AFTERMATH
– original novella Takes place an hour or two after the end of Changes
To quote a great man: 'Nuff said. I can't believe he's dead.
Harry Dresden, Professional Wizard. It sounds like a bad joke. Like most people, at first I figured it was just his schtick, his approach to marketing himself as a unique commodity in private investigation, a job market that isn't ever exactly teeming with business.
Well, that's not entirely true. I knew better. I'd seen something that the rules of the normal world just couldn't explain, and he was right in the middle of it. But I did what everyone does when they run into the supernatural: I told myself that it was dark, and that I didn't really know what I had seen. No one else had witnessed anything to support me. They would call me crazy if I tried to tell anyone about it. By the time a week had passed, I had half convinced myself that I hallucinated the whole thing. A year later, I was almost certain it had been some kind of trick, an illusion pulled off by a smarmy but savvy con.
But he was for real.
Believe me, I know. Several years and several hundred nightmares later, I know.
He was the real thing.
God. I was already thinking about him in the past tense.
'Sergeant Murphy,' said one of the lab guys. Dresden was almost one of our own, in Special Investigations. We'd pulled every string we had to get a forensics team on the site. 'Excuse me, Sergeant Murphy.'
I turned to face the forensic tech. He was cute, in a not-quite-grown, puppyish kind of way. The ID clipped to his lapel said his name was Jarvis. He looked nervous.
'I'm Murphy,' I said.
'Um, right.' He swallowed and looked around. 'I don't know how to tell you this, but… my boss said I shouldn't be talking to you. He said you were on suspension.'
I looked at him calmly. He wasn't more than average height, but that put his head about eight and a half inches over mine. He still had that whippet thinness that some twentysomethings hang on to for a while after their teenage years. I smiled at him and tried to put him at ease. 'I get it,' I said. 'I won't tell anyone if you won't.'
He licked his lips nervously.
'Jarvis,' I said, 'please.' I gestured at the bloodstain on the exterior of the cabin of a dumpy little secondhand boat, the lettering on which proclaimed it the Water Beetle. 'He is my friend.'
I didn't say was-not out loud. You don't ever do that until you've found the remains. It's professional.
Jarvis exhaled and looked around. I thought he looked as if he might throw up.
'The blood spatter suggests that whoever was struck there took a hit somewhere in his upper torso. It's impossible to be sure, but'-he swallowed-'it was a heavy spray. Maybe an arterial hit.'
'Or maybe not,' I said.
He was too young to notice the way I was grasping at straws. 'Or maybe not,' he agreed. 'There's not enough blood on the site to call it a murder, but we think most of it… We didn't find the round. It went through the victim, and both walls of the, uh, boat there. It's probably in the lake.'
I grunted. It's something I picked up over a fifteen-year career in law enforcement. Men have managed to create a complex and utterly impenetrable secret language consisting of monosyllabic sounds and partial words- and they are apparently too thick to realize it exists. Maybe they really are from Mars. I'd been able to learn a few Martian phrases over time, and one of the useful ones was the grunt that meant I acknowledge that I've heard what you said; please continue.
'Smears on the deck and the guardrail suggest that the victim went over the side and into the water,' Jarvis continued, his tone subdued. 'There's a dive team on the way, but…'
I used the Martian phrase for You needn't continue; I know what you're talking about. It sounded a lot like the first grunt to anyone without a Y chromosome, but I really did get it.
Lake Michigan is jealous and protective of her dead. The water's depth and the year-round cold temperatures that go with it mean that corpses don't tend to produce many gasses as they decompose. As a result, they often don't bob to the surface, like you see in all those cop shows on cable. They just lie on the bottom. No one knows how many poor souls' earthly remains rest in the quiet cold of Michigan's depths.
'It hasn't been long,' I said. 'Even if he fell off the back, into the open water, he can't have gone far.'
'Yes, ma'am,' Jarvis said. 'Um. If you'll excuse me.'
I nodded at him and shoved my hands into the pockets of my coat. Night was coming on, but it wouldn't make a lot of difference-the lake wasn't exactly crystal clear on the best days. The divers would have to use flashlights, day or night, even though we weren't more than fifty yards from shore, on the docks of the marina the Water Beetle called home. That would limit the area of water they could search at any given moment. The cold would impose limits on their dive time. Sonar might or might not be useful. This close to Chicago, the lake floor was cluttered with all kinds of things. They'd have to get lucky to get a good radar hit and find him.
If he was in there, he'd been there for several hours, and the wind had been rising the whole time, stirring the surface of the lake. Harry's corpse would have had plenty of time to fall to the bottom and begin to drift.
The dive team probably wasn't going to find him. They'd try, but…
Dammit.
I stared hard at the lengthening shadows and tried to make my tears evaporate through sheer will.
'I'm… very sorry, Sergeant,' Jarvis said.
I replied with the Martian for Thank you for your concern, but at the moment I need some space. That one's easy. I just stared forward without saying anything, and after a moment, Jarvis nodded and toddled off to continue working.
A while later, Stallings was standing next to me, wearing his badge prominently out on his coat. After I'd been busted back to sergeant, Stallings had replaced me as the head of Special Investigations, Chicago's unofficial monster squad. We dealt with the weird stuff no one would accept, and then lied about what we'd been doing so that everything fit neatly into a report.
Stallings was a big, rawboned man, comfortably solid with age, his hair thinning on top. He had a mustache like Magnum's. I'd been his boss for nearly seven years. We got along well with each other. He never treated me like his most junior subordinate-more like an adviser who had been made available to the new commander.
The forensics boys were sealing the doors of the little boat with crime scene tape, having taken enough samples and photographs to choke a rhinoceros, before anyone spoke.
'Hey,' he said.
'Hey.'
He exhaled through his nose and said, 'Hospital checks have come up with zip.'
I grimaced. They would. When Harry got hurt, the hospital was the last place he wanted to be. He felt too vulnerable there-and he worried that the way a wizard's presence disrupted technology could hurt or kill someone on life support, or do harm to some innocent bystander.
But there was so much blood on the boat. If he was that badly hurt, he couldn't have gone anywhere on his own power. And down here, anyone who had found him would have called emergency services.
And the blood trail led to the lake.
I shook my head several times. I didn't want to believe it, but you can't make fact into fiction, no matter how much denial you've got to draw upon.
Stallings sighed again. Then he said, 'You're on suspension, Murphy. And this is a crime scene.'
'Not until we know a crime's been committed,' I said. 'We don't absolutely know anyone's been hurt or killed. Right now, it's just a mess.'
'God dammit,' he said, his voice weary. 'You're a civilian now, Karrin. Get away from the fucking scene. Before someone gets word to Rudolph about this and Infernal Affairs comes down here to toss your ass in jail.'
'On any other day, I would think you were talking sense,' I said.
'I don't care what you think,' he said. 'I care what you do. And what you're going to do is turn around, walk over to your car, get in it, go home, and get a good night's sleep. You look like a hundred miles of bad road. Through Hell.'
