by Jim Butcher
“Also because of when they died—in the middle of sex. It wasn’t a coincidence. Emotions are a kind of channel for magic, a path that can be used to get to you. She picked a time when they’d be together and be charged up with lust. She got samples to use as a focus, and she planned it out in advance. You don’t do that to strangers.”
“Crap,” Carmichael said, but this time it was more of an absentminded curse than anything directed at me.
Murphy glared at me. “You keep saying ‘she,’” she challenged me. “Why the hell do you think that?”
I gestured toward the room. “Because you can’t do something that bad without a whole lot of hate,” I said. “Women are better at hating than men. They can focus it better, let it go better. Hell, witches are just plain meaner than wizards. This feels like feminine vengeance of some kind to me.”
“But a man could have done it,” Murphy said.
“Well,” I hedged.
“Christ, you are a chauvinist pig, Dresden. Is it something that only a woman could have done?”
“Well. No. I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so?” Carmichael drawled. “Some expert.”
I scowled at them both, angry. “I haven’t really worked through the specifics of what I’d need to do to make somebody’s heart explode, Murph. As soon as I have occasion to I’ll be sure to let you know.”
“When will you be able to tell me something?” Murphy asked.
“I don’t know.” I held up a hand, forestalling her next comment. “I can’t put a timer on this stuff, Murph. It just can’t be done. I don’t even know if I can do it at all, much less how long it will take.”
“At fifty bucks an hour, it better not be too long,” Carmichael growled. Murphy glanced at him. She didn’t exactly agree with him, but she didn’t exactly slap him down, either.
I took the opportunity to take a few long breaths, calming myself down. I finally looked back at them. “Okay,” I asked. “Who are they? The victims.”
“You don’t need to know that,” Carmichael snapped.
“Ron,” Murphy said. “I could really use some coffee.”
Carmichael turned to her. He wasn’t tall, but he all but loomed over Murphy. “Aw, come on, Murph. This guy’s jerking your chain. You don’t really think he’s going to be able to tell you anything worth hearing, do you?”
Murphy regarded her partner’s sweaty, beady-eyed face with a sort of frosty hauteur, tough to pull off on someone six inches taller than she. “No cream, two sugars.”
“Dammit,” Carmichael said. He shot me a cold glance (but didn’t quite look at my eyes), then jammed his hands into his pants pockets and stalked out of the room.
Murphy followed him to the door, her feet silent, and shut it behind him. The sitting room immediately became darker, closer, with the grinning ghoul of its former chintzy intimacy dancing in the smell of the blood and the memory of the two bodies in the next room.
“The woman’s name was Jennifer Stanton. She worked for the Velvet Room.”
I whistled. The Velvet Room was a high-priced escort service run by a woman named Bianca. Bianca kept a flock of beautiful, charming, and witty women, pandering them to the richest men in the area for hundreds of dollars an hour. Bianca sold the kind of female company that most men only see on television and the movies. I also knew that she was a vampiress of considerable influence in the Nevernever. She had Power with a capital P.
I’d tried to explain the Nevernever to Murphy before. She didn’t really comprehend it, but she understood that Bianca was a badass vampiress who sometimes squabbled for territory. We both knew that if one of Bianca’s girls was involved, the vampiress must have been involved somehow, too.
Murphy cut right to the point. “Was this part of one of Bianca’s territorial disputes?”
“No,” I said. “Unless she’s having it with a human sorcerer. A vampire, even a vamp sorcerer, couldn’t have pulled off something like this outside of the Nevernever.”
“Could she be at odds with a human sorcerer?” Murphy asked me.
“Possible. But it doesn’t sound like her. She isn’t that stupid.” What I didn’t tell Murphy was that the White Council made sure that vampires who trifled with mortal practitioners never lived to brag about it. I don’t talk to regular people about the White Council. It just isn’t done. “Besides,” I said, “if a human wanted to take a shot at Bianca by hitting her girls, he’d be better off to kill the girl and leave the customer healthy, to let him spread the tale and scare off business.”
“Mmph,” Murphy said. She wasn’t convinced, but she made notes of what I had said.
“Who was the man?” I asked her.
Murphy looked up at me for a moment, and then said, evenly, “Tommy Tomm.”
I blinked at her to let her know she hadn’t revealed the mystery of the ages. “Who?”
“Tommy Tomm,” she said. “Johnny Marcone’s bodyguard.”
Now it made sense. “Gentleman” Johnny Marcone had been the thug to emerge on top of the pile after the Vargassi family had dissolved into internal strife. The police department saw Marcone as a mixed blessing, after years of merciless struggle and bloody exchanges with the Vargassis. Gentleman Johnny tolerated no excesses in his organization, and he didn’t like freelancers operating in his city. Muggers, bank robbers, and drug dealers who were not a part of his organization somehow always seemed to get ratted out and turned in, or else simply went missing and weren’t heard from again.
Marcone was a civilizing influence on crime—and where he operated, it was more of a problem in terms of scale than ever before. An extremely shrewd businessman, he had a battery of lawyers working for him that kept him fenced in from the law behind a barricade of depositions and papers and tape recordings. The cops never said it, but sometimes it seemed like they were almost reluctant to chase him. Marcone was better than the alternative—anarchy in the underworld.
“I remember hearing he had an enforcer,” I said. “I guess he doesn’t anymore.”
Murphy shrugged. “So it would seem.”
“So what will you do next?”
“Run down this hairstylist angle, I guess. I’ll talk to Bianca and to Marcone, but I can already tell you what they’ll tell me.” She flicked her notebook closed and shook her head, irritated.
I watched her for a minute. She looked tired. I told her so.
“I am tired,” she replied. “Tired of being looked at like I’m some sort of nutcase. Even Carmichael, my own partner, thinks I’ve gone over the edge in all of this.”
“The rest of the station think so too?” I asked her.
“Most of them just scowl and spin their index fingers around their temples when they think I’m not looking, and file my reports without ever reading them. The rest are the ones who have run into something spooky out there, and they’re scared shitless. They don’t want to believe in anything they didn’t see on Mister Science when they were kids.”
“How about you?”
“Me?” Murphy smiled, a curving of her lips that was a vibrantly feminine expression, making her look entirely too pretty to be such a hardass. “The world’s falling apart at the seams, Harry. I guess I just think people are pretty arrogant to believe we’ve learned everything there is to know in the past century or so. What the hell. I can buy that we’re just now starting to see the things around us in the dark again. It appeals to the cynic in me.”
“I wish everyone thought like you do,” I said. “It would cut down on my crank calls.”
She continued to smile at me, impish. “But could you imagine a world where all the radio stations played ABBA?”
We shared a laugh. God, that room needed a laugh.
“Hey, Harry,” Murphy said, grinning. I could see the wheels spinning in her head.
“Yeah?”
“What you said about being able to figure out how the killer did this. About how you’re not sure you can do it.”
“Yeah?�
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“I know it’s bullshit. Why did you lie to me about it?”
I stiffened. Christ, she was good. Or maybe I’m just not much of a liar. “Look, Murph,” I said. “There’s some things you just don’t do.”
“Sometimes I don’t want to get into the head of the slime I go after, either. But you do what needs to be done to finish the job. I know what you mean, Harry.”
“No,” I said, shortly. “You don’t know.” And she didn’t. She didn’t know about my past, or the White Council, or the Doom of Damocles hanging over my head. Most days, I could pretend I didn’t know about it, either.
All the Council needed now was an excuse, just an excuse, to find me guilty of violating one of the Seven Laws of Magic, and the Doom would drop. If I started putting together a recipe for a murder spell, and they found out about it, that might be all the excuse they needed.
“Murph,” I told her. “I can’t try figuring this spell out. I can’t go putting together the things I’d need to do it. You just don’t understand.”
She glared at me, without looking at my eyes. I hadn’t ever met anyone else who could pull that one off. “Oh, I understand. I understand that I’ve got a killer loose that I can’t catch in the act. I understand that you know something that can help, or you can at least find out something. And I understand that if you dry up on me now, I’m tearing your card out of the department Rolodex and tossing it in the trash.”
Son of a bitch. My consulting for the department paid a lot of my bills. Okay, most of my bills. I could sympathize with her, I supposed. If I was operating in the dark like she was, I’d be nervous as hell, too. Murphy didn’t know anything about spells or rituals or talismans, but she knew human hatred and violence all too well.
It wasn’t as though I was actually going to be doing any black magic, I told myself. I was just going to be figuring out how it was done. There was a difference. I was helping the police in an investigation, nothing more. Maybe the White Council would understand that.
Yeah, right. And maybe one of these days I’d go to an art museum and become well rounded.
Murphy set the hook a second later. She looked up at my eyes for a daring second before she turned away, her face tired and honest and proud. “I need to know everything you can tell me, Harry. Please.”
Classic lady in distress. For one of those liberated, professional women, she knew exactly how to jerk my old-fashioned chains around.
I gritted my teeth. “Fine,” I said. “Fine. I’ll start on it tonight.” Hooboy. The White Council was going to love this one. I’d just have to make sure they didn’t find out about it.
Murphy nodded and let out a breath without looking at me. Then she said, “Let’s get out of here,” and walked toward the door. I didn’t try to beat her to it.
When we walked out, the uniform cops were still lazing around in the hall outside. Carmichael was nowhere to be seen. The guys from forensics were there, standing around impatiently, waiting for us to come out. Then they gathered up their plastic bags and tweezers and lights and things and filed past us into the room.
Murphy was brushing at her windblown hair with her hand while we waited for the ancient elevator to take its sweet time getting up to the seventh floor. She was wearing a gold watch, which reminded me. “Oh, hey,” I asked her. “What time is it?”
She checked. “Two twenty-five. Why?”
I breathed out a curse, and turned for the stairs. “I’m late for my appointment.”
I fairly flew down the stairs. I’ve had a lot of practice at them, after all, and I hit the lobby at a jog. I managed to dodge a porter coming through the front doors with an armload of luggage, and swung out onto the sidewalk at a lope. I have long legs that eat a lot of ground. I was running into the wind, my black duster billowing out behind me.
It was several blocks to my building, and after covering half of them I slowed to a walk. I didn’t want to arrive at my appointment with Monica Missing-Man puffing like a bellows, with my hair windblown and my face streaming with sweat.
Blame it on being out of shape from an inactive winter season, but I was breathing hard. It occupied enough of my attention that I didn’t see the dark blue Cadillac until it had pulled up beside me, and a rather large man had stepped out of it onto the sidewalk in front of me. He had bright red hair and a thick neck. His face looked like someone had smashed it flat with a board, repeatedly, when he was a baby—except for his jutting eyebrows. He had narrow little blue eyes that got narrower as I sized him up.
I stopped, and backed away, then turned around. Two more men, both of them as tall as me and a good deal heavier, were slowing down from their own jog. They had apparently been following me, and they looked annoyed. One was limping slightly, and the other wore a buzz cut that had been spiked up straight with some kind of styling gel. I felt like I was in high school again, surrounded by bullying members of the football team.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” I asked. I looked around for a cop, but they were all over at the Madison, I supposed. Everyone likes to gawk.
“Get in the car,” the one in front of me said. One of the others opened the rear door.
“I like to walk. It’s good for my heart.”
“You don’t get in the car, it isn’t going to be good for your legs,” the man growled.
A voice came from inside the car. “Mister Hendricks, please. Be more polite. Mister Dresden, would you join me for a moment? I’d hoped to give you a lift back to your office, but your abrupt exit made it somewhat problematic. Perhaps you will allow me to convey you the rest of the way.”
I leaned down to look into the backseat. A man of handsome and unassuming features, dressed in a casual sports jacket and Levi’s, regarded me with a smile. “And you would be?” I asked him.
His smile widened, and I swear it made his eyes twinkle.
“My name is John Marcone. I would like to discuss business with you.”
I stared at him for a moment. And then my eyes slid aside to the very large and very overdeveloped Mister Hendricks. The man growled under his breath, and it sounded like Cujo just before he jumped at the woman in the car. I didn’t feel like duking it out with Cujo and his two buddies.
So I got into the back of the Caddy with Gentleman Johnny Marcone.
It was turning out to be a very busy day. And I was still late for my appointment.
Chapter
Three
Gentleman Johnny Marcone didn’t look like the sort of man who would have my legs broken or my jaw wired shut. His salt-and-pepper hair was cut short, and there were lines from sun and smiling etched into the corners of his eyes. His eyes were the green of well-worn dollar bills. He seemed more like a college football coach: good-looking, tanned, athletic, and enthusiastic. The impression was reinforced by the men he kept with him. Cujo Hendricks hulked like an all-pro player who had been ousted for extreme unnecessary roughness.
Cujo got in the car again, glowered at me in the rearview mirror, then pulled out into the street, driving slowly toward my office. The steering wheel looked tiny and delicate in his huge hands. I made a mental note: Do not let Cujo put his hands around your throat. Or hand. It looked almost like one of them could manage it.
The radio was playing, but as I got in the car it fouled up, squealing feedback out over the speakers. Hendricks scowled and thought about it for a second. Maybe he had to relay the message through his second brain or something. Then he reached out and fiddled with the knobs before finally turning the radio off. At this rate I hoped the car would make it all the way to my office.
“Mister Dresden,” Marcone said, smiling, “I understand that you work for the police department, from time to time.”
“They throw the occasional tidbit my way,” I agreed. “Hey, Hendricks. You should really wear your seat belt. Statistics say you’re fifty or sixty percent safer.”
Cujo growled at me in the rearview mirror again, and I beamed at him. Smiling always seems to annoy people
more than actually insulting them. Or maybe I just have an annoying smile.
Marcone seemed somewhat put off by my attitude. Maybe I was supposed to be holding my hat in my hand, but I had never really liked Francis Ford Coppola, and I didn’t have a Godfather. (I do have a Godmother, and she is, inevitably perhaps, a faery. But that’s another story.) “Mister Dresden,” he said. “How much would it cost to retain your services?”
That made me wary. What would someone like Marcone want me for? “My standard fee is fifty dollars an hour plus travel expenses,” I told him. “But it can vary, depending on what you need done.”
Marcone nodded along with my sentences, as if encouraging me to speak. He wrinkled up his face as if carefully considering what he would say, and taking my well-being into account with grandfatherly concern. “How much would it set me back to have you not investigate something?”
“You want to pay me to not do something?”
“Let’s say I pay you your standard fee. That comes out to fourteen hundred a day, right?”
“Twelve hundred, actually,” I corrected him.
He beamed at me. “An honest man is a rare treasure. Twelve hundred a day. Let’s say I pay you for two weeks’ worth of work, Mister Dresden, and you take some time off. Go catch a few movies, get some extra sleep, that sort of thing.”
I eyed him. “And for more than a thousand dollars a day, you want me to…?”
“Do nothing, Mister Dresden.” Marcone smiled. “Nothing at all. Just relax, and put your feet up. And stay out of Detective Murphy’s way.”
Ah-hah. Marcone didn’t want me looking into Tommy Tomm’s murder. Interesting. I looked out the window and squinted my eyes, as though thinking about it.