Crowbones

CHAPTER 10

Grimshaw

Windsday, Grau 31

Grimshaw helped Samuel Ames lift the body bag from the gurney onto the table in the mortuary’s preparation room. He opened the bag, put on some gloves, then pulled out the bottle of bleach and set it aside. He’d take it to the station and dust it for prints. He didn’t think it would help him identify the individual, but he would follow procedure.

“Why the bleach?” Samuel asked. “Did someone really think there would be time to clean away evidence before the Others gave chase?”

“I don’t know,” Grimshaw replied. It was a good question because it indicated a serious lack of knowledge about the terra indigene and how they would respond to someone playing a trick—especially at The Jumble.

Doc Wallace, who was Sproing’s medical examiner as well as the junior partner in the village’s only medical practice, handed Grimshaw the gourd and removed the severed arm from the bag.

Grimshaw shook the gourd. Hearing the rattle, he tipped the gourd over one hand.

Pebbles that you could find in any creek bed. No helpful clue there.

Then the three men looked at the soggy mass of black feathers.

By rights, he should call the CIU team in Bristol to come up and examine the evidence. In the morning, he would call Captain Hargreaves, who was his old boss and the man who had assigned him to deal with the trouble in Sproing over the summer, but tonight he was going to be his own CIU team.

The feathers were sewn in patches onto some kind of netting shaped like a cape. His own skill began and ended with sewing buttons on a shirt and mending a small rip in a seam, but this struck him as shoddy workmanship rather than something ragged from wear. And some of the feathers, brown in color, definitely didn’t come from a crow—or a Crow.

As he lifted one side of the cape, he felt the round, hard something in the center of the mass. Slowly, methodically, the men uncovered what the feathers and netting had hidden.

Samuel Ames and Doc Wallace sucked in a breath. Grimshaw looked at the broken beak and the grotesque head that was caved in on one side and said, “Papier-mâché. It’s a mask.”

At the same time, Doc Wallace said, “Plague doctor.”

Samuel frowned. “What?”

“A few centuries ago, there was a devastating plague in the lands we know as Cel-Romano. The doctors who tried to treat the victims of the plague wore these masks that had a long beak, probably as an attempt to protect themselves from breathing in the disease. I’m guessing this is supposed to be a Crowgard skull and beak, but it reminds me of the plague doctor.” Doc gave them a faint smile. “It’s a popular Trickster Night costume among medical students, which is why I thought of it.”

The mask was split and crushed in places, but Doc Wallace still removed it as carefully as if it were living tissue.

Then they stared at the partially crushed head that had been under the mask, and Grimshaw breathed out the word “Crap.”