by Jim Butcher
I just stared for a few moments, noting details in a sort of detached way. Again. Again someone had used magic to end a life.
I had to think of her as she sounded on the phone. Joking, a quick wit. A sort of sly sensuality, in the way she said her words and phrased her sentences. A little hint of insecurity around the edges, vulnerability that magnified the other parts of her personality. Her hair was damp because she’d been taking a bath before she came to see me. Whatever anyone said of her, she had been passionately, vitally alive. Had been.
Eventually, I realized how quiet the room was.
The men and women of the forensics team, all five of them, were looking up at me. Waiting. As I looked around, they all averted their gazes, but you didn’t have to be a wizard to see what was in their faces. Fear, pure and simple. They had been faced with something that science couldn’t explain. It rattled them, shook them to their cores, this sudden, violent, and bloody evidence that three hundred years of science and research was no match for the things that were still, even after all this time, lurking in the dark.
And I was the one who was supposed to have the answers.
I didn’t have any for them, and I felt like shit for remaining silent as I stepped back and turned away from Linda’s body, then walked across the room to the small bathroom. The tub was still full of water. A bracelet and earrings were laid out on the counter in front of a mirror, plus a little makeup, a bottle of perfume.
Murphy appeared beside me and stood with me, looking at the bathroom. She seemed a lot smaller than she usually does.
“She called us,” Murphy said. “Nine one one has the call recorded. That’s how we knew to come out here. She called and said that she knew who had killed Jennifer Stanton and Tommy Tomm and that now they were coming for her. Then she started screaming.”
“That’s when the spell hit her. The phone probably went out right after.”
Murphy frowned up at me and nodded. “Yeah. It did. But it was working fine when we got here.”
“Magic disrupts technology sometimes. You know that.” I rubbed at one eye. “Have you talked to any relatives, anything like that?”
Murphy shook her head. “There aren’t any relatives in town. We’re looking, now, but it might take some time. We tried to reach her boss, but he wasn’t available. A Mr. Beckitt?” She studied my face, waiting for me to say something. “You ever heard of him?” she asked, after a moment.
I didn’t look back at Murphy. I shrugged.
Murphy’s jaw tensed, little motions at the corners of her face. Then she said, “Greg and Helen Beckitt. Three years ago, their daughter, Amanda, was killed in a cross fire. Johnny Marcone’s thugs were shooting it out with some of the Jamaican gang that was trying to muscle in on the territory back then. One of them shot the little girl. She lived for three weeks in intensive care and died when they took her off life support.”
I didn’t say anything. But I thought of Mrs. Beckitt’s numb face and dead eyes.
“The Beckitts attempted to lodge a wrongful-death suit against Johnny Marcone, but Marcone’s lawyers were too good. They got it thrown out before it even went to court. And they never found the man who shot the little girl. Word has it that Marcone offered to pay them blood money. Make reparation. But they turned him down.”
I didn’t say anything. Behind us, they were putting Linda in a body bag, sealing her in. I heard men count to three and lift her, put her onto a gurney of some kind, and wheel her out. One of the forensics guys told Murphy they were going to take a break and would be back in ten minutes. She nodded and sent them out. The room got even more quiet.
“Well, Harry,” she said. Her voice was hushed, like she didn’t want to disturb the apartment’s new stillness. “What can you tell me?” There was a subtle weight to the question. She might as well have asked me what I wasn’t telling her. That’s what she meant. She took her hand out of her jacket pocket and handed me a plastic bag.
I took it. Inside was my business card, the one I’d given to Linda. It was still curled a little, where I’d had to palm it. It was also speckled with what I presumed was Linda’s blood. I looked at the part of the bag where you write the case number and the identification of the piece of evidence. It was blank. It wasn’t on the records. It wasn’t official. Yet.
Murphy was waiting for my answer. She wanted me to tell her something. I just wasn’t sure if she was waiting for me to tell her that a lot of people have my card, and that I didn’t know how it had gotten here, or if she wanted me to say how I had known the victim, how I had been involved with her. Then she would have to ask me questions. The kinds of questions you ask suspects.
“If I tell you,” I said, “that I was having a psychic premonition, would you take me seriously?”
“What kind of premonition?” she said. She didn’t look up at me.
“I sense…” I paused, thinking of my words. I wanted them to be very clear. “I sense that this woman will have a police record, probably for possession of narcotics and solicitation. I sense that she used to work at the Velvet Room for Madame Bianca. I sense that she used to be close friends and lovers with Jennifer Stanton. I sense that if she had been approached, yesterday, and asked about those deaths, that she would have claimed to know nothing.”
Murphy mulled over my words for a moment. “You know, Dresden,” she said, and her voice was tight, cool, furious, “if you’d sensed these things yesterday, or maybe even this morning, it’s possible that we could have talked to her. It’s possible that we could have found out something from her. It’s even possible”—and she turned to me and slammed me against the doorway with one forearm and the weight of her body, suddenly and shockingly hard—“it’s even possible,” she snarled, “that she’d still be alive.” She stared up at my face, and she didn’t look at all like a cutesy cheerleader, now. She looked like a mother wolf standing over the body of one of her cubs and getting ready to make someone pay for it.
This time I was the one to look away. “A lot of people have my card,” I said. “I put them up all over the place. I don’t know how she got it.”
“Goddammit, Dresden,” she said. She stepped back from me and walked away, toward the bloodstained sheets. “You’re holding out on me. I know you are. I can get a warrant for your arrest. I can have you brought in for questioning.” She turned back to me. “Someone’s killed three people already. It’s my job to stop them. It’s what I do.”
I didn’t say anything. I could smell the soap and shampoo from Linda Randall’s bath.
“Don’t make me choose, Harry.” Her voice softened, if not her eyes or her face. “Please.”
I thought about it. I could bring everything to her. That’s what she was asking—not half the story, not part of the information. She wanted it all. She wanted all the pieces in front of her so she could puzzle them together and bring the bad guys in. She didn’t want to work the puzzle knowing that I was keeping some of the pieces in my pocket.
What could it hurt? Linda Randall had called me earlier that evening. She had planned on coming to me, to talk to me. She was going to give me some information and someone had shut her up before she could.
I saw two problems with telling Murphy that. One, she would start thinking like a cop. It would not be hard to find out that Linda wasn’t exactly a high-fidelity piece of equipment. That she had numerous lovers on both sides of the fence. What if she and I were closer than I was admitting? What if I’d used magic to kill her lovers in a fit of jealous rage and then waited for another storm to kill her, too? It sounded plausible, workable, a crime of passion—Murphy had to know that the DA would have a hell of a time proving magic as a murder weapon, but if it had been a gun instead, it would have flown.
The second problem, and the one that worried me a lot more, was that there were already three people dead. And if I hadn’t gotten lucky and creative, there would have been two more dead people, back at my apartment. I still didn’t know who the bad guy was. Telling Murph
y what little more I knew wouldn’t give her any helpful information. It would only make her ask more questions, and she wanted answers.
If the voice in the shadows knew that Murphy was heading the investigation to find him, and was on the right track, he would have no qualms about killing her, too. And there was nothing she could do to protect herself against it. She might have been formidable to your average criminal, but all the aikido in the world wouldn’t do her any good against a demon.
Then, too, there was the White Council. Men like Morgan and his superiors, secure in their own power, arrogant and considering themselves above the authority of any laws but their own, wouldn’t hesitate to remove one police lieutenant who had discovered the secret world of the White Council.
I looked at the bloodstained sheets and thought of Linda’s corpse. I thought of Murphy’s office, and what it would look like with her sprawled on the floor, her heart torn from her chest, or her throat torn out by some creeping thing from beyond.
“Sorry, Murph,” I said. My voice came out in a rasping whisper. “I wish I could help you. I don’t know anything useful.” I didn’t try to look up at her, and I didn’t try to hide that I was lying.
I sensed, more than saw, the hardening around her eyes, the little lines of hurt and anger. I’m not sure if a tear fell, or if she really just raised a hand to brush back some of her hair. Then she turned to the front door, and shouted, “Carmichael! Get your ass in here!”
Carmichael looked equally as slobbish as he had a few days ago, as though the passage of time hadn’t changed him—it certainly hadn’t changed his jacket, only the food stains on his tie and the particular pattern of rumplement to his hair. There had to be something comforting, I reflected, in that kind of stability. No matter how bad things got, no matter how horrible or sickening the scene, you could count on Carmichael to look like the same quality of crap. He glared at me as he came in. “Yeah?”
She tossed the plastic bag to him, and he caught it. “Mark that and log it,” she said. “Hang around for a minute. I want a witness.”
Carmichael looked down at the bag and saw my card. His beady eyes widened. He looked back up at me, and I saw the shift in gears in his head, reclassifying me from annoying ally to suspect.
“Mr. Dresden,” Murphy said. She kept her tone frosty, polite. “There are some questions we’d like to ask you. Do you think you could come down to the station and make a statement?”
Questions to be asked. The White Council would convene and execute me in a little more than thirty hours. I didn’t have time for questions. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I’ve got to comb my hair tonight.”
“Tomorrow morning, then,” she said.
“We’ll see,” I said.
“If you aren’t there in the morning,” Murphy said, “I’m going to ask for a warrant. We’ll come and find you and by God, Harry, I’ll get some answers to this.”
“Suit yourself,” I told her, and I started for the door. Carmichael took a step forward and stood in my way. I stopped and looked at him, and he kept his eyes focused on the center of my chest. “If I’m not under arrest,” I told her, “then I presume I’m free to go.”
“Let him go, Ron,” Murphy said. Her tone of voice was disgusted, but I could hear the hurt underneath it. “I’ll talk to you again soon, Mr. Dresden.” She stepped closer and said, in a perfectly even tone, “And if it turns out that you’re the one behind all this, rest assured. Whatever you can do and whatever you can pull, I will find you and I will bring you down. Do you understand me?”
I did understand, really. I understood the pressure she was under, her frustration, her anger, and her determination to stop the killing from happening again. If I was some kind of hero from a romance novel, I’d have said something brief and eloquent and heartrending. But I’m just me, so I said, “I do understand, Karrin.”
Carmichael stepped out of my way.
And I walked away from Murphy, whom I couldn’t talk to, and from Linda, whom I couldn’t protect, my head aching, weary to my bones, and feeling like a total piece of shit.
Chapter Sixteen
I walked down the block from Linda Randall’s apartment building, my thoughts and emotions a far more furious thunderstorm than the one now rolling away from the city, out over the vastness of the lake. I called a cab from the pay phone outside a gas station and stood about with my back resting against the wall of the building in the misting rain, scowling and waiting.
I had lost Murphy’s trust. It didn’t matter that I had done what I had to protect both her and myself. Noble intentions meant nothing. It was the results that counted. And the results of my actions had been telling a bald-faced lie to one of the only people I could come close to calling a friend. And I wasn’t sure that, even if I found the person or persons responsible, even if I worked out how to bring them down, even if I did Murphy’s job for her, that what had happened between us could ever be smoothed over.
My thoughts were on that topic and similar issues of doom and gloom when a man with a hat pulled low over his face began to walk past me, stopped halfway, then turned and drove his fist into my belly.
I had time to think, Not again, and then he struck me a second, and third time. Each blow drove into my guts, thrust me back against the unyielding wall, made me sick. My breath flew out of my mouth in a little, strangling gasp, and even if I’d had a spell already in mind, I wouldn’t have had the breath to speak it.
I sort of sagged when he stopped hitting me, and he threw me to the ground. We were at a well-lit gas station, just before midnight on a Saturday night, and anything he did was in full view of any cars going by. Surely, God, he didn’t plan on killing me. Though at the moment, I was too tired and achy to care.
I lay there for a moment, dazed. I could smell my attacker’s sweat and cologne. I could tell it was the same person who had jumped me the night before. He grabbed my hair, jerked my head up, and, with an audible snip of steel scissors, cut off a big lock of my hair. Then let me go.
My blood went cold.
My hair. The man had cut off my hair. It could be used in almost any kind of magic, any kind of deadly spell, and there wouldn’t be a damned thing I could do to stop it.
The man turned away, walking quickly, but not running. In a flood of panic and desperation, I leapt at his leg, got him around the knee, and yanked hard. I heard a distinctive little pop, and then the man screamed, “Son of a bitch!” and fell heavily to earth. One fist, one very large and knob-knuckled fist, was clutched around my hair. I tried to suck in a breath, and leapt for that hand.
My attacker’s hat had fallen off, and I recognized him—one of Johnny Marcone’s men who had followed me from the hotel on Thursday afternoon, the one who had begun limping after jogging after me for several blocks. Apparently, Gimpy had a trick knee, and I had just made it jump through its hoop.
I grabbed his wrist and held on with both hands. I’m not a particularly strong man, but I’m made out of wire, and stubborn as hell. I curled up around his wrist and hung on, trying to pry at his thick fingers. Gimpy tried to jerk his arm away. He was carrying a lot of muscle on that arm, but it wasn’t enough to move the weight of my whole body. He shoved at me with his other arm, trying to push me off of him, then started pounding at me with one fist.
“Let go of me, dammit,” Gimpy shouted. “Get off of me!”
I hunched my head down, my shoulders up, and hung on. If I could dig my thumbs into his tendons for long enough, his hand would have to open, no matter how strong he was. I tried to imagine his wrist as Play-Doh and my thumbs as solid steel, pushing into him, and held on for everything I was worth. I felt his fingers start to loosen. I could see the dark, thin strands of my hair.
“Jesus Christ,” someone shouted. “Hey, Mike, come on!”
There were running footsteps.
And then a couple of young guys dressed in jogging suits and sneakers came over and dragged me off Gimpy. I screamed, incoherently, as my hands slipped from
Gimpy’s wrist. Some of my hair spilled out, onto the wet concrete, but more stayed in his grip as his fingers closed over it again.
“Easy, easy, man,” one of the guys was saying as they dragged me off. “Take it easy.”
There wasn’t any use struggling against the pair of them. Instead, I dragged in a breath and managed to gasp, “Wallet. He’s got my wallet.”
Considering the way I was dressed, compared to Gimpy’s suit and coat, that was one lie that was never going to get off the ground. Or at least, it wouldn’t have, if Gimpy hadn’t turned and started hurrying away. The two men let me go, confused. Then, taking the cautious route, they started away, walking hurriedly back to their car.
I struggled to my feet and after Gimpy, wheezing like a leaky accordion. Gimpy headed across the street to a car, and was already in it and leaving by the time I got there. I shambled to a halt in a cloud of his exhaust, and stared dully after his taillights as he drove off into the misting rain.
My heart pounded in my chest and didn’t slow down even after I recovered my breath. My hair. Johnny Marcone now had a lock of my hair. He could give it to someone who used magic, and use it to do whatever they damn well pleased to me.
They could use my hair to tear my heart from my chest, rip it right out, like they had done to Jennifer Stanton, Tommy Tomm, and poor Linda Randall. Marcone had warned me to stop, twice, and now he was going to take me out once and for all.
My weariness, fear, and fatigue were abruptly burned away by anger. “Like hell,” I snarled. “Like hell you will!”
All I had to do was to find them, find Johnny Marcone, find Gimpy, and find Marcone’s wizard, whoever he or she was. Find them, get my hair back, lay them out like ninepins, and send in Murphy to round them up.
By God, I wasn’t going to take this lying down. These assholes were serious. They’d already tried to kill me once, and they were coming after me again. Marcone and his boys—
No, I thought. Not Marcone. That didn’t make any sense, unless it had been Marcone’s gang dealing the ThreeEye from the very beginning. If Marcone had a wizard in residence, why would he have tried to bribe me away? Why not just swipe a lock of hair from me when he’d sent the thug with the bat, and then kill me when I didn’t pay attention?
