Dead Beat df-7

by Jim Butcher

  The older cop's radio clicked, and he took it off his belt and had a brief conversation. "Sir," he told the security chief, "they're removing the body now. Forensics will be over in a couple of hours to sweep the room."

  "Why the delay?" the chief asked.

  The cop answered with a shrug. "But until then, I'm afraid we'll have to close down access to the crime scene."

  "There are a dozen different senior members of the staff with offices off of that hallway," the security chief protested.

  "I'm sure they'll finish up as quickly as they can, sir," the cop said, though his tone brooked no debate.

  "Told my boss I'd give it a try." The chief sighed. "You want to come explain it to him?"

  "Glad to," the cop said with a forced smile. "Lead the way." The two cops and the security chief strode off together, presumably to talk to somebody with an office, a receptionist, and an irritatingly skewed perspective on the importance of isolating a crime scene.

  I chewed on my lip. I was pretty sure that the apparent murder the cops were talking about and my hot spot of dark magic had to be related to each other. But if the hot spot was located on a murder site, it would be shut away from any access. Forensics could spend hours, even days, going over a room for evidence.

  That meant that if I wanted to get a look around, I had to move immediately. From what the cops had said, Forensics wasn't there yet. The men moving the body were part of the new civilian agency the city government was employing to transport corpses around town, judging from the ambulance outside. Both cops were with the security chief, which would mean that at most there was maybe a detective and a cop at the crime scene. There might be a chance that I could get close enough to see something.

  It took me about two seconds to make up my mind. The minute the security chief was out of sight, I slipped through the nondescript doorway, down a flight of stairs, and into the plain and unassuming hallways meant for the Field Museum 's staff instead of its visitors. I passed a small alcove with a fridge, a counter, and a coffee machine. I picked up a cup of coffee, a bagel, a newspaper, and a spiral notebook someone had left there. I piled up everything in my arms and tried to look like a bored academic on his way to his office. I had no clue where I was going yet, but I tried to walk like I knew what I was doing, reaching out with my arcane senses in an effort to feel where the remnants of the hot spot might be.

  I chose intersections methodically, left each time. I hit a couple of dead ends, but tried to keep close track of where I was going. The complex of tunnels and hallways under the Field Museum could swallow a small army without needing a glass of water, and I couldn't afford to get lost down there.

  It took me fifteen minutes to find it. One hallway had been marked with crime-scene tape, and I homed in on it. Even before I turned down the hall, my senses prickled with uneasy cold. I'd found my hot spot of necromantic energy, and there was a murder scene at its center. I heard footsteps and slipped to one side, remaining still as a pair of cops in suits came out, arguing quietly with each other about the shortest path outside so that they could smoke. They'd been cooped up with the body, taking pictures and documenting the scene since before anyplace had been open for breakfast, and neither one of them sounded like he was in a good mood.

  "Rawlins," said one of them into his radio, "where the hell are you?"

  "Talking to some administrator," came the reply, the voice of the older cop from upstairs.

  "How soon can you get down here to watch the site?"

  "Give me a few minutes."

  "Dammit," cursed the other detective. "Bastard is doing this on purpose."

  The one with the radio nodded. "Screw this. I've been on duty since noon yesterday. We've got the scene documented. It'll keep for two minutes while he walks his slow ass down here."

  The other detective nodded his agreement and they left.

  I set my props aside and slipped under the tape and down the hallway. There were office doors every couple of steps, all closed. At the end of the hall a door stood open, the lights on. I might have only a few minutes, and if I was going to learn anything it had to be now. I hurried forward.

  There might not have been a body there anymore, but even before I saw it, the room stank of death. It's an elusive scent, something that you get as a bonus to other smells, rather than a distinctive smell of its own. The thick, sweet odor of blood was in the air, mixed in with the faint stench of offal. There was the musty, moldy smell of old things long underground, too, as well as a few traces of something spicier, maybe some kind of incense. The death scent was mixed all through it, something sharp and unnerving, halfway between burned meat and cheap ammonia-based cleaner. My stomach rolled uncomfortably, and the rising sense of dark energy didn't help me keep it calm.

  The office was a fairly large one. Shelves and filing cabinets lined the walls. Three desks sat clumped together in the middle of the room. A small refrigerator sat in the corner, near an old couch and a coffee table littered with mostly empty boxes of Chinese takeout and a laptop computer. Books and boxes filled the shelves. The desks were cluttered with books, notebooks, folders, and a few personal articles-a novelty coffee mug, a couple of picture frames, and some recent popular novels.

  Everything had been splattered with blood and dark magic.

  The blood had dried out, and most of it was either red-black or dark brown. There was a large pool on the floor between the door and the nearest desk, dried into a sticky sludge. A sharp, almost straight line marked where the corpse had been lifted, probably peeling up the hem of a jacket or coat from where it had been stuck to the floor. Droplets had splattered the walls, the desk, the photographs, the novels, and the novelty mugs.

  I hated blood. As a decorating theme it left something to be desired. And it smelled horrible. My stomach twisted again, and I fought to keep down the doughnuts I'd grabbed at the convenience store. I closed my eyes and then forced myself to open them again. To look. The only way to avoid more scenes like this was to look at this one, figure out who had done it, and then to go stop them from doing it again.

  I pushed my revulsion away and focused on the scene, searching for details.

  There were a few smears of blood on the floor but none on the sides, surface, or edge of the nearest desk. That meant that the victim hadn't moved much after he'd gone down. Either he'd been held down or he'd bled out so quickly that he hadn't had time to crawl toward the nearest phone, on the desk, to call for help. I looked up. There wasn't much blood on the ceiling. That didn't prove anything, but if someone had opened his throat, there would almost certainly have been blood sprayed all over it. Any other kind of bleeding wound would probably have left the victim, evidently Dr. Bartlesby, able to function, at least for a couple of minutes. He'd probably been held down.

  I looked down. There was part of a footprint in blood on the floor, leading away. It looked like part of the heel of an athletic shoe-and not a large one, either. Probably a woman's shoe, or a large child's. For the sake of my ability to sleep at night, I hoped it was an adult's shoe. Children shouldn't see such things.

  Then again, who should?

  On an entirely different level, the room was even more disturbing. The dark power here was not the pure, silent cold I'd felt on the sidewalk on Wacker. It felt corrupt, dark, somehow mutilated. There was a sense of malicious glee to the residue of whatever magic had been worked here. Someone had used their power to murder a man-and they had loved doing it. Worse, it was a distinctly different aura than I had felt near either Cowl or Grevane. Magical workings didn't leave behind an exact fingerprint that could be traced to a given wizard, but intuition told me that this working had been sloppier and more frenetic than something Grevane would have done, and messier than Cowl would prefer.

  But it was strong-stronger magic than almost anything I had ever done. Whoever was behind the spell that had been wrought here was at least as powerful as I was. Maybe stronger.

  "Heh," drawled a voice from behind me. "I though
t that was you."

  I stiffened and turned around. The older of the two cops from upstairs stood ten feet down the hall from me, one hand resting casually on the butt of his sidearm. His dark face was wary, but not openly hostile, and his stance one of caution but not alarm. The name tag on his jacket read rawlins.

  "Thought who was me?" I asked him.

  "Harry Dresden," he said. "The wizard. The guy Murphy hires for SI."

  "Yeah," I said. "I guess that's me."

  He nodded. "I saw you upstairs. You didn't look like your typical museum patron."

  "It was the big leather coat, wasn't it?" I said.

  "That helped," Rawlins acknowledged. "What are you doing down here?"

  "Just looking," I said. "I haven't gone into the room."

  "Yeah. You can tell that from how I haven't arrested you yet." Rawlins looked past me, into the room, and his expression sobered. "Hell of a thing in there."

  "Yeah," I said.

  "Something don't feel right about it," he said. "Just… I don't know. Sets my teeth on edge. More than usual. I've seen knifings before. This is different."

  "Yeah," I said. "It is."

  Dark eyes flicked back to me, and the old cop exhaled. "This is something from down Si's way?"

  "Yeah."

  He grunted. "Murphy send you?"

  "Not exactly," I said.

  "Why you here then?"

  "Because I don't like things that put cops' teeth on edge," I said. "You guys have any suspects?"

  "For someone who just happened to be walking by, you got a lot of questions," he said.

  "For a beat cop in charge of securing the scene, you were asking plenty of your own," I said. "Upstairs, with museum security."

  He grinned, teeth very white. "Shoot. I been a detective before. Twice."

  I lifted my eyebrows. "Busted back down?"

  "Both times, on account of I have an attitude problem," Rawlins said.

  I gave him a lopsided smile. "You going to arrest me?"

  "Depends," he said.

  "On what?"

  "On why you're here." He met my gaze directly, openly, his hand still on his gun.

  I didn't meet his eyes for very long. I glanced over my shoulder, debating how to answer, and decided to go with a little sincerity. "There are some bad people in town. I don't think the police can get them. I'm trying to find them before they hurt anyone else."

  He studied me for a long minute. Then he took his hand off the gun and reached into his coat. He tossed me a folded newspaper.

  I caught it and unfolded it. It was some kind of academic newsletter, and on the cover page was a photograph of a portly old man with sideburns down to his jaw, together with a smiling young woman and a young man with Asian features. The caption under the picture read, Visiting Professor Charles Bartlesby and his assistants, Alicia Nelson, Li Xian, prepare to examine Cahokian collection at the FMNH, Chicago.

  "That's the victim in the middle," Rawlins said. "His assistants shared the office with him. They have not been answering their cell phone numbers and are not in their apartments."

  "Suspects?" I asked.

  He shrugged. "Not many people murder strangers," he said. "They were the only ones in town who knew the victim. Came in with him from England somewhere."

  I looked from the newsletter up to Rawlins, and frowned. "Why are you helping me?"

  He lifted his eyebrows. "Helping you? You could have found that anywhere. And I never saw you."

  "Understood," I said. "But why?"

  He leaned against the wall and folded his arms. "Because when I was a young cop, I went running down an alley when I heard a woman scream. And I saw something. Something that…" His face became remote. "Something that has given me bad dreams for about thirty years. This thing strangling a girl. I push it away from her, empty my gun into it. It picks me up and slams my head into a wall a few times. I figured Mama Rawlins's baby boy was about to go the way of the dodo."

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "Lieutenant Murphy's father showed up with a shotgun loaded with rock salt and killed it. And when the sun comes up, it burns this thing's corpse like it had been soaked in gasoline." Rawlins shook his head. "I owed her old man. And I seen enough of the streets to know that she's been doing a lot of good. You been helping her with that."

  I nodded. "Thank you," I told him.

  He nodded. "Don't really feel like losing my job for you, Dresden. Get out before someone sees you."

  Something occurred to me. "You heard about the Forensic Institute?"

  He shrugged at me. "Sure. Every cop has."

  "I mean what happened there last night," I said.

  Rawlins shook his head. "I haven't heard of anything."

  I frowned at him. A grisly murder at the morgue would have been all over the place, in police scuttlebutt if not in the newspapers. "You haven't? Are you sure?"

  "Sure, I'm sure."

  I nodded at him and walked down the hallway.

  "Hey," he said.

  I looked over my shoulder.

  "Can you stop them?" Rawlins asked.

  "I hope so."

  He glanced at the bloodied room and then back at me. "All right. Good hunting, kid."

  Chapter Fourteen

  Wow," Butters said, fiddling with the control panel on the SUV. "This thing has everything. Satellite radio stations. And I bet I could put my whole CD collection inside the changer on this player. And, oh, cool, check it out. It's got an onboard GPS, too, so we can't get lost." Butters pushed a button on the control panel.

  A calm voice emerged from the dashboard. "Now entering Helsinki."

  I arched an eyebrow at the dashboard and then at Butters. "Maybe the car is lost."

  "Maybe you're interfering with its computer, too," Butters said.

  "You think?"

  He smiled tightly, checking his seat belt for the tenth time. "Just so we're clear, I have no problems with hiding, Harry. I mean, if you're worried about my ego or something, don't. I'm fine with the hiding. Happy, even."

  I pulled off the highway. The green lawns and tended trees of the industrial park hosting the Forensic Institute appeared as the SUV rolled up the ramp. "Try to relax, Butters."

  He jerked his head in a nervous, negative shake. "I don't want to get killed. Or arrested. I'm really bad at being arrested. Or killed."

  "It's a calculated risk," I said. "We need to find out what Grevane wanted with you."

  "And we're taking me to work… why?"

  "Think about it. What would have happened if they'd found you missing, blood all over the place, the building ransacked, and Phil's corpse lying in the morgue or on the lawn outside?"

  "Someone would have gotten fired," Butters said.

  "Yeah. And they would have locked down the building to search for evidence. And they would have grabbed you and locked you away somewhere, for questioning at least."

  "So?" Butters asked.

  "If Grevane cleaned up what happened at the morgue, it means he didn't want too much official attention focused there. Whatever he wants from you, I'm betting it's still in the building." I pulled into the industrial park. "We have to find it."

  "Eduardo Mendoza?" he asked me.

  "Offhand, I can't think of any other reason for someone to want to grab your friendly neighborhood assistant medical examiner," I said. "Grevane's got to be interested in a corpse at the morgue, and that one was the only one that seemed a little odd."

  "Harry," Butters said, "if this guy really is a necromancer-a wizard of the dead-then why the hell would he need a plain old vanilla science nerd like me?"

  "That's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question," I said. "And we have another reason, too."

  "The museum doctor guy, right?" Butters asked.

  I nodded at him and parked in the lot next to Butters's ruined little truck. "Right. I need to know what killed him. Hell, any information could be useful."

  Butters exhaled. "Well. I don't know what I'll b
e able to manage."

  "Anything is more than I have now."

  He looked around warily. "Do you think… do you think Grevane or his buddy is out there right now? Watching for… you know… me?"

  I pulled open my coat and showed Butters my shoulder holster and gun. Then I reached behind me and drew out my staff from the back of the SUV "If they show up, I'm going to ruin their whole day."

  He chewed on his lip. "You can do that, right?"

  I took a look around and said, "Butters, trust me. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's ruining people's day."

  He let out a nervous little laugh. "You can say that again."

  "If there's one thing I'm good at-" I began. Butters punched me lightly on the arm, and I smiled at him. "We'll get in and out as quick as we can, get you back under cover. I think we've got it under control."

  I killed the SUV's ignition and pulled out the key. The truck shuddered, and a warbling, wailing sound came from the dashboard. For a second I expected someone to shout, "Red alert, all hands to battle stations!" Instead there was a hiccup of sound from the truck, and then a smooth, recorded voice reported, "Warning. The door is ajar. The door is ajar."

  I blinked at the dashboard. It repeated the warning several more times, getting a little slower and lower pitched each time, then droned into a basso rumble, followed by silence.

  "That was not an omen," I said firmly.

  "Right," Butters replied in a faint voice. "Because stuff is always messing up around you."

  "Exactly," I said. I tried to think of a way to wring positive spin from that last statement, but I wasn't up to the mental gymnastics. "Come on. The sooner we get moving, the sooner we get you out of here."

  "Okay," he said, and the pair of us got out of the SUV and headed for the Forensic Institute. As we approached the door, I started limping and leaning on my staff a little, as if I needed the support. Butters opened the door for me, and I hobbled in with a pained expression on my face as we approached the security desk.

  I didn't know the guard on duty. He was in his mid-twenties and looked athletic. He watched us coming, squinting a little, and when we were well inside his eyebrows lifted. "Dr. Butters," he said, evidently surprised. "I haven't seen you in a while."