"And there's not much difference between 'kiss' and 'kill.' If you only look at the letters." I shrugged. "But here you are, working for Marcone. As a madam."
"I am a convicted felon, Mister Dresden," she replied. "I used to handle accounts with a total value in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I was ill suited to work as a waitress in a diner."
"Nickel in the pen didn't do much for your resume, huh?"
"Or references," she replied. She shook her head. "My reasons for being here are none of your business, Dresden, and have nothing to do with the matter at hand. Ask your questions or get out."
"After you parted company with the other members of the Ordo tonight," I said, "did you place a phone call to them?"
"Again," she said quietly, "we are at an impasse, exactly as we were before. It doesn't matter what I say, given that you are clearly unwilling to believe me."
"Did you call them?" I asked.
She stared steadily, her eyes so dull and empty that it made her elegant black outfit look like funerary wear. I couldn't tell if it would be more suitable for mourners - or for the deceased. Then her eyes narrowed and she nodded. "Ah. You want me to look you in the eyes. The term is overdramatic, but I believe it is referred to as a soulgaze."
"Yeah," I said.
"I hadn't realized it was a truth detector."
"It isn't," I said. "But it will tell me what sort of person you are."
"I know what sort of person I am," she replied. "I am a functional borderline psychopath. I am heartless, calculating, empty, and can muster very little in the way of empathy for my fellow human beings. But then, you can't take my word for it, can you?"
I just looked at her for a moment. "No," I said then, very quietly. "I don't think I can."
"I have no intention of proving anything to you. I will submit to no such invasion."
"Even if it means more of your friends in the Ordo die?"
There was the slightest hesitation before she answered. "I have been unable to protect them thus far. Despite all..." She trailed off and shook her head once. Confidence returned to her features and voice. "Anna will watch over them."
I stared at her for a second, and she regarded me coolly, focused on a spot a bit over my eyebrows, avoiding direct eye contact.
"Anna's important to you?" I asked.
"As much as anyone can be, now," she replied. "She was kind to me when she had no cause to be. Nothing to gain from it. She is a worthy person."
I watched her closely. I've done a lot of work as both a professional wizard and a professional investigator. Wizardry is awfully intriguing and useful, but it doesn't necessarily teach you very much about other people. It's better at teaching you about yourself.
The investigating business, though, is all about people. It's all about talking to them, asking questions, and listening to them lie. Most of the things investigators get hired to handle involve a lot of people lying. I've seen liars in every shape and size and style. Big lies, little lies, white lies, stupid lies. The worst lies are almost always silence - or else truth, tainted with just enough deception to rot it to the core.
Helen wasn't lying to me. She might have been dangerous, might have been willing to practice black magic to seek vengeance in the past, might have been cold and distant - but she had not, for one second, tried to conceal any of it, or denied anything that had happened.
"Oh, God," I said quietly. "You don't know."
She frowned at me for a moment - then her face became drawn and pale. "Oh." She closed her eyes and said, "Oh, Anna. You poor fool." She opened them again a moment later. She cleared her throat and asked, "When?"
"A few hours ago. The hotel room. Suicide."
"The others?"
"Safe. Hidden and under guard." I took a deep breath. "I have to be sure, Helen. If you really do give a damn about them, you'll cooperate with me. You'll help me."
She nodded once, her eyes distant. Then she said, "For them." And met my eyes.
The phenomenon referred to as a soulgaze is a fairly mysterious thing. No one's ever been able to get a really good grasp on exactly how it works. The best descriptions of it have always been more poetical than anything else.
The eyes are the windows of the soul.
Lock eyes with a wizard and the essence of who and what you are is laid bare. It is perceived in different ways by every individual. Ramirez had once told me that he heard it as a kind of musical theme that accompanied the person he was gazing upon. Others looked on a soul in a series of frozen images. My interpretation of a soulgaze was, perhaps inevitably, one of the most random and confusing I'd ever heard about. I see the other person in symbol and metaphor, sometimes in panorama and surround sound, sometimes in misty translucence and haunting whispers.
Whoever was gazed upon got a good look back. Whatever universal powers governed that kind of thing evidently decided that the soul's windows don't come in an optional issue of one-way mirrored glass. You saw them. They saw you, with the same kind of searing permanence.
For me, meeting someone's eyes is always risky. Every human being on earth knows what I'm talking about. Try it. Walk up to someone, without speaking, and look them in the eyes. There's a certain amount of leeway for a second, or two, or three. And then there's a distinct sensation of sudden contact, of intimacy. That's when regular folks normally cough and look away. Wizards, though, get the full ride of a soulgaze.
All things considered, I shouldn't have been surprised that when Helen met my eyes, it got uncomfortably intimate before a second had passed and...
... and I stood in Chicago, in one of the parks on Lake Michigan. Calumet, maybe? I couldn't see the skyline from where I was standing, so it was hard to be sure.
What I could see was the Beckitt family. Husband, wife, daughter, a little girl maybe ten or eleven years old. She looked like her mother - a woman with smile lines at the corners of her eyes and a white-toothed smile who very little resembled the Helen Beckitt I knew. But all the same, it was her.
They'd been on a family picnic. The sun was setting on a summer evening, golden sunset giving way to twilight as they walked back to the family car. Mother and father swung the little girl between them, each holding one hand.
I didn't want to see what was about to happen. I didn't have a choice in the matter.
A parking lot. The sounds of a car roaring up. Muffled curses, tight with fear, and then a car swerved up off the road and gunfire roared from its passenger window. Screams. Some people threw themselves down. Most, including the Beckitts, stared in shock. More loud, hammering sounds, not ten feet away.