Death Masks

"Discreet. That’s me."

"I’m serious."

"Serious, yep."

"Dammit, Harry." But she smiled when she said it.

"You probably don’t want me to call you if I need help."

She nodded. "Hell, no. That would be illegal. Keep your nose clean, walk the straight and narrow."

"Okay."

Murphy paused and asked, "I don’t think I’ve seen you without that coat outside of summer. Where’s your duster?"

I grimaced. "Missing in action."

"Oh. You talk to Susan?"

I said, "Yeah."

I felt Murphy’s eyes on my face. She got it without being told. "Oh," she said again. "Sorry, Harry."

"Thanks."

"See you." She opened my door, kept her hand near her gun, and then warily padded on out.

I shut my door after her and leaned against it. Murphy was worried. She wouldn’t have come to me in person if she weren’t. And she’d been extra careful with the legal stuff. Were things that dicey in the CPD?

Murphy was the first head of Special Investigations not to get her rear bounced onto the street after a token week or three of unsolvable cases. Generally speaking, when the administration wanted someone off the force, they’d get promoted to running SI. Or at least working in it. Every cop there had some kind of failing that had landed them what everyone else considered to be a cruddy assignment. It had, by and large, created a strong sense of camaraderie among the SI officers, a bond only made tighter by the way they occasionally faced off with one kind of nightmarish creature or another.

SI cops had taken down several half-assed dark spellslingers, half a dozen vampires, seven or eight ravening trolls, and a demon that had manifested itself out of a mound of compost-heated garbage behind a pawnshop in Chinatown. SI could handle itself pretty well because they played careful, they worked together, and they understood that there were unnatural beings that sometimes had to be dealt with in ways not strictly in accordance with police procedure. Oh, and because they had a hired wizard to advise them about bad guys, of course. I liked to think that I had contributed too.

But I guess every bucket of fruit has something go rotten sooner or later. In SI the stinker was Detective Rudolph. Rudy was young, good-looking, clean-cut, and had slept with the wrong councilman’s daughter. He had applied some industrial-strength denial to his experiences with SI despite freak encounters with monsters, magic, and human kindness. He had clung to a steadfast belief that everything was normal, and the realm of the paranormal was all make-believe.

Rudy didn’t like me. Rudy didn’t like Murphy. If the kid had sabotaged Murphy’s investigation in order to curry favor with the folks in Homicide, maybe he was angling to get out of SI.

And maybe he’d lose a bunch of teeth the next time he walked through a quiet parking garage. I doubted Murphy would take that kind of backstabbing with good grace. I spent a moment indulging myself in a pleasant fantasy in which Murphy pounded Rudy’s head against the door of her office at SI’s home building until the cheap wood had a Rudolph-shaped dent in it. I enjoyed the thought way too much.

I gathered up a few things from around my apartment, including the antivenom potions Bob had helped me with. I checked on Bob while I was in the lab, and got a sleepy and incoherent response that I understood to mean that he needed more rest. I let him, went back upstairs, and called my answering service.

I had a message from Susan, a phone number. I called it, and a second later she answered. "Harry?"

"You’ve become clairvoyant. If you can do a foreign accent you could get a hot line."

"Like, sure, as if," Susan drawled ditzily.

"California isn’t foreign," I said.

"You’d be surprised. How did things go?"

"Okay, I guess," I said. "I got a second."

"Michael?" she asked.

"Shiro."

"Who?"

"He’s like Michael but shorter and older."

"Oh, uh. Good. I did the legwork."

I thought of some work I’d seen Susan’s legs do before. But I only said, "And?"

"And the downtown Marriott is hosting an art gala this very night, including a gallery sale and a fundraiser auction for charity."

I whistled. "Wow. So lots of art and money moving around, changing hands, being shipped hither and yon."

"Hither maybe, but I don’t think UPS does yon," Susan said. "Seems like a good place to sell a hot article or three. And it’s all sponsored by the Chicago Historical and Art Society."

"Who?"

"A very small and very elite club for the upper crust. Gentleman Johnny Marcone is chairman of its board of directors."

"Sounds like smuggling country all right," I said. "How do I get in?"

"You put up a five-thousand-dollar-per-plate donation to charity."

"Five thousand," I said. "I don’t think I’ve ever had that much all in one place at one time."

"Then you might try option two."

"Which is?"

Susan’s voice took on a note of satisfaction. "You go with a reporter from the Midwest Arcane on her last assignment for her editor. I talked to Trish and got two tickets that had originally been given to a reporter on the Tribune."

"I’m impressed," I said.

"It gets better. I got us formal wear. The gala begins at nine."

"Us? Uh, Susan. I don’t want to sound like an ass, but do you remember the last time you wanted to come on an investigation with me?"

"This time I’m the one with the tickets," she said. "Are you coming with me or not?"

I thought about it for a minute but didn’t see any way around it. There wasn’t time for a long argument, either. "I’m in. I have to meet the Reds at McAnnally’s at eight."

"Meet you there with your tux. Eight-thirty?"

"Yeah. Thank you."

"Sure," she said quietly. "Glad I could help."

Silence stretched long enough to become painful for both of us. I finally broke it at the same time as Susan. "Well, I’d better-"

"Well, I’d better let you go," Susan said. "I have to hurry to get all of this done."

"All right," I said. "Be careful."

"Stones and glass houses, Harry. See you this evening."

We hung up, and I made sure I was ready to go.

Then I went to pick up my second, and work out the terms to a duel I was increasingly certain I had little chance of surviving.

Chapter Seventeen

I put on an old fleece-lined denim jacket and went by my office. The night security guy gave me a little trouble, but I eventually browbeat him into opening the safe in the office to retrieve my envelope from Father Vincent. I opened it and found a plastic case the size of a playing card, like the kind coin collectors use to frame paper money. In the exact center of the case was a single, dirty white thread about two inches long. The sample from the Shroud.