"Amen," I said.
"I read your file. Says you were looked at by my office before. Says four agents vanished a few days later." He pursed his lips. "You've been suspected of kidnapping, murder, and at least two cases of arson, one of which was a public building."
"It wasn't my fault," I said. "That building thing."
"You lead an interesting life, Dresden."
"Not really. Just a wild weekend now and then."
"To the contrary," Tilly said. "I'm very interested in you."
I sighed. "Man. You don't want to be."
Tilly considered that, a faint frown line appearing between his brows. "Do you know who blew up your office building?"
"No."
Tilly's expression might have been carved in stone. "Liar."
"If I tell you," I said, "you aren't going to believe me-and you're going to get me locked up in a psycho ward somewhere. So no. I don't know who blew up the building."
He nodded for a moment. Then he said, "What you are doing now could be construed as obstructing and interfering with an investigation. Depending on who was behind the bombing and why, it might even get bumped up to treason."
"In other words," I said, "you couldn't find anything in my apartment to incriminate me or give you an excuse to hold me. So now you're hoping to intimidate me into talking with you."
Agent Tilly leaned back in his chair and squinted at me. "I can hold you for twenty-four hours for no reason at all. And I can make them fairly unpleasant for you without coming close to violating any laws."
"I wish you wouldn't do that," I said.
Tilly shrugged. "And I wish you'd tell me what you know about the explosion. But I guess neither of us is going to get what we want."
I propped my chin on my hand and thought about it for a moment. I gave it even odds that someone in the supernatural scene, probably the duchess, had pulled some strings to send Rudolph my way. If that was the case, maybe I could bounce this little hand grenade back to her.
"Off the record?" I asked Tilly.
He stood up, went out the door, and came back in a moment later, presumably after turning off any recording devices. He sat back down and looked at me.
"You're going to find out that the building was wired with explosives," I said. "On the fourth floor."
"And how do you know that?"
"Someone I trust saw some blueprint files that showed where the charges had been installed, presumably at the behest of the building's owners. I remember that a few years ago, there were crews tearing into the walls for a week or so. Said they were removing asbestos. The owners had hired them."
"Nuevo Verita, Inc., owns the building. As insurance scams go, this isn't a great one."
"It isn't about insurance," I said.
"Then what is it about?"
"Revenge."
Tilly tilted his head to one side and studied me intently. "You did something to this company?"
"I did something to someone far up the food chain in the corporate constellation that Nuevo Verita belongs to."
"And what was that?"
"Nothing illegal," I said. "You might look into the business affairs of a man calling himself Paolo Ortega. He was a professor of mythology in Brazil. He died several years ago."
"Ah," Tilly said. "His family is who is after you?"
"That's a reasonably accurate description. His wife in particular."
Tilly absorbed that, taking his time. The room was silent for several minutes.
Finally, Tilly looked up at me and said, "I have a great deal of respect for Karrin Murphy. I called her while you were resting. She says she'll back you without reservation. Considering the source, that is a significant statement."
"Yeah," I said. "Considering the source, it is."
"Frankly, I'm not sure if I can do anything to help you. I'm not in charge of the investigation, and it's being directed by politicians. I can't promise that you won't be questioned again-though today's events should make it harder to get judicial approval to move against you."
"I'm not sure I understand your meaning," I said.
Tilly waved a hand toward the rest of the building. "As far as they're concerned, you're guilty, Dresden. They're already writing headlines and news text. Now it's just a matter of finding the evidence to support the conclusion they want."
"They," I said. "Not you."
Tilly said, "They're a bunch of assholes."
"And you aren't?"
"I'm a different kind of asshole."
"Heh," I said. "Am I free to go?"
He nodded. "But since they've got nothing remotely like evidence that you were the one to plant the explosives, they're going to be digging into you. Your personal life. Your past. Looking for things to use against you. They'll play dirty."
"Okay by me," I said. "I can play, too."
Tilly's eyes smiled. "Sounds like. Yeah." He offered me his hand. "Good luck."
I shook it. I felt the very, very faint tingle of someone with a slight magical talent. It probably augmented Tilly's ability to separate truth from fiction.
I got up and walked wearily toward the door.
"Hey," Tilly said, just before I opened it. "Off the record. Who did it?"
I stopped, looked at him again, and said, "Vampires."
His expression flickered with swiftly banished emotions: amusement, then realization, followed by doubt and yards and yards of rationalization.
"See," I said to him. "I told you that you wouldn't believe me."
Chapter Fourteen
I came out of the doors of the FBI building to find a ring of paparazzi surrounding it, waiting with predatory patience to get more material for their stories. A couple of them saw me and hurried toward me, beginning to ask me questions, thrust microphones toward me, that sort of thing. I winced. I was still pretty tired, but it was going to play merry hell with their gear if I got too close to it. came out of the doors of the FBI building to find a ring of paparazzi surrounding it, waiting with predatory patience to get more material for their stories. A couple of them saw me and hurried toward me, beginning to ask me questions, thrust microphones toward me, that sort of thing. I winced. I was still pretty tired, but it was going to play merry hell with their gear if I got too close to it.
I looked around for a way to get down the sidewalks without messing up anybody's equipment, and that was when they tried to kill me.
I'd been the target of a drive-by attempt once before. This one was considerably more professional than the first. There was no roar of engines to give me a warning, no wildly swerving vehicle. The only tip-off I had was a sudden prickling of the hairs on the back of my neck and a glimpse of a dark sedan's passenger window rolling down.
Then something hit me in the left side of my chest and hammered me down onto the stairs. Stunned, I realized that someone was shooting at me. I could have rolled down the stairs and into the news crowd, put them between myself and the shooter, but I had no way of knowing whether the shooter wanted me bad enough to fire through a crowd in hopes of getting me. So I curled into a defensive ball and felt two more heavy blows land against me: one of them on my ribs, the second on my left arm, which I'd raised to cover my head.
There was an exclamation from below, and then there were several people standing over me.
"Hey, buddy," said a potbellied cameraman in a hunting jacket. He offered me a hand to help me up. "Nasty fall, there. You still in one piece?"
I just stared at him for a second, the adrenaline coursing through me, and realized that the cameraman-all of the newsies, in fact-didn't even know what had just happened.
It made a creepy kind of sense. I hadn't heard anything. The assassin must have been using a suppressor. There hadn't been any flashes, so he must have done it right, aiming at me through the car window while sitting far enough back to make sure the barrel of his gun didn't poke out suspiciously-and that he never became a highly visible target. I had helped, too, by denying the onlookers the subtle clue of a dead body with little holes in the front of it and big ones in the back. No sound, no sight, and no victim. Why should they think that murder had just been attempted?
"Move!" I said, hauling myself up by the cameraman's paw. I struggled to get higher, to look over the crowd and get a plate off of the dark sedan. It didn't take much more than stepping around a couple of people and standing on tiptoe to get a view of the shooter's vehicle, cruising calmly away, without roaring engines, without crashing up onto the sidewalk or running red lights. It just vanished into the traffic like a shark disappearing into the depths. I never got a clear look at the plates.
"Dammit," I growled. Pain was starting to register on me now, especially in my arm. The protective spells I'd woven over my duster had held out against the bullets, but the leather had been pulled pretty tight over my skin and as a result it felt like someone had smashed a baseball bat into my forearm. The fingers of my left hand were tingling and refused to do more than twitch. I felt similar throbs from the other two hits, and ran my hands over the duster, just to be sure none of them had gone through without my noticing.
I found a bullet caught in the leather of my left sleeve. It hadn't penetrated more than maybe a quarter of an inch, but it was trapped in the leather and deformed from the impact. I pulled a handkerchief out of my pocket, wrapped the bullet in it, and put it back again, managing to do the whole thing unnoticed while about a dozen people looked at me like I was a lunatic.
From the street came a wheezy little beep-beep! beep-beep! The The Blue Beetle Blue Beetle came slowly down the street and stopped in front of the building. Molly was behind the wheel, waving at me frantically. came slowly down the street and stopped in front of the building. Molly was behind the wheel, waving at me frantically.
I hurried down to the street and got in before the mismatched color scheme of my car sent the obsessive-compulsive federal personnel in the building behind me into a conniption. As Molly pulled away, I buckled up, then got a sloppy kiss on the face from Mouse, who sat in the backseat, his tail going thump-thump-thump thump-thump-thump against the back of the driver's seat. against the back of the driver's seat.
"Ick!" I told him. "My lips touched dog lips! Get me some mouthwash! Get me some iodine!"
His tail kept wagging and he smooched me again before settling down and looking content.
I sagged back into my seat and closed my eyes.
Maybe two minutes passed. "You're welcome," Molly said abruptly, her tone frustrated. "No problem, Harry. Whatever I can do to help."
"Sorry, padawan," I said. "This has been a long day already."
"I came back from the church and saw a bunch of guys and cops were going in and out of your apartment. The door was broken down and the whole place looked like it had been ransacked." She shuddered and clenched the wheel. "God. I was sure you were dead or in trouble."
"You were about ninety percent right," I said. "Someone told the feds I was the one who blew up the office building. They wanted to talk to me."
Molly's eyes grew wide. "What about the Swords? We've got to tell my dad, right away, or-"
"Relax," I said. "I stashed them. They should be safe for now."
Molly puffed out a breath and subsided in relief. "You look terrible," she said, after a minute. "Did they beat you up or something?"
I swept my eyes left and right as we went on, searching. "Giant centipede."
"Oh," Molly said, drawing the word out, as though I had explained everything. "What are you looking for?"
I'd been scanning the traffic around us for a dark sedan. I'd found about thirty of them so far, being a master detective and all. "The car of the guy who just shot at me." I produced the bullet, a little copper-jacketed round more slender than my pinkie and a little under an inch long.
"What is that?" Molly asked.
"Two-twenty-three Remington," I said. "I think. Probably."
"What's that mean?"
"That it could have been almost anybody. It's the round used in most NATO assault rifles. A lot of hunting rifles, too." A thought struck me and I frowned at her. "Hey. How did you know where to find me?"
"I let Mouse drive."
Thump, thump, thump.
I was tired. It took my brain a second to sort out the humor in her tone. "It isn't funny when everyone does it, Molly. Not ready for the burden of constant wiseassery are you."
She grinned widely, evidently pleased at having scored the point on me. "I used a tracking spell and the hair you gave me in case I ever needed to find you."
Of course she had. "Oh, right. Well-done."
"Um," she said. "I'm not sure where we're driving. As far as I know, your apartment is still crawling with guys."
"Priorities, grasshopper. First things first."
She eyed me. "Burger King, huh?"
"I'm starving," I said. "Then back to the apartment. They should be gone by the time we get there, and it's the only place where I'm sure Susan and Martin will be trying to make contact."
She frowned. "But ... the wards are down. It's not safe there anymore. Is it?"
"It never was," I said calmly. "If someone really wants to come kill you, it's hard to stop them. All you can do is make it expensive for them to try it, and hope that they decide the price is too high."
"Well, sure," Molly said. "But ... without the wards, aren't you kind of having a super discount sale?"
Kid had a point. Anyone who ever wanted to take a whack at me had a peachy opportunity now. Attention, shoppers! Discount specials on Harry Dresden's life. Slightly used, no refunds, limit one per customer. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart.