hash browns, coffee, bacon…

As Jim sat down at the old pine table they'd got from the junkyard, Blair 
placed his plate in front of him, piled high with the aforementioned bacon, 
sausage, beans and so forth, plus a big mug of coffee. Muttley immediately 
took up a position by the Sentinel's chair.

"Forget it, Mutt," Jim growled, "you didn't warn me about the attack cat. 
Besides, you both should know about the no furniture rule."

Blair bit his lip to stop sniggering. "They were on the furniture again?" He 
tried to sound concerned.

Jim glared at the two offenders. "They were on my bed this morning, and 
they were on the couch yesterday. I've explained the House Rules to them – 
twice!"

Blair carefully set down his coffee mug at the Sentinel's aggrieved tone, his 
lips trembling. He managed to say solemnly, "Jim, that's the problem."

"What?" Jim paused with a biscuit partway to his mouth.

"Big guy, they're only little, they're babies." Blair pointed out. "You can't 
expect them to pick stuff up instantly. You should have let them have a 
rest, then explained the rest of the rules to them – say, a break after the 
first two hundred, then another after the next two hundred."

Jim nodded, then his brain caught up. "Hey…"

Blair couldn't contain himself any longer. Sinking into a chair he hooted 
with mirth, "Jim, you tried the House Rules on a puppy and a kitten?! Now 
that's anal!"

Jim glared at his hooting friend. "I'm also gonna try some torture 
techniques on a certain Guide in a while…"

Blair sobered himself up – mostly - and began to read the paper while Jim 
tucked in. However, as he had known, Jim was too observant not to realise 
that Blair's sole intake consisted of coffee, while all the actual food was 
going down the Sentinel gullet.

"Why aren't you eating?" Jim frowned.

"I'm not hungry today."

"What's wrong?" Jim put down his knife and fork and automatically began 
to cast out his senses towards whatever threat had upset his Guide. Search, 
locate…and destroy…

Blair shrugged. "Unsettled night, that's all. I had a bad dream."

Jim frowned. "Just a bad dream, or do you mean a  "bad dream"?" He made 
quotation marks with his fingers to indicate the visions their spirit guides 
were wont to hit them with unexpectedly.

"I'm not sure." Blair shrugged. "We'll soon know." He placated as Jim 
continued to frown. "Your breakfast is getting cold."

He got up and started to clear away the pots. Jim finished most of his 
breakfast and when he thought Blair wasn't looking he held out a bit of 
sausage to the two under the table. Dastardly gave him a look of sheer 
disbelief, How dumb do you think I am buddy? I know where that hand has 
been! Muttley had no such sophistication and gobbled down the treat.

Blair smirked to himself as the titbits disappeared under the table. For all 
the big guy's growling, it was clear that small, furry animals could count as 
part of the tribe. Blair had resolutely not noticed the very expensive chew 
toys that mysteriously appeared around the loft, or the way that Jim would 
sit for an hour on the couch with Muttley on his lap, watching the Jags and 
brushing the puppy's fur, which the little animal loved; Jim had also 
brought "scraps" for the pair as treats, and again Blair made no mention of 
the fact that the scraps seemed to consist of steak and chicken rather than 
gristle and bacon rinds. Sometimes Jim Ellison was so darn cute you just 
wanted to cuddle him. Firmly repressing that thought, Blair composed his 
face into sober seriousness before he turned back around.

Contentedly stuffed with a week's worth of cholesterol and coffee almost 
strong enough to qualify as paint stripper, Jim gathered his truck keys ready 
to depart for work. "I'll see you at noon?"

"Sure thing Jim." Blair agreed as if Jim hadn't already checked his ETA at 
the police precinct twice. Jim was always only a couple of steps away from 
Blessed Protector/Mother Hen From Hell mode and Blair's dream had put 
the Sentinel on edge.

Blair listened to the elevator descend as he put the crockery in his new 
dishwasher, then went upstairs with Dastardly and Muttley on his heels. 
Sometimes a man just needed to contemplate life leaning on a balcony rail 
with a hot cup of coffee and since his otherwise wonderful apartment didn't 
have a balcony, he would borrow Jim's. He gazed out over the cityscape, 
not even looking for Jim's truck – unfortunate genetics had given him 
myopia that a career spent poring over old, badly written manuscripts plus 
staring for hours on end at a VDU was rapidly exacerbating. There was the 
world within range of his spectacles, then there was the Big Blurriness.   

He vented a despondent sigh and Muttley immediately responded by coming 
and sitting on his foot, gazing up at him with big eyes that clearly declared: 
don't worry, I love you. The little fur ball was "sensitive to atmosphere". 
Despite his obfuscation to Jim, Blair knew perfectly well that his dream had 
been a vision – an instructive vision to be precise. The Sandburg mouth set 
in a stubborn streak – instructions he had no intention of following. Blair 
Sandburg was the Guide of the Sentinel of the Great City, a job that lasted 
twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week. Besides that he was also a 
college lecturer, a scientist and a police "volunteer" whose long-standing 
position as Psychological Profiler/Anthropological Consultant seemed highly 
likely to soon become official if Simon Banks got his way. 

Blair took a sip of his coffee, feeling tense and irritable. Those were just his 
"big" jobs, each of which took up large chunks of his life and didn't even 
come close to all the "little stuff" – the listing of which would probably 
produce enough paper to wallpaper a room. Blair Sandburg was Jim's 
confidante, private psychologist, masseur/physiotherapist, cheerleader, 
personal shopper, chef, cleaner, back-watcher, decorator and bodyguard. 
Blair did not begrudge or resent for a second a single thing he did to help 
Jim, but the common denominator shared by all of them was that they took 
further chunks of time and effort out of his already full life. 

Blair Sandburg couldn't simply rush through the mall in thirty minutes, 
grabbing whatever items were cheapest/on offer – the list of things that 
had/probably would/possibly could cause Jim discomfort or outright harm 
was daunting in it's sheer scope – everything from soap, cologne, talcum 
powder, shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste, detergent, wash powder, 
household cleaners, medicines, tinned food, powdered food, frozen food, 
clothing, pesticides, moisturising lotions, fabric softener, clothing, shoes, 
printer ink, paint, wood varnish and furniture fabrics made up the litany of 
substances that were potentially lethal or seriously discombobulating to a 
Sentinel! 

Blair grinned to himself at being able to remember a word with that many 
syllables at only 7:55am but the smirk faded. The contents/ingredients of 
every item he purchased had to be mentally ticked-off against Blair's lists of 
things that "Jim can tolerate", "Jim suffers minor irritation from", "Jim 
becomes ill from" and "Jim absolutely MUST NOT be allowed anywhere 
near". 

In order to stay ahead of the marketing game, companies were always 
messing about with formulas and each "New and Improved" product had to 
be re-checked to ensure that a favourite did not now have a banned 
component, or that something previously off-limits was safe to try. Not even 
prophylactics could be taken for granted – only last year, out on a hot date, 
Jim had bought an "emergency supply" of plain and assorted fruit-flavoured 
condoms. The night of amour had come to a screeching halt when Jim's 
date had to rush him to ER as the strawberry-flavoured condom caused his 
penis to swell for entirely the wrong reasons. Fortunately the swelling had 
gone down within twelve hours but a painful red rash had persisted for 
another two days. 

Eventually even Jim had seen the funny side, but the incident had brought 
home to Blair the reality that he could take nothing for granted where his 
friend's well being was concerned. The fact that Jim's Sentinel abilities 
were hard-wired into his primitive, instinct driven brain was his greatest 
asset since they enabled Jim to react automatically to a threatening 
situation without losing valuable seconds required to consciously "think", 
but pre-industrialised Sentinels had lived their lives on a planet without 
plastics, additives, "E-numbers", synthetics and a whole host of nasties that 
could wreak havoc on a Sentinel.          

Blair's "shopping" was usually a marathon expedition that went from one 
end of Cascade to the other, for example the factory outlet that was the 
cheapest place to purchase Ivory Snow washing powder was so far North in 
Cascade that it was practically in Alice Lake, whereas "Breeze By The Sea", 
which allowed customers to mix their own perfumes/shampoos, etc., from 
"blank" base scents was just as far in the opposite direction. Well aware of 
how dangerous Western medicine was to Jim, Blair used Kwai Sun Herbal 
Chinese apothecary for all their medicinal needs, even though it was deep in 
the heart of Chinatown, and strongly suspected that there Jim's secret was 
"out". The manager of the shop was a serene twenty-something called 
Kitty, but the owner, who lived in California and whom she clearly revered 
as "The Ancient", had the uncanny ability to phone in when Blair was in the 
shop and make subtle suggestions regarding herbs and remedies that were 
tailor-made for someone with heightened senses. Even then, care had to be 
taken – just because something occurred naturally didn't mean it was less 
harmful than the over-relied upon chemicals of Western medicine; for 
instance Chamomile acted as a sedative to Jim, while too much St. John's 
Wort made him giddy.

In short, there was no such thing as quickly grabbing the nearest tin of tuna, 
cheapest jar of coffee or that bargain swatch of fabric at a yard sale. 
Sentinel allergies plus aesthetics like Sentinel-heightened taste buds meant 
that the "best" kind of food was both fresh and of the highest quality – 
buying just-caught herring from the docks at 5:00am was both tiring and 
expensive; top-quality "unprocessed" coffee beans and quick-frozen freshly 
picked tea cost an impressive amount at the small, exclusive distributor on 
Galileo and 5th; curtains for Jim's bedroom ended up being genuine, high-
quality, very thick velvet, damask or some other wallet-walloping material 
in order to provide enough thickness to block out as much light as possible 
in deference to Sentinel eyesight.           

As long as it helped Jim Blair didn't care, but last night's vision had scared 
him rigid and also triggered Maximum Sandburg Obstreperousness. Abruptly 
Blair remembered a quote he had read in a story about a Shaman*:
For all catastrophic events there is a catalyst. Before the earthquake there is the tiny 
fissure beneath the earth's surface that insidiously expands with pressure; the boiling 
pot that overflows because it is topped too near the surface when the heat expands it's 
mass; the spirit of an individual who has filled his plate with responsibilities 
impossible to meet without sacrificing bits of his soul.
That was exactly how he felt – as if he had…Hell, he was still worried about 
letting Jim down as the man's Guide, never mind taking on the burden of 
being Jim's personal spiritual adviser and in a wider context, Shaman to 
Cascade's 4 million plus citizens. Blair's crotch suddenly tingled, but he 
ignored the sensation, turning and walking inside with his now empty mug. 
The phoenix tattoo that adorned his intimate anatomy was the physical 
symbol of his acceptance into the Simba-Nyeuse tribe of Africa, but the pre-
pubescent Blair had been so grateful the tribal warriors had not skewered 
him like a shish-kebab that he hadn't paid any attention to the long, 
confusing explanations he received from the tribe's medicine woman about 
his "destiny" and his future as what sounded like "Yeah-niche-oh-ham", a 
word he had come to realise more than likely was the Simba-Nyeuse word 
for "Guide".

Well, tough! Incacha could "pass on the way of the Shaman" all he wanted. 
Blair had no idea how to be a Shaman and absolutely no desire to be one, 
even before the minor sticking point that he didn't have time to be a 
shaman, medicine man, witch doctor, priest, rabbi, or whatever. Blair 
Sandburg was being slowly nibbled into oblivion by his myriad 
responsibilities, and he had had enough. He was putting his foot down right 
now! 

"So deal with it!" He growled to the empty apartment at large as he 
grabbed his backpack and headed out the door to CCC.

* * *

"Jim! Blair!" 

Walking side by side into the Major Crime Unit bullpen at Cascade Central 
Precinct, Jim and Blair exchanged whimsical smiles. The deep yet melodious 
bass rumble was a great contrast to the stentorian bellow that had once 
been Their Master's Voice. 

Entering the office, which now bore the legend: Captain Joel Taggart, Major 
Crime Unit, the pair were given a warm smile by the huge man sat behind 
the desk. Both Joel and Jim had stepped into their new roles of Captain and 
Lieutenant effortlessly, helped by the fact that they had the total support 
and complete faith of their immediate superior, the new Chief of Police. As 
a Lieutenant, Jim had more "clout" but was still very much an active 
detective. Joel Taggart was now of an age where his body could well do 
without the stress of being Captain of the Bomb Squad, but he also 
possessed an unmovable serenity. Simon had known how to dance to the 
political tune of the moment in order to protect his people, however Joel 
succeeded simply by being like a mountain range – large, majestic, stately - 
and impervious. Many had been patronisingly amused when first meeting 
Joel, dismissing him as old, slow and stupid simply because of his large size, 
so Jim and Blair had watched with vicious glee as Captain Taggart routed all 
before him. 

Joel was unfailingly polite, always courteous, and listened earnestly to what 
was said; then the big man would pick up some statistical report or other bit 
of bureaucratic twaddle and metaphorically blow it to hell by asking all 
manner of awkward, uncomfortable questions in a tone of sincere, 
concerned interest that could not be challenged because he genuinely was 
sincere, concerned and interested. When some new directive came to his 
office that would blatantly hinder his people, Joel would send it back or on 
to some other pen-pusher with a note of apology for his non-understanding 
that also containing a long list of points he wished clarifying about how the 
changes would be implemented, who would pay, what procedures needed to 
be in place, and so forth. 

Until all those points had been answered the directive would not be 
implemented, and since all the red tape and buck-passing took time, often 
the silly nonsense would be quietly dropped. When budget cuts were 
proposed again, Joel had carefully taken the paperwork and then sent 
personal letters of apology to the Mayor's wife, the City Council and various 
other dignitaries for scaling back or cutting down on the police presence 
during their various "charity fetes", public appearances and so forth "due to 
budget restrictions". Since it was virtually impossible to be churlish to 
someone who had been the "bigger man" by apologising first for something 
that was in fact your fault, the various dignitaries of Cascade had magically 
stumped up a budgetary increase for the police department.

Aware of Jim's physical Sentinel sensitivities and the emotional ambivalence 
of Jim-his-friend to change, Joel had carefully ensured that Simon's office 
was as unchanged as possible. Virtually the only differences were the lack of 
cigar tobacco scent and that the photograph of Daryl Banks had been 
replaced by various photographs of Joel's wife, Mavis, their son Jake and 
daughter-in-law Ariadne, and the grandchildren. His eyes twinkling, Joel 
informed them, "The Chief wants to see you both. I said I'd send you right 
on up!"

The three grinned at each other like little boys before Jim and Blair exited 
the office, the latter practically bouncing along, greeting Rhonda, now 
Joel's assistant. Much as Simon would have preferred to take his efficient 
secretary with him, he was aware of how unfair it would be for Joel to learn 
the ropes of the new job with an inexperienced assistant to boot, and also 
the fact that Rhonda's "worse half", her fiancé-soon-to-be-husband 
Detective Henri Brown would be forever finding excuses to "visit" his lady 
love, irritating the hell out of the Chief in the process. 


The low whistle made Simon look up from his paper work with a glare that 
did not fade as he took in Jim and Blair's smirks. The Chief of Police's office 
was much larger, much plusher and sported a panoramic view of the ocean; 
Simon had treated himself to an even snazzier coffee maker too.

Both bearing twin pseudo expressions of earnest eagerness, it was Jim who 
asked in a tone of vapid, chirpy adoration, "How can we help, Chief?"

"You can stop before I shoot." Simon warned gruffly but without heat, 
standing up and coming around his desk as his two best men - and best 
friends – tried without much success to smother their smirks. "Take a look 
at this."

Simon's big, bright office had a conference table just like his previous one. 
But whereas that table had been a cheap veneered plastic construction that 
just squeezed into the Captain of Major Crimes Unit's office, this 
conference table was long and wide and practically screamed "executive". 
The dark, glossy wood had been polished to mirror-brightness and sported a 
vase of silk flowers in the centre – which was an impressive distance from 
the paperwork that had been placed on the edge nearest Simon's desk and 
the door, the previous table having been so short that Sandburg could touch 
each end if he stretched out on it – not that the anthropologist should ever 
have done any such thing!

Jim and Blair looked at the large map of Washington State spread out on the 
conference table. In red ink someone had drawn a vertical line down from 
Seattle towards Portland, but stopping at the city of Cascade situated 
between the two, nearly parallel to Astoria. Another red line had been 
drawn horizontally from Cascade out towards Yakima, but again it 
terminated earlier near the base of the Cascade Mountains, the range 
bisecting Washington State. Finally someone had drawn another red line 
from Seattle, diagonally down away from Cascade to meet up at the point 
where the horizontal line terminated, creating approximately a right-angled 
triangle. The Sentinel and Guide exchanged puzzled glances. Unless you 
counted Seattle at the top point of the triangle, it did not include any major 
Washington cities – Tacoma, Olympia, Spokane, Yakima and Astoria were all 
more famous, despite some having a lower population density than Cascade.

Simon pointed to the narrower right-hand section of the triangle. "Do either 
of you recognise that area?"           

Blair didn't even lower his myopic eyes to peer as Jim's Sentinel vision gave 
the big man the answer. "The Lorelei?" Jim made the reply a question.

In the words of a visiting 18th Century British naturalist to the area: 
"Almighty God hath wrought purest perfection upon this one blesséd place, 
glory greater than kings and beauty unsurpassable by any queen being 
unfurl'd in every petal! E'er wise to the spiteful destructiveness of His 
most rebellious children, the Lord hath bent His Will to the protection of 
this incomparable splendour, by his Great Design to ensure that Man 
neither can, nor e'en wishes, to destroy it…"

Dangerously close to purple prose the words might be, they were perfectly 
true. Nestled near the base of the Cascade Mountains, the area known as 
the Lorelei – for reasons unknown, since the Lorelei were the German 
equivalent of the Greek Sirens, mermaids who lured sailors to shipwreck, 
while this area was landlocked – seemed to have almost been designed by 
someone well aware of humanity's capacity to destroy. The land was so 
rugged that mass construction of suburb housing would have been far too 
expensive to undertake, and what few homes did exist in the area were 
built for and owned by those multimillionaires wealthy enough to afford 
having utilities such as water and electricity brought to them. Likewise the 
land's contours ruled out commercial intensive farming, and thorough 
testing had proved the area contained no gold, silver, platinum, gemstones, 
minerals, ore, stone or anything else worth mining and quarrying for. The 
Lorelei was unremarkable except for one thing – it's stupendous natural 
beauty. Virtually every inch of the area seemed to be crammed with some 
incredibly rare, endangered, unique or newly-discovered fauna and flora. It 
was claimed that great artists came to the area and wept over their failure 
to re-create the rich colours onto paper. 

"Specifically, that bit of it." Simon pointed to a lake on the map on the 
edge of the Lorelei towards Cascade and the small black dot that signified a 
town. 

This time Blair, who had been peering at the area with scholarly interest, 
blurted out incredulously, "Witt's End?!"

"You're not serious?" Jim looked at Simon. "Witt's End? What kind of bad 
play on words is that?"

"It was originally intended as a very macabre bit of humour." Simon stepped 
around Jim to flip open the file that lay next to the map. Atop a sheaf of 
papers was a large photograph of an unremarkably featured man with faded 
blue eyes and sandy brown hair who could have been anywhere between 40 
and 65 years of age. Simon tapped the image with his finger. "Nathaniel 
Haakon Christian Eirik de Witt, Danish-American father, Danish-Norwegian 
mother, the Landgravine Christiana Saxe-Luneberg-Brunswick, who was a 
minor member of the Norwegian Royal Family. Her parents saw War World II 
coming and shipped her off the USA for safety. Despite the drama of the 
war, they found time to arrange a nice upwardly mobile marriage for her to 
some Eastern European prince by the time they summoned her home in 1945 
to coincide with the return of the King. They were therefore less than 
thrilled when she arrived with a commoner American husband and a small 
son in tow."

"Unpleasantness ensued, I take it?" Blair perched on the conference table, 
ignoring Simon's glower.

"Apparently to the max." Simon admitted. "By the time de Witt returned to 
the USA as a teenager he was a fervent socialist-come-hippie. He was one of 
about 20 anti-war activists who bummed their way around the continental 
United States from one pot party to the next, but to cut a long story short, 
about 1965 a doctor told de Witt that he had a lower life-expectancy than a 
severely depressed lemming, so de Witt and about a score of his buddies 
plus a similar number of camp followers and good-time girls settled in a 
commune on the Lorelei Lake, calling their camp "Witt's End"."

Both Jim and Blair groaned softly, but ever the cop Jim enquired, "What 
happened?"

"Nothing." Simon explained, "De Witt's illness turned out to be nasty but 
non-lethal, however he and his merry band had re-discovered the joys of 
soft beds and regular bathing so they stayed. Witt's End has grown into a 
sort of artistic tourist community. De Witt died in his own bed a few months 
ago."

Blair shook his head. "Funny, huh? After all that he just slipped away in his 
sleep."

"Hardly." Simon's voice was drier than the Sahara in midsummer, 
"Nathaniel de Witt suffered a fatal heart attack in his bed, which at the 
time was also occupied by a pair of twenty-something twins from 
Stockholm."  

There was a moment of appreciation for a demise that probably really was 
the way to go, then Jim asked, "Simon, what has this got to do with us?"

"Everything, because it's in our jurisdiction –"

"No it isn't."

This time Simon's glare was very real.

"I was speaking Sentinally!" Jim apologised hastily for his blunt 
contradiction, ignoring Sandburg's sotto voce, "I don't think "Sentinally" is 
a word."

Simon grunted but had a small smirk of his own. It had only been short while 
ago that Simon, out of curiosity, had enquired where the geographical 
boundaries of Jim's Sentinel "territory" were and had been greatly amused 
at the flabbergasted expressions on the face of both men. After few days of 
frantically improvised tests devised by Blair, it was ascertained that Jim's 
"Sentinel persona" considered the boundary of his physical territory to be 
Cascade City's "limit" as it had been six years ago when his hyperactive 
senses came online again during the Switchman case. The city limits had 
grown in the past six years, including new suburbs and some less salubrious 
trailer parks, plus there were the already existing satellite towns such as 
Mellors Vale and Alice Lake, but it was as if Jim crossed an invisible chalk 
line - on one side he was a Sentinel defending his territory, on the other he 
was still a protector, as befit a police officer, but that extra edge, that 
"territorial imperative" instinct, didn't twitch. 

Blair had explained it (didn't he always?) as a matter of limits. A Sentinel 
had super-senses but wasn't super-human, a fact brought home every time 
Jim came down with a cold or was injured in the line, and therefore there 
was only so much land one man, or woman, could feasibly protect 
effectively. Any empire you cared to name – from Egypt through Assyria and 
Greece, down to Rome and right up the British, who saw the end of the Age 
of Empires – immediately began to come unstuck the instant it's land area 
exceeded a certain point, since the whole thing became just too unwieldy, a 
point illustrated perfectly by Tzarist Russia. Blair had positively glowed with 
excitement as he explained that Jim was unique – again – as the first 
Sentinel in history to take "ownership" of such a large geographical area. 
Ancient Sentinels' territories would have only covered the equivalent of a 
few city blocks but Blair's theory was that because of the advantages of 
modern technologies – such as cars, 'copters, planes and trains, instant 
global communication via telephone/e-mail and Internet – which allowed 
fast travel/communication anywhere, Jim's Sentinel abilities had 
instinctively "responded" to his ability to protect a larger tribe than before.

Jim did have a valid point though. Witt's End missed being part of the 
"tribe" by a good 75 miles and it certainly should have missed out on 
Cascade Police Department jurisdiction by a clear 50 miles, but then things 
were so rarely as they should be. Simon let his team in on the facts, "In the 
early 1970s, Nathaniel de Witt fished a little boy out of the Lorelei Lake, 
who turned out to be the favourite grandson of the Governor of Washington 
State."

"Ah." There was a wealth of understanding in Blair's tone.

Simon nodded automatically, "Exactly. Witt's End has become a sort of 
artistic refuge, a self-proclaimed sanctuary for those who shall we say 
"march to the tune of a different drummer". Back in the 1970s, people 
were even more intolerant of such eccentricities than they are today. 
Nathaniel de Witt knew he needed some sort of law enforcement back-up he 
could use to keep people in line, but nobody actually wanted a "jack-booted 
neo-Nazi representative of the Federal monsters" in Witt's End. Therefore 
Nathaniel de Witt had a cosy chat with his new best friend the Governor and 
they reached a compromise – Witt's End would have it's own sheriff, but it 
would come under the jurisdiction of Cascade PD, because at the time our 
police department could get there more directly than any other, and also 
the sheriff of Witt's End would only involve the Cascade PD if it was a real 
emergency – say the end of the world." Simon commented dryly. "It worked 
perfectly because Witt's End didn't want the neo-Nazi thugs of the PD 
anywhere near them just as the PD didn't want to be dashing halfway across 
the state every five minutes at the summons of a bunch of tree-hugging pot-
heads…no offence, Sandburg. In the past 27 years the jurisdiction has never 
been invoked."

"So what's changed?" Jim queried in resignation.

"There's been a sort of murder."

Jim and Blair exchanged glances. "Um, Simon, isn't "sort of murder" like 
"almost being pregnant"?"

"Tell me about it!" Simon answered the anthropologist's comment. "The 
situation is this: Witt's End resident, poet Edgar Fincham, was found with a 
broken neck at the bottom of his stairs at 2:45pm last Wednesday – a not 
unexpected event considering Fincham's propensity for drinking "not wisely 
but too well". The problem was that Fincham had already been dead for 
over half an hour when he did his swan-dive down the staircase." 

At last the smirks vanished to be replaced by twin expressions of 
astonishment. Going into "cop" mode for the first time since the meeting 
started, Jim asked, "Cause of death?"

"Suicide." Simon held up his hand to forestall their next comments. "The 
Witt's End Sheriff is a guy called Rick Valenti, he sent a full report in when 
he requested our assistance. According to Valenti, Edgar Fincham claimed to 
do his "best work" – which apparently isn't saying much – in the late 
afternoon, and he believed he needed to "store" his creative energy to this 
end. Therefore, Fincham took a nap every day from noon till three in the 
afternoon to build his creative energy reserves, which also had the benefit 
of enabling him to sleep off his latest bender. In order to stop his creativity 
being wasted through dreams, Fincham took a sleeping pill at noon before 
he went to bed."

"Who knew about the nap and the sleeping pills?" Jim asked.    

Simon snorted derisively. "Everyone and his grandmother! Both were 
common knowledge throughout the area. Last year Sheriff Valenti caught 
some frat boys who'd sneaked into Fincham's house and were busy 
decorating his person with some interesting body art while Fincham snored 
on obliviously as they painted his face with cartoon genitalia. Thanks to the 
frat boys' prank the would-be killer knew that he or she could do just about 
anything bar tap-dance on top of Fincham and not wake him."

Jim frowned, "Are women serious suspects here? I mean, carrying an 
unconscious person takes enormous strength, it's like lugging a sack of 
potatoes –"

Simon nodded and showed them the "crime" scene photographs from the 
file, which he spread out on the desk. Again, the crumpled corpse of Edgar 
Fincham looked unremarkable, he was the sort of man you'd pass on the 
street without noticing. "Fincham's bed was only a couple of feet from the 
stairs. Providing she did it right, any reasonably healthy woman could have 
borne Fincham's weight for the few feet it took her to get him to the top of 
the stairs, where she – or he – just let go. That morning Edgar Fincham took 
a fatal overdose of his sleeping pills. He left the empty bottle and the 
suicide note – which gave no reasons, just directions for his interment – in 
the bathroom and closed the door before going to the bed…"

"The Murderer Presumptive didn't search the place?" Blair interjected.

Simon blinked at the semi-poetic description and admitted, "No, the place 
was undisturbed, which was why Valenti discounted the theory of burglary 
gone wrong. The…"Murderer Presumptive"…apparently went for the sole 
purpose of killing of Fincham. Fincham lay down, went to sleep and died. 
The "MP" just walked in through the open door – Witt's End has zero crime 
rate because it has virtually zero worth stealing – went upstairs, threw what 
he or she thought was a sleeping Fincham down the stairs and left once they 
were sure his neck was broken. The only suspects we can rule out are any 
people with a great degree of medical knowledge – the corpse was still 
warm and while a layman would have great difficulty in telling the 
difference between a sleeping and just-dead person, someone with medical 
training would have noticed."  

Blair's face scrunched up and he suddenly shifted uncomfortably. "Umm, 
Simon, er, I mean, what about when Fincham…you know…after he 
died…wouldn't the MP have noticed…?"

Understanding what Blair was trying to verbalise, it was Jim who explained. 
"Chief – and I'm sorry for it – over the past six years you've only seen violent 
deaths. All people void their bladder and bowels after death, but it depends 
on the type of death as to when that happens. With a violent death 
everything just collapses at once like a house of cards and all the muscles 
release, which is why people void instantly, but if someone dies peacefully 
in their sleep for example, the process takes longer. Instead of a sudden 
collapse the body winds down like a spring, gradually. If a person's heart 
stops in their sleep, their other organs will continue on for several minutes 
until they start to shut down, and a person's brain can still be functioning 
ten to fifteen minutes after everything else has stopped. A person is only 
really dead once their brain is dead, and the muscles only begin to relax 
after that happens. It's possible that Fincham could have been dead for at 
least twenty to thirty minutes before his muscles relaxed enough to void."

"Plus he'd already taken care of that." Simon put in. "He was wearing a 
makeshift talcum-powdered diaper that would have been almost invisible 
under his pants. There would have been no mess and very little odour at 
that point, so recently after he'd died."

<When I died…> Blair abruptly cut off his telepathic contact with Jim.

The Sentinel answered anyway. <I honestly have no idea, Chief. When I 
pulled you out of the fountain all my senses were concentrated on your 
lungs and heart. Besides, considering how dirty that fountain water already 
was, nothing would have been noticeable.>

Simon was carrying on, "Look, throwing a corpse down a flight of stairs is a 
grade-A sicko thing to do, but it's not a crime. However, it would have been 
a murder had Edgar Fincham been alive when he was thrown. Basically 
Valenti wants to know the motive for the would-be murder, and the identity 
of the "Murderer Presumptive", because until he does, there is always a 
chance that the MP will continue racking up more victims. He's also pretty 
convinced that Fincham killed himself for the same reasons that he was – or 
would have been – murdered."

"What's the rest of it, Simon?" Jim had been watching his friend carefully.

Knowing this was the bit that would cause the arguments, Simon sighed. 
"North of Witt's End is an equally small town called St. Mary Vale. It grew 
up in the last twenty years – originally a few rich people's homes around a 
golf course; they only started construction properly a decade ago, so the 
town itself has only really been in existence for the past eight years. It also 
has it's own country club, every 15 year old drives a Merc' and everyone's 
daddy is Something in the City. St. Mary Vale is an elite commuter/holiday 
village for the Washington State wealthy and influential and until recently 
they rubbed along fine with the Witt's End crowd. The Valers were amused 
by the artistic eccentrics and the artistic eccentrics were kind towards the 
vapid Capitalists. Tourists and vacationers just used to go between one 
place and the other – golf, haute cuisine, health spas and chic boutiques at 
the Vale and rustic extremely expensive art plus beautifully scenery and a 
little boating or fishing at Witt's End."

"When did the snake appear in Paradise?" Mused Blair knowingly.

"About four months ago." Simon indicated the file on the desk. "At first the 
animosity went nowhere fast – both sides assumed it was outsiders trying to 
drive a wedge between the two towns – but then it became clear that 
whoever was spreading slanderous rumours about some of the prominent 
residents of both towns had to be a local. There is nothing more destructive 
than being suspicious of people you love. The situation is currently teetering 
on the edge. The Witt's End people believe the Valers are anti-hippie bigots 
who are trying to drive them out so they can flog the Lorelei to real estate 
developers –"

"Is that plausible?" Jim interposed, having grown up in a family that for 
generations had personified "cut-throat business tactics" at their most 
unpleasant.

"No," vetoed Simon, "it would be financial suicide. The land is just too 
unstable and too rugged for mass housing projects – the company would 
never get back even a third of the outlay necessary to build them. The 
Valers on the other hand are convinced that the Enders are drug-addled 
conspiracy theorists suffering from a sort of mass paranoia. The crunch 
came when Edgar Fincham died. The Witty Chronicle newspaper printed an 
editorial all but accusing a Valer of the "murder" and basically warning 
everyone in Witt's End that they were in danger of being slaughtered in 
their beds. The editor followed that up by repeating various groundless 
rumours about a Valer plot to poison Lorelei Lake with illegal industrial 
chemicals, or launch a mass arson attack on Witt's End. Some visiting 
tourists took copies of the newspapers to St. Mary Vale, the residents of 
which understandably went berserk when they read that they were mass-
murdering, eco-terrorist arsonists. The Mayor of St. Mary Vale is suing the 
editor of the Witty Chronicle for slander, Town Councillors of Witt's End are 
drawing up an ordnance that will ban any St. Mary Vale resident from within 
a mile radius of the town, both the local high school and the college are 
each a war zone as students from each town polarise in support of their own 
side. To summarise, it's an unholy mess." 

"Why us, Simon?" Blair asked.

"You two have worked your asses ragged for weeks, and you deserve a 
break, but unfortunately I can't afford to have you on leave right now." 
Simon replied. "So I figured a busman's holiday in one of the country's most 
celebrated beauty spots was the next best thing. Go help out Valenti, 
admire the scenery and unwind a while. Besides, Jim being an Ellison will 
reassure the Valers you're on their side, while Blair being the Poster Child 
for Woodstock will convince the Witt's End population that you're on their 
side. You don't even have to worry about the terrible twosome - Daryl might 
be starting Georgetown in a couple of weeks but he's still enough of a kid to 
be drooling at the thought of house-sitting the loft, Muttley and the FIFF."

" 'Fiff'?" Blair repeated the unfamiliar word.

"Fiend in Feline Form!!" Chorused Simon and Jim simultaneously.

"Now git." Simon said with mock sternness. "Go find me a Murderer 
Presumptive."

Bantering, his own terrible twosome left the Chief of Police's office to go 
back downstairs and tell Joel what had transpired. Simon kept his surface 
thoughts bland until he heard the elevator start to descend, aware of Blair's 
empathic "reach". Sitting back behind his desk, he lit his cigar and puffed 
edgily. He could have wangled leave for his friends, but the "Murderer 
Presumptive" – Simon smiled wryly at Blair's turn of phrase – had been a 
godsend in getting the pair away from Cascade. He sighed again, knowing 
how they – especially Jim – would have reacted to the news that the Bureau 
were "considering" opening an office in Cascade. When it came to the 
Feeble Bullies of Incompetence, Simon was like a lot of police officers in 
that the more absent they were, the fonder he became of them. 

He hadn't ranted when informed of the possibility, because that just made 
them smirk, but he had adopted an attitude of passive non-involvement. He 
referred every phone call, letter and email to the Mayor, City Council or 
D.A. He sent back a standard "no funds are currently available for us to 
contribute towards your proposed office in Cascade" reply to any and all 
queries and booked himself up with meetings so he couldn't be inveigled 
into examining suitable premises. Sometime in the next few days a couple 
of FBI representatives were coming to meet Simon again and "talk over" the 
proposal and Simon so did not want Jim and Blair to be within miles of the 
building when whatever pair of clones started wandering the precinct!

His lips thinned in irritation. At the initial meeting when the "notion" was 
dropped on him, one of the agents had been a little too overtly 
condescending about a black Chief of Police but Simon had been too busy 
thanking God that the pair weren't around to see that – if Simon considered 
those two his own personal pit bulls it was because they were as 
determinedly protective of him as he was of them. Well aware of his own 
foibles, thanks to Grandmother Banks complete non-toleration of self-
delusion in her family, Simon took a moment to admit to himself how much 
he had wanted the two in the precinct to both back him up against the FBI 
and to let him sound off when the bean-counting nitwits got too much for 
him. 

Simon leaned back in his comfy, imprisoning executive chair and focussed on 
the photograph of Dr Leonie McKinley, soon to be Mrs Banks, trying to 
soothe his stressed nerves. He remembered back when Darryl was ten and 
he had begun yelling at him for not getting an A grade. It was the time when 
he had had to acknowledge that his marriage to Joan was irretrievable and 
he had just received a letter from St. Thomas Aquinas informing him of the 
rise in fees for the next semester. Darryl had yelled back to the effect that 
Simon had only himself to blame. If Simon hadn't spent every single moment 
at work in the precious cop job he clearly cared about more than his family 
and instead had been around to help Darryl with his homework as the boy 
had requested twice, then maybe Darryl would have got an A. In short, 
Simon had simply taken it for granted that Darryl would get an A without 
help and considered his job more important. 

Simon had taken Darryl's uncomfortable home truths to heart and applied 
them in his dealings with Jim and Blair, well aware of his proclivity towards 
using "Jim the Sentinel" and "Blair the Guide" as his own personal clean up 
crew. It would be too easy to dump all the most difficult and emotionally 
traumatic cases on them and then simply take it for granted that they would 
fix it while he got on with more important things – he had done it in the 
past, especially in the early days, which had partly led to the Lash near-
disaster! However, Jim had been a good detective even before his senses 
came back on line, and all Simon's people – Henri, Rafe, Megan and Joel – 
were excellent detectives who would have ended up being stuck doing 
donkey work and resenting the glory hounds Ellison & Sandburg, unaware 
they were being burdened down by Simon. I'm a big boy now, Simon 
acknowledged not entirely without resentment, which means that 
sometimes I just have to suck it up. I don't have to like it, I just have to do 
it…God, I have got to stop reading those Rogue Warrior books that Darryl 
devours, I sound like Chuck Norris at his wooden worst…

Blair bounced into the bullpen and even Ellison had a mellow smirk. They 
informed Joel of the situation and the big Captain, knowing perfectly well 
about the FBI's impending visit to 250 Pender Street, amiably "OK'd" the 
case and slipped back into his office to do some work as the rest of the MC 
gang began to cry favouritism. Jim and Blair gave as good as they got, Jim 
shaking his head when Henri made the "Teacher's Pet" accusation.

"H., my man, Simon had to send us. We can't have you leaving Cascade so 
close to your and Rhonda's Big Day!" Jim grinned and began to whistle – The 
Funeral March.

The bullpen erupted with ribaldry and only Jim, automatically attuned to 
Blair Sandburg, suddenly realised that the anthropologist's gaiety was 
forced. Making their goodbyes since Simon had asked them to leave that 
day, Jim eased Blair into the elevator. He waited until they were in 
Sweetheart and driving down the block before he decided to bite the bullet 
and instigate a discussion. Since he and Blair had become telempathically 
linked, Jim was always aware of Blair's mental presence, the other man's 
mind like a soft, soothing background murmur, but whenever Blair was 
troubled or distressed, he tended to "pull back" not wanting to upset Jim. 
Despite his concerns, Jim hadn't pressed Blair for details of his concerning 
dream/possibly vision, but if it was causing Blair such anxiety that it was 
distracting him even days later…

"Chief listen," Jim started cautiously, "I don't need to know the details if 
you don't want, but if this vision thing is bothering you this much –"

"Huh? What? No! No, I mean…" Blair ran his hand through his hair agitatedly. 
"No, Jim I haven't thought about the vi – dream in days. There's no problem 
there."

"Then what?" Jim pressed, "You went from I've-just-won-the-Lottery to my-
budgie-died in ten seconds flat back there?"

Blair hesitated. <It's Rafe.>

Jim turned his head sharply to look at Blair and had to brake hurriedly for 
the lights. As far as possible they tried to leave important telepathic 
conversations to times when they were out of the public gaze, aware of the 
way they would appear to others if they accidentally started responding to 
conversations only they could hear. Jim had certainly amended his previous 
derogatory attitude towards those people who claimed to hear voices – yes 
they might be vagrants, winos, junkies or mental patients but Jim was only 
too well aware that it was possible that they really were hearing voices. For 
Blair to start speaking telepathically in public, and when Jim was operating 
a lethal weapon – Sweetheart – too boot, showed just how distraught the 
anthropologist was. <What about Rafe?>

<His emotions were all over the place when you started to whistle the 
Funeral March. He doesn't want to be Henri's best man. He's really upset 
about H. marrying Rhonda…>

<Why?!>

<Because he's black…and she's not.>

"No way, Sandburg!"

Jim's yell made Blair wince and unconsciously his voice dropped an octave 
into the soothing "Guide voice", "Jim…"

"No way, Chief. This is Rafe we're talking about!"

Blair nodded miserably. "I know big guy."

Right from Rafe – he disliked his first name, Bryn – joining the Major Crime 
Unit from Olympia PD's Homicide Division, he had gelled excellently with 
the others. Simon had perceptively seen past the well-tailored suits and GQ 
appearance to how Rafe was really lacking in self-confidence, and so had 
partnered him with the exuberant but dedicated detective and generous 
man that was Henri Brown. For all his grunge look, penny pinching and 
boisterous attitude, Henri Brown was a very sharp detective who got a good 
case-solved ratio on his own merit without any assistance from the resident 
super-Sentinel. 

He and Henri had become best friends to the point that Rafe had been 
Henri's automatic choice for best man and the GQ detective had accepted 
the position with apparent pleasure. Blair looked at the way Jim's clenched 
jaw was pulsing and not for the first time bitterly reflected on the fact that, 
useful as it was, a telempathic connection was definitely a double-edged 
sword.

Jim glared at nothing as he drove. It was ridiculous! Rafe had never showed 
the slightest hint of racism, and Jim had seen enough bigotry directed 
towards Simon Banks – a black man in a position of power over white people 
– for it to register on his inner radar miles away. It just didn't seem 
possible, particularly as people who tended to be prejudiced about one 
thing or group of people often had other prejudices too, and the Major 
Crime Unit was the last place bigotry would find comfortable. The Sentinel's 
"inner circle" of companions/support, who jokingly referred to themselves 
as "Us", consisted of Joel, Henri, Simon and Darryl – four black non-
Protestants, Megan Connor - female and non-American in a major way, Blair 
Jacob Sandburg – illegitimate and a Jew, Serena Baxter-Chang – black 
female married to an Asian, plus latterly Rhonda Delagardie – female and 
actually Canadian by upbringing though American by birth. 

The only WASP males among "Us" were William and Stephen Ellison, neither 
of whom counted in this instance as they weren't cops, along with the last 
member, Sally Lilkalani, William Ellison's Japanese-Hawaiian housekeeper. 
Rafe had interacted fine with everyone over the past four years since he'd 
joined the PD, and certainly shown no preference for William and Stephen. 
Jim snorted derisively – as a matter of fact the "ranking" member of "Us" 
was none other than his dad's housekeeper Sally, who was the great-great-
granddaughter of Hawaii's last monarch. Had the Queen not been 
overthrown and the nation annexed by an opportunistic USA with 
imperialistic ambitions, there was a better than fair chance that Sally would 
have been the latest sovereign of Hawaii!

"Jim, I'm sorry," Blair said softly but firmly, "all I can tell you is what I felt 
and Rafe's emotions are in turmoil – he is deeply distressed and if he 
doesn't work it out he's going to make himself ill."

"One case at a time, Chief." Jim growled, but kept his anger in check – no 
way was Blair going to be the whipping boy for things Jim Ellison didn't 
want to hear, Sandburg's lifeless body in Rainier University's fountain had 
cured Jim of that nasty personality trait – "We'll sort out Edgar Fincham, 
but when we come back, we are going to sort out Detective Bryn Rafe." His 
tone promised that Rafe would find it an unpleasant experience.

The rest of the ride continued in grim silence, each man lost in his own 
thoughts.

* * *
   
"Ah hah!"

"Not one word, Sandburg." Growled Jim as he turned the truck right onto 
the deserted back road.

Obediently Sandburg shut up and bent his head over the map again, but you 
could just feel his broad grin – Blair, whose non-sense of direction was 
notoriously abysmal, had insisted Jim needed to take a right onto a small 
back road to get to Witt's End, which Jim had argued against. After they 
had had to turn round and come back to take the small road, which was 
indeed the correct way, Blair's exuberance had been uncontained. 

Driving along the back road towards Witt's End, Jim spared a quick glance at 
where Blair was practically jigging gleefully in triumph and he himself 
relaxed at the re-emergence of his Energizer Bunny. Sandburg's casual 
evasiveness had pretty quickly clued Jim in that his "dream" had really 
been a "vision" and that it was something Blair was not happy about, though 
it wasn't the sort of "imminent-disaster-great-pain" type of thing, but Blair 
had become almost taciturn. That quietness had grown profoundly when 
Blair felt Rafe's negative emotions towards the marriage of Henri and 
Rhonda. Possible racism in someone they considered an intimate friend had 
upset both Blair and Jim greatly and Jim intended to address the issue 
directly with Rafe upon their return to Witt's End.

Turning his face away slightly, Jim hid his own smile. Back in the Rangers his 
unit's drill sergeant had always claimed that they needed three getaway 
plans for every operation, what the Sarge had called "Escape Routes A, B 
and Oh shit!" In that spirit Jim had memorised several routes to Witt's End; 
his small subterfuge had only taken them a few miles out of their way and it 
was worth it to see Blair become more his usual enthusiastic self as he 
crowed about being "directionally" right – for once.

His Sentinel abilities easily enabling him to drive expertly and monitor his 
Guide, Jim turned his thoughts to his own self-imposed investigation that he 
intended to begin in Witt's End during their Busman's Holiday: the Life & 
Times of Blair Jacob Sandburg. After tuning in to William Ellison and Naomi 
Sandburg's conversation about their emotionally abusive, mentally cruel 
fathers, Jim had had a sort of epiphany, as he had recalled an illustration 
about child-rearing he'd read in one of those religious/current affairs-type 
magazines, Awake!, that he occasionally read.

The magazine had illustrated the child as a metal spring held tight in the 
parents' hand. The parents had three choices: they could close their fist 
even tighter around the spring, crushing it down until they damaged it 
beyond repair; they could suddenly open their fist and the spring would 
wildly bounce about all over the place; or, they could slowly and carefully 
open their fist by gradual increments, after which the undamaged spring 
would simply rest comfortably in their palm. Jim had realised that Naomi 
and William had both been crushed and damaged by controlling, repressive 
parents, particularly their fathers. Whereas William had repeated that 
damage with his own two sons, as an adult Naomi had gone to the other 
extreme, bouncing wildly about all over the place and dragging Blair with 
her. Naomi was always in control, always the one doing the leaving, 
dumping and abandoning rather than the one being left, dumped and 
abandoned – and even Blair had to admit that Naomi's loathing of routine, 
structure, limits, boundaries etc., bored on the pathological. Those musings 
had made him realise fully how guarded Blair really was and how that 
wariness was superbly camouflaged by Sandburg's attitude of ebullient, 
gregarious bonhomie.

Blair uses words as both sword and shield, Jim mused to himself as he 
slowed down for the pheasant that would come blustering out of the 
hedgerow in a few minutes, because he knows that after a while people 
just stop listening. A short while after he and Blair began to work together 
following the Switchman case, Jim had become subliminally aware of how 
little Blair revealed of himself, but when they truly bonded as Sentinel and 
Guide after Philip Wilham's attempt to abduct Blair, Jim consciously 
grasped how little Blair actually said.

Blair Sandburg's mouth was the personification of perpetual motion – it was 
universally acknowledged that if Sandburg was Silent, something was very, 
very wrong. By actively tuning into what Blair was saying instead of just 
letting the sound of his Guide's voice soothe him, Jim found himself with a 
ring-side seat watching as Blair hid himself in plain sight. Blair talked 
constantly and with great animation, but revealed virtually nothing at all of 
himself. He would launch into some interesting explanation about the Boo-
Boo tribe of Timbuktu, or the eating habits of the Flintstones in Ten Zillion 
Years B.C. but Jim could count on the fingers of one hand the number of 
times Blair had mentioned a personal anecdote, memory or even a 
commonly known fact such as his birthday about himself. With a jolt, Jim 
had realised just how much he didn't know about Blair or his life.

I automatically tuned him out, just like everyone else does, Jim 
acknowledged as they passed the sign for Witt's End. For instance, one 
question that Jim had been very intent on getting the answer to was when 
and how Blair had gotten that phoenix tattoo on his genitalia – the 
procedure must have been agonising to undergo – yet Blair was so superb at 
deflecting and diverting people off on conversational tangents that you 
often ended up miles from where you intended to be.  It was precisely 
because Blair talked so constantly that people simply assumed they knew 
everything about the young man and filed him neatly away under the 
heading: Witty, enthusiastic chatterer - but if they actually listened to the 
content instead of just the noise, they'd realise he had revealed nothing of 
or about himself to them. Jim was willing to bet that, just like himself, 
there were several people who counted themselves as close personal friends 
of Blair and yet would never realise that they knew next to nothing about 
him.

Where exactly had Blair been born? Where and when had he fallen out of 
that tree that broke his arm? Where and when had he got the phoenix 
tattoo? Where had he had his Bar Mitzvah? How many countries had Blair 
lived in before coming to Rainier at 13? Exactly how many languages did the 
anthropologist speak? Had he ever been a smoker? How old was he when he 
got drunk/lost his virginity/tried pot for the first time? What was his 
favourite TV programme as a child? What was Blair's favourite 
colour/author/musician?

To his chagrin, Jim realised that he couldn't answer any of the questions he 
had scribbled down one afternoon while Blair had been at Cascade 
Community College, and had decided that it was going to change. The 
empathic/telepathic bond he and Blair now shared had given each glimpses 
into the other's psyche, but mutual respect and an understanding of the 
psychological need for privacy prevented deeper prying. Something Jim had 
found out by accident was that Blair was a student counsellor at Cascade 
Community College as he had been at Rainier, and was reckoned to be 
"awesome" by those who went to him. As Jim overheard one youth 
succinctly put it, "Sandburg's brilliant 'cos he just knows, man!" 

As a cop, Jim was only too well aware that the wisest voice often came 
from the bitterest experience. A large part of him didn't want to know 
about his Guide's childhood, didn't want to be aware of the times when 
Blair needed him, needed his protection, and Jim wasn't there, but the 
glimpses of the Dark Side he had occasionally witnessed in Blair had led the 
Sentinel to decide that perhaps they both needed "closure" or whatever 
psychobabble terminology was currently in vogue. During the past six years 
there had been cases that had been profoundly traumatic for both men and 
their fellow colleagues, yet Jim had seen Blair step in and save the day time 
and time again. Little girls who had been terribly abused by grown men 
approached Blair with utter fearlessness; women traumatised by rape or 
brutal sexual assaults beamed at him; kids on drugs or contemplating using 
illegal narcotics poured our their souls to Sandburg as if he were the very 
personification of their deepest wish; deeply suspicious pensioners unbent 
from stubborn pride at the very sight of Sandburg. In every situation, Blair 
seemed to have an almost clairvoyant ability to anticipate what the other 
person needed to hear or do and Jim discovered that he was in his heart 
afraid to find out exactly how Blair had acquired his acutely accurate 
perceptions.

That was going to change  - gradually like the parent who carefully released 
the spring – starting in Witt's End. He wouldn't interrogate or have heavy 
discussions, but Jim would carefully prise up the deep parts of Sandburg's 
soul so he could better understand, and therefore help, his dearest friend.

Sweetheart crested a ridge and both men uttered an appreciative murmur 
as they spotted Witt's End before them. Jim drove down along the 
waterfront, where an eclectic mixture of expensive pleasure craft and less 
flashy working boats bobbed gently on the aquamarine surface of Lorelei 
Lake. The Cascade Mountains, swathed in brilliant emerald foliage and 
capped with pristine pearl-white snow soared above the small town that 
meandered along the lakeside. Nathaniel de Witt's fellow commune 
members had tended towards artists, sculptors and the like, who found their 
talents put to practical use in Witt's End. The buildings were an eclectic 
mixture of wood and/or stone, many of which were decorated in bright, 
primary colours or vibrant, complex murals that would have turned a New 
York graffiti vandal green with envy. It was apparent that many of the 
buildings had and maybe still did double as both home and studio, since the 
greater proportion sported all-round marching ranks of huge plate glass 
windows that afforded a panoramic view of the area and also let in as much 
as light as the most demanding artist could ever wish for. Only yards past 
the town limits began the lush, verdant forests of the Cascade range, and 
dozens of brightly-coloured wild flowers seemed to be growing everywhere. 
Witt's End did indeed look picture-postcard-perfect.

Jim parked in the bay in front of the unimaginatively named Lorelei Hotel, a 
four-storey high, grand stone edifice in the British Edwardian style that had 
been built, according to Sandburg's research, during the greed-is-good 
Eighties when the tourist boom started to take off. Taking their luggage 
from the flatbed and entering the lobby, Jim and Blair found themselves in 
an imposing foyer, all marble and soaring mural covered ceiling that looked 
as if it were auditioning for an Agatha Christie movie. Neither man was 
surprised at the hotel's British Imperial décor - the potential "white 
elephant" had earned back its building costs when the wily owner 
accentuated the overblown, pseudo Victorian-Edwardian British Empire 
decorating and gave the hotel's high-priced suites names such as "King 
Edward VII suite" and "President Kennedy Suite". Many wealthy American, 
German and Japanese vacationers had happily forked out large sums of 
cash, fooled by the implication that the place was a venerable hostelry of 
ancient lineage that had indeed hosted such notables, when in fact it had 
been built a score years after Kennedy's death, the youngest of the "great 
and good" commemorated in the names.

The desk clerk was Indian, as in Gandhi not Sitting Bull. Her welcoming 
smile upon spotting Sandburg approach faltered into one of uncertain 
confusion as her gaze fell upon the stiff-spined, buzzcut-sporting Poster Boy 
for Jackboots that was following him. 

Jim suppressed the desire to suggest she could smile at Sandburg with one 
half of her face and frown at him with the other. Showing her his badge he 
intoned, "Ma'am, I'm Lieutenant Jim Ellison and Professor Blair Sandburg, 
Cascade Police Department –"

Her eyes widened with eager interest. "You're from the police!"

"Yes ma'am." Jim affirmed just this fact with the caution of long practice.

Jim had rapidly learned that using the words "police" and "Dr Sandburg" in 
the same sentence had led people either assuming Blair to be some sort of 
forensic Sherlock Holmes, or else that he was a medical doctor like the 
Great Detective's chronicler Dr Watson. According to their individual 
misconception, they had a disconcerting tendency to either lead Blair 
towards the epicentre of the homicidal gore apparently oblivious to Blair's 
grey-green face, or else start explaining details of extremely intimate bodily 
ailments. It was a waste of breath explaining Blair's exact position with the 
department, since the majority of people weren't listening – they heard 
"police" and nothing else. Jim himself found a similar problem - despite 
conscientiously introducing himself as "Detective" (now "Lieutenant") 
Ellison, Jim had found himself addressed as "Officer", "Captain", 
"Patrolman", "Lieutenant", "Chief" and "Deputy" by those he was 
interviewing. The elderly Mrs Jacobiwcz, who lived in Apartment 36 at 852 
Prospect, even respectfully call Jim  "Major" Ellison and he hadn't the heart 
to point out her mistake, especially after he'd glimpsed the photographs 
and citations in her small, spartan apartment and realised she'd lost three 
male family members in Pearl Harbour, Korea and Vietnam – Mrs Jacobiwcz 
could call Jim anything she chose.

The clerk, whose nametag read "Suzanne", explained that Sheriff Valenti 
had explained they were coming so, despite it being the height of the 
tourist season, the Lorelei had been able to hold open one twin room. 
Assuring her that was fine, Jim and Blair took the elevator up to the top 
floor. Despite it's overblown décor teetering ever precariously between 
"lushly imperial" and "tackily garish", the Lorelei was scrupulously clean, 
with high ceilings and wide corridors. Inserting the heavy, ornately carved 
wrought iron key into the lock (apparently the lack of electronic key cards 
was all part of the hotel's pseudo-historic design), Jim thrust open the door 
and entered first, his Sentinel senses on alert. Blair paused a second to let 
his Sentinel scan the area before he entered. 

Consisting of a large room containing two queen-sized beds, usual furniture 
and an en suite bathroom, the room was decorated in complementing 
peach, lemon and cornflower pastels that gave it an airy spacious feel that 
Blair didn't need empathy to tell him Jim appreciated; it was topped off by 
a wide balcony overlooking a glorious view of the lake that both men 
admired appreciatively for a moment. About to pull out the bedding for 
Jim's bed, Blair raised an eyebrow. The Sentinel sniffed carefully then 
shook his head. "They practise what they preach, Chief. These sheets are 
washed with unstarched Ivory Snow."

"Cool". Blair left the hideously expensive pure Egyptian cotton sheets and 
pillowslip in his luggage. They were always packed as a precaution after he 
had discovered at a law enforcement seminar in Seattle that Jim was 
routinely suffering in silence over hotel sheets that to a Sentinel felt like 
hot sandpaper. 

The Guide drifted over to the balcony and gazed out over the sun-dappled 
lake as Jim swiftly and efficiently unpacked their luggage, using the room's 
complementary coffee maker to produce two mugs of excellent, filtered 
coffee, eschewing the well-stocked bar as they would not doubt be 
encountering Sheriff Valenti shortly. Jim came and handed Blair his mug 
with no acrimony at being left to sort out their belongings. Both having 
spent years travelling light neither wasted an inch of luggage space with 
non-essentials, besides which, Jim knew there was nothing idle about Blair's 
position on the balcony.

"Anything?" Jim enquired.

"Nothing leaps out at me, but…" Blair took a sip of coffee.

"Ah, the coup de but." Jim watched Blair closely as the younger man 
struggled to verbalise; they made it a habit to speak aloud to each other as 
much as possible primarily so as not to trivialise the profound gift they had 
in their mutual telepathy and empathy, but also to minimise the chances of 
them "slipping up" in front of other people.

"It's just a…sensation…" Blair said finally. "So faint it's like a noise that's 
only on the threshold of audibility…almost too far away to register but you 
just know it's there…"
    
Jim nodded seriously - call it "going with your gut", "following your 
instincts" or whatever – all good cops had it even if they couldn't verbalise 
what they knew that they knew. Blair's empathy worked on similar 
principles. However, Blair had discovered – much to his relief – that his 
empathy wasn't omnipotent. His empathic "reach" had similar limits to that 
of Jim's physical five Sentinel senses – the equivalent of between a three to 
five city block radius depending on density of population, etc. Just as Jim's 
senses could range much further in the relative quiet of an uncluttered 
forest than they could in the middle of a major US city in rush hour, so too 
Blair's empathy was much farther reaching in rural areas than in the middle 
of Cascade. Blair couldn't "feel" the emotions of people in Africa or Europe 
– only really intense, ultra-powerful emotions could reach Blair beyond 
about a four-block radius.

"Your turn." Blair directed, and obediently Jim cast out a sensory net, half-
closing his eyes and letting his senses open wide, secure in the presence of 
his Guide. In the far distant was a suspiciously familiar, slightly discordant 
humming that would bear out later investigation, but in the immediate 
vicinity, nothing that bespoke threat or danger to either him or his Guide.

Leaving behind strategically placed strands of hair – after ducking Jim's 
swat as he pointed out that Jim didn't have enough hair to do it - so they 
could tell if anyone had been inside, Blair locked the room and together 
they left the hotel and paused momentarily on the steps to let their eyes 
adjust to the sunshine. Blair inhaled pure mountain air deeply, aware that 
even though they were working that somehow he felt less weighed down 
than when they'd left Cascade.

"Let's take the scenic route." Jim led the way as they began to meander 
along the lakefront, the Witt's End section of which was a pretty exclusive 
marina from the looks of it.

Blair followed without comment, knowing that following their stroll Jim 
would be able to map Witt's End in his head completely, even though they'd 
never before been to the town. Put Jim in any major city in the world and 
within an hour he would have been able to ID every hospital, police 
precinct, fire station and so forth in the city by scent alone. Jim had 
realised that lots of places had a distinctive smell, an obvious example 
being a hospital. With practice, Jim had learned to associate certain 
combinations of scents. A police precinct for example was a multi-layered 
mixture of firearm gunpowder, waxed leather holsters, old, awesomely 
strong coffee and a myriad of other smells that when combined in that way 
just said "police" or at least "law enforcement". Jim's nose could 
differentiate instantly between an ordinary supermarket, and one that was 
Kosher or Halal, he could scent the difference between a morgue and a 
funeral parlour. The chances of Jim ever needing to find his way around a 
city without being able to see or hear where he was going were remote, but 
like Blair pointed out, the ability to get yourself to a hospital or the nearest 
cops by smell alone was never a useless talent.

"At least now I get the arsonist crack." Blair commented.

Jim nodded, knowing Blair didn't require a response. The spectre of toxic 
waste being dumped in the lake had been obvious back in Cascade when 
they'd never seen the place, but it was clear that Witt's End was possibly 
the largest single fire hazard on the mainland USA. Nathaniel De Witt and 
his merry men had contained sufficient carpenters and bricklayers to make a 
reasonably good construction team, but hewing stone blocks is a lot harder 
even than felling and dressing trees. The buildings of Witt's End were large 
and beautiful. Nearly all were painted either in pastel or vibrant hues that 
nevertheless complemented or contrasted rather than jarring – as if the 
householders coordinated their exterior décor. The majority of them were 
also still doubling as studios of some artistic type, as evinced by the fact 
that many had huge windows or in some cases an entire wall of glass panes. 

Apart from glass, the other major component in the majority of buildings 
was wood. True a lot of buildings did have some brick and stonework, but 
often this was clearly decorative or a facia. The Lorelei Hotel was the only 
building they had seen to be constructed entirely out of stone and brick. 
The rest of Witt's End was a firebug's dream – wood and glass were two of 
the worst combinations to have in a fire – glass either melted, becoming a 
sticky glue or else exploded into a million flying murderous stilettos, and 
wood twisted and writhed as whatever sap in it boiled away and often it 
didn't just burn but could explode like a nail bomb if the fire touched a 
large enough "pocket" of sap.    

Jim pressed down the urge to snort derisively – the window boxes and flower 
tubs that seemed everywhere were just more fuel for any fire, pretty as 
they were, but he could see why the local newspaper editor's claim that 
Valers were plotting an arson attack had been so…

<inflammatory> Blair finished.

This time Jim didn't suppress the urge, but the action brought new scents to 
his sensitive proboscis and he sighed wistfully. "Oh, Chief…I've identified 
seven different types of freshly brewed coffee in the last minute, this is 
torture…"

"You want lunch first?" Blair suggested.

Jim shook his head regretfully. "No. You can bet the Sheriff knew we'd 
arrived all of ten seconds after I drove Sweetheart inside the town limits. I 
know Simon intended this to really be a break for us, but we'd better at 
least make the appearance of being here to work."

Blair had to agree – blatantly making like tourists within an hour of arrival 
would not endear them to the local representative of law enforcement. 
Blair knew how small towns operated, having experienced enough of them 
as a child with Naomi – regardless of nationality or race, they were modern 
"tribes"; close-knit and sometimes closed societies. They were very like 
police forces, the fire service, the medical profession, religious orders and 
the military in their tendency to aggressively reject or at least "close ranks" 
against anyone who, even inadvertently, transgressed the often unwritten 
and/or unspoken cultural taboos. Blair would have bet his Doctorate that 
everything from his and Jim's clothing through personal appearance and 
speech patterns to intense speculation about their sexuality and Blair's 
narcotics intake would be the topics of conversation for the entire place.

Regretfully Jim dialled down his sense of smell because his stomach, like a 
bad ham actor, was making all sorts of dramatic claims that his throat had 
been cut and he just wasn't noticing and the more instinct-driven parts of 
his brain were getting in on the act too, flashing adverts of hamburgers and 
BBQ smothered ribs in front of his inner eye. The smirk on Blair's face told 
Jim that his Guide was picking up his Sentinel's barely hidden drooling; 
sometimes having heightened senses were a pain in the ass, especially when 
coupled with a too-smug-for-his-own-good Guide. 

Witt's End Sheriff's office wasn't all that hard to find, despite the 
meandering layout of the town, a sharp contrast to the orderly grid system 
that characterised most if not all of America's urban centres. When 
Nathaniel De Witt and his group had arrived at Lorelei Lake, their total 
number of vehicles had amounted to the two battered camper vans they 
were crammed into and the journey along what back then had been barely 
more than rutted cart tracks had given them a keenly developed awareness 
of what the psychobabblers termed "the need for personal space". Each 
commune member had therefore picked his or her spot with the aim of 
ensuring that the nearest neighbour was someone you would have to yell to 
at the top of your lungs to say "good morning", and of course deliberately 
ensuring their town did not follow the "slavish architectural demands of 
fascist Capitalist oppression" had a nice denunciatory ring to it.

<Cuts down the number of suspects, at least?> Blair made the comment 
privately, pleased with himself that his face, reflected in a shop window, 
showed nothing other than bland interest in their surroundings.

Before he responded, Jim sent a feeling of approval through the link. 
Academically, Blair was a "quick study" and so it was proving with their 
relatively new telempathic link; while Blair hadn't reached the level of 
control that Jim now had over his Sentinel abilities, he practised religiously 
every day to refine his telepathic and empathic control. It would take 
another few months yet, but by next year, Blair should be able to hold a 
lengthy telepathic conversation or share strong emotions with Jim without 
giving any outward sign that he was doing so.

It would certainly cut down on their need to be so circumspect in public, 
which in turn would save a lot of time and effort involved in making some 
distracting pretence; their standard MO during public telepathic 
conversations – dreamed up by Blair -was to pretend to be talking on a cell 
phone, more than one person at Cascade Central had made cracks about the 
size of their phone bills. The main problem Blair had was his zest for life, 
which Jim wouldn't change for anything, but which in this case was damned 
inconvenient. Blair's entire body was involved in everything he did – he 
talked with his whole being, not just his mouth. Jim on the other hand knew 
he well deserved the old epithets like "Stone-Face" and "Granite Chops". 
Misquoting the famous British insult, Carolyn had once told him that he had 
only two expressions – anger and indigestion.

<It does for Witt's End, Chief, but I bet the St. Mary Valers have two gas-
guzzlers per head of population,> Jim pointed out ruefully. They could see 
glimpses of the rich resort town through the thick foliage of ancient, 
graceful trees to the North, and this main wide road that came off from the 
lakeside like an upside-down T shape led directly to it.

<True, but none of the crime reports mentioned anything about tyre tracks 
or signs of a vehicle outside Edgar Fincham's cabin, and I think "random 
serial killer in out-of-town-vehicle managing to drive up to Fincham's 
cabin, "kill" him and then leave again unnoticed" is a bit far-fetched.>

Jim accepted that point as they crossed the street to go inside the Sheriff's 
office. Again contrary to almost every other American town, in Witt's End 
the pedestrian not the driver clearly reigned supreme. Everybody walked; 
you could always tell the first time visitors because they came down in their 
cars, drove around looking for a parking space, drove back to St. Mary Vale 
and returned on foot. Nor was walking much hardship – due to the scattered 
layout of buildings and roads, St. Mary Vale was in reality little more than 
an expansion of Witt's End, not a separate place. It was perhaps a maximum 
thirty-minute gentle stroll up a very slight incline from the quayside at 
Lorelei Lake to the de facto town centre of St. Mary Vale. Any reasonably fit 
adult could run it in ten minutes. It was therefore highly unlikely that Edgar 
Fincham's "Murderer Presumptive" was a non-local or tourist who might 
have been and gone.

Jim and Blair entered what superficially resembled any small town Sheriff's 
office. The main room was rectangular, with a low swing gate leading 
through to the three-cell block at the back and also to a small kitchenette 
and adjoining washroom. The main area had two desks in a general  -
shaped layout only with a gap between them. The desk on the long wall was 
the smaller, bearing the usual office accoutrements, but while there were 
several mounds of paperwork on the desktop surface, a thin layer of dust 
proclaimed it had no regular user. The desk with the short wall behind it 
was larger and of better quality, and it was at this that a rangy, craggy-
featured man sat.     

He stood up, revealing himself to be only an inch order so shorter than Jim. 
He eyes were a sort of faded blue, like very old, frequently-washed denim 
jeans, but sharp, keen intelligence glinted in them as they looked at the 
newcomers. His hair was dark gold-blond and naturally spiky in what was 
perilously close to a military buzz-cut though it managed to remain 
precariously on the side of a severe civilian short-back-and-sides. His 
features were craggily handsome and he bore a superficial resemblance to 
the actor William Sadler. For a long moment he regarded Jim then spoke, 
his voice soft but firm, "Delta Force?"

"Rangers." Jim supplied, then, "Naval Intelligence? Navy SEALs?"

"Navy Seals." Valenti confirmed, then murmured, almost as if speaking to 
himself, "Army."

"Navy." Jim's tone was bland but contained, if you knew him really well 
enough to recognise his nuances, perhaps a soupçon of challenge. 

Blair did. "Oh, the machismo." He breathed just loud enough to be clearly 
audible.

Valenti blinked and focussed on him. The sheriff's eyes widened fractionally 
as they took in the long curly hair, earrings and layers of clothing that could 
only be described as eclectic. Then he smiled, "Dr Sandburg?"

"Blair, please."

Jim relaxed instantly, something that Valenti didn't miss. Jim was all too 
used to law enforcement individuals – even seasoned veterans who should 
know a hell of a lot better – jumping to all sorts of erroneous conclusions 
because they had forgotten their training and had grown too lazy to observe 
beyond the surface veneer. Valenti was clearly shrewd enough to look 
beyond the initial appearance of people he met.

"What's your take on Edgar Fincham's death?" Jim asked, getting right 
down to business.

"Nothing." Valenti gave a theatrical sigh as he perched himself on the 
corner of his own desk, swinging one leather-booted foot idly.

Jim and Blair looked at him askance. "What do you mean nothing?" Jim 
demanded.

Valenti spread out his hands, palms upwards, in a gesture of helplessness. "I 
mean nothing. Gentlemen you are looking at the Founder, President and 
Secretary of the Utterly Baffled Club. I haven't formed any opinions as to 
likely suspects because the whole thing is too bizarre. I mean, Witt's End is 
like the elephant's graveyard – it's where crooks come to die. Being 
arrested for drunk and disorderly is a major felony around here."

"So having an ex-Navy SEAL sheriff is merely a massive case of overkill?" 
Blair mused softly from where he had sat down in a chair under the window.

Valenti blinked at Blair, then shrugged. "My wife died here, and I just 
stayed on."

Instantly Blair projected comfort towards the man, his empathy reading the 
sudden spike of grief, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean…"

As usual, Blair didn't need to finish his apology; Jim prudently stayed silent. 
Even before developing his current empathic powers Blair simply 
"connected" with people on a level that Jim could only envy. Even 
hardened types like his father William Ellison wanted Blair around them, 
treating him with a sort of bemused affection. Despite being far closer to 
Jim than Stephen ever would be, Blair had still managed to bring Jim's 
younger brother into their lives in such a way as to make him content with 
his and Jim's relationship, without jealousy over Blair and Jim's closeness, 
and Blair had done it all on such an automatic, instinctive level he had 
barely realised what he himself did. It was just his way. 

While Jim was sure Sandburg was correct in his previous assessment that 
traditionally psychos were drawn to the Guide so the Sentinel could easily 
locate and destroy them, in this instance it was also a case of them being 
drawn to Blair the man. Jim had seen it on too many faces – Lee Bracket, 
David Lash, even Alex Barnes in Sierra Verde. True she'd raised her gun to 
fire, but Jim had known that if, even for a second, Alex had really thought 
she had a reasonable chance of taking Blair for herself, that gun in a 
heartbeat would have been turned and used on Jim, regardless of the hot 
and heavy hormones raging between them. Deep inside him, something 
shifted and growled possessively; Jim firmly shoved it down and tuned back 
into the world, finding to his complete unsurprise that a Navy SEAL – for 
which read the epitome of aloof and close-mouthed – was sharing his life-
story with Blair as if the duo were best friends of long-standing.

"…often the divorce rate is because both sides aren't being realistic." 
Valenti was sat back in his chair, tilted back on two legs as he explained to 
an attentive Blair Sandburg the pitfalls of so many military marriages. "The 
woman doesn't fall for the man, she falls for the knight in shining armour – 
the dress whites, the medals, her very own GI Joe. Ditto the guy. He doesn't 
fall in love with the woman, he falls in love with what she represents – the 
chance for a proper family life, a real home, a domestic utopia to return to 
presided over by his own Mrs Cunningham."

"Each side is in love with the idea and the ideal, not the person." Blair 
nodded his understanding.

Valenti shrugged, "Exactly, which is why Navy SEALs have one of the highest 
divorce rates in the US Military. If your child is in hospital with a 104° fever 
or you need to get the house rewired or face a thousand dollar repair bill, 
you don't give a damn if your husband is saving the world from disaster in 
Baghdad, you want him with you."

"And vice versa," put in Jim, "it was pretty much the same in the Rangers. 
The husband wants to come home and enjoy domestic perfection – home-
cooked meals on the table every night, children who are happy and bright 
and a pretty, clean home. He doesn't want to be faced with a list of repair 
chores so long you could wallpaper a cathedral, with children who stare at 
him blankly and who are more interested in Play Station and hanging out 
with their girlfriends at the Mall than this weird stranger, with a wife who 
works till six every night and whose sole contribution to home-cooked food 
is to defrost him a TV dinner in the microwave."

Blair waited while Jim and Valenti shared a look of understanding, then 
commented, "But I get the impression that you and your late wife had a 
very happy marriage?" He added a subtle "push" to his friendly tone to 
deflect Valenti from asking how Blair had ascertained this. 

Valenti smiled, his gaze dropping to a framed photograph on his desk, from 
which a broadly laughing brunette gazed out. "Lillian was a very…private 
person. She was almost like a wild animal in that she had this need for, I 
don't know, space. She loved me very much, but she knew she could never 
cope with a regular marriage. Being with someone 24/7 would have driven 
her crazy. That's why our marriage worked so well – often a SEAL is at home 
for three weeks then away for five months. I would come home and we'd 
revel in domestic harmony, and she didn't mind because just as it was 
getting to the stage where she felt hemmed in and claustrophobic, I'd be 
gone again. After we had Kyle, she always ensured that he went to stay at 
friends for the first two days I was back, then she insisted we spent almost 
the entire time I was home doing things together as father and son…" 
Abruptly he blinked, his voice rough, "Damn, she was a hell of a lot brighter 
than I am."

Once again Blair soothed. "I'm sorry, we came here to help try solve a 
murder, not bring up painful memories."

Valenti shook his head. "Nothing of Lilian is painful. It's just…I always 
assumed that I would be the one to die young if either of us were going to – 
I mean, a Navy SEAL. Is it true your unit was sold out by your own Colonel in 
Peru?" He asked Jim abruptly.

"Yes." Jim answered cautiously.

Valenti smiled grimly. "Things like that have a way of getting around. The 
Admiral who sold us out wasn't a deliberate traitor like Oliver, just a 
horse's ass. He wasn't a SEAL, some three-star who'd backed the right 
politician and gotten promotions out of it –"

Jim frowned, "Hold it, you don't mean that jackass Naylor, during Desert 
Storm? Gave an interview on CNN and all but said: "US and Allied Special 
Forces X and X will be at point Y tomorrow at 0830"?"

Valenti nodded. "Yeah, it was practically an invitation to ambush us. My 
swim buddy was one of the three who died – he was engaged to be married; 
he was still swollen-headed over the fact that I'd named my kid after him – 
he was going to return the favour…"

<During Desert Storm, it was a big scandal, > Jim communicated rapidly to 
Blair, <a lot of Special Forces were in the area, and thanks to that idiot 
Naylor they were all sitting ducks – SEALs, Deltas, Rangers, SAS and SBS, 
USAF and RAF F16s and choppers – I think nearly everyone took hits, and ->

<I know!>

Jim blinked at Blair's sharp mental tone, confused as his Guide suddenly 
withdrew from their ever-present link. <Sorry, Jim, didn't mean to snap at 
you. I…remember…the incident> He withdrew again from mental contact, 
this time a lot more gently.

Jim completely forgot the peculiarity as he tuned back into Valenti's 
explanation.   
     
"When I got out of the hospital, our team found out no action was going to 
be taken against Naylor. I told my CO either Naylor was court-martialled or I 
quit. He refused to take any action because he was bucking for promotion to 
a two-star. With Kyle gone…I had no respect left for the chain of command 
or the US Navy, so I quit. Got home in a fine temper to find Lily and Kyle 
packed and in the car. I demanded to know what the hell was going on and 
she told me we were going on our first family vacation." Valenti grinned. 
"Lily had many talents, but navigation wasn't one of them – she had ended 
up in Witt's End when Kyle was a baby and they'd been coming here every 
year since. It was just what I needed…"

"Serene without being soporific, tranquil without being twee, soothing 
without being saccharine?" Blair put in.

Valenti nodded, amazed at the younger man's perception and realising that 
a keen mind lay behind the hippie look and the cutesy bouncing. "Yeah. The 
former Witt's End sheriff had just passed away and St. Mary Vale had just 
been finished, more or less. Nathaniel De Witt didn't want the Valers to 
bring in some urban rent-a-cop and he thought that having a former Navy 
SEAL as sheriff would be a good answer to the problem. Lily told me to take 
the job and dropped the bombshell that she was dying and wanted me to 
raise Kyle here."

Blair made no more inadequate expressions of condolence but rather 
notched up his empathic broadcast a notch.

Rick Valenti shrugged, grateful that the two newcomers ignored his over-
bright eyes and somewhat hoarse voice. "I acceded to her last wishes 
reluctantly, but to be honest this place has been a godsend, particularly 
with me and Kyle. Lily was a single parent for years, then she was gone and 
Kyle had to get used to me bumbling about trying to take up where she left 
off. Also my outsider perspective is very useful for Witt's End."

Jim gave a soft snort and said half-apologetically, "The people in this town 
are certainly…interesting."

Valenti's eyes gleamed. "You mean weird. Don't be afraid to say it, they're 
not." He shrugged, "I guess what I mean is that I found my niche here. The 
people who live in Witt's End I would trust with my life – we are in many 
ways an extended family, but it's very obvious even to me that very few of 
them are equipped to deal with mainstream US society."

"They're certainly…eccentric." Blair concurred. 

Valenti chuckled, "They don't just march to the tune of a different 
drummer, they're listening to a whole other orchestra. Anywhere other than 
Witt's End and most of the people here would be in mental hospitals or 
prisons. They depend on the few immigrants like me to be a filter between 
them and a world they just can't interface with."      
        
<He can say that again> Jim sent the thought to Blair with feeling, whose 
mouth twitched in response.

"That's why this…"murder" took me by surprise." Valenti shook his head, 
focussing his eyes on his idly swinging leg as he perched on his desk, as if 
the limb could somehow impart mystic knowledge to his brain. "I mean, the 
individual stories may change, but once you get down to it there have only 
ever been four basic motives for murder –"

"Passion; Revenge; Greed; Insanity." Jim quoted for him. "Fincham didn't 
any of them?"

"Fincham was a paunchy middle-aged man – he was hardly the love triangle 
type. As for revenge – for what?" Valenti shrugged. "Fincham was here in 
Witt's End years before me and Kyle moved here – he came with De Witt's 
original commune – and he spent most of that time labouring on his poetry. 
If he had some sort of sideline in plagiarising other's work for example it 
didn't get him anywhere that I can see. As for greed – he had no family, his 
"estate" was left to the people of Witt's End and I think the sum total of his 
worldly wealthy was about $83 give or take gas money."

"That leaves insanity." Blair pointed out.

Valenti shook his head, unconsciously echoing Blair's previous objections, 
"Random psychopath decides to off him because he doesn't like his shirt? 
Uh-uh. I don't buy it. In a more urban area random murder by travelling 
sicko lunatic might be a possibility, but not out here in the boondocks. 
Anyone that mentally diseased wouldn't be able to hold together rationality 
long enough to make it out here." 

"But somebody intended to murder him." Blair pointed out again. "How 
many people know that it was a suicide?"

"Here in Witt's End, including you two, four people. I'm the third and our 
doctor – who also triples up as the coroner and forensic examiner – is the 
fourth."

"What about whoever found him?" Questioned Jim, moving into "detective" 
mode. 

"I found him."

Jim and Blair couldn't prevent exchanging an involuntary glance – terrific, 
their town liaison and the only local law enforcement officer for miles 
around had also just become the prime suspect.

Valenti openly smirked at the pair of them, "Yeah, it's a bitch, ain't it?" 
Becoming serious he went on, "Just because I'm not a SEAL doesn't mean I 
let myself go, and Kyle's an early riser too. Every morning I go for a morning 
patrol around Witt's End and St. Mary Vale. You can't set your watch by me 
but you can usually know when I'll be coming within 15 minutes either way. 
I pass Edgar Fincham's on the way back. I was walking past, saw the door of 
his cabin ajar, which was unusual because he didn't crawl out from under 
until at least nine o'clock and it was only half past seven, so I went to have 
a look – found him in a crumpled heap at the bottom of his stairs."

"What did you do?" Jim asked.

"Checked the body." Valenti admitted ruefully, "And yes, I know that 
means that the prime suspect contaminated the crime scene but at that 
point I thought it was an accident – considering how much Fincham drank 
half the town had been expecting him to take a fatal header down those 
stairs for years."

"Something the MP was well aware of as shown by the way they rigged the 
scene to make it look as if he'd done just that." Blair murmured, mostly to 
himself.

"MP?" Valenti looked baffled.

"Uh…just my way of saying almost-murderer. Murderer Presumptive." Blair 
went slightly pink.

Valenti considered it then smiled, "I like it – good way of putting it. Anyway, 
I checked the body and noticed something unnatural around the clothing on 
his hips and a really strong smell of talcum powder. I checked and found the 
makeshift diaper, which did throw me for a loop. I mean as far as I'm 
concerned whatever you do in the privacy, etc., as long as both parties are 
freely consenting adults, etc…"

"But it suddenly appeared that you knew Fincham a lot less well that you 
assumed you did?" Jim commented dryly.

"Huh-huh." Valenti admitted. "It was clear he'd been dead for at least 
thirty minutes so I shut the door and check the place out. I eventually found 
the suicide note in the bathroom, which explained the diaper, but again I 
just thought he'd decided on an unusual way to commit suicide. I sorted out 
getting the body to Dr Kendal's and he did a post-mortem just as a matter 
of procedure – we both got it as suicide. That's when he found out that 
Fincham had been dead over half an hour when he was bodily thrown down 
the stairs and his neck was broken. He actually died of heart failure – 
swallowed enough booze and sleeping pills to wipe out a battalion. With all 
the trouble that's been going on these past few months, the fact that 
Fincham had been murdered set all my alarm bells going."

"You've definitely observed a change in relations between Witt's End and 
St. Mary Vale – more than the usual everyday stresses?" Blair asked casually.

"I'll say!" Valenti asserted with feeling, standing up and going over to the 
coffee pot and pouring himself a mug when they shook their heads to his 
silent offer. "The irony is that Fincham was the only one who stayed upset 
over St Mary Vale."

"In what way?" Jim queried.

Valenti took an appreciative gulp of coffee, his expression the clear 
frustration of someone who has a jigsaw where the pieces refuse to fit. 
"Just because we don't deal well with mainstream culture and our town has 
a silly name doesn't mean we don't appreciate the free market economy." 
He said somewhat testily. "When they started building the Vale, everyone 
sorted of viewed it with resigned acceptance – only Fincham got really upset 
and stayed that way, but it isn't any threat really. The Vale is a vacation 
village for the super-rich and we each have things the other finds useful, so 
we've gotten along quite nicely."

"You don't worry about over-expansion and environmental damage?" Blair 
raised an eyebrow.

"Expand where?" Valenti challenged derisorily. "Between them the End and 
the Vale have utilised all the easily accessible construction land in the 
Lorelei. Maybe in a hundred years someone will invent a way to cheaply 
build houses on any terrain and turn the Lorelei in a giant commuter suburb, 
but until then the odd pocket that's left would need someone with Bill 
Gates' bank account to be able to afford to build on it."

"So what seems to be causing all this sudden hostility between people, in 
your opinion?" Blair enquired thoughtfully

"I have no idea!" Valenti sighed helplessly. "It's like trying to plait fog. It 
didn't just start one morning – this whole situation has grown by tiny 
increments – in fact it was Fincham's murder that made me realise how bad 
things have gotten." Seeing their enquiring faces, he went on, "There was 
just sparks of nastiness that suddenly began and then faded away to pop up 
somewhere else only stayed longer; spiteful rumours that came out of 
nowhere and couldn't be pinned down. For instance, Senator Wynn's 
daughter spent six months this summer with her grandmother in Vienna. No 
big thing, but when she came back to the Vale I heard tittle-tattle that 
she'd actually gone to have an abortion after being knocked up by a boy 
from one of Witt's End's more…exuberant…families." 

"You couldn't track the rumour down?" Jim said, though it was more a 
statement than a question.

"I did try but the gossip died quickly – probably because it was so patently 
ridiculous. Cecily Wynn's been in regular contact with her schoolmates back 
here throughout the summer, and she's remarkably cheery for a teenage girl 
who's undergone a secret abortion, if you follow me. Then there was Elrick 
Wiakowski. Anywhere else he'd be labelled trailer park white trash. 
Family's on welfare, rough and scruffy, with plenty of attitude – until the 
day that Jack Hallam, a teacher at our school, discovers Elrick is an artistic 
prodigy. He encouraged Elrick to submit a portfolio and the kid received the 
offer of a scholarship by return mail – providing he his academic grades were 
up there. So Jack takes Wiakowski under his wing and tutors him for four 
solid months – there's screaming and throwing of heavy crockery, but Elrick 
Wiakowski goes from straight flunk to solid 'A' grades. The whole town's 
waiting when Charlie the mailman delivers a distinctive envelope to Jack 
Hallam's house – Wiakowksi got his scholarship."

"What was the general attitude of people?" Blair questioned.

"Public rejoicing. Even Wiakowski Senior – whose interest in life begins and 
ends with an open bottle of Jack Daniels – actually went about yelling to 
everyone who would listen that his son was the next "Gervinchi"."

"Isn't that a perfume?" Jim blinked.

"We all knew he meant Da Vinci." Valenti smiled, "But it was a positive 
thing – then I picked up another rumour – Wiakowski's grade average shot up 
from F to A not because of his hard work and effort but –"

"Because he was dropping his pants for Jack Hallam." Blair finished wearily.

< Chief?> Jim easily "read" his Guide's exasperated irritation.

Answering aloud Blair told Valenti, with some embarrassment, "I was a child 
prodigy. IQ of etc., by the time was I ten. I went to Rainier University on 
AUPGC – "the Accelerated Undergraduate Program for Gifted Children" no 
less - when I was thirteen. I got my first Degree at fifteen, and my second at 
eighteen, and my MA at twenty-one, which is when the university began to 
employ me as a TA and Teaching Fellow." Blair shook his head. "All I will 
say is that it was often an unpleasant and steep learning curve, particularly 
when I started at thirteen and got qualifications so young. Everything I 
achieved, there were always sly whispers and outright slanders about how 
I'd done it – the main themes being bribery, blackmail or that I was a 
female professor's toyboy-stroke-male professor's catamite."

"I tried to track the rumour down again, a bit more vigorously." Valenti said 
after a momentary silence, "but it disappeared again, mainly because the 
whole idea of Jack Hallam as a paedophilic sexual predator is too ridiculous 
for words. But then things began to crop up and linger like a bad smell, 
especially when stuff started getting into print in the local paper. 
Friendships and relationships put under strain because of stories going 
around about them that neither side had started, about how the Valers were 
planning to drive us out and fill in the lake so they could build a mall. At 
first it was easy to dismiss the talk as some malicious tourist, but then 
people had deeply personal things in their lives become public knowledge, 
in some cases obscure things that only a local person would know. What 
people believe to be Edgar Fincham's murder has only heightened the 
hostility between St. Mary Vale and Witt's End, but the MP clearly thinks he 
or she has got away clean, so revealing that he committed suicide may take 
away our only hope of catching the perpetrator. Besides, I could hardly 
investigate a crime where I was the chief suspect without stirring up more 
talk about myself –" He broke off, rage flaring suddenly in his eyes.

Blair made an encouraging noise; the fact that Valenti had been targeted 
was no surprise to Jim and Blair who knew that perceived "authority 
figures" – cops, fire fighters, doctors, lawyers, military – were often the 
favoured targets of malicious gossip, particularly when things were going 
wrong.   

Valenti's tone was ice, his face hard and dangerous – now he clearly was a 
U.S. Navy SEAL, a trained and deadly killer. "I was called to the school 
because Kyle got into a fight with a Valer kid – his face was black and blue. 
Turned out the kid had repeated the story that…" Valenti took a breath, 
"…Lily had not died of ovarian cancer, but that I had used my SEAL skills to 
slowly poison her because I was knocking off the school Principal, Janet 
Myers. As soon as I realised what was going on with Fincham, I knew I had to 
have outside, impartial investigators, because as a Navy SEAL I do have the 
training to have murdered my wife and Fincham undetectably."

"Surely it was easy to prove what really killed Lily?" Jim said as gently as 
possible, skirting around the dreaded words "post mortem".

"Sure, but those months leading up to her being diagnosed…" Valenti's voice 
trailed off as he looked down at his wedding ring. "They call ovarian cancer 
the silent killer because often by the time a woman feels any real pain it's 
already terminal. For three days before her period Lily was the bitch-queen 
from hell, but when we came to Witt's End after I quit the Navy, one day 
she told me how one month her PMS never happened. She didn't suffer from 
it the month after that either. She was so delighted to not be a virago every 
twenty-six days that of course she never realised that all those hormones 
weren't magically disappearing from her body – so where were they going? 
The answer was the tumour was literally devouring all her hormonal output. 
When she died the main tumour was the size of a basketball and it had five 
tennis ball sized satellites in her upper torso. The doc told me before she 
died that the reason more women than men get cancer is because to a 
cancer cell, a woman is the brass ring. Men have only one main hormone, 
testosterone, whereas a woman's bloodstream is an exotic, all-you-can-eat 
buffet of hormonal scrumptiousness that will set up a cancer cell, his wife 
and ten kiddies for life." Valenti looked at them both, his face grim. "Thing 
is, before she started to experience the abdominal pain that made her go to 
the doctor in the first place, Lily was under the weather for months – 
intermittent headaches, fatigue, anaemia, bouts of nausea that came and 
went and could never be really pinned down…"

Blair sighed in sympathy, "All of which are also the symptoms of someone 
who is being slowly, systematically poisoned."

Valenti gave a bitter snort. "Yeah, everyone who has ever read Agatha 
Christie knows what to look for. I keep in touch with some buddies from my 
Navy days, and a few days after I let one of them know what was going 
down around here, I got a call from FInCOM HQ - two old guys who were in 
the UDTs1 in World War II, now they're firearms instructors for the FInCOM 
recruits. Medgar Evers told me their nephew was Cascade PD's new Chief of 
Police and I should lay it before the man. I called Captain Banks and here 
you are. So, back to my first assessment – I don't know what in hell is going 
on, but I'm starting to seriously worry that whoever is behind all this will 
end up destroying both Witt's End and St. Mary Vale."

"Simon is the mutual nephew of Medgar Evers and Carlton Banks," Blair 
explained to the sheriff as Jim took a moment to absorb and begin to 
process the large amount of new information Valenti had provided them, 
"his mother Orelia is Medgar's sister and his father Luther is Carlton's 
brother."

"Can we see Edgar Fincham's cabin?" Jim asked.

"Sure." Going back around his desk, Valenti opened his top drawer and took 
out a key which he inserted into a small safe at the same time as twiddling 
the dial – and making sure neither man could see the combination. (Though 
of course Jim could and did memorise the sounds). Removing what was 
clearly a house key he shut the safe again and handed it over to Blair who 
was nearest. "I've got some rounds to make but I'll be in the diner if you 
want me when you get back. It's an easy ten to fifteen minute walk to 
Fincham's cabin, it's here." He directed them on the local map pinned to 
his office wall. St. Mary Vale was "above" Witt's End, North and slightly 
West, Edgar Fincham's cabin was mid-distance between the two towns even 
more to the West, towards Cascade, and would have been the intersection 
point of a < shape.

The key secure in Blair's pocket, he and Jim exited the Sheriff's Office and 
stood for a moment. "You want to go now?" Blair made the question nearly 
a statement.

But Jim gave sudden sniff and then a decisive shake of his head. "No. That 
café is calling to me. Lunch first, and then we'll go. Considering how little is 
going to be left of any real crime scene, taking a half hour for lunch is 
hardly going to be a dereliction of duty."

<Not when the prime suspect has trampled all over it. Damn.> Blair 
commented as they walked side by side in apparent silence towards the 
Lorelei Trattoria  café that had a magnificent lakeside view.    

<Yeah. You think Valenti could be the MP?> Jim been taught by the likes of 
Alexandra Barnes to trust Blair's judgement of character against all 
challengers when it came to reading people long before his Guide developed 
into an empath.

<All things are possible, but seriously – there's more likelihood of Simon 
joining the Ku Klux Klan. What worries me about Valenti is the fact that 
he's probably going to be the target of our local unfriendly neighbourhood 
slanderer – libeller I suppose now things are getting into the local news – if 
news does leak out that Fincham's death was suicide and not murder. I 
know a Navy SEAL is trained to keep secrets, but I grew up in small tight-
knit towns and villages like Witt's End all over the globe, and they all have 
things in common, one of which is a grapevine like you would not believe; 
Valenti may sincerely believe only four people in this place know Fincham 
wasn't murdered, but I'm not sure how much stock I put in that 
assessment.>

<But won't that help Valenti?> Jim asked as he pushed open the door of the 
café, automatically entering in front of his Guide and doing a sensory sweep 
of the place. <I mean, I'm surprised he didn't mention rumours already 
implying he was the murderer, but if it comes out as suicide…?>

They sat down at a table in the empty café. The lakeside wall was 
completely glass, the tables and chairs wood and metal constructs that were 
very comfortable; the place was clearly clean and the other walls painted in 
bright blue and yellow with big cheerful prints of flowers adorning them. 
Most important of all were the delicious odours wafting out of the back and 
they could clearly hear things sizzling and bubbling. <No such luck.> Blair's 
mental tone was harsh and stern, <A slanderer's mind is a twisted, 
shrivelled, spiteful thing eaten up with malice and unreasoning hate. I've 
been on the receiving end of slanders time and again; I've looked in the 
eyes of people and seen the envy eating them up, gnawing away at them 
like acid. They're the unhappiest people on earth and what makes them so 
evil is that they are consumed by trying to make everyone as bitter and 
twisted as they are. They impute the vilest of motives to the most innocent 
of situations ->

<Whoa, Chief! I get it> Jim blinked at this tirade even as his ears picked up 
the sound of approaching footsteps from the back.

<Sorry.> Blair gave a sheepish smile. <Didn't mean to unload on you, big 
guy. What I mean is that even if it does get round Fincham killed himself, 
then the rumours will change, not go away – since he found the body the 
likeliest one will be that Valenti was blackmailing Fincham who killed 
himself in despair and Valenti went up to dispose of any evidence of his 
blackmail.>

<Oh for God's sake, that's…> Words failed Jim.

Wry amusement tinged Blair's telepathic speech. <Yeah. But to borrow from 
Valenti himself, what makes slander so bad is that stopping it is trying to 
plait fog again. It's easy to shoot back at a gunman, but words are the 
ultimate stealth weapons; it's almost impossible to successfully fight 
whispers and innuendo because everything is secret, hidden, implied. Do 
you know that in the Old Testament slander was a crime punishable by 
death?>

<Seriously?>

Blair nodded. <My mother didn't practice Judaism but she's still a Jewess. 
All the time I was growing up she showed me all the scriptures on slander – 
Proverbs, Deuteronomy, Titus. Did you know that in Hebrew the word 
"Devil" actually means "slanderer"? Genesis 3:4 shows how Humanity fell 
into Sin when the Satan "the Devil" slandered God to Eve and the little 
twit believed him. Naomi has been a victim of almost constant slanders her 
whole life, which is why she always refuses to say anything other than 
positive things about other people. When I was growing up we'd be in a 
place on average for less than forty-eight hours before somebody started 
spreading gossip about what Naomi was and Child Protection Services would 
turn up.> 

<I'm sorry, Chief.>

<S'okay. What upsets me is that Witt's End and St. Mary Vale are being 
attacked by a more deadly enemy than the guy who thought he murdered 
Edgar Fincham. From the age of thirteen, time and again I looked into the 
eyes of people I thought were friends and I could see like an indelible stain 
that shadow of doubt – oh, they didn't consciously believe that I got my 
grades at Rainier by bribing professors or sleeping with them, but 
subconsciously the uncertainty was there, the doubt, festering away like 
damp under supposedly smooth plaster, deepening and growing every time I 
smiled at a tutor, or did a favour for one of my lecturers – maybe I really 
was Professor X's jailbait whore. Unless we find out who is spreading all 
these rumours and shut him or her up fast, then it won't matter if we solve 
the Fincham case because Witt's End and St. Mary Vale will destroy 
themselves, rip themselves apart like rice paper. I've seen it happen to 
relationships and friendship I thought were rock solid – "A man of intrigues 
keeps sending for contention, and a slanderer is separating those familiar 
with one another – Proverbs 16:28.>

"What can I get you?" The low, musical voice nearly made Jim jump as it 
intruded, though he had been half-aware of the waitress's approaching their 
table.

He looked up, automatically cataloguing. In simple but elegant blue sheath 
dress protected by a long, white cotton apron, her name badge said "Zinnia 
Seddon". Jim judged her to be in her late thirties or early forties, a 
handsomely attractive woman with hazel eyes and a red-brown bob. She 
lacked any attitude of disinterest, weariness or sloppiness, instead giving 
them a clearly genuinely friendly smile as she waited, pen poised over the 
pad. She had no rings on her fingers but Jim knew her slim gold watch was 
expensive and the slender chain around her other wrist. Her make-up had 
been deftly and lightly applied and her perfume was a subtle fragrance – 
indeed, she looked more like a bank clerk.

"Today's special is buffalo steak with wild mushroom sauce…" She 
suggested.

Blair inhaled deeply and a beatific smile spread across his face. "I'll have 
the steak medium with salad, plus Italian potatoes and a side order of 
cheese garlic bread, and a cafetiére of cold pressed Peruvian coffee." He 
decided, taking a moment to enjoy the stunned expression on Jim's face.

Managing to recover his poise by the time Zinnia turned back to him, Jim 
told her to make it two, and as she turned and walked back to the kitchen, 
Jim eyed Blair warily. "Who are you and where's the real Blair Sandburg?"

"What?" Blair parried innocently.

"Don't give me that. I can quote your lecture on cholesterol verbatim. Mr 
Do-You-Know-What-That's-Doing-To-Your-Arteries, and you've just ordered 
steak with mushroom sauce and cheese covered garlic bread. What's going 
on?"

"I love steak." Blair said calmly.

For a moment Jim's lower jaw just hung, then he brought it up with a snap, 
glaring at the man sat opposite him "Alright, now I'm serious – where's Blair 
Sandburg?" 

Blair sighed heavily and regarded Jim for a moment. "Jim, have you ever 
been to New Zealand?"

"No?" Jim responded slowly, surprised at this question. Even with their 
telempathic bond Blair had never pried into Jim's Army career; someone as 
bright as he was had known without needing diagrams that Captain Jim 
Ellison of the U.S. Army Rangers had spent most of his time abroad in Africa, 
Asia, the Middle and Near East or the Communist bloc, on the sort of "I 
could tell you but then I'd have to kill you" type missions. He had never 
until now directly asked Jim, even telepathically, if he'd visited a specific 
location.

"I have." Blair's lips curved in reminiscence. "New Zealand…New Zealand is 
what God intended the world to be, before human beings for some insane 
reason got the unfathomably stupid idea that shitting on their own doorstep 
was a good idea. You've never tasted lamb until you've eaten it roast with 
redcurrant gravy in Nelson, or fish until you've have pan-friend snapper in 
Auckland, or fruit salad made from things that you know were still on the 
trees thirty minutes ago. You've never had a proper fish 'n' chip supper 
unless you've eaten it on the seafront in Bridlington, wrapped in yesterday's 
newspaper and slathered in vinegar and salt, watching the stormy North Sea 
pound the beach. You've never had a proper crispy duck until you've eaten 
in a back street dive in Peking with homemade hoisin sauce…"  

"I get the point." Jim found he was salivating.

Blair shrugged. "I love steak and cream and cheese and crackling off the 
roast pork, but I've eaten the real deal, which is why I refuse to hand over 
my hard earned bucks to WalMart so they can hand me back some battery-
farmed, factory processed, water-bulked, emulsifier-soaked bit of shoe-
leather.

"Okay," Jim sighed knowing Blair was spot on – though he occasionally 
indulged his love of tasty junk food, he rarely ate at Wonderburger any 
more. One of the disadvantages of being a Sentinel was that he could tell 
with a single bite just how much – or rather how little - of his hamburger or 
sausage was actually meat and how much of it was "bulking out" corn flour, 
wheat, gelatine, gristle and preservatives. 

Her low-heeled pumps making little noise on the floor, Zinnia returned with 
their order and both men took a moment to admire it. Jim took a tentative 
bite and sighed in gustatory bliss. The steak was thick and juicy but hot and 
dissolved in his mouth in a manner that indicated slow, careful cooking; he 
estimated a good two pints of double cream had gone into the sauce. Blair 
followed suit, his expression clearly appreciative. The mushrooms had not 
been chopped but rather blended into fine slivers and simmered in double 
cream and white wine, the Italian potatoes cubed and smattered with cumin 
before being sautéed to perfect crisp goldenness. The garlic bread was the 
flat Italian type baked in old stone ovens and was smothered in real cheese. 
Not Monterey Jack or the other main American cheeses that were all canary 
yellow, looking like melted plastic and tasting like wet cardboard. This 
bread had been prepared by someone who knew that cheeses existed like 
Roulé; Wensleydale with cranberries, Stilton, and Mild Cheddar. The cheese 
had been carefully and evenly grated on and gently bubbled to a melted 
golden covering.            

Jim took advantage of Blair's gastronomic distraction to file away the 
conversation they'd just had for later review. Despite the urgency of 
Fincham's murder he hadn't forgotten his own personal "open case" – the 
Biography of Blair Sandburg. That Blair's time at Rainier had never been 
particularly happy even before he took up with Jim went some way to 
easing Jim's pangs of guilt over "causing" his Guide to have to move to 
Cascade Community College. He filed away the other information for later 
meditation, remembering his and Blair's somewhat strident discussion a few 
months earlier on the subject of municipal officials. Jim gave a moment's 
thought to Naomi, adding this new insight into the conversation he'd 
overheard her having with his dad at the loft during Blair's housewarming 
party. If her father had been as tyrannical as William had been with Jim, it 
must have been an incredible act of willpower that enabled an eighteen-
year-old Jewess to have an illegitimate child in the first place, and to then 
take that child away from everything that was safe and familiar to risk 
starting over in a place she didn't know or have any support network in…Had 
Naomi at least initially been a wanderer out of necessity rather than choice? 
Settling in place after place only to be forced to move on again when nosy 
neighbours jumped to wrong conclusions and bigoted bureaucrats started 
trying to take away the son Naomi only needed to have aborted in the womb 
for a much easier life? Jim was painfully aware of the snap judgements he 
himself and Simon Banks had made when first meeting Naomi – druggie 
hippie flake had probably been the kindest of them.

He came back to the present as Zinnia returned to check everything was 
alright with their meal and Blair drew her into conversation by asking if her 
name wasn't a flower? Smiling she admitted that it had long been a 
tradition in her family to name the daughters after assorted flora – her sister 
was called Fern, her grandmother Orchid. Blair commented on the unusual 
opening times of the Lorelei Trattoria and Zinnia explained that it had been 
mutually agreed amongst the various owners. Dawn's Early Light opened 
from 5:00am to 1:00pm and was breakfast oriented, catering for the dawn 
hikers, early morning golfers, lake fishermen and so on. Lorelei Trattoria 
opened at 11:30 – 5:00pm and was more focussed on lunches and light 
afternoon meals, while the Flower Courtyard opened from 3:00pm – 6:00pm 
and was very a much a cake and coffee patisserie. In the evening Lakeview 
Restaurant opened from 5:00pm – 1:00am, with Buddy's Diner from