Dead Beat (13 page)

I looked down. There was part of a footprint in blood on the floor, leading away. It looked like part of the heel of an athletic shoe—and not a large one, either. Probably a woman's shoe, or a large child's. For the sake of my ability to sleep at night, I hoped it was an adult's shoe. Children shouldn't see such things.

Then again, who should?

On an entirely different level, the room was even more disturbing. The dark power here was not the pure, silent cold I'd felt on the sidewalk on Wacker. It felt corrupt, dark, somehow mutilated. There was a sense of malicious glee to the residue of whatever magic had been worked here. Someone had used their power to murder a man—and they had loved doing it. Worse, it was a distinctly different aura than I had felt near either Cowl or Grevane. Magical workings didn't leave behind an exact fingerprint that could be traced to a given wizard, but intuition told me that this working had been sloppier and more frenetic than something Grevane would have done, and messier than Cowl would prefer.

But it was strong—stronger magic than almost anything I had ever done. Whoever was behind the spell that had been wrought here was at least as powerful as I was. Maybe stronger.

"Heh," drawled a voice from behind me. "I thought that was you."

I stiffened and turned around. The older of the two cops from upstairs stood ten feet down the hall from me, one hand resting casually on the butt of his sidearm. His dark face was wary, but not openly hostile, and his stance one of caution but not alarm. The name tag on his jacket read rawlins.

"Thought who was me?" I asked him.

"Harry Dresden," he said. "The wizard. The guy Murphy hires for SI."

"Yeah," I said. "I guess that's me."

He nodded. "I saw you upstairs. You didn't look like your typical museum patron."

"It was the big leather coat, wasn't it?" I said.

"That helped," Rawlins acknowledged. "What are you doing down here?"

"Just looking," I said. "I haven't gone into the room."

"Yeah. You can tell that from how I haven't arrested you yet." Rawlins looked past me, into the room, and his expression sobered. "Hell of a thing in there."

"Yeah," I said.

"Something don't feel right about it," he said. "Just… I don't know. Sets my teeth on edge. More than usual. I've seen knifings before. This is different."

"Yeah," I said. "It is."

Dark eyes flicked back to me, and the old cop exhaled. "This is something from down Si's way?"

"Yeah."

He grunted. "Murphy send you?"

"Not exactly," I said.

"Why you here then?"

"Because I don't like things that put cops' teeth on edge," I said. "You guys have any suspects?"

"For someone who just happened to be walking by, you got a lot of questions," he said.

"For a beat cop in charge of securing the scene, you were asking plenty of your own," I said. "Upstairs, with museum security."

He grinned, teeth very white. "Shoot. I been a detective before. Twice."

I lifted my eyebrows. "Busted back down?"

"Both times, on account of I have an attitude problem," Rawlins said.

I gave him a lopsided smile. "You going to arrest me?"

"Depends," he said.

"On what?"

"On why you're here." He met my gaze directly, openly, his hand still on his gun.

I didn't meet his eyes for very long. I glanced over my shoulder, debating how to answer, and decided to go with a little sincerity. "There are some bad people in town. I don't think the police can get them. I'm trying to find them before they hurt anyone else."

He studied me for a long minute. Then he took his hand off the gun and reached into his coat. He tossed me a folded newspaper.

I caught it and unfolded it. It was some kind of academic newsletter, and on the cover page was a photograph of a portly old man with sideburns down to his jaw, together with a smiling young woman and a young man with Asian features. The caption under the picture read,
Visiting Professor Charles Bartlesby and his assistants, Alicia Nelson, Li Xian, prepare to examine Cahokian collection at the FMNH, Chicago
.

"That's the victim in the middle," Rawlins said. "His assistants shared the office with him. They have not been answering their cell phone numbers and are not in their apartments."

"Suspects?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Not many people murder strangers," he said. "They were the only ones in town who knew the victim. Came in with him from England somewhere."

I looked from the newsletter up to Rawlins, and frowned. "Why are you helping me?"

He lifted his eyebrows. "Helping you? You could have found that anywhere. And I never saw you."

"Understood," I said. "But why?"

He leaned against the wall and folded his arms. "Because when I was a young cop, I went running down an alley when I heard a woman scream. And I saw something. Something that…" His face became remote. "Something that has given me bad dreams for about thirty years. This
thing
strangling a girl. I push it away from her, empty my gun into it. It picks me up and slams my head into a wall a few times. I figured Mama Rawlins's baby boy was about to go the way of the dodo."

"What happened?" I asked.

"Lieutenant Murphy's father showed up with a shotgun loaded with rock salt and killed it. And when the sun comes up, it burns this thing's corpse like it had been soaked in gasoline." Rawlins shook his head. "I owed her old man. And I seen enough of the streets to know that she's been doing a lot of good. You been helping her with that."

I nodded. "Thank you," I told him.

He nodded. "Don't really feel like losing my job for you, Dresden. Get out before someone sees you."

Something occurred to me. "You heard about the Forensic Institute?"

He shrugged at me. "Sure. Every cop has."

"I mean what happened there last night," I said.

Rawlins shook his head. "I haven't heard of anything."

I frowned at him. A grisly murder at the morgue would have been all over the place, in police scuttlebutt if not in the newspapers. "You haven't? Are you sure?"

"Sure, I'm sure."

I nodded at him and walked down the hallway.

"Hey," he said.

I looked over my shoulder.

"Can you stop them?" Rawlins asked.

"I hope so."

He glanced at the bloodied room and then back at me. "All right. Good hunting, kid."

Chapter Fourteen

Wow," Butters said, fiddling with the control panel on the SUV. "This thing has everything. Satellite radio stations. And I bet I could put my whole CD collection inside the changer on this player. And, oh, cool, check it out. It's got an onboard GPS, too, so we can't get lost." Butters pushed a button on the control panel.

A calm voice emerged from the dashboard. "Now entering Helsinki."

I arched an eyebrow at the dashboard and then at Butters. "Maybe the car is lost."

"Maybe you're interfering with its computer, too," Butters said.

"You think?"

He smiled tightly, checking his seat belt for the tenth time. "Just so we're clear, I have no problems with hiding, Harry. I mean, if you're worried about my ego or something, don't. I'm fine with the hiding. Happy, even."

I pulled off the highway. The green lawns and tended trees of the industrial park hosting the Forensic Institute appeared as the SUV rolled up the ramp. "Try to relax, Butters."

He jerked his head in a nervous, negative shake. "I don't want to get killed. Or arrested. I'm really bad at being arrested. Or killed."

"It's a calculated risk," I said. "We need to find out what Grevane wanted with you."

"And we're taking me to work… why?"

"Think about it. What would have happened if they'd found you missing, blood all over the place, the building ransacked, and Phil's corpse lying in the morgue or on the lawn outside?"

"Someone would have gotten fired," Butters said.

"Yeah. And they would have locked down the building to search for evidence. And they would have grabbed you and locked you away somewhere, for questioning at least."

"So?" Butters asked.

"If Grevane cleaned up what happened at the morgue, it means he didn't want too much official attention focused there. Whatever he wants from you, I'm betting it's still in the building." I pulled into the industrial park. "We have to find it."

"Eduardo Mendoza?" he asked me.

"Offhand, I can't think of any other reason for someone to want to grab your friendly neighborhood assistant medical examiner," I said. "Grevane's got to be interested in a corpse at the morgue, and that one was the only one that seemed a little odd."

"Harry," Butters said, "if this guy really is a necromancer—a wizard of the dead—then why the hell would he need a plain old vanilla science nerd like me?"

"That's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question," I said. "And we have another reason, too."

"The museum doctor guy, right?" Butters asked.

I nodded at him and parked in the lot next to Butters's ruined little truck. "Right. I need to know what killed him. Hell, any information could be useful."

Butters exhaled. "Well. I don't know what I'll be able to manage."

"Anything is more than I have now."

He looked around warily. "Do you think… do you think Grevane or his buddy is out there right now? Watching for… you know… me?"

I pulled open my coat and showed Butters my shoulder holster and gun. Then I reached behind me and drew out my staff from the back of the SUV "If they show up, I'm going to ruin their whole day."

He chewed on his lip. "You can do that, right?"

I took a look around and said, "Butters, trust me. If there's one thing I'm good at, it's ruining people's day."

He let out a nervous little laugh. "You can say that again."

"If there's one thing I'm good at—" I began. Butters punched me lightly on the arm, and I smiled at him. "We'll get in and out as quick as we can, get you back under cover. I think we've got it under control."

I killed the SUV's ignition and pulled out the key. The truck shuddered, and a warbling, wailing sound came from the dashboard. For a second I expected someone to shout, "Red alert, all hands to battle stations!" Instead there was a hiccup of sound from the truck, and then a smooth, recorded voice reported, "Warning. The door is ajar. The door is ajar."

I blinked at the dashboard. It repeated the warning several more times, getting a little slower and lower pitched each time, then droned into a basso rumble, followed by silence.

"That was not an omen," I said firmly.

"Right," Butters replied in a faint voice. "Because stuff is always messing up around you."

"Exactly," I said. I tried to think of a way to wring positive spin from that last statement, but I wasn't up to the mental gymnastics. "Come on. The sooner we get moving, the sooner we get you out of here."

"Okay," he said, and the pair of us got out of the SUV and headed for the Forensic Institute. As we approached the door, I started limping and leaning on my staff a little, as if I needed the support. Butters opened the door for me, and I hobbled in with a pained expression on my face as we approached the security desk.

I didn't know the guard on duty. He was in his mid-twenties and looked athletic. He watched us coming, squinting a little, and when we were well inside his eyebrows lifted. "Dr. Butters," he said, evidently surprised. "I haven't seen you in a while."

"Casey," Butters said, giving him a jerky nod of the head. "Hey, I like the new haircut. Is Dr. Brioche in?"

"He's working now," Casey said. "Room one, I think. What are you doing here?"

"Hoping to avoid a lecture," Butters replied dryly. He clipped his identification to his coat. "I forgot to file some forms, and if I don't get them done before the mail goes out, Brioche will scold me until my eyes bleed."

Casey nodded and looked me over. "Who's this?"

"Harry Dresden," Butters said. "He's got to sign off on the forms. He's a consultant for the police department. Harry, this is Casey O'Roarke."

"Charmed," I said, and handed him the laminated identification card Murphy had issued me to get me through police lines to crime scenes. As I did, I felt another cold pocket of dark energy. Grevane had murdered and then reanimated Phil while the poor guy was sitting at his desk.

Casey examined the card, checked my face against the picture on it, and passed it back to me with a polite smile. "You want me to tell Dr. Brioche you're here, Dr. Butters?"

Butters shuddered. "Not particularly."

"Right," Casey said, and waved us past. We were almost out of the entry hall when he spoke again. "Doctor? Did you see Phil this morning?"

Butters hesitated for a second before he turned around. "He was there at the desk the last time I saw him, but I had to leave for an early dentist appointment. Why?"

"Oh, he wasn't at the desk when I got here," Casey said. "Everything was locked down, and the security system was armed."

"Maybe he had somewhere to be, too," Butters suggested.

"Maybe," Casey agreed. There was a faint frown line between his eyes. "He didn't tell me anything, though. I mean, I'd have come in early if he had an appointment or something."

"Beats me," Butters said.

Casey squinted at Butters and then nodded slowly. "Okay. I just wouldn't want him to get in trouble over breaking protocol."

"You know Phil," Butters said.

Casey rolled his eyes and nodded, then went back to filling out some kind of paperwork. Butters and I slipped away from the entry hall and down to Butters's usual examination room. The place had been put back together. His desk rested in its usual spot, piled with papers and his computer. Whoever had cleaned up the room had done a fairly good job of it.

"Casey knows something," Butters said the minute the door was shut. "He suspects something."

"That's what they pay security to do," I said. "Don't let it rattle you."

Butters nodded, looking around the examination room. He walked over to his polka suit, still piled in the corner. "At least they didn't wreck this," he said. Then he let out a short laugh. "Man. Are my priorities skewed or what?"

"Everyone has something they love," I said.

He nodded. "Okay. So what do we do now?"

"First things first," I said. "Can you get a look at Bartlesby's corpse?"

Butters nodded and walked over to his computer. I backed up and stood against the wall.

Butters started the thing up and spent a minute or two waggling a mouse and stabbing at keys with his forefinger. Then he whistled. "Wow. Bartlesby's body got here about an hour ago, and it's been nagged for immediate examination. Brioche is doing it."

"Is that unusual?" I asked.

He nodded. "It means someone really wants to know about the victim. Someone in government or law enforcement, maybe." He wrinkled up his nose. "Plus it was pretty horrific. Brioche will get some press out of it. Of course he took this one for himself."

"Can you get to it?" I asked.

Butters frowned and tapped a few more keys. Then he looked up at the clock. "Maybe. Brioche is working in room one right now, but he's got to be almost finished with whatever he's doing. Bartlesby's corpse is in room two. If I hurry…" He stood up and scurried for the door. "Wait here."

"You sure?" I asked him.

He nodded. "Someone really would get suspicious if they saw you roaming around. If I need you I'll give you a signal."

"What signal?"

"I'll imitate the scream of a terrified little girl," he said with a waggle of his eyebrows. He headed out the door. "Back in a minute."

Butters wasn't gone long, and he slipped back into the room before five minutes had passed. He looked a little shaky.

"You all right?" I asked.

He nodded. "Couldn't stay there for long. I heard Brioche come out of room one."

"You see the body?"

"Yeah," Butters said with a shudder. "It was already stripped and laid out. Bad stuff, Harry. He had thirty or forty stab wounds in his upper thorax. Someone carved his face up, too. His nose, ears, eyelids, and lips were in a sandwich Baggie next to his head." He took a deep breath. "Someone had sliced off the quadriceps on both legs. They were missing. And he'd been eviscerated."

I frowned. "How?"

"A big X-shaped cut across his abdomen. Then they peeled him open like a Chinese take-out box. He was missing his stomach and most of his intestines. There might have been other organs gone, too."

"Ick," I said.

"Extremely."

"Could you see anything else?"

"No. Even if I'd wanted to, there wasn't time for more than a quick look." He walked over to a rolling stand of medical instruments. "Why would someone do that to him? What possible purpose could it have served?"

"Maybe some kind of ritual," I said. "You've seen that before."

Butters nodded. He went through the motions of pulling on an apron, mask, gloves, cap—the works. "I still don't get it. You know?"

I did know. Butters didn't have it in him to comprehend the kind of violence, hatred, and bloodlust that had fallen upon the late Bartlesby. That kind of utter disregard for the sanctity of life simply didn't exist in his personal world, and it left him at a total loss when confronted with it face-to-face.

"Or," I said, a thought occurring to me, "it might have been something else. Anthropomancy."

He walked over to one of the freezers and cracked it open. "What's that?"

"An attempt to divine the future or gain information by reading human entrails."

Butters turned to me slowly, his face sickened. "You're kidding."

I shook my head. "It's possible."

"Does it work?" he asked.

"It's extremely powerful and dangerous magic," I answered. "Anyone who does it has to kill someone and gets an immediate death sentence if the Council learns of it. If it didn't work, no one would bother."

Butters's mouth hardened into a firm line. "That's… really wrong." He frowned over the sentence and then nodded. "Wrong."

"I agree."

He turned back to the freezer, checked a toe tag, and then hauled a rolling exam table over to it. "This might take me a little while," he said. "An hour and a half, maybe more."

"You want a hand with that?" I asked. I hoped he didn't.

Butters, bless him, shook his head. He walked over to his desk and flicked on his CD player. Polka music filled the room. "I'd really rather do this alone."

"You sure?" I asked.

"Just listen for a girlie scream," he said. "Can you wait for me up front?"

I nodded, leaned my staff in the corner, and left him in the room. He locked the door behind me, and I wandered up to sit down in the waiting area near the front doors. I took a chair that put the wall to my back, and where I could see Casey's video monitor, the front door, and the door leading back to the examination rooms.

I leaned my head back against the wall with my eyes mostly closed and waited. Over the next hour one doctor came in and another left. The mailman showed up with the day's deliveries, as did the UPS truck. An ambulance arrived with the cadaver of an old woman that Casey rolled away, presumably into storage.

Then a young couple came in. The girl was about five-six and pleasantly pretty, even without much in the way of makeup. She was dressed in sandals, a simple blue sundress, and a wool jacket. Her hair was cut into a bob full of unruly brown curls, and her eyes were bloodshot with fatigue. The young man wore a simple, well-cut business suit. He was a little under six feet tall, had Asian features, wire-rimmed glasses, wide shoulders, and wore his hair in a long ponytail.

I recognized them: Alicia Nelson and Li Xian, from the picture on the cover of the newsletter Rawlins had given me. Dr. Bartlesby's missing assistants had come to the morgue.

I remained very still, and tried to think thoughts that would make me blend in with the wall. They walked to the security desk and stood so close to me that I didn't need to bother with Listening to them.

"Good morning," Alicia said, producing a driver's license and showing it to Casey. "My name is Alicia Nelson. I'm the late Dr. Bartlesby's assistant. I understand that his remains have been brought here."

Casey regarded her without much in the way of expression. "Ma'am, we do not make that kind of information available to the public, in order to protect the relatives of the deceased."

She nodded, drew an envelope out of her purse, and passed that to Casey as well. "The doctor had no surviving family or next of kin," she said. "But he granted me power of attorney over his estate two years ago. The paperwork is all in order."