“How big was the victim,” Luther asked.
“About five-four, maybe one-fifty.”
“Weightlifter or something?”
“Not so you’d notice,” Dwayne said.
Luther nodded. “You known me a while. How come?”
“I was the one who arrested you the first damn time.”
“Officer,” the Judge said.
“Beg pardon, your Honor,” Dwayne said hurriedly.
“I remember that too,” Luther said. “In your experience, a businessman like that handle a guy like me?”
“Unless he’s armed, or got a lot of training, no.”
“One more question,” Luther said. He squinted at the officer and said, “You in my neighborhood ever since I got out. You ever think I’d be trouble again?”
“Objection,” Tremont said. “He’s asking for pure conjecture.”
Luther frowned and said, “Beat cops deal with ex-cons on a regular basis professionally, ma’am. Figure that qualifies him as an expert opinion on potential, uh . . .” He consulted his notes and spoke in a careful, clear tone. “Recidivism.”
The judge eyed Luther and said, toward Tremont, “Overruled. You may answer the question, Officer.”
“No,” Dwayne said. “I’ve seen you with your kids. I wouldn’t have called you for it.”
“In the arrest report,” Luther said, “does it say what I kept asking the officers?”
Dwayne cleared his throat and looked down at a notepad in front of him. “Yeah. The suspect kept asking ‘Where is she?’ and ‘Is she all right?’”
“Who was I talking about?”
Officer Dwayne turned a page and cleared his throat. “The suspect claimed that he only began the confrontation with the deceased after witnessing the man drag a female child, Latino, around the age of ten, into the alley,” he read. “Subsequent investigation could not confirm the presence of any such person.”
“How hard did they look?” Luther asked.
“I’m sorry?”
“You heard me,” Luther said. “In your opinion, how hard did the investigating detectives look for a little girl who might clear an ex-con from being guilty of a murder of a big-shot businessman?”
“Objection.”
“Overruled.”
“I’m not a detective,” Officer Dwayne said. “I can’t speak to that. But I’m sure they followed departmental guidelines.”
My finely honed crapometer, garnered during my days as a legitimate, licensed private investigator went off. Cops were as thorough as they could be, but that wasn’t always supremely thorough—that was why private investigators could stay in business in the first place. It was understandable: a city the size of Chicago has an enormous caseload, detectives are always buried in work, and the investigations get triaged pretty severely. The preponderance of evidence, absence of witnesses, and Luther’s status as an ex-con would have made this case a slam dunk, a low priority—and most of the time, the cops would have been right. Once the evidence was all taken and dissected and duly reported upon, as far as the police were concerned, they had their man. And there was already a mountain of fresh justice waiting to be pursued on behalf of new victims. Even the most dedicated and sincere police detective could understandably have dropped the ball here.
“Sure,” Luther said. He sat back down again and said, “I’m done.”
The judge looked at the clock and asked, “Mister Tremont, do you have any further witnesses?”
Tremont listened to something his assistant whispered and rose. “Your Honor, the prosecution rests.”
“Then so will we,” she said. “Mister Luther, the defense can begin its case in the morning. I remind the jury that the details of this case are confidential and not to be discussed or disclosed. We will reconvene here at 9 a.m.”
“All rise,” the bailiff said, and we did as the judge left the room.
I frowned as Luther was escorted out.
Something did not add up here.
If Luther had been a professional tough, a little guy like Curtis Black wouldn’t have a prayer against him. I had been around enough tough guys to size Luther up. I wouldn’t want to take him on in muscle-powered combat if I could avoid it, not even now with all the extra physical stuff the Winter Knight’s mantle had given me. Doesn’t matter how much you bench press, some people are damned dangerous in a fight, and you’re a fool to take unnecessary chances against them. Luther struck me as one of those men.
Also, Tremont was way too young a kid to be pulling a high profile murder case like this one. This was the kind of flashy prosecution DAs loved to showboat. Killers brought to justice, the system working, that kind of thing. They certainly didn’t hand the case off to some kid straight out of law school. Which meant that the old hands in Chicago thought that something about this case stunk to high Heaven as well.
I didn’t know the law really well, but I have a doctorate in the parts of Chicago that never showed up on the evening news. If Luther was telling the truth, then Curtis Black couldn’t have been human.
Problem was, most humans didn’t know that. Even if Luther was telling the truth about Black, he wasn’t going to get a fair shake from Chicago’s justice system. Hell’s bells, the cop acquainted with him wasn’t even giving him much. Nobody was going to go to bat for him.
Unless I did it.
He was a father. For his kids’ sake, I wanted answers.
I glanced at the clock as I filed out with the rest of the jury. Nine tomorrow morning. That gave me just under sixteen hours to do what wizards do best.
I left, and began meddling.
“Well?” I asked the rather large wolf after he had been casting around the alley for a while.
He gave me an irritated look. He sat, and after a few seconds, shimmered and resumed the form of Will Borden, crouched naked on the dirty concrete. “Harry, you are not helping.”
“Did you find anything or not?” I asked.
“This isn’t as easy as it looks,” he said. “Look, man, when I’m wolf, I’ve got a wolf’s sense of smell—but I don’t have a wolf’s freaking brain. I’ve been learning how to sort out signals from the noise, but it’s freaking hard. I’ve been doing this since my freshman year, and I could follow a hot trail, but you’re asking me to sift background. I don’t even know if a real wolf could do it.”
I looked around the alley where Luther had beaten Black to death with a bowling pin. It had been nearly a year to the day since the murder. There was nothing dramatic to suggest a man had died here, and the bloodstains had long since faded into unrecognizability with the rest of the grunge. We were far enough down the alley to be out of sight of the street except for a slim column of space that cars crossed in under a second. “Yeah, that was a long shot anyway.”
“You going to wizard up some information?”
“After this long, there’s nothing left,” I said. “Too many rains, too many sunrises. Not even Molly could get much.”
“Then what are we going to do?”
“Get furry again. We might be here a while.”
He frowned. “Why?”
“I think the girl might come by in the next few hours.”
“Why?”
I shrugged a shoulder. “Let’s assume Luther’s telling the truth.”
“Sure.”
“This little guy grabs a little girl and drags her into the alley. Luther jumps him from behind and gets thrown into a wall. Fights him, hard, and beats him to death with a bowling pin. What can we deduce?”
“That Black was stronger than normal and tougher than normal,” Will said. “Some kind of supernatural.”
I nodded. “A predator. Maybe a ghoul or something.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So a predator, operating in the middle of a town? They don’t tend to openly grab little girls off the street, because someone might see it happen.”