by Jim Butcher
“Good,” Butters said. “Good. You still playing guitar?”
“I hold it. It makes noise. Might be a little generous to call it playing.” I gestured to Molly. “Waldo Butters, this is Molly Carpenter, my apprentice.”
“Apprentice, eh?” Butters extended an amiable hand. “Pleased to meetcha,” he said. “So does he turn you into squirrels and fishes and stuff, like in The Sword in the Stone?”
Molly sighed. “I wish. I keep trying to get him to show me how to change form, but he won’t.”
“I promised your parents I wouldn’t let you melt yourself into a pile of goo,” I told her. “Butters, I assume someone—and I won’t name any names—told you I’d be dropping by?”
“Yowsa,” the little ME said, nodding. He held up a finger, went to the door, and locked it, before turning to lean his back against it. “Look, Dresden. I have to be careful what kind of information I share, right? It comes with the job.”
“Sure.”
“So you didn’t hear it from me.”
I looked at Molly. “Who said that?”
“Groovy,” Butters said. He walked back over to me and offered me the packet of papers. “Names and addresses of the deceased,” he said.
I frowned and flipped through them: columns of text, much of it technical; ugly photographs. “The victims?”
“Officially, they’re the deceased.” His mouth tightened. “But yeah. I’m pretty sure they’re victims.”
“Why?”
He opened his mouth, closed it again, and frowned. “You ever see something out of the corner of your eye? But when you look at it, there’s nothing there? Or at least, it doesn’t look like what you thought it was?”
“Sure.”
“Same thing here,” he said. “Most of these folks show classic, obvious suicides. There are just a few little details wrong. You know?”
“No,” I said. “Enlighten me.”
“Take that top one,” he said. “Pauline Moskowitz. Thirty-nine, mother of two, husband, two dogs. She disappears on a Friday night and opens up her wrists in a hotel bathtub around three A.M. Saturday morning.”
I read over it. “Am I reading this right? She was on antidepressants?”
“Uh-huh,” Butters said, “but nothing extreme, and she’d been on them and stable for eight years. Never showed suicidal tendencies before, either.”
I looked at the ugly picture of a very ordinary-looking woman lying naked and dead in a tub of cloudy liquid. “So what’s got your scalpel in a knot?”
“The cuts,” Butters said. “She used a box knife. It was in the tub with her. She severed tendons in both wrists.”
“So?”
“So,” Butters said. “Once she’d cut the tendons on one wrist, she’d have had very little controlled movement with the fingers in that hand. So what’d she do to cut them both? Use two box knives at the same time? Where’s the other knife?”
“Maybe she held it with her teeth,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll close my eyes and throw a rock out over the lake and it will land in a boat,” Butters said. “It’s technically possible, but it isn’t really likely. The second wound almost certainly wouldn’t be as deep or as clean. I’ve seen ’em look like someone was cutting up a block of Parmesan into slivers. These two cuts are almost identical.”
“I guess it’s not conclusive, though,” I said.
“Not officially.”
“I’ve been hearing that a lot today.” I frowned. “What’s Brioche think?”
At the mention of his boss, Butters grimaced. “Occam’s razor, to use his own spectacularly insensitive yet ironic phrasing. They’re suicides. End of story.”
“But your guess is that someone else was holding the knife?”
The little ME’s face turned bleak, and he nodded without speaking.
“Good enough for me,” I said. “What about the body today?”
“Can’t say until I look,” Butters said. He gave me a shrewd glance. “But you think it’s another murder.”
“I know it is,” I replied. “But I’m the only one, until Murphy’s off the clock.”
“Right.” Butters sighed.
I flipped past Mrs. Moskowitz’s pages to the next set of ugly pictures. Also a woman. The pages named her Maria Casselli. Maria had been twenty-three when she washed down thirty Valium with a bottle of drain cleaner.
“Another hotel room,” I noted quietly.
Molly glanced over my shoulder at the printout of the photo at the scene. She turned pale and took several steps away from me.
“Yeah,” Butters said, concerned eyes on my apprentice. “It’s a little unusual. Most suicides are at home. They usually go somewhere else only if they need to jump off a bridge or drive their car into a lake or something.”
“Ms. Casselli had a family,” I said. “Husband, her younger sister living with her.”
“Yeah,” Butters said. “You can guess what Brioche had to say.”
“She walked in on her hubby and baby sister, decided to end it all?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Uh,” Molly said. “I think—”
“Outside,” Butters provided, unlocking the door. “First door on the right.”
Molly hurried from the room, down to the bathroom Butters had directed her to.
“Jesus, Harry,” Butters said. “Kid’s a little young for this.”
I held up the picture of Maria’s body. “Lot of that going around.”
“She’s actually a wizard? Like you?”
“Someday,” I said. “If she survives.” I read over the next two profiles, both of women in their twenties, both apparent suicides in hotel rooms, both of them with housemates of one sort or another.
The last profile was different. I read over it and glanced up at Butters. “What’s with this one?”
“Fits the same general profile,” Butters said. “Women, dead in hotel rooms.”
I frowned down at the papers. “Where’s the cause of death?”
“That’s the thing,” Butters said. “I couldn’t find one.”
I lifted both eyebrows at him.
He spread his hands. “Harry, I know my trade. I like figuring this stuff out. And I haven’t got the foggiest why the woman is dead. Every test I ran came up negative; every theory I put together fell apart. Medically speaking, she’s in good shape. It’s like her whole system just…got the switch turned off. Everything at once. Never seen anything like it.”
“Jessica Blanche.” I checked the profiles. “Nineteen. And pretty. Or at least prettyish.”
“Hard to tell with dead girls,” Butters said. “But yeah, that was my take.”
“But not a suicide.”
“Like I said. Dead, and in hotel rooms.”
“Then what’s the connection to the other deaths?”
“Little things,” Butters said. “Like, she had a purse with ID in it, but no clothes.”
“Meaning someone had to have taken them away.” I rolled up the papers into a tube and thumped them against my leg, thoughtfully. The door opened, and Molly came back in, wiping at her mouth with a paper towel. “This girl still here?”
Butters lifted his eyebrows. “Yeah. Miss Blanche. Why?”
“I think maybe Molly can help.”
Molly blinked and looked up at me. “Um. What?”
“I doubt it’s going to be pleasant, Molly,” I told her. “But you might be able to read something.”
“Off of a dead girl?” Molly asked quietly.
“You’re the one who wanted to come along,” I said.
She frowned, facing me, and then took a deep breath. “Yes. Um. Yes, I was. I mean, yes, I will. Try.”
“Will you?” I asked. “You sure? Won’t be fun. But if it gets us more information, it could save someone’s life.”
I watched her for a moment, until her expression set in determination and she met my eyes. She straightened and nodded once. “Yes.”
“All right,” I s
aid. “Get yourself set for it. Butters, we need to give her a few minutes alone. Can we go get Miss Blanche?”
“Um,” Butters said. “What’s this going to entail, exactly?”
“Nothing much. I’ll explain it on the way.”
He chewed on his lip for a moment, and then nodded once. “This way.”
He led me down the hall to the storage room. It was another exam room, like the one we’d just been in, but it also featured a wall of body-sized refrigerated storage units like morgues are supposed to have. This was the room we’d been in when a necromancer and a gaggle of zombies had put a bullet through the head of Butters’s capacity to ignore the world of the supernatural.
Butters got out a gurney, consulted a record sheet on a clipboard, and wheeled it over to the fridges. “I don’t like to come in here anymore. Not since Phil.”
“Me either,” I said.
He nodded. “Here, get that side.”
I didn’t want to. I am a wizard, sure, but corpses are inherently icky, even if they aren’t animated and trying to kill you. But I tried to pretend we were sliding a heavy load of groceries onto a cart, and helped him draw a body, resting upon a metal tray and covered in a heavy cloth, onto the gurney.
“So,” he said. “What is she going to do?”
“Look into its eyes,” I said.
He gave me a somewhat skeptical look. “Trying to see the last thing impressed on her retinas or something? You know that’s pretty much mythical, right?”
“Other impressions get left on a body,” I said. “Final thoughts, sometimes. Emotions, sensations.” I shook my head. “Technically, those kinds of impressions can get left on almost any kind of inanimate object. You’ve heard of object reading, right?”
“That’s for real?” he asked.
“Yeah. But it’s an easy sort of thing to contaminate, and it can be tricky as hell—and entirely apart from that, it’s extremely difficult to do.”
“Oh,” Butters said. “But you think there might be something left on the corpse?”
“Maybe.”
“That sounds really useful.”
“Potentially.”
“So how come you don’t do it all the time?” he asked.
“It’s delicate,” I said. “When it comes to magic, I’m not much for delicate.”
He frowned and we started rolling the gurney. “But your only half-trained apprentice is?”
“The wizarding business isn’t standardized,” I said. “Any given wizard will have an affinity for different kinds of magic, due to their natural talents, personalities, experiences. Each has different strengths.”
“What are yours?” he asked.
“Finding things. Following things. Blowing things up, mostly,” I said. “I’m good at those. Redirecting energy, sending energy out into the world to resonate with the energy of what I’m trying to find. Moving energy around or redirecting it or storing it up to use later.”
“Aha,” he said. “None of which is delicate?”
“I’ve practiced enough to handle a lot of different kinds of delicate magic,” I said. “But…it’s the difference between me strumming power chords on a guitar and me playing a complex classical Spanish piece.”
Butters absorbed that and nodded. “And the kid plays Spanish guitar?”
“Close enough. She’s not as strong as me, but she’s got a gift for the more subtle magic. Especially mental and emotional stuff. It’s what got her in so much trouble with…”
I bit my tongue and stopped in midsentence. It wasn’t my place to discuss Molly’s violations of the White Council’s Laws of Magic with others. She would have enough trouble getting past the horrible acts she’d committed in innocence without me painting her as a psycho monster-in-training.
Butters watched my face for a few seconds, then nodded and let it pass. “What do you think she’ll find?”
“No clue,” I said. “That’s why we look.”
“Could you do this?” he said. “I mean, if you had to?”
“I’ve tried it,” I hedged. “But I’m bad about projecting things onto the object, and I can barely ever get something intelligible out of it.”
“You said it might not be pleasant for her,” Butters said. “Why?”
“Because if something’s there, and she can sense it, she gets to experience it. First person. Like she’s living it herself.”
Butters let out a low whistle. “Oh. Yeah. I guess that could be bad.”
We got back to the other room, and I peered in before opening the door. Molly was sitting on the floor with her eyes closed, her legs folded lotus-style, her head tilted slightly up. Her hands rested on her thighs, the tips of her thumbs pressed lightly against the tips of her middle fingers.
“Quietly,” I murmured. “No noise until she’s finished. Okay?”
Butters nodded. I opened the door as silently as I could. We brought the gurney into the room, left it in front of Molly, and then at my beckon, Butters and I went to the far wall and settled in to wait.
It took Molly better than twenty minutes to focus her mind for the comparatively simple spell. Focus of intention, of will, is integral to any use of magic. I’d drawn myself up to focus power so often and for so long that I only had to actually make a conscious effort to do it when a spell was particularly complex, dangerous, or when I thought it wise to be slow and cautious. Most of the time, it took me less than a second to gather up my will—which is critical in any situation where speed is a factor. Drooling abominations and angry vampires don’t give you twenty minutes to get a punch ready.
Molly, though she was learning quickly, had a long damned way to go.
When she finally opened her eyes, they were distant, unfocused. She rose to her feet with slow, careful movements, and drifted over to the gurney with the corpse. She pulled the sheet down, revealing the dead girl’s face. Then Molly leaned down, her expression still distant, and murmured quietly beneath her breath as she opened the corpse’s eyelids.
She got something almost instantly.
Her eyes flew open wide, and she let out a short gasp. Her breath rasped in and out frantically several times before her eyes rolled back up into her head. She stood frozen and rigid for a pair of quivering seconds, and then her breath escaped in a low, rough cry and her knees buckled. She did not fall to the floor so much as melt down onto it. Then she lay there, breathing hard and letting out a continuous stream of guttural whimpers.
Her breathing continued, fast and hard, her eyes unfocused. Her body rippled with several slow, undulating motions that drew the eye to her hips and breasts. Then she slowly went limp, her panting gradually easing, though little, unmistakably pleased sounds slithered from her lips on every exhalation.
I blinked at her.
Well.
I hadn’t been expecting that.
Butters gulped audibly. Then he said, “Uh. Did she just do what I think she just did?”
I pursed my lips. “Um. Maybe.”
“What just happened?”
“She, um.” I coughed. “She got something.”
“She got something, all right,” Butters muttered. He sighed. “I haven’t gotten anything like that in about two years.”
For me, it had been more like four. “I hear you,” I said, more emphatically than I meant to.
“Is she underage?” he asked. “Legally speaking?”
“No.”
“Okay. I don’t feel quite so…Nabokovian, then.” He raked his fingers back through his hair. “What do we do now?”
I tried to look professional and unfazed. “We wait for her to recover.”
“Uh-huh.” He looked at Molly and sighed. “I need to get out more.”
Me and you both, man. “Butters, is there any way you could get her some water or something?”
“Sure,” he said. “You?”
“Nah.”
“Right back.” Butters covered up the corpse and slipped out.
I went over to th
e girl and hunkered down by her. “Hey, grasshopper. Can you hear me?”
It took her longer than it should have to answer, like when you’re on the phone with someone halfway around the world. “Yes. I…I hear you.”
“You okay?”
“Oh, God.” She sighed, smiling. “Yes.”
I muttered under my breath, rubbed at the incipient headache beginning between my eyes, and thought dark thoughts. Dammit all, every time I’d opened myself up to some kind of horrible psychic shock in the name of investigation, I’d gotten another nightmare added to my collection. Her first time up to bat, and the grasshopper got…
What had she gotten?
“I want you to tell me what you sensed, right away. Sometimes the details fade out, like when you forget parts of a dream.”
“Right,” she murmured in a sleepy-sounding drawl. “Details. She…” Molly shook her head. “She felt good. Really, really good.”
“I gathered that much,” I said. “What else?”
Molly kept shaking her head slowly. “Nothing else. Just that. It was all sensation. Ecstasy.” She frowned a little, as if struggling to order her thoughts. “As if the rest of her senses had been blinded by it, somehow. I don’t think there was anything else. Not sight nor sound nor thought nor memory. Nothing. She didn’t even know it when she died.”
“Think about it,” I said quietly. “Absolutely anything you can remember could be important.”
Butters came back in just then, carrying a bottle of water beaded with drops of condensation. He tossed it to me, and I passed the cold drink to Molly. “Here,” I told her. “Drink up.”
“Thanks.” She opened the bottle, turned on her side, and started guzzling it without even sitting up. The pose did a lot to make her clothing look tighter.
Butters stared for a second, then sighed and quite evidently forced himself to go over to his desk and start sharpening pencils. “So what do we know?”
“Looks like she died happy,” I said. “Did you run a toxicology check on her?”
