“Do notdarewalk out now, Hugh. Where was this raven feather?”
“Oh, do not concern yourself with such an uninteresting murder, Duncan. I’m certain you have better puzzles to captivate that brain of yours. Off I go.”
McCreadie walks from the room as I scamper back into my hiding spot. I listen as his boots clomp across the floor, and Gray strides after him, audibly seething.
“Be sure to leave the door open for our return,” McCreadie says cheerfully. “No need to stay up. I’ll see you on the morrow.”
McCreadie leaves. Gray follows him, still asking about the raven feather. I should make my escape now. Get out while I can. But even as I fix my gaze on the back door, my feet take me to that “laboratory” door.
I sneak toward the door the men exited. It’s firmly closed. I slip into the lab and sidle up to the table for a look at the body.
I’ve seen mangled corpses and drowning victims, and other sights that made me wish I hadn’t eaten breakfast. This is horrifying in an entirely different way. There’s no blood. No gore. Not even stab wounds.
Gray called it a prop. That’s what it looks like. The prop from some avant-garde performance art meant to convey God knows what message. Except in art, it wouldn’t be an actual body. That’s where the horror comes from.
The young man has been staged to look like a bird. Legs bound up and feet broken into a perch pose. Elbows wide. Hands affixed to the torso so the arms form wings.
It all looks postmortem. That hardly matters. It’s still grotesque.
Rows of feathers protrude from the young man’s shoulders. They’ve been poked through the shirt and inserted into his shoulders.
Then there is the beak. It looks like a mask from an old play. By old, Imean old-fashioned, in the sense that it’s carved from wood rather than plastic formed in a 3D printer. There’s a string for fastening it, but when I nudge the beak with my knuckle, it stays fixed. Glued on? That makes me shiver, but then, morbid ghoul that I am, I can think of far worse ways to fasten a beak onto a person’s face.
This is what my detective brain seizes on. It’s what has my hands moving instinctively to my nonexistent pockets for my nonexistent phone, itching to snap a photo for later study. I see past the grotesquerie of the staging and must grudgingly marvel at the ingenuity and lack of mutilation. I grew up in the era of movies likeSaw,which I walked out of. I love horror; I hate the torture-porn of body horror. The killer here has managed to capture the essence of that while refraining from true butchery.
That doesn’t mean I admire the killer in any possible way. They murdered a young man. The kid barely looks twenty and, yes, the death of anyone is tragic, but I will always feel an extra pang of grief for lives cut so short.
What did McCreadie say? Evans had been a reporter on the crime beat? This boy had accomplished something, and now he’s lying in a funeral parlor. What was done to him only makes it that much worse. It’s mockery. Using his body as a canvas, using his death as a message, as if his life was worth no more than that.
Staged to look like a bird. A pigeon, Gray said. I eye the feathers and consider taking one for study. McCreadie did say a few had fallen out, so another wouldn’t be missed.
I stifle the impulse. Not my circus. Not my monkey. Not even my century. I plan to be gone tomorrow, and I’m sure as hell not disturbing a murder victim’s body to satisfy idle curiosity. Because that’s all it can be. Idle curiosity.
Presuming they are pigeon feathers, the symbolism is simple. As Gray said, pigeons carry messages. A reporter spreads the news. As for the raven feather near the body, well, ravens prey on pigeons. Corvids have a reputation for being the smartest birds. That’s how our killer sees themself. They’re the smartest person in the room.
All the creative thought that went into the staging is ruined by the simplicity of the message. That’s typical. In movies, detectives drive themselves mad trying to figure out what a killer is trying to say. A singleraven feather left by the corpse. What ever can it mean? Surely if we answer that we’ll find the killer. In real life, that damned feather is just a feather, either naturally occurring or put there by a killer who presumes detectives will be so engrossed investigating its meaning that they won’t pay attention to any actual clues. Yeah, the average detective just pops that feather into an evidence bag and adds it to the list, acknowledging its existence while recognizing that it probably means nothing.
These feathers do mean something, but it’s a ham-fisted message, one I hope McCreadie doesn’t spend too much time deciphering.
Despite all the staging, the method of murder seems simple enough. There are rope burns around the neck. I pry open an eyelid. Petechial hemorrhaging. Evans was strangled.
Just like me.
Just like Catriona.
My fingers move to the healing bruises around my neck as I look down at the rope. Then I shake my head sharply. There’s no connection to either attempted murder. Mine happened a hundred and fifty years from now. Catriona had been manually strangled. The fact that the rope looks similar to the one used on me is pure coincidence, and I need to stop seeing connections where none exist. This—
The front door slaps shut. I spin. I had intended to just take a quick glance in here because Gray seems to have only stepped out, leaving on the lights, as if intending to return.
There’s no time to leave. The steps are crossing the room, heading straight for this one. I glance around. One table. One body. Shelves of tools and bottles. No place to hide.
A cloth covers the table, but when I move it aside, it’s solid wood beneath, a cabinet with more drawers. I dart to the other side and press myself against the cloth. It’s a poor spot, and he’ll only need to lean over to see me.
Gray walks in. His shoes squeak as he stops beside Evans’s body. A grunt. The clink of forceps. Another grunt.
“You are not interesting,” he says. “Bizarre, but otherwise mundane. Death by strangulation. As boring as they come. Not even worth the effort of matching fibers in your flesh to those on the rope, as your killer left it around your neck. Utterly unworthy of my attention.”
Another shoe squeak. Another grunt. Another clink. Then a clatter, as if he’s tossing down the forceps.