“Just like in the cop and crime shows that Victoria, Aggie, Jozi, and Eddie enjoy watching.”
“Yeah, like that.”
Ilya picked up the unopened bottle of bleach and placed it at one end of the body bag. The severed arm and gourd were placed in the middle. Wishing he’d brought gloves and accepting that his clothes were going to get soiled with something, Grimshaw lifted the bundle of soggy feathers.
Something inside the bundle of feathers. Something hard and round, but this wasn’t the time or place to investigate.
Stuffing the bundle into the bottom end, he zipped up the bag. Keeping tension on the ends of the bag, he and Ilya lifted it, trying to prevent everything from sliding into the middle and destroying any evidence he might be able to glean once he got back to the station.
Rattle, rattle, rattle.
Just his imagination, or was there anger in that sound?
Every step was taken with the expectation of an attack. Even after they reached his cruiser and placed the evidence in the trunk, Grimshaw felt his skin crawl. The attack on this prankster had been so fierce and so fast—and so silent. Except for that rattling sound coming out of the dark.
“You can’t go inside like that,” Ilya said, looking at Grimshaw’s bloody hands and the cuffs of his shirt and jacket. “Natasha is bringing out some towels and water.”
He looked at his bloody hands. Gods above and below, what was in that bundle? “Thanks. Can you talk to Aggie and Jozi?”
Ilya nodded. “With Victoria. Do you want Julian Farrow to accompany you to the station?”
He did, but Julian wasn’t a cop anymore, and he needed someone at The Jumble who would sound the alarm if there was more trouble. “No need. I’ll talk to him in the morning.”
When Natasha stepped outside, they walked up to meet her. Grimshaw cleaned up as best he could.
“I’ll escort Victoria’s guests to their cabins,” Ilya said.
“We will escort Victoria’s guests.” Natasha smiled, showing a hint of fang that no man could mistake for anything but a spousal warning.
Ilya didn’t look happy, but he said, “Yes. We will escort the guests.”
“Will you be okay returning to Silence Lodge?” Grimshaw asked. “You don’t know what’s out there.”
“I’ll find out what I can from the Crows before we leave,” Ilya replied.
Meaning the Sanguinati really didn’t know what was out there, and that wasn’t good. “I’ll be back in the morning.”
He drove slowly, scanning the land on either side of the gravel access road. He didn’t expect to see any of the terra indigene, but he breathed a sigh of relief that he didn’t find a car that had been flipped or crushed or bent around a tree. He didn’t see any debris or body parts. Maybe those idiot teenage boys had gotten away.
As he turned onto Lake Street and headed north toward Sproing, he also didn’t see Aiden. Apparently Fire had completed his stint of directing traffic.
Grimshaw pulled into his parking space in front of the station. A month ago, there hadn’t been any officially reserved parking spaces on Main Street. People took any available spot. But after he’d returned from answering a call one afternoon and had trouble finding a parking space near the station, someone who wasn’t him or the Sanguinati had decided that the three spaces in front of the station were now reserved for police vehicles and Ilya’s black luxury sedan and had painted POELEESE POLICE across the spaces.
It had taken only a couple of cars having BAD HUMAN! clawed into the hoods to teach the residents of Sproing the value of letting the police have those spaces.
“Assess, then decide,” he said quietly. It wasn’t that late in the evening, and he couldn’t leave the evidence in his trunk overnight. Best get on with it, then, as long as things had stayed quiet in the village.
He went into the station and nodded to Osgood, who was on the phone.
“No, ma’am,” Osgood said politely, “you can’t make out an official complaint against the diner for running out of brownie squares and offering peanut butter cookies to youngsters coming in for a treat.”
Standing on the other side of the desk, Grimshaw couldn’t make out the words, but he heard the tone loud and clear—and he recognized the voice. Mrs. Ellen C. Wilson was one of Sproing’s newer residents. She seemed determined to let everyone know that living in a village the size of Sproing was beneath her. She complained about everything and reported poor quality at least twice a week in an effort to be given a steep discount at a store or receive something for free from any business serving food. And somehow, despite the growing dislike for her throughout the village, she usually managed to get what she wanted.
Personally, he thought it was because her voice grated in a way that reminded him of a horror movie he’d seen as a kid where sentient worms burrowed into people’s brains and took control, causing people to go on murdering rampages.
He’d love to see the back of her. He’d happily drive her and her son, Theodore, to the train station and see them heading anywhere. And he was afraid that, one of these days, she would offend someone who wasn’t human and most of her wouldn’t be seen again.
“We don’t have time for this.” He held out his hand.
Osgood hesitated, then gave him the receiver.
“Mrs. Wilson? This is Chief Grimshaw.” He listened to her diatribe for a full minute before he interrupted. “Since I saw your boy stuff a handful of those peanut butter cookies into his mouth earlier this afternoon, you and I both know any tummy ache he has right now was caused by overindulgence rather than him being sensitive to certain foods, and I’m telling you now that, at his age, he should know if there is something he shouldn’t eat. The people working at the diner aren’t going to act as surrogate parents while you go flitting from store to store, spreading ill will, but if you want to pursue this, here’s what you do. You have Doc Wallace give your boy a thorough physical and run whatever tests are available to check for food sensitivities. I, in the meantime, will inform the food businesses in the village that they should not serve your son unless he can give them a note from you specifying what food he is allowed to purchase. And if you think for one moment you’re going to use whiny complaints to slide out of paying for those tests or the doctor’s bill, you should know that the Sanguinati can also test blood for all kinds of things. They just take an extra pint or two as their fee.”
He hung up and looked at Osgood, whose brown eyes were wide with shock and whose brown skin was looking paler by the minute.
“The Sanguinati can test blood?” Osgood asked.
“They react to substances in the blood.” Grimshaw shrugged. “Any trouble in the village? Besides Ellen Wilson?”