Jim Butcher - Death Masks

Butters shrugged. "No idea. I mean, the odds against him getting all of those at once like that are beyond astronomical."

"Days?" I asked.

"If I had to guess," Butters said, "I'd say more like hours. Maybe less."

"Okay," I said. "And during those hours, someone uses a knife on him and turns his chest into tuna cubes. Then when they're done, they take his hands and his head and dump the body. Where was it found?"

"Under an overpass on the expressway," Murphy said. "Like this, naked."

I shook my head. "SI got handed this one?"

Murphy's face flickered with annoyance. "Yeah. Homicide dumped it on us to take some high-profile case all the municipal folk are hot about."

I took a step back from the corpse, frowning, putting things together. I figured odds were pretty good that there weren't all that many people running around the world torturing victims by carving their skin into graph paper before murdering them. At least I hoped there weren't all that many.

Murphy peered at me, her expression serious. "What. Harry, do you know something?"

I glanced from Murphy to Butters and then back again.

Butters raised both his hands and headed for the doors, stripping his gloves and dumping them in a container splattered with red biohazard signs. "You guys stay here and Mulder it out. I have to go down the hall anyway. Back in five minutes."

I watched him go and said, after the door swung shut, "Bunny slippers and polka music."

"Don't knock it," Murphy said. "He's good at his job. Maybe too good."

"What's that mean?"

She walked away from the autopsy table, and I followed her. Murphy said, "Butters was the one who handled the bodies after the fire at the Velvet Room."

The one I'd started. "Oh?"

"Mmm- hmm. His original report stated that some of the remains recovered from the scene were humanoid, but definitely not human."

"Yeah," I said. "Red vampires."

Murphy nodded. "But you can't just stick that in a report without people getting their panties in a bunch. Butters wound up doing a three-month stint at a mental hospital for observation. When he came out, they tried to fire him, but his lawyer convinced them that they couldn't. So instead he lost all his seniority and got stuck on the night shift. But he knows there's weirdness out there. He calls me when he gets some of it."

"Seems nice enough. Except for the polka."

Murphy smiled again and said, "What do you know?"

"Nothing I can tell you," I said. "I agreed to keep the information confidential."

Murphy peered up at me for a moment. Once upon a time, that comment might have sent her into a fit of stubborn confrontation. But I guess tunes had changed. "All right," she said. "Are you holding back anything that might get someone hurt?"

I shook my head. "It's too early to tell."

Murphy nodded, her lips pressed together. She appeared to weigh things for a moment before saying, "You know what you're doing."

"Thanks."

She shrugged. "I expect you to tell me if it turns into something I should know."

"Okay," I said, staring at her profile. Murphy had done something I knew she didn't do very often. She'd extended her trust. I'd expected her to threaten and demand. I could have handled that. This was almost worse. Guilt gnawed on my insides. I'd agreed not to divulge anything, but I hated doing that to Murphy. She'd gone out on a limb for me too many times.

But what if I didn't tell her anything? What if I just pointed her toward information she'd find sooner or later in any case?

"Look, Murph. I specifically agreed to confidentiality for this client. But - if I were going to talk to you, I'd tell you to check out the murder of a Frenchman named LaRouche with Interpol."

Murphy blinked and then looked up at me. "Interpol?"

I nodded. "If I were going to talk."

"Right," she said. "If you'd said anything. You tight-lipped bastard."

One corner of my mouth tugged up into a grin. "Meanwhile, I'll see if I can't find out anything about that tattoo."

She nodded. "You figure we're dealing with another sorcerer type?"

I shrugged. "Maybe. But if you give someone a disease with magic, it's usually so that you make it look like they haven't been murdered. Natural causes. This kind of mishmash - I don't know. Maybe it's something a demon would do."

"A real demon? Like Exorcist demon?"

I shook my head. "Those are the Fallen. The former angels. Not the same thing."

"Why not?"

"Demons are just intelligent beings from somewhere in the Nevernever. Mostly they don't care about the mortal world, if they notice it at all. The ones who do are usually the hungry types, or the mean types that someone calls up to do thug work. Like that thing Leonid Kravos had called up."

Murphy shivered. "I remember. And the Fallen?"

"They're very interested in our world. But they aren't free to act, like demons are."

"Why not?"

I shrugged. "Depends on who you talk to. I've heard everything from advanced magical resonance theory to 'because God said so.' One of the Fallen couldn't do this unless it had permission to."

"Right. And how many people would give permission to be infected and then tortured to death," Murphy said.

"Yeah, exactly."

She shook her head. "Going to be a busy week. Half a dozen professional hitters for the outfit are in town. The county morgue is doing double business. City Hall is telling us to bend over backward for some bigwig from Europe or somewhere. And now some kind of plague monster is leaving unidentifiable, mutilated corpses on the side of the road."

"That's why they pay you the big bucks, Murph."

Murphy snorted. Butters came back in, and I made my good-byes. My eyes were getting heavy and I had aches in places where I hadn't known I had places. Sleep sounded like a great idea, and with so many things going on, the smart option was to get lots of rest in order to be as capably paranoid as possible.

I walked the long route back out of the hospital, but found a hall blocked by a patient on some kind of life-support machinery being moved on a gurney from one room to another. I wound up heading out through the empty cafeteria, into an alley not far from the emergency room exit.

A cold chill started at the base of my spine and slithered up over my neck. I stopped and looked around me, reaching for my blasting rod. I extended my magical senses as best I could, tasting the air to see what had given me the shivers.

I found nothing, and the eerie sensation eased away. I started down the alley, toward a parking garage half a block from the hospital, and tried to look in every direction at once as I went. I passed a little old homeless man, hobbling along heavily on a thick wooden cane. A while farther on, I passed a tall young black man, dressed in an old overcoat and tattered and too-small suit, clutching an open bottle of vodka in one heavy-knuckled hand. He glowered at me, and I moved on past him. Chicago nightlife.

I kept on moving toward my car, and heard footsteps growing closer, behind me. I told myself not to be too jumpy. Maybe it was just some other frightened, endangered, paranoid, sleep-deprived consultant who had been called to the morgue in the middle of the night.

Okay. Maybe not.

The steady tread of the footsteps behind me shifted, becoming louder and unsteady. I spun to face the person following me, raising the blasting rod in my right hand as I did.

I turned around in time to see a bear, a freaking grizzly bear, fall to all four feet and charge. I had already begun preparing a magical strike with the rod, and the tip burst into incandescent light. Shadows fell harshly back from the scarlet fire of the rod, and I saw the details of the thing coming at me.

It wasn't a bear. Not unless a bear can have six legs and a pair of curling ram's horns wrapping around the sides of its head. Not unless bears can somehow get an extra pair of eyes, right over the first set, one pair glowing with faint orange light and one with green. Not unless bears have started getting luminous tattoos of swirling runes on their foreheads and started sprouting twin rows of serrated, slime-coated teeth.