Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files #8) - Jim Butcher Page 0,37
could recognize, if I could just get a look at the room. I might be able to help the kid.
He squinted at me. You think theres spooky afoot?
I told the girl Id look into it.
Rawlins frowned, but then shook his head. Cant let you in there.
Could I just look? I asked. You open the door, and I dont even go in. I just look. That couldnt hurt anything, could it? And youve already been in there, the EMTs, maybe a detective. Am I right? I couldnt 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.
Youre 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 wasnt 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 wasnt really a surprise. There wasnt 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.
Wasnt a professional, either. Crowded spot like this. Witness in the bathroom. Cop twenty feet away. Dumbest thug in Chicago wouldnt open up that big a can of whoopass where hed 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.
Thats 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 wizards Sight.
The Sight is something anyone born with enough talent has. Its 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 thats spells, for the newbieand 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.