Saga frowned but said nothing, shifting her weight.
“As the students are removing the brain, they realize—it’s not there.”
“What?” Saga blinked.
“The brain,” Avery confirmed. “It’s gone. And in its place”—she leaned in, jabbing an accusing finger at the list she’d written on the file—“is a pile of impossibly revolting-smelling herbs.”
Saga’s eyes rounded.
“How is this possible?”
“The ginkgo biloba, hands down. Smells like a corpse shit itself.”
Avery paused awkwardly and clarified. “I meant… How is it possible the brain is missing?”
Saga smiled that same wide smile, and Avery realized she was teasing her again. Then it dropped and she scrutinized the list with this new context, her eyes bewildered but curious. “Have you questioned the students?”
“Not personally, but the original officer on the scene took testimony that supposedly there was no evidence the skull had already been opened.”
Saga shot Avery a look. “Bullshit.”
“I agree.”
“Could it be a prank of the students?”
“Unlikely.”
Saga stared at the closed file folder as if she were trying to see through it. “Any discernible wounds on the body?”
Avery turned it back to face her and opened it once more to rescan over the coroner report. “Typical car crash bruising without a safety belt—only, it appears, that’s not what killed her. The medical examiner is convinced the bruises were all incurred postmortem.”
“She was dead before the crash?”
Avery nodded and took another bite of the pasty, watching Saga puzzle over this.
“Wherewas she driving when she crashed? And when exactly?”
Avery paused and flipped through the file to find the initial police report. “Into the gate around Trevor Square. By the noise complaints from the neighbors, they’re confident it was around three a.m. Mondaymorning.”
This clearly puzzled Saga more.
“You know it?”
“Yeah, my mother always insists on getting tea at Harrods when she’s in town—it’s about spitting distance from there.”
“There’s a teahouse in Knightsbridge?” Avery recalled the infamous “name without a town”22 best avoided due to its unsavory reputation that had begun to change rapidly in her last years before the curse.
Saga gave Avery a look that told her this poor reputation had been so altered, it was not even a distant memory to London’s current citizens. “There’s…alotin Knightsbridge… What I don’t understand is what she was doing there at three a.m. on a Monday…”
Avery said nothing. Were it her time, she could think of quite a few illegal things that would bring someone to Knightsbridge at that hour, but clearly things had changed. It was better to ask questions and absorb than attempt to make her own conclusions at this point. “Is Monday significant?”
Saga nodded. “I mean, there are bars and clubs that are open late on the weekend, but most of them in that area aren’t even open on Sundays, and if they are, they close well before that, so why she’d be there as if she’d been out all night is…odd.”
“Medical examiner’s report said there was no alcohol in her system, either.”
Avery could see this only intrigued Saga more. The way her eyes ignited with a curiosity that was not discouraged by a dead end—but intrigued. “Toxicity report?”
“They tested for a few standard signs of common poisons or recreational drugs—nothing,” Avery repeated the findings in the report.
