Then the little medical examiner nodded to Murphy and said, “Can we talk in the conference room?”
“Sure,” she said. She walked by the ring and bumped (left) fists with Skaldi. Then she led Butters and me out of the gym, down another hallway, and into a long, narrow conference room. She shut the door behind us, and Butters popped Bob’s flashlight onto the table. His eyelights winked on again, and I saw Murphy react visibly when that light revealed my presence.
She stiffened a little, looking at me, and her eyes showed a sudden weariness and pain. She took a deep breath through her nose and closed her eyes for a second. Then she took off her jacket, moving gingerly, and said, “Hi, Harry.”
Butters put the radio on the table and I said, “Hi, Murph.”
She was wearing thin, light padding under the jacket—like the stuff I’d seen on stuntmen on a case I’d done not long after I’d gone into business. So her full-contact practice hadn’t been as vicious as it had looked. She’d be covered in bruises, but the impact with the wall hadn’t actually been likely to break her back. Her skull, maybe, but not her back.
“You okay?”
She rolled one shoulder with a grimace of discomfort. “I will be.”
“Big guy like that going to town on you,” I growled. “Someone needs to push his face in.”
Her eyes glittered as she gave me a sharp look. “Dresden . . . when, exactly, am I going to fight someone my size and strength?”
“Um.”
“If you want to wrestle hostile mooses—”
“Moose,” Butters corrected absently. “Singular and plural, same word.”
“Gorillas,” Murphy continued, hardly breaking stride, “then the best way to train for it is by wrestling slightly less hostile gorillas. Skaldi’s two hundred pounds heavier than me, almost two feet taller, and he has going on two millennium—”
“Millennia,” Butters said. “
Murphy pushed a breath out through her nose and said, “Millennia of experience in breaking the backs of annoying little doctors with annoying little grammar fetishes.”
Butters grinned.
“I’m not going to beat him, Harry. Ever. That isn’t the point.” She looked away and her voice became quiet. “The point is that the world isn’t getting any kinder. A girl’s got to take care of herself.”
The expression on her face? It hurt. Hearing the words that went with it felt like a knife peeling back layers of skin. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t let it show. Murphy would have been offended at the notion that she needed my protection, and if she thought I felt guilty for not being there to protect her, to help her, she’d be downright angry.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t think Murphy was a princess in a tower. But at the end of the day, she was just one person, standing in defiance of powers that would regard her with the same indifference as might an oncoming tsunami, volcanic eruption, or earthquake. Life is precious, fragile, fleeting—and Murphy’s life was one of my favorites.
“Okay, Harry,” Murphy said. “Where do we get started?”
I felt awkward standing there while she and Butters sat at the table, but it wasn’t like I could pull out a chair. “Um. Maybe we get started with what you know about my . . . my shooting.”
She nodded and pulled on her cop face—her expression professionally calm, detached, analytical. “We don’t have much, officially speaking,” she said. “I came to pick you up and found the blood and a single bullet hole. There wasn’t quite enough to declare it a murder scene. Because the vic . . . because you were on the boat and it was in motion, there was no way to extrapolate precisely where the bullet came from. Probably a nearby rooftop. Because the bullet apparently began to tumble as it passed through your body, it left asymmetric holes in the walls of the boat. But forensics thinks it was something between a .223 assaultrifle round and a .338 magnum-rifle round; more likely the latter than the former.”
“I never got into rifles. What does that mean?”
“It means a sniper rifle or a deer rifle,” Butters clarified. “Not necessarily military. There are plenty of civilian weapons that fire rounds in those calibers.”
“We never found the bullet,” Murphy said. She took a deep breath. “Or the body.”
I noticed that both Murph and Butters were staring at me very intently.
“Uh,” I said. “I . . . sort of did that whole tunnel-of-light thing—which is a crock, by the way.” I bit down on a mention of Murphy’s father. “Um, I was sent back to solve the murder. Which . . . sort of implies a death. And they said my body wasn’t available, so . . .”
Murphy looked down and nodded.
“Huh,” Butters said, frowning. “Why send you back?”
I shrugged. “Said what came next wasn’t for whiners or rubberneckers.”
Murphy snorted. “Sounds like something my father would say.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Heh.”
Butters arched an eyebrow. His dark eyes flickered between me and Murphy, and thoughtful lines appeared on his face.
“Anyway,” I said. “That’s what you know officially, right? So . . . what else do you know?”
“I know it wasn’t Marcone,” Murphy said. “All of his troubleshooters have alibis that check out. So do he and Gard and Hendricks. I know which building the shot probably came from, and it wasn’t an easy one.”
“Four hundred and fifty yards,” Butters said. “Which means it was probably a professional gunman.”
“There are amateurs who can shoot that well,” Murphy said.
“As a rule, they don’t do it from buildings at their fellow Americans,” Butters replied. “Look, if we assume it’s an amateur, it could be anyone. But if we assume it was a professional—which is way more likely, in any case—then it gives us the beginning of an identity, and could lead us back to whomever he works for.”
“Even if we do assume that,” Murphy said, “I don’t have the access to information that I used to. We’d need to review TSA video records, security cameras—all kinds of things I can’t get to anymore.”
“Your brother-in-law can,” I said. “Dick can.”
“Richard,” she corrected me. “He hates that nickname.”
“Dick who?” Butters asked, looking between us.
I said, “Her brother-in-law,” at the same time she said, “My exhusband.”
Butters’s brow arched even farther and he shook his head. “Man. Catholics.”
Murphy gave him a gimlet look. “Richard runs by the book. He won’t help a civilian.”
“Come on, Murph,” I said. “You were married to the guy. You’ve got to have some dirt on him.”
She shook her head. “It isn’t a crime to be an asshole, Harry. If it was, I’d have put him away for life.”
Butters cleared his throat. “We could ask—”
“No,” Murphy and I said at the same time, and continued speaking over each other.
“The day I ask for that bastard’s help will be the day I—”
“—told you before, over and over, that just because he’s reasonable doesn’t mean he’s—”
“—a murderer and a drug dealer and a pimp, and just because Chicago’s corrupt government can’t put him away doesn’t mean—”
“—you were smarter than that,” Murphy finished.
Butters lifted his hands mildly. “Okay, okay. I was on board at
“Wally,” Murphy said, one eyebrow arching dangerously.
He held up his hands again. “Uncle. I don’t understand your reasoning, but okay.”
“You think Marcone was behind it, Harry?” Murphy asked.
I shrugged. “Last time I saw him, he said he didn’t need to kill me. That I’d get myself killed without any help from him.”
Murphy frowned. It made her lip hurt and she winced, reaching up. The wince made it hurt worse, apparently, because fresh blood appeared. “Dammit. Well. You can take that a couple of different ways, can’t you?”
“Like how?”
