Proven Guilty df-8

by Jim Butcher

  “Doesn’t seem like Charity agrees with you,” I said.

  Michael nodded. “She loves Molly very much. She’s terrified of the kinds of things that could happen to her little girl.” He glanced at the house. “Which brings me to a question for you.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is there some kind of dangerous situation developing?”

  I chewed on my lip and then nodded. “It seems probable, but I don’t have anything specific yet.”

  “Is my daughter involved in it?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” I told him. “Her boyfriend got arrested tonight. She talked me into bailing him out.”

  Michael’s eyes narrowed a little, but then he caught himself, and I saw him force the angry expression from his face. “I see. How in the world did you get her to come here?”

  “It was what I charged for my help,” I said. “She tried to back out, but I convinced her not to.”

  Michael grunted. “You threatened her?”

  “Politely,” I said. “I’d never hurt her.”

  “I know that,” Michael said, his tone gently reproving. Behind us, the front door opened. Molly stepped out onto the porch, hugging herself with her arms. She stood that way for a moment, ignoring us. A few seconds later, a light on the second floor came on. Charity, presumably, had gone back upstairs.

  Michael watched his daughter for a moment, pain in his eyes. Then he took a deep breath and said, “May I ask a favor of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Talk to her,” Michael said. “She likes you. Respects you. A few words from you might do more than anything I could tell her right now.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have to negotiate a treaty,” Michael said, smiling. “Just ask her to talk to her mother. To be willing to give a little.”

  “Compromise has to work both ways,” I said. “What about Charity?”

  “She’ll come around.”

  “Am I the only one who has noticed that Charity really doesn’t regard me with what most of the world thinks of as fairness? Or fondness? I am the last person in the world likely to get her to sit down for a reconciliation talk.”

  He smiled. “Have a little faith.”

  “Oh, please.” I sighed, but there wasn’t any real feeling behind it.

  “Will you try to help?” Michael asked.

  I scowled at him. “Yes.”

  He smiled at me, mostly in his eyes. “Thank you. I’m sorry you walked into the cross fire tonight.”

  “Molly told me there had been trouble at home. Bringing her here seemed like the right thing to do.”

  “I appreciate it.” Michael frowned, his eyes distant for a moment, then said, “I’ve got to get moving.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He met my eyes and said, “If something arises, will you keep an eye on them for me? It would make me feel a lot better to know you were watching over them until I return.”

  I glanced back at his house. “What happened to having faith?”

  He smiled. “Seems a bit lazy to expect the Lord to do all the work, doesn’t it?” His expression grew serious again. “Besides. I do have faith, Harry. In Him-and in you.”

  Demon-infested me writhed in uncomfortable guilt on the inside. “I’ll keep an eye on them, of course.”

  “Thank you,” Michael said, and put the truck in gear. “When I get back, I need to talk business with you, if you have the time.”

  I nodded. “Sure. Good hunting.”

  “God be with you,” he replied with a deep nod, and then he pulled out and left. Have sword, will travel. Hi-yo, Silver, away.

  Get Molly and Charity to sit down and talk things out. Right. I had about as much chance to do that as I did of backpacking my car to the top of Mount Rushmore. I was gloomily certain that even if I did manage to get them together, it would only make things go more spectacularly wrong once they were there. The whole house would probably go up in an explosion when mother met antimother.

  No good could come of this one. Why in the world had I agreed to it?

  Because Michael was my friend, and because I was in general too stupid to turn down people in need. And maybe because of something more. Michael’s house had always been fulll of hectic life, but it had been a place, in general, of talk and warmth and laughter and good food. The ugly shouts and snarls of Molly and Charity’s quarrel had stained the place. They didn’t belong there.

  I had never had a home like that, growing up. Even now that Thomas and I had found one another, when I thought of a family, I thought of the Carpenter household. I had never had that kind of intimacy, closeness. Those who have such a family seldom realize how rare and precious it is. It was something worth preserving. I wanted to help.

  And Michael had a point. I might have a chance to get through to Molly. That was only half the battle, so to speak, but it was probably more than he could manage from his own position.

  But whatever higher power arranged these things had a demented sense of timing, given how much I had on my plate already. Hell’s bells.

  Molly came over to me after Michael’s truck had vanished. She stood beside me in the quiet summer evening, silent.

  “I guess you need a ride back to your place,” I said.

  “I don’t have any money,” she replied quietly.

  “Okay,” I said. “Where do you need to go?”

  “The convention,” she replied. “I have friends there. A room for the weekend.” She glanced over her shoulder at the house.

  “The rug rats seemed glad to see you,” I observed.

  She smiled fleetingly and her voice warmed. “I didn’t realize how much I missed them. Dumb little Jawas.”

  I thought about nudging her toward her mother for a second, and decided against it. She might decide to do it if she wasn’t pressured, but the second she thought I was trying to force her into something, she’d dig in her heels. So all I said was, “They’re cute kids.”

  “Yes,” she replied quietly.

  “I’m heading for the convention anyway,” I told her. “Get in the cab.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome,” I said.

  Chapter Eleven

  When people say the word “convention,” they are usually referring to large gatherings of the employees of companies and corporations who attend a mass assembly, usually in a big hotel somewhere, for the purpose of pretending to learn stuff when they are in fact enjoying a free trip somewhere, time off work, and the opportunity to flirt with strangers, drink, and otherwise indulge themselves.

  The first major difference between a business convention and a fan-dom convention is that fandom doesn’t bother with the pretenses. They’re just there to have a good time. The second difference is the dress code- the ensembles at a fan convention tend to be considerably more novel.

  SplatterCon!!! (apparently the name of the con was misspelled if the three exclamation points were left out) had populated the hotel with all kinds of costumed fans, unless maybe the costumes were actually clothing trends. Once in a while, it gets hard to tell make-believe and avant-garde fashion apart. The hotel had an entry atrium, which in turn branched off into a pair of long, wide hallways leading to combination ball- and dining rooms, the ones with those long, folding partitions that can be used to break the larger rooms up into smaller halls for seminars and talk panels and so on. There were a couple hundred people in sight, and I could see more entering and leaving various panel rooms.

  “I kind of expected a few more people to be here,” I said to Molly. I had stopped at my apartment to grab my stuff and drop off Mouse.

  “It’s Thursday night,” she said, as if that should be significant. “And it’s getting late, at least for a weeknight. We have more than three thousand people already registered.”

  “Is that a lot?”

  “For a first-year convention? It’s a Mongol horde.” There was pride in her voice as she spoke. “A
nd we have a really young staff, to boot. But old hands at putting conventions together.” She went on like that for a few moments, naming names and citing their experience as though she expected me to whip out a licensing manual or something to make sure the convention was up to code.

  Two girls, both too young for me to think adult thoughts about, sidled by in black-and-purple clothing and makeup that left a lot of skin bare, their faces painted pale, trickles of fake blood at the corners of their mouths. One of them smiled at me, and she had fangs.

  I had my hand on my staff and the harsh, clear scent of wood smoke filled my nose before I stopped myself from unleashing an instant, violent, and noisily pyrotechnic assault upon the vampire five feet from me. A second’s study showed irregular lumps and finger marks on the teeth-the girls had probably made them with their own fingers from craft plastic. I let out my breath in a steady exhalation and relaxed again, releasing the power I’d begun to channel through my staff.

  Relax, Harry. Hell’s bells, that would be a great story for the papers. Professional Wizard Incinerates Amateur Vampire. News at ten.

  The two girls went on by, none the wiser, and even Molly only frowned at them and then back at me for a second, her face tilted into an expression of silent inquiry.

  I shook my head. “Sorry, sorry. Been a long day already. Look, I need to get a look at the bathroom where this theater owner was attacked.”

  “All right,” Molly said. “But first we’ll get you a name tag at registration.”

  “We will?” I asked. “Why?”

  “Because you’re not supposed to have access to the convention if you haven’t registered for it,” she said. “Con security and hotel security might get confused. It would be inconvenient for you.”

  “Right,” I said. “Good thinking. I’m not sure how I’d react to inconvenience.”

  I followed her over to a set of tables set up to receive dozens or hundreds of people at once, each designated with white paper signs marked with “A-D,” “E-J,” and so on down the alphabet. A tired-looking, brown-haired woman of early middle age sat behind the first table, doing some kind of paperwork.

  “Molly,” she said, and her voice warmed with tired but genuine pleasure. “Who is your friend?”

  “Harry Dresden,” Molly said. “This is Sandra Marling. She’s the convention chair.”

  “You’re a horror fan?” Sandra Marling asked me.

  “My life is all about horror, these days.”

  “You should find plenty here to entertain you,” she assured me. “We’re showing movies in several rooms as well as in the theater, and there’s the vendors’ room, and some autograph signings tomorrow, and of course there are several parties active already, and the costume contests are always fun to watch.”

  “Isn’t that something,” I said, and tried not to drown in my enthusiasm.

  “Sandy,” Molly said, stepping in, “I want to use my freebie for Harry, here.”

  Sandra nodded. “Oh, Rosanna was looking for you a few minutes ago. Have you spoken to her yet?”

  “Not since this afternoon,” Molly said, and fretted at her lower lip. “Did she remember to take her vitamins?”

  “Rest easy, girl. I reminded her for you.”

  Molly looked visibly relieved. “Thank you.”

  Sandra, meanwhile, had me filling out a registration form, which I scribbled through fairly quickly. At the end, she passed me a plastic badge folded around a card that said, SPLATTERCON!!! HI, I’m… She gave me a black ink marker to go with it and said, “Sorry, the printer’s been off-line all day. Just write your name in.”

  I promptly wrote the words An Innocent Bystander onto the name tag before folding it up in the plastic badge and pinning it to my shirt.

  “I hope you enjoy SplatterCon, Harry,” Sandra said.

  I picked up a schedule and glanced at it. “Make Your Own Blood and Custom Fangs” at ten A.M., to be followed by “How to Scream Like a Pro.”

  “I don’t see how I can avoid being entertained.”

  Molly gave me a level look as we walked away. “You don’t have to make fun of it.”

  “Actually I do,” I said. “I make fun of almost everything.”

  “It’s mean,” she said. “Sandra has poured her whole life into this convention for a year, and I don’t want to see her feelings hurt.”

  “Where do you know her from?” I asked. “Not church, I guess.”

  Molly looked at me obliquely for a second and then said, “She’s a part-time volunteer at one of the shelters where I’m doing community service.

  She helped Nelson out when he was younger. Rosie too, and her boyfriend.“

  I lifted a hand in acquiescence. “Fine, fine. I’ll play nice.”

  “Thank you,” she said, her voice still prim. “It’s very adult of you.”

  I started to get annoyed, but was struck by the disturbing thought that if I did, I would be coming down on the same side of the situation as Charity, which might be one of the signs of the apocalypse.

  Molly led me down to the end of one of the long conference room hallways, where there were the usual restroom doors. One of them had been marked over with three bars of police tape, shutting it, and a uniformed cop sat in a chair beside the door.

  The cop was a large black man, grey in his hair at the temples, and he sat with the chair leaned on its rear two legs so that his head rested back against the wall. He had on his uniform, but had added on a SplatterCon!!! name tag. He had filled in the name on the card with a marker, too, though his blocky script under the HI, I’m read An Authority Figure. The uniform name stripe on his shirt read RAWLINS.

  “Well now,” the cop said as I walked over to him. He opened his mostly closed eyes and gave me a wary smile. He read my name tag and snorted. “It’s the consultant guy. Thinks he’s a wizard.”

  “Rawlins,” I said, smiling, and offered him my hand. He took it, his grip lazily strong.

  “So you’re one of those horror movie fans, huh?” he rumbled.

  “Um, yes,” I said.

  He snorted again.

  “I was sort of hoping I could get into the bathroom there.”

  Rawlins pursed his lips. “There’s two more on this floor. One’s back near the front desk, and there’s another at the end of the other conference hall.”

  “I like this one,” I said.

  Rawlins squinted at me and said, “Maybe you can’t read so good. You see that tape there, says crime scene and such?”

  “The bright yellow and black stuff?” I asked.

  “That’s it exactly.”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, that’s what we police use when we have a crime scene and we don’t want nosy private investigators stomping all over it in their big boots and contaminating everything,” he drawled.

  “What if I promise to walk on tippy toe?”

  “Then I promise I will stop bouncing you off walls just as soon as I think you’re not resisting arrest,” he said in a cheerful tone. The smile faded a little and his eyes hardened. “It’s a crime scene. No.”

  “Molly,” I said quietly. “Would you mind if I talked to the officer alone?”

  “Sure,” she said. “There are things I need to handle anyway. Excuse me.” She walked away without looking back.

  “Do you mind talking about it?” I asked Rawlins.

  “Naw,” he said. “Look, you seem okay, Dresden. I’ll talk. But I’m not letting you in there.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because it might make things harder on the kid we took in for it.”

  I frowned and tilted my head. “Yeah?”

  Rawlins nodded. “Kid didn’t do it,” he said. “But hotel security cameras show him going in there, then the victim, and no one else. And I was sitting right here in this spot the whole time. I’m sure no one else went in or out.”

  “So how do you know the kid didn’t attack the old man?” I asked.

  Rawlins gave an easy shr
ug. “Didn’t fit him. He wasn’t breathing hard, and giving a beating runs you out of breath quick. No damage to his hands or knuckles. No blood on him.”

  “So why’d you arrest him?” I asked.

  “Because the record shows that there’s no one else who could have done it,” Rawlins said. “And because the old man was too out of it to talk and clear him. Kid didn’t beat on the old man, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t in with whoever did. I figured maybe he knows how the attacker got in and out unseen, so I took him down and booked him. I figured if he was an accomplice, he’d spill rather than take the whole fall himself.” Rawlins grimaced. “But he didn’t spill. Didn’t know a damn thing.”

  “Then why’d he get put away?” I asked.

  “Didn’t know he had a record until the paperwork was already going. Repeat offender got a real steep hill to climb as a suspect. Makes it look bad for him. He might take the fall on this even if he’s innocent.”

  I shook my head. “You’re sure no one could have gone in or out?”

  “I was right here,” he said. “Anyone went past me without me noticing, they were a Jedi Knight or something.”

  “Or something,” I muttered, glancing at the door.

  “The girlfriend,” Rawlins said, nodding after the departed Molly. “She get you involved in this?”

  “Daughter of a friend,” I said, nodding. “Bailed him out.”

  Rawlins grunted. “Damn shame for that kid. I played it by the book, but…” He shook his head. “Sometimes the book don’t do enough.”

  “The girl thinks he’s innocent,” I said.

  “The girl always thinks they’re innocent, Dresden,” Rawlins said, without malice. “Problem is that there’s pretty good evidence that says he ain’t. Good enough to send a repeat offender upstate, unless the lab guys find something in there or on the old man to clear him. Which brings us back to why you ain’t going in.”

  I nodded, frowning. “What if I told you it might be something weird?”

  He shrugged. “What if you did?”

  “Might be something that I could recognize, if I could just get a look at the room. I might be able to help the kid.”