Jim Butcher - White Night

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."

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 any one 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 shoes!" 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?"

I had to be careful. The young cop wasn't dumb. She thought she smelled a rat.