Proven Guilty

Chapter Eleven

When people say the word “convention,” they are usually referring to large gatherings of the employees of companies and corporations who attend a mass assembly, usually in a big hotel somewhere, for the purpose of pretending to learn stuff when they are in fact enjoying a free trip somewhere, time off work, and the opportunity to flirt with strangers, drink, and otherwise indulge themselves.

The first major difference between a business convention and a fan-dom convention is that fandom doesn’t bother with the pretenses. They’re just there to have a good time. The second difference is the dress code- the ensembles at a fan convention tend to be considerably more novel.

SplatterCon!!! (apparently the name of the con was misspelled if the three exclamation points were left out) had populated the hotel with all kinds of costumed fans, unless maybe the costumes were actually clothing trends. Once in a while, it gets hard to tell make-believe and avant-garde fashion apart. The hotel had an entry atrium, which in turn branched off into a pair of long, wide hallways leading to combination ball- and dining rooms, the ones with those long, folding partitions that can be used to break the larger rooms up into smaller halls for seminars and talk panels and so on. There were a couple hundred people in sight, and I could see more entering and leaving various panel rooms.

“I kind of expected a few more people to be here,” I said to Molly. I had stopped at my apartment to grab my stuff and drop off Mouse.

“It’s Thursday night,” she said, as if that should be significant. “And it’s getting late, at least for a weeknight. We have more than three thousand people already registered.”

“Is that a lot?”

“For a first-year convention? It’s a Mongol horde.” There was pride in her voice as she spoke. “And we have a really young staff, to boot. But old hands at putting conventions together.” She went on like that for a few moments, naming names and citing their experience as though she expected me to whip out a licensing manual or something to make sure the convention was up to code.

Two girls, both too young for me to think adult thoughts about, sidled by in black-and-purple clothing and makeup that left a lot of skin bare, their faces painted pale, trickles of fake blood at the corners of their mouths. One of them smiled at me, and she had fangs.

I had my hand on my staff and the harsh, clear scent of wood smoke filled my nose before I stopped myself from unleashing an instant, violent, and noisily pyrotechnic assault upon the vampire five feet from me. A second’s study showed irregular lumps and finger marks on the teeth-the girls had probably made them with their own fingers from craft plastic. I let out my breath in a steady exhalation and relaxed again, releasing the power I’d begun to channel through my staff.

Relax, Harry. Hell’s bells, that would be a great story for the papers. Professional Wizard Incinerates Amateur Vampire. News at ten.

The two girls went on by, none the wiser, and even Molly only frowned at them and then back at me for a second, her face tilted into an expression of silent inquiry.

I shook my head. “Sorry, sorry. Been a long day already. Look, I need to get a look at the bathroom where this theater owner was attacked.”

“All right,” Molly said. “But first we’ll get you a name tag at registration.”

“We will?” I asked. “Why?”

“Because you’re not supposed to have access to the convention if you haven’t registered for it,” she said. “Con security and hotel security might get confused. It would be inconvenient for you.”

“Right,” I said. “Good thinking. I’m not sure how I’d react to inconvenience.”

I followed her over to a set of tables set up to receive dozens or hundreds of people at once, each designated with white paper signs marked with “A-D,” “E-J,” and so on down the alphabet. A tired-looking, brown-haired woman of early middle age sat behind the first table, doing some kind of paperwork.

“Molly,” she said, and her voice warmed with tired but genuine pleasure. “Who is your friend?”

“Harry Dresden,” Molly said. “This is Sandra Marling. She’s the convention chair.”

“You’re a horror fan?” Sandra Marling asked me.

“My life is all about horror, these days.”

“You should find plenty here to entertain you,” she assured me. “We’re showing movies in several rooms as well as in the theater, and there’s the vendors’ room, and some autograph signings tomorrow, and of course there are several parties active already, and the costume contests are always fun to watch.”

“Isn’t that something,” I said, and tried not to drown in my enthusiasm.

“Sandy,” Molly said, stepping in, “I want to use my freebie for Harry, here.”

Sandra nodded. “Oh, Rosanna was looking for you a few minutes ago. Have you spoken to her yet?”

“Not since this afternoon,” Molly said, and fretted at her lower lip. “Did she remember to take her vitamins?”

“Rest easy, girl. I reminded her for you.”

Molly looked visibly relieved. “Thank you.”

Sandra, meanwhile, had me filling out a registration form, which I scribbled through fairly quickly. At the end, she passed me a plastic badge folded around a card that said, SPLATTERCON!!! HI, I’m… She gave me a black ink marker to go with it and said, “Sorry, the printer’s been off-line all day. Just write your name in.”

I promptly wrote the words An Innocent Bystander onto the name tag before folding it up in the plastic badge and pinning it to my shirt.

“I hope you enjoy SplatterCon, Harry,” Sandra said.

I picked up a schedule and glanced at it. “Make Your Own Blood and Custom Fangs” at ten A.M., to be followed by “How to Scream Like a Pro.”

“I don’t see how I can avoid being entertained.”

Molly gave me a level look as we walked away. “You don’t have to make fun of it.”

“Actually I do,” I said. “I make fun of almost everything.”

“It’s mean,” she said. “Sandra has poured her whole life into this convention for a year, and I don’t want to see her feelings hurt.”

“Where do you know her from?” I asked. “Not church, I guess.”

Molly looked at me obliquely for a second and then said, “She’s a part-time volunteer at one of the shelters where I’m doing community service.

She helped Nelson out when he was younger. Rosie too, and her boyfriend.“

I lifted a hand in acquiescence. “Fine, fine. I’ll play nice.”

“Thank you,” she said, her voice still prim. “It’s very adult of you.”

I started to get annoyed, but was struck by the disturbing thought that if I did, I would be coming down on the same side of the situation as Charity, which might be one of the signs of the apocalypse.

Molly led me down to the end of one of the long conference room hallways, where there were the usual restroom doors. One of them had been marked over with three bars of police tape, shutting it, and a uniformed cop sat in a chair beside the door.

The cop was a large black man, grey in his hair at the temples, and he sat with the chair leaned on its rear two legs so that his head rested back against the wall. He had on his uniform, but had added on a SplatterCon!!! name tag. He had filled in the name on the card with a marker, too, though his blocky script under the HI, I’m read An Authority Figure. The uniform name stripe on his shirt read RAWLINS.

“Well now,” the cop said as I walked over to him. He opened his mostly closed eyes and gave me a wary smile. He read my name tag and snorted. “It’s the consultant guy. Thinks he’s a wizard.”

“Rawlins,” I said, smiling, and offered him my hand. He took it, his grip lazily strong.

“So you’re one of those horror movie fans, huh?” he rumbled.

“Um, yes,” I said.

He snorted again.

“I was sort of hoping I could get into the bathroom there.”

Rawlins pursed his lips. “There’s two more on this floor. One’s back near the front desk, and there’s another at the end of the other conference hall.”

“I like this one,” I said.

Rawlins squinted at me and said, “Maybe you can’t read so good. You see that tape there, says crime scene and such?”

“The bright yellow and black stuff?” I asked.

“That’s it exactly.”

“Yep.”

“Well, that’s what we police use when we have a crime scene and we don’t want nosy private investigators stomping all over it in their big boots and contaminating everything,” he drawled.

“What if I promise to walk on tippy toe?”

“Then I promise I will stop bouncing you off walls just as soon as I think you’re not resisting arrest,” he said in a cheerful tone. The smile faded a little and his eyes hardened. “It’s a crime scene. No.”

“Molly,” I said quietly. “Would you mind if I talked to the officer alone?”

“Sure,” she said. “There are things I need to handle anyway. Excuse me.” She walked away without looking back.

“Do you mind talking about it?” I asked Rawlins.

“Naw,” he said. “Look, you seem okay, Dresden. I’ll talk. But I’m not letting you in there.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because it might make things harder on the kid we took in for it.”

I frowned and tilted my head. “Yeah?”

Rawlins nodded. “Kid didn’t do it,” he said. “But hotel security cameras show him going in there, then the victim, and no one else. And I was sitting right here in this spot the whole time. I’m sure no one else went in or out.”

“So how do you know the kid didn’t attack the old man?” I asked.

Rawlins gave an easy shrug. “Didn’t fit him. He wasn’t breathing hard, and giving a beating runs you out of breath quick. No damage to his hands or knuckles. No blood on him.”

“So why’d you arrest him?” I asked.

“Because the record shows that there’s no one else who could have done it,” Rawlins said. “And because the old man was too out of it to talk and clear him. Kid didn’t beat on the old man, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t in with whoever did. I figured maybe he knows how the attacker got in and out unseen, so I took him down and booked him. I figured if he was an accomplice, he’d spill rather than take the whole fall himself.” Rawlins grimaced. “But he didn’t spill. Didn’t know a damn thing.”

“Then why’d he get put away?” I asked.

“Didn’t know he had a record until the paperwork was already going. Repeat offender got a real steep hill to climb as a suspect. Makes it look bad for him. He might take the fall on this even if he’s innocent.”

I shook my head. “You’re sure no one could have gone in or out?”

“I was right here,” he said. “Anyone went past me without me noticing, they were a Jedi Knight or something.”

“Or something,” I muttered, glancing at the door.

“The girlfriend,” Rawlins said, nodding after the departed Molly. “She get you involved in this?”

“Daughter of a friend,” I said, nodding. “Bailed him out.”

Rawlins grunted. “Damn shame for that kid. I played it by the book, but…” He shook his head. “Sometimes the book don’t do enough.”

“The girl thinks he’s innocent,” I said.

“The girl always thinks they’re innocent, Dresden,” Rawlins said, without malice. “Problem is that there’s pretty good evidence that says he ain’t. Good enough to send a repeat offender upstate, unless the lab guys find something in there or on the old man to clear him. Which brings us back to why you ain’t going in.”

I nodded, frowning. “What if I told you it might be something weird?”

He shrugged. “What if you did?”

“Might be something that I 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 there’s spooky afoot?”

“I told the girl I’d look into it.”

Rawlins frowned, but then shook his head. “Can’t let you in there.”

“Could I just look?” I asked. “You open the door, and I don’t even go in. I just look. That couldn’t hurt anything, could it? And you’ve already been in there, the EMTs, maybe a detective. Am I right? I couldn’t 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.”

“You’re 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 wasn’t 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 wasn’t really a surprise. There wasn’t 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.

“Wasn’t a professional, either. Crowded spot like this. Witness in the bathroom. Cop twenty feet away. Dumbest thug in Chicago wouldn’t open up that big a can of whoopass where he’d 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.

“That’s 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 wizard’s Sight.

The Sight is something anyone born with enough talent has. It’s 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- that’s spells, for the newbie-and 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.

And just for a second, I saw a shadow on the wall-a brief glimpse, a form, a shape, something that left an outline of itself on the wall where it had absorbed the agonized energy of the old man’s suffering.

I fought to push the Sight away from my perceptions again, and staggered. That was the drawback to using the Sight. The Sight could show you a lot of things, but everything you saw with it was there to stay. It wrote everything you perceived with it upon your memory in indelible ink, and those memories were always there, fresh and harsh when you went back to them, never blurring with the passage of time, never growing easier to endure. The little demonic diorama of bad vibes painted over the white tiles of that bathroom was going to make some appearances in my darker dreams.

It looked like I’d found the black magic the Gatekeeper warned me about. Just as well that I hadn’t tried the dangerous spell with Little Chicago.

I took a couple of steps away, shaking away the flickers of color and sparkles of light on my vision that remained for a time when the Sight was gone once more. Rawlins had a hand under one of my elbows.

“You all right, man?” he rumbled a moment later, his voice very quiet.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Thanks.”

He looked from me to the closed door and back. “What did you see in there?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I said. My voice sounded shaky. “Something bad.”

Almost too quietly to be heard, he said, “This wasn’t just some thug, was it.”

My stomach twisted again. In my mind’s eye, I could see a malicious smile reflected in the eyes of the old man, the memory absolutely crystalline. “Maybe not,” I mumbled. “It could have been a person, I think. Someone really sick. Or… maybe not. I don’t know.” More words struggled to bubble out of my mouth and I clamped my lips resolutely shut until I’d gotten my thoughts back under control.

I looked around me and realized that the hairs on the back of my neck were not crawling around at the memory of the energy I’d just brushed.

They were reacting to more of it drifting through the air. Now. Nearby.

“Rawlins,” I said. “How many other cops are here?”

“Just me now,” he said quietly. He took a look at my face and then peered around, his heavy-lidded eyes deceptively alert, his hand on his gun. “We got trouble?”

“We got trouble,” I said quietly, shifting my staff into my right hand.

The lights went out, all of them at once, plunging the hotel into pure blackness.

And the screaming started.