The office was a fairly large one. Shelves and filing cabinets lined the walls. Three desks sat clumped together in the middle of the room. A small refrigerator sat in the corner, near an old couch and a coffee table littered with mostly empty boxes of Chinese takeout and a laptop computer. Books and boxes filled the shelves. The desks were cluttered with books, notebooks, folders, and a few personal articles-a novelty coffee mug, a couple of picture frames, and some recent popular novels.
Everything had been splattered with blood and dark magic.
The blood had dried out, and most of it was either red-black or dark brown. There was a large pool on the floor between the door and the nearest desk, dried into a sticky sludge. A sharp, almost straight line marked where the corpse had been lifted, probably peeling up the hem of a jacket or coat from where it had been stuck to the floor. Droplets had splattered the walls, the desk, the photographs, the novels, and the novelty mugs.
I hated blood. As a decorating theme it left something to be desired. And it smelled horrible. My stomach twisted again, and I fought to keep down the doughnuts I'd grabbed at the convenience store. I closed my eyes and then forced myself to open them again. To look. The only way to avoid more scenes like this was to look at this one, figure out who had done it, and then to go stop them from doing it again.
I pushed my revulsion away and focused on the scene, searching for details.
There were a few smears of blood on the floor but none on the sides, surface, or edge of the nearest desk. That meant that the victim hadn't moved much after he'd gone down. Either he'd been held down or he'd bled out so quickly that he hadn't had time to crawl toward the nearest phone, on the desk, to call for help. I looked up. There wasn't much blood on the ceiling. That didn't prove anything, but if someone had opened his throat, there would almost certainly have been blood sprayed all over it. Any other kind of bleeding wound would probably have left the victim, evidently Dr. Bartlesby, able to function, at least for a couple of minutes. He'd probably been held down.
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."