by Butcher, Jim
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 Murphy 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 tal
k 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?
Could it be Marcone? Or could his thug be playing two sides of the street?
I decided that ultimately it didn’t matter. One thing was clear: Someone had a lock of my hair. Some wizard, somewhere, meant to kill me.
Whoever this wizard was, he wasn’t much good—I’d seen that when I’d wiped out his shadow-sending spell. He couldn’t stand up to me if I could force him into a direct confrontation—he might have a lot of moxie, and a lot of raw power, to harness the storms as he had and to slap a demon into servitude. But he was like a big, gawky teenager, new to his strength. I had more than just strength, more than just moxie. I had training, experience, and savvy on my side.
Besides. At the moment I was mad enough to chew up nails and spit out paper clips.
The Shadowman couldn’t take a shot at me yet. He didn’t have that kind of strength. He needed to wait for the storms that came each spring, and to use them to kill me. I had time. I had time to work. If I could just find out where they were, where Gimpy had taken my hair, I could go after
him.
The answer came to me in a flash, and it seemed simple. If the hair could be used as a link to the rest of me, I should be able to reverse it—to create a link from me back to the hair. Hell, maybe I could just set it on fire, burn it all up from my apartment. The formula for a spell like that would be screwy as hell, though. I needed Bob. Bob could help me work out a spell, figure out a formula like that in minutes instead of hours or days.
I grimaced. Bob was gone, and would be for almost another twenty-four hours. There was no way I could work out that formula in less than ten or twelve hours by myself, and I didn’t think my brain was coherent enough to come up with solid calculations at the moment, anyway.
I could have called Murphy. Murphy would have known where Marcone was lurking, and Gimpy would probably be nearby. She could have given me an idea, at least, of how to find Gentleman Johnny, Gimpy, and the Shadowman. But she never would, now. And even if she did, she’d demand to know the whole story, and after I’d told it to her, she’d try to take me into protective custody or something ridiculous like that.
I clenched my fists, hard, and my nails dug into my palms. I should trim them sometime—
I looked down at my nails. Then hurriedly crossed the street to stand under the gas station’s lights, and stared at my hands.
There was blood under my fingernails, where they’d bitten into Gimpy’s wrists. I threw back my head and laughed. I had everything I needed.
I moved back out of the misting rain and squatted down on the concrete sidewalk. I used a bit of chalk I keep in my duster pocket to sketch out a circle on the concrete, surrounding me. Then I scraped the blood out from under my nails and put it onto the concrete between my feet. It glistened in the fine, misty fall of rain.