by Jim Butcher
I checked in the first bedroom. It, too, was more Thomas’s style. There was a king-sized bed with no head or foot, only the metal frame to support it. It had white sheets, several pillows in white cases, and a big, dark blue comforter on top. All of them were disheveled. The closet door stood open, and more clothes lay around on the floor. Two laundry baskets of fresh, neatly folded and ironed clothing (mostly empty) sat on a dresser with three of its drawers slightly open. There was a bookshelf haphazardly saturated with fiction of every description, and a clock radio. A pair of swords, one of them an old U.S. Cavalry saber, the other a more musketeer-looking weapon, were leaned against the wall, where they’d be more or less within reach of anyone in the bed.
I went back to the hall and shook my head at the rest of the apartment. “It’s a disguise,” I told Mouse. “The front of the apartment. He wants it to give a certain impression. He makes sure no one gets to see the rest.”
Mouse tilted his head and looked at me.
“Maybe I should just leave him a note.”
The phone rang, and I about jumped out of my skin. After I made sure I wasn’t having a cardiac episode, I padded back out to the living room, debating whether or not to answer it. I decided not to. It was probably building security calling to check up on the stranger who had walked in with a pet woolly mammoth. If I answered and Thomas wasn’t here, they might get suspicious. More suspicious. If I let them eat answering machine, they’d still be uncertain. I waited.
The answering machine beeped, and my brother’s recorded voice said, “You know the drill.” It beeped again.
A woman’s voice poured out of the answering machine like warm honey. “Thomas,” she said. She had a polyglot of a European accent, and pronounced his name “toe-moss,” accent on the second syllable. “Thomas,” she continued. “It is Alessandra, and I am desperate for you. Please, I need to see you tonight. I know that there are others, that there are so many others, but I can’t stand it anymore, and I must have you.” Her tone lowered, thick with sensuality. “There is no one, no one else who can do for me what you do. Do not disappoint me, I beg you.” She left her number, and her voice made it sound like foreplay. By the time she hung up, I had begun to feel uncomfortably voyeuristic for listening.
I sighed and told Mouse, “I so need to get laid.”
At least now I knew what Thomas had been feeding his Hunger. Alessandra and “so many others” must be supplying him. I felt…ambiguous about that. He could feed the demonic portion of his nature on many different victims, effectively spreading out the damage he inflicted upon them in a bid to avoid fatally overfeeding upon any one of them. Even so, it meant that there were a number of lives who had been tainted by his embrace, women who had become addicted to the sensation of being fed upon—who were now under his influence, subject to his control.
It was power, of a sort, and power tends to corrupt. Wielding such authority over others would provide a great many temptations. And Thomas had been distant of late. Very distant.
I took a deep breath and said, “Don’t get carried away, Harry. He’s your brother. Innocent until proven guilty, right?
“Right,” I replied to myself.
I decided to leave Thomas a note. I didn’t have any paper handy. The stylishly sterile kitchen and living room yielded none—nor did the bedroom. I shook my head, muttering about people who couldn’t organize their way out of a paper bag, and checked in the second bedroom.
I flicked on the light, and my heart stopped.
The room looked like the office of Rambo’s accountant. There was a desk and computer against one wall. Tables lined two of the other walls. One of them was dedicated to the neatly organized disassembly of a pair of weapons—submachine guns I didn’t recognize right away. I did, however, recognize the kit for home-converting the weapons from legal semiautomatics to fully illegal automatics. A second table looked like a workbench, with the necessary tools to modify weapons and custom-assemble ammunition. It would not be difficult to create explosive devices, such as pipe bombs, with what he had there, if the heavy storage containers under the table contained, as I suspected, explosive compounds.
A nasty thought went through my mind: They could just as easily be used to create incendiaries.
One wall was covered with corkboard. There were papers tacked up on it. Maps. Photographs.
I walked over to the photos with heavy, reluctant feet.
There were photos of dead women.
I recognized them all.
The victims.
The photos were those Instamatic kind. They were a little grainy, the images lit by the harsh glare of a flashbulb, but they covered many of the same angles as the police photos. There was one difference, though. The police photos had all been neatly indexed, with small placards with large, printed numbers appearing in each shot, accompanied by a meticulous written diagram recording their relative positions and what they showed, locking the scene down for future reference.
Thomas’s photos did not have any such placards.
Which meant that they could only have been taken before the police got there.
Holy shit.
What was my brother thinking? Leaving all of this stuff sitting out here like this? Anyone who came by with an only slightly biased point of view would come to the conclusion that he had been at all of those sites before the police. That he was a killer. I mean, I was his brother, and even I thought that it looked damned peculiar….
“Hell’s bells.” I sighed to Mouse. “Can this day get any worse?”
A heavy, confident hand delivered a short series of knocks to the apartment’s door. “Security,” called a man’s voice. “Here with Chicago police. Open the door, please, sir.”
Chapter Eight
I had only a few seconds to think. If security had called in a cop, they were thinking I might be trouble. If I came off as something suspicious, they’d probably take a look around as a matter of course. If that happened, and they found what was in my brother’s war room, I’d be buying us both more kinds of trouble than I could count.
I needed a lie. A really good, really believable lie. I shut the door to Thomas’s war room and bedroom and stared around the immaculate, stylish, tracklit living room, trying to think of one. I stared at Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion, looking for inspiration. Nothing. The Pirate King, with his white shirt manfully open to his waist, didn’t give me any ideas either.
And then it hit me. Thomas had already established the lie. He’d used it before, no less—and it was just his style of camouflage, too. All I had to do was play up to it.
“I can’t believe I’m about to do this,” I told Mouse.
Then I set my coat and staff aside, took a deep breath, flounced to the door, opened it, and demanded, “He sent you, didn’t he? Don’t try to lie to me!”
A patrol cop—God, she looked young—regarded me with a polite, bored expression. “Um, sir?”
“Thomas!” I snarled, pronouncing it the same way as the woman on the answering machine. “He’s not man enough to have come to meet me himself, is he? He sent his bully boys to do it for him!”
The cop let out a long-suffering breath. “Sir, please, let’s stay calm here.” She turned to the building’s security guy, a nervous-looking, balding man in his forties. “Now, according to building security, you aren’t a known resident, but you’ve entered with a key. It’s standard procedure for them to ask a few questions.”
“Questions?” I said. It was hard not to lisp. So hard. But that might have been too much. I settled for saying everything in my Murphy impersonation voice. “Why don’t you start with why he hasn’t called me? Hmm? After giving me his spare key? Ask him why he hasn’t come to visit the baby!” I pointed an accusatory finger at Mouse. “Ask him what excuse he has this time!”
The cop looked as if she had a headache. She blinked at me once, lifted a hand to her mouth, coughed, and stepped aside, gesturing to the security guy.
“He’d better not have!” I said. “I have given him years, years, and I will not be cast aside like last season’s shoes!” I shook my head and told the young cop, in an aside voice, “Never date a beautiful man. It isn’t worth what you have to put up with.”
“Sir,” the security man said. “I’m sorry to, um, intrude. But part of what our residents pay for is security. May I see your key, please?”
“I can’t believe that he never even…” I trailed off into a mutter, got the key out of my coat pocket, and showed it to him.
The security guy took it, squinted at it, and checked a number on its back against a list on his clipboard. “This is one of the resident’s original keys,” he confirmed.
“That’s right. Thomas gave it to me,” I said.
“I see,” the security man said. “Um. Would you mind if I saw some photo ID, sir? I’ll put a copy in our file, so this won’t, um…happen again.”
I was going to kill my brother later. “Of course not, sir,” I assured him, trying to appear mollified and reluctantly willing to be gracious. I got out my wallet and handed him my driver’s license. The cop glanced at it as it went by.
“I’ll be right back,” he told me, and hustled toward the elevator.
“Sorry about this,” the cop told me. “They get paid to be a little paranoid.”
“Not your fault, Officer,” I told her.
She regarded me thoughtfully for a moment. “So, you and the owner are, uh…”
“We’re something.” I sighed. “You can never get the pretty ones to come out and say exactly, can you?”
“Not generally, no,” she said. Her tone of voice stayed steady, her expression mild, but I knew a poker face when I saw one. “Do you mind if I ask what you’re doing here?”
I had to be careful. The young cop wasn’t dumb. She thought she smelled a rat.
I gestured forlornly at the dog. “We were living together in a tiny little place. We got a dog and didn’t know he was going to get so big. Thomas was feeling crowded, so he moved into his own place, and…” I shrugged and tried to look like Murphy did when talking about her exes. “We were supposed to switch off every month, but he always had some excuse. He didn’t want the dog slobbering around his little neat-freak world.” I gestured at the apartment.
The cop looked around and nodded politely. “Nice place.” But she hadn’t been convinced. Not completely. I saw her putting a few thoughts together, formulating more questions.
Mouse pulled it out of the fire for me. He padded over to the door, looked up at the cop.
“Good lord, he’s huge,” the cop said. She leaned slightly away from him.
“Oh, he’s a big softie, isn’t he,” I crooned to him, and ruffled his ears.
Mouse gave her a big doggy grin, sat, and offered her one of his paws.
She laughed and shook. She let Mouse sniff the back of her hand, and then scratched his ears herself.
“You know dogs,” I said.
“I’m in training for one of the K-9 units,” she confirmed.
“He likes you,” I said. “That’s unusual. He’s usually a great big chicken.”
She smiled. “Oh, I think dogs can tell when someone likes them. They’re smarter about that kind of thing than people give them credit for.”
“God knows, that seems to be smarter than I can ever manage.” I sighed. “What kind of dogs do they use at the K-9 units?”
“Oh, it varies a great deal,” she said, and started in on talking about candidates for police dogs. I kept her going with a couple of questions and a lot of interested nodding, and Mouse demonstrated his ability to sit and lie down and roll over. By the time the security guy and his apologetic expression got back, Mouse was sprawled on his back, paws waving languidly in the air, while the cop scratched his tummy and told me a pretty good dog story about her own childhood and an encounter with a prowler.
“Sir,” he said, handing my key and license back and trying not to look like he was carefully not touching me. “I apologize for the inconvenience, but as you are not a resident here, it is standard procedure for visitors to check in with the security personnel at the entrance when entering or leaving the building.”
“This is just typical of him,” I said. “Forgetting something like this. I probably should have called ahead and made sure he’d told you.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I hate to inconvenience you. But until we do have that written authorization from Mr. Raith that he wishes you to have full access, I need to ask you to leave. I know it’s just paperwork, but I’m afraid there’s no way around it.”
I sighed. “Typical. Just typical. And I understand you’re just doing your job, sir. Let me go to the bathroom and I’ll be right down.”
“Perfectly all right,” he told me. “Officer.”
The cop stood up from Mouse and gave me a lingering look. Then she nodded, and the pair of them headed back down the hall.
I let Mouse back in, then closed the door most of the way and Listened, narrowing the focus of my attention until nothing existed but sound and silence.
“Are you sure?” the cop asked the security guy.
“Oh, absolutely,” he said. “Toe-moss,” he said, emphasizing the pronunciation, “is as queer as a three-dollar bill.”
“He have any other men here?”
“Once or twice,” the man said. “This tall one is new, but he does have one of the original keys.”
“He could have stolen it,” the cop said.
“An NBA-sized gay burglar who works with a dog?” the security guy replied. “We’ll make sure he’s not stealing the fridge when he comes out. If Raith is missing anything, we’ll point him right at this guy. We’ve got him on video, eyewitnesses putting him in the apartment, a copy of his driver’s license, for crying out loud.”
“If they’re in a relationship,” the cop said, “how come this Raith guy never cleared his boyfriend?”
“You know how queers are, the way they sleep around,” the security guy said. “He was just covering his ass.”
“So to speak,” the cop said.
Security guy missed the irony in her tone, and let out a smug chuckle. “Like I said. We’ll watch him.”
“Do that,” the cop said. “I don’t like it, but if you’re sure.”
“I don’t want a jilted queen making a big scene. No one wants that.”
“Heavens, no,” the cop said, her tone flat.
I eased the door shut and said to Mouse, “Thank God for bigotry.”
Mouse tilted his head at me.
“Bigots see something they expect and then they stop thinking about what is in front of them,” I told him. “It’s probably how they got to be bigots in the first place.”
Mouse looked unenlightened and undisturbed by it.
“We’ve only got a couple of minutes if I want them to stay complacent,” I said quietly. I looked around the apartment for a minute. “No note,” I said. “Not necessary now.”
I went back to the war room, turned on the light, and stared at the huge corkboard wall with its maps, notes, pictures, and diagrams. There was no time to make sense of it.
I closed my eyes for a moment, lowered certain mental defenses I’d held in place for a considerable while, and cast a thought into the vaults of my mind: Take a memo.
Then I stepped up to the wall and scanned my eyes over it, not really stopping to take in any information. I caught glimpses of each photo and piece of paper. It took me maybe a minute. Then I turned the lights back out, gathered my things, and left.
I breezed out of the elevators, stopping at the security guy’s desk. He nodded at me and waved me out, and Mouse and I departed the building, secure in our heterosexuality.
Then I went back to my car and headed home to seek counsel
from a fallen angel.
Chapter Nine
I picked up some burgers, four for me and four for Mouse, and went home. I got onion rings, too, but Mouse didn’t get any because my class-four hazmat suit was at the cleaners.
Mister, of course, got an onion ring, because he has seniority. He ate some, batted the rest around the kitchen floor for a minute, then mrowled to be let outside for his evening ramble.
By the time I’d eaten it was after ten, and I was entertaining thoughts of putting off more investigation until after a full night’s sleep. Pulling all-nighters was getting to be more difficult than it had been when I was twenty and full of what my old mentor Ebenezar McCoy would term “vinegar.”
Staying awake wasn’t the issue: If anything, it was far easier to ignore fatigue and maintain concentration these days. Recovering from it was a different story. I didn’t bounce back from sleep deprivation quite as quickly as I used to, and a missed night’s sleep tended to make me grouchy for a couple of days while I got caught up. Too, my body was still recovering from way too many injuries suffered in previous cases. If I’d been a normal human being, I’d probably be walking around with a collection of scars, residual pain, and stiff joints, like an NFL lineman at the tail end of an injury-plagued career, or a boxer who had been hit too many times.
But I wasn’t normal. Whatever it is that allows me to use magic also gives me a greatly enhanced life span—and an ability to eventually recover from injuries that would, in a normal person, be permanently disabling. That didn’t really help me much on an immediate, day-to-day basis, but given what my body’s gone through, I’m just as glad that I could get better, with enough work and enough time. Losing a hand is bad for anyone. Living for three or four centuries with one hand would, in the words of my generation, blow goats.
Sleep would be nice. But Thomas might need my help. I’d get plenty of sleep when I was dead.