Disclaimer & Story summary: see Perspective Part 1. This story is #3 in the 
“Telempathy” Series.


PERSPECTIVE PART 6

Despite the already busy state of Lakeview Restaurant, Jim and Blair were 
given their previously table on the upper veranda overlooking the lake, which 
resembled a giant pool of mercury under the moon, shot through with distorted 
obsidian streaks in the shadowed areas or where foliage threw surreal 
silhouettes across the water. Both men were pleased, particularly as the buzz 
of conversation had troughed and then peaked at their arrival – no prizes for 
guessing the subject of the renewed conversations, even if you hadn’t had your 
own living surveillance equipment sat across you.

Now, Blair took a small sip of his perfectly chilled glass of Chablis and 
regretfully pierced the last shrimp on his fork. Tonight, he and Jim had both 
decided on the ‘marine medley basket’. This consisted of a puff pasty basket 
filled with flaked ‘seasonal’ river creatures in a white wine and cream sauce 
served with sweet potatoes and mixed greens. Just like their first meal it was 
fabulous; the basket was a perfect golden hue cooked to perfect without being 
soggy, chewy or crunchy, filled with tender flaked freshwater salmon, trout 
and perch with freshwater shrimp and crab, in a sauce of flawless consistency 
rather than being as runny as dishwater or like lumpy glue. Watching Jim 
savour every sliver, Blair had no doubt that everything had been swimming in 
the river the day it was caught and cooked.

However, an observer would have seen just two men enjoying a good meal and 
each other’s company, unaware that a silent conversation was simultaneously 
conducted. 

Deciding to leave to one side the Kyle Valenti conundrum for now, Jim got to 
his preferred topic of the day. <So how did things go with Joe?>

<I don’t know if you’d term it okay but I have to admit he’s given me a lot to 
think about.>

<So you’ve accepted the shaman thing?>

<I don’t know if I’d go that far…at least not yet…but I am going to become 
one.>

<The vision quest worked then?> Jim didn’t want to flat out ask, part of him 
wondering if Joe had forbidden disclosure or discussion of what had occurred.

<I’ll say…> as he ate, Blair explained everything he’d seen in the vision, 
stopping before he got to reiterating Joe’s commentary to gauge Jim’s 
reaction.

Jim dipped a potato in some of the sauce as mentally he said, <I get it – the din 
means lots of other Sentinels and Guides. I was panther, you were wolf…and 
we ignored others of our kind in distress – we actively abandoned them to 
their fate>

<That was the gist of it. Joe said…> Blair repeated Joe’s statements to him, 
<and I get where he’s coming from…>

<You hear that, man.> Jim teased lightly.

<Ha-ha. But he’s right; I’ve been resenting how much I’ve had to given up to 
be the Guide; the volunteering at the homeless shelters and soup kitchens, 
teaching disabled kids at CCC, but like Joe said, I haven’t been missed. Others 
have moved in to fill the gap with those things, but false modesty aside I am 
the world’s leading expert on Sentinels…and empaths.>

<So what’s the plan?> Jim got down to the nitty-gritty.

<I’m going back first thing tomorrow morning. Basically Joe’s going to give me 
the Emergency First Aid in Shamanism deal so we can get rid of the MP and 
save Witt’s End, but sooner rather than later I’m going to have to take the full 
college course.>

Jim gave a slight nod, which could be mistaken for agreeing that the food was 
indeed excellent, <I guess then we’ll have to come up with some plan for the 
others. I don’t go on a guilt trip about the bad guys I take down, but I do 
acknowledge that not even the ones like Alex Barnes or Lee Brackett just woke 
up one morning as fully-formed sociopaths. A kid of six swipes some candy 
from a mom ‘n’ pop store and gets away with it. At ten he’s a runner, at 
twelve he’s got a .45 and is knocking over gas stations and assuming he’s not 
dead in the gutter at sixteen he’s doing 18 to life or on death row for blowing 
away a bank clerk as easily as brushing lint of your suit.  If someone had got to 
them earlier…>

<But they were just left, like that fox thing and the dog and the trapped 
cat…> Blair acknowledged sadly, <I remember when we had to get Brackett 
into the military facility; he was going on about how the government had 
betrayed him before he betrayed it. Like you said, things happened that 
warped them, turned them bitter and twisted.>

<So now we know that there are people like us out there and that some of 
them are in need of advice and guidance if not more, and we just carry on as 
we are, we have nobody but ourselves to blame when the next Alex Barnes or 
Lee Brackett - >

< - or Garrett Kincaid or Dawson Quinn - > 

<- turns up on our doorstep,> acknowledged Jim grimly.

<Got it in one…I mean…I did know but that vision made it real, man. Too 
real.>

<In what way?>

Blair gave a slight shrug as he finished his wine – he had had one small glass and 
would have no more; by mutual consent both men would stick to coffee and 
water for the rest of the evening. <Like I’ve said, I did the research; I’ve met 
and acquired documented cases of people with one to four heightened senses. 
I know nearly a dozen Beta Sentinels in the American Northwest alone, never 
mind the rest of the planet – Sentinels and empaths are not an American 
phenomena…though to be honest, it’s the empaths who are most at risk.>

<You think those animals were empaths?> Jim caught the waitress’s eye and 
with a slight smile she came over already clutching the dessert and coffee 
menu, which of course Jim could read from here…damn, he was going to have 
to go a diet back home.

<You and me both,> Blair commiserated ruefully having following his train of 
thought. <I can’t explain it any other way than to say those animals just 
seemed more ‘Guide like’. But it makes sense since it’s exponentially worse to 
be an empathy than to be a Sentinel.>

Jim raised both eyebrows, <That I’m gonna have to take issue with, Chief. 
Come on, you know how on the edge I was when we met. Believe it or not, 
going off at the deep end and throwing virtual strangers against walls with 
threats of bodily harm is not my usual M.O. Besides which, I was incredibly 
dumb when I did it – I hadn’t frisked you when I tried to pin you to the wall 
and if you’d had a knife or a gun and the inclination you could have 
disembowelled me or gut-shot me on the spot ->

<Jim! Not needing the visual man!> Blair flinched visibly at Jim’s graphic 
description, ludicrous as it was – willingly causing his Sentinel pain was never 
going to happen in this universe. <Look, I’m not trying to downplay what you 
went through but even as an Alpha Sentinel, you retained not just 
functionality but an actual life for a reasonable period of time, and those 
lower down the scale than you are even more adept at coping. Look at Julia 
Bettencourt. While big bad kitties like Alpha Sentinels are relatively rare, a 
considerable proportion of the human species has a couple or three heightened 
senses to some degree and manages to live their entire lives reasonably Ok.>
<And empaths differ how?>

<They differ because they are empaths> Blair argued. <Whoever created that 
power potion at the temples of the guides and sentinel was light years ahead 
of modern medical pharmacology and equally so in the fields of psychiatry and 
psychology from what I could interpret. A lot of shrinks would huff and puff if 
you said this but modern mental health treatment still hasn’t advanced all 
that far from the days when the mentally ill were locked away in cells at 
Bedlam and subjected to exorcisms to drive out demons. Some of them were, 
but the vast majority were far more likely to be suffering from autism, 
bipolar disorder, multiple personality and disassociative personality orders or 
something along the schizophrenic spectrum ->

<I get it, Chief.> Jim interposed quietly, knowing such treatment and attitudes 
towards those who did not – or could not – conform to the social ‘norm’ was 
something Blair held strong views on. He certainly hadn’t forgotten what Blair 
had described when they’d first come to Witt’s End, about he and Naomi 
having to constantly move from place to place in his infancy because of social 
prejudice and how by first grade age Blair could be provoked into physical 
illness by the mere mention of Child Protection Services.

<If you get an inexplicable rash or hearing problems, doctors and hospitals will 
run exhaustive tests in the search for a physical explanation. The instant you 
go to the doctor’s with any sort of mental problem they’re prescribing a 
cocktail of anti-psychotics, anti-hallucinogens and sedatives and you can find 
yourself in Conover in short order. I worked there for a couple of semesters 
and some of the people were left more disturbed and in a worse condition as a 
result of the medication they were pumped full of than from whatever illness 
they’d been committed there for in the first place.>

<And unlike heightened senses, being empathic is, for want of a better phrase, 
all in the mind.> Jim finally saw what Blair was driving at.

<Exactly – Western medicine and Western science is also very blinkered and 
prejudiced. It has this historic but unfortunately still thriving tradition of 
knee-jerk rejection; anything that cannot be empirically measured is 
fraudulent. Absence of evidence is continuously treated as evidence of 
absence, which is not the same thing at all. That’s part of the problem – 
hyperactive senses can be physically measured and quantified – even your 
range can be calibrated with sensitive enough equipment. But how do you 
measure empathy? How do calibrate whether one person’s telepathy is of 
greater or lesser magnitude than another person’s?>  

<I never thought of it like that.> Jim admitted with a sensation of guilt.

<In hindsight, I know I was lucky. My abilities didn’t begin to germinate until I 
met you, and they’ve developed gradually. When I first began to research 
Sentinels, Guides didn’t even feature but what little thought I did give was 
just to acknowledge they would have enormous difficulty functioning on any 
level – particularly the more powerful their abilities. Since I had that vision 
with Joe this afternoon I have to wonder how many poor souls there are 
dumped into mental hospitals who are perfectly sane but immensely gifted 
empaths…> Blair looked immeasurably sad <…considering the emotional state 
of the one online empath I did ever meet I strongly suspect it’s a large number 
of very tormented people.>

<An empath? What, someone like you are now?> Jim asked more out of a desire 
to head off the ‘guilt trip’ he could see brewing than deep interest in the 
individual. Not that he didn’t understand it; for all the devastation she’d 
wreaked, a part of Jim had always experienced a sense of ‘survivor guilt’ in the 
knowledge that it was having Blair as a Guide rather than any superior Sentinel 
ability on his own account that had prevented him from ending up as 
psychopathic as Alexandra Barnes or worse. 

<Yes. When I got back to Rainier – after Desert Storm – and got back into 
things I needed people with measurably heightened senses, so I used to hold 
sensitivity tests in Hargrove Hall; put up flyers and stuff and hope one of 
those who came in was a full Alpha. The strongest I got were Beta Sentinels 
but anyway, one particular day this kid came in. I noticed him because of his 
hair, actually; most redheads are ginger or carrot or strawberry blonds, but he 
was true copper, sort of glowing like every strand had been polished. A lot of 
those who came treated the test as a joke or were only trying to see if they 
had allergies…>

<He took it seriously?>

<He took the tests like his life depended on it. Which in the end, it did. He 
look absolutely devastated when the tests came back that he had no 
heightened senses of all – which was actually quite unusual because 
statistically most humans have one heightened or increased sense - even I have 
one heightened sense ->

<Touch.>

<Ye- how’d you know?>

Jim smiled at his friend’s guppy expression <Oh, by a lot of little things – the 
stuff you wear like corduroy and knitted vests; your nipple ring…your love life. 
You have a greater ability to process tactile input, even if it’s nowhere near as 
strong as mine…which now I come to think of it must have made getting that 
phoenix tattoo interesting.>

Blair shivered. <I’ll tell you about it sometime.>

Yes, you will. This time Jim kept the thought firmly deep in his brain and just 
continued to look encouraging as Blair related the experience.

<Anyway, something made me follow him when he left Hargrove Hall. It was 
the hopeless look on his face, like he’d pinned everything on the tests and had 
lost.> Blair shook his head. <Good thing I did, I ended up having to drag him 
back from taking a swan dive off the 5th Street Bridge.>

It was Jim’s turn to suppress both a shiver and sharp order that Blair was never 
to do such a thing again. Suicidal people were by definitional irrational, and 
could lash out or become violently hysterical, sometimes without meaning to 
injuring or killing a rescuer along with themselves. 

Carrying on with his explanation, Blair elaborated, <The poor kid was like you 
went you came looking for Dr McCoy. The sensitivity testing had been his last 
ditch attempt to find a physical explanation before…you know. I managed to 
talk him into going to this café further down the block and talking things out. 
Turned out the poor kid had been online from birth.>

<Like me…>

<Yup, and ditto not realising that other people weren’t like him. He grew up 
in a seriously dysfunctional military family. Dad only cared about being on the 
fast-track to the Pentagon; his mom finally got sick of it enough to jettison 
the Generalissimo when Keir was ten. Acrimony doesn’t even begin to describe 
it. According to the way he told it, he’d always been his mom’s favourite, so 
dad allowed her to have custody of the eldest two boys who were teenagers at 
that point whilst he insisted on retaining custody of the third boy and the 
youngest – Keir. According to Keir his dad’s idea was that his ex-wife couldn’t 
do much wishy-washy nonsense to the eldest two boys who were away at some 
god-awful military prep school anyway, but he didn’t want her having the 
youngest two boys and filling their heads with nonsense.>

Jim thought of William Ellison with, for once, something akin to nostalgia. 
Harsh and combative as William had been, as dysfunctional as his home life 
with his two sons had been, William would never have dreamed of packing Jim 
or Stevie off to military school or any similar. 

<The kid was mad on archaeology…thing was the older three boys all took to 
military life like ducks to water and that only increased the pressure on the 
slacker, the failure, the laggard. He had to finance his way through his 
archaeology degree himself, sometimes he worked four jobs at college.>

<How did you help him?> That Blair had found a way Jim was certain of.

<I was flying as blind as he was, but I couldn’t tell him that,> confessed Blair, 
<else he’d have been straight back to the 5th Street bridge the second my back 
was turned. Doctors are always saying that to stave off Alzheimer’s and Senile 
Dementia people need to exercise their brain, so I suddenly thought that 
maybe exercising your mental barriers would make them stronger, like  
building physical muscle. I told him to visualise his mental shields like muscles 
that he had to exercise to make them strong. I told him to cut down on things 
that reduced his mental control like coffee and booze and suggested that he 
take some low-level job that enabled him to carry on archaeology but which 
was connected to the military – a civilian computer tech or something. Close 
enough to the jackboots – no offence – to keep his dad off his case, but far 
enough removed for him to be able to follow his dream.>

<I bet it worked.>

<Amazingly enough it did. We keep in touch – although very sporadically – I 
haven’t heard from him in three or four years now.> Blair admitted. <I gotta 
tell you, big guy, it was a relief. In the beginning I used to lie awake at nights 
sweating over what I’d told him to do and worrying what would happen if all 
my blasé advice hadn’t worked. I seriously think he’d have killed himself, and 
when my empathic abilities came fully online after we bonded properly I can 
understand why.> Blair shuddered. <Being touched by a mind as loathsome as 
Henry Greveson, or that of a paedophile…iy-ah!>

<You saved his life, chief,> Jim praised softly. 

They ate a truly fabulous chocolate confection dessert followed by coffee but 
then headed back to the hotel since Blair intended ‘first thing’ to be soon as 
reasonably possible. Besides which, considering the amount of energy 
expended by the MP in his abortive attempt to create chaos by having Lance 
Ducharme murder Sadie Bettencourt, it was highly unlikely he would be abroad 
or doing anything detectable by either Sentinel or Shaman tonight. Blair’s hope 
was that the MP’s arrogance and overconfidence was mixing nicely and 
thoroughly with increasing frustration and anger over his failure to get rid of 
Jim and Blair and would in short order make him reckless enough to expose 
himself. 

Jim called Simon to update him briefly on the situation but didn’t stay on the 
phone long due to the hour and as he could hear Leonie McKinley in the 
background. While Jim went into the bathroom to do his nightly ablutions Blair 
called the loft and spoke to a cheerful Daryl, who was having no problems with 
Dastardly and Muttley, and then he called Ellie McKinley at her dorm room in 
D.C. She also answered the phone with evident good cheer, laughingly related 
how she’d managed to get several passing football jocks to help get her stuff 
up from the ground floor to her room. There wasn’t much, since she too had 
had to learn to travel light and fast due to her and Leonie’s frequent moves in 
an attempt to shake off her biological father, Andrew McKinley. It transpired 
that her roommate had had a seriously inflamed appendix that had been 
removed and so Ellie was going to stay at Georgetown for a few days and just 
fly back for the wedding. She’d had all her dress fittings and was glad of a 
reason to evade a tetchy mom for a little while.

Jim turned off the lights and locked the door; they went to bed and as a result 
of the extremely eventful day, quickly fell into slumber.

* * *

Simon twitched reflexively as his eyes snapped open. The level of alertness 
lasted only a microsecond and he groaned inwardly as the bedside clock’s LED 
display read: 4:47a.m. 

You have got to be kidding me; careful not move fast or hurriedly he rolled 
onto his back and listened keenly. He had taken the time to familiarise himself 
with the security system of this nice new house and, as always when his fiancée 
or his son was here with him, it was set to ‘full bells and whistles’ mode. Simon 
had also incorporated the improvements to eliminate the few weak areas his 
police career had enabled him to spot, with the result that it would an 
extraordinarily brilliant and gifted burglar to get in undetected.

Besides, at the moment there was nothing worth stealing. Most of his personal 
property was still at his former marital  home waiting to be brought over and 
likewise all Leonie’s alluring toys were either at her office in Cascade 
Community College or still in her apartment. She had decided to keep the 
latter and rent it out for the income, so there was no rush to transfer her 
belongings. 

Simon automatically smiled down at the woman sleeping peacefully beside 
him. While Leonie’s idea made financial sense, Simon was aware that 
subconsciously, her apartment was her safety net – both psychologically and 
financially. Nor did he take umbrage for a moment over it; considering what 
she had endured over the past twelve years courtesy of her first husband, it 
was a miracle she’d managed to remain as together as she had. Simon strongly 
suspected that he would have been a crumpled wreck long before now. He 
certainly didn’t begrudge her need to maintain a ‘sanctuary’ for herself ‘just in 
case’ and he had no doubt that a few years down the line she would decide 
that she didn’t need the income after all and the apartment could be let go.

It certainly wasn’t Leonie who had disturbed his sleep at any rate. Indeed, 
tonight she had been far more relaxed than for the past couple of weeks. She 
and Rhonda Delagardie – the latter fretting that she was fattening too fast for 
the double wedding – had attended their final dress fittings and found 
perfection. Their wedding gowns fitted flawlessly, all their accessories were 
dyed exactly the right colour and fitted perfectly, including an aquamarine 
bracelet Leonie had been most worried about matching up as it was antique, a 
wedding gift from her first mother-in-law, Eleanor McKinley, after whom Ellie 
was named. 

Leonie had been worried about offending Simon’s mother by wearing the 
bracelet, but had explained that she had gotten on extremely well with ‘Old 
Ellie’. Her mother-in-law had raised Andrew McKinley from childhood after her 
husband died of a completely unexpected heart attack at 42. Sadly Leonie had 
explained how Mrs McKinley had died just before Andrew got the initial 
promotion that led to all the problems; a hardy widow, she would have had no 
truck with her son’s nonsense and brought his swelling ego back down to earth 
with a bang. In a way, Leonie was glad the woman had been spared the distress 
of seeing what her son had turned into as he’d let his position go to his head. 

Personally Simon would have happily married Leonie had she been clad in rags 
but he was far too wise to express this sentiment. Women noticed – and 
appreciated – these things and above all were understandably irked when they 
went to considerable trouble to be as attractive as possible only for the dense 
male their pairing to evince little interest. Leonie had thus arrived at what 
would be her marital home in a definitely cheerful frame of mind with fewer 
things to worry about. Her wedding attire was present and correct and she was 
thus less inclined to facial tics and hyperventilation a la Sandburg. Simon had 
to wonder how Henri was coping with his increasingly pregnant fiancée Rhonda 
Delagardie…which brought to mind Bryn Rafe. A small frown furrowed his brow; 
Bryn was executing the role of Henri’s Best Man with diligence but no joy, to 
the extent he seemed almost convinced he would be put against a wall and 
shot for any mistake. But that was a problem for another day…preferably the 
part of the day when the sun was up…

* * *

Jim came awake with the psychic scream of the panther echoing the enraged 
howl of the wolf ringing in his ears and sat bolt upright, his heart hammering, 
yet in full warrior mode. His vision easily pierced the night yet the room 
remained still and undisturbed.

The figure in the other bed stirred and half sat up; Sandburg looked over at 
Jim. “What is it?”

“I…don’t know,” Jim answered honestly where once he would have brushed it 
off as a nightmare – now he wouldn’t insult their spirit guides with such a 
dismissal but entities that could only communicate with yowls and growls 
would just have to be patient when it came to translation.

“Go back to sleep, Jim,” Blair recommended softly.

The slivers of moonlight changed his face to sinister shadowed angles and gave 
his smile a sly cast. 

Acting on something beyond even instinct, Jim wasn’t even aware that he 
lunged from his bed and clamped his hand around Blair’s fleshy upper arm, but 
the pain was instant and incredible, searing as if Jim had just grabbed a red 
hot ember from a fire. Nothing on earth would have induced Jim to let go; he 
bared his teeth and lashed out with every ounce of psychic energy an enraged 
and terrified Alpha Sentinel could muster. 

Blair’s whole body jerked as if his arm were a fulcrum to move the world, and 
he cried out in sharp pain, his free hand batting at something in front of his 
face. Blair’s face seemed to ripple and distort slightly as his own features sort 
of stretched momentarily to become pointy of chin, narrower of nose and 
pastier of complexion, before snapping back into the roundness of Blair. There 
was a distant shriek of fury and agony, and above Blair’s head an oily black 
haze-cloud broke apart and dissipated like fog scattered by a gale.

For a moment the two men stared at each other, before Jim released his death 
grip on Blair’s arm, automatically looking down to see that his fingers were red 
and faintly blistered, as if he had laid his fingers on a too-hot radiator and kept 
them there. Blair had clear finger marks on his arm, also red and sore like 
scalds. 

“Ohmanohmanohman,” Blair gasped, clenching his hand spasmodically in the 
front of his T-shirt.

“Breathe, Sandburg,” instructed Jim automatically even as he sank down on his 
own bed a foot away, “but I agree with the sentiment. Oh man.”

Blair hutched up his bed to the pillow end and Jim automatically dialled his 
eyesight down as Blair switched on the overhead light. In the unflattering pool 
of luminescence they were both pale and puffy-eyed, hardly surprising. 

“Well, we know how the MP took control of Lance Ducharme.” Jim blew out a 
breath. “Are you alright, Chief?”

Blair nodded. “Yeah, it was like…you know when you step in the edge of a 
puddle and a second later you feel this spreading wetness over your sock and 
you realise you’ve got a hole in your shoe? I could feel him trying to seep 
in…ugh!” he shuddered dramatically.

“But you had the power to kick him out?”

“We kicked him out, big guy,” Blair admitted, “but yeah, I could’ve have laid 
the psychic smack down on him if I had to.” Brightening, Blair shoved back the 
covers and got up. “And that’s another mistake of his – I’ve got the measure of 
him now. He is powerful, but not as powerful as his ego insists, and he couldn’t 
get a handle on what you and I were as Sentinel and Guide.”

Jim nodded, unsurprised at this titbit – the selflessness of being a Guide was an 
alien concept to the homicidal egomaniac that was the MP, as 
incomprehensible as Sanskrit or Sumerian, and thus Sandburg himself was 
wholly a mystery.

“….do you mind, I need some air to be honest?”

Jim tuned back in and back-filled the start of Sandburg’s question from the 
visual clues of his friend getting dressed in outdoor clothing, “Me too.”

They both dressed quickly and Blair put on his coat and walking boots. They 
went downstairs quietly, but the fracas in their room had clearly not disturbed 
anyone. Blair took in a deep breath of the cleansing, cold air as they walked a 
few yards and stood looking out of the marina, side by side, still getting over 
the nasty surprise of a few minutes ago. Jim checked his watch: 5:03a.m., 
already the blackness was getting tinges of that grey half-light of pre-dawn. 
They weren’t totally out of place either, as some of the fishing/hunting tourists 
were already up and about; the breakfast places were opening up as the bar 
closed, but Jim doubted it was advisable for either him or Blair to try eating 
just yet. 

“How’re you doing?”

“Better,” Blair answered, no longer having to concentrate on keeping his 
respiration on an even keel. “That was seriously unpleasant.” 

“You don’t think the MP did any permanent damage to Lance Ducharme?” Jim 
asked tentatively, though pleased to hear that growing undertone of anger in 
Blair’s voice replacing shock and distress.

“Depends on your definition…has the MP turned Ducharme into a psychopathic 
time-bomb ticking down to zero? Absolutely not; but in terms of psychological 
trauma…It was like being…”

“Mentally raped?” Jim suggested quietly.

“Yes, exactly.”

“I need to know the full name.”

“Hm?”

“Of the guy that hurt you…” Jim explained softly; how could he find the guy 
and slowly kill him otherwise.

“Ah…I think not…” Blair commented judiciously, “I’ve never been actually 
raped –”

“And ‘actually’ is BS for?” Jim demanded, not clarifying whether he meant 
Blair Sandburg or bullshit.

Blair sighed. “Most of Naomi’s boyfriends were okay with me…some of them 
wanting a son fell more in love with me than her. But some of them didn’t like 
me at all…and occasionally some of them liked me too much…and I was in more 
danger from some of the people when CPS dumped me in foster-care whilst 
investigating Mom’s ‘maternal fitness’ than all her boyfriends combined. I’ve 
had to fight off a few grab ‘n’ grope artists in my time, let’s leave it at that.”

Let’s not; but there were more ways to snare a Guide than demanding chapter 
and verse, Ellison…He is not a Corporal and you are not a Captain; honey, not 
vinegar, slow and easy does it. “Sure, Chief.”  

“I think Lance will be ok, but I think we can safely say how the MP also took 
hold of Kyle Valenti long enough to goad him into a killing rage during that 
fight, and also how Kyle knew that whole Mickey Finn in the drink spiel was a 
load of BS BS?”

“I’m sure he can confirm that himself, right Kyle?” Jim’s voice took on a hard 
edge and he looked into the darkness.

There was a soft clack, and then a snick then a tiny, brief flicker of orange 
flame followed by another clack, as Kyle Valenti came out of the side street to 
where they stood at the water front, plucking the cigarette from between his 
lips as he eyed them warily.

“You saw what really happened to Lance Ducharme,” Blair’s voice was soft but 
strangely persuasive, and once again Jim thought back to his mini-epiphany of 
the previous day that the most dangerous creature within miles was standing 
right next to him.

“Yeah,” Kyle Valenti looked out over the water, his posture tense but not 
hostile. “I was meeting the guys for a drink at the café. I came down the cut-
through, between the café and Abracadabra?”

 “Yeah, we saw the alley,” Blair encouraged.

“I knew Lance would’ve have got me a root beer or whatever he was having, so 
I stopped for a smoke…” Kyle rolled his eyes in that way humans can only pull 
off at one point in their lives, when their ages end with ‘teen’. “Ducharme’s 
not averse to a few Millers with his buds y’know, but the grief I get for the odd 
Marlboro, you wouldn’t believe…anyway, I was only a  couple of minutes…”

<Yeah, one minute for the smoke, the second to try and get the smell to 
dissipate> Blair commented knowingly to Jim.

“I came down the alley and there was, like, this faint haze above Lance’s 
head,” Kyle’s voice was hard and taut now, “like a miniature cloud but really 
faint, kinda oily. It settled onto his hair and the next thing all hell breaks loose 
as he goes Norman Bates on Sadie Bettencourt.”

“Why didn’t you intervene?” Jim asked.

“No time,” Kyle answered. “Everybody and their mother was crowding in front 
of me and I had no idea how I was supposed to get rid of the cloud, but I saw it 
suddenly appear and then dissipate like someone had turned an invisible fan on 
a wisp of fog –” he missed the look Jim and Blair exchanged “– and the next 
thing Lance freaked, threw the knife away from himself and took off like he 
was turbo charged. Sadie was hysterical and bleeding so I stayed with her; I 
had no idea until a few minutes later that Lance had freaked out so much he 
was about to take a swan dive from Lover’s Leap.”

“Had you ever seen the cloud before?” Blair prompted.

Kyle took another nervous drag of his cigarette. “I guess…yeah.”

“When you had that fight with Lance over – what he said about your father and 
the school principal, Mrs Myers?” Jim guessed.

Kyle nodded, raising a hand and running it through his hair. “It started out as a 
bull session, y’know? I mean, we’re teenage boys – present ’em in the right way 
and quadratic equations will give us hard-ons you could poke a fire with.”

Blair chuckled, “I’ll have to remember to suggest that bit of teaching 
innovation at the next Cascade Community College faculty meeting.” 

“Yeah, okay, there was the odd bottle of Bud or Coors, but no more than two 
or three. You do not DUI when my dad is the Sheriff around here.” Kyle 
shivered delicately. “We were all lying through our teeth about our mostly 
fictional sex lives and making out we live the Kama Sutra and then somehow 
me and Lance were sniping at each other for no reason I can think of…and 
things got personal. Then he’s spewing all this crap about how Dad was banging 
Janet Myers like a drum and how he’d used his SEAL mojo to knock off my mom 
because of it.”

“And at that point you started to fight?” Blair asked.

“The rage took over – it was like it had a life and a will of its own but was using 
my body to be the smoking gun. But just like before when the argument was 
getting heated, I jumped up and I saw my reflection in a window and for a 
moment it looked like I had this wisp of black fog floating above my head.” 
Kyle shook his head, “I thought about it afterwards but until I saw it happen to 
Lance I didn’t know whether I’d imagined it, or I had been seeing things, or…”

“Had a flashback to a particularly hard-partying weekend,” Jim’s tone was 
stern and authoritative. 

“Somethin’ like that.”

“But you don’t use any more.” Again, Jim’s voice was pure Detective Ellison, 
officer of the law, and his words were a definite statement as in, this better 
not be a question. 

“I was into some stuff,” Kyle acknowledged with no discernible hint of guilt or 
contrition in his tone, his voice becoming strained as he spoke of painful 
memories, “but I stopped when mom got sick…Dad was still OCONUS for several 
months…she never talked about how the treatment was going but the math 
wasn’t hard to figure…”

“You knew your mom needed you to keep it together in every way,” Blair 
praised softly.

Kyle rolled his shoulders in a deep shrug. “The treatment and the chemo drugs 
were real hard on her…the last thing she needed was me being more lit than 
she was – or having to haul herself out of a hospital bed and get downtown to 
post bail because I’d been arrested with an eight ball of blow in my back 
pocket. Besides, it made me realise…if that’s what legal, medically approved 
drugs were doing to her, God only knew what street junk cut with everything 
from detergent to rat poison was doing to me each time. So now I only have 
one vice,” he indicated the cigarette wryly.

“Which is just as toxic, you idiot.”

Blair hadn’t heard or ‘felt’ Lance Ducharme approach as he had been 
concentrating solely on Kyle Valenti, but Jim didn’t bat an eyelid and Blair was 
as happy to categorise him as no threat as Jim had clearly done.

Kyle glared at the other youth, but didn’t raise the cigarette to his lips again, 
despite his obvious stress. “What are you doing wandering around town at this 
hour on your own?”

Lance rolled his eyes. “I see their hotel light come on, then I look out over the 
roof tops and see you making an obviously well-practised exit through your 
bedroom window, so I decided to join the party as I have a special interest as it 
were. Is Sadie really alright?” he asked Jim and Blair abruptly.

“Yes, shock and a minor cut,” Jim assured him. 

“Thank god,” Lance rejoined with undeniable sincerity. “Man, I’ve spent the 
night staring out of my hotel window trying to work out whether I should have 
myself committed before I become the next John Gacy.” He spotted the glance 
Jim and Blair exchanged and asked with a soupcon of challenge, “But 
apparently I really wasn’t to blame, was I?”

“No,” Blair replied coolly, with a take-it-or-leave-it challenge in his voice.

“Can you stop it?” Lance spoke in a more friendly tone, “This evil dude, before 
he, or it, or whatever takes control of some little kid who can’t fight back…or 
some dumb-ass who killed off vital brain cells with illegal herbage?”

“I don’t use,” Kyle ground out in a hard tone.

“And you better not ever again or I will kick your ass from here to the Capitol,” 
Lance snapped back in an equally inflexible tone but didn’t take his regard 
from Blair and Jim. “Can you?”

“Yes, we can stop him,” Blair stated. “In fact, with any luck, by the time this 
day is out.”

“Works for me,” Kyle commented.

Lance was also unable to prevent the clear expression of relief on his face. 
“Thanks. It was…I was watching myself pick up the knife but I couldn’t stop 
myself doing it…”

“You’re fighting as hard as you can to stop but you can only watch yourself,” 
Kyle commiserated softly, with feeling.

Lance looked again at Blair. “Why here? Why has this…man…chosen Witt’s 
End?”

“Because you’re all special,” Blair replied, “in a good way. Certain people, and 
certain places have…a zeitgeist. They’re like roses in a field of daisies, they’re 
just a bit bigger and brighter, a big more vital and well, alive, than others. 
Witt’s End and St. Mary Vale are two places that should never work together 
but they do; this place is a haven for those whose souls need a little bit of 
healing and soothing, a little bit of respite from a world unable, unwilling and 
uncaring about their needs. The…Murderer Presumptive…is like the guy who 
rigs his trailer illegally to the power line, running his stove and TV and shower 
off all that juice but not paying a cent for it.”

The two boys considered this for a long moment. Shrewdly, Lance looked at the 
two older men. “You’re not the usual kind of cops, are you?”

“No, we’re not,” Jim admitted. 

“All this…stuff that a lifetime of very expensive private education is trying to 
tell me is nonsense and just mass hysteria…it’s the real deal isn’t it?”

“I wish more than anything I could tell you otherwise, but yes,” Blair 
acknowledged with a hint of sadness, knowing he was destroying the vestiges of 
youthful innocence that both Kyle and Lance were still entitled to hold; it 
made him even more coldly angry at the MP, knowing that these two boys 
should have only been worrying about the senior prom and exam grades and 
pretty girls.

“Dad told me there’d be days like these.” Lance suddenly grinned, looking 
about six years old. “I’d best get back to the hotel before my parents find I’m 
not in my room and freak. Come on, Valenti, let’s leave the nice men to do 
their thing. Mom and Dad will chill if they find me in the hotel eating a hearty 
breakfast with you chaperoning me.”

“What’re we having?” Kyle enquired.

“I’m having every bit of red meat I can get down my gullet, you are having fruit 
juice.”

Kyle paused and raised his eyebrows. “Come again?”

“You’re already doing enough damage with the nicotine to add cholesterol to 
the list.”

“I’m only eighteen,” Kyle sputtered. 

Lance raised an eyebrow. “Exactly, and if you get kicked out of the Naval 
Academy because of your busted lungs, or because of your spare tyre – or 
because of drugs –” his tone hardened momentarily again “- then you won’t 
have made it to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs when I need to pick someone as 
my Presidential golfing buddy when I win my second term in office.”

Kyle folded his arms. “Confident, much?”

“Totally.” Lance sniffed. “Is that bacon frying?”

“It’s been nice talking to you, Mr President, Mr Chairman,” Jim drawled 
sardonically as the two boys walked away, bickering amicably. He shook his 
head. “The Ducharme kid will probably make it too…what?”

Blair looked back at where both boys had nearly disappeared into the still 
gloomy dusk of early dawn. “I just had a…vision…an image really.”

“A vision or just…a vision?”

Blair shrugged and then grinned at Jim. “No idea, but there was a middle-aged 
Admiral decked out with enough medals to cover a wall cheating outrageously 
at golf with another middle-aged, slightly plump I must say, dude wearing a 
suit who was demanding of some Man in Black clone whether cheating at golf 
with the President wasn’t an offence punishable by instantly shooting the 
miscreant?…”

Jim’s eyes widened and he glanced towards where the boys had disappeared, 
“You’re not saying…” 

“Nope, but I’ve got a feeling…” 

Jim raised a hand. “I don’t want to know, Sandburg.”

Blair grinned mischievously but then became grim. “One thing you do want to 
know – what Kyle said about using that cut-through to get to the café – I think I 
have an idea why the MP decided he had to ‘murder’ Edgar Fincham. I need to 
go see Joe…?”

Jim glanced at his watch; it was nearly six o’clock. The fishers and hunter-
tourists had been up for hours and the enthusiastic camper/hikers would be 
stirring any moment. Blair taking a casual pre-breakfast stroll in the woods 
wouldn’t be out of place, even at this hour. 

“Go,” he suggested, “I’ll enjoy the meaty breakfast a la the double-act of 
Ducharme and Valenti, and I’ll cover for you if necessary with Rick Valenti. 
Like you said Chief, I’m only a thought away.”

“Thanks…but Jim - be ready…for anything,” Blair warned even as he wasn’t 
entirely sure what he was warning against.

Jim inclined his head solemnly and as he discreetly walked as fast as 
inconspicuously possible into the woods, Blair knew that Jim’s first port of call 
would be back up to the hotel room and his handgun. 

Once out of sight of casual passers by, Blair was able to rapidly increase his 
pace, finding that he didn’t need to try and consciously follow a route as long 
as he ‘locked in’ on the ‘buzz’ of the temple. He kept his eyes and ears sharp, 
but could detect no sense of anything or anyone evil nearby. To be honest he 
hadn’t expected anything, which was why making it back to ‘Joe’ this early 
was to Blair’s advantage. 

The MP had tried twice in the last twenty-four hours to take control of 
individuals for vicious purposes and had on each occasion been violently and 
precipitously expelled from his intended victim, which would have caused 
immense physical pain and a psychic backlash of great proportions on each 
occasion. It was a sign of the MP’s desperation that he had tried a second time 
against Blair so soon after the first attempt with Lance Ducharme, and unless 
he was superman he would be curled up in a whimpering ball for a good hour 
yet…Works for me.

To Blair’s complete lack of surprise, Joe was waiting for him, and Blair took 
heart from the lack of grimness to Joe’s expression, though the man was hardly 
grinning like a loon. Doubting whether Joe needed the update, Blair 
nevertheless filled him in on events since Joe had told him he needed to leave 
and get back to Witt’s End as they walked to Joe’s cave.

“You are correct, he is desperate now, and you having the strength of will to 
expel him so forcefully earlier this night will have pushed him over the line into 
the act of rash folly that you need – direct confrontation.”

“You think he’ll really do something that drastic?” Blair queried as he sat down 
facing Joe again.

Joe nodded sombrely. “He was safe, because everyone was looking for a 
mundane, earthly motive. Then you came, and he realised you had power. 
Then you came to learn of his existence and his attempts to stop you were 
thwarted, and now you even have a description to go on…”

“Pointy chin, narrow blade of a nose, pasty and bad complexion,” Blair reeled 
off to his own surprise as he brought back the memory that Jim had 
inadvertently shared with him through their telempathic link. “Not too many fit 
that description since everyone around here is mostly as healthy as a horse.”

“Clean, strong, bright souls make for clean, strong, bright bodies,” Joe 
commented dryly.

“So pick the skinny dude with chronic acne and a face that just sucked a 
lemon,” Blair snorted.

“More or less,” Joe agreed. “He will be desperate to end your threat to him so 
he will be goaded beyond rationality into an opportunistic attack – a physical 
‘wallop you’ attack.”

“Wonderful.”

Joe shrugged, “He felt infused with power and glee because he ‘got away’ with 
the murder of someone larger and stronger than himself. The MP does not know 
that his was a pseudo-victory with an already dead victim. He has never faced 
an intended victim who was awake, alert and capable of retaliation and I doubt 
his nerve will hold…but yours must.”

“I get that,” Blair muttered.

Joe shook his head. “I mean your nerve must hold to act as bait. If I were the 
MP, I would be desperate, but cunning enough to attack you in the woods on 
your way back to Witt’s End. You must hold him off long enough to lure him as 
close to Witt’s End as possible, and there your Sentinel must publicly kill him.”

Blair stiffened at this bald diktat. For all his grimness, it was never an easy 
thing, no matter how twisted the individual, for Jim to take a human life. Even 
such creatures as David Lash preyed on his friend’s mind sometimes, Blair 
knew, thoughts of ‘if only’ – if only David Lash hadn’t had the misfortune to be 
born to a pair of drunken, useless white trash parents, if only he had had a 
mother and a father who loved him deeply and sincerely and took the time to 
nurture and encourage the deeply sensitive child instead of emotionally 
abandoning him and trying to replace the ‘wimp freak’ with a ‘real’ son. If only 
Alicia Bannister had been helped long before she was warped and twisted into 
Alexandra Barnes, she wouldn’t now be a vegetable in Conover…

Joe accurately divined his train of thought, or more likely simply read the 
emotions flowing across Blair’s face. He regarded Blair solemnly and said, “I 
know that your Sentinel is a man who reveres life – which is as it should be. A 
Sentinel is a warrior, not an assassin, a killer but not a murderer. But think, 
what would happen if the MP attacks you and instead of Jim Ellison killing him, 
he is arrested and taken into custody?”

“Sheriff Valenti will ensure he’s put on trial,” Blair had no doubt of the man’s 
integrity, despite the vicious rumours the MP had spread about Valenti as a 
murderer and adulterer.

“But will it come to trial?” pressed Joe quietly. “After the MP is arrested, all 
he has to do is tell the truth.”

Blair blinked for several seconds and then groaned aloud, slapping his hand 
against his forehead as his mind’s eye replayed a selection of cringe-worthy 
memories from a lifetime of enduring therapy sessions with well-meaning but 
clueless mental health professionals foisted on him by misguided Child 
Protection Services officials. “Aagh! Stupid, stupid, Blair! Of course…”

Joe smiled faintly but spelled it out anyway, knowing that sometimes it needed 
to be said aloud to reinforce the point. “You and Jim hide what you are, for 
now. The mainstream culture of this country has become almost totally 
divorced from its spirituality, and is hideously damaged because of it. Now 
consumerism is king, selfishness and egomania are treated as the height of 
sophistication by the vapid and self-serving while faith is ridiculed and service 
to any other master but your own base impulses, especially submission to the 
Divine, is scorned as contemptible. That is why evil flourishes in this land 
despite the Hunters, and why there are so many other Sentinels and empaths 
out there who need your help, who will be examples to a world lost to 
hedonistic stupidity as how far they have fallen, because they need so many 
heroes to stand between them and the consequences of their hubris.”

Blair was silent at this condemnation, for a more succinct and excoriating 
summation of everything wrong with Western culture he had not come across in 
some time. 

“So you and Jim Ellison are Dr Sandburg, Anthropologist and Lieutenant 
Detective Ellison, not Shaman-Guide and Sentinel of the Great City,” Joe 
continued. “You know those who accept the former labels without blinking 
would try and get you committed to Conover for claiming the latter as equally 
genuine and real statements of rank or status. Likewise, the MP is 
megalomaniacal but not stupid. All he has to do is be honest about what he is 
and what he did.”

Blair sighed. “Right…because the instant he admits he’s a real life Voldemort 
and that he ‘murdered’ in-inverted-commas Edgar Fincham because the guy 
stumbled across him performing a ‘dark arts ritual’ in the woods then he will 
bypass every courtroom and pass Go straight for a plush suite in Conover as a 
whack-job.”

“Just so,” Joe agreed. “We marshal no defence against an enemy we do not 
know – or perhaps more aptly do not believe - is there. Once in a mental health 
facility…”

“…The MP will use the powers the psychiatrists and medical staff don’t believe 
in to manipulate them as if he were Yehudi Menuhin playing them as a violin 
concerto,” Blair recited with exasperated certainty.

“Besides, what crime has he really committed?” Joe posed the question 
thoughtfully. “The ‘non-murder’ of a ‘victim’ so mentally unstable himself that 
he took his own life before the MP got anywhere near him? Within eighteen 
months to two years, tops, those psychologists and psychiatrists will be 
genuinely believing that he’s just a harmless, ageing kook over-indulging in 
Walter Mitty fantasies of paranormal greatness…and that is what their reports 
will say, and that is why the MP would be free and clear to move to a new 
hunting ground and prey on the innocent unfettered.”

Blair felt the tension behind his eyes as Joe recited the sequence of events as if 
watching an old and familiar movie rather than foretelling the future. Trouble 
was his summation was spot on. If you wanted to deceive, but were unable to 
lie yourself, the next best M.O. was to trick an innocent person into being the 
vector, like viruses that hitched a ride into the body via an innocuous glass of 
water or milk, that not quite properly cooked chicken or the air itself. 

You tricked a sincere, genuine person into believing the deception was true, or 
right, and then simply stood back and watched them spread the falsehood on 
your behalf; it worked because they were genuine and sincere, and so were 
believed even by those usually more cynically inclined. 

Once the MP had control of the psychobabblers to the extent that they 
genuinely believed him to be a harmless eccentric, getting himself legally 
released from Conover by the Board of Trustees would be a formality. Blair 
knew the methodology well, for he had seen it in action and been forced to 
pull the stunt himself. Studying Psychology at the higher levels had only served 
to convince Blair even more that the mental health disciplines were a long way 
from the genuine science they claimed to be and still not that far removed 
from the 19th Century charlatanism of séances, mesmerism, and esoteric 
pursuits from which they had emerged. His childhood experiences with Child 
Protection Services’ endless battalions of Educational Psychologists and Child 
Psychiatrists had taught him that if nothing else. 

The only way to fully protect innocent people was to kill the MP. Blair took a 
breath, acknowledging, “If you find a rabid animal, you don’t risk trying to 
cage it and cure it, you humanely destroy it to prevent you having to wipe out 
an entire ecosystem if it spreads.”

“Just so.” Joe inclined his head. “Now, I will take you through some exercises 
that will help you channel your power and your will when the MP attacks you, 
so you can both hold him off and goad him into following you too close to town. 
When you leave here, warn your Sentinel to be ready for what will happen.”

* * *

Jim was aware that the fact that breakfast did not taste as good as it usually 
did was purely a psychosomatic reaction the absence of Blair. It wasn’t fun if 
he couldn’t rib his friend about jettisoning his usual ‘my-body-is-a-temple-to-
algae-shakes’ for the fabulous blueberry waffles or the sausage and pancakes. 
Coming down from his and Blair’s room after collecting his gun and donning his 
back-up gun in his ankle holster (this was, after all, him and Sandburg), he 
spotted Lance Ducharme and Kyle Valenti in the hotel’s breakfast room where 
to his complete lack of surprise Kyle was also tucking into ham, eggs, biscuits 
and the like. 

Nodding to them in passing, Jim took a window table for one slightly away from 
the others; he spotted two familiar, tense people exiting the elevator, and saw 
how Senator and Mrs Ducharme visibly lost their worried expressions as they 
spotted their son innocuously eating breakfast. Kyle rose as they approached, 
moving back from the table despite a barely half-eaten breakfast – teenage 
boys really were bottomless pits – but Senator Ducharme waved him back down 
again with patrician grace. 

Jim thought of what Sandburg had said and eyed the quartet speculatively, for 
some reason brought to mind of the last time he’d seen Daryl Banks, though he 
couldn’t for the life of him have said why. Senator Ducharme was a long-
standing and close personal as well as political friend of President Monteith, 
from an old, wealthy and politically-aristocratic family, respected amongst 
Republicans as well as Democrats. Mrs Ducharme’s family did not have the Blue 
Chip Stock Pilgrim Fathers pedigree, but plenty of cash and her Amerindian 
blood provided cachet and acceptance with one of America’s most powerful 
and increasingly vocal ethnic minorities, especially as the rights of Native 
Americans were always going to be a powder keg. 

There had never been any scandal attached to either the Senator or his wife, 
not even the usual, trite indiscretions-with-pretty-secretaries – faint memory 
nagged at Jim and he remembered that they had lost their eldest child, a little 
girl, to SIDS a few years prior to the birth of Lance, who was now their only 
child. Lance clearly possessed intelligence and charisma to complement his 
clean-cut looks, and with the backing of his parents’ money and connections, 
there was no reason why Lance Ducharme could not one day become the 
United States’ first Indian-descended President. Nor, if Kyle quit the cigarettes 
and determined to follow in the footsteps of the SEAL father he obviously 
dearly loved, there was theoretically no reason why he shouldn’t achieve a 
position on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Chairman or not.

Putting such idle musings aside, Jim took out his cellular and called Simon. 
Leaving out certain ‘too much information’ details, especially about Sentinel 
and Guide matters and exactly how they had at least some resemblance to 
match to the bad guy, he explained the events of the last few days and that, 
thanks to their conversation with Kyle Valenti, they hoped to be able to take 
down the perpetrator today.

“When the Valenti boy explained how he’d taken a circuitous route to meet his 
friends so he could have a crafty smoke on the way,” Jim related, “Sandburg 
realised that was probably the MP’s motive. Witt’s End is a place where 
everyone notices everyone else, so the MP could hardly be sacrificing chickens 
and performing arcane rituals with inverted crosses in town, but then he’s got 
all these nice, quiet, deserted woods to play in…”

Simon, just like Jim, was equally quick to figure things out under his own steam 
once the idea had been pointed out, “So the MP does his thing in the woods, 
but then one night Edgar Fincham reels past while he’s in flagrante delicto so 
to speak, and he panics. What if Fincham remembers what he saw when he 
sobers up and starts asking questions? What if Fincham blabs what he saw to 
someone else?”

“We still don’t know why Fincham killed himself,” Jim admitted, “but as to the 
other my guess is that what he saw didn’t mean anything to him; he wouldn’t 
have recognised it for what it was, but if Fincham did talk and the wrong 
people – to the MP’s way of thinking – got to hear…its like the little old lady 
obliviously bragging to her friend about the chemistry experiment her brilliant 
grandson and his friend Abdul are running in his basement, and the FBI agent 
inadvertently eavesdropping from a nearby park bench whilst eating lunch 
realises that grandson and his buddy are building a bomb.”

“So the MP murdered – or thought he murdered – Fincham to prevent him from 
telling anyone what he saw, or maybe even just might have seen.” Simon 
acknowledged. “What’s really scary is that he would have gotten completely 
away with it if Fincham had not already committed suicide for reasons 
unknown.”

“Tell me about it.” Jim agreed. “But how’re things back in Cascade?”

As it happened, Simon was staring at a long-winded missive from the FBI which 
more or less boiled down to: clear out space in your closet ’cause we’re moving 
in, but just like last time, he had positive news with which to throw the 
Sentinel off the scent. “At the moment going worryingly well; Leonie’s gown is 
a perfect fit and the wedding preparations are going like clockwork, so she’s 
much more relaxed about it everything. But as one female takes a chill pill 
another starts up – you remember all that serene calm Rhonda was exuding 
while Leonie was doing the headless chicken thing?”

“Yeah.” Jim smiled at Simon’s ebullient tone, for it was good to hear his friend 
so upbeat after a tough few years dealing with his divorce and the shenanigans 
of his Sentinel/Guide duo. 

“Well it seems to be wearing off slightly. Rhonda’s starting to fret with 
paranoia that she’s already beginning to reach the beached-whale stage or that 
she’ll suddenly go into premature labour halfway through the wedding 
service.”

“I can’t see that happening,” Jim soothed, having monitored Rhonda’s 
pregnancy since the tadpole stage and not finding anything that indicated the 
foetus was likely to attempt an early escape. 

“We keep reinforcing that fact,” Simon chuckled. “But Henri’s a wreck. How 
Rafe puts up with him is beyond me.”

Suddenly reminded of what Blair had empathically picked up regarding Rafe’s 
attitude to the wedding of Henri Brown, a black man, to Rhonda Delagardie, a 
white woman, Jim lost his smile, but he put that matter aside for now. They’d 
deal with that back in Cascade.

“So when do you think you’ll be back?” Simon asked, his tone indicating the 
answer had better be soon.

“Assuming we can hand the MP gift wrapped to Sheriff Valenti today, my Dad 
and brother are flying in tomorrow to help head off Julie Bettencourt’s family, 
so hopefully it will be day after tomorrow, but the day after that at the latest. 
We will be back for the wedding, Simon.”

Simon gave a self-derisive snort, “I know, I know…I am calm…I am calm…I don’t 
suppose there’s any way of preventing that partner of yours from finding out 
how much coffee I’ve been drinking while you’re away?”

“Sorry, Simon, life in the Sandburg Zone does have its downside.”

“Hah, hah…I’d better start earning my salary. See you, Jim.”

Jim ended the call, pleased that things were going reasonably smoothly back 
home, even though the Rafe issue would have to be addressed when they got 
back. After so many years of work, poker and beer with the man, Jim just 
could not accept that Bryn Rafe was a racist – he and Henri Brown had a strong, 
close friendship. But Blair’s empathic abilities were an even better lie detector 
than Sentinel senses in some instances.

<Jim?>

<What’s up, Chief?> Jim pretended to linger over his last cup of coffee as he 
‘heard’ his friend’s subdued tone.

Reluctantly, Blair reiterated his discussion with Joe.

<It’s okay, Blair,> Jim soothed, despite knowing that the MP would become the 
latest in a line of faces that would periodically haunt him in the years to come. 
<For all I hate to admit it, Joe’s got the situation dead on. The American 
criminal justice system as it stands today is utterly unprepared to cope with 
what the Murderer Presumptive is. If innocent people are to be protected, the 
MP has to be either locked away for the rest of his natural life or else dead.>

<I know; I just wish there was another way…>

<Me too, Chief. Where are you now?>

<Heading back to town. Can’t sense anything yet but probably in a few 
minutes…Give me five then stroll along the waterfront until you get the road 
leading up to St. Mary Vale. There should be enough impartial passers by there 
to show it as a righteous shoot. I’ll come back down past Edgar Fincham’s 
cabin. Seeing that should remind the MP of how he ‘murdered’ him and 
increase his over-confidence again; riding the power trip will make him even 
more reckless.>

Jim left it nowhere near as long as five minutes. He had confidence in himself 
and Blair, but to pull this off he needed to be prepared and in position. Whilst 
easier, killing the MP in the woods with only Blair as his far from impartial 
witness to the ‘righteousness’ of the shooting would create as many problems 
for the twin community of Witt’s End/St. Mary Vale as the MP’s slander 
attempts. Especially so in view of all the rich politicos such as Senator 
Ducharme residing in St. Mary Vale and the fact that their boss Simon Banks 
had just been appointed to the politically sensitive post of Chief of Police with 
his hand-picked successor Joel Taggart now Captain of the MCU; definitely 
achieved on merit in both cases, nevertheless two black men in prominent 
positions in a predominantly white city were vulnerable to innuendoes about 
the ‘Less Qualified Black Woman’ syndrome and being used to pander to a 
politically correct agenda rather than the person most capable of doing the 
job.

On top of that, he needed to remember that the MP had more weaponry at his 
disposal than a physical knife or gun. If Blair was threatened, Jim had no 
compunction about taking out the perp regardless of his geographical location 
and any problems it caused. However, the last thing he wanted, if he could 
avoid it, was to have to perform his Sentinel ‘party tricks’ in a wood smack 
bang on top of a secret military installation actually under the aegis – what 
were the odds, surely? – of an unknowingly ‘dormant’ Alpha Sentinel.

Nor was Jim going to risk fluffing the shot and letting the MP escape when 
tomorrow morning his father’s pilot was going to deposit William and Stephen 
Ellison in the vicinity. Besides, the MP had had contact with Blair’s mind and, 
although extremely briefly and painfully, Jim’s…sufficiently enough to 
recognise the Bettencourt family as being the same thing on a less powerful, 
and therefore less able to defend themselves, level? Jim had no idea, but he 
had no intention of taking the risk; as Lance Ducharme had raised, the prospect 
of the MP taking over a child who hadn’t the life experience or the adult 
strength of will to fight – like Sadie or her brothers or that tiny, adorable terror 
Rosalie, was unthinkable.

* * *

The hairs on Blair’s neck began to prickle barely a minute after his telepathic 
conversation with Jim. However, he continued to steadily walk back through 
the woods towards Witt’s End, even slowing his stride as he went past Edgar 
Fincham’s forlorn cabin with the police tape still bobbing faintly in the breeze, 
as if contemplating going in. He did not, for it would be an open invitation for 
the MP to follow him inside and attempt to kill him.

Finally he saw the sunlight reflecting off the lake and the outline of buildings 
through the trees. Sensing that the MP would naturally attempt to stay within 
the disguising sanctuary of the wood, Blair spoke to throw him off balance. 

“You might as well come out,” he said in a cheerful, faintly taunting tone. “I’m 
afraid yet another of the things you aren’t very good as is lurking. Perhaps a bit 
more attention to personal hygiene might be in order?”

The MP appeared from the left, a man with a pointy chin, sharp blade of a nose 
bisecting his face between his too-close set eyes and sallow skin. But despite 
these features he was still unremarkable. He looked like any other ordinary 
white-collar type man you’d pass on the street; he had no ‘distinguishing 
features’. 

Which had probably been the inception of his megalomania, Blair realised wryly 
as he saw that the MP was also about an inch shorter than himself. 
Unfortunately during his life Blair had had a lot of dealings with the sort of 
conceited, arrogant type of person whose ego insisted that he or she was a 
colossus whose brilliance soared far above that of every other human being on 
the planet and their attitude was only exacerbated because every mirror 
showed the physical falsity of their puffed-up self-image. You had to wonder 
how many megalomaniac dictators the world would not have had to suffer had 
all human men grown up to be a minimum of six feet tall.

The MPs eyes were a dark brown-black and seemed to glitter as if lit by a fire 
behind them – it was entirely possible they were, mystically speaking. Most 
occult practitioners used narcotics or stimulating herbal concoctions of dubious 
provenance to ‘boost’ their abilities. 

Pasting an expression of faint apprehension on his face, Blair began to edge 
away as if fearfully, and as he’d hoped the MP gave a vicious, gleeful grin and 
automatically followed, not noticing how close they were to the edge of the 
wood. 

“You’ve caused me enough problems,” the MP snarled, his accent having a 
definite Northern twang – maybe Detroit or Chicago? “It’s time for you and that 
goon of yours to die.”

“You don’t seriously believe you’ll get away with killing me?” Blair challenged, 
using his peripheral vision to calculate how far they were from leaving the 
trees and being out into the open where Jim – Blair had no doubt – was waiting.

“That military moron will never figure out who murdered Fincham,” the MP 
dismissed Rick Valenti contemptuously, “and besides, there won’t be a mark on 
you…I’ve been inside your mind you meddlesome creature, and you’re afraid of 
water…” a gleeful grin swallowed up the MP’s face, “…so in a minute when I 
take over your pathetic little brain you’re going to walk straight into Lorelei 
Lake. How sad…”

Blair let him try, giving a broad smile of his own as the MP’s attempted mental 
invasion slid off his own psychic shields as if the MP had thrown a softball to try 
and break through a brick wall.

 “I don’t think so,” he retorted, and his tone was no longer apprehensive. “I 
think you’ve caused quite enough trouble to the innocent people of this 
community. You’re a second-rater, a rank amateur; how do you think I was 
able to expel you so easily? You couldn’t even control two teenage boys for 
longer than a few seconds at a time and you seriously think you can challenge 
me?” He was no longer just Blair, the man, nor even Blair the Guide, but the 
Shaman came out to play for the first time, too.

“Fine!” The MP hissed in rage and suddenly from the pocket of his fishing 
jacket pulled an unhappily large revolver that he pointed straight at Blair. “I’ll 
do things the old-fashioned way.”

“Yeah, like you’ve got the balls to pull the trigger!” Blair jeered, heartily 
wishing that the MP had only had a knife; why was he forever on the wrong end 
of the gun and why was it always in the grip of some nut-job who needed to be 
in Conover…Life in the Sandburg Zone could sometimes bite even him in the 
ass.

“Already got one murder under my belt, and Fincham was just a necessity…you 
I’m going to enjoy wasting,” the MP gloated.

“Actually, you’ve never murdered anybody,” Blair contradicted, needing to 
keep things going for just a few more yards; he had no doubt that Jim was 
watching and that his Sentinel could make the shot easily, but both Blair and 
the MP needed to be out in the open. That way the few tourists that Blair’s 
empathy allowed him to ‘feel’ were in close proximity could see and 
independently witness that the MP had been holding a gun and aiming it at 
Blair, instead of Jim just shooting into the trees and Blair alone able to 
‘corroborate’ his claim that the MP had been going to shoot.

“If you think I’m going to fall for that and do the ‘Oh but I did…’ thing –” the 
MP sneered.

Blair cut him off. “There’s no need, you’re hardly a criminal mastermind of 
labyrinthine plots.” He noted the flare of rage and hurried on before the MP 
could simply shoot him, “Let me take a stab at it: Edgar Fincham, blind drunk 
as usual, staggers home through the woods and probably nearly trips over you 
sacrificing a chicken or buggering a goat or trying to literally raise Hell, but 
lurches off again with no idea as to the significance of what he’s seen – if he 
saw anything in the state he was in. But you are acutely aware that if he 
mentions it in the hearing of a Shaman or a Priest or someone mystically 
knowledgeable who realises you’re an evil magician sucking the life energy 
from the extraordinary collection of gifted and talented people who live 
around here, then you’re going to be hunted down by someone with a lot more 
power than you can muster even in your most extravagant egomaniac 
fantasies.”
 
The MP snarled at the derisory words, “The drunken fool fell right over my 
altar – he ruined the ritual!”

“More likely you didn’t have the power necessary to make it work in the first 
place,” snorted Blair, but again swiftly continued, “So you broke into 
Fincham’s house knowing, courtesy of that frat prank, that Fincham was 
oblivious when sleeping off the booze and you threw him downstairs to break 
his neck in the hope it would be passed off as a drunken accident.”

The MP smirked, but did not respond, clearly determined not to incriminate 
himself.

“But here’s the rub,” Blair told him. “You see, you went in, grabbed Fincham 
and went out again. You never searched his home or went anywhere other than 
straight up the stairs to the bedroom. And when you pulled him off the bed 
with his ankles and then heaved him up under the armpits and dropped him, 
you never noticed that Edgar Fincham was already dead.”

The MP, whose finger had been curling too tightly round the trigger, paused 
and looked baffled as Blair emphasised the latter three words. “What?” he 
snapped with irritation.

“Before you got to his cabin, for reasons unknown, Edgar Fincham downed 
enough booze and pills to wipe out an entire Marine division and lay down on 
his bed. He’d left a suicide note in the bathroom. Dr Martin did the autopsy as 
a formality, and that’s when he discovered your handiwork. Edgar Fincham was 
already dead when you got there. That’s why my partner and I were brought in 
to Witt’s End by Sheriff Valenti, to solve the riddle of a man who had been 
thrown down a flight of stairs a half-hour after killing himself. Officially, 
you’re known as the ‘Murderer Presumptive’. It’s ironic, I suppose,” Blair 
goaded, “that if only you hadn’t panicked and over-reacted instead of keeping 
your head and waiting to see what, if anything, Fincham remembered, you’d 
still be free and clear. All you had to do was do nothing and you’d still be 
secret and safe and preying on the people of Witt’s End.”

The MP’s eyes widened with shock and fresh panic, and an irrational rage as his 
ego refused to accept the glaring mistakes someone of his genius was incapable 
of making. 

Pushed into rashness by the taunts of the taller, handsomer, younger man who 
possessed the power he craved and utilised it with such unconscious ease, the 
MP raised the gun as Blair, abandoning subtlety, hastily scrambled back out 
onto the waterfront and called loudly and warningly, “Jim! He’s got a gun!”

The MP screeched wordlessly in fury, the gun wavering wildly as his most hated 
affliction – imperfect eyesight, for which his egomania would not allow him to 
wear spectacles or contact lenses – made Blair turn from target to blurred 
shape after a certain distance. Driven beyond reason and caution, the MP 
surged forward out into the open, shooting once in Blair’s general direction.

Mercifully, the few passers by had stopped dead at Blair’s yell and so were 
nowhere near in range when Blair and then some guy with a gun burst out of 
the woods. Instinctively crouching down as the MP came charging after him 
Blair spotted Rick Valenti around the curve of the Lake, talking with the 
Ducharme family, and turning to sprint towards the scene as he heard the 
commotion. 

The bullet shot a clear two feet over Blair’s head to bury itself harmlessly in 
the mast of the sailboat behind him, but Jim Ellison was right where he needed 
to be, ready and waiting.

“Cascade PD! Freeze!” he barked, aiming his gun at the MP.

Still infuriated, the MP swung towards the new threat, automatically swinging 
his gun in Jim’s direction. Aware of the civilians behind him who were frozen in 
shock and alarm, Jim unhesitatingly fired the police officer’s standard one-two 
‘tap’ to the perpetrator’s heart and the man collapsed instantly to the ground.

There followed that momentary pause of instant silence, then the smell of 
cordite hit your nostrils and the frantic buzz of gasps and shrill voices sounded. 
Approaching the MP, Jim kicked the gun away from the man’s hand even 
though he knew he was dead. Blair was at his side, a comforting presence.

<It had to be done, Jim.>

<Yes, it did.>

Then Rick Valenti was arriving to take charge as inevitably the crowd began to 
gather, although unlike most places these people kept a respectful distance 
away; Jim’s hearing picked up the rapid whispers that the man was the MP and 
the slanderer/libeller who had caused so much trouble. 

The man’s ID named him as Waldo Wirth, and also produced the keys to a 
sailboat, Wylie II, berthed a few hundred yards away. Jim was aware of Blair’s 
faint twitches at the names, and wondered if the triplicate ‘W’s had some 
deeper meaning; while it was true the man’s name could have been an alias, 
Jim certainly wouldn’t have picked ‘Waldo’ as an option. As without being 
asked, the marina owner, Selby, dashed off to look at the hire records, two 
men volunteered to transport the body to Bert Martin’s house and Valenti 
promptly accepted with an unconcern that showed he knew they were Saxon 
Ware’s contingent. Jim’s supposition turned to certainty when Valenti on-the-
spot deputised two men ‘randomly’ from the crowd – who just happened to be 
Saxon Ware and his lugubrious colleague, Terry Richards.  

Fortunately Selby, or more likely his eminently organised wife, Dora, had 
excellent computer records and both came back as Jim and the others 
approached Wirth’s sailboat. Selby gave the papers to Valenti, explaining that 
Wirth had been coming every year for the past five, but Selby couldn’t ever 
remember having a conversation with him or seeing him enough to do more 
than exchange a ‘good morning’ in passing. Another murmur swept through the 
crowd and even Blair could hear people asking each other, ‘Did you ever talk to 
him?’ ‘No, I could’ve sworn I’d never met the man!’ It was becoming obvious 
that Wirth, probably by design, had been a veritable Invisible Man.

Rick Valenti harshly ordered everyone – including his four ‘deputies’ – to keep 
well back, just in case Wirth had left any ‘surprises’ on his boat. The tension 
rocketed as Valenti, gun in hand, cautiously boarded the Wylie. At the 
forefront of the crowd, sharply shrugging off hands and well-meaning attempts 
to get him to leave the scene, Kyle Valenti watched his father unblinkingly as 
the man stepped aboard; Lance Ducharme, Sadie Bettencourt, Brandon and 
Kelly Winterbourne and several other kids also politely but firmly squeezed in 
to surround Kyle and he did not reject their overtures. 

<Jim?> Blair asked anxiously.

<I can’t smell anything, but that doesn’t mean anything – too many watches 
and clocks around to disguise a timer, too much resin and paint and pungent 
lake water to filter out!> Jim mentally snarled the words, not at Sandburg, but 
in frustration at his inability to filter as effectively; unfortunately it was 
impossible to come up with any explanation other than the truth that would 
clear everyone out of the way sufficiently for Jim to concentrate.

Blair was aware of the thrumming tension in himself, Jim, and Saxon Ware and 
his companion as Rick Valenti went below deck; so Ware wasn’t entirely an 
emotionally crippled iceman after all. 

A minute later, Valenti reappeared, declaring, “Clear!” and a mass sigh rolled 
around as everyone deflated with relief. 

Letting the other three board the boat ahead of him, Jim turned and called 
out, “Okay, who’s the Geek-in-Chief around here? You know what I 
mean…streaming live from mom’s basement?”

“That would be me…and it’s the poolhouse, but same diff,” called an amused 
and non-offended voice from the gathering. A tall, well-dressed Valer kid 
stepped forward; stereotypically he wore glasses and had a sissy haircut but his 
face was strong and his build solid. Give him a few years to get contacts, a tan 
and lose the silly James Spader floppy hair for something shorter-cropped and 
fashionably ‘Boy Band’ spikier/gelled and the girls would be licking their lips 
wolfishly.

“Okay,” declared Jim, tossing the kid the driver’s licence Valenti had handed 
off to him. “Can you Google us everything you can on Waldo Wirth?”

“No problem,” the kid assured him confidently but with calm maturity.

“Kyle, Lance, please go lend…”

“Varian Sutherland.”

“…a hand. Oh, and boys,” Jim paused significantly, “I am an officer of the law, 
so whatever you find out, I still need plausible deniability; so first you tell 
Sandburg, and let him tell me.”

Giving wicked grins at this official sanction to hack into whatever needed to be 
hacked into to get the answers, the three youths disappeared towards St. Mary 
Vale at a zesty speed. 

On the boat everyone bar Blair was looking at him with raised eyebrows and 
dubious expressions. “Was that all together wise?” Saxon Ware echoed the 
sentiments of a considerable proportion of onlookers.

Jim shrugged, “Half the kids were hitting Yahoo! within a minute of us finding 
his ID anyway thanks to 3G cell phones; we might as well let the young bucks 
do the heavy lifting.”

It didn’t take long to search Wirth’s boat and come up trumps; there was a 
steady buzz amongst the crowd as various unpleasant things like inverted 
crosses, voodoo dolls and other accoutrements of ‘black’ magic were brought 
out, including an almost clichéd ceremonial ‘Satanist’ robe that looked as if it 
had been copied straight out of some hysterical 1980s teenage slasher movie. 

Abruptly Rick Valenti slammed the lid down on a small wooden box he’d 
brought up from below deck and rose from his crouch with a thunderous 
expression. “Buddy!” he called to the owner of the bar/diner usually 
frequented by the huntsmen-fishermen crowd. “Is that coal-fired heating 
furnace of yours lit?”

“Yes, sir,” Buddy agreed with alacrity, coming to attention in way that 
indicated he’d been military at some point.

“Good.” Hefting the box, Rick stood up.

“What is it?” asked Blair with concern, though Jim got the impression he 
already knew and was focussing the townspeople’s attention on what was 
about to happen.

“They’re notebooks, dozens of them,” growled Valenti with obvious anger, 
“that record Wirth’s spying on us for months at a time.”

A low mutter of ire went through the crowd and people watched as Valenti, 
Jim, Blair, and Saxon Ware (with Terry Richards remaining on the Wylie II) 
marched into Buddy’s Diner where the man had opened the door to the 
furnace. Vigorously tipping out the notebooks into the furnace and throwing 
the wooden box in after them, Valenti took a poker and rapidly stoked the 
blaze until all the paper and most of the box itself was consumed by flames, 
before Buddy shut the door, his expression like most of the onlooker townsfolk 
one of angry satisfaction. Saxon Ware looked faintly dyspeptic but made no 
comment, and strangely enough nobody pointed out the blatant destruction of 
evidence.

At that point, it being past lunchtime now, Blair volunteered himself and Jim 
to go to Bert Martin’s for an update.

As soon as they were out of sight of Witt’s End, heading up the road, Jim 
indulged his curiosity and asked Blair, “Do the ‘W’ names have any 
significance?”

“Not the letter no,” Blair replied, “and though Waldo is geeky enough to be 
genuine, I suspect that Wirth is an alias. Wylie was certainly picked 
deliberately.”

“Wylie?” 

“It’s a play on words,” Blair suggested. “Waldo is a Germanic name, meaning 
“the ruler, the king”; Wirth the given name with an ‘i’ not an ‘o’ like Worth 
the surname is also Germanic, and comes from Wirt, meaning ‘the master’.”

“Waldo Wirth – ‘the king, the master’,” Jim reiterated. “Huh, nicely 
megalomaniacal…though like you say, one of them has got to be an alias.”

“Definitely,” Blair nodded. “Today Western society is increasingly secular not 
spiritual, so babies are given names that sound cute, like Kyiesha and Tiffany 
rather than because of any deeper meaning. But at one time, names had 
profound significance.”

“Like American Indian tribes that used to have child names and man names,” 
suggested Jim. “Once the boy had proven himself in a battle, Loud Voice or 
Yaps Like Dog would be rechristened Roaring Puma or Great Bear or 
something.”

“More or less,” Blair agreed. “Ware, for instance, as in Saxon, comes from a 
Scandinavian root meaning ‘far-seeing’, ‘astute’, ‘discerning’, which faintly 
implies that he is descended from at least one Alpha Sentinel somewhere in his 
paternal line.”

“‘Saxon the Ware’; the far-seeing…apt name for a Sentinel.” Jim could see the 
correlation. “What about ‘Wylie’?”

“It’s Saxon in origin. It means ‘the enchanter’ but also ‘beguiler’ or ‘deceitful 
sorcerer’. Of course there is also w-i-l-y; think about how Wirth, the MP, would 
have strung the words together in his own head when he picked them: Waldo 
Wirth and Wylie II.”

“‘King, Master, and wily too.’” Jim sounded it out. “Didn’t he just love 
himself?”

Blair knew the question was rhetorical, and by that point they had reached 
Bert Martin’s home. Having a body that was obviously dead for obvious reasons 
(bullets to the heart), Bert had used his initiative and tested some fragments of 
waxy residue from Wirth’s clothing against the small misshapen lump Blair and 
Jim had recovered from Edgar Fincham’s and though it would need an official 
crime lab to formally confirm, preliminary tests indicated the two samples 
matched. Bert had also retrieved tiny fabric fibres from some of the waxy 
residue on Wirth’s pants that he was certain would match up to Edgar 
Fincham’s carpet and/or bedclothes, as apparently personal grooming wasn’t 
Wirth’s strong point and he had made no attempt to rid himself of any 
‘evidence’ of being in Fincham’s cabin.

Accepting the report from Judith, Jim and Blair headed back, but Blair 
requested they swing by Edgar Fincham’s cabin, explaining that he wanted to 
try his new ‘Shaman-sense’ on the place, in view of the one loose end they still 
had – why had Edgar Fincham killed himself in the first place?

Entering, they found it undisturbed and dusty, looking the same as when they’d 
been before. Jim stood back and let Blair just look around without interruption 
for a few minutes, and gradually Blair meandered over to the writing desk that 
was still piled high with old copies of Radical Radicals and loose leaf sheets 
with yet more never-to-be-published stanzas of his seemingly endless Ode to 
Blue.

Blair ghosted his fingers over them lightly. “Hmm…” 

Picking up the papers he actually looked at each page. Jim was happy to let 
him; perfect Sentinel recall meant if he started casting an eye he was going to 
be able to recite the crap verbatim just by thinking about it for the rest of his 
life. He so did not want Ode to Blue taking up any space in his brain, thank you 
very much.

“It’s here.” Blair pulled out a sheet of paper covered in spidery writing – i.e., 
identical to all the others. “Read it…”

Jim took the sheet that had been anonymous amongst the others, and 
superficially identical, and slowly read it through.

* * *

With Blair standing beside him, Jim watched his father and brother step down 
from William Ellison’s small Cessna. Unlike a lot of rich men who took a few 
flying lessons and though they were the new Biggles, William Ellison left the 
controls strictly in the hands of his highly paid, long-experienced personal 
pilot.

Now Jim was glad that Blair had encouraged him to involve Dad and Stevie 
even if only in their assignment’s ‘sub-plot’ as it were. Both William and 
Stephen Ellison had been transformed from the grim, careworn men they had 
been when Jim had reluctantly encountered them at Cascade’s racetrack and 
the hunt for Bud Haidasch’s killer. William particularly looked a good ten years 
younger than that frail, remorseful old man who had been far from the 
belligerent ogre of Jim’s memory. With some subtle help from Blair, Jim was 
rebuilding his relationship with his father and brother but equally as 
importantly, Blair was deftly helping them to build a real relationship with 
each other as individuals now that Stevie was at long last casting off the 
burden of being the ‘spare’ rather than a son in his own right.

Jim greeted his family and Blair hung back just slightly; he was on excellent 
terms with both William and Stephen Ellison who had shrewdly (if a bit 
hesitantly in William’s case) looked beyond the long hair, earring and dubious 
fashion sense, but he was aware of the nebulous jealousy, subconscious though 
it was, that they would never achieve the total accord with Jim that Blair had – 
and apparently so effortlessly at that. If only they knew…Blair kept his face 
straight.

As they strolled down to Witt’s End to meet the Bettencourts, Jim brought Bill 
and Stevie Ellison up-to-date, explaining about the Murderer Presumptive, 
a.k.a. Waldo Wirth…

The two men had come back to Witt’s End from Edgar Fincham’s cabin, 
intending to privately make Rick Valenti aware of the reasons for Edgar 
Fincham’s suicide. Upon arriving, they found Bert and Judith Martin had arrived 
and were explaining the wax match to the interested parties, and then the 
terrible trio of Lance Ducharme, Kyle Valenti and Varian Sutherland had arrived 
back with bright eyes and a veritable aura of eagerness. 

The boys were accompanied by several Valers including a perfectly coiffed 
woman and a big, bullish-faced man, both of whom Jim recognised as 
Undersecretary of State Elaine Stockwell and Virgil Tobias Sutherland III, CEO 
of one of the U.S. Military’s biggest defence-contracted companies, a.k.a. Mr & 
Mrs Sutherland, or as Varian presumably knew them, mom and dad. A long-time 
business rival/associate of William Ellison, Virgil Three was famous for his often 
declared decree of, ‘no kid of mine is going to sit on their ass and count their 
bank balance for a living’; his offspring received a miniscule stipend and 
worked for a living like the hoi polloi. They had been in the news recently 
because the eldest, Virgil Tobias Sutherland IV, was a Top Gun Navy pilot and 
‘best friend’ of Presidential first son Dominic Monteith – best friend enough, at 
any rate, to insert himself into the line of fire during a botched mugging when 
some guy pulled a gun on them outside a bar on shore leave and end up with a 
bullet breaking his arm for his trouble. 

Remembering Jim’s warning, the boys had given their findings to Blair who had 
flicked through the papers and then smiled slightly at the anticipatory faces 
around them. It was certainly an unconventional way to end a police 
investigation, but Jim didn’t see any reason to insist on protocols and 
procedures – a place like Witt’s End made them seem even more ridiculous and 
pointless than the bureaucracy did usually.

Perceptively deciding that ‘Waldo’ was genuine, the trio had promptly come up 
trumps. ‘Waldo Wirth’ was really Simon Waldo Wallbanks, aged 45, bachelor, 
born 1st September 1959 in Detroit, Michigan, graduated High School in Chicago 
and achieved an adequate if unspectacular Degree in Chemistry in Seattle from 
the age of 27 he had lived and worked in Spokane, as a laboratory technician 
for the international chemicals company, ICI. Blair had read out some of the 
man’s staff evaluations, ignoring the faint winces on the faces of Jim and Rick 
Valenti as to how that information had been obtained (few international 
companies’ ‘personnel’ databases were quite as secure as they fondly 
imagined). 

‘Punctilious’ had summarised the general theme. Wallbanks was routinely 
described by his superiors as ‘stiffly polite’, ‘totally unsociable’ and ‘lacking 
any social graces’. His work was done to an ‘adequate standard’, but he 
absolutely refused to mix with workmates and had no interaction with his 
employers outside of office hours. Though he never had any days off work ill he 
had on occasion suffered minor injuries because of his absolute refusal to 
acknowledge a gradually worsening eyesight problem. One particularly astute 
manager had labelled him ‘discreetly egotistical’ stating that he always 
projected an image of having far, far more important things to do and gave the 
impression that his workmates were a barely tolerable irritant of 
inconsequence. His badly hidden attitude that even senior executives were 
beneath him intellectually had gone a long way to ensuring he had never been 
promoted. But that was it; there was nothing to suggest that Wallbanks was the 
out-and-out psycho that those dark magic artefacts and his attempts to destroy 
Witt’s End and St. Mary Vale suggested.  

“But what happened?” Lance Ducharme had been unable to keep from asking 
plaintively, speaking for everyone present. “What turned Walter Mitty into 
Sideshow Bob?”

“I believe his parents,” Blair had stated.

Jim had waited in anticipation, aware that Blair’s enthusiastic anthropologist’s 
brain had been grabbing each titbit of information on Wallbanks and arranging 
it and rearranging it at unimaginable speeds while everyone else was still 
scratching their heads. 

“It’s only conjecture,” Blair had disclaimed, “and now we’ll never prove it, 
but…”

William Jefferson Wallbanks had married Olive Minnie Waldo on 14th February 
1935, in Cleveland, Ohio, she being 22 and him 27-years-old. In the summer of 
1936 they had a son, Jefferson Waldo Wallbanks, but then ten years had passed 
until the birth of a daughter, Minnie Waldo Wallbanks, in 1946. 

“The Wallbanks were decent, devout people, industrious and honest and 
completely ordinary,” Blair opined as he gestured with the papers the boys had 
printed off, “but in 1950 they suffered a tragedy when Minnie contracted…” he 
checked “…Measles. For most kids, Measles is an excuse to have a week off 
school, eat ice cream and Jello and get away with the sort of behaviour that if 
you were well would see your butt blistered and you grounded for a week.” He 
paused as several suppressed nostalgic smiles, “But for some children… 

Bert Martin had interjected at that point, “For some children, a rare, 
heartbreaking few, Measles is as deadly as Ebola.”

Blair had nodded. “Yes, it says…here…Minnie Waldo Wallbanks died aged 4 
years and 3 months in 1950 from Measles. Her death notice in the Chicago Sun-
Times mentions she was the only fatality from a class of 22 children affected.” 

Blair cleared his throat as he glanced at the next printed out copy of a 
newspaper, this one showing what Jim saw to be a black-and-white image of a 
young man in Army uniform with a familiar pointy chin and sharp blade of a 
nose. That young man was smiling broadly and Jim got a bad feeling.

“The Wallbanks and their son must have been devastated. Then in 1953, 
Jefferson Wallbanks was listed as MIA and then confirmed killed in action in the 
Korean War.”

A murmur of sympathy went around the crowd. 

“And that’s when the rot set in?” Saxon Ware, alone looking unmoved by the 
poignancy, had coolly enquired from where he was standing, subtly in the 
background, close enough to monitor everything going off but far enough from 
the centre of attention to be not that noticeable. 

Not taking umbrage at Ware’s tone, Blair had nodded, his expression regretful. 
“In 1959, Olive Wallbanks took ill, but instead of more misery, a miracle – a 
healthy baby boy to a mother who had given up at 46 and a 51-year-old father. 
Simon Waldo Wallbanks.”

“So what made him go Dark Side? As an only child, I’m starting to get a 
complex.” Kyle Valenti had wryly enquired.

“He was probably spoiled, right Chief?” Jim had helped out.

“In essence, yes,” Blair agreed. “Though not spoiled in the usual way we think 
of the term. I doubt his parents pandered to him so blatantly but…I bet that he 
was discouraged from active, sporty pursuits because they might attract him to 
serve in the military. I doubt he ever had to do any chores for his allowance, or 
wanted for anything in his life. To his parents he was infinitely precious; they 
thought he was wonderful and didn’t hide the fact…which was all very well 
until they weren’t there any more.”

“When did they die?” Rick, having accepted the printouts from Blair after the 
bit of sophistry, looked through them. 

“They died within weeks of each other - Olive Wallbanks died at 73 in 
December 1986 of a stroke, William died in February 1984 of a heart attack at 
79.” Blair recited, “But what struck me as I read through was that after 
obtaining his Degree at 24, Simon still lived with his parents in Seattle. He 
didn’t get a job, he just drifted.”

“And how is that significant?” Virgil Sutherland had demanded, following 
proceedings with keen interest.

Blair shrugged. “Like I said, I bet Simon Wallbanks never had to do any chores 
to earn his allowance, but the downside of that is a persistent belief even after 
the age of 21 that the cleaning fairy magically taps the laundry hamper with 
her wand and hey, presto! there are your meadow-fresh shirts.”

Titters had gone round the audience, some more sheepish than others.

Blair continued, “The further downside is that I bet Mr & Mrs Wallbanks were 
still organising Simon’s entire life for him at 27 as they had been at 7. The 
whole point of parenthood is to educate, guide and prepare the child to 
function autonomously and independently as an adult, and unfortunately the 
Wallbanks didn’t do that.”

“But you can understand why,” Judith Martin, who had lost a child of her own, 
pointed out.

“Yes ma’am,” Blair responded respectfully. “But with all due respect, that was 
a large contributing factor to how Simon Wallbanks ended his life at 45 as the 
Murderer Presumptive, a slanderer and an evil sorcerer. There’s a big 
difference between raising your child to be a socially and sexually confident 
adult, to help them make the best of what of what they’ve got, and 
indoctrinating them with wholly unrealistic ideas that they have the IQ of 
Stephen Hawking, the looks of George Clooney, the body of Michelangelo’s 
David, the magnetism of Henry Fonda, the machismo of a young Marlon Brando 
and the sensitivity of Alan Alda all rolled into one glorious package.”

There had been several grins at this extravagant description but Blair’s tone 
had been firm not fun as he went on, “Parents who spoil a child are just as 
guilty of child abuse as the sicko who beats his son bloody with a belt every 
night or the sicker sicko who goes into his little girl’s bedroom to play their 
‘special game’. The adult version is utterly incapable of functioning as a useful 
member of society or in society.”

“And you think that’s what happened to Simon Wallbanks,” Virgil Sutherland 
again put in, his eyes assessing Sandburg in a pugnacious way that made Jim 
bristle; if Sutherland thought he was going to bull his way in here and take 
charge…but Rick Valenti and Saxon Ware were relaxed and Jim doubted 
whether either of them would take kindly to Sutherland attempting to throw 
his or his wife’s political/economic weight around. 

Blair nodded. “It’s supposition, I’ll admit, but the timeline fits. Simon is 
drifting along with mom and pop then loses both parents more or less at the 
same time. I have no doubt he loved his parents, but…he was also suddenly 
free. His parents were his biggest support but his greatest constraint. So there 
he was, young, single, financially comfortable and unfortunately for him 
exposed to a world that was no longer filtered through his parents’ 
extraordinary over-estimation of his genius. I’d say he took the lab tech job 
after his parents’ death as a temporary measure and just sat back and waited 
for his employers to realise his towering genius and promote him to Head of the 
Biochemistry Division.”

“But it never happened,” Rick Valenti commented.

“No. Wallbanks floundered helplessly because he had been brought up to 
believe his brilliance was obvious. He got a job and expected instant and heady 
promotion. He smiled at a woman and expected her to jump up and do all the 
running because his wonderfulness had indicated an interest in her and of 
course it never happened, and so and so on. He never took any days ill because 
illness was only something that affected inferiors; he refused to correct his 
eyesight because someone as perfect as him had no defect. Then he got mixed 
up with a few of the more fringe religious elements and discovered he finally 
had a bit of talent. He was finally a big fish in a pond that was a lot smaller 
than he persuaded himself to believe.”

“Where did Witt’s End come in?” Rick Valenti cut to the chase.

“He probably got lost because he couldn’t read road signs clearly and ended up 
here five years ago,” Blair surmised. “Then he realised that Witt’s End was a 
town full of bright, healthy, creative people. Bluntly, he wanted to suck the 
psychic energy right out of the town like the guy who illegally hooks his trailer 
up to the power lines. So he kept coming back and injecting a little more 
poison each time until he built it to critical mass and then...”

Zinnia Seddon was shaking her head. “But how could he be the libeller?”

Blair actually smiled. “That was easiest of all. He was like Denis Thatcher.”

“Who?” Jim had asked at that point, to spare anyone else’s blushes though he 
knew perfectly well.

“The late husband of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister; a journalist once 
asked him to describe how he dealt with being the husband of the Prime 
Minister and his reply was that he was ‘always present but never there’.” Blair 
explained. “Simon Wallbanks used the same M.O. He came every year and 
became invisible in plain sight. When you lead a busy, active life, busy bodying 
into your neighbours’ affairs is usually last thing on your mind-”.

“But that is all he did, day in and day out,” Zinnia perceptively realised.

“Exactly.” Blair gestured around him generally towards Buddy’s Diner, the 
Lakeview and other eateries. “All day, every day, pretending to read a paper 
here, sipping endless cups of coffee in a quiet corner there. For a single day 
it’s a pointless exercise, but come back day after day after day and gradually 
snippets become sentences become paragraphs become stories. A glimpse here 
becomes a large window over time. He wrote down everything he heard and 
over the months gleaned the full picture from a hundred separate 
conversations eavesdropped on in a dozen different places, and what few gaps 
there were he was often able to make an educated guess at…”

And that had been that. Once it was explained, it had been obvious, and 
people had dispersed to their homes, earnestly discussing the day’s 
dramatically events. Blair had also been satisfied; as he had pointed out to Jim 
telepathically, take note of how the Valers and Enders were mingling again 
freely. Blair and Jim had returned to the hotel and called Simon, informing him 
of developments and that they intended to return home the following night 
after William and Stephen Ellison’s visit and they had then repaired to the 
Lakeview where they had been treated to a slap-up meal on the house that had 
ended up with them waddling rather than walking back to the hotel.

Bill and Stevie listened with obvious fascination to Jim’s recounting of events 
as they reached the waterfront. Julia Bettencourt’s family were making this a 
day trip rather than a stopover visit so as long as the deception could be pulled 
off for a few hours, all would be well, and they weren’t arriving till lunchtime 
which gave breathing space for any scene setting necessary. 

“William!”

The four men stopped at this ringing exclamation uttered by a patrician, well-
preserved woman of middle-age. Handsome, with an autocratic bearing and 
tastefully but expensively attired, she looked straight at William Ellison.

“Isabelle?” William Ellison’s eyes widened at the sight of his long-estranged 
half-sister. “Good Lord, is that you?”

“It most certainly is. I’m here visiting Andrew and Diandra and the children. 
Don’t let the height fool you, the taller boy is the younger one, Kelly, Brandon 
is the shorter one.” Thus gracefully clueing William in as who were his 
nephew’s wife and children, Isabelle Ellison-Winterbourne continued, “Andrew 
is the Mayor of St. Mary Vale, he’s been telling me all about how James 
captured some dreadful murderer.”

“Yes,” William agreed with sincere pride in his tone.

Before any awkwardness could develop, Andrew Winterbourne moved to take 
centre stage, surrounded by local dignitaries from both St. Mary Vale and 
Witt’s End. Rick Valenti was on the sidelines, and Saxon Ware lurked in the 
background keeping an eye on proceedings.

“On behalf of both towns, we just want to say thank you for what you’ve 
done,” Andrew said with polish but also sincerity. “You’re welcome any time 
here.”

Blair and Jim exchanged wry grins, both acutely aware of Joe and the temple 
hidden in the woods. “That’s good,” Jim smiled, “because we intend to be 
back…a lot.”

There were smiles all around at this, but then Andrew Winterbourne looked 
grave, “Is there any chance you could stay on a few days?”

“I’m afraid not,” Jim vetoed. “It’s my friend’s wedding…”

“We understand,” Andrew assured him. “It’s just that we were talking this 
morning and we rather felt that in all the drama poor old Edgar got shoved out 
of the limelight. After all, it was his supposed murder that started all this off. I 
was hoping you might be able to discover why he killed himself?”

Blair and Jim exchanged glances, aware that their private word with Rick 
Valenti was going to have to be jettisoned.

That worthy, seeing their exchange of looks, declared: “You know why Edgar 
committed suicide.”

Jim pulled the paper out of his jacket’s inner pocket and handed it to Valenti, 
everyone’s eyes on it, while Blair explained, “We found that letter last night 
amongst some…other papers.”

“Why did he do it, Sheriff?” someone, Jim thought it was Buddy, the diner 
owner, asked. 

It was Blair who answered. “He did it to protect Witt’s End.”

Alarmed glances were passed between various people at this implication of yet 
another threat to their community.

“How so?” Andrew Winterbourne asked, torn between looking at Blair and 
peeking at the paper the Sheriff had.

Blair pursed his lips. “Edgar was one of the original Witt’s Enders, wasn’t he? 
He came with Nathaniel de Witt?”

“Yep,” Rick Valenti concurred. “He was here from the start.”

Blair indicated the paper, filled with spidery writing. “Twenty years ago, 
during a drunken binge in Seattle, Edgar Fincham sold his cabin and the 
surrounding land in Witt’s End to a property developer, if you can call 
scribbling on a paper napkin a sale. When he sobered up, he was horrified 
because Witt’s End was a genuine sanctuary for him. Eight years ago when they 
started to build St Mary Vale, Fincham fell into a remorse-filled funk, a full on 
guilt-fest. Daily he imagined the bulldozers trundling into Witt’s End with the 
property developer on a footplate gleefully waving the incriminating evidence 
around like a flag and beefcake goons tossing people out of their homes to 
build executive condos.”

“Why didn’t he say anything?” lamented Zinnia Seddon, having paused on her 
way to work. “Illegible scrawl on a paper napkin during a drinking binge – I 
could have tied up any development company in court for years.” 

Deliberately ignoring the woman’s unconscious slip into the personal pronoun 
rather than the collective ‘we’, Blair agreed with her. “It would have saved 
Fincham a great deal of unnecessary breast beating and personal anxiety. Last 
night we did a Google search and found out what Fincham didn’t know – that 
the developer he dreaded had gone bankrupt precisely because he was a bad 
businessman who made silly decisions like buying land unseen from drunks in 
bars at inflated prices.”

“So he killed himself out of guilt?” William Ellison clarified.

“No, sir,” Blair contradicted politely. “His suicide was his mea culpa. His 
doctor told him he had heart disease and if he gave up booze, smoking, burgers 
and women he’d live another five years – with luck. The poet, Burns, asked God 
to let us see ourselves as others see us; unfortunately, most people don’t. 
Edgar Fincham certainly didn’t. We all know that Fincham was a mediocre poet 
at best, but when he looked in the mirror Edgar Fincham really believed he was 
the reincarnation of Keats, a misunderstood genius like Coleridge. In keeping 
with poetic tradition, his death had to be extraordinary and eccentric - so he 
nobly ended his own life and bequeathed all his copyrights to Witt’s End.”

There was a stunned silence as everyone looked at everyone else. “Why?” Rick 
Valenti asked for them all finally.

Blair sighed, “Because Edgar Fincham knew that few of the great artists were 
ever appreciated during their own lifetimes. Picasso couldn’t give his paintings 
away when he was above ground; Elvis has earned far more money since he 
died than he ever managed alive. Edgar Fincham really did believe that within 
weeks of his death, you would be inundated with people waving huge cheques 
for the copyright to his poetry; money you could use to beat the bulldozers.”

Nobody said anything – the idea that anyone would pay for Edgar’s poems was 
ludicrous, and yet mockery was impossible in the face of the fact that the man 
had been sincerely trying to protect the community he cared about.

Taking advantage of their stunned ‘you can’t be serious’ looks, Blair finished, 
“By pure chance, Edgar Fincham happened to witness one of Simon Wallbanks’ 
rituals as he staggered home after a night on the booze. Fincham just chalked 
Wallbanks up to another weird Witt’s Ender, but Wallbanks knew that if 
Fincham was allowed to describe what he’d seen, any shaman worth the name 
would instantly recognise a Dark Forbidden Ritual when he heard it, and know 
that Wallbanks was using Witt’s End as a hideout, and to feed off the power of 
the inhabitants. Before you could blink you’d have half a dozen Light-bearers 
here to kick bad guy ass. So Wallbanks “murdered” Fincham.”

“Incredible,” Andrew Winterbourne muttered. “I don’t know what to think.”

“You might think about putting up a plaque or even a statue for Edgar,” Blair 
suggested somewhat tartly, making them blink sheepishly. “Remember, the 
irony is that if Edgar Fincham had not committed suicide, regardless of it being 
due to erroneous delusions of grandeur, Simon Wallbanks would probably have 
gotten clean away with his actual murder and gone on like a fat spider in the 
middle of a web, generating emotional poison and sucking greedily on the 
negative fallout between St. Mary Vale and Witt’s End. It might not have been 
in the manner he intended, but Edgar Fincham killed himself to save Witt’s End 
- and that is exactly what he did.” 

* * *

“...Hmph…just as long as your new best friend ‘Joe’ doesn’t expect me to tag 
along on any of these trips,” Simon growled, thrusting the unlit cigar clenched 
between his lips upward aggressively. “I’m happy! And I’ll leave it to you two 
to work out you’re going get around writing your reports without mentioning 
evil sorcerers, ancient temples and secret black ops bases in the woods.”

“Why thank you, Simon,” Jim retorted. “You’re such a support to us.”

“Damn straight,” Simon declared, but he was grinning.

Jim grinned back at their friend, knowing Simon would give as much assistance 
as he could as and when they needed to return to Witt’s End, even though he 
didn’t ‘want to know’ the minutiae. 

Blair and Jim had gone to say their goodbyes to Rick Valenti as Bill and Stevie 
conversed with Isabelle and the others, imbued with the pleasure of a job well 
done as they saw the harmony restored. Of course, the Valers were elegantly 
amused about the whole ‘evil arts’ commentary and thought their unworldly 
neighbours’ naïveté was ‘sweet’, whilst the Enders accepted the presence of a 
mystical evil entity amongst them with perfect equanimity and wouldn’t have 
dreamed of bothering their neighbours with things that were beyond their 
mentally-chained capitalistic comprehension. Both sides were therefore happy 
and happy with each other. 

Julia Bettencourt’s family had arrived just as Blair and Jim were admitting that 
they would be returning – something that Rick Valenti commented with a grin 
was par for the course for practically everyone who had ever come to Witt’s 
End. 

William Ellison had promptly whisked the pertinent people all off to St. Mary 
Vale’s Golf Club and the day was an unqualified success, with Julia’s family 
swanning off unaware of the superlative snow job that had been pulled on 
them. Julia Bettencourt had almost been ready to weep with gratitude at 
William Ellison’s feet; as Jim and Blair prepared to finally drive away, William 
had stated that he and Stevie were staying a few more days at Isabelle’s 
invitation. Jim was surprised and pleased to see his father reaching out to his 
estranged half-sister, but was aware that there was more to it than that. 
Throughout the day he had seen his father casting looks of pensive concern and 
speculative thoughtfulness at both Julia and Tad Bettencourt’s children and 
Cousin Andrew’s family. 

Jim had left it alone, sure that his dad would come and talk to him about 
whatever was on his mind eventually. He and Blair had arrived back in Cascade 
late at night and been met by an ecstatic Muttley and a more regal Dastardly at 
the loft, along with a grinning Daryl who had watched them being ‘mugged’ by 
their pets. Due to the late hour, Daryl had spent the night in Blair’s guest 
bedroom and the trio had had breakfast out before Blair and Jim came into 
Cascade Central. 

“Well, now you’re back and ready to work,” Simon commented, “I need to talk 
to you Sandburg –”

“It’s okay, Simon; I’m going to accept the consultant position.”

The cigar went down and Simon glared at Jim, “Ellison…”

“I didn’t tell him,” Jim denied. “He figured it out on his own – he is the one 
with the triple figure IQ, remember?”

Blair chuckled at Simon’s snort. “It wasn’t a quantum leap, Simon. Joel finding 
that ‘police volunteer’ loophole was a godsend but we knew it was only a 
stopgap, especially now that Parker Dackholm’s made the scene. Speaking of 
whom, any luck in-”

“I haven’t managed to offload him yet,” Simon confessed.

“Right… and even without him, your wedding would have been the crunch. 
Between the Mayor and councillors and the great-and-good every time you 
turned around, ‘who was that hippie?’ would be the question du jour and we’d 
be rumbled,” Blair pointed out. “I had the discussion with Dr McBirnie before I 
even started lecturing at Cascade Community College and she’s even been 
gently suggesting that I should devote all my time to my work with the PD for a 
while now.”

“Are you okay with that?” Simon asked with genuine concern unmasked by his 
usual gruffness, aware of how much Sandburg loved teaching and perhaps more 
importantly how good he was at it.

But Blair gave him – and to some extent Jim – a broad, genuine smile. “Yes, I 
am. Besides, after seven years I think I deserve my own, proper I.D.”

“I can’t argue with that,” Simon conceded, “which is why,” he pulled out a 
wad of official-looking documentation and held it out over the desk to Blair, “I 
expect you to have those completed, signed and handed in to admin by lunch-
time today. At which point you will give them to Rhonda who will ensure that 
they are fast-tracked so that by Thursday this week you will be an official, on-
the-payroll –”

“Simon, wait, please.” Blair held up a hand and closed his eyes with a 
histrionic expression of bliss, “Let me just savour those three little words…on 
the payroll…”

Jim manfully suppressed a snigger and even Simon smiled as he had to admit 
Blair’s reaction was fully justified. Blair should have been bankrolled by the PD 
years ago by rights. 

“…ahem,” Simon gave a mock-glare just for form’s sake, “on the payroll 
working stiff with your little ID Badge and ghastly as always photograph telling 
the world you are a Criminal Anthropologist (Major Crimes Unit) Cascade PD.”

“Is there such a thing as Criminal Anthropology?” Blair queried uncertainly.

“If not, I’ve invented it,” Simon retorted with determination. “Now get the 
pair of you and fill in this paperwork; by lunchtime, gentlemen!”

Smirking like schoolboys they obediently took the paperwork and left Simon’s 
office to let him get back to work.

“No wonder Joel had that grin on his face when he said there was no rush till 
after one,” Blair hefted the documents. “There’s half a rain forest here.”

“Focus on your ‘own little ID badge’ Chief,” Jim encouraged cheerfully. 
“Besides you need to be official in time for the weddings on Saturday. We can’t 
blame Joel for wanting everything on solid ground, especially now he’s moving 
up a level.”

Blair nodded his agreement. When they had come to the PD that morning they 
had not gone straight to Simon but to see Joel Taggart. They had asked if he 
were willing, as the MCU’s Captain now, to take on more of the ‘den mother’ 
role that Simon had used to fulfil. Simon remained their close friend, but as 
Chief of Police he was now separated from them by a level of bureaucracy and 
more pertinently, Jim and Blair felt he deserved a reward for seven years of 
support and trust often under difficult circumstances. 

Whilst Joan Kendala had been far from blameless in the disintegration of her 
and Simon’s marriage, as Jim pointed out to Joel, Simon had started the rot by 
developing into a workaholic whose family came second to his career. Strange 
as it sounded, had not Kincaid and his bigoted lunatics besieged the PD and 
endangered Daryl, the chances were that today Daryl and his father would be 
as estranged as so many families were nowadays in an increasingly secular and 
materialistic Western world.

“‘…Leonie’s a great woman, and Simon deserves the Chief’s job totally,” Blair 
had finished, “but he can be too conscientious for his own good, and 
unfortunately he made his way during the days when women and non-whites 
had to even more blatantly work twice as hard to be considered half as good. 
The last thing me and Jim want is for his second marriage to go south and for 
him to stall his own career progression for another seven years because of 
getting swallowed up by the ‘Sentinelverse’.’”

But Joel had readily agreed; as he himself pointed out, as Captain of MCU, he 
needed to be more involved with Jim and Blair’s daily workload, and as a long-
married grandfather, he did not have the personal demands of a teenage son, 
teenage stepdaughter and a new wife on his time.

“We’d best – hey, H!” Blair broke off and smiled as Detective Henri Brown 
came around the corner with a thick wallet file in his hands.

“Hey, the vacationers return!” H., as garishly dressed as ever, broke into a 
broad grin. “You’ve survived being at your Witt’s End?”

“Oooh, painful, H,” Jim shook his head. “Anything critical happened since 
we’ve been gone?”

Henri Brown hadn’t been a two-time ‘Cop of the Year’ winner without a) 
becoming very perceptive and b) knowing when to keep schtum. Aware that 
Jim would not be exuding this general relaxed bonhomie if Simon had told him 
about the FBI Field Office next-door deal, H grinned and lied like a rug. “Nah, 
just the usual scum of the earth. Once you’ve done, if Joel okay’s it, you could 
give us a hand with the Adewale case?” he hefted the file.  

“Sure,” Jim agreed.

“Well I’m taking this down to Rafe now, so I’ll catch you in the bullpen -”

“We’ll take it,” Blair offered cheerfully not needing to use his telempathic 
abilities to know that Jim had just remembered what Blair had revealed about 
Rafe’s attitude to Henri and Rhonda’s wedding. They weren’t going to look this 
gift horse of getting Rafe alone in the mouth.

Henri happily handed over the file and hurried off back towards the bullpen as 
if afraid they’d suddenly change their minds, and the two went to the Record 
Room which was conveniently empty bar Rafe at the back, looking through a 
filing cabinet with an expression of distaste and much futile brushing at his 
elegantly tailored silver-grey suit; under any other circumstances, they would 
have found it amusing.

Rafe smiled, “Hey guys, what’s up?”

“That’s what we want to know,” Jim replied bluntly, not in any mood for 
gradual build up. “What is your problem with Henri marrying Rhonda?”

“What?” Rafe’s jaw dropped and he looked from one to the other in 
astonishment.

“Have you sleepwalked through the last seven years?” Blair chimed in 
rhetorically. “Sentinel and Guide are in the house. We know you don’t want to 
be Henri’s best man, we know you’re upset over the wedding. What we don’t 
know is why. Since I refuse to believe we could make such a serious mistake as 
to befriend a bigot –”

“I’m not a racist!” Rafe blurted angrily, glaring at them. “Henri is my best 
friend and I’m delighted he’s so happy!”

“Then what is that giant burr shoved up your ass about?” Jim shot straight 
back, glancing momentarily at Blair to see if the younger man’s empathy had 
picked up the mental equivalent of what Jim’s senses had just detected. 

He could see that Blair had, but they kept their attention on Rafe, giving no 
indication that they knew there was no longer just the three of them in the 
room.

Rafe slumped wearily against the filing cabinet and rested his forehead against 
his palm. “It’s not Henri and Rhonda getting married…it’s me being the best 
man. Henri even wants me to be godfather for crying out loud…but when he 
finds out…”

“When he finds out what?” Jim pressed.

Rafe straightened up and blew out a breath, looking haggard for the first time 
ever. “I’m not American. I’m South African.”

“So?” Jim asked after a momentary pause during which he and Blair had been 
prepared for pretty much anything.

“I’m white South African, and Henri’s black.” 

“And Henri is far too wise to give a damn,” Blair snorted. “Do you really think 
he’s going to blame you for the colonial oppression of blacks on another 
continent?”

“Of course not, but there’s a lot more to it than that.” Rafe suddenly looked 
immeasurably sad. “My real name isn’t Bryn Rafe and my parents aren’t 
genteel, affluent New Englanders.”

“Why don’t you tell us about it,” Jim encouraged.

Rafe ran his hand through his hair wearily. “My real name is Raphael Byron van 
den Ri?nsbørg. I have American citizenship because my mother was American – 
she used to call herself ‘a Connecticut Yankee’. My father was an Afrikaner; I 
was born in Connecticut and I have dual American-South African citizenship but 
I grew up until I was eight in Natal, South Africa.”

“Then what happened?” Blair asked quietly.

Rafe looked down at his hands intently, a muscle beating in his jaw. “My 
parents were civil rights activists, and they were active in the anti-apartheid 
movement; they were friends of Nelson Mandela. They were very friendly with 
the Chief of Botswana, who the South African government hated because he 
was an Oxford educated statesman with a white Englishwoman wife.”

“Must have been tough,” Blair commented encouragingly.

“You can’t imagine. My dad being an Afrikaner and siding with black people 
just made him vilified amongst a lot of the white population, but there were 
also a lot of those who understood what the Boers had done to South Africa,” 
Rafe explained. “Anyway, your crack about sleepwalking is right. When I was a 
kid, I used to sleepwalk sometimes. Apparently my mom was the same. But 
when I was eight, it saved my life.”

They didn’t speak as they watched him struggle, knowing any words would 
sound trite and harsh.

“I used to sleepwalk which, in Africa…was risky. One night when I was eight, I 
woke up and found myself on the veldt in the small hours. Freaked me out and 
I hurried back home before a hungry leopard or a lion pride could make me into 
a midnight snack, but then I heard this loud, weird noise, a sort of roaring 
mingled with loud cracking sounds, and the night sky had this blood-orange 
coloured glowing patch.” Rafe paused again, and explained, “I got back to see 
our ranch house in flames. There were…bodies…out front and I saw a bunch of 
gun-toting white guys dragging my parents, my elder brother Schuyler, and my 
little sister Noo-Noo…her name was Amelia but we called her Noo-Noo, it 
means ‘grasshopper’…into trucks…they were all lolling about…like they were 
unconscious or …”

Blair laid a hand on Rafe’s arm comfortingly and after a moment Rafe managed 
to keep it together. 

“I guess they must have thought I was still inside. I ran down the hill but the 
trucks were speeding away across the veldt by the time I got there. They 
hadn’t had things their own way though,” Rafe said with a soft sort of pride, 
“not all the bodies out front were our ranch hands who’d tried to drive them 
off – some of the corpses were white guys…but our ranch manager George 
Aboueyle was dead, too.”

“How did you make it?” Jim asked gently.

“Our neighbours on the next ranch saw the flames and came to see what was 
going on. They found me shivering in the burnt out shell about an hour later 
and took me back to the ranch. They were good people; they risked their lives 
to smuggle me out of South Africa back to my maternal grandparents in 
Connecticut –”

“Smuggle?” Jim interposed.

Rafe nodded. “I found out later that the authorities were going to try and pass 
off the attack as drunken blacks from a nearby township, but I’d seen the 
attackers – I knew they were white and what’s more I could identify them. Plus 
those white bodies out front of our ranch house…? In life one of them had been 
a 17-year-old spoilt brat of a bigot who was absolutely the only son of one of 
the area’s most wealthy and rabidly racist pro-White Rule politicians. My mom 
was rated an Expert markswoman with a rifle, and George Aboueyle wasn’t far 
behind. One of them would have taken the drunken sot out without breaking a 
sweat and his father would have been foaming at the mouth when his darling 
boy got whacked either by a woman or a n- well, you know.”

“What did your grandparents do?” Blair asked.

“They changed my name, and theirs,” Rafe admitted softly. “They were 
wealthy and granddad had a successful business, but he sold it and the house 
and we moved to Maryland. Mr and Mrs Rafe and their boy Bryn, just in case 
anyone ever came looking.”

“I’m so sorry, Rafe,” Blair said sincerely. “Growing up as the illegitimate son of 
a Jewess hippie had its hair-raising moments but I never had to suffer anything 
close to witnessing my family attacked.”

Rafe shrugged. “It was a long time ago…and…well, Gramps could afford the 
therapy. It’s just…my head knows my family are murdered and buried 
somewhere out on the veldt, but…”

“…Your heart never quite gets the message,” Blair finished with soft 
melancholy.

“Yeah….there’s a part of me that will always hope for the miracle – y’know?” 
Rafe appealed. “The four of them to stroll into the bullpen one day with a 
‘hey, Raffie, whatcha been doin’ for the last twenty years?’”

“But Rafe,” Jim interjected, “why are you so upset about Henri’s wedding?”

Rafe threw up his hands agitatedly, “Because I could screw it up! Since I was 
eight I’ve always been called Bryn Rafe but my grandparents never actually 
legally changed my name. If I witness Henri’s wedding as Bryn Rafe, could I 
render it invalid by using a pseudonym? But how on earth do I explain Raphael 
Byron van den Ri?nsbørg? What if H is angry with me?”

“Damn right I’m angry!” declared a new voice, but one which Jim and Blair had 
been expecting for the past few seconds.

The trio turned and Rafe cringed as Henri Brown moved forward into the room. 
His arms were folded across his chest, one hand still clutching the form that, 
presumably, he had forgotten to put in the file and caused him to follow them 
here in the first place. His big face was scowling instead of smiling, a unique 
occurrence.

“I’m angry that you think I’d give a damn,” Henri scolded sternly. “You’re my 
partner and my friend. I don’t care whether you sign as Rafe or van whatever.”

Rafe’s expression of relief was almost comical. “I don’t want to mess up your 
wedding, H. But it’s still too painful to think about my family and everyone’s 
usually so full of questions when I have to explain my real name –”

“You won’t mess it up,” Henri rolled his eyes, “and you tell nosy parkers to 
MYOB. Now come on, let’s you and me break the back of this Adewale case 
paper-fest and send this pair of idlers back to the bullpen to do some work.”

Rafe grinned as Blair and Jim snorted derisively in unison. “Works for me!”


Epilogue…

Jim carried the two bottles of beer out onto the balcony and handed one to 
Blair. Without speaking they clinked the bottles together in toast and they both 
took sips as they watched the particularly stunning sunset, courtesy of some 
minor volcanic activity happily further down the coast of the Pacific Rim.  

“I hope their plane took off on time,” commented Blair. “Can you imagine, 
spending your wedding night in the departure lounge of Cascade Number One 
Terminal?”

“It did, and I can’t,” Jim replied. “I was talking to my dad this afternoon and 
he got that I’ve-got-a-secret look on his face. Finally Stevie and me managed to 
weasel it out of him. When Simon and Leonie got to the airport this evening, 
they would have found they’d been upgraded to Business Class. Dad said it was 
his wedding present to them.”

“Yay, Mr Ellison.” Blair grinned. 

“He didn’t forget Henri and Rhonda either. You know they were going on that 
coastal mini-cruise and stopping off to see Henri’s folks instead of somewhere 
they’d have to fly?”

“Yeah?”

“Upgraded to First Class stateroom,” Jim filled in cheerfully.

“Awesome,” Blair commented. “But I can’t say I’m sorry today is over. If our 
friends’ weddings were this nerve-wracking, I’ll have to be sedated when I go 
down the aisle. I can feel the panic attack now.”

“I wouldn’t let Megan hear that,” Jim advised teasingly, since he had, of 
course, known back when Blair and Megan’s romantic liaison had finally 
become fully sexual.

“It’s the other way around, man,” Blair admitted wryly. “I even hint around 
the ‘m’ word and her eyes glaze over. This is probably the only woman in the 
world who recoils at the sight of wedding gowns in store windows.”

“Maybe it’s because she’s Australian?” mused Jim idly.

“No, I think it’s because she’s Megan.”

“True,” Jim conceded as he thought of their contrary friend, who was often as 
incomprehensible as Blair only with an unfortunate preference for wearing pink 
fur to boot. “But I get where you’re coming from. You could’ve used me as a 
violin string until the ceremony was over without a hitch.”

Blair drank some more of his beer, nodding his head in agreement. The double 
wedding of Simon and Leonie and Henri and Rhonda had gone as smoothly as 
warm silk, but life in the Sandburg Zone had put Cascade’s Sentinel and Guide 
on tenterhooks, especially considering the number of VIPs in attendance and 
the presence of Federal parties that would severely cramp Jim’s style if 
anything went down – including Simon’s new elder stepson Kyler McKinley who 
was an FBI agent attached to some sort of special counterterrorism unit just for 
one. However, in the event, it seemed the universe had decided to cut her 
boys some slack for once. 

The wedding reception had been cheerfully decorous for the first couple of 
hours until the Mayor et al departed, along with Parker Dackholm and a few 
others neither man had been disappointed to see disappear. As Simon had 
intended, Blair had been official and carrying his new ID by Thursday lunch-
time, though everyone just carried on as normal around Blair so it remained 
nice and anonymous. After filling in his paperwork by lunch-time as instructed, 
Blair had gone to Cascade Community College to see Ellen McBirnie, one of 
those at the wedding today with her brother Dr Elijah Stoddard, but had found 
her kind and amicable and shrewdly perceptive. She did not probe but Blair got 
the impression that if he had come out and said, ‘Oh by the way I’m now a 
Shaman, too’ she wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. Both Ellen and her twin Eli 
Stoddard were far more perceptive and receptive to the fact that Western 
Science was not omniscient than many of their fellow scientists were and 
should have been.

Even when it had loosened up a little, there was no inappropriate behaviour as 
most of the police officers were due back on duty later or tomorrow. In 
agreement with Leonie, Henri and Rhonda, Simon had made the reception 
invitation open to the entire Cascade law enforcement community – not just 
the PD but the Sheriff’s Department and the assorted Federal bunches like the 
ATF and yes, FBI. (Mulrooney, who happened to be in town, had even shown up 
with an obviously hastily wrapped wedding present.) The rank-and-file cops 
were hardly used to the Chief of Police inviting them to his level of soiree and 
both Jim and Blair knew that Simon had created a great deal of goodwill by his 
consideration for the hardworking people usually forgotten by those who had 
surged ahead to greater glory. 

Simon had never mentioned anything about taking his career off at a political 
tangent but Jim was considering delicately implanting