by Alex P. Berg
“He probably just missed us,” said Shay.
He eyed her warily. “You’re too trusting, but maybe that’s a good quality. Anyway, don’t stand here wasting space. Go on. Get back up there.”
“Where?” I asked. “The Deli?”
“The Delta district,” said the bulldog. “There’s been another incident. No, don’t ask. I don’t have the details. Just get your butts to 37th and Fairweather. And get me some damn answers! There are only so many transients that can get axed in one district before someone starts breathing down my neck.”
What my butt really wanted was a nice long break in my preferred resting spot at my desk, but I didn’t think the Captain would appreciate me putting the needs of my posterior before that of the department, so with a resigned sigh, I performed an about face and headed back out.
33
Our feet carried us toward the Captain’s prescribed destination, an intersection farther northeast than either of our previous crime scenes but still within a stone’s throw of the DEITA station. Though Shay continued her vow of silence, Quinto apparently decided I’d been handled with kid gloves for long enough. He peppered me with questions the entire walk up, mostly regarding the circumstances of Burly’s discovery, seeing as he’d missed out on that. Despite my initial reticence, it felt good to talk. If nothing else, Quinto’s barrage prevented my psyche from crawling back into one of the dark holes inside me.
As we reached the intersection in question, I realized the Captain hadn’t explicitly told us where we were heading, or for that matter, what we should look for. As luck would have it, however, we weren’t the first members of the city’s finest at the scene. I spotted Phillips nodding and mumbling to himself under a black striped awning at the front of a long, narrow building, one with arched windows and a subdued gothic feel.
“Phillips!” I called.
The young beat cop spotted us and waved us over. “Hey, Detective Daggers. Good to see you. You, too, Steele and Quinto.”
I think the young guy meant it, despite my harsher than necessary treatment of him yesterday morning. One of the best parts of youth was the body’s speed of recovery, both mentally as well as physically.
“So,” I asked. “What’s the deal here? We didn’t get a whole lot of details before the Captain ran us out the door with a switch.”
“Not sure,” said Phillips. “I arrived a couple minutes ago myself. I’ve been trying to get a statement out of the bystander who alerted the runner.”
“Oh. Great.” I took a look around. “And, uh…where is this witness?”
I heard a high-pitched, piqued voice. “Over here, dimwit.”
I tracked the source of the sass to a windowsill in front of me, upon which perched a ten-inch tall homunculus with translucent wings roughly as wide as it was tall.
A pixie. Wonderful.
I’d harbored a high level of distaste for the diminutive, winged prats ever since a childhood taunting incident involving a pack of them, a beehive, my hair, and about a cup’s worth of refined sugar, but even if didn’t suffer childhood nightmares because of them, I’d probably have disliked them anyway. The buzzing of their wings made them sound like enormous flies, and as a species, they tended to be brash, loquacious, and cheeky. I sometimes wondered if their abrasive personalities were a result of extreme short man syndrome, but then again, they could fly, which I’d be pretty jazzed about if I were one.
The pixie who’d spoken sat cross-legged on the stone sill, eyeing me with disdain. It—I couldn’t determine its gender right off the bat—wore a billowing black shirt over matching pants. Its shoes, also black, sparkled as if with glitter, and fingerless gloves of a predictable color partially concealed its hands. Surprisingly, however, the creature sported a bright shock of blue hair.
I found my voice after scowling at the miniature winged person for a few seconds. “And…you are?”
“Meriwether Angelsdust,” it said, which didn’t particularly help me in the gender determination department. “Now are you going to stand and gawk or are you going to help?”
“What seems to be the problem?” asked Steele, stepping forward.
Meriwether finally noticed my partner. “Hey, hey, hot stuff. Who died and sent me to heaven?”
It flipped its hair to the side and smiled—or, rather, he did. I think my gender question had been answered.
“I’m, uh…flattered by your interest,” said Shay, “but in case you missed it, I’m a detective, too. I’m here in a professional role.”
“Hey, that’s cool, baby,” said Meriwether. “I love roleplay.”
Quinto eyed Phillips and jerked a thumb at Meriwether. “Is this guy for real? Where’d you find him?”
“Hey, I live here, asshole,” said the pixie.
“Alright,” I said, holding my hands up. “I know I’m the most unlikely source of reason among the lot of us, but why don’t we calm down and start over fresh. Meriwether—you sent a runner for help, right? So what’s the problem?”
The pixie rolled his eyes and snorted. “Fine. I was inside, snoozing, when I heard this loud thumping and—”
“Hold on,” I said. “You live here? What is this place?”
“This?” said Meriwether, pointing at the building. “Church of the Holy Oblivion.”
“Church of the…?” I stopped myself before I completed the statement. I remembered the last time I inadvertently let my tongue flap over at the place with the trees for a ceiling, and I didn’t want to get the same sort of rambling religious spiel from a woebegone pixie. “You live in a church? Don’t tell me you’re a pastor.”
“Me?” said Meriwether. “Nah. I just live and work here.”
We all gave him looks with varying degrees of confusion.
“Hey, it’s different, ok?” he said. “I pick up trash and dust in the hard to reach portions of the rafters. In return, they let me stay here rent free.”
“So what happened?” asked Steele.
“Well,” said Meriwether, “as I was saying before Inspector Peabrain over here interrupted, I was sleeping inside when crashes and screams woke me. Coming from the direction of the reflection rooms and sleeping quarters—you know, for the humans. Again, I sleep in the rafters.”
“You were sleeping during the day?” asked Quinto.
“Hello?” said the pixie, showing off his garb. “Church of the Holy Oblivion? We get most of our patrons at night. And it’s not like I give the sermons, anyway.”
“So, was there a fight?” I asked. “Is anyone hurt? Did someone murder a hobo?”
“Murder a hobo?” Meriwether gave me the fisheye. “Is that what gets you off?”
My patience wore thin. “It’s been a thing, lately. Now, out with it. What happened? In fact, why are we standing out here? Why don’t you show us?”
“Help yourself,” said Meriwether. “I’m staying right here where it’s safe.”
I felt a rush of adrenaline. “Wait…is there still someone in there?”
Meriwether shrugged. “How would I know?”
“Are you saying you didn’t go investigate?” said Quinto. “That you don’t even know what happened?”
Meriwether scoffed. “What a stupid, big guy thing to say. Of course not. One errant footstep or flailing slap and I’m dog food. Look, I heard noises and screams. I got the hell out. End of story.”
I sighed and pressed a hand to my forehead. Despite my aching feet, I’d been somewhat eager at the prospect of another murder—not because I relished in the slaying of vagrants, but because it might help shed light on an otherwise murky case. But the more Meriwether flapped his gums, the more convinced I became his experiences were likely as not the product of a wayward alley cat knocking over some trash cans.
“Let’s get this over with,” I said. “Meriwether, you’re coming with us—and don’t give me any guff. It’s so you can show us where you thought you heard the commotion. If you somehow get ground under a boot heel in the few short moments it
takes to do that, then I’m sure the police department will deliver a kind letter to your next of kin.”
Meriwether grumbled, but I think he realized if he didn’t help us, we wouldn’t secure the building that served as his home, so he acquiesced.
Together, we pushed into the chapel, which was as austere and depressing as you might expect from a church with the name of the Holy Oblivion. Lacquered pine benches lined a thin aisle, culminating at a narrow pulpit painted in black, but it was the emblem behind the pulpit that caught my eye.
“Um, Daggers…” said Steele.
“I see it.” I dug the token out of my pocket and held it at arms length in front of my face to could compare it to the wall design. The two mirrored each other perfectly—geometrically-designed vortices swirling around central circles.
“Hey,” said Meriwether. “You’ve got one of our oblivion mementos. And here I thought you weren’t familiar with our religion.”
“Where did you hear these noises and screams from, again?” I asked.
“In back,” said Meriwether. “Upstairs, I think. From the direction of Deacon Vo’s office.”
“Show us,” I said.
The pixie led us past the pulpit, up a flight of stairs, and down a corridor, but as an open doorway pulled within view, he zipped past to hide behind us.
“That’s Vo’s office,” he said. “His door’s usually locked.”
If any screams and thumps had echoed down the hall earlier in the day, they’d long since disappeared. All I heard now was the buzzing of Meriwether’s wings and the beating of my own heart. Nonetheless, I pulled Daisy from my coat and gripped her tightly before stepping into the open doorway.
My jaw nearly hit the floor. What the hell was going on?
34
The office was a mess. Papers littered the surface of a wide, unembellished oaken desk, and ink from an overturned bottle ran across its surface, soaking the pages and dripping onto the floor like the blood of the damned. An overturned bookshelf vomited tomes of varying shapes and sizes onto the floor, the latter of which languished alongside shards of glass from broken windows that gleamed in the light of the late afternoon sun. Pieces of what might’ve once been a chair peeked out like gophers from between the carnage, but it was the centerpiece of the room that drew my attention.
Two bodies sprawled on the polished wood underfoot, not more than three or four feet from each other. The first belonged to a man in his late forties or early fifties, short in stature, with close-cropped black hair and almond eyed.
“Aww, crap,” I heard Meriwether mutter over the buzz of his wings. “That’s Vo. This isn’t good.”
What an understatement. I’d get to him, but first I walked over to the other body. I planted my hands on my hips and stared.
Shay joined me at my side. “Well…we found Lanky.”
I knelt down to get a closer look. He wore the same moth-eaten pants and threadbare coat I remembered. Same long, matted hair. Same bushy beard. It was Lanky, no question about it. But to suggest he was completely unchanged from when I saw him last would be incorrect. There appeared to be new abrasions on the skin of his arms and on his palms, as if someone had scraped it with sandpaper. In addition to that, his clothes had deteriorated. Numerous new tears graced his ensemble, including a number of what appeared to be punctures in his coat and underlying shirt. There must’ve been at least twenty of them.
I plucked at the shirt and stuck the tip of my pinky into one of the holes. It barely fit. Grimacing, I lifted the shirt from Lanky’s waist, revealing a goodly portion of his torso. As expected, small, bloodless incisions covered it.
“Daggers,” said Steele. “Come take a look at this.”
My partner knelt over a miniature claymore about the length of my outstretched hand. At first I thought the thing had been dropped by a heavily armed relative of Meriwether’s, but as I noted its dull edge and cheap construction, I realized it was a letter opener. The width of its blade matched the size of the holes in Lanky’s shirt.
“Don’t touch it,” I said. “Maybe we can get prints off it.”
Shay nodded, and I returned to Vo’s body. Quinto squatted next to it, his face looking much as I imagine mine did, with his brows so furrowed I feared they might knit themselves together. Phillips, meanwhile, stood at the entrance to the room with his arms crossed, no doubt trying to stay out of the way.
Meriwether alighted on the edge of the desk. He cupped his chin in one of his tiny hands and shook his head. “Not good, man. Not good. He didn’t deserve this. He never hurt anybody.”
I squatted next to the body, across from Quinto. “You said his name was Deacon Vo?”
“No,” said Meriwether. “His name was Cornelius Vo. Deacon was his title. He was the grand master of our church. At least the local branch.”
I passed my eyes over Vo’s body. He wore an un-monklike pair of black trousers that he’d matched with a checkered grey dress shirt with double cuffs. A few ink splatters dotted the grey cloth, but I didn’t notice any red ones, nor did any blood pool on the floor. I did, however, notice some distinct, uneven bruising around his throat, with the worst spots to either side of his windpipe and farther around the sides. His eyes bulged, and his mouth, which hung half open, contained a swollen tongue.
“Looks like he was strangled to death,” said Quinto.
I nodded as a gleam of something metallic from around his neck caught my eye. I dug a pencil out of my coat pocket and snaked it under the man’s collar, the top button of which was unbuttoned, and used it to draw upon a fine silver chain. Attached to the end was a medallion, perhaps twice as large as the token we’d found on Burly, featuring the now familiar vortex symbol of his church.
I stood, interlacing my hands and wrapping them around the back of my neck, as I stared at the body. “Ok, Meriwether. Walk me through this one more time. When did you hear the commotion?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe half an hour ago, or a little more.”
“And you didn’t hear anything before that, right?”
Meriwether shook his head. “Nope. Told you, I was sleeping.”
“How heavy of a sleeper are you?” I asked. “Would you have heard if someone came in through the front door?”
“Probably,” he said. “But there’s another entrance in back. It’s usually locked, but…”
But maybe it hadn’t been this time. Or maybe someone had a key. “We’ll check it out,” I said. “Does anyone else live here?”
“Nah,” said Meriwether. “Vo had a couple understudies, but they’re volunteers. They hang out a lot, but they don’t live here.”
“And none of them are here now?” I asked.
Meri shook his head.
“Of course not.” I jerked a thumb in Lanky’s direction. “I don’t suppose you recognize that guy?”
“Me?” said the pixie. “You’re the one with the dead hobo fetish.”
Shay joined me at my side.
“See anything I missed?” I asked.
“Well, I can’t really answer that, seeing as I don’t know what’s in that thick head of yours,” she said. “But other than the letter opener and the puncture wounds and the state of Mr. Vo here? Did you notice Lanky’s lower quarter?”
“Huh?” I glanced in the body’s direction. “What about it?”
“His shoes and pants are dirtier than I remember,” said Steele. “As if someone dragged him through a back alley or a muddy lot.”
Someone—emphasis on one. I made a mental note as I sighed and dropped my hands to my sides.
“Please tell me you have a theory, Daggers,” said Quinto.
I shrugged. “Honestly, big guy? I’m at a total loss.”
“Come on,” said Shay. “That doesn’t sound like the Daggers I know. What ever happened to concocting crazy theories on the fly, regardless of whether or not they make sense? It’s just an exercise, right?”
I wanted to smile. If nothing else, she did pay atten
tion to my investigative advice.
“Ok,” I said. “Maybe…Vo hired Lanky and Burly to do something for him. Something illegal. Perhaps they blackmailed him after the fact. Asked for more money to keep their mouths shut. Vo didn’t like that so he killed them, except Lanky got away. And he had something on his person that would connect him to Vo. Something like that token. So Vo broke into the morgue, stole Lanky’s body, and returned it here. Except…”
I growled and threw my hands in the air. “Damn it, this doesn’t make any sense! It was Burly who had the token on him, not Lanky. Lanky didn’t carry anything connecting him to Vo—not that we know of, anyway. And none of this would explain why Burly’s body was in that street several days after his death, or why someone, likely Vo, mutilated Lanky’s corpse with a letter opener, or why someone strangled Vo to death.”
“Maybe it was a weird form of autoerotic asphyxiation,” said Quinto.
“Please,” I said. “I love creepy, kinky theories as much as the next guy, but he didn’t do this to himself.”
“Maybe someone found out Vo killed the homeless men and came to exact revenge,” said Steele.
Phillips piped up from the doorway. “Yeah. Could’ve been a relative. Or an ex-lover.”
I held up my hands. “Stop it. Just stop it, all of you. We all know my theory has more holes in it than Lanky’s mangled shirt, so stop trying to buttress it up with logic.”
Shay and Quinto exchanged glances and shrugged.
I pressed a hand to my forehead. “Alright. We’ll knock some sense into this, one way or another. Quinto, why don’t you hit Taxation and Revenue and Public Records before they close? Dig up whatever you can on Vo and meet us back at the precinct. Phillips—alert CSU. Get them to go over this office with a fine-toothed comb. In the meantime, Steele and I will check out the rest of the church. See if we can find any additional evidence, and we’ll personally transport the bodies to the morgue. Hopefully Cairny will still be around by the time we get there. Sound good?”
