by Jim Butcher
I took the gun in both hands, pointed it at the floor, drew back the hammer, and asked the door, “Who is it?”
There was a moment’s silence and then a calm, male voice asked, “Is Susan Rodriguez there?”
I glanced at Susan. She straightened more, her eyes flashing with anger, but she put the poker back in its stand beside the fireplace. Then she motioned to me and said, “Put it away. I know him.”
I uncocked the revolver, but I didn’t put it away as Susan crossed to the door and opened it.
The most bland-looking human being I had ever seen stood on the other side. He was maybe five nine, maybe one seventy-five. He had hair of medium brown, and eyes of the same ambiguous shade. He wore jeans, a medium-weight brown jacket, and worn tennis shoes. His face was unmemorable, neither appealing nor ugly. He didn’t look particularly strong, or craven, or smart, or particularly anything else.
“What are you doing here?” he asked Susan without preamble. His voice was like the rest of him—about as exciting as a W-2.
Susan said, “I told you I was going to talk to him.”
“You could have used the phone,” the man pointed out. “There’s no point to this.”
“Hi,” I said in a loud voice, and stepped up to my door. I towered over Blandman. And I had a great big gun in my hand, even if I did keep it pointed down at the floor. “I’m Harry Dresden.”
He looked me up and down and then looked at Susan.
Susan sighed. “Harry, this is Martin.”
“Hi, Martin,” I said. I switched my sidearm to my other hand and thrust mine at him. “Nice to meet you.”
Martin regarded my hand and then said, “I don’t shake hands.” That was evidently all the verbal interaction I merited, because he looked back at Susan and said, “We have to be up early.”
We? We?
I looked at Susan, who flushed with embarrassment. She glared at Martin and then said to me, “I need to go, Harry. I wish I could have stayed longer.”
“Wait,” I said.
“I wish I could,” she said. “I’ll try to call you before we go.”
There was that we again. “Go? Susan—”
“I’m sorry.” She stood up on tiptoe and kissed my cheek, her too-warm lips soft. Then she left, brushing past Martin just hard enough to jostle him into taking a little step to keep his balance.
Martin nodded to me and walked out too. After a minute I followed them, long enough to see them getting into a cab on the street outside.
We.
“Hell’s bells,” I muttered, and stalked back inside my house. I slammed the door behind me, lit a candle, stomped into my little bathroom, and turned on the shower. The water was only a couple degrees short of becoming sleet, but I stripped and got in anyway, simmering with several varieties of frustration.
We.
We, we, we. Which implied she and someone else together. Someone who was not me. Was she? Susan, with the Pedantic Avenger there? That didn’t track. I mean, hell’s bells, the guy was just so dull. Boring. Blasé.
And maybe stable.
Face it, Harry. Interesting you might be. Exciting you might be. Stable you ain’t.
I pushed my head under the freezing water and left it there. Susan hadn’t said they were together. Neither had he. I mean, that wouldn’t be why she had broken off the kiss. She had a really good reason to do that, after all.
But then again, it wasn’t like we were together. She’d been gone for better than a year.
A lot can change in a year.
Her mouth hadn’t. Or her hands. Or the curve of her body. Or the smoldering sensuality of her eyes. Or the soft sounds she made as she arched against me, her body begging me to—
I looked down at myself, sighed, and turned the water to its coldest setting.
I came out of the shower shriveled and turning blue, dried off, and got into bed.
I had just managed to get the covers warm so that I could stop shivering when my phone rang.
I swore sulfurously, got out of bed into the freezing air, snatched up the phone, and growled, “What.” Then, on the off chance it was Susan, I forced some calm into my voice and said, “I mean, hello?”
“Sorry to wake you, Harry,” said Karrin Murphy, the head of Chicago PD’s Special Investigations division. SI routinely handled any crime that fell between the cracks of the other departments, as well as being handed the really smelly cases no one else wanted. As a result, they wound up looking into all kinds of things that weren’t easily explained. Their job was to make sure that things were taken care of, and that everything typed up neatly into the final report.
Murphy called me in as a consultant from time to time, when she had something weird that she didn’t know how to handle. We’d been working together for a while, and Murphy had gotten to where she and SI could handle your average, everyday supernatural riffraff. But from time to time, she ran into something that stumped her. My phone number is on her quick dial.
“Murph,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Unofficial business,” she said. “I’d like your take on something.”
“Unofficial means not paid, I guess,” I said.
“You up for any pro bono work?” She paused and then said, “This could be important to me.”
What the hell. My night had pretty much been shot anyway. “Where do you want me?”
“Cook County Morgue,” Murphy said. “I want to show you a corpse.”
Chapter Five
They don’t make morgues with windows. In fact, if the geography allows for it, they hardly ever make morgues above the ground. I guess it’s partly because it must be easier to refrigerate a bunch of coffin-sized chambers in a room insulated by the earth. But that can’t be all there is to it. Under the earth means a lot more than relative altitude. It’s where dead things fit. Graves are under the earth. So are Hell, Gehenna, Hades, and a dozen other reported afterlives.
Maybe it says something about people. Maybe for us, under the earth is a subtle and profound statement. Maybe ground level provides us with a kind of symbolic boundary marker, an artificial construct that helps us remember that we are alive. Maybe it helps us push death’s shadow back from our lives.
I live in a basement apartment and like it. What does that say about me?
Probably that I overanalyze things.
“You look pensive,” Murphy said. We walked down an empty hospital corridor toward the Cook County Morgue. We’d had to go the long way around so that I could avoid any areas with important medical equipment. My leather duster whispered around my legs as I walked. My blasting rod thumped against my leg rhythmically, where I’d tied it to the inside of the duster. I’d traded in my slacks for blue jeans and my dress shoes for hiking boots.
Murphy didn’t look like a monster-hunting Val-kyrie. Murphy looked like someone’s kid sister. She was five nothing, a hundred and nothing, and was built like an athlete, all springy muscle. Her blond hair hung down over her blue eyes, and was cut close in back. She wore nicer clothes than usual—a maroon blouse with a grey pantsuit—and she had on more makeup than was her habit. She looked every inch the professional businesswoman.
That said, Murphy was a monster-hunting Valkyrie. She was the only person I’d ever heard of who had killed one with a chainsaw.
“I said you look pensive, Harry,” she repeated, a little louder.
I shook my head and told Murphy, “I don’t like hospitals.”
She nodded. “Morgues spook me. Morgues and dogs.”
“Dogs?” I asked.
“Not like beagles or cocker spaniels or anything. Just big dogs.”
I nodded. “I like dogs. They give Mister something to snack on.”
Murphy gave me a smile. “I’ve seen you spooked. It doesn’t make you look like that.”
“What do I look like?” I asked.
Murphy pursed her lips, as though considering her words. “You look worried. And frustrated. And guilty. You know, romance things.
”
I gave her a wry glance, and then nodded. “Susan’s in town.”
Murphy whistled. “Wow. She’s…okay?”
“Yeah. As much as she can be.”
“Then why do you look like you just swallowed something that was still wriggling?”
I shrugged. “She’s in town to quit her job. And she was with someone.”
“A guy?” Murphy asked.
“Yeah.”
She frowned. “With him, or with him?”
I shook my head. “Just with him, I think. I don’t know.”
“She’s quitting her job?”
“Guess so. We’re going to talk, I think.”
“She said so?”
“Said she’d get in touch and we’d talk.”
Murphy’s eyes narrowed, and she said, “Ah. One of those.”
“Eh?” I said, and eyed her.
She lifted her hands, palms out. “None of my business.”
“Hell’s bells, Murph.”
She sighed and didn’t look up at me, and didn’t speak for a few steps. Finally she said, “You don’t set up a guy for a good talk, Harry.”
I stared at her profile, and then scowled down at my feet for a while. No one said anything.
We got to the morgue. Murphy pushed a button on the wall and said, “It’s Murphy,” at a speaker next to the door. A second later, the door buzzed and clicked. I swung open the door and held it for Murphy. She gave me an even look before she went through. Murphy does not respond well to chivalry.
The morgue was like others I’d seen, cold, clean, and brightly lit with fluorescent lights. Metal refrigerator doors lined one wall. An occupied autopsy table sat in the middle of the room, and a white sheet covered its subject. A rolling medical cart sat next to the autopsy table, another by a cheap office-furniture desk.
Polka music, heavy on accordion and clarinet, oompahed cheerfully through the room from a little stereo on the desk. At the desk sat a small man with a wild shock of black hair. He was dressed in medical scrubs and green bunny slippers, complete with floppy ears. He had a pen clenched in one hand, and scribbled furiously at a stack of forms.
When we came in, he held up a hand toward us, and finished his scribbling with a flourish, before hopping up with a broad smile. “Karrin!” he said. “Wow, you’re looking nice tonight. What’s the occasion?”
“Municipal brass are tromping around,” Murphy said. “So we’re all supposed to wear our Sunday clothes and smile a lot.”
“Bastards,” the little guy said cheerfully. He shot me a glance. “You aren’t supposed to be spending money on psychic consultants, either, I bet. You must be Harry Dresden.”
“That’s what it says on my underwear,” I agreed.
He grinned. “Great coat, love it.”
“Harry,” Murphy said, “this is Waldo Butters. Assistant medical examiner.”
Butters shook my hand, then turned to walk to the autopsy table. He snapped on some rubber gloves and a surgical mask. “Pleased to meet you, Mister Dresden,” he said over his shoulder. “Seems like every time you’re working with SI my job gets really interesting.”
Murphy chucked me on the arm with one fist, and followed Butters. I followed her.
“Masks on that tray to your left. Stay a couple of feet back from the table, and for God’s sake, don’t throw up on my floor.” We put on masks and Butters threw back the sheet.
I’d seen corpses before. Hell’s bells, I’d created some. I’d seen what was left of people who had been burned alive, savaged to death by animals, and who had died when their hearts exploded out of their chests, courtesy of black magic.
But I hadn’t ever seen anything quite like this. I shoved the thought to the back of my head, and tried to focus purely upon taking in details. It wouldn’t do to think too much, looking at this. Thinking too much would lead me to messing up Butters’s floor.
The victim had been a man, maybe a little over six feet tall, thin build. His chest looked like twenty pounds of raw hamburger. Fine grid marks stretched vertically from his collarbones to his belly, and horizontally across the width of his body. The cuts were spaced maybe a sixteenth of an inch apart, and the grid pattern slashed into the flesh looked nearly flawless. The cuts were deep ones, and I had the unsettling impression that I could have brushed my hand across the surface of that ruined body and sent chunks of flesh pattering to the floor. The Y-incision of the autopsy had been closed, at least. Its lines marred the precision of the grid of incisions.
The next thing I noticed were the corpse’s arms. Or rather, the missing bits of them. His left arm had been hacked off two or three inches above the wrist. The flesh around it gaped, and a shard of black-crusted bone poked out from it. His right arm had been severed just beneath the elbow, with similar hideous results.
My belly twitched and I felt myself taking one of those prevomit breaths. I closed my eyes for a second and forced the impending reaction down. Don’t think, Harry. Look. See what there is to see. That isn’t a man anymore. It’s just a shell. Throwing up won’t bring him back.
I opened my eyes again, tore my gaze from his mutilated chest and hands, and forced myself to study the corpse’s features.
I couldn’t.
His head had been hacked off, too.
I stared at the ragged stump of his neck. The head just wasn’t there. Even though that’s where heads go. Ditto his hands. A man should have a head. Should have hands. They shouldn’t simply be gone.
The impression it left on me was unsettling—simply and profoundly wrong. Inside me, some little voice started screaming and running away. I stared down at the corpse, my stomach threatening insurrection again. I stared at his missing head, but aloud all I said was, “Gee. Wonder what killed him.”
“What didn’t kill him,” Butters said. “I can tell you this much. It wasn’t blood loss.”
I frowned at Butters. “What do you mean?”
Butters lifted one of the corpse’s arms and pointed down at dark mottling in the dead grey flesh, just where the corpse’s back met the table. “See that?” he asked. “Lividity. If this guy had bled out, from his wrists or his neck either one, I don’t think there’d be enough blood left in the body to show this much. His heart would have just kept on pumping it out of his body until he died.”
I grunted. “If not one of the wounds, then what was it?”
“My guess?” Butters said. “Plague.”
I blinked and looked at him.
“Plague,” he said again. “Or more accurately plagues. His insides looked like models for a textbook on infection. Not all the tests have come back yet, but so far every one I’ve done has returned positive. Everything from bubonic plague to strep throat. And there are symptoms I’ve found in him that don’t match any disease I’ve ever heard of.”
“You’re telling me he died of disease?” I asked.
“Diseases. Plural. And get this. I think one of them was smallpox.”
“I thought smallpox was extinct,” Murphy said.
“Pretty much. They have some in vaults, probably some in some bioweapon research facilities, but that’s it.”
I stared at Butters for a second. “And we’re standing here next to his plague-ridden body why?”
“Relax,” Butters said. “The really nasty stuff wasn’t airborne. I disinfected the corpse pretty well. Wear your mask and don’t touch it, you should be fine.”
“What about the smallpox?” I said.
Butters’s voice turned wry. “You’re vaccinated.”
“This is dangerous, though, isn’t it? Having the body out like this?”
“Yeah,” Butters said, his voice frank. “But County is full, and the only thing that’s going to happen if I report an occurrence of free-range smallpox is another evaluation.”
Murphy shot me a warning look and stepped a very little bit between me and Butters. “You got a time of death?”
Butters shrugged. “Maybe forty-eight hours ago, tops. A
ll of those diseases seemed to sprout up at exactly the same time. I make cause of death as either shock or a massive failure and necrosis of several major organs, plus tissue damage from an outrageously high fever. It’s anyone’s guess as to which one gets the blue ribbon. Lungs, kidneys, heart, liver, spleen—”
“We get the point,” Murphy said.
“Let me finish. It’s like every disease the guy had ever had contact with all got together and planned when to hit him. It just isn’t possible. He probably had more germs in him than blood cells.”
I frowned. “And then someone Ginsued him after he died?”
Butters nodded. “Partly. Though the cuts on his chest weren’t postmortem. They had filled with blood. Tortured before he died, maybe.”
“Ugh,” I said. “Why?”
Murphy regarded the corpse without any emotion showing in her cool blue eyes. “Whoever cut him up must have taken the arms and hands to make it hard to identify him after he died. That’s the only logical reason I can think of.”
“Same here,” said Butters.
I frowned down at the table. “Why prevent identification of the corpse if it had died of disease?” Butters began to lower the arm slowly and I saw something as he did. “Wait, hold it.”
He looked up at me. I pressed closer to the table and had Butters lift the arm again. I had almost missed it against the rotted tone of the dead man’s flesh—a tattoo, maybe an inch square, located on the inside of the corpse’s biceps. It wasn’t fancy. Faded green ink in the shape of a symbolic open eye, not too different from the CBS network logo.
“See there?” I asked. Murphy and Butters peered at the tattoo.
“Do you recognize it, Harry?” Murphy asked.
I shook my head. “Almost looks old Egyptian, but with fewer lines. Hey, Butters, do you have a piece of paper?”
“Better,” Butters said. He got an old instant camera off the bottom tray of one of the medical carts, and snapped several shots of the tattoo. He passed one of them over to Murphy, who waved it around a little while the image developed. I got another.