Grimshaw would have bet a month’s pay that Janse was an Intuit, and whatever he had sensed hadn’t been the “friendlier” Others who usually studied the humans who came to study them.
He took Adam Fewks’s student ID out of his shirt pocket and held it out. “Have you seen this man?”
Janse looked at him, then at the ID. “Maybe in the village yesterday or the day before? There were several young men around that age wandering Main Street.” He lowered his voice. “They were disturbing—unnatural aggression covered by boisterous behavior.”
That fit the four teenagers who had come to The Jumble on Trickster Night.
Janse might have lowered his voice, but not enough, because one of the other men muttered, “Pansy.”
As Grimshaw turned to the other three men, Ilya said, “Chief Grimshaw, I’m sure you remember Professor Rodney Roash, who expressed such interest in Crowbones last night. His colleague is Richard Cardosa, and the man who is so eager to share his questionable opinions about other humans is Peter Lynchfield.”
Ilya had already confirmed with the Sanguinati who took care of rental properties which colleges had rented which cabins. Fewks had attended the college where Roash taught. That was a connection—especially since Roash had been so insistent about interviewing the Crows last night after the Crowgard bogeyman’s appearance.
Grimshaw focused on Roash and held out Fewks’s student ID. “You know him.” It wasn’t a question.
“No.” Roash shook his head. “I don’t recognize him.”
Richard Cardosa frowned at the student ID. “Are you sure, Rodney? Isn’t Adam Fewks one of the students who takes your Folklore and Urban Legends class? I remember hearing him make some noise about a special project.”
He didn’t have time for lies, so Grimshaw opened the manila envelope he’d taken out of the cruiser, pulled out the photo of the severed head, and said, “How about now, Professor? Recognize your student now?”
Three men stared at the photo. Janse, who was standing behind Grimshaw and couldn’t see the image, said, “Could we go inside now? We should—”
“Monkey man,” a female voice sang out from somewhere nearby.
“Moooonkey man,” a second voice sang.
“Don’t matter if you caw,” a third voice sang.
“Don’t matter if you shout.” A fourth voice.
“Crowbones will gitcha if you don’t . . . watch . . . out!” The fifth voice.
Grimshaw shuddered.
Ilya opened the gate in the short wall that enclosed the cabin’s front yard and said, “The front yard is considered neutral ground under most circumstances. Let’s continue the discussion there.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to be inside?” Janse asked.
Aiden sat on the wall, swung his feet up, and wrapped his arms lightly around his legs. “Better for you if everyone can hear what is said.”
And you wouldn’t want them, whoever and whatever they are, inside the cabin with you, Grimshaw thought as he herded the men into the small yard.
“There’s no reason for everyone—” Roash began.
“Yes, there is,” Grimshaw said, overriding him. “You’ve put these men in jeopardy, so they’re entitled to know how this scheme of yours was supposed to work. Right now I’ve got a dead college boy and two dead Crows, and everything points to your research project being the trigger that set off this chain of killings. Now, you can tell me what the plan was, or I can force you to look at the photos of the rest of the body parts we recovered.”
Silence.
“Are you playing bad cop, Chief Grimshaw?” Aiden asked.
“I’m the pissed-off cop who’s working up to a righteous mad if I don’t get answers now and end up getting a call about another body,” Grimshaw snapped. Not diplomatic. Not even smart, considering Fire had asked the question.
“Ah,” Aiden said.
“Now, look here—” Roash blustered.
“Moooonkey man.”
Grimshaw had never seen someone still breathing look so much like a corpse. “Would you prefer explaining it to them?”
“All right, yes, it was a research project,” Roash said. “Adam Fewks is—was—a student in my Folklore and Urban Legends class. I had found an old book about early human settlements in the Northeast Region of Thaisia. It had a woodcut illustration of a creature called Crowbones—a skeletal figure about the size of a man, with a crow’s head and feet but the rest of the body looked humanlike, wearing a ragged cape made out of feathers. It held a gourd in one hand and a scythe in the other.” He wiped the sweat off his forehead with a shaking hand. “There was almost no information about the creature, just that a death rattle was heard when it was nearby. I figured the gourd was hollowed out and filled with stones or beans or something to make it rattle.”
“So you had this student dress up in a cape and put on a papier-mâché head, and knock on The Jumble’s door during Trickster Night to scare the feathers off the Crowgard who work for Vicki DeVine?”
“It was research. I wasn’t even sure if Crowbones was from human or terra indigene folklore. The more we understand—”
“Stop there,” Grimshaw said. “You’ve dug the hole deep enough.”
“What was the bleach for?” Ilya asked.
“Bleach?” Roash frowned. “What bleach?”
Maybe Fewks thought he would have time to wipe down the props? If that wasn’t part of Roash’s plan, it wasn’t likely that he and Ilya would ever get an answer. He still had to ask Pops Davies if he’d sold a bottle of bleach to a college boy.
Before Grimshaw could decide if Roash really didn’t know about the bleach or was a habitual liar, his mobile phone buzzed. There wasn’t any room in the small yard to move out of hearing, but he turned his back on the other men before answering the call. “Grimshaw.”
“Chief?”
He heard nerves stuffed under training and reminded himself that Osgood was barely out of the academy and had already seen more than most veteran cops had seen in their entire careers. “Did you find Tom Saulner?” The missing teen might be an aggressive ass, but there was something Janse had said about that aggression that bothered him.
“No, sir.” A long pause while Officer Osgood sucked in air. “There was a vehicular incident on the road heading east, not far beyond the village limits.”
In other words, in the wild country.
“A Fred and Wilma Cornley were heading home after spending a couple of nights at The Jumble when ice fog suddenly formed across the road and rapidly became thicker,” Osgood continued.