"Well," Ortega said, under his breath. "Nice to see you again, Mister Dresden."

I swallowed and fumbled at my pocket, where I had a couple of wizard gadgets I used for self-defense. Ortega put his hand on my arm. It didn't look as if he was exerting himself, but his fingers closed on my wrist like manacles, hard enough to send flashes of pain up through my elbow and shoulder. I looked around, but everyone was staring at the malfunctioning camera.

"Relax," Ortega said, his accent thick and vaguely Latinate. "I'm not going to kill you on television, wizard. I'm here to talk to you."

"Get off me," I said. My voice was thin, shaky. Goddamned stage fright.

He released me, and I jerked my arm away. The crew rolled the smoking camera back, and a director type with a set of headphones made a rolling motion with the fingers of one hand. Larry nodded to him, and turned to Ortega.

"Sorry about that. We'll edit that part out later."

"It's no trouble," Ortega assured him.

Jerry paused for a moment, and then said, "Dr. Ortega, welcome to the show. You have a reputation as one of the premier analysts of paranormal phenomena in the world. You have proven that a wide variety of so-called supernatural occurrences were actually clever hoaxes. Can you tell us a little about that?"

"Certainly. I have investigated these events for a number of years, and I have yet to find one that cannot be adequately explained. Alleged alien crop circles proved to be nothing more than a favorite pastime of a small group of British farmers, for example. Other odd events are certainly unusual, but by no means supernatural. Even here in Chicago, you had a rain of toads in one of your local parks witnessed by dozens if not hundreds of people. And it turned out, later, that a freak windstorm had scooped them up from elsewhere and deposited them here."