by Jim Butcher
“Casey,” Butters said, giving him a jerky nod of the head. “Hey, I like the new haircut. Is Dr. Brioche in?”
“He’s working now,” Casey said. “Room one, I think. What are you doing here?”
“Hoping to avoid a lecture,” Butters replied dryly. He clipped his identification to his coat. “I forgot to file some forms, and if I don’t get them done before the mail goes out, Brioche will scold me until my eyes bleed.”
Casey nodded and looked me over. “Who’s this?”
“Harry Dresden,” Butters said. “He’s got to sign off on the forms. He’s a consultant for the police department. Harry, this is Casey O’Roarke.”
“Charmed,” I said, and handed him the laminated identification card Murphy had issued me to get me through police lines to crime scenes. As I did, I felt another cold pocket of dark energy. Grevane had murdered and then reanimated Phil while the poor guy was sitting at his desk.
Casey examined the card, checked my face against the picture on it, and passed it back to me with a polite smile. “You want me to tell Dr. Brioche you’re here, Dr. Butters?”
Butters shuddered. “Not particularly.”
“Right,” Casey said, and waved us past. We were almost out of the entry hall when he spoke again. “Doctor? Did you see Phil this morning?”
Butters hesitated for a second before he turned around. “He was there at the desk the last time I saw him, but I had to leave for an early dentist appointment. Why?”
“Oh, he wasn’t at the desk when I got here,” Casey said. “Everything was locked down, and the security system was armed.”
“May be he had somewhere to be, too,” Butters suggested.
“Maybe,” Casey agreed. There was a faint frown line between his eyes. “He didn’t tell me anything, though. I mean, I’d have come in early if he had an appointment or something.”
“Beats me,” Butters said.
Casey squinted at Butters and then nodded slowly. “Okay. I just wouldn’t want him to get in trouble over breaking protocol.”
“You know Phil,” Butters said.
Casey rolled his eyes and nodded, then went back to filling out some kind of paperwork. Butters and I slipped away from the entry hall and down to Butters’s usual examination room. The place had been put back together. His desk rested in its usual spot, piled with papers and his computer. Whoever had cleaned up the room had done a fairly good job of it.
“Casey knows something,” Butters said the minute the door was shut. “He suspects something.”
“That’s what they pay security to do,” I said. “Don’t let it rattle you.”
Butters nodded, looking around the examination room. He walked over to his polka suit, still piled in the corner. “At least they didn’t wreck this,” he said. Then he let out a short laugh. “Man. Are my priorities skewed or what?”
“Everyone has something they love,” I said.
He nodded. “Okay. So what do we do now?”
“First things first,” I said. “Can you get a look at Bartlesby’s corpse?”
Butters nodded and walked over to his computer. I backed up and stood against the wall.
Butters started the thing up and spent a minute or two waggling a mouse and stabbing at keys with his forefinger. Then he whistled. “Wow. Bartlesby’s body got here about an hour ago, and it’s been flagged for immediate examination. Brioche is doing it.”
“Is that unusual?” I asked.
He nodded. “It means someone really wants to know about the victim. Someone in government or law enforcement, maybe.” He wrinkled up his nose. “Plus it was pretty horrific. Brioche will get some press out of it. Of course he took this one for himself.”
“Can you get to it?” I asked.
Butters frowned and tapped a few more keys. Then he looked up at the clock. “Maybe. Brioche is working in room one right now, but he’s got to be almost finished with whatever he’s doing. Bartlesby’s corpse is in room two. If I hurry…” He stood up and scurried for the door. “Wait here.”
“You sure?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Someone really would get suspicious if they saw you roaming around. If I need you I’ll give you a signal.”
“What signal?”
“I’ll imitate the scream of a terrified little girl,” he said with a waggle of his eyebrows. He headed out the door. “Back in a minute.”
Butters wasn’t gone long, and he slipped back into the room before five minutes had passed. He looked a little shaky.
“You all right?” I asked.
He nodded. “Couldn’t stay there for long. I heard Brioche come out of room one.”
“You see the body?”
“Yeah,” Butters said with a shudder. “It was already stripped and laid out. Bad stuff, Harry. He had thirty or forty stab wounds in his upper thorax. Someone carved his face up, too. His nose, ears, eyelids, and lips were in a sandwich Baggie next to his head.” He took a deep breath. “Someone had sliced off the quadriceps on both legs. They were missing. And he’d been eviscerated.”
I frowned. “How?”
“A big X-shaped cut across his abdomen. Then they peeled him open like a Chinese take-out box. He was missing his stomach and most of his intestines. There might have been other organs gone, too.”
“Ick,” I said.
“Extremely.”
“Could you see anything else?”
“No. Even if I’d wanted to, there wasn’t time for more than a quick look.” He walked over to a rolling stand of medical instruments. “Why would someone do that to him? What possible purpose could it have served?”
“Maybe some kind of ritual,” I said. “You’ve seen that before.”
Butters nodded. He went through the motions of pulling on an apron, mask, gloves, cap—the works. “I still don’t get it. You know?”
I did know. Butters didn’t have it in him to comprehend the kind of violence, hatred, and bloodlust that had fallen upon the late Bartlesby. That kind of utter disregard for the sanctity of life simply didn’t exist in his personal world, and it left him at a total loss when confronted with it face-to-face.
“Or,” I said, a thought occurring to me, “it might have been something else. Anthropomancy.”
He walked over to one of the freezers and cracked it open. “What’s that?”
“An attempt to divine the future or gain information by reading human entrails.”
Butters turned to me slowly, his face sickened. “You’re kidding.”
I shook my head. “It’s possible.”
“Does it work?” he asked.
“It’s extremely powerful and dangerous magic,” I answered. “Anyone who does it has to kill someone and gets an immediate death sentence if the Council learns of it. If it didn’t work, no one would bother.”
Butters’s mouth hardened into a firm line. “That’s…really wrong.” He frowned over the sentence and then nodded. “Wrong.”
“I agree.”
He turned back to the freezer, checked a toe tag, and then hauled a rolling exam table over to it. “This might take me a little while,” he said. “An hour and a half, maybe more.”
“You want a hand with that?” I asked. I hoped he didn’t.
Butters, bless him, shook his head. He walked over to his desk and flicked on his CD player. Polka music filled the room. “I’d really rather do this alone.”
“You sure?” I asked.
“Just listen for a girlie scream,” he said. “Can you wait for me up front?”
I nodded, leaned my staff in the corner, and left him in the room. He locked the door behind me, and I wandered up to sit down in the waiting area near the front doors. I took a chair that put the wall to my back, and where I could see Casey’s video monitor, the front door, and the door leading back to the examination rooms.
I leaned my head back against the wall with my eyes mostly closed and waited. Over the next hour one doctor came in and another left. The mailman showed up
with the day’s deliveries, as did the UPS truck. An ambulance arrived with the cadaver of an old woman that Casey rolled away, presumably into storage.
Then a young couple came in. The girl was about five-six and pleasantly pretty, even without much in the way of makeup. She was dressed in sandals, a simple blue sundress, and a wool jacket. Her hair was cut into a bob full of unruly brown curls, and her eyes were bloodshot with fatigue. The young man wore a simple, well-cut business suit. He was a little under six feet tall, had Asian features, wire-rimmed glasses, wide shoulders, and wore his hair in a long ponytail.
I recognized them: Alicia Nelson and Li Xian, from the picture on the cover of the newsletter Rawlins had given me. Dr. Bartlesby’s missing assistants had come to the morgue.
I remained very still, and tried to think thoughts that would make me blend in with the wall. They walked to the security desk and stood so close to me that I didn’t need to bother with Listening to them.
“Good morning,” Alicia said, producing a driver’s license and showing it to Casey. “My name is Alicia Nelson. I’m the late Dr. Bartlesby’s assistant. I understand that his remains have been brought here.”
Casey regarded her without much in the way of expression. “Ma’am, we do not make that kind of information available to the public, in order to protect the relatives of the deceased.”
She nodded, drew an envelope out of her purse, and passed that to Casey as well. “The doctor had no surviving family or next of kin,” she said. “But he granted me power of attorney over his estate two years ago. The paperwork is all in order.”
Casey scanned it, frowning. “Mmmmph.”
Alicia pushed brown curls wearily from her eyes. “Please, sir, the doctor had several personal effects which I need to take into custody as soon as possible. Passwords, credit cards, keys, that sort of thing. They were in his wallet.”
“What’s the rush?” Casey drawled.
“Some of his effects could potentially grant a thief access to his accounts and security boxes. As you can see in the documents, he wanted control of them to pass to me until I could arrange to have them passed on to the charities he patronized.”
Casey folded up the pages again and put them back in the envelope. “Ma’am, you’re going to have to speak with our director, Dr. Brioche. I’m sure he’ll be happy to help you out.”
“All right,” Alicia agreed. “Is he available?”
“I’ll go speak to him,” Casey said. “If you’ll wait here, please.”
“Of course,” the girl replied. She waited for Casey to go through the security door and then spun on her heel and stalked over to the entrance, staring out at the morning sunlight. Her posture was stiff with anger. She leaned her forearm on the glass door and pressed her forehead to it.
The tall young man, Li Xian, had remained silent the whole while. He followed her over to the door and spoke in a quiet voice I could scarcely hear. I narrowed my eyes and Listened.
“…back at any moment,” Xian murmured. “We should sit down.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Alicia shot back in a heated whisper. “I’m weary, not idiotic.”
“You should get some rest before you do anything more,” Xian said. “I don’t see why you’re playing games. You should have let me follow the guard back.”
“Stop thinking with your stomach,” the girl growled. “It’s bad enough that you lost control without adding a further lack of discipline to the situation.”
“We are not here because I stopped to eat,” Xian replied, anger of his own in his whisper. “If you hadn’t indulged yourself we wouldn’t face this problem.”
The girl spun from the glass, facing Xian squarely, her face contorted with pride and anger. “Your attitude, Li, is making you part of the problem. Not part of the solution.”
The long-haired man went white and cringed back from the girl. His face rippled, a sort of slithery motion just beneath the surface of his skin that stretched his features grotesquely, causing a slight sinking of the eyes, a slight elongation of the jaw. He let out a gasp, and when his mouth opened I could see the teeth of a carnivore.
It happened for only a second, but I averted my eyes before he might have noticed me watching him. If he had seen me, I would have been in immediate danger. I’d seen a flash of Li Xian’s true face—he was a ghoul. Ghouls are preternatural predators who derive their primary sustenance from devouring human flesh. Fresh, cold, rotting, they don’t care as long as it gets into their bellies.
My stomach turned. Butters said that someone had removed Bartlesby’s quadriceps, the long, strong muscles on the front of the thigh. It had been Xian. He’d carved himself steaks from the old man’s corpse. If he suspected that I knew what he was, he might decide to protect himself with extreme prejudice, and that would be bad. Ghouls are quick, strong, and harder to kill than a juicy rumor about the president. I’d fought ghouls before, and it wasn’t something I wanted to repeat if I could avoid it. Especially given that I’d left my staff in Butters’s office.
Xian recovered his normal appearance and lowered his eyes. He bowed his head to Alicia.
“Do I make myself clear?” the girl whispered.
“Yes, my lord,” Xian replied.
Lord? I thought. My mind raced over the possibilities.
Alicia exhaled and pressed her thumb against the spot between her eyebrows. “Don’t talk, Xian. Just don’t talk. We’ll all be happier. And safer.” She breezed past him, back to the little waiting area, and sat down. She picked up a copy of Newsweek sitting out on an end table and began to flick through it, while Xian remained standing near the door. I pretended to be drowsing.
Casey returned a couple of minutes later and said, “Ms. Nelson, it’s going to be a while before Dr. Brioche can see you.”
“How long?” she asked, smiling.
“An hour or so at least,” Casey said. “He says that if you’d like to make an appointment for this afternoon that he will be glad to—”
“No,” she interrupted him, shaking her head firmly. “Some of his business is time-critical, and I need to recover his effects at the earliest possible opportunity. Please tell him that I will wait.”
Casey lifted his eyebrows and then shrugged. “Yes, ma’am.”
I blinked my eyes a few times and then sat up straight, stretching. “Oh, hey, Casey,” I mumbled, standing. I feigned a limp and went to the desk. “I left my cane in Butters’s office. Would it be okay to go back and grab it?”
Casey nodded. “One second.” He picked up the phone, and a second later I heard polka music pumping through the little speaker. “Doctor, your consultant friend forgot something in your office. You want me to send him back?” He listened, nodding, and then waved me at the door, buzzing me through.
I hurried back to Butters’s examination room and knocked. Butters unlocked the door to let me in.
“Hurry,” I told him, glancing back down the hall. “We’ve got to go.”
Butters gulped. “What’s going on?”
“There are some bad guys here.”
“Grevane?” he asked.
“No. New bad guys,” I said.
“More of them?” Butters said. “That’s not fair.”
“I know. It’s getting to be like Satan’s reunion tour around here.” I shook my head. “Is there a back door?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Grab your stuff and let’s go.”
Butters gestured at the exam table. “But what about Eduardo?”
I chewed on my lip. “You find out anything?”
“Not a lot,” he said. “A car hit him. He suffered some pretty massive blunt impact trauma. He died.”
I frowned and took a few steps toward the corpse. “There’s got to be more to it than that.”
Butters shrugged. “If there is, I didn’t see it.”
I frowned down at the dead man. He was a painfully skinny specimen. His abdomen had been opened with a neat Y incision. There was a lot of blo
od and disgusting-looking greyish flesh. Broken, jagged bone protruded from the skin of one leg. One hand had been crushed into pulp. And his face…
Looked familiar. I recognized him.
“Butters,” I said. “What was this guy’s name?”
“Eduardo Mendoza.”
“His full name,” I said.
“Oh. Uh, Eduardo Antonio Mendoza.”
“Antonio,” I said. “It’s him. It’s Tony.”
“Who?” Butters asked.
“Bony Tony Mendoza,” I said, excited. “He’s a smuggler.”
Butters tilted his head at me. “A smuggler? Not like Han Solo, I guess.”
“No. He’s a ballooner.”
“What’s that?”
I gestured at his head. “He’d done time in a carnival as a sword swallower when he was a kid. He would fill up a balloon with jewels or drugs or whatever other small items he wanted to move around. Then he swallowed the balloon with a string tied to it. Check at the back of his mouth. He’d wedge the string between two of his back teeth and pull the balloon out when the coast was clear.”
“That’s silly,” Butters said, but he went over to the corpse and pried its jaws open. He adjusted an overhead work lamp on a flexible stand and peered down past Bony Tony’s teeth. “Holy crap. It’s there.”
He fished around for a few moments while I went back to the door and picked up my staff. I looked back to see Butters drag from the corpse’s mouth a yellow-white condom with its end closed and a heavy piece of kite cord knotted around it.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
“Hang on.” Butters sliced the condom open with a scalpel and withdrew a small rectangle of dark plastic, about the size of a key chain ornament.
“What is that?” I asked him.
“It’s a jump drive,” he said, frowning.
“A what?”
“You plug it into your computer so you can store data on it when you want to move files around to other machines.”
“Information,” I said, frowning. “Bony Tony was smuggling information. Something Grevane needed to know. Maybe the two out front wanted it too. Maybe that’s why he got killed.”
