Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files 8)

Rawlins frowned, but then shook his head. "Can't let you in there."

"Could I just look?" I asked. "You open the door, and I don't even go in. I just look. That couldn't hurt anything, could it? And you've already been in there, the EMTs, maybe a detective. Am I right? I couldn't contaminate it all that much just from looking in the door."

Rawlins gave me a long, level stare and then sighed. He grunted, and the front legs of his chair thunked down to the floor. He rose and said, "All right. Not one step inside."

"You're an officer and a gentleman," I told him. I used my elbow to nudge the restroom door open. It squealed ferociously. I leaned my head in, my chin just over the level of the top strip of tape, and looked around the bathroom.

Standard stuff. A bathroom. White tile. Stalls, urinals, sinks, a long mirror.

The blood wasn't standard, of course.

There was a large splotch of it on the floor, and it had been smeared around when it had been making the tile all slippery. There were a couple of different footmarks on the floor, outlined in blood, and more smears of it on one of the sinks, where the victim had apparently tried to pull himself up off the floor. It looked fairly gruesome, which wasn't really a surprise. There wasn't as much blood as there would have been at, say, a murder, but there was plenty all the same. Someone had laid into Clark Pell, the victim, with a will. I picked out small blood splatter on the mirror, high on the wall, and in a spot on the ceiling.

"Jesus," I muttered. "It was an unarmed assault? No knives or anything?"

Rawlins grunted. "Old man had broken ribs, bruises, gashes from being slammed around. No cuts or stabs, though."

"No kid did this," I said.

"Wasn't a professional, either. Crowded spot like this. Witness in the bathroom. Cop twenty feet away. Dumbest thug in Chicago wouldn't open up that big a can of whoopass where he'd be seen and caught."

"Someone strong," I muttered. "And really, really vicious. He had to have hit the old guy a few times after he went down."

Rawlins grunted again. "Sound like anyone you know?"

I shook my head. I stared at the room for a second and then chewed on my lower lip for a second, coming to a decision. I closed my eyes, clearing my thoughts.

"That's enough," Rawlins said. "Shut the door before people start to stare."

"One second," I murmured. Then with an effort of focus and will, and a faint sense of illusory pressure on my forehead, I opened my wizard's Sight.

The Sight is something anyone born with enough talent has. It's an extra sense, though when using it almost everyone experiences it as a kind of augmented vision. It shows you the primal nature of things, the true and emotional core of what they are. It also shows you the presence of magical energies that course through pretty much everything on the planet, showing you how that energy flowed and pulsed and swirled through the world. The Sight was especially useful for looking for any active magical constructs- that's spells, for the newbie-and for cutting through illusions and spells meant to obfuscate what was true.

I opened my Sight and it showed me what my physical eyes could not see about the room. It showed me something that, with as many bad things as I had seen in my life, still made me clench my fists and fight to keep from losing control of my stomach.

The site of the attack, the blood, the brutality and pain inflicted upon the victim, had not been a simple matter of desire, conflict, and violence.

It had been a deliberate, gleeful work of art.

I could see patterns in the bloodstain, patterns that showed me the terrified face of an old man, pounded into a lumpy, unrecognizable mass by sledgehammer fists, each one a miniature portrait painted in the medium of terror and pain. When I looked at the smears on the sink, I could hear a short series of grunts meant to be desperate cries for help. And then the old man was hurled back down for another round of splatter portraits of pain.

And just for a second, I saw a shadow on the wall-a brief glimpse, a form, a shape, something that left an outline of itself on the wall where it had absorbed the agonized energy of the old man's suffering.

I fought to push the Sight away from my perceptions again, and staggered. That was the drawback to using the Sight. The Sight could show you a lot of things, but everything you saw with it was there to stay. It wrote everything you perceived with it upon your memory in indelible ink, and those memories were always there, fresh and harsh when you went back to them, never blurring with the passage of time, never growing easier to endure. The little demonic diorama of bad vibes painted over the white tiles of that bathroom was going to make some appearances in my darker dreams.

It looked like I'd found the black magic the Gatekeeper warned me about. Just as well that I hadn't tried the dangerous spell with Little Chicago.

I took a couple of steps away, shaking away the flickers of color and sparkles of light on my vision that remained for a time when the Sight was gone once more. Rawlins had a hand under one of my elbows.

"You all right, man?" he rumbled a moment later, his voice very quiet.

"Yeah," I said. "Yeah. Thanks."

He looked from me to the closed door and back. "What did you see in there?"

"I'm not sure yet," I said. My voice sounded shaky. "Something bad."

Almost too quietly to be heard, he said, "This wasn't just some thug, was it."

My stomach twisted again. In my mind's eye, I could see a malicious smile reflected in the eyes of the old man, the memory absolutely crystalline. "Maybe not," I mumbled. "It could have been a person, I think. Someone really sick. Or... maybe not. I don't know." More words struggled to bubble out of my mouth and I clamped my lips resolutely shut until I'd gotten my thoughts back under control.

I looked around me and realized that the hairs on the back of my neck were not crawling around at the memory of the energy I'd just brushed.

They were reacting to more of it drifting through the air. Now. Nearby.

"Rawlins," I said. "How many other cops are here?"

"Just me now," he said quietly. He took a look at my face and then peered around, his heavy-lidded eyes deceptively alert, his hand on his gun. "We got trouble?"

"We got trouble," I said quietly, shifting my staff into my right hand.

The lights went out, all of them at once, plunging the hotel into pure blackness.

And the screaming started.

Chapter Twelve

No more than two or three seconds went by before Rawlins had his flashlight out and he flicked it on. The light flashed white and clean for maybe half a second, and then it dimmed down, as though some kind of greasy soot had coated it, until the light, though still bright, was so vague and veiled that it accomplished little more than to cast a faint glow to maybe an arm's length from Rawlins.