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Which would then mean that Lionel had known the Pegasus killer.
A glitter of gold caught my eye. It was a couple of feet away from Lionel, lying in a thick patch of grass.
A necklace. “Check this out.” I looked to the sheriff. “You got any gloves on you?”
She nodded and pulled a pair of gloves from her pocket. She handed them to me, getting another pair for Jason. I picked up the necklace and lifted it toward the light. It seemed like actual gold, well taken care of. The links were thin and the chain long, the clasp snapped off. A circular gold charm etched with two letters: J and D hung from the necklace. Nothing else about it jumped out at me, but that didn’t mean what we already had couldn’t be huge. This may have been dropped before the murder happened, or it very well could belong to the Pegasus killer, torn off during the struggle and left behind in a haste to get away.
“Are we searching the woods?” I asked, unable to keep the authority from edging into my tone. I had already done some recon on the Blue Creek police department and wasn’t surprised they’d called the FBI for help with this case. They were a small-town force with big-city problems—mainly their last sheriff being involved in a trafficking ring while trying to murder an inquisitive resident.
“I’ve got a team prepping now.” The sheriff met my gaze with an icy one. She took the necklace in a ziplock bag and said she’d be entering it into evidence.
Jason and I went back to examining the scene, pointing out how Lionel was sitting, with legs out and arms on his lap, palms up. The wings behind him looked like a fucked-up version of those rainbow wings everyone jizzes over for a social media post.
“They’re different,” I noted to myself. Jason picked up on it with a “Huh?”
“The wings,” I elaborated, “they aren’t the same as the last ones. The previous wings were drawn on clean, with distinct feathers across the bottom of them. These wings are more rudimentary, more rounded.”
“They must not have had time. This murder wasn’t as planned as the others.”
I agreed with Jason. Something about the way the killer had handled this murder wasn’t the same as the others.
“Maybe there was less time with this one,” I noted. “Or he could have heard someone coming?”
“What do you think the murder weapon was?” Jason asked me as we slowly started to walk around the back of the stage, looking for any more clues. The forensics team arrived in their space suits with their powders and gels and cameras. I looked at Lionel again, unable to keep my eyes on his face—or lack thereof.
“Had to have been a mallet or a hammer. The killer couldn’t even leave a horn impaled in Lionel’s forehead with all the damage he did.”
Jason sucked air between his teeth. A vein in his forehead bulged. He looked exhausted but determined, same as he had looked back in the day when we’d be pushed to our limits in the academy. He never let shit stop him, not even sleep.
I turned to the sheriff, who was speaking to one of her officers about shutting down the park for the foreseeable future. “Sheriff, have you been collecting all the video evidence from everyone in attendance?”
She looked at me a little wide-eyed before reining her surprise in.
She hadn’t thought of it. Jesus.
“We’re working on it,” she answered, before turning to the officer and whispering something in his ear. He turned and walked off with determination in his step, no doubt going to hunt down the few witnesses that were left at the park. I wanted to roll my eyes but decided to keep the professionalism intact.
“When you get everything, send it to me.”
She nodded, leaving us to go speak with someone on forensics. “We should give them space to work,” Jason suggested, looking at the watch on his wrist. I thought I caught a peek of color from underneath his long-sleeve but couldn’t ask about it before Jason said he wanted to head to the Stonewall offices, where he could look over old case files and compare them with Lionel’s murder.
“All right, let’s go. I’ll drive you back.”
“I can walk from here,” Jason said, bright red leaves crunching under our shoes, these made red from the seasons changing and not from a man’s life draining out of him.
“And I can drive you from here.” I gave him a look that seemed to decide the matter.
This was weird. It was undeniably weird. Jason and I—our history was a tangled web of complete chaos and passion and even more passion. We had spent weekends locked up inside our apartment, fucking on every surface we could, claiming each other’s bodies with kisses and teeth and tongue. And then we’d go to the academy and act like nothing happened, trying to keep our relationship on the low.
