by Jim Butcher
“Thanks, boy.” I grabbed the mail, scratched his ears again, and flicked to life several candles on the end table next to the recliner with a muttered spell. “Bills,” I reported to him, going through the mail. “More bills. Junk mail. Another Best Buy catalog, Jesus, those people won’t give up. Larry Fowler’s new lawyer.” I put the unopened envelope against my forehead and closed my eyes. “He’s threatening me with another variation on the same lawsuit.” I opened the letter and skimmed it, then tossed it on the floor. “It’s as if I’m psychic.”
I opened the drawer in the end table, felt about with my fingertips, and withdrew a single silver metallic key, the only one on a ring marked with an oval of blue plastic that sported my business card’s logo: HARRY DRESDEN. WIZARD. PARANORMAL INVESTIGATIONS. CONSULTING, ADVICE, REASONABLE RATES.
I looked at the key. Thomas had given it to me, in case I should need to show up at his place in an emergency. He had a key to my place, too, even after he’d moved out. There had been a tacit understanding between us. The keys were there in case one or the other of us needed help. They had not been given so that one or the other of us could go snooping uninvited around the other one’s home and life.
(Though I suspected that Thomas had looked in on my place a few times, hoping to figure out how the place managed to get so clean. He’d never caught my housekeeping brownies at work, and he never would. They’re pros. The only drawback to having faerie housekeepers is that you can’t tell people about them. If you do, they’re gone, and no, I don’t know why.)
The faces of the dead women drifted through my thoughts, and I sighed and closed my fingers around the key. “Okay, boy,” I said. “Time to go visit Thomas.”
Mouse rose up expectantly, his tags jingling, his tail thrashing energetically. Mouse liked going for rides in the car. He trotted over to the door, pulled his lead down from where it hung on the doorknob, and brought it over to me.
“Hang on,” I told him. “I need the arsenal.”
I hate it when bad business goes down in summer. I put on my torturously warm leather duster. I figured I could take death from heat prostration to whole new levels given the potential presence of further firebombs. And that could land me a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. Maybe even a Darwin Award.
See there? That’s called positive thinking.
I put on my new and improved shield bracelet, too, and slipped three silver rings onto the fingers of my right hand. I snagged my blasting rod, clipped Mouse’s lead on, took up my staff, and tromped on out to the car.
I told Mouse to stay back while I approached the Blue Beetle, my battered, often-repaired, mismatched Volkswagen Bug. I looked all around it, then lay down to check the vehicle’s undercarriage. I looked at the trunk and under the hood next. I even examined it for traces of hostile magic. I didn’t find anything that resembled a bomb or looked dangerous, unless you counted the half-eaten Taco Bell burrito that had somehow gotten tossed into the trunk about six months ago.
I opened the door, whistled for Mouse, and off we went to invade my brother’s privacy.
I hadn’t actually visited Thomas’s place before, and I was a little taken aback when I got there. I had assumed that the street address was to one of the new buildings in Cabrini Green, where urban renewal had been shoved down the throat of the former slum by the powers that be—largely because it bordered on the Gold Coast, the most expensive section of town, and the second-highest-income neighborhood in the world. The neighborhood around the Green had become slowly more tolerable, and the newer apartment buildings that had replaced the old were fairly nice.
But Thomas’s apartment wasn’t in one of those buildings. He was across the street, living in the Gold Coast. When Mouse and I got to the right apartment building, twilight was fading fast and I felt underdressed. The doorman’s shoes were nicer than any I owned.
I opened the outer door with Thomas’s key and marched to the elevators, Mouse walking smartly at heel. The doorman watched me, and I spotted two security cameras between the front door and the elevator. Security would have a pretty good idea who was a resident and who wasn’t—and an extremely tall and gangly man in a black coat with nearly two hundred pounds of dog with him wouldn’t be something they forgot. So I tried to stall them with body language, walking the walk of the impatient and confident in the hopes that it would make the security guys hesitate.
Either it worked or the building’s security people were getting paid too much. No one challenged me, and I took the elevator to the sixteenth floor and walked down the hall to Thomas’s apartment.
I unlocked the door, gave it a couple of knocks, and then opened it without waiting. I slipped in with Mouse, and found the light switch beside the door before I closed it.
Thomas’s apartment was…well. Chic. The door opened onto a living room bigger than my entire apartment—which, granted, will never cause anxiety to agoraphobics. The walls were painted a deep crimson, and the carpeting was a rich charcoal grey. The furniture all matched, from the sofas to the chairs to the entertainment centers, all of it done in stainless steel and black, and a little more art deco than I would have preferred. He had a TV too big ever to fit into the Beetle, and a DVD player and surround sound and racks of DVDs and CDs. One of the newer video game systems rested neatly on a shelf, all its wires squared away and organized. Two movie posters decorated the walls: The Wizard of Oz and The Pirates of Penzance, the one with Kevin Kline as the Pirate King.
Well. It was good to see that my brother was doing well for himself. Though I had to wonder what he was doing that pulled down the kind of money this place would require.
The kitchen was like the living room—a lot of the same stainless steel and black in the appliances, though the walls had been painted white, as was the expensive tile floor. Everything was pristine. No dirty dishes, no half-open cupboards, no food stains, no papers lying about. Every single horizontal surface in the place was empty and sanitized. I checked the cupboards. The dishes stood in neat stacks, perfectly fitted to their storage in the cupboard.
None of which made sense. Thomas had a lot of positive qualities, but my brother was a fairly shameless slob. “I get it now. He’s dead,” I said aloud to Mouse. “My brother is dead, and he’s been replaced with some kind of obsessive-compulsive evil clone.”
I checked the fridge. I couldn’t help it. It’s one of those things you do when you’re snooping through someone’s house. It was empty, except for one of those boxes of wine, and about fifty bottles of Thomas’s favorite beer, one of Mac’s microbrewed ales. Mac would have killed Thomas for keeping it cold. Well. He would have scowled in disapproval, anyway. For Mac, that was tantamount to a homicidal reaction in other people.
I checked the freezer. It was packed, wall to wall, with TV meals in neat stacks. There were three different meals, stacked up in alternating order. There was room for maybe nine or ten more, and I presumed the others eaten. Thomas probably went shopping only every couple of months. That was more like him—beer, food cooked by pushing one button on a microwave. No dishes needed, and the drawer nearest the freezer yielded up a container of plastic forks and knives. Eat. Discard. No cooking or cleaning necessary.
I looked around at the rest of the kitchen, then at the fridge and freezer.
Then I went down the little hall that led to two bedrooms and a bath, and snorted in triumph. The bathroom was in total disarray, with toothbrushes and various grooming supplies tossed here and there, apparently at random. A couple of empty beer bottles sat out. The floor was carpeted with discarded clothing. Several half-used rolls of toilet paper sat around, with an empty cardboard tube still on the dispenser.
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 blinked a few times. “Sir,” the security man said. “Um, it’s just that Mr. Raith hasn’t actually listed with building security anyone he’s given access to his apartment.”
“He’d better not have!” I said. “I have given him years, years, and I will not be cast aside like last season’s sh
oes!” 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?”