I don’t mean that there were a lot of pictures on the wall, like at great-grandma’s house. I mean covered in photographs. Entirely. Completely papered.
I glanced up. So was the ceiling.
I took a moment to walk slowly around, looking at pictures. All of them, every single one of them, featured the two dead people together, posed somewhere and looking deliriously happy. I walked and peered. Plenty of the pictures were near-duplicates in most details, except that the subjects wore different sets of clothing—generally cutesy matching T-shirts. Most of the sites were tourist spots within Chicago.
It was as if the couple had gone on the same vacation tour every day, over and over again, collecting the same general batch of pictures each time.
“Matching T-shirts,” I said. “Creepy.”
Murphy’s smile was unpleasant. She was a tiny, compactly muscular woman with blond hair and a button nose. I’d say that she was so cute I just wanted to put her in my pocket, but if I tried to do it, she’d break my arm. Murph knows martial arts.
She waited and said nothing.
“Another suicide pact. That’s the third one this month.” I gestured at the pictures. “Though the others weren’t quite so cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Or, ah, in medias res.” I shrugged and gestured at the obsessive photographs. “This is just crazy.”
Murphy lifted one pale eyebrow ever so slightly. “Remind me: How much do we pay you to give us advice, Sherlock?”
I grimaced. “Yeah, yeah. I know.” I was quiet for a while and then said, “What were their names?”
“Greg and Cindy Bardalacki,” Murphy said.
“Seemingly unconnected dead people, but they share similar patterns of death. Now we’re upgrading to irrational and obsessive behavior as a precursor…” I frowned. I checked several of the pictures and went over to eye the bodies. “Oh,” I said. “Oh, hell’s bells.”
Murphy arched an eyebrow.
“No wedding rings anywhere,” I said. “No wedding pictures. And…” I finally found a framed family picture, which looked to have been there for a while, among all the snapshots. Greg and Cindy were both in it, along with an older couple and a younger man.
“Jesus, Murph,” I said. “They weren’t a married couple. They were brother and sister.”
Murphy eyed the intertwined bodies. There were no signs of struggle. Clothes, champagne flutes, and an empty bubbly bottle lay scattered. “Married, no,” she said. “Couple, yes.” She was unruffled. She’d already worked that out for herself.
“Ick,” I said. “But that explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“These two. They were together—and they went insane doing it. This has the earmarks of someone tampering with their minds.”
Murphy squinted at me. “Why?”
I spread my hands. “Let’s say Greg and Cindy bump into Bad Guy X. Bad Guy X gets into their heads and makes them fall wildly in love and lust with each other. There’s nothing they can do about the feelings—which seem perfectly natural—but on some level they’re aware that what they’re doing is not what they want, and dementedly wrong besides. Their compromised conscious minds clash with their subconscious and…” I gestured at pictures. “And it escalates until they can’t handle it anymore, and bang.” I shot Murphy with my thumb and forefinger.
“If you’re right, they aren’t the deceased,” Murphy said. “They’re the victims. Big difference. Which is it?”
“Wish I could say,” I told her. “But the only evidence that could prove it one way or another is leaking out onto the floor. If we get a survivor, maybe I could take a peek and see, but barring that, we’re stuck with legwork.”
Murphy sighed and looked down. “Two suicide pacts could—technically—be a coincidence. Three of them, no way it’s natural. This feels more like something’s MO. Could it be another one of those Skavis vampires?”
“They gun for loners,” I said, shaking my head. “These deaths don’t fit their profile.”
“So. You’re telling me that we need to turn up a common denominator to link the victims? Gosh, I wish I could have thought of that on my own.”
I winced. “Yeah.” I glanced over at a couple of other SI detectives in the room, taking pictures of the bodies and documenting the walls and so on. Forensics wasn’t on site. They don’t like to waste their time on the suicides of the emotionally disturbed, regardless of how bizarre they might be. That was crap work, and as such had been dutifully passed to SI.
I lowered my voice. “If someone is playing mind games, the Council might know something. I’ll try to pick up the trail on that end. You start from here. Hopefully, I’ll earn my pay and we’ll meet in the middle.”
“Right.” Murph stared at the bodies and her eyes were haunted. She knew what it was like to be the victim of mental manipulation. I didn’t reach out to support her. She hated showing vulnerability, and I didn’t want to point out to her that I’d noticed.
Freddie reached a crescendo, which told us that love must die.
Murphy sighed and called, “For the love of God, someone turn off that damned record.”
“I’M SORRY, HARRY,” Captain Luccio said. “We don’t exactly have orbital satellites for detecting black magic.”
I waited a second to be sure that she was finished. The presence of so much magical talent on the far end of the call meant that at times the lag could stretch out between Chicago and Edinburgh, the headquarters of the White Council of Wizardry. Anastasia Luccio, Captain of the Wardens, my ex-girlfriend, had been readily forthcoming with the information the Council had on any shenanigans going on in Chicago—which was exactly nothing.
“Too bad we don’t, eh?” I asked. “Unofficially—is there anyone who might know anything?”
“The Gatekeeper, perhaps. He has a gift for sensing problem areas. But no one has seen him for weeks, which is hardly unusual. And frankly, Warden Dresden, you’re supposed to be the one giving
“Three couples, apparently lovey-dovey as hell, have committed dual suicide in the past two weeks,” I told her. “The last two were brother and sister. There were some seriously irrational components to their behavior.”
“You suspect mental tampering,” she said. Her voice was hard.
Luccio had been a victim, too.
I found myself smiling somewhat bitterly at no one. She had been, among other things, mindboinked into going out with me. Which was apparently the only way anyone would date me, lately. “It seems a reasonable suspicion. I’ll let you know what I turn up.”
“Use caution,” she said. “Don’t enter any suspect situation without backup on hand. There’s too much chance that you could be compromised.”
“Compromised?” I asked. “Of the two people having this conversation, which one of them exposed the last guy rearranging people’s heads?”
“Touche,” Luccio said. “But he got away with it because we were overconfident. So use caution anyway.”
“Planning on it,” I said.
There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Anastasia said, “How have you been, Harry?”
“Keeping busy,” I said. She had already apologized to me, sort of, for abruptly walking out of my personal life. She’d never intended to be there in the first place. There had been a real emotional tsunami around the events of last year, and I wasn’t the one who had gotten the most hurt by them. “You?”
“Keeping busy.” She was quiet for a moment and then said, “I know it’s over. But I’m glad for the time we had together. It made me happy. Sometimes I—”
“No, there isn’t. When it’s real.” Her voice softened. “Be careful, Harry. Please.”
