Magie Noire
By Rurouni Star
A/N: I don't know how I ended up here, writing fanfiction again for the first time in more than a decade… but here I am. I had an idea, and it needed writing.
I've spent the last while doing original writing in paranormal romance, the latest of which you can find under the pseudonym Isabella August ( isabellaaugust dot com ). Currently, my first book under that name, Crown of Briars, has come out on Kindle Unlimited ( amazon dot com /dp/B07Q895HC3 ). I have, however, rediscovered my love for with its low-pressure environment and friendly community. So I'm going to try dipping my fingers back into fanfiction in between original novels, just to keep my brain from over-stressing. If my brain continues finding it a nice bit of stress relief, I'll continue… but I make no immediate promises, since this is my silly hobby.
That said… for books and books, Karrin Murphy was my very favorite character in the Dresden Files. I often wished I could have read the novels from her point of view instead of Harry's — or better yet, have her be the main character. It occurred to me today that I could make that happen all by my lonesome, if I really wanted to. So here goes. I've obviously taken some liberties with the source material here and there to make things more interesting, so if you see a detail that strikes you as outrageously different from canon, it's probably on purpose — for instance, as the story begins, you will be following along with Detective Murphy instead of Lieutenant Murphy.
This is for all you other Karrin Murphy superfans.
Chapter One
"We're not doing this again," I said, my voice low and menacing. I crossed my arms and schooled my expression into my best, most practiced Bad Cop stare. "If you think you're gonna get away with this, you've got another thing coming."
The computer I was glaring at failed to respond. It remained frozen, the cursor stuck halfway through the last word of my report.
"I could throw you out a window," I growled. "No one would stop me. Hell, some of the boys would probably cheer." I narrowed my eyes. "I'd think really hard about that, if I were you."
The screen didn't even flicker. I sighed, and rubbed my palms against my face. I briefly considered following through on my threat, but I knew that if I did, the higher-ups would chew me out. Part of the reason I had this ancient hunk of junk on my desk in the first place was because Special Investigations had such a shoestring budget.
"You trying to get a confession, Murph?" A light, nasal voice behind me drawled the words. I grimaced.
"You wanna play Good Cop, Ron?" I asked. "I think I've got it on the ropes."
My partner snorted. I heard the crinkle of foil as he bit into something he'd gotten off a food truck. The smell of burrito wafted over toward me, and I groaned. My alarm clock hadn't gone off that morning, and I'd had to book it to get to work on time. I hadn't eaten a bite yet, and my stomach was starting to protest. Ron Carmichael was a charitable soul — he probably would have offered me a bite if I'd asked — but we'd long since established that our tastes in food couldn't possibly be further apart.
"Might as well shut it down and try again later," Carmichael told me. "We've got a case."
I closed my eyes and breathed in slowly. I'd only been transferred into Chicago P.D.'s Special Investigations department a few months ago. I'd been keeping up as best I could, but the sheer breakneck pace of cases was starting to wear on me. Anything weird, anything not normal, inevitably got thrown at us as soon as the case's original inheritor could wash their hands of it. It went without saying, of course, that not normal cases almost never got closed. As a result, the pile of open cases on my desk was far larger than I was used to — and every time another one got added to the pile, my heart gave a little spasm of despair. My once-sterling reputation as a detective was slowly, inevitably circling the drain right before my eyes.
"I hear it's real gruesome," Carmichael added absently, and I thinned my lips to a hard line.
I hate Mondays.
I opened my eyes and snatched my coat from the back of my chair. "Where at?" I muttered.
"Madison Hotel. Seventh floor. They've got an officer on-scene. Didn't even bother sending Homicide — they kicked it straight to us. You know what that means."
I suppressed a groan.
Special Investigations always handled special cases. It was right there in the title. But this one was almost certainly what S.I. had internally dubbed a Very Special Case.
"I'll drive," I said shortly. "And Ron — you've got burrito on your tie."
"Tell you what," Carmichael laughed. "First victim that complains, I'll go get it dry-cleaned."
0-0-0-0
It was a very special case.
We both smelled the blood long before the hotel room even came into view. The thick, cloying smell shot straight to my stomach, and I quietly thanked whatever deity had been watching out for me this morning that I hadn't had time to eat anything.
The tall, brunette officer outside the hotel room still looked green around the gills when we turned the corner of the hallway. She wasn't a rookie, either — I was pretty sure she'd graduated from Academy in the class right before mine. I glanced down at her nametag quickly. Officer Garcia.
"Hey," I said, meeting her eyes with a jerk of my chin. "We're S.I. I'm Detective Karrin Murphy — this is Detective Ron Carmichael. Thanks for watching the door. Got anything interesting to tell us?"
Garcia grimaced as though I'd tried to force-feed her what was left of Carmichael's cold burrito. "Housekeeper found them and called it in," she said. "I only stayed inside long enough to clear the premises and confirm no one was still alive."
"Yeah?" Carmichael asked, interested. He tilted his head to try and look past her into the hotel room "How long did that take?"
"Clearing the place? Less than a minute. Calling signs of life… I don't think I even bothered taking a pulse." Garcia shook her head. "It's all yours. I'll be right here keeping people out."
"Yeah. Thanks." I gave Carmichael a flat look. "Can you drop the burrito in the trash already? I need you on camera duty."
Carmichael sighed. "Fine, fine," he muttered. He'd brought the whole camera case up with him instead of putting it around his neck, mostly because of the last sticky dregs of sauce on his hands. He set it down just outside the door and turned back from the hotel room door. "I'll throw it in the car, just in case."
"In case what?" I demanded. "You're not really gonna eat that later, are you?"
"Don't ask if you don't want to know the answer," he replied.
My partner disappeared back down the hallway, and I shook my head disbelievingly. "All right," I said. "I guess I'll get started."
I stepped through the doorway just past Officer Garcia, and instinctively held my breath.
0-0-0-0
The outer room of the suite was still spotless, if tacky. Officer Garcia had already turned on all the lights full-force, so I got a very clear view of a room that had probably never been intended to see so much light at once. The sitting room looked like it had been decorated by a neophyte with a platinum corporate credit card. Dark leather, shag carpet, velvet curtains… I wouldn't have been surprised to find a heart-shaped pillow somewhere, as an unsubtle wink-nudge toward the suite's primary intended purpose.
I carefully noted details as I pulled on my gloves, searching for anything broken or out-of-place. The door didn't look as though it'd been forced at any point; the housekeeper had probably let herself in with her own card. The stereo and the television were both off. A brass bucket held a recorked bottle of champagne in lukewarm water that had probably once been ice. Two empty glasses sat on the table, one with a smear of bright red lipstick on its rim. I caught sight of a single rose petal on the carpet, but I couldn't find the flower from which it had come.
It all looked fairly peaceful, as far as crime scenes go. No signs of struggle or clumsiness. My brain had already leapt to the obvious conclusion: when I walked into the bedroom, I'd find a dead woman, killed by her partner. Maybe he'd committed suicide shortly thereafter, aghast at his own actions. It had been a depressingly common scenario when I was in Homicide — most of the murders I got called in on tended to fall into the category of either drugs or relationships gone wrong.
But I wasn't in Homicide anymore. If any of the above scenarios had been the case, Special Investigations would never have been called, and I wouldn't be here.
I was sharply reminded of this fact when I dared to sidestep into the bedroom.
Blood was everywhere.
And I do mean everywhere.
It soaked the carpets. It was sprayed across the ceiling. It was smeared along the mirror… and it was definitely soaked into the bed.
The cranked-up overhead lights spared me no details. The two human figures entwined on the bed were frozen in a gruesome moment of ecstasy. The woman on top was fit, her breasts just a bit too round and firm to be natural. The man beneath her looked like he saw a gym on a regular basis: the handful of white scars I could see on his body suggested he'd seen his fair share of knife fights and maybe a bullet or two.
Both of their chests gaped wide open, their ribs bursting from their skin like something out of Alien. I stared just long enough to realize that their hearts were both missing.
A soft grunt came from behind me. I turned, and saw Carmichael standing there with the camera. The sick expression on his face suggested that he was suddenly regretting his last few bites of burrito.
"Pictures," I reminded him stonily. The comment was a mercy — an offering of something to focus on. He seized on it, hauling the camera up to his face with shaking fingers and dissociating himself from the mess by putting a lens between him and the horror.
I turned back, and forced myself to study the two victims more closely. The man in the bed had a tattoo on his right biceps — a winged dagger. I didn't recognize the picture as any kind of gang symbol, but I was willing to bet those scars marked him as someone who'd run into the law from the wrong side at least once. Tattoos were always entered into the system as identifying marks. If the hotel couldn't ID him, that tattoo probably could.
"Get a shot of that," I told Carmichael, pointing out the mark. He dutifully obliged.
"What the hell d'you think happened to them?" he asked in a soft voice. He didn't look up from the man's arm, but I forced myself to consider those bizarre chest wounds as I answered him.
"I think it's pretty clear," I said. "Their hearts exploded out of their chests." I said it matter-of-factly only because it was so obviously true. Now that I looked around, I realized that I could see fleshy bits of organ on the ceiling along with the blood spray there. Other pieces of heart were scattered in with the carpet.
"Jesus." Carmichael paled behind the camera. He was a seasoned S.I. detective. I had more total years on him if you counted my time in Homicide, but he'd probably seen more downright weirdness than I had. It took a lot to rattle a man like that. Frankly, I wasn't feeling so hot myself — but I had years of practice acting tougher and more competent than everyone around me, even when I didn't feel it. Being a woman in the police department meant that any sign of weakness got magnified a hundredfold, turned into Yet Another Reason no one liked working with lady cops.
"I've never seen anything like this," Carmichael admitted. "Nothing. And I'm tellin' you, Murph, I have seen some weird shit."
I swallowed as inconspicuously as I could manage. My stomach was roiling, but instinct told me I couldn't afford to show it.
The lights flickered for a moment. We both jumped, startled. The effect on the scene was uncanny, like a strobe light in a Halloween haunted house. In between flashes, I had the thought that it made the corpses look like wax figures instead of real bodies. Somehow, that was even scarier and more repugnant.
One of the lights blew abruptly. I took a step back, wide-eyed. Carmichael, S.I.'s resident avowed skeptic, was already backpedaling for the door, swearing loudly.
The two of us stepped back out into the sitting room, shaking. Slowly, the lights in the room steadied and came back on… with the exception of the bulb that had burst. A wordless silence fell between us. We shared a look that agreed: neither of us would mention the moment of cowardice.
Carmichael cleared his throat. "Uh. Well."
I steadied myself with a deep breath. The smell of blood was so keen I could taste it. "Yeah. That."
"Everything all right in there?" Officer Garcia asked in a raised voice.
"Everything's fine!" I called back. "Other than the dead guys — they're still dead!"
Carmichael chortled nervously at that.
I shook my head, and forced my way back into the bedroom. "I don't even know where to begin with this shit," I muttered at him. "Let's just… start with the evidence, and go from there."