The Dresden Files Series Part I Part 129

"Yeah. As much as she can be."

"Then why do you look like you just swallowed something that was still wriggling?"

I shrugged. "She's in town to quit her job. And she was with someone."

"A guy guy?" Murphy asked.

"Yeah."

She frowned. "With him, or with with him?" him?"

I shook my head. "Just with him, I think. I don't know."

"She's quitting her job?"

"Guess so. We're going to talk, I think."

"She said so?"

"Said she'd get in touch and we'd talk."

Murphy's eyes narrowed, and she said, "Ah. One of those."

"Eh?" I said, and eyed her.

She lifted her hands, palms out. "None of my business."

"h.e.l.l's bells, Murph."

She sighed and didn't look up at me, and didn't speak for a few steps. Finally she said, "You don't set up a guy for a good talk, Harry."

I stared at her profile, and then scowled down at my feet for a while. No one said anything.

We got to the morgue. Murphy pushed a b.u.t.ton on the wall and said, "It's Murphy," at a speaker next to the door. A second later, the door buzzed and clicked. I swung open the door and held it for Murphy. She gave me an even look before she went through. Murphy does not respond well to chivalry.

The morgue was like others I'd seen, cold, clean, and brightly lit with fluorescent lights. Metal refrigerator doors lined one wall. An occupied autopsy table sat in the middle of the room, and a white sheet covered its subject. A rolling medical cart sat next to the autopsy table, another by a cheap office-furniture desk.

Polka music, heavy on accordion and clarinet, oompah oompahed cheerfully through the room from a little stereo on the desk. At the desk sat a small man with a wild shock of black hair. He was dressed in medical scrubs and green bunny slippers, complete with floppy ears. He had a pen clenched in one hand, and scribbled furiously at a stack of forms.

When we came in, he held up a hand toward us, and finished his scribbling with a flourish, before hopping up with a broad smile. "Karrin!" he said. "Wow, you're looking nice tonight. What's the occasion?"

"Munic.i.p.al bra.s.s are tromping around," Murphy said. "So we're all supposed to wear our Sunday clothes and smile a lot."

"b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," the little guy said cheerfully. He shot me a glance. "You aren't supposed to be spending money on psychic consultants, either, I bet. You must be Harry Dresden."

"That's what it says on my underwear," I agreed.

He grinned. "Great coat, love it."

"Harry," Murphy said, "this is Waldo b.u.t.ters. a.s.sistant medical examiner."

b.u.t.ters shook my hand, then turned to walk to the autopsy table. He snapped on some rubber gloves and a surgical mask. "Pleased to meet you, Mister Dresden," he said over his shoulder. "Seems like every time you're working with SI my job gets really interesting."

Murphy chucked me on the arm with one fist, and followed b.u.t.ters. I followed her.

"Masks on that tray to your left. Stay a couple of feet back from the table, and for G.o.d's sake, don't throw up on my floor." We put on masks and b.u.t.ters threw back the sheet.

I'd seen corpses before. h.e.l.l's bells, I'd created some. I'd seen what was left of people who had been burned alive, savaged to death by animals, and who had died when their hearts exploded out of their chests, courtesy of black magic.

But I hadn't ever seen anything quite like this. I shoved the thought to the back of my head, and tried to focus purely upon taking in details. It wouldn't do to think too much, looking at this. Thinking too much would lead me to messing up b.u.t.ters's floor.

The victim had been a man, maybe a little over six feet tall, thin build. His chest looked like twenty pounds of raw hamburger. Fine grid marks stretched vertically from his collarbones to his belly, and horizontally across the width of his body. The cuts were s.p.a.ced maybe a sixteenth of an inch apart, and the grid pattern slashed into the flesh looked nearly flawless. The cuts were deep ones, and I had the unsettling impression that I could have brushed my hand across the surface of that ruined body and sent chunks of flesh pattering to the floor. The Y-incision of the autopsy had been closed, at least. Its lines marred the precision of the grid of incisions.

The next thing I noticed were the corpse's arms. Or rather, the missing bits of them. His left arm had been hacked off two or three inches above the wrist. The flesh around it gaped, and a shard of black-crusted bone poked out from it. His right arm had been severed just beneath the elbow, with similar hideous results.

My belly twitched and I felt myself taking one of those prevomit breaths. I closed my eyes for a second and forced the impending reaction down. Don't think, Harry. Look. See what there is to see. That isn't a man anymore. It's just a sh.e.l.l. Throwing up won't bring him back Don't think, Harry. Look. See what there is to see. That isn't a man anymore. It's just a sh.e.l.l. Throwing up won't bring him back.

I opened my eyes again, tore my gaze from his mutilated chest and hands, and forced myself to study the corpse's features.

I couldn't.

His head had been hacked off, too.

I stared at the ragged stump of his neck. The head just wasn't there. Even though that's where heads go go. Ditto his hands. A man should have a head. Should have hands. They shouldn't simply be gone gone.

The impression it left on me was unsettling-simply and profoundly wrong. Inside me, some little voice started screaming and running away. I stared down at the corpse, my stomach threatening insurrection again. I stared at his missing head, but aloud all I said was, "Gee. Wonder what killed him."

"What didn't didn't kill him," b.u.t.ters said. "I can tell you this much. It wasn't blood loss." kill him," b.u.t.ters said. "I can tell you this much. It wasn't blood loss."

I frowned at b.u.t.ters. "What do you mean?"

b.u.t.ters lifted one of the corpse's arms and pointed down at dark mottling in the dead grey flesh, just where the corpse's back met the table. "See that?" he asked. "Lividity. If this guy had bled out, from his wrists or his neck either one, I don't think there'd be enough blood left in the body to show this much. His heart would have just kept on pumping it out of his body until he died."

I grunted. "If not one of the wounds, then what was it?"

"My guess?" b.u.t.ters said. "Plague."

I blinked and looked at him.

"Plague," he said again. "Or more accurately plagues. His insides looked like models for a textbook on infection. Not all the tests have come back yet, but so far every one I've done has returned positive. Everything from bubonic plague to strep throat. And there are symptoms I've found in him that don't match any disease I've ever heard of."

"You're telling me he died of disease?" I asked.

"Diseases. Plural. And get this. I think one of them was smallpox."

"I thought smallpox was extinct," Murphy said.

"Pretty much. They have some in vaults, probably some in some bioweapon research facilities, but that's it."

I stared at b.u.t.ters for a second. "And we're standing here next to his plague-ridden body why?"

"Relax," b.u.t.ters said. "The really nasty stuff wasn't airborne. I disinfected the corpse pretty well. Wear your mask and don't touch it, you should be fine."

"What about the smallpox?" I said.

b.u.t.ters's voice turned wry. "You're vaccinated."

"This is dangerous, though, isn't it? Having the body out like this?"

"Yeah," b.u.t.ters said, his voice frank. "But County is full, and the only thing that's going to happen if I report an occurrence of free-range smallpox is another evaluation."

Murphy shot me a warning look and stepped a very little bit between me and b.u.t.ters. "You got a time of death?"

b.u.t.ters shrugged. "Maybe forty-eight hours ago, tops. All of those diseases seemed to sprout up at exactly the same time. I make cause of death as either shock or a ma.s.sive failure and necrosis of several major organs, plus tissue damage from an outrageously high fever. It's anyone's guess as to which one gets the blue ribbon. Lungs, kidneys, heart, liver, spleen-"

"We get the point," Murphy said.

"Let me finish. It's like every disease the guy had ever had contact with all got together and planned when to hit him. It just isn't possible. He probably had more germs in him than blood cells."

I frowned. "And then someone Ginsued him after he died?"

b.u.t.ters nodded. "Partly. Though the cuts on his chest weren't postmortem. They had filled with blood. Tortured before he died, maybe."

"Ugh," I said. "Why?"

Murphy regarded the corpse without any emotion showing in her cool blue eyes. "Whoever cut him up must have taken the arms and hands to make it hard to identify him after he died. That's the only logical reason I can think of."

"Same here," said b.u.t.ters.

I frowned down at the table. "Why prevent identification of the corpse if it had died of disease?" b.u.t.ters began to lower the arm slowly and I saw something as he did. "Wait, hold it."

He looked up at me. I pressed closer to the table and had b.u.t.ters lift the arm again. I had almost missed it against the rotted tone of the dead man's flesh-a tattoo, maybe an inch square, located on the inside of the corpse's biceps. It wasn't fancy. Faded green ink in the shape of a symbolic open eye, not too different from the CBS network logo.

"See there?" I asked. Murphy and b.u.t.ters peered at the tattoo.

"Do you recognize it, Harry?" Murphy asked.

I shook my head. "Almost looks old Egyptian, but with fewer lines. Hey, b.u.t.ters, do you have a piece of paper?"

"Better," b.u.t.ters said. He got an old instant camera off the bottom tray of one of the medical carts, and snapped several shots of the tattoo. He pa.s.sed one of them over to Murphy, who waved it around a little while the image developed. I got another.

"Okay," I said, thinking out loud. "Guy dies of a zillion diseases he somehow contracted all at once. How long do you think it took?"

b.u.t.ters 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," b.u.t.ters 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 overpa.s.s 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 munic.i.p.al 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 b.u.t.ters and then back again.

b.u.t.ters 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, "b.u.t.ters 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. b.u.t.ters 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 s.h.i.+ft. 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 times 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.