by C. S. Poe
“There’s no color in this, right?” I asked.
“Black ink,” Neil confirmed. “Probably a run-of-the-mill ballpoint pen, judging by the strokes left behind. I’m having it analyzed.”
I shook my head after another moment and handed the camera back. “I don’t know what it’s supposed to mean.”
“Happy now?” Calvin asked Neil.
Neil glowered and put the strap around his neck again.
“Did it have a message included like mine?” I asked.
Calvin put one strong hand on my shoulder, turned me toward the awaiting cruiser, and essentially severed any and all ties I had to the investigation. “I’ll give you a call later this evening.”
Chapter Two
“KIDDO!”
“Hey, Pop,” I said. I reached the landing of the hallway stairs and saw my dad—William Snow—standing in the open doorway of his apartment. “How’re you?” I gave him a brief hug.
“Fine, fine. Come in.” Pop ushered me inside, took another peek into the hall, and shut the door. “No Calvin?”
“No,” I agreed, bending down to unclasp Dillon’s leash so he could go play with Maggie before the giant pit bull came to greet me with her usual tackle and slobber. “Working.”
“Then New York’s in good hands,” Pop said with a chuckle.
I straightened, took off my coat and scarf, and hung them up. I removed my glasses case from my messenger bag, swapped out sunglasses for regular ones, then set the bag against the wall.
“Good grief, Sebastian,” Pop murmured, tugging on the sleeve of my button-down shirt.
“It’s not that wrinkled.”
“I know you know what an iron is.”
“Who has time to iron?”
“Apparently not you.” Pop made a sudden face. “Did you brush your teeth this morning?”
I put a hand over my mouth at the reminder of vomit breath and started across the room. “I’ll be right back.” I went down the dim hallway and turned into the bathroom. No spare toothbrush, but my finger and copious amounts of toothpaste worked just as well. I swished some mouthwash afterward for good measure, then used my hand to wipe excess water from my unshaven face. I dried my mouth and chin on the sleeve of my shirt.
Huh. It was pretty wrinkled.
I shrugged and left the room.
“Minty fresh,” I declared, joining Pop again.
“Thank goodness,” Pop said as he busily filled the coffee maker with water. “I really thought at thirty-three, I wouldn’t have to remind you of the necessity of basic grooming.”
“I’m thirty-four.”
“That’s right,” Pop said, shaking his head a little, whether at his mistake or my age, I wasn’t sure.
“Anyway. I did brush my teeth this morning.” I walked to the kitchen area on the left of the spacious apartment layout, opened a cupboard, and removed two mugs. “But something happened and I blew chunks.”
Pop set the pot down with a minor clatter and looked at me. “Are you sick?” He did the parent hand-on-forehead maneuver.
“I’m fine.”
He was still frowning. Then recognition lit Pop’s features, and he sighed while shaking his head. “Oh, Sebastian….”
“I didn’t do anything.”
Pop put a hand on his hip, the other tapping the kitchen counter.
“Honest.”
“Where’s Calvin?”
“He’s working,” I insisted.
“At the Emporium?”
“Er….”
“I simply don’t understand how so much mayhem can befall a single individual,” Pop said as he flipped the coffee maker on.
“Apparently I’ve got a reputation on the streets.”
“What kind of reputation?”
I shrugged. “Busybody, know-it-all, I guess.”
“And habitual dead-body discoverer.”
Couldn’t argue with that.
Business had been booming for the last twelve months, but it wasn’t merely because waves of folks were suddenly discovering a joy in tangible history. I’d been briefly mentioned in the media after crashing Good Books to stop loose cannon Duncan Andrews from killing innocent patrons. I’d definitely been discussed publicly after uncovering the murderous rampage NYPD officer Brigg had gone on. And revealing Pete White to be an art and antiques thief, followed by being shot in the Javits Center—let’s say that while I was in the hospital, I briefly required a security detail.
Even taking these past events into account, my private life was still surprisingly private. I mean, yeah, people knew I was the gay, antique-hoarding amateur sleuth. And yes, my fiancé had gone from the back-back-back of the closet to sort of finding himself a reluctant poster child the NYPD used to showcase their diversity. But outside of crime scenes, Calvin and I managed not to have any serious issues. I suspected word of my crotchety disposition had made the rounds along with my inability to let a mystery rest.
I was an acquired taste and not to most people’s liking. For once that was doing me a favor.
I moved around Pop, fetched cream from the fridge, and added a splash to both mugs. “At least I didn’t trip over this one,” I told him. “And it wasn’t even a whole body.”
Pop was frowning. A lot. The kind of face that adults warned kids would stick if they held it for too long. He opened a cupboard and took out a plastic container of black-and-white cookies. He placed several on a plate and handed it to me. “Are we making a repeat of last Christmas?”
“No.” I walked the cookies to the dining table near the bay windows, the curtains drawn tightly shut. “No reimagining of Poe tales. And Calvin likes me a lot more this year than last. Hey, Dad—is it a hard-and-fast rule that wedding tables need centerpieces?” I turned.
Pop was watching me. Silent.
“Because they’re kind of expensive,” I added.
The coffee garbled.
Dog toys squeaked from the corner of the room where Maggie and Dillon were pawing through a box.
“There was a logical transition in subject matter.”
Pop raised a hand. “I’ve got experience in deducing your thought process, kiddo.”
Point A to Point Q, as Calvin liked to tease.
“Let’s focus on the bigger issue.” Pop turned and poured the coffee into our mugs.
“I don’t know anything about centerpieces.” I obediently shut up and sat at the table when Pop walked across the room with the beverages and gave me The Look.
“Tell me what happened,” Pop said, sitting beside me.
I gave him the most accurate account I could, starting with the courier and ending with Neil’s bold defiance of Calvin’s direct order not to share any prior crime-scene details with me that might have linked the events. I did my best to leave out the grislier details, though, both for Pop’s benefit and my own.
The bloated tongue protruding from the mouth.
The missing eye.
The fluids pooling in the thick plastic.
I shuddered a little and did my best to disguise it as a shiver from the cold. I picked up my mug and took a long sip.
Pop broke a cookie apart. He took a bite of the darker piece and then said, “So who thinks this unfortunate incident at the Emporium is linked to another homicide case? You? Neil?”
“All of us, I think,” I replied as I put the cup down on the tabletop.
“But you don’t know the other victim?”
“I don’t know this victim,” I answered. “I know nothing about whatever case Neil and Calvin worked on prior to today, but it seems at least the note I got is similar to another one out there.”
Pop considered this. “If you were involved, even unknowingly, in this previous case, Calvin would have said something, wouldn’t he?”
“I’m certain. I’m here now because he doesn’t seem to know what’s going on and didn’t want me alone. Not that I have to be pushed to visit with you,” I hastened to add.
My dad smiled a little, bu
t it was a distant expression. “But that seems to suggest you’ve been randomly targeted.”
I leaned back in the chair. “Maybe. Not that my dance card has many names on it, but I’m sure Calvin is looking into past acquaintances and customers to deduce whether there’s overlap with whoever the previous victim was.” I finally reached for a cookie.
Pop looked at me. He didn’t say anything for a long, increasingly uncomfortable moment.
“What?” I finally asked. The frosting of the cookie was warming and softening in my hold.
“What if it’s not you who’s been targeted, per se, but your reputation?”
“You don’t think Calvin will find a common individual to link the events?”
Pop solemnly shook his head. “The wording of your message implies they could have contacted anyone with the right… magnetism. ‘An intriguing proposition for a most curious man.’ That’s very particular verbiage.”
The thought that this lunatic could be any random face on the streets—in a city of eight million people—was alarming. If a connection could be traced to a sour customer or… fuck, I don’t know, an old high school classmate… that made Calvin’s job ever so slightly easier. There was an established timeline. A relationship. A perceived link between Calvin’s previous homicide and the one currently in a box on my counter. And with that association—no matter how tentative or absurd—there was bound to be a motive.
If I, Sebastian Snow, the frumpy-dumpy guy who lived on the fourth floor of a multiuse in the East Village, was not a clue in this case, what did the detectives have to work with? The head, of course. Somewhere in New York City was a body bound to match it. Then there was the plastic. It was thick and heavy, maybe used in an industrial environment. And the note. Hopefully the pen wasn’t as common as Neil suspected. Or perhaps the Collector left a fingerprint behind on the packaging.
But if the physical clues didn’t provide anything of real use—then what?
That left us with the reputation of Sebastian Snow. And by all accounts from the media over the last year, he was most definitely a curious man who had a compulsion for intrigue, mystery, murder, and to quote one newspaper, “a complex fascination with the morbidity of a bygone era.” Translation: I could speak at length about the fascinating relationship Victorians had with death, and apparently that was weird to some folks.
The point was, Pop might have been on to something.
This Collector was looking for something old, lost, and strange. Their words. And I’d been portrayed as a man who could uncover that very sort of thing. Maybe the vagueness of the note was done on purpose. To arouse curiosity. To ensure I sank my teeth into the mystery.
Reputation could be the connection between me and the other homicide. Maybe the first victim was a curious person too. Maybe they hadn’t solved the puzzle in time….
I swallowed audibly.
I was absolutely not getting involved.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t at least share this concept with Calvin. If nothing else, it’d be something for him to mull over in between interviews, paperwork, and cups of shitty precinct coffee.
“Father knows best,” I finally said.
MUDDER NYC missn toe.
I sat in Pop’s living room, squinting at the screen of my phone. I pushed my glasses up with my knuckle and tried that internet search again. I carefully pecked out with one finger: Murder NYC missing toe.
I couldn’t be certain what those well-drawn body parts on the notes implied, but I found it particularly odd that my own message had an eyeball and the bagged head was missing one eye. Simple logic would suggest the photo of Neil’s ear corresponded with a severed ear on a real body. I wondered if that was the only photo of a mysterious drawing on Neil’s camera, or if there were others. Like of the toes Quinn spoke of. If I had a teeny tiny bit more information on what Calvin was working on prior to this morning, I might be able to give him more than my wild two cents to run with.
But I wasn’t sleuthing. Not really.
I was sunk into the couch cushions with my feet propped up on the coffee table. I was going nowhere fast.
And I didn’t really suspect I’d find much on the internet. This seemed—if anything—to be the sort of crime the police would try to keep out of the papers, lest they spook the bastard behind it. Unsurprisingly, Google pulled up a plethora of articles tagged with murder and NYC. Some were years old but sensational enough to remain at the top of the search results. Homicide had been steadily on the decline in The City That Never Sleeps, but until that number hit zero, Calvin was still gainfully employed. I thumbed through the sound bites of urban atrocities before taking pause at one posted five days ago—last Wednesday.
Human Remains Mailed to AMNH Staff.
Color me intrigued.
I clicked the article and scanned the contents. On Wednesday morning, a staff member of the paleontology division at the American Museum of Natural History received some kind of delivery that included unspecified human remains—and not the ancient sort. There wasn’t much more information beyond that. The museum staffer wasn’t named, and the lead detective on the scene—Calvin, I’d bet—had directed the news outlet to the Chief of Detectives for comment.
I wished Neil had shown me a photo of the entire note, and not only the drawing….
Regardless, this was too coincidental to not be related to this morning’s adventure. That much was for sure.
But I didn’t have a connection to the museum. I loved it, visited quite a bit, and of course had discovered a dead exotic dancer in one of their displays…. But did I know anyone who worked in the field of paleontology? Personally or professionally? I was drawing a big blank on that. The article added weight to Pop’s suggestion that it was my reputation that had been targeted and not me-me.
My phone’s screen blackened, rang obnoxiously, and Calvin Winter popped up. I quickly accepted the call. “I swear you’re a mind reader,” I said upon answering.
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“I was thinking of you.”
“In a positive light, I hope.”
“Professional context. But if you’d rather, I can imagine you stark naked.”
The distinct murmur of Quinn’s voice was much too close for this to have been a private phone call.
“I’m on speaker, aren’t I?” I concluded.
“Yup,” Calvin answered.
“Hi, Quinn,” I called.
“Sebastian,” she replied.
“We’re caught in a traffic jam at Columbus Circle,” Calvin continued, not missing a beat. “I just wanted to check in with you.”
Huh. If they took a right onto Central Park West and headed uptown for almost twenty blocks, they’d land at the Museum of Natural History. Funny how that works.
“Uptown murder?” I asked casually.
“Some follow-up interviews.”
“Can I tell you something?”
A few car horns blared in the distance before Calvin said, “I know you will. Further discussion is a matter of topic, isn’t it?”
I glanced to my right. Before delving into internet snooping, I had honest to God pulled out my battered spiral-bound notebook that was my “wedding planner” and wasted time drawing squiggles around the to-do list.
I put my fingertip on the scrawled note to myself and said, “Did you know that ‘purchase undergarments’ is part of a wedding itinerary?”
Calvin was quiet for a beat. “I really don’t think that applies to us.”
“Sure, I know. But I’m having to make this up as I go, and most of these to-do lists are for brides.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There’s a whole industry dedicated to specialized bras for wedding dresses,” I continued.
Calvin’s silence was palpable confusion.
“They make adhesive bras,” I concluded. “Which… sounds pretty awful.”
“Almost lost my nipple to one of those,” Quinn stated. “Had a rash for three days from the r
esidue.”
Calvin cleared his throat. “Well, thank goodness we aren’t in the market for one.”
“Are you going to the Museum of Natural History?” I asked quickly.
“How did—” Calvin paused, mentally backtracked. “Sebastian.”
“It was a logic jump.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“It was,” I insisted. “It’s in the news. Someone in the paleontology division was mailed human remains.”
Silence.
“Last Wednesday.”
Still silence.
“And I’m going to go out on a limb and suspect the undetermined remains were phalanges. I was thinking about the museum,” I said without taking a breath for subject transition. “I’m certain I don’t have any connection.” I put my feet down on the floor.
“You found a crime scene in February,” Calvin replied.
“But here’s the thing I wanted to tell you.” I stood from the couch, knees cracking as I straightened. “If you’re looking for a tangible relationship between me and this other event, I don’t think you’re going to find one. I don’t have any friends or acquaintances who work there. I have no relationship to anyone in the field of paleontology. The body of Meredith Brown was found in the museum only because it related to P.T. Barnum.”
“What’s your point?” Calvin asked.
“I didn’t have a relationship to Barnum either,” I answered. “But my reputation did.”
“No association, but also not a random target,” Calvin replied. “Is that what you’re trying to say?”
“Basically.” I moved around the couch, watching as Pop came from his bedroom, winter boots having replaced his house slippers. “Obviously without knowing either of the victims or the staffer who received this first package, it’s impossible to contrast and compare to determine something more sinister, like a serial—”
“Stop right there, sweetheart,” Calvin interrupted.
