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“And you only found the one shell?”
I frowned. “Yes?”
“Did it look like you broke it accidentally, or like it had already been broken?”
I thought back, and couldn’t remember, but that was why I took pictures of things. I pulled out my phone and scrolled back, then set it on the table so Taavi could see the image of the clearly cut shell still mostly in the dirt.
“May I?” he asked, and, at my nod, picked up my phone to examine it. “Do whelks wash up near where you were?”
“Whelks?” I repeated, feeling particularly slow.
“It’s a whelk shell,” Taavi replied, setting the phone down again.
“Should that matter?” I was starting to suspect that Taavi had seen something I’d missed, and that was making me uncomfortable again, although this time it was definitely because I was feeling self-conscious about the fact that I was supposed to be the fucking detective.
Taavi shrugged, sliding my phone back to me. “Maybe not,” he replied.
“But?”
“Whelk shells are symbols of the afterlife. There is an Aztec legend in which Quetzalcóatl, god of life, was given a shell by Mictlantecuhtli, the god of death, which he caused to make music with the help of bees and worms, thus earning the precious bones to restore humankind after the end of the Fourth Sun.”
“The what?”
“The fourth period of the world. Quetzalcóatl was successful, according to the myth. The Aztecs believed—or believe, I suppose—that this is the fifth period, or Fifth Sun.”
“So bones and shells…”
“Are significations of Quetzalcóatl’s victory over Mictlantecuhtli—of life over death.”
“So then why does this seem to be tied to murder?”
Taavi shrugged. “That was the ancient way. To stave off death and devastation through ritual sacrifice.”
I stared at him as this processed through my brain. “Fuck.”
His dark brows rose.
“Fucking fuck,” I repeated.
“It might not—”
“Oh, I’m sure it does,” I interrupted him, stabbing at a fry with my fork, irritated at myself for missing the obvious. Who the fuck just buries a cut-in-two-pieces shell? Dogs don’t. Kids? Maybe, but not under a goddamn raspberry bush.
I flipped through the phone pictures again until I found the damn knife Doc had texted to me and turned it around again.
Taavi picked it up. “And this was what killed your victim?”
“Yep.”
“You know it’s a fake, right?”
“Not my job,” I replied, but I did wonder if the museum people knew that. “But just for the sake of argument, how do you know that?”
“It’s metal.”
“Aren’t most knives?”
Taavi smirked. “Not Aztec ones,” he replied. “They used obsidian.”
