Crowbones

CHAPTER 52

Grimshaw

Watersday, Novembros 3

Grimshaw dropped his mobile phone and slammed on the brakes when the horse and rider suddenly appeared in his headlights. He waited for his heart to resume something close to a regular beat, then put the cruiser in park and stepped out, staying behind the open door.

“Aiden? Is there a problem?”

Fire and Twister approached the cruiser. “The road is closed tonight.”

“I was just heading to my cabin.”

Aiden shook his head. “Not tonight. Stay in the village, Chief.”

Not good. “Can I know why?”

“I am as much in the dark as you are,” Aiden replied.

I doubt that.

No point in arguing with an Elemental. A human would never win.

“All right. I’ll be back in the morning.”

Fire watched as he got in the cruiser and drove back to the village.

Someone was going to die tonight, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

Osgood was just about to bite down on a meat-loaf sandwich when Grimshaw walked into the station. The rookie took one look at him and lowered the sandwich.

“Chief?” Osgood said. “Thought you were heading home.”

“Road’s closed. The Mill Creek Cabins are out-of-bounds tonight.”

“Well . . . You can have my room at Ineke’s. I can sleep on the couch. I’ve done it before when Captain Hargreaves needed a place to stay.”

Grimshaw shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but I can bunk here if there’s no one in the cell.”

“We don’t have company tonight.” Osgood made a face. “You sure, Chief?”

“I’m sure.”

“There’s an extra meal in the fridge if you want it. Helen from Come and Get It called to say she was closing early and asked if we wanted anything, so I picked up a couple of her meat-loaf sandwiches. There’s a container of soup too.”

“Thanks. I’ll heat up something in a bit. You eat.”

Grimshaw went into the station’s small kitchen, pulled his mobile phone out of the holder on his belt, and called Julian.

“Are you all right?” Julian asked, the question almost a demand. “What happened?”

“Fire happened,” he replied quietly. “The road to the cabins is blocked off tonight, so neither of us is getting home. By the way, Doc’s car is now parked behind yours, so you can’t leave until he does unless you swap vehicles.”

“We’re sheltering in place for the time being. The guests in the cabins are staying put and checking in. The rest of us . . . Wayne, it was like the Murder board we set up at the bookstore. Vicki, Aggie, and Kira together and then that sound at the door.”

“Check in, okay?”

“Will do.” A pause. “Where are you staying tonight?”

“I’m going to bunk at the station. Why?”

Another pause. “You have the spare set of keys I gave you for the store?”

“Locked in a safe box in my desk.”

“The other keys on that ring are for the space upstairs. It’s basic, but there’s a bed and a bathroom. Clean towels in the linen closet. Even a spare toothbrush.”

Grimshaw could picture Julian’s strained smile.

“No food,” Julian continued, “but there is a wave-cooker and an electric kettle to heat up water.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it. Osgood picked up some supplies from Come and Get It, so I’ll be set for tonight.”

Strained silence before Julian said, “If you’re looking for something to read, the key to the locked filing cabinet is in a small box in the middle drawer of the desk.”

Grimshaw said nothing for a moment. “Is there something you think I should see? Something that might relate to what’s going on here?”

“Not sure. But maybe something that more than one person should know.”

Julian ended the call.

Leaving the food in the fridge, Grimshaw drank a glass of water before returning to the main area.

“We get any response from other police stations?” he asked.

“A few. Some of the ITF agents responded too, although a couple of those e-mails had bounced back—Viktor must have made a typing error in the e-mail addresses. I checked the addresses from the original list and sent those out again. Still waiting to hear back from them.”

Typing errors or a deliberate delay?

Osgood picked up a pad of lined paper off his desk and held it out. “From the responses we’ve received so far, I made a list of the places where there were similar . . . occurrences . . . in the past two years.”

Grimshaw looked over the list. Osgood had indicated the ITF agent who had sent the e-mail, the location of the trouble, and the highlights of what had happened. The deaths seemed to end as suddenly as they began, which made him think the predator had moved on.

Why move on when there was still prey in the area? Or was the predator following someone who also looked for prey?

Grimshaw reviewed the e-mails, reading all the details that had been sent by the ITF agents. When Osgood finished eating, he turned to the rookie. “You head out and keep an eye on things at the boardinghouse. I’ll stay here in case someone needs help.” He wrestled with loyalties for a moment before adding, “I might be over at the bookstore. I’ve got keys to the place, and Julian won’t object to me browsing.”

He didn’t mention that he wasn’t planning to browse through the books.

Once Osgood had driven away, Grimshaw put an In Case of Emergency sign on the door with the number of his mobile phone. Complainers tended to call Osgood. People who really needed a cop tended to call him if there was no one at the station.

He found a container in the kitchen and took half the soup and the other meat-loaf sandwich, then packed the Come and Get It delivery bag with the food, a copy of Osgood’s listings, and a folded regional map of the Northeast. Then he locked the station and walked across the street to Lettuce Reed.

As he walked around the building to the doors in the back, Grimshaw wondered if anyone would call the cops if they saw a light on the second floor. Or would Sproing’s residents just think that Julian had finally rented out the space?

Looked like he was about to find out.

A plain metal door with a high-end dead bolt. Could have led to a utility room or storage space or even a basement if the store had one, but it opened to a wide flight of stairs heading up. Grimshaw found the light switch. Two bare bulbs, one at the top and one at the bottom of the stairs.

Grimshaw locked the door and headed upstairs. He stopped at the top of the stairs and looked around. Heavy shades and blackout curtains on the windows confirmed that no one was going to notice a light, so he stepped into the front room and turned on a lamp.

As Julian had said, the place was basic. There was a comfortable reading corner with chair, hassock, and lamp. Even a crocheted afghan, which made Grimshaw wonder if Farrow had purchased it or if there had been someone in Julian’s life at one time who had made it for him. The rest of the room held a wooden rolltop desk with pigeonholes and plenty of drawers, another desk with a computer and printer, a big worktable filling up the center of the room, a couple of filing cabinets, and several bookcases.

The furnished bedroom had a single bed, a night table, a bookcase, and a dresser that held a spare set of sheets and pillowcases in the bottom drawer. The other two bedrooms held packing boxes of books.

Basic. A bolt-hole. Or a place to keep the secrets that had come from working with the terra indigene?

He laid out the regional map and the information from the ITF agents on one end of the big worktable, then heated up the soup and half of the meat-loaf sandwich. He didn’t find any coffee, but there were bottles of beer in the fridge. He opened a bottle and took his meal to the table. He ate standing, looking from Osgood’s list to the map and back again. Finishing off the last bite of the sandwich, he rummaged in the desk drawers, stumped for a moment when he found the middle drawer was locked—and then thought to try one of the keys on Julian’s key ring. He found a package of removable color-coded labels, the small dots in various colors that women used on family calendars to keep track of appointments—and cops sometimes used on maps when they were keeping track of a suspect’s movements or searching for a pattern to a series of deaths.

Grimshaw took the labels and returned to the map, applying dots to each town or village that had had an incident resulting in what the police had identified as a ritualized killing.

We’re not the first, he thought as he studied the map. Not even close to the first. But what do those places have in common?

He rummaged in the desk again and found a legal pad and a pen. He wrote the names of the guests staying at The Jumble and at the Mill Creek Cabins. Under those names, he wrote Ineke as a reminder to find out where her guests were from. Then he began to fill in what he could remember about everyone’s current place of residence and put a different colored dot next to each name that matched a trouble spot.

Grimshaw took the dishes back to the kitchen and washed them before taking another beer out of the fridge and returning to the table.

He stared at the map. Stared and stared. Then he set the beer down, fetched the key from the middle drawer of the desk, and opened the file cabinet to find out some of Julian Farrow’s secrets.