She directed a level gaze around the room. She hadn’t put the gun away.

I smiled at her. Just a little.

Gard looked at me and said, “Dresden.”

I shrugged and shook my head sadly. “What? Once we gave them the vote, it went totally out of control.”

“You’re a pig, Harry,” Murphy growled.

“But a pig smart enough to bow to the inevitable,” I said. I looked at Gard and said, “Far as I’m concerned, she’s got a legitimate interest. I’ll back it.”

“Warden,” Luccio said in a warning tone, “may I speak to you?”

I walked over to her.

“She can’t possibly know,” Luccio said quietly, “the kind of grief she could be letting herself in for.”

“She can,” I replied as quietly. “She’s been through more than most Wardens, Captain. And she’s sure as hell covered my back enough times to have earned the right to make up her own mind.”

Luccio frowned at me for a moment, and then turned to face Murphy. “Sergeant,” she said quietly. “This could expose you to a…considerable degree of risk. Are you sure?”

“If it were your town,” Murphy said, “your job, your duty? Could you stand around with your fingers in your ears?”

Luccio nodded slowly and then inclined her head.

“Besides,” Murphy said, half smiling as she put her gun in her shoulder holster, “it’s not as if I’m leaving you people much choice.”

“I like her,” Sanya rumbled in his deep, half-swallowed accent. “She is so tiny and fierce. I don’t suppose she knows how to—”

“Sanya,” Michael said, his voice very firm. “We have talked about this.”

The dark-skinned Russian sighed and shrugged. “It could not hurt to ask.”

“Sanya.”

He lifted both hands in a gesture of surrender, grinning, and fell silent.

The door to the house banged shut, and running footsteps crunched through the snow. Molly opened the door to the workshop and said, “Harry, Kincaid’s on the phone. He’s got the location for the meeting.”

“Kincaid?” Murphy said in a rather sharp voice.

“Yeah, didn’t I mention that?” I asked her, my tone perfectly innocent as I headed for the door. “He showed up last night.”

Her eyes narrowed. “We’ll talk.”

“Tiny,” Sanya rumbled to Michael, clenching a demonstrative fist. “But fierce.”

Chapter Twenty-eight

People think that nothing can possibly happen in the middle of a big city—say, Chicago—without lots of witnesses seeing everything that happened. What most people don’t really understand is that there are two reasons why that just ain’t so—the first being that humans in general make lousy witnesses.

Take something fairly innocuous, like a minor traffic accident at a busy pedestrian intersection. Beep-beep, crunch, followed by a lot of shouting and arm waving. Line up everyone at that intersection and ask them what happened. Every single one of them will give you a slightly different story. Some of them will have seen the whole thing start to finish. Some of them will have seen only the aftermath. Some of them will have seen only one of the cars. Some of them will tell you, with perfect assurance, that they saw both cars from start to finish, including such details as the expressions on the drivers’ faces and changes in vehicle acceleration, despite the fact that they would have to be performing simultaneous feats of bilocation, levitation, and telepathy to have done so.