"For that matter," I mused, "why didn't either of them use magic? This was a strictly physical struggle."
"Could their powers have canceled each other out?"
"Technically, I guess," I said. "But that sort of thing needs serious synchronization. It doesn't often happen by accident."
"Well. That's something, then," she said. "Both men either chose not to use magic or else were unable to use magic. Ditto the curse. Either LaFortier chose not to use it, or he was incapable of using it. The question is, why?"
I nodded. "Sound logic. So how does that help us get closer to the killer?"
She shrugged, unfazed. "No clue."
That's how investigation works, most of the time. Cops, detectives, and quixotic wizards hardly ever know which information is pertinent until we've actually got a pretty good handle on what's happening. All you can do is accumulate whatever data you can, and hope that it falls into a recognizable pattern.
"Good thought, but it doesn't help yet," I said. "What else have we got?"
Murphy shook her head. "Nothing that I can see yet. But do you want a suggestion?"
"Sure."
She held up the page with the details on the incriminating bank account. "Follow the money."
"The money?"
"Witnesses can be mistaken-or bought. Theories and deductions can throw you completely off target." She tossed the page back onto the coffee table. "But the money always tells you something. Assuming you can find it."
I picked up the page and scanned it again. "A foreign bank. Amsterdam. Can you get them to show you where the payment came from?"
"You're kidding," Murphy said. "It would take me days, weeks, maybe months to go through channels and get that kind of information from an American bank, if I could get it at all. From a foreign bank specializing in confidentiality? I've got a better chance of winning a slam-dunk contest against Michael Jordan."
I grunted. I got the disposable camera out of my duster pocket and passed it over to Murphy. "I snapped some shots of the scene-a lot more of them than are in the Wardens' file. I'd like to get your take on them."
She took the camera and nodded. "Okay. I can take them by a photo center and-"
My old rotary telephone rang, interrupting her. I held up a hand to her and answered it.
"Harry," Thomas said, his voice tight. "We need you here. Now."
I felt my body thrum into a state of tension. "What's happening?"
"Hurry!" my brother snapped. "I can't take them on by m-"
The line went dead.
Oh, God.
I looked up at Murphy, who took one look at my face and rose to her feet, car keys in hand, already moving toward the door. "Trouble?"
"Trouble."
"Where?"
I rose, seizing my staff and blasting rod. "Storage rental park off Deerfield Square."
"I know it," Murphy said. "Let's go."
Chapter Eighteen
The handy part about riding with a cop was that she has the cool toys to make it simpler to get places quickly, even on a busy Chicago morning. The car was still bouncing from sweeping into the street from the little parking lot next to my apartment when she slapped a whirling blue light on the roof and started a siren. That part was pretty neat.
The rest of the ride wasn't nearly as fun. Moving "fast" through a crowded city is a relative term, and in Chicago it meant a lot of rapid acceleration and sudden braking. We went through half a dozen alleys, hopped one bad intersection by driving up over the curb through a parking lot, and swerved through traffic at such a rate that my freshly imbibed coffee and donuts started swirling and sloshing around in a distinctly unpleasant fashion.
"Kill the noise and light," I said a couple of blocks from the storage park.
She did it, asking, "Why?"
"Because whatever is there, there are several of them and Thomas didn't think he could handle them." I drew my.44 out of my duster pocket and checked it. "Nothing's on fire. So let's hope that nothing's gone down yet and we'll be all sneaky-like until we know what's happening."
"Still with the revolvers," Murphy said, shaking her head. She drove past the street leading to the storage units and went one block past it instead before she turned and parked. "When are you going to get a serious gun?"
"Look," I said, "just because you've got twice as many bullets as me-"
"Three times as many," Murphy said. "The SIG holds twenty."
"Twenty!? Look the point is that-"
"And it reloads a lot faster. You've just got some loose rounds at the bottom of your pocket, right? No speed loader?"
I stuck the gun back in my pocket and tried to make sure none of the bullets fell out as we got out of the car. "That's not the point."
Murphy shook her head. "Damn, Dresden."
"I know the revolver is going to work," I said, starting toward the storage park. "I've seen automatics jam before."
"New ones?"
"Well, no..."
Murphy had placed her own gun in the pocket of her light sports jacket. "It's a good thing you've got options. That's all I'm saying."
"If a revolver was good enough for Indiana Jones," I said, "it's good enough for me."
"He was a fictional character, Harry." Her mouth curved up in a small smile. "And he had a whip."
I eyed her.
Her eyes sparkled. "Do you have a whip, Dresden?"
I eyed her even more. "Murphy... are you coming on to me?"
She laughed, her smile white and fierce, as we rounded a corner and found the white rental van where Thomas had left it, across the street from the storage park.
Two men in similar grey suits and grey fedoras were standing nonchalantly in the summer-morning sunshine on the sidewalk next to the van.
On second glance, they were wearing the exact same grey suit, and the exact same grey hat, in fact.
"Feds?" I asked Murphy quietly as we turned down the sidewalk.
"Even feds shop at different stores," she said. "I'm getting a weird vibe here, Harry."
I turned my head and checked out the storage park through the ten-foot-high black metal fencing that surrounded it.
I saw another pair of men in grey suits going down one row of storage units. Two more pairs were on the next. And two more on the one after that.
"That makes twelve," Murphy murmured to me. She hadn't even turned her head. Murphy has cop powers of observation. "All in the same suit."