a while since I’d seen him. He was on the tall side of medium height, good-looking, with a regulation high-and-tight for his dark hair, although he’d added a thick mustache to his look that, admittedly, set off his blue eyes very well. He wore a suit too expensive for his pay grade and had a thick manila envelope tucked under one arm.
“Detective Rudolph,” I said as I finished pulling my pants on. In a tone of voice generally reserved for phrases like Crucify him or I’m going to cut your throat, I continued, “How nice to see you again.”
“Dresden,” Rudolph said, smirking for a moment. “Great. Two birds with one stone. Is Ms. Murphy home?”
He put a little emphasis on the title, just to remind everyone that she wasn’t a cop anymore. I wanted to smack him. I restrained myself in a manly fashion and said, “It isn’t a good time. She’s still recuperating from her injuries.”
“The ones from last winter,” Rudolph noted.
I arched a brow. Murphy’s injuries from our little outing with a pack of psychotic killers and sociopathic malcontents hadn’t involved gunshot wounds, and they hadn’t happened at a crime scene. The medical establishment hadn’t needed to report them to the police—which meant that the cops had gone sniffing around to find out about them. That wasn’t good.
Murphy had been helping me with a smash-and-grab operation. We’d robbed Hell. Or at least, a hell. The target hadn’t been anything inside Chicago PD’s jurisdiction, but we’d kind of had to get there through the basement of a bank, and it had gotten pretty thoroughly wrecked as a result. Plus there’d been the guards. And the police who had surrounded the bank. And the cops we’d gone through on the way out. We’d worked hard to make sure no one would be killed, but one of our associates had slaughtered a guard anyway.
That made us accomplices to murder at least, as far as the law was concerned. And they weren’t wrong.
“Yeah, those injuries,” I told him. “So buzz off.”
“Or what?” Rudolph asked mildly.
“Or, unless you have a warrant to enter, or some kind of believable probable cause, I imagine Murph sues your department’s ass to kingdom come.”
“Maybe I’ll insist,” Rudolph said, smiling.
“I’d love to see that,” I told him, and I meant it. The mantle was talking to me again, advising me that if I wasn’t going to vent some of my built-up tension on a willing woman, then beating the arrogant stuffing out of Rudolph would be an appropriate substitute.
“Nah,” the second cop said in a bored, distant voice. “You wouldn’t, sir.”
I eyed the other guy. He was about five feet, six inches—in all three dimensions. I seriously couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a guy built so solidly. He wore a tailored suit, because I doubted anything fit him off the rack, but it was made of neutral, plain materials, meant to blend into the background of the business world. His salt-and-pepper hair was buzzed short, and his face was rough with beard shadow that I suspected appeared about ten seconds after he was done shaving. Something about the way he held himself, the way his eyes were focused on nothing in particular, put me on notice that he knew what he was doing better than most.
I wasn’t familiar with the cops in Internal Affairs the way I was with Special Investigations, or the beat cops in the neighborhoods I knew. “They partnered you with Rudy, huh?” I said. “Harry Dresden.”
“Detective Bradley,” he said. “Sir, it would be in Ms. Murphy’s best interests to speak to us now.”
“Or we could do it downtown,” Rudolph said. “I don’t care which.”
“Rudolph,” I said in a pleasant voice, “do you know how long it takes to wash dried blood from a broken nose out of a mustache?”
“Harry,” Karrin said from the couch, reproof in her voice. “Dial it down a notch?” She waved an apologetic hand at me, out of sight of the men at the door. “Let’s just get it over with, huh?”
I glowered at the men and said, “I reserve the right to kick—”
“Harry,” Murphy sighed.
“—ask you to leave if it looks like she’s getting tired,” I continued smoothly. I looked past Rudolph to the older man and said, “Okay?”
“Why, you—” Rudolph said.
Bradley the human tank put a hand on Rudolph’s shoulder. His fingers squeezed slightly, and Rudolph shut his mouth and then shot him a quick, hard look.
“Sir,” Bradley said, “it’s in no one’s interests to strain