Dead Beat

That meant that if I wanted to get a look around, I had to move immediately. From what the cops had said, Forensics wasn’t there yet. The men moving the body were part of the new civilian agency the city government was employing to transport corpses around town, judging from the ambulance outside. Both cops were with the security chief, which would mean that at most there was maybe a detective and a cop at the crime scene. There might be a chance that I could get close enough to see something.

It took me about two seconds to make up my mind. The minute the security chief was out of sight, I slipped through the nondescript doorway, down a flight of stairs, and into the plain and unassuming hallways meant for the Field Museum ‘s staff instead of its visitors. I passed a small alcove with a fridge, a counter, and a coffee machine. I picked up a cup of coffee, a bagel, a newspaper, and a spiral notebook someone had left there. I piled up everything in my arms and tried to look like a bored academic on his way to his office. I had no clue where I was going yet, but I tried to walk like I knew what I was doing, reaching out with my arcane senses in an effort to feel where the remnants of the hot spot might be.

I chose intersections methodically, left each time. I hit a couple of dead ends, but tried to keep close track of where I was going. The complex of tunnels and hallways under the Field Museum could swallow a small army without needing a glass of water, and I couldn’t afford to get lost down there.

It took me fifteen minutes to find it. One hallway had been marked with crime-scene tape, and I homed in on it. Even before I turned down the hall, my senses prickled with uneasy cold. I’d found my hot spot of necromantic energy, and there was a murder scene at its center. I heard footsteps and slipped to one side, remaining still as a pair of cops in suits came out, arguing quietly with each other about the shortest path outside so that they could smoke. They’d been cooped up with the body, taking pictures and documenting the scene since before anyplace had been open for breakfast, and neither one of them sounded like he was in a good mood.

"Rawlins," said one of them into his radio, "where the hell are you?"

"Talking to some administrator," came the reply, the voice of the older cop from upstairs.

"How soon can you get down here to watch the site?"

"Give me a few minutes."

"Dammit," cursed the other detective. "Bastard is doing this on purpose."

The one with the radio nodded. "Screw this. I’ve been on duty since noon yesterday. We’ve got the scene documented. It’ll keep for two minutes while he walks his slow ass down here."

The other detective nodded his agreement and they left.

I set my props aside and slipped under the tape and down the hallway. There were office doors every couple of steps, all closed. At the end of the hall a door stood open, the lights on. I might have only a few minutes, and if I was going to learn anything it had to be now. I hurried forward.

There might not have been a body there anymore, but even before I saw it, the room stank of death. It’s an elusive scent, something that you get as a bonus to other smells, rather than a distinctive smell of its own. The thick, sweet odor of blood was in the air, mixed in with the faint stench of offal. There was the musty, moldy smell of old things long underground, too, as well as a few traces of something spicier, maybe some kind of incense. The death scent was mixed all through it, something sharp and unnerving, halfway between burned meat and cheap ammonia-based cleaner. My stomach rolled uncomfortably, and the rising sense of dark energy didn’t help me keep it calm.

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.