Storm Front

"Out in Lake Providence," I said.

"Yeah."

"What did you see there?" I asked.

Donny Wise shook his head, his eyes drawn past me to the bed again. "Linda. Some other people. No one I knew. They were having some kind of party. All candles and stuff. It was storming like hell, a lot of thunder and lightning, so I couldn’t really hear them. I worried for a while about someone looking up and seeing me in the lightning, but I guess they were too busy."

"They were having sex," I said.

"No," he snapped. "They was playing canasta. Yeah, sex. The real thing, not fake stuff on a set. The real thing don’t look as good. Linda, some other woman, three men. I shot my roll and got out."

I grinned, but he didn’t seem to have noticed the double entendre. You just don’t get quality lowlife often enough anymore. "Can you describe any of these other people?"

He shook his head. "I wasn’t looking. But they wasn’t being too particular, if you take my meaning. Turned my stomach."

"Did you know what Linda wanted with the pictures?"

He looked at me and then snickered, as though I were extremely simple. "Jesus, buddy. What do you think someone wants with pictures like that? She wanted to get leverage on somebody. Hell, it wouldn’t hurt her reputation any if pictures of her in the middle of an orgy got out. But it might have, some of the people with her. What kind of simp, wanna-be cop are you?"

I ignored the question. "What are you going to do with the film, Donny?"

He shrugged. "Trash it, probably." I saw his eyes flick from side to side, and I knew that he was lying to me. He’d keep the film, find out who was in the pictures, and if he thought he could get away with it, he’d try to weasel whatever profit he could out of it. He seemed the type, and I trusted my instincts.

"Allow me," I said, and snapped my fingers. "Fuego."

The canister’s grey lid flew off in a little whoosh of flame, and Donny Wise yelped, drawing his hand back sharply. The red canister burst into flame on its way to the ground and landed there in a crumpled, smoking lump.

He stared at the film, then up at me, his mouth gaping.

"I hope I don’t find out you’ve lied to me, Donny," I told him. He went white as a sheet, assured me that he hadn’t, then turned and fled out of the apartment, knocking loose two bits of police tape on the way out. He didn’t close the door behind him.

I let him go. I believed him. He didn’t seem bright enough to make up a story on the fly, as rattled as he’d been. I felt a ferocious surge of triumph, of anger, and of the desire to find this person, whoever it was, who was taking the raw forces of life and creation and turning them to the ends of destruction, and to put him in the trash with the rest of the garbage. Whoever he was, murdering with magic and killing people by degrees with the ThreeEye drug, he was someone I wanted to put down. My brain lurched into gear, now that there was something to work with, some other possibility for tomorrow morning than me dying in a variety of gruesome ways.

Linda Randall had been planning on blackmailing someone, I took a staggering mental leap and figured it was Victor, or someone out at his house during the party. But why? I didn’t have any pictures now, only the information I’d gotten from Donny Wise. I couldn’t afford to wait around. I had to pursue the lead he’d given me if I was to get to the bottom of this, and find out who had killed Linda.

How had I managed to get into all of this trouble in only a few days? And how in the world had I managed to stumble across what appeared to be a complex and treacherous little plot by chance, out at the house in Lake Providence, on a separate investigation entirely?

Simple answer – it hadn’t been an accident. It had all been by design. I had been directed there. Someone had wanted me out at the lake house, had wanted me to get involved and to find out what was going on out there. Someone who was nervous as hell around wizards, who refused to give out her name, who had carefully dropped phrases that would make me believe her ignorance, who had to rush out quickly from her appointment and who was willing to let five hundred dollars go, just to get me off the phone a few seconds faster. Someone had drawn me out and forced me into the open, where I had attracted all sorts of hostile attention.

That was the key.

I gathered up my staff and rod and stalked out the door.

It was time to talk to Monica Sells.

Chapter Twenty

The cabby dropped me off a block away from Monica Sells’s house in the suburbs. I was running out of time, out of Murphy’s loan, and out of patience, so I didn’t waste any daylight in walking down the street toward her place.

It was a cute little house, two stories, a couple of young trees in the front yard, just now starting to rival the house for height. There was a minivan in the driveway, and a basketball goal, well used. The lawn was grown rather long, but all the recent rains left a good excuse for that. The street was a quiet one, and it took me a moment to realize that most of the houses on it were not occupied. FOR SALE signs stood in many of the yards. Sparse curtains draped over empty, gaping windows, like cobwebs. There wasn’t a lot of birdsong, for a street with so many trees, and I couldn’t hear any dogs barking as I walked along the sidewalk. Overhead, clouds were thickening, building up for another thunderstorm.

Taken all together, it had the feel of someplace blighted, a place where a black wizard had set up shop. I swung up through the Sells yard and to the front door.

I rang the bell, and waited.

There was no answer.

I knocked. I leaned on the doorbell.

Still no answer.

I tightened my jaw and looked around. I didn’t see anyone, so I turned back to the door, preparing to use a spell to open it.

Instead, the door swung open, maybe six inches. Monica Sells stood inside, peering out at me with her green eyes. She was dressed in jeans, a plain flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and her hair was covered by a bandana. She wore no makeup. She looked both older and more appealing that way – I think maybe because it was a more natural look for her, something that was closer to the sort of person she really was, rather than the nicer clothes and jewelry she’d worn when she visited my office. Her face went pale, her lips bloodless.

"I don’t have anything to say to you, Mr. Dresden," she said. "Go away."

"I can’t do that," I said. She started to swing the door shut, but I jammed the end of my staff into the doorway, keeping it from closing.

"I’ll call the police," she said, voice strained. She leaned against the door, trying to keep me from coming in.

"Do it," I growled, and then I played a hunch, "and I’ll tell them about you and your husband." I was taking a shot in the dark, but what the hell. She didn’t know that I didn’t know what the hell was going on.