Turn Coat

by Butcher, Jim

“You are a cruel and devious young woman.” I took the card from her and read it. It said: Smith Cohen Mackleroy, listed a phone number, and had the name “Evelyn Derek” printed under that.

  I looked up to meet Molly’s smiling eyes. Her grin widened. “Damn, I’m good.”

  “No argument here,” I told her. “Now we have a name, a lead. One might even call it a clue.”

  “Not only that,” Molly said. “I have a date.”

  “Good work, grasshopper,” I said, grinning as I rolled my eyes. “Way to take one for the team.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Smith Cohen and Mackleroy, as it turned out, was an upscale law firm in downtown Chicago. The building their offices occupied stood in the shadow of the Sears Tower, and must have had a fantastic view of the lake. Having plucked out the enemy’s eyes, so to speak, I thought that I might have bought us some breathing space. Without Vince on our tail, I hoped that Morgan could get a few hours of rest in relative safety.

  I’d figure out somewhere else to move him—just as soon as I leaned on Ms. Evelyn Derek and found out to whom she reported Vince’s findings.

  I guess I looked sort of mussed and scraggly, because the building’s security guard gave me a wary look as I entered solidly in the middle of lunch hour. I could practically see him deciding whether or not to stop me.

  I gave him my friendliest smile—which my weariness and stress probably reduced to merely polite—and said, “Excuse me, sir. I have an appointment with an attorney at Smith Cohen and Mackleroy. They’re on the twenty-second floor, right?”

  He relaxed, which was good. Beneath his suit, he looked like he had enough muscle to bounce me handily out the door. “Twenty-four, sir.”

  “Right, thanks.” I smiled at him and strode confidently past. Confidence is critical to convincing people that you really are supposed to be somewhere—especially when you aren’t.

  “Sir,” said the guard from behind me. “I’d appreciate it if you left your club here.”

  I paused and looked over my shoulder.

  He had a gun. His hand wasn’t exactly resting on it, but he’d tucked his thumb into his belt about half an inch away.

  “It isn’t a club,” I said calmly. “It’s a walking stick.”

  “Six feet long.”

  “It’s traditional Ozark folk art.”

  “With dents and nicks all over it.”

  I thought about it for a second. “I’m insecure?”

  “Get a blanket.” He held out his hand.

  I sighed and passed my staff over to him. “Do I get a receipt?”

  He took a notepad from his pocket and wrote on it. Then he passed it over to me. It read: Received, one six foot traditional Ozark walking club from Mr. Smart-ass.

  “That’s Doctor Smart-ass,” I said. “I didn’t spend eight years in insult college to be called Mister.”

  He leaned the staff against the wall behind his desk and sat back down at his chair.

  I went to the elevator and rode up. It was one of those express contraptions that goes fast enough to compress your spine and make your ears pop. It opened on the twenty-fourth floor facing a reception desk. The law office, apparently, took up the entire floor.

  The receptionist was, inevitably, a young woman, and just as unavoidably attractive. She went with the solid-oak furnishings, the actual oil paintings, and the handcrafted furniture in the reception area, and the faint scent of lemon wood polish in the air—variations on a theme of beautiful practicality.

  She looked up at me with a polite smile, her dark hair long and appealing, her shirt cut just low enough to make you notice, but not so low as to make you think less of her. I liked the smile. Maybe I didn’t look like a beaten-up bum. Maybe on me it just looked ruggedly determined.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, “but the addiction-counseling center is on twenty-six.”

  Sigh.

  “I’m actually here to see someone,” I said. “Assuming that this is Smith Cohen and Mackleroy?”

  She glanced rather pointedly—but still politely—at the front of her desk, where a plaque bore the firm’s name in simple sans serif lettering. “I see, sir. Who are you looking for?”

  “Ms. Evelyn Derek, please.”

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No,” I said. “But she’ll want to talk to me.”

  The receptionist looked at me as though she had some kind of bitter, unpleasant taste in her mouth. I’d timed my arrival correctly, then. The young lady clearly would have been much more comfortable handing me off to a secretary, or executive assistant, or whatever you’re supposed to call them now, and letting someone else decide if I was supposed to be there. And Ms. Evelyn Derek’s assistant was just as clearly out to lunch, which was the point of showing up during lunch hour. “Who shall I say is here?”

  I produced Vincent Graver’s business card and passed it to her. “Please tell her that Vince has acquired some unexpected information and that she needs to hear about it.”

  She pushed a button, adjusted her headset, and dutifully passed on the message to whoever was on the other end. She listened and nodded. “Straight back down the hall, sir, the second door on the left.”

  I nodded to her and walked through the door behind her. The carpet got even thicker and the decor more expensive. A nook in the wall showcased a small rock fountain between a pair of two-thousand-dollar leather chairs. I shook my head as I walked through a hall that absolutely reeked of success, power, and the desire for everyone to know about it.

  I bet they would have been seethingly jealous of the Ostentatiatory in Edinburgh.

  I opened the second door on the left, went in, and closed it behind me, to find a secretary’s desk, currently unoccupied, and an open door to what would doubtless be an executive office appropriate to the status of Evelyn Derek, attorney at law.

  “Come in, Mr. Graver,” said an impatient woman’s voice from inside the office.

  I walked in and shut the door behind me. The office was big, but not monstrous. She probably wasn’t a full partner in the firm. The furnishings were sleek and ultramodern, with a lot of glass and space-age metal. There was only one small filing cabinet in the room, a shelf with a row of legal texts, a slender and fragile-looking laptop computer, and a framed sheepskin from somewhere expensive on the wall. She had a window, but it had been frosted over into bare translucency. The glass desk and sitting table and liquor cabinet all shone, without a smudge or a fingerprint to be seen anywhere. It had all the warmth of an operating theater.

  The woman typing on the laptop might have come with the office as part of a complete set. She wore rimless glasses in front of the deepest green eyes I had ever seen. Her hair was raven black, and cut close to her head, showcasing her narrow, elegant features and the slender line of her neck. She wore a dark silk suit jacket with a matching skirt and a white blouse. She had long legs, ending in shoes that must have cost more than most mortgage payments, but she wore no rings, no earrings, and no necklace. There was something cold and reserved about her posture, and her fingers struck the keys at a rapid, decisive cadence, like a military drummer.

  She said nothing for two full minutes, focusing intently on whatever she was typing. Obviously, she had something to prove to Vince for daring to intrude upon her day.

  “I hope you don’t think you can convince me to rehire you, Mr. Graver,” she said, eventually, without looking up. “What is it that you think is so important?”

  Ah. Vince had quit already. He didn’t let much grass grow under his feet, did he?

  This woman was evidently used to being taken very seriously. I debated several answers and decided to start things off by annoying her.

  I know. Me. Shocking, right?

  I stood there treating her the same way she had treated me, saying nothing, until Evelyn Derek exhaled impatiently through her nose and turned a cool and disapproving stare toward me.

  “Hi, cuddles,” I said.

  I’ll gi
ve the lady this much—she had a great poker face. The disapproval turned into a neutral mask. She straightened slightly in her chair, though she looked more attentive than nervous, and put her palms flat on the desktop.

  “You’re going to leave smudges,” I said.

  She stared at me for a few more seconds before she said, “Get out of my office.”

  “I don’t see any Windex in here,” I mused, looking around.

  “Did you hear me?” she said, her voice growing harder. “Get. Out.”

  I scratched my chin. “Maybe it’s in your secretary’s desk. You want me to get it for you?”

  Spots of color appeared on her cheeks. She reached for the phone on her desk.

  I pointed a finger at it, sent out an effort of will, and hissed, “Hexus.”

  Fouling up technology is a fairly simple thing for a wizard to do. But it isn’t surgical in its precision. Sparks erupted from the phone, from her computer, from the overhead lights, and from something inside her coat pocket, accompanied by several sharp popping sounds.

  Ms. Derek let out a small shriek and tried to flinch in three directions at once. Her chair rolled backward without her, and she wound up sprawled on the floor behind her glass-topped desk in a most undignified manner. Her delicate-looking glasses hung from one ear, and her deep green eyes were wide, the whites showing all around them.

  Purely for effect, I walked a couple of steps closer and stood looking down at her in silence for a long moment. There was not a sound in that room, and it was a lot darker in there without the lights.

  I spoke very, very quietly. “There are two shut doors between you and the rest of this office—which is mostly empty anyway. You’ve got great carpets, solid-oak paneling, and a burbling water feature out in the hallway.” I smiled slightly. “Nobody heard what just happened. Or they would have come running by now.”

  She swallowed, and didn’t move.

  “I want you to tell me who had you hire a detective to snoop on me.”

  She made a visible effort to gather herself together. “I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I shook my head, lifted my hand, and made a beckoning gesture at the liquor cabinet as I murmured, “Forzare,” and made a gentle effort of will. The door to the cabinet swung open. I picked a bottle of what looked like bourbon and repeated the gesture, causing it to flit from the opened cabinet across the room to my hand. I unscrewed the cap and took a swig. It tasted rich and burned my throat pleasantly on the way down.

  Evelyn Derek stared at me in pure shock, her mouth open, her face whiter than rural Maine.

  I looked at her steadily. “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  “Evelyn,” I said in a chiding voice. “Focus. You hired Vince Graver to follow me around and report on my movements. Someone told you to do that. Who was it?”

  “M-my clients,” she stammered. “Confidential.”

  I felt bad scaring the poor woman. Her reaction to the use of magic had been typical of a straight who had never encountered the supernatural before—which meant that she probably had no idea of the nature of whoever she was protecting. She was terrified. I mean, I knew I wasn’t going to hurt her.

  But I was the only one in the room who did.

  The thing about playing a bluff is that you have to play it all the way out, even when it gets uncomfortable.

  “I really didn’t want this to get ugly,” I said sadly.

  I took a step closer and put the bottle down on the desk. Then I slowly, dramatically, raised my left hand. It had been badly burned several years before, and while my ability to recover from such things was more intense than other human beings, at least in the long term, my hand still wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t quite horror-movie special effects anymore, but the molten scars covering my fingers, wrist, and most of my palm were still startling and unpleasant, if you hadn’t ever seen them before.

  “No, wait,” Evelyn squeaked. She backed across the floor on her buttocks, pressed her back to the wall and lifted her hands. “Don’t.”

  “You helped your client try to kill people, Evelyn,” I said in a calm voice. “Tell me who.”

  Her eyes widened even more. “What? No. No, I didn’t know anyone would get hurt.”

  I stepped closer and snarled, “Talk.”

  “All right, all right!” she stammered. “She—”

  She stopped speaking as suddenly as if someone had begun strangling her.

  I eased up on the intimidation throttle. “Tell me,” I said, more quietly.

  Evelyn Derek shook her head at me, fear and confusion stripping away the reserve I’d seen in her only moments before. She started shaking. I saw her open her mouth several times, but only small choked sounds emerged. Her eyes lost focus and started flicking randomly around the room like a trapped animal looking for an escape.

  That wasn’t normal. Not even a little. Someone like Evelyn Derek might panic, might be cowed, might be backed into a corner—but she would never be at a loss for words.

  “Oh,” I said, mostly to myself. “I hate this crap.”

  I sighed, and walked around the desk to stand over the cowering lawyer. “Hell, if I’d known that someone had . . .” I shook my head. She wasn’t really listening very hard to me, and she’d started crying.

  It was one of about a thousand possible reactions when someone’s free will has been directly abrogated by some kind of psychic interdiction. I’d just created a situation in which every part of her logical, rational mind had been completely in favor of telling me who had hired her. Her emotions had been lined up right behind her reasoned thoughts, too.

  Only I was betting that someone had gotten into her head. Someone had left something inside her that refused to let Ms. Derek speak about her employer. Hell, she might not even have a conscious memory of who hired her—despite the fact that she wouldn’t just hire some detective to spy on somebody for no reason.

  Everyone always thinks that such obvious logical inconsistencies wouldn’t hold up, that the mind would somehow tear free of the bonds placed upon it using those flaws. But the fact is that the human mind isn’t a terribly logical or consistent place. Most people, given the choice to face a hideous or terrifying truth or to conveniently avoid it, choose the convenience and peace of normality. That doesn’t make them strong or weak people, or good or bad people. It just makes them people.

  It’s our nature. There’s plenty to distract us from the nastier truths of our lives, if we want to avoid them.

  “Evelyn Derek,” I said in a firm, authoritative voice. “Look at me.”

  She flinched closer to the wall, shaking her head.

  I knelt in front of her. Then I reached out to touch her chin, and gently lifted her face to mine. “Evelyn Derek,” I said in a gentler voice. “Look at me.”

  The woman lifted her dark green eyes to mine and I held her gaze for the space of a long breath before the soulgaze began.

  If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then wizards are the souls’ voyeurs. When a wizard looks into another person’s eyes, we get to see something of that person, a vision of the very core of their being. We each go through the experience a little differently, but it amounts to the same thing—a look into another person’s eyes gives you an insight into the most vital portions of their character.

  Evelyn Derek’s deep green eyes almost seemed to expand around me, and then I found myself staring at a room that was, if anything, almost identical to the woman’s office. The furniture was beautiful and minimalistic. Ms. Derek, it seemed, was not the kind of person to overly burden her soul with the care and mementos most people collect over the course of a lifetime. She had devoted her life to her mind, to the order and discipline of her thoughts, and she had never left herself much room for personal entanglements.

  But as I stared at the room, I saw Ms. Derek herself. I would have expected her in her business clothing, or perhaps in student’s attire. Instead, she was wearing . . .


  Well. She was wearing very expensive, very minimalistic black lingerie. Stockings, garters, panties, and bra, all black. She wore them, ahem, very well. She was kneeling on the floor, her knees apart, her hands held behind the small of her back. She faced me with her lips parted, her breath coming in quickened pants. I was able to change my viewpoint slightly, as if walking around her, and those green eyes followed me, pupils wide with desire, her hips shifting in little yearning rolls with every tiny correction of her balance.

  Her wrists were bound behind her back with a long, slender ribbon of white silk.

  I caught a motion in the corner of my eye, and I snapped my gaze up, to see a slender, feminine form vanish into the corridors of Evelyn Derek’s memory, showing me nothing more than a flash of pale skin—

  —and a gleam of silver eyes.

  Son of a bitch.

  Someone had bound up Ms. Derek’s thoughts, all right, and woven those restraints together with her natural sexual desire, to give them permanence and strength. The method and the glimpses I’d seen of the perpetrator, flashes of memory that had managed to remain in her thoughts, perhaps, gave strong indicators as to who was responsible.

  A vampire of the White Court.

  And then there was a wrenching sensation and I was kneeling over Evelyn Derek. Her eyes were wide, her expression a mixture of terror and awe as she stared up at me.

  Oh, yeah. That was the thing about a soulgaze. Whoever you look at gets a look back at you. They get to see you in just as much detail as you see them. I’ve never had anyone soulgaze me who didn’t seem . . . disconcerted by the experience.

  Evelyn Derek stared at me and whispered, “Who are you?”

  I said, “Harry Dresden.”

  She blinked slowly and said, her voice dazed, “She ran from you.” Tears started forming in her eyes. “What is happening to me?”

  Magic that invades the thoughts of another human being is just about as black as it gets, a direct violation of the Laws of Magic that the Wardens uphold. But there are grey areas, like in any set of laws, and there are accepted customs as to what was or was not allowed in practice.