his wife and child. He turned to face me, his stance unconsciously confrontational, his shoulders squared, his chest thrust out, his hands clenched into fists. “We need to do something else.”
Ah, masculine assertiveness—I’ve got nothing against it, as long as it helps get the job done instead of making it harder. “Yeah?” I asked him. “You think we’d be better off walking down the street calling her name, Will?”
“N-no, but—”
“But what?” I asked him, keeping my tone reasonable while facing him with an equal amount of ready-to-kick-your-ass Martian body language. You do not intimidate me. “You came to me for help. I’m giving it to you. Either you work with me or you tell me you want to go it alone. Right now.”
He backed off, unclenching his hands and looking away. I relaxed as well. Will hadn’t meant to deliver a threat to me, as such, but he was a hell of a lot bigger and stronger than I was. Stronger isn’t everything, but simple mass and power mean a lot in a fight, and Will had the ferocity and killer instinct to make them count even more heavily than most. He’d never considered—hell, probably never noticed—the full depth of the statement he was making with his stance and clenched fists.
It’s another in a long list of things that Martians hardly ever think about: Almost any woman knows that almost any man is stronger than she is. Oh, men know they’re stronger, but they seldom actually stop to think through the implications of that simple reality—implications that are both unnerving and virtually omnipresent, if you aren’t a Martian. You think about life differently when you know that half the people you see have the physical power to do things to you, regardless of whether you intend to allow it—and even implied threats of physical violence have to be taken seriously.
Will hadn’t intended to frighten me. He just wanted to find his wife.
“I know it’s frustrating,” I told him, “but it’s the best way to find out something we didn’t know before.”
“We’ve been through the whole building,” he snapped. “The most we’ve got is a neighbor a couple of floors up who heard a thump.”
“Which tells us there wasn’t much of a fight,” I said, “or they’d have probably heard it. Fights are loud, Will, even when only one person is fighting. A building like this, everyone knows it when the neighbor beats his wife.”
“Somebody should have heard her scream.”
“Maybe it wasn’t as loud as you thought. It was right in your ear. And it upset you. If it ended quickly enough, it might not even have woken anyone up.”
I looked out the hallway window, toward more of the same sort of apartment building across the parking lot. Will wasn’t going to be terribly helpful in his current state. “I’m going to check across the lot, see if anyone happened to see or hear anything last night. I want you to call Andi and Marcy. Get them over here if you can reach them. After that, go over your phone’s caller ID, Georgia’s cell phone’s caller ID, her e-mail. See if anyone odd has been in contact with her.”
“Okay,” he said, frowning—but nodding.
“Control your emotions, Will. Stay calm,” I told him. “Calm’s the best way to think, and thinking’s the best way to find Georgia and help her.”
He inhaled deeply, still nodding. “Look, Sergeant. . . . One of the guys in that building . . . Maybe you shouldn’t go over there by yourself.”
I smiled sweetly at him.
He lifted his empty hands as if I’d pointed a gun. “Right. Sorry.”
THREE BUILDINGS HAD apartments in them that faced out on the common parking lot in general, and had a view of the Bordens’ apartment in particular. I stood in the parking lot, looking up at the windows for a moment, and then started with the building on the left.
Most of an hour later, I hadn’t learned anything else, and I figured out my main problem: I wasn’t Harry Dresden.
Dresden would have looked around with a vague expression on his face and wandered around, bumping into things and barely comporting himself with professional caution, even at a crime scene. He’d ask a few questions that wouldn’t make much sense on the surface, make a few remarks he thought were witty, and glibly insult anyone who appeared to be a repressive authority figure. Then he’d do something that didn’t make any goddamn sense, and produce results out of thin air, like a magician