Side Jobs

The attacker had dragged her out by main force. Either he’d beaten her with his fists and feet—easy, on a pregnant woman, who would instinctively curl her body around her unborn child, so that blows landed mostly on the back, ribs, and buttocks—or else he’d choked her unconscious. Either way, he’d subdued her without, apparently, drawing blood.

Then they left.

I shook my head.

“What do you think?” Will asked.

“I think you don’t want to know.”

“No, I don’t,” he said. “But I need to.”

I nodded. I repeated my theory and its supporting evidence. It made Will go pale and silent.

“How was her hand-to-hand?” I asked him.

“Fair. She used to teach women’s self-defense seminars on campus. I don’t think she’s ever had to use it in earnest. . . .” His voice trailed off as he stared at the fallen chair.

“What did you find out that I couldn’t?” I asked. “I mean, with the whole werewolf thing.”

He shook his head. “The human brain isn’t wired for serious scent-processing,” he said. “Not like a wolf’s, anyway. Shifting . . . sort of turns up the volume in your nose, but it’s really hard to sort things out. I can follow a trail if I’m on it soon enough, but when a bunch of scents get mixed together, it’s a crap shoot. In here there’s new paint, spilled cocoa, the last day or two of meals. . . .” He shrugged.

“Magic never seems to make things any easier,” I said.

Will snorted faintly. “Dresden keeps saying the same thing.”

I felt an odd pain in my chest. I ignored it. I walked over to the apartment’s little kitchen and studied it for a minute. Then I said, “So she’s a cocoa junkie.”

“Well, she’s functional.”

“She drink instant?”

“Are you kidding?” The pitch and cadence of his voice changed a little, becoming slightly higher and more clearly inflected, in what was probably an unconscious imitation of his wife. “It’s the Spam of cocoas.”

I got a pen out of my pocket and used it to lift a second cup, this one with a bit of lipstick smeared on the rim. The bottom of the cup was sticky with the residue of real cocoa, the kind you make from milk and chocolate. Some of it was still liquid enough to stir as the cup shifted. I showed it to him.

“Georgia doesn’t wear makeup,” he half whispered.

“I know,” I said. “And the cocoa in this cup has been sitting out for about the same length of time as the cocoa in the other cup. So the next question we need to answer: Who was drinking cocoa with Georgia when the door broke in?”

Will shook his head. “Either it’s the attacker’s scent or it’s someone we know. Someone who is over a lot.”

I nodded. “Redhead, right? The one who likes wearing the tight shirts.”

“Andi,” Will said. “And Marcy. She moved back to town after Kirby’s funeral. Their scents are here, too.”

“Marcy?”

“Little mousey girl. Brown hair. She and Andi had kind of a thing in school.”

“Liberal werewolves,” I said. “Two words rarely seen adjacent to each other.”

“Lots of people experiment in college,” Will said. “You probably did.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I tried getting into watching European football. It didn’t work out.”

“Neither did Marcy and Andi.”

“Bad blood there?”

“Not that I know of. They were still roommates after they split.”

“But Marcy left town.”

Will nodded. “She wanted into the animation business. She pulled a job at Skywalker. Seriously cool stuff.”

“So cool that she left it to come back here?”

Will shrugged a shoulder. “She said it was more important for her to be here to help us. And she lived in a cardboard box or something, socked most of her money into the bank. Says the interest is enough to get by on for now.”

I decided to remain skeptical on that story. “You happen to remember if either of them wears this color lipstick?”

He shook his head. “Sorry. Not really the kind of thing I notice.”

If I remembered right, most guys who looked at Andi wouldn’t be entirely certain whether or not she had lips afterward. But she’d probably have back problems at some point. “Okay,” I said. “Maybe the cops will be here soon, and maybe not. Either way, I don’t think we should wait around for them.”

Will nodded. “What are we going to do?”

“This isn’t exactly high-dollar soundproof housing. Someone in this building must have heard or seen something.”

“Maybe,” Will said, though he didn’t sound confident.

I turned to leave the apartment and tried not to notice the little crib and changing table that had already been set up just beyond the open door of the apartment’s second bedroom. “We won’t know until we ask. Come on.”

CANVASSING A BUILDING isn’t particularly fun work. It’s awkward, boring, repetitive, and frustrating. Most of the people you talk to don’t want to be talking to you and want out of the conversation as quickly as possible—or else they’re just delighted to be talking to you, and want to keep talking to you even though they don’t know a damn thing. You have to ask the same questions over and over again, get the same answers over and over again, and generally look like you’re an idiot without a single clue.

And you pretty much are, or you wouldn’t be canvassing the building in the first place. You grow a thick skin fast for that kind of thing when you do police work.

“This is getting us nowhere,” Will said after the umpteenth door, his frustration and worry finally boiling over to the point that it was beginning to outweigh his terror for his wife and child. He turned to face me, his stance unconsciously confrontational, his shoulders squared, his chest thrust out, his hands clenched into fists. “We need to do something else.”

Ah, masculine assertiveness—I’ve got nothing against it, as long as it helps get the job done instead of making it harder. “Yeah?” I asked him. “You think we’d be better off walking down the street calling her name, Will?”

“N-no, but—”

“But what?” I asked him, keeping my tone reasonable while facing him with an equal amount of ready-to- kick-your-ass Martian body language. You do not intimidate me. “You came to me for help. I’m giving it to you. Either you work with me or you tell me you want to go it alone. Right now.”

He backed off, unclenching his hands and looking away. I relaxed as well. Will hadn’t meant to deliver a threat to me, as such, but he was a hell of a lot bigger and stronger than I was. Stronger isn’t everything, but simple mass and power mean a lot in a fight, and Will had the ferocity and killer instinct to make them count even more heavily than most. He’d never considered—hell, probably never noticed—the full depth of the statement he was making with his stance and clenched fists.

It’s another in a long list of things that Martians hardly ever think about: Almost any woman knows that almost any man is stronger than she is. Oh, men know they’re stronger, but they seldom actually stop to think through the implications of that simple reality—implications that are both unnerving and virtually omnipresent, if you aren’t a Martian. You think about life differently when you know that half the people you see have the physical power to do things to you, regardless of whether you intend to allow it—and even implied threats of physical violence have to be taken seriously.

Will hadn’t intended to frighten me. He just wanted to find his wife.

“I know it’s frustrating,” I told him, “but it’s the best way to find out something we didn’t know before.”

“We’ve been through the whole building,” he snapped. “The most we’ve got is a neighbor a couple of floors up who heard a thump.”