Jim Butcher - Proven Guilty

“God almighty,” Murphy breathed. “Any chance this could be regular folks playing dress up?”

“I doubt it. But it’s possible.”

She nodded. “We’ll let Greene cover that angle, then. Consider yourself to be on the clock for the department, Harry. What’s our next move?”

“We talk to the surviving victims,” I said. “And I try to figure out how many ways there are for someone to do something this crazy.”

She nodded, and then frowned at me. “First, you get some sleep. You look like hell.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Feel like I’m about to fall down.”

She nodded. “I’ll see if I can talk to Pell, if he’s even awake. I doubt we’ll get to the others before morning. Assuming they survive.”

“Right,” I said. “I’ll need to get back here and do some snooping tomorrow With any luck, we can track down our bad guy before something else jumps off the movie screen.”

Murphy nodded and rose. She offered me a hand. I took it and she hauled me up. Murphy is a lot stronger than she looks.

“Give me a ride home?” I asked.

She already had her keys in her hand. “Do I look like your driver?”

“Thanks, Murph.”

We headed for the door. Usually I have to shorten my steps to match Murphy’s, but tonight I was so tired that she was waiting for me.

“Harry,” she said. “What if we can’t find out who is doing it in time?”

“We’ll find them,” I said.

“But if we don’t?”

“Then we fight monsters.”

Murphy took a deep breath and nodded as we stepped out into the summer night. “Damn right we do.”

Murphy drove me home and parked in the gravel lot next to the century-old converted boardinghouse. She killed the engine in the car, and it made those clicking noises they do. We sat there with the windows rolled down for a second. A cool breeze coming off the lake whispered through the car, soothing after the unrelenting heat of the day.

Murphy checked her rearview mirror and then scanned the street. “Who were you watching for?”

“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“You rubbernecked so much on the way here, I’m surprised your shoulders aren’t bruising your ears.”

I grimaced. “Oh, that. Someone was tailing me tonight.”

“And you’re just now telling me about it?”

I shrugged. “No sense worrying you over nothing. Whoever he is, he’s not there now.” I described the shadowy man and his car.

“Same one who ran you off the road, do you think?” she asked.

“Something tells me no,” I said. “He wasn’t making any effort to avoid being spotted. For all I know, he could just be a PI gathering information on me for the lawsuit.”

“Christ,” Murphy said. “Isn’t that thing over with?”

I grimaced. “For a talk show host, Larry Fowler can really hold a grudge. He keeps doing one thing after another.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have burned down his studio and shot up his car, then.”

“That wasn’t my fault!”

“That’s for a court to decide,” Murphy said in a pious tone. “You got an attorney?”

“I helped a guy find his daughter’s lost dog five or six years ago. He’s an attorney. He’s giving me a hand with the legal process, enough so it hasn’t actually bankrupted me. But it just keeps going and going.”

Neither of us got out of the car.

I closed my eyes and listened to the summer night. Music played somewhere. I could hear the occasional racing engine.

“Harry?” Murph asked after a while. “Are you all right?”

“Hungry. Little tired.”

“You look like you’re hurting,” she said.

“Maybe a little achy,” I said.

“Not that kind of hurt.”

I opened my eyes and looked at her, and then away. “Oh. That.”

“That,” she agreed. “You look like you’re bleeding, somehow.”

“I’ll get over it,” I told her.

“Is this about last Halloween?”

I shrugged a shoulder.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “There was a lot of confusion in the blackout and right after. But they found a corpse in the Field Museum that had been savaged by an animal. Lab guessed it was a large dog. They found three different blood types on the floor, too.”

“Did they?” I asked.

“And at Kent College. They found eight dead bodies there. Six of them had no discernable means of death. One had its head half severed by a surgically sharp blade. The other had taken a.44 round to the back of the head.”

I nodded.

She stared at me for a while, frowning and waiting for me to continue. Then she said, in a quiet, certain voice, “You killed them.”

My memory played some bad clips in my head. My stomach twisted. “I didn’t do the headless guy.”

Her cool, blue eyes stayed steady and she nodded. “You killed them. It’s eating at you.”

“It shouldn’t. I’ve killed a lot of things.”

“True,” Murphy said. “But they weren’t faeries or vampires or monsters this time. They were people. And you weren’t in the heat of battle when they died. You made the choice cold.”

I couldn’t lift my eyes for some reason. But I nodded and whispered, “More or less.”

She waited for me to say more, but I didn’t. “Harry,” she said. “You’re tearing yourself up over it. You’ve got to talk to someone. It doesn’t have to be me or here, but you’ve got to do it. There’s no shame in feeling bad about killing someone, not for any reason.”

I let out a short little laugh. It tasted bitter. “You’re the last person I’d expect to tell me not to feel bad about committing murder.”

She shifted uncomfortably. “Sort of surprised myself,” she said. “But dammit, Harry. You remember when I shot Agent Denton?”

“Yeah.”

“Took me some time to deal with it, too. I mean, I know he’d lost it. And he was going to kill you if I didn’t do it. But it made me feel…” She squinted out at the Chicago night. “Stained. To take a life.” She swallowed. “And those poor people the vampires had controlled at the shelter. That was even worse.”

“All of those people were trying to kill you, Murph. You had to do it. You didn’t have an option. You thought about it. You knew that when you pulled the trigger.”

“Do you think you had an option?” she asked.

I shrugged and said, “Maybe. Maybe not.” I swallowed. “The point is that I never bothered to consider it. Never hesitated. I just wanted them dead.”

She was quiet for a long time.

“What if the Council is right about me?” I asked Murphy quietly. “What if I grow into some kind of monster? One who takes life without consideration for anything but his own will. Who cares more about end than means. More about might than right. What if this is the first step?”

“Do you think it is?” Murphy asked.

“I don’t-”

“Because if you think so, Harry, then it probably is. And if you decide that it isn’t, it probably isn’t.”

“The power of positive thinking?” I asked.

“No. Free will,” she said. “You can’t change what has already happened. But you choose what to do next. Which means that you only cross over to the dark side if you choose to do it.”

“What makes you think that I won’t?” I asked.

Murphy snorted, and reached over to touch my chin lightly with the fingers of one hand. “Because I’m not an idiot. Unlike some other people in this car.”

I reached up and gripped her fingers with my right hand, squeezing gently. Her hand was steady and warm. “Careful. That was almost a compliment.”

“You’re a decent man,” Murphy said, lowering her hand without removing it from my fingers. “Painfully oblivious, sometimes. But you’ve got a good heart. It’s why you’re so hard on yourself. You’re tired, hungry, and hurting, and you saw the bad guys do something you couldn’t stop. Your morale is low. That’s all.”