Ch2: He's not dead, he's resting!
My name is Constanza "Connie" Murphy, and I'm a Detective Lieutenant of the Chicago Police Department. I'm also the CPD's unofficial designated detective for the bullshit cases, so I have to deal with a lot of oddities.
Which is why I got this case.
Well, that and the fact that me and my partner were around ten minutes out from the scene after it was called in.
According to the witness, a man had run after "some creepy thing" into an alley, only to get blindsided and gunned down by "a girl" who then "vanished into thin air, honest."
Chances are, the witness was drunk, high, or too traumatized by witnessing a murder, so they thought a dog looked like something else and couldn't remember the murderer taking her leave.
Still, it was a high enough chance of oddness to be the kind of case that always got handed to me and my partner, Detective Sid Kirmani.
Sid was my balance. Where I was serious and intent, he played mellow wise ass. When I got frustrated with the weird refusing to be reasonable, Sid made wisecracks. The fact that our consultant occasionally took great inspiration from those wisecracks was just another thing to hate the weirdness of my cases for.
I just hoped this one was going to be a simple, normal case that we could close on our own.
Looking at the alley with the body in it, I felt my chances drop.
Our corpse was laid out on his stomach, mostly covered up by a big, weathered and beaten black leather duster. The positioning of his arms suggested that he'd tried to catch himself, or possibly get up to his feet again, before being killed. Black leather gloves that matched the coat covered his hands. There was blood on his face from a head wound, highlighting how pale he was. A quick flick of my flashlight to the wall of the dim alley showed a small splotch of blood.
That was all pretty normal for a crime scene with a body. Unfortunately, there were irregularities that pointed out why this case fell under 'weird' jurisdiction.
Starting with how our corpse was shot in the back, according to the witness, yet there was a stark lack of blood at our crime scene. There was the blood from the wound on the victim's head, but that seemed to be it. I know the kind of gushing blood from a killing blow wouldn't stand out as well against the deep black of the leather duster the victim was wearing as, say a white shirt, but it still should have been visible. Even if the bullet had struck elsewhere on the victim, there should have been a bullet hole and blood, but I wasn't finding any.
Something was wrong here.
If the bullet didn't hit this man, we shouldn't have a dead body. But if it did kill him, there should be a sign of where the bullet hit. Yet here our corpse was with no signs of being hit.
As I continued inspecting the body, Sid canvassed the scene. It was the way we worked. One of us focused on the body, the other the surroundings, then we switched before bringing our observations together. We missed less details that way.
"Think he was friends with Dresden?" Sid asked, pulling me from my search for the bullet hole as he shined his flashlight on a wooden pole resting on the ground not far from the victim. A wooden pole densely carved with strange symbols that I might have recognized from all of the paraphernalia and decorations at Dresden's. I idly wondered if Dresden would call it a magic wizard's staff.
A closer inspection of the "staff" revealed a roughness to the carving, as well as burn darkened wood on the inside of the sigils. Of greater interest to an officer of the law like me was the pattern of nicks and dings in the wood that suggested that it had been used as a weapon on at least one occasion. Likely more given the obvious facial scarring on the victim.
And if our victim was into the weird like professional 'wizard' Harry Dresden was, well, maybe he could do seemingly impossible things like Harry, including dying from a bullet that left no mark. I just hoped that the cause of death wouldn't mysteriously change on me like when I had looked into the possible (magical) murder of Harry's uncle.
"Maybe. I can't spot any bullet wound on our victim," I replied.
"Kevlar?" Sid suggested, looking toward the corpse himself.
"There'd still be a hole in the leather coat," I reminded him.
"Maybe the bullet got caught in his mini-cape," Sid joked.
"Maybe," I said more thoughtfully, looking at the spread of extra leather around the victim's shoulders.
"C'mon, Murphy, you can't be serious," Sid complained as he followed my gaze. I kind of wished I wasn't, but when things look weird, sometimes the truth is too.
"Humor me," I curtly told him, crouching down and pulling on a latex glove so I could prod at the folds of the mantle.
I carefully slid a few fingers into a raised fold and dragged it to the side. Then did it again and again until something flashed under the beam of Sid's flashlight. I stilled. Sid swore.
There, pressed into the leather between the victim's shoulder blades, was the bullet.
Besides the fact that a leather coat should be of no use in stopping bullets, though this one obviously was given the way the bullet was flattened into it, it just made the fact that we had a dead man here all the more strange. He'd obviously still been shot, but seeing as the bullet hadn't penetrated anything vital, it shouldn't have been able to kill the man.
"Take pictures, then get me an evidence bag," I instructed Sid. We would solve this case, even with all the strangeness going on, and to do that, we needed all the evidence we could get.
With the pictures done, and a quick search to make sure there were no more bullets in the victim's coat, it was time to pull the one bullet we did find for evidence.
I couldn't just pluck the flattened bullet from the victim's coat. The leather had some sort of grip on the bullet. Maybe the bullet had penetrated it just a little, or possibly deformed just right to hook itself in just a little bit. Regardless of cause, I had to dig my fingers into the back of the corpse, just a bit, to get a real grip on the bullet.
A slight stirring beneath my fingertips was all the warning I got to start backpedaling before the corpse surged upwards.
It was a good call on the part of my instincts, as his gloved fist passed mere inches away from my nose in a backhanded swing while his other arm was preoccupied with helping him back to his feet.
His stance was shaky as he backed into the alley wall, but ready to move if anything came at him, as his breathing sped up from the adrenaline of his sudden awakening. Loose fists were held ready at his sides as his wild, unfocused eyes searched for a target, probably the long-gone perpetrator who took him down.
Sid and I were equally frozen in shock at our sudden not-a-corpse.
But that frozen state did give me time to take in our live victim.
Tall was the obvious first impression. Harry is a tall guy at a few inches over six feet, this guy was taller. He was also built of sharper angles than Harry. Part of it looked to be from his lifestyle, a sleep-deprived sunkness to his eyes, the hollowness of not quite enough food. Part of it was just his natural shape, the sharp cut of his jaw, his hawkish nose.
Our John Doe was also possessed of pale skin and dark hair and eyes like Harry. Though his unshaven face bore scars, the most obvious being one over his right eye. Somebody had tried to take it out, the line of the scar was too clean to be random debris or an accident. And his nose had obviously been broken a time or two.
As for clothing, there was the big black leather duster with the mantle that had been so obvious while he was laying face down, and underneath was a simple gray shirt and jeans. There was also the pair of black leather gloves, though it wasn't quite chilly enough out to really need gloves. A silver necklace around his throat caught the light, its pendant the outline of a star in a circle. It reminded me a lot of the necklace Harry wore, though this guy's necklace looked more battered, and valuable given the red gem nestled in the center of the star.
It was just strangely easy to compare him to my consultant on all things weird.
But it also made the differences between this man and Harry all the more stark.
Unlike Harry, who seemed to stumble into violence, this guy was obviously a soldier of one walk or another. He was too alert, too balanced in his movements to be a regular civilian. It hinted that the violent story of the scarring on his face and staff had been a result of his own choices, not happenstance.
And while he wasn't as broad as Harry, he was lined with a lean muscle that indicated a regular workout routine, while I knew Harry made the occasional attempt at healthy living before immersing himself back in his usual odd pastimes.
His eyes finally quit roaming and focused on me and Sid. It was an intense look where you could just tell he was evaluating how much of a threat you posed to him. If it would be worth his while to fight.
To be honest, I didn't like my own evaluation of the results of that possibility.
I'm a damn good cop, but this guy moved more like a Marine, and professional soldiers usually beat out us normal peacekeepers.
"Who are you? What's going on here?" he asked in a deep baritone, breaking the stare-off.
"That's what I'd like to know," I replied.
His stance relaxed a bit after a heartbeat, an amused light flickering in his eyes and ghosting across his face. He shifted a bit to look more directly at me, though not enough to lose sight of Sid.
"I asked first," he said with a near-patronizing smirk.
I chewed the answer over for a moment, weighing the pros and cons of introducing myself first. People tend to act differently when they know they're dealing with a cop. Some pander to the authority we represent, others rebel. Some people freak out thinking we're out to take them in for something, others want us to take someone else in for them. Military guys tend to respect the badge, but militaristic tells didn't mean he actually served, just that life was a war zone to him.
"Lieutenant Murphy, Chicago Police Department," I said, deciding to take the plunge. John Doe flinched just the tiniest bit at that, something intense flashing across his face before it closed off. "My partner, Detective Kirmani," I gestured to Sid, who got no such reaction. "We got called in about a murder and dead body. Turned out you weren't really dead."
He snorted at that last bit while his eyes flickered over myself and Sid again.
"Do I get to see a badge to back that up, or am I just supposed to take your word on it?" he asked warily.
I wanted to feel insulted by that, and maybe I was a bit, but there was a certain sensibility in wanting confirmation that complete strangers are who and what they say they are.
Sid and I both pulled our badges out to show the guy, who gave them some intense scrutiny before nodding to himself, satisfied we weren't fake cops. There was also a flicker of something else in his eyes, tugging at the edges of his expression. I wanted to call it fear or panic, maybe confusion. Regardless, there were thoughts whirling behind that face.
"And you are?" Sid asked when our mystery man still didn't introduce himself after a good ten seconds.
"Hmm? Oh right, my name's Harry. Harry McCoy."
AN: Just to be perfectly clear, the two Harry's do not look alike/aren't doppelgängers (which can be explained with LeFay vs Morningway, at the minimum). Just look at the cover art. TV!Harry is, of course, as he appears in the show. So he looks like Paul Blackthorne, which makes him 6'3" or so. Book!Harry has all his Book looks, includnig being 6'9". Though if you want to know what a good live-action/real look for him is, Jason Bernardo was great in the Peace Talks and Battle Ground book trailers. Or you could go with the book covers, minus the hat. Book!Harry doesn't do hats.
Also, I checked how long it takes for a corpse to look not so alive, the internet said around 15-25 minutes, and that it's less noticeable in pale people, which Book!Harry describes himself as. Not to mention Connie and Sid walked in with the preconception that they were dealing with a corpse, so a corpse is what they saw. Until it started moving, lol.