“So this could have been a banishing spell?” Murphy asked.

“It’s possible. But you can do a lot of other things with it, if you draw it differently.”

“Like build a cage for things,” Murphy said.

“Yeah.” I frowned, troubled. “Or open a doorway for something.”

“Which, judging by your face, would be bad.”

“I…” I shook my head. I didn’t even want to know what kind of terror would need a pentagram that huge in order to squeeze into our world. “I think if something sized to fit this pentagram had come through it, there would probably be more than one building on fire.”

“Oh,” Murphy said quietly.

“Look, until I know what the pentagram’s purpose was, all I can do is speculate. And there’s something else weird here, too.”

“What’s that?”

“There’s not a trace of residual magic, and there should be. Hell, with this much power being tossed around, the whole area should practically be glowing. It isn’t.”

Murphy nodded slowly. “You’re saying they wiped their prints.”

I grimaced. “Exactly, and I have no idea how to do it. Hell’s bells, I didn’t know it was possible.”

I sipped at my coffee in the silence and pretended the shiver that went down my spine was from the cold. I passed the cup to Murphy, who took a sip from the opposite side and passed it back to me.

“So,” she said, “we’re left with questions. What is a major-league supernatural hitter doing placing a huge pentagram under an empty apartment building? What was his goal in creating it?”

“And why blow up the building afterward?” I frowned and thought of an even better question. “Why this building?” I turned to Murphy. “Who owns it?”

“Lake Michigan Ventures,” Murphy replied, “a subsidiary of Mitigation Unlimited, whose CEO is—”

“Triple crap,” I spat. “Gentleman Johnnie Marcone.”

Chapter Five

I tried to collect some of the blood in the reflective symbols and use it in a tracking spell to follow it back to its original owner, but it was a bust. Either the blood was already too dry to use or else the person who had donated it was dead. I had a bad feeling it wasn’t the winter air that made the spell fail.

Typical. Nothing was ever simple when Marcone was involved.

Gentleman Johnnie Marcone was the robber baron of the streets of Chicago, and the undisputed lord of its criminal underworld. Though he’d long been under legal siege, the bastions of paperwork defended by legions of lawyers had never been conquered, and his power base had grown steadily and quietly. They probably could have tried harder to take him down, but the heartless fact of the matter was that Marcone’s management style was a better alternative than most. He’d put the civil back in civil offender, harshly cutting down on violence against civilians and law enforcement alike. It didn’t make his business any less ugly, just tidier, but it could have been worse, as far as the city’s authorities were concerned.