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“Oh?” I wasn’t aware that we’d found anything other than bones and seashells.
Kurtz led the way past the table of bones, his hooves clicking on the cement, and I sucked in my breath at the table at the far end—a table where the two halves of each of the whelk shells had been split open and placed alongside one another.
“Holy fucking shit.”
I felt a guilty punch to the chest as I realized that—yet again—I’d dismissed the importance of the shells, even though Taavi had told me that whelks were supposed to represent the cycle of life and death.
A cycle.
A calendar.
Ten bodies meant twenty shells, split in half.
Cleaned off, half of each one had a carving on the inside of the wide, sweeping shell. Symbols that looked an awful lot to me like the carved handle of the Aztec-style knife.
It fit with what Doc and Taavi had come up with—mostly. They’d suggested that there was a link between the murders and the Aztec calendar, and these shells seemed to absolutely confirm that.
“They fit together?” I asked Kurtz.
“Not quite.”
“Next you’re going to fucking tell me that we’re missing some.”
Kurtz snorted. “You psychic, too, elf?”
“How many?”
“Three, we think.”
A quick count confirmed that it looked like they only had seventeen on the tables. “Fuck. In the yard?”
“And that’s where Raj is,” he answered.
“Digging?”
Kurtz shook his head. “He got some fancy ground-penetrating radar so they can at least figure out where to dig. Assuming those last three are in there, of course.”
“Fucking hell,” I muttered. “Are we thinking they have a second site?”
“And that’s where the museum’s records are hopefully going to come in handy,” Kurtz answered.
“Madeeha dug those out, right?”
Kurtz nodded. “Drew’s chasing down the owners from our date range. You think your orc or that shifter would be able to tell us what the missing pieces are?”
I was almost certain Taavi would. I nodded, reminding myself that the case was more important either than my bullshit pride or my probably irrational fear for Taavi’s safety. Big elf pants. “Maybe. I can ask.”
* * *
I met Dan that night—severaldays after we’d originally planned—at Hardywood, where we could gorge ourselves on artisan pizza and craft beer. We decided to split a soppressata and margherita, Dan getting an IPA while I got my go-to Weiss.
By the time our pizzas arrived, we were both on our second beers, and Dan had given me a solid earful about the bullshit at Precinct One.
Dan didn’t bother catching me up on what Caro—Caroline Little-Bruneski—or Dani Bowman were up to, since I saw them regularly enough. He did tell me that Ellen Schmidt and Ricky McGuire had gotten themselves into trouble for trying to stop one of the worst blowhard assholes in the precinct, senior detective Barney McBride—one of the jackoffs who had left the bullpen to join the fucking MFM assholes protesting outside the precinct—from arresting an orc kid for breathing. At least according to Dan, whose opinion I valued far above most people’s.
“So, what? Villanova backed McBride?” I took a bite of pizza.
Dan sighed. “Not exactly, no. More like Henderson and Riley backed McBride, and Villanova couldn’t very well call all three of them liars.”
