The first thing he noticed when he approached the twisted body was the tie that was now partially visible. Which meant someone had fiddled with the corpse in the past few minutes.
“Gods above and below,” Julian breathed. He didn’t say another word, just started taking pictures of the body in situ.
Grimshaw looked around, moving out in an ever-widening circle. He found it unnerving that anything big enough to do that to a full-grown man also managed to leave no tracks—no sign of any kind of its presence. He bagged the service revolver that Baker had dropped.
“Done,” Julian said.
Grimshaw waved to the men in the hearse. The older man, who had been driving, paled when he saw the body and realized what “facedown, feet up” meant. The younger one stumbled away and was sick.
“We’re going to take a look around back,” Grimshaw said. “Wait for us to escort you out.”
“Caw!”
“Caw!” “Caw!” “Caw!”
The Crowgard didn’t follow them to the back of the house, but they weren’t unsupervised, not with a big-ass Hawk perched in one of the trees that gave it a clear view of the screened-in porch that ran across the back of the house.
Blood in the grass. A lot of blood.
“Whatever attacked must have hit an artery,” Julian said as he took pictures.
Grimshaw noticed something glinting in the grass. He pointed. “Take some shots of those before I bag them.”
Julian huffed as he photographed the set of lock picks. “Damned fools, trying to break into this place.”
Damned was right. Even the baby cop who wasn’t physically hurt would be damaged by the experience. At the very least, he’d ride through a lot of nightmare-filled nights.
After bagging the lock picks, Grimshaw turned the handle on the screen door.
“Wayne!” Julian breathed the word.
The door opened, proving Chesnik had gotten the door unlatched before he was attacked—proving he had broken the rules of staying out of Ms. DeVine’s house.
“Someone used lock picks to open this door,” he said in a loud voice. “From what I can see from here, the intruder didn’t actually enter Ms. DeVine’s house or disturb any of her possessions, but we will inform her attorney about the attempted break-in.” He started to shut the door.
“Wayne!”
Out of the corner of his eye, Grimshaw saw Julian drop to the ground. He hunched his shoulders and lowered his head a moment before he felt the tip of a wing brush across his back.
An aborted attack or a warning?
Shaken, and not daring to reach for the door again to shut it, he and Julian gathered the evidence and their equipment and headed for the front of the house.
Grimshaw glanced back. The Hawk they had seen was still in the tree, watching them. The attack, or warning, had come from a different direction.
Something to remember since he was certain he’d be coming back to The Jumble before this was over.
CHAPTER 14
Vicki
Sunsday, Juin 13
After receiving a call from Officer Grimshaw, Ilya Sanguinati gave me a ride to the Pizza Shack so that I could pick up dinner. He wouldn’t explain why he had ordered a large Meat Eater’s pizza with double meat as well as the mushroom and black olives pizza I had ordered for myself. Well, I’d be sharing it with Aggie if she decided to join me for cop and crime night on TV.
Then I met my new employee-lodgers, Conan Beargard and Robert “call me Cougar” Panthera, and I understood why I was bringing home what you could call the Carnivore’s Special pizza, which had so much meat you couldn’t tell there was sauce, cheese, or a crust underneath.
I looked at Conan and Cougar and hoped it was meaty enough that they wouldn’t be looking to nibble anything else. I rather liked having ten toes, not to mention a full set of fingers.
Aggie arrived before I could set out plates at the round kitchen table that seated four but could squeeze in five or six. She was a little wary of “the boys,” but that wore off in a hurry. My wariness didn’t wear off as fast, but I think I was entitled to a few moments of anxiety. After all, I, the dumpy human, was sitting with a Bear, a Cougar, and a vampire—because Ilya Sanguinati stayed and had a piece of pizza with the rest of us. I wasn’t sure if he liked it or just didn’t want to make it obvious that he had other dining preferences. Or maybe he understood that having a known predator sitting at the table would help me get acquainted with “the boys,” who were chowing down on the Carnivore’s Special.
While we bonded over pizza, I learned that Conan had settled into one of The Jumble’s cabins near Mill Creek because the creek provided good fishing, and he liked eating fish. Except for making patchwork repairs on the roofs and replacing a couple of broken windows in order to prevent any further weather damage to those cabins, I hadn’t done any renovating. By human standards, those cabins were still “primitive,” since anyone staying in them had to go to a separate building for toilets and showers. But Conan seemed to think the cabin was very “human,” although the bed puzzled him and he couldn’t figure out how to sleep on it, so he’d been sleeping on the floor in his furry form.
I explained that the mattresses had rotted and been removed, and that I would purchase a new box spring and mattress, as well as linens and blankets. Cougar was also in one of the primitive cabins, but he’d chosen one from the second set of cabins that were close to the lake. He, too, had been puzzled by the bed frame but hadn’t given it much thought.
As we talked, I had the impression that Aggie had more of what they called a human-centric education than the boys, who made me think of young men in earlier times of human history who would give up formal education before finishing grade school in order to go to work. I didn’t get the impression that Conan and Cougar wanted to get too humanized, but they wanted something enough to settle into two of the cabins and do some work in lieu of rent.
I put away what was left of the vegetable pizza. After confirming what time Ilya would return in the morning to take me to the bank, I said good night to my attorney and settled in to watch cop and crime shows with my new friends.
The boys had never seen television, so I had to explain that commercials weren’t some weird schism in the story, that they were like their own little stories about something humans were selling and wanted other humans to buy. When Aggie said it was all right to talk during commercials because no one wanted to listen to them anyway, that started a whole round of questions about why the TV police did or didn’t do the same things the police who had been sniffing around The Jumble had done. Which made me wonder if I should warn Officer Grimshaw about how carefully he was watched when he came around to investigate.
There were growls when the cops missed a clue and snarls when the bad humans did something sneaky—and more than a few eye rolls over human behavior in general. At one point, Aggie shouted at a woman who approached a villain who was pretending to be hurt. “It’s a trick! There’s no blood! Can’t you smell that there’s no blood?”
During commercials I tried to explain about human senses without sounding too apologetic for the inadequacies of my species. I ended up feeling that all I’d managed to do was convince my new friends that fish were smarter than humans even if humans did have those nifty opposable thumbs.
The other thing I realized by the end of the evening was that humans and the Others did have one thing in common—we both had a love for, and fascination with, stories. I learned that every form of terra indigene had its own teaching stories as well as stories that were the repository of their history and connection to the world. And they all had stories that were told for the fun of it.