The signs reminded me that not everyone was willing to abandon the Weird. Just like I had come to care about the people down here, others did, too. Along with the sinners, a few hardy saints marched down here, struggling to make a difference. Some of them try to persuade people off the paths they have chosen. Some just hand out bandages to get someone through the day. At best, they make tiny dents. At worst, they get themselves caught up in the shifting alliances. I figured that’s what we were probably walking into now, someone who had poked their nose in a little too deep.

We ducked the tape, and the smell hit me immediately. “Damn, Murdock, I can sense a lot of blood from here. It’s an elf.”

Two more officers stood just inside the door. One of them seemed to be concentrating on keeping his jaw clamped shut. The other one nodded at us. “Hope you haven’t had breakfast.”

Not a good sign. The police see a lot, especially in rougher neighborhoods. They deal with most of it with gallows humor. When they openly acknowledge the severity of a murder scene, it is definitely not a good sign.

“That bad?” asked Murdock.

“Worse,” said the officer. He pointed inside. “Nine-one-one call came from a phone in the front room. Door was unlocked when we got here. No one here but the victim.”

Murdock nodded. It is a time-honored tradition to remain anonymous in the Weird. Murdock gave me a quick look and stepped inside. I followed, already tamping down my senses to deaden the scent of blood.

The front room spanned the width of the building and ran back about thirty feet. Several groupings of cast-off furniture filled the near section, behind those was a Ping-Pong table, and behind that were three old metal desks. The walls were painted a jarringly vibrant shade of yellow and covered with posters proclaiming the virtues of friendship, cooperation, and racial harmony. The cynic in me couldn’t help snorting. Not that it wasn’t all well-intentioned. But this close to the Tangle, it smacked of naïveté.

Two archways stood on opposite sides of the back wall. “The left side,” I said to Murdock. The stench was unavoidable.

Murdock went first. He stopped in the archway, blocking my view. “Sweet mother of God,” he whispered. He turned away from the door with his eyes closed. I was not going to like it. I stepped into the archway and froze.

Half of my brain began objectively assessing what I was seeing. The other half was screaming. The room was long and narrow, no windows, with a closed door at the rear. A desk had been flipped forward to my right. Everything that had been on it had scattered to the floor. Four of the five chairs in the room were either upturned or broken. The fifth was embedded in the back wall. Every conceivable surface was sprayed with blood. Floors. Walls. Ceiling. At my feet lay a left hand with the lower half of a forearm attached. I could see a right arm under one of the chairs. I assumed a separate bloody mangle near the desk was the lower extremities. Gobbets of body organs appeared to be smeared everywhere. To the right and about eight feet up, a head peered out of a bloody crater in the wall. The face had been flattened. Other than my ability to sense its essence, the only remaining clue to race of the individual was a long, pointed ear that was sticking straight out in the wrong direction.

I closed my eyes. I could hear Murdock breathing through his mouth. If I was going to help, I had to use my nose. The scent of blood overwhelmed, the elf essence coating everything. Two things jumped out at me, though. At least one troll had spent a lot of time in the room, and I could sense a second. I moved forward a little.

“Don’t touch anything,” Murdock said. I nodded. Contaminating a crime scene like this would not be looked on tolerantly by anyone.

I could sense fear. The feeling is more intuitive than technical. I’m not a dog. But sometimes strong emotion seems to color how essence feels to me, like salt or pepper on a steak. The odd thing was, I wasn’t sensing the fear from the elf, which suggested to me that whatever happened to him was unexpected. He literally hadn’t seen it coming. But fear permeated the place, a fear intense enough to announce the presence of at least one human normal. That’s the one thing you can always sense from a human.

I turned away from the carnage. “We should get in that back room.”

Murdock led the way back to the front door. “How long ago did this call go out on the wire?” he asked the same officer by the door.

He looked at his watch. “Probably ten minutes or so.”

Murdock looked at me. “We don’t have much time. Let’s go.” We broke into a jog out the door, ducked under the tape again, and made our way to a narrow back alley. For this part of the neighborhood, the alley was surprisingly clean. Probably some do-gooder project. The back door to the building was the self-closing type, but wasn’t quite closed. Murdock pulled out his gun.

I don’t carry a gun. Never did. Once I didn’t need to with all the other abilities I had. Now I avoid them because the metal content messes up whatever little ability I do have. I flattened myself against the wall behind Murdock. He stretched forward and tugged quickly at the door handle, simultaneously pulling back into firing stance. The door swung open, briefly revealed a darkened room, then began to close. Murdock grabbed it before it could lock. He scuttled across the face of the door, pulling it open as he moved to the opposite side. No sounds came out. No gunfire, which was good, and no explosive shot of essence, which was even better. Neither of us was equipped to deal with that. I ducked my head into the opening and back.

“Empty,” I mouthed to him.

Gun forward, Murdock leaped into the room to the opposite side again. I could picture him inside, the two of us pressed against the wall between us. I waited a long two seconds, listening. “Clear,” he called out.

I walked in to find Murdock holstering his gun. He kept the holster open.

The back room was mainly storage, some stacked chairs and folding tables, boxes and filing cabinets, and some standard office equipment: a fax machine, a photocopier, and some kind of large-size printer. Faint levels of essence from all species permeated the space, in tribute to the apparent ethic of the place. Given that, the strong register of troll and human stood out. The troll was definitely the same one I had sensed in the office space. The human was strong enough to be identifiable, but with the mess in the other room, I couldn’t tell if the fear I had felt there was from the same person.

“I’d say someone hid in here while the action in the other room went on. When everything went down, they ran out the back door,” said Murdock.

Made sense to me. It would explain why the inside door was closed and the back door was open. Someone was in too much of hurry to worry about securing the door.

Murdock’s two-way squawked. It was only one word, so I understood it. “Company.”

Murdock looked around. “Did you touch anything?”

“Okay, second time you’ve done that. I’m not an amateur,” I said.

“Sorry. Guild’s here. Let’s go.” He had the good sense to look chagrined. I let it pass, because at the least it showed why I liked working with him. Murdock paid attention to details. We backed out of the room and left the door exactly how we found it. As we walked back up the building, I paused. More troll essence. It led off to the right, into the Tangle. It didn’t surprise me. If I were a troll and needed to blend in with the scenery fast, that’s where I’d go.

When we reached the front of the building, the activity level had increased dramatically in a short period of time. Two more police cars, an EMT van, the medical examiner’s car, a Boston morgue wagon and a Guild one, and a black town car now cluttered the street. The interesting action was occurring at the front door, where several people were arguing.