Crowbones

CHAPTER 63

Grimshaw

Earthday, Novembros 4

No Elementals blocked the road leading to the Mill Creek Cabins. No Elementals—or Others of any kind that Grimshaw could see—were waiting to be helpful. He had a bad feeling their absence was telling.

He drove down the lane and pulled onto the patch of gravel that served as the driveway for his cabin. By the time he got out of the cruiser, Roash and Cardosa, looking haunted and hollow-eyed, had come out of their cabin to meet him, more or less. He noticed they didn’t leave the dubious safety of their cabin’s enclosed front yard.

“Edward Janse said he had an odd feeling and went out to check on something last night,” Richard Cardosa said when Grimshaw reached the gate in that cabin’s low stone wall. “He didn’t come back. That’s why I called.”

“Peter Lynchfield went out for food yesterday and didn’t come back,” Rodney Roash grumbled. “We all pitched in for supplies, and he never came back.”

Gods above and below, was it only last night that the Five had gone to The Jumble for books, which had led to all the rest?

“He could have run into some trouble and stayed in the village,” Richard Cardosa said, his voice sounding weary and strained, as if he’d been saying the same thing for hours.

Grimshaw studied each man in turn. “Lynchfield is dead. And that, Professor Roash, is something you and I need to talk about, since you’re the one who sent him to his death.”

Blustering and denials from Roash, which he expected.

“Peter is dead?” Cardosa looked sick. “I should have gone with him. I offered to go with him, but . . .”

“There’s nothing you could have done.” Grimshaw wasn’t sure about that. It was possible Cardosa could have convinced the other man to stay away from The Jumble, but he doubted it.

“Chief?” Cardosa raised his voice to be heard over Roash’s continued protests of innocence. “I’m sorry Lynchfield is dead, but Edward Janse might not be. Shouldn’t we look for him?”

Grimshaw spotted a hawk flying just above the cabins’ rooflines, heading toward the woods. Could be a regular hawk, but he doubted it, so it looked like he had a helper after all.

“I’ll look,” he said. “You stay here.”

He headed in the same direction as the Hawk. By all the gods, what had Edward Janse been thinking to go out after dark? The man was an Intuit. He should have sensed something that told him he was in danger—unless his particular Intuit sensitivity was tuned to something like weather.

But if, as Cardosa claimed, Janse had sensed something and that was the reason he’d left the safety of his cabin? Had he found an answer or just an enemy?

Grimshaw spotted the Hawk perched on a branch, watching him. When it didn’t fly away, he figured the body would be nearby—and he was right.

The killing was as savage as, or worse than, the way Adam Fewks had died—as if something hated humans or, at the very least, the human form. But Grimshaw didn’t think he was looking at the work of the same killer.

Janse wore a sportsman’s all-weather coat, olive green in color. Would a Crow identify that color as a muddy green? Could Janse have been the man who had met with Civil and Serious Crowgard? Why? Or had someone—something—seen the coat and killed the wrong man?

Someone had cut open the body from breastbone to groin and scooped out the intestines and other internal organs, which lay in a pile at Janse’s feet. It reminded him of the faux cat’s hollowed-out body, and he wondered if there was a connection.

The worst part was the way the man had been secured to the tree. His mouth had been opened and a wooden stake had been driven through the mouth and the back of the head, impaling Janse to the tree trunk.

Grimshaw pulled his small, high-powered flashlight from his belt and shone it into the mouth. Then he swore softly.

No tongue.

He didn’t see it among the organs on the ground, and he wasn’t about to dig around to locate it. Besides . . .

He studied the body and the ground again. The kill had the look of something frenzied and brutal. The stake driven through the mouth and back of the skull produced a bone-deep terror that whatever had done the staking had no care for anything human. But the more he looked at the body and the ground, the more convinced he was that these were two separate events.

What if something did care about this man’s death but didn’t understand how another human would react to seeing the body displayed this way? What if this had been the most expedient way to get the body off the ground—or warn other predators to stay away? Or make the body easy to find?

What if leaving the body like this was an attempt to assist in the investigation?

He’d bet Doc Wallace would tell him pinning the body to the tree was done postmortem. He’d also bet Doc would tell him that Janse’s tongue had been cut out while the man was on the ground, grievously wounded and dying but still alive.

Grimshaw stepped back, pulled out his mobile phone, and placed another call to Captain Walter Hargreaves at the Bristol Police Station, requesting further assistance from Detective Kipp and his CIU team. Based on what Julian had told him that morning about the dead crow, he was sure that Janse’s death was connected with whatever happened at The Jumble last night, because dangling from some black thread tied to Janse’s bottom front teeth were the lower legs and feet of a crow.

Edward Janse had been a few yards into the trees when he’d been attacked. Almost within sight of the cabins. The man must have thought he was safe enough, or why go out at all? What had compelled an Intuit to go out last night?

Grimshaw stopped at the edge of the trees and called Julian.

“Who’s with you?” He was asking a friend who was an ex-cop. He didn’t need to specify that he was asking about individuals who could fight.

“Ilya. He found Jozi tied up at the dock. The body I saw is an ordinary crow.”

“It’s going to take me a while to get there. Edward Janse is dead. It was savage.”

“Were any bones taken?”

“No. At least nothing obvious. But a pair of crow’s feet were left at the scene.”

Julian swore softly.

A thought occurred to him. “Hold on a minute.” Thinking about the Crowgard and how they often revealed themselves even when they could otherwise pass for human, Grimshaw went back to the body and studied the head. “I can’t be sure, but it looks like someone cut off three locks of hair.”

“Feathers of the fallen?” Julian said.

“Could be.” Which would mean Janse had been considered an innocent who had been wrongfully killed.

“Can I tell the guests staying at the lake cabins that they can come up to the main house? They’re all looking for coffee and company.”

“Tell them to stay on the path leading up to the house. Then ask someone with a good sense of smell to sniff around the crime scene and tell you if there were any strangers around last night.”

“Let’s hope they find a scent,” Julian said. “If they don’t, Vicki’s guests could be in a lot of trouble.”

Not just the guests, Grimshaw thought as he ended the call and made one more.

“Yes?” Stavros said.

“Julian Farrow should be included on the need-to-know list, and I think the four of us should meet tonight,” Grimshaw said.

“You found whose blood was used to write the warning?”

“Not sure, but we have found two more bodies, one human, one crow.”

Silence. Then: “Very well. Bring Mr. Farrow with you tonight.”

Grimshaw returned the mobile phone to its place on his belt and took a minute to consider what had to be done.

Detective Kipp and his CIU team would be driving up to The Jumble by now to examine the crime scene and remove Peter Lynchfield’s body and take it to Ames Funeral Home for examination. Would Kipp recommend the remains go to Bristol where they could do a full autopsy, or would the CIU team’s leader realize learning too much could be dangerous to his team? Same thing with Edward Janse’s body, although Grimshaw wasn’t sure Janse had been killed by any form of terra indigene, so a full autopsy could be useful.

It suddenly occurred to him that there was one possible reason why Janse would have ignored any warnings from his Intuit sensibilities. Drugs. Two drugs—gone over wolf and feel-good—had caused all kinds of trouble last year. Gone over wolf made a person off-the-charts aggressive, and feel-good made a person so passive they had no sense of self-preservation. This killing could be the result of someone—or more than one person—taking gone over wolf. Had someone managed to dose Janse with feel-good in order to persuade him to go out last night? Who?

Well, if it wasn’t one of the terra indigene, which was likely since they hated both drugs for no other reason than both were made from the blood of cassandra sangue, then his pool of suspects was down to the other two men staying in the cabins.

He’d think about that later. Right now he needed to get the blood on the steps of the government building analyzed to see if it was human or animal, and he still needed to locate Tom Saulner, the missing teenager he’d dubbed Hatchet Head.

More than anything, he needed to figure out who was behind what was happening before he ended up investigating another body.