I shuddered a little and did my best to disguise it as a shiver from the cold. I picked up my mug and took a long sip.
Pop broke a cookie apart. He took a bite of the darker piece and then said, “So who thinks this unfortunate incident at the Emporium is linked to another homicide case? You? Neil?”
“All of us, I think,” I replied as I put the cup down on the tabletop.
“But you don’t know the other victim?”
“I don’t knowthisvictim,” I answered. “I know nothing about whatever case Neil and Calvin worked on prior to today, but it seems at least the note I got is similar to another one out there.”
Pop considered this. “If you were involved, even unknowingly, in this previous case, Calvin would have said something, wouldn’t he?”
“I’m certain. I’m here now because he doesn’t seem to know what’s going on and didn’t want me alone. Not that I have to be pushed to visit with you,” I hastened to add.
My dad smiled a little, but it was a distant expression. “But that seems to suggest you’ve been randomly targeted.”
I leaned back in the chair. “Maybe. Not that my dance card has many names on it, but I’m sure Calvin is looking into past acquaintances and customers to deduce whether there’s overlap with whoever the previous victim was.” I finally reached for a cookie.
Pop looked at me. He didn’t say anything for a long, increasingly uncomfortable moment.
“What?” I finally asked. The frosting of the cookie was warming and softening in my hold.
“What if it’s notyouwho’s been targeted, per se, but your reputation?”
“You don’t think Calvin will find a common individual to link the events?”
Pop solemnly shook his head. “The wording of your message implies they could have contacted anyone with the right… magnetism. ‘An intriguing proposition for a most curious man.’ That’s very particular verbiage.”
The thought that this lunatic could be any random face on the streets—in a city of eight million people—was alarming. If a connection could be traced to a sour customer or… fuck, I don’t know, an old high school classmate… that made Calvin’s job ever soslightlyeasier. There was an established timeline. A relationship. A perceived link between Calvin’s previous homicide and the one currently in a box on my counter. And with that association—no matter how tentative or absurd—there was bound to be a motive.
If I, Sebastian Snow, the frumpy-dumpy guy who lived on the fourth floor of a multiuse in the East Village, was not a clue in this case, what did the detectives have to work with? The head, of course. Somewhere in New York City was a body bound to match it. Then there was the plastic. It was thick and heavy, maybe used in an industrial environment. And the note. Hopefully the pen wasn’t as common as Neil suspected. Or perhaps the Collector left a fingerprint behind on the packaging.
But if the physical clues didn’t provide anything of real use—then what?
That left us with the reputation of Sebastian Snow. And by all accounts from the media over the last year, he was most definitely a curious man who had a compulsion for intrigue, mystery, murder, and to quote one newspaper, “a complex fascination with the morbidity of a bygone era.” Translation: I could speak at length about the fascinating relationship Victorians had with death, and apparently that was weird to some folks.
The point was, Pop might have been on to something.
ThisCollectorwas looking for something old, lost, and strange. Their words. And I’d been portrayed as a man who could uncover that very sort of thing. Maybe the vagueness of the note was done on purpose. To arouse curiosity. To ensure I sank my teeth into the mystery.
Reputation could be the connection between me and the other homicide. Maybe the first victim was a curious person too. Maybe they hadn’t solved the puzzle in time….
I swallowed audibly.
I was absolutely not getting involved.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t at least share this concept with Calvin. If nothing else, it’d be something for him to mull over in between interviews, paperwork, and cups of shitty precinct coffee.
“Father knows best,” I finally said.
MUDDER NYCmissn toe.
I sat in Pop’s living room, squinting at the screen of my phone. I pushed my glasses up with my knuckle and tried that internet search again. I carefully pecked out with one finger:Murder NYC missing toe.
I couldn’t be certain what those well-drawn body parts on the notes implied, but I found it particularly odd that my own message had an eyeball and the bagged head was missing one eye. Simple logic would suggest the photo of Neil’s ear corresponded with a severed ear on a real body. I wondered if that was the only photo of a mysterious drawing on Neil’s camera, or if there were others. Like of the toes Quinn spoke of. If I had a teeny tiny bit more information on what Calvin was working on prior to this morning, I might be able to give him more than my wild two cents to run with.
But I wasn’t sleuthing. Not really.
I was sunk into the couch cushions with my feet propped up on the coffee table. I was going nowhere fast.
