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back and let her in. Murph sat down on the couch and Mouse came over to her and laid his head shamelessly on her lap. She yawned and scratched and petted him obligingly, her small, strong hands making his doggy eyes close in bliss.
    I passed her a cup of coffee and got one for myself. She took it black with a couple of zero-calorie sweeteners in it. Mine came with cream and lots and lots of sugar. We sipped coffee together, and her eyes became more animate as the caffeine went in. Neither of us spoke, and her gaze eventually roved over my apartment and me. I could hear the wheels spinning in her head.
    “You showered less than an hour ago. I can still smell the soap. And you just got done cleaning your coat. At four in the morning.”
    I sipped coffee and neither confirmed nor denied.
    “You were at the building when it blew up,” she said.
    “Not at it,” I said. “I’m good, but I don’t know about having a building fall on me.”
    She shook her head. She stared at the remainder of her coffee. “Rawlins called. Told me that your office building had exploded. I thought someone had gotten to you, finally.”
    “We on the record?” I asked. Murphy was a detective sergeant with Chicago PD’s Special Investigations division. It was the dead-end department of CPD and the only one with any clue whatsoever about the supernatural world. Even so, Murphy was a cop to the bone. She could stretch the line when it came to legality, but she had limits. I’d crossed them before.
    She shook her head. “No. Not yet.”
    “Red Court,” I said. “They bought the building a few years back. They wired it to blow if they wanted to do it.”
    Murphy frowned. “Why do it now? Why not blow you up years ago?”
    I grunted. “Personal grudge, I guess,” I said. “Duchess Arianna is upset about what happened to her husband when he tangled with me. She thinks it’s my fault.”
    “Is it?”
    “Pretty much,” I said.
    She swirled the coffee around the bottom of the cup. “So why not just kill you? Click, boom.”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “She figured it wasn’t enough, maybe. Click-boom is business. What I have going with her is personal.”
    My jaws creaked a little as I clenched them.
    Murphy’s blue eyes missed little. “Personal?” She looked around again. “Your place looks too nice. Who was it?”
    “Susan.”
    Her back straightened a little. It was the only sign of surprise she showed. Murphy knew all about Susan. “You want to talk about it?”
    I didn’t, but Murphy needed to know. I laid it out for her in sentences of three and four words. By the time I’d finished, she had set her mug on the coffee table and was listening to me intently.
    “Jesus and Mary, Mother of God,” she breathed. “Harry.”
    “Yeah.”
    “That . . . that bitch .”
    I shook my head. “Pointing fingers does nothing for Maggie. We’ll do that later.”
    She grimaced, as if swallowing something bitter. Then she nodded. “You’re right.”
    “Thank you.”
    “What are you going to do?” she asked.
    “Martin and Susan are seeing what they can get off the disk,” I said. “They’ll contact me as soon as they know something. Meantime, I’ll get a couple hours horizontal, then start hitting my contacts. Go to the Council and ask them for help.”
    “That bunch of heartless, gutless, spineless old pricks,” she said.
    I found myself smiling, a little, at my coffee.
    “Are they going to give it to you?” Murphy asked.
    “Maybe. It’s complicated,” I said. “Are you going to get CPD to help me?”
    Her eyes darkened. “Maybe. It’s complicated.”
    I spread my hands in a “there you are” gesture, and she nodded. She rose and paced over to the sink to put her cup down. “What can I do to help?”
    “Be nice if the police didn’t lock me up for a while. They’ll realize that the explosives were around my office eventually.”
    She shook her head. “No promises. I’ll do what I can.”
    “Thank