And he was making a choice to stand his ground.
Billy Borden, kid werewolf, was gone.
Will was choosing to stand with me.
I couldn’t treat him like a child anymore. Will was ignorant of the supernatural world beyond the fairly minor threats that lurked around the University of Chicago. He and the other werewolves had been kids who learned one really neat magic trick, almost ten years before. I hadn’t shared more with them, and the paranormal community in general is careful about what they say to strangers. He had, at best, only a vague idea of the scope of supernatural affairs in general, and he had not the first clue about how hot the water really was around me right now.
Will had picked his ground. I couldn’t keep him in the dark and tell myself that I was protecting him.
I nodded to a few chairs sitting along the wall at a nearby intersection of hallways. “Let’s sit down. I don’t have much time, and there’s a lot to cover. I’ll tell you everything when I get a chance, but for now all I can give you is a highlights reel.”
By the time I got done giving Will the CliffsNotes version of the supernatural world, I still hadn’t come up with a plan. So, working on the theory that the proper answers just needed more time to cook, and that they could do so while I was on the move, I went back to my borrowed car and drove to the next place I should have visited sooner than I had.
Murphy used to have an office at the headquarters of CPD’s Special Investigations department. Then she’d blown off her professional duty as head of the department to cover me during a furball that went bad on an epic scale. She’d nearly lost her job altogether, but Murph was a third-generation cop from a cop clan. She’d managed to gain enough support to hang on to her badge, but she had been demoted to Detective Sergeant and had her seniority revoked—a dead end for her career.
Now her old office was occupied by John Stallings, and Murphy had a desk in the large room that housed SI. It wasn’t a new desk, either. One leg was propped up with a small stack of triplicate report forms. It wasn’t unusual in that room. SI was the bottom of the chute for cops who had earned the wrath of their superiors or, worse, had taken a misstep in the cutthroat world of Chicago city politics. The desks were all battered and old. The walls and floor were worn. The room obviously housed at least twice as many work desks as it had been meant to contain.
It was late. The place was quiet and mostly empty. Whoever was on the night shift must have been out on a call of some kind. Of the three cops in the room, I only knew one of them by name—Murphy’s current partner, a blocky, mildly overweight man in his late fifties, with hair going steadily more silver in sharp contrast to the dark coffee tone of his skin.
“Rawlins,” I said.
He turned to me with a grunt and a polite nod. “Evening.”
“What are you doing here this late?”
“Giving my wife ammunition for when she drags my ass to court to divorce me,” he said cheerfully. “Glad you made it in.”
“Murph around?” I asked.
He grunted. “Interrogation room two, with the British perp. Go on down.”
“Thanks, man.”
I went down the hall and around the corner. To my left was a security gate blocking the way to the building’s holding cells. To the right was a short hallway containing four doors—two to the bathrooms, and two that led to the interrogation rooms. I went to the second room and knocked.
Murphy answered it, still wearing the same clothes she’d been in at the storage park. She looked tired and irritated. She grunted almost as well as Rawlins had, despite her complete lack of a Y-chromosome, and stepped out into the hall, shutting the door behind her.
She looked up and studied my head for a second. “What the hell, Harry?”
“Got a visit from Shagnasty the Skinwalker when I went to talk to Lara Raith. Any trouble with Binder?”
She shook her head. “I figured he’d have a hard time doing whatever he does if he can’t get out of his chair or use his hands. I’ve been sitting with him, too, in case he tried to pull something.”
I lifted an eyebrow, impressed. There hadn’t been time to advise her how to handle Binder safely, but she’d worked it out on her own. “Yeah, that’s a pretty solid method,” I said. “What’s he in for, officially?”
“Officially, I haven’t charged him yet,” she said. “If I need to stick him with something, I can cite trespassing, destruction of property, and assault on a police officer.” She shook her head. “But we can’t keep this close an eye on him forever. If I do press charges, it won’t be long before he’s under lighter security. I don’t even want to think about what could happen if he got to turn those things loose inside a precinct house or prison.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding. “Long term, I don’t think you can hold him.”
Her mouth twisted bitterly. “Hate it when I have to let pricks like that walk.”
“Happen much?”
“All the time,” she said. “Legal loopholes, incorrect procedures, crucial evidence declared inadmissible. A lot of perps who are guilty as hell walk out without so much as a reprimand.” She sighed and twitched her shoulders into something like a shrug. “Ah, well. It’s a messed-up world. Whatcha gonna do?”
“I hear that,” I said. “Want to compare notes?”
“Sure,” she said. “What did you get?”
I gave her the rundown of what had happened since I’d last seen her.
She grunted again when I finished. “Isn’t that sort of dangerous? Involving the vampires?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s Thomas. I think Lara is probably sincere about getting him back. Besides. Why worry about smoking in bed when your building is already on fire?”
“Point,” she said. “I got the photos. They don’t tell me anything new. I ran those account numbers you gave me through the system to see if anything came up. Brick wall.”
“Dammit.”
“It was a long shot anyway,” she said.
“Binder give you anything?”
Her mouth scrunched up as if she wanted to spit out something that tasted terrible. “No. He’s a hard case. Career criminal. He’s been grilled before.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And he knows that you can’t do anything but make him sit still for a little while. If he gives us anything on his employer, he’ll lose his credibility with clients—assuming that he lives that long.”
She leaned her shoulders back against the wall. “You say this Shagnasty thing has Thomas’s cell phone?”
“Yeah. Think you can track it?”
“As part of what investigation?” she asked. “I don’t have the kind of freedom to act that I used to. If I wanted to get what amounts to a wiretap, I’d have to get approval from a judge, and I don’t know any of them who would take ‘my friend the wizard’s vampire brother was kidnapped by a demonic Navajo shapeshifter’ as a valid justification for such a measure.”
“I hadn’t really thought of it like that,” I said.
She shrugged. “Honestly, I suspect Lara’s resources and contacts are better than mine, given the time constraints.”
I couldn’t quite suppress a growl of frustration. “If she learns anything. If she’s honest about what she learns.”
Murphy frowned, scrunching up her nose. “Where was Thomas taken from?”
“I’m not certain, but I think he was at the storage park. His rental van was there, and he said something about not being able to handle all of them on his own.”
“Them? The grey suits?”
I nodded. “Most likely. But since Thomas never pitched in during the fight, I figure Shagnasty probably snuck up on him and grabbed him while he was being distracted by Binder and his pets.”
“And you can’t track him down with magic.”