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Maybe, though our discovery downstairs suggested that at least one enemy had known about this refuge.
I moved up to the next floor. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom here, and none of them appeared to have been used. There were no personal items on the bedside tables, no clothes in either the drawers or the closets, and there was a stale mustiness in the air that came with the stillness of a locked-up, poorly ventilated house.
I continued on to the loft, expecting to find more of the same. Instead, I found chaos. The bed had been stripped, the mattress pushed off the frame and resting at a wonky angle against the rear wall. The wardrobes tucked in under the roof line had all been opened, their contents pulled out and either smashed or thrown in untidy piles all over the floor.
This wasn’t untidiness. There was too much destruction here to be mere untidiness. This was someone searching for something.
I pressed a hand against the doorframe, but the wood held no echoes of what might have happened. But then, wood song very rarely held on to memories of events unless they had impacted them directly.
I picked my way through the mess, heading for the bed at the far end, but was barely six feet in when I found the bloodstain.
It wasn’t large, but the size and shape of it matched the wound on the back of Aram’s head. I scanned the surrounding mess but couldn’t see a weapon. There wasn’t even a blood trail, and there should have been if Aram had been carried down to the freezer almost as soon as he’d been killed. Maybe the killer had somehow staunched the flow of blood long enough to get him downstairs—though why he or she would bother given they obviously hadn’t bothered concealing the fact this room had been searched, I couldn’t say.
This mess might explain why there was no laptop or other records down in the office, though, and even why Aram’s office had been blown apart. Our spellcaster obviously had something his killers had wanted.
The question was, did they find it?
I stepped around the stain and continued on over to the bed. The pillows had been tossed across to the window, and the lamp had been swept off the bedside table, and I rather suspected both were done in fury.
Whoever had murdered Vincentia had also possessed a temper—did that mean they were one and the same person? It was possible. More than possible, really. Coincidences did happen, but not all that often.
I carefully opened the top drawer, which was as empty as the ones in the office, although this time it was due to the fact the contents were on the floor. It was actually surprising the drawer remained in place—why bother doing that when everything else had ended up thrown out of the way? I checked the other drawer in this unit, then tugged my sleeve over my hand again and did Lugh’s trick, checking the back for hidden things.
Sadly, I didn’t find a lever to open a secret door, but I did find an envelope. It had been taped to the back of the bedside table, and unless you physically reached past the back of the actual drawer, you wouldn’t have discovered it.
I carefully pulled it free, my pulse rate accelerating. Nothing had been written on the front or the back of the envelope, but it had been sealed. I carefully slid a nail underneath and opened it. Inside was a neatly folded, single sheet of paper.
The soft song of the floorboards underneath my feet altered their cadence slightly. I looked up as Mathi appeared in the doorway.
“The IIT will be here in five minutes.” His gaze dropped to the envelope. “You’ve found something?”
“Aside from this mess and a bloodstain on the carpet between the bed and the door, this was stuck to the back of the bedside table.”
He skirted around the stain without really looking at it and stopped next to me. “What is it?”
“I haven’t had a chance to look yet.” I carefully tugged the paper free and then unfolded it. Inside was a small black-and-white photograph.
“Whoever took this certainly wasn’t a photographer.” I turned the photo around in an attempt to figure out what it was. “Is that a person? In front of a gravestone?”
Mathi plucked the image from me, got out his phone, and took a picture. After giving me the photo back, he enlarged the image on his phone.
“It was definitely taken in a graveyard,” he said, after a moment. “You can just make out a couple of other gravestones behind that first one.”
I peered closer at the original but couldn’t see anything more than a couple of darker blobs. “Why would he have kept something like this at the back of the bedside table?”
It wasn’t like you could see the figure’s face, as he had his back to the camera, and there certainly wasn’t anything identifiable about his clothes or body. If there was some sort of memoriam on the gravestone, it wasn’t visible in this image.
“It has to be of some value to his killer, otherwise this room would not have been torn apart.”
“Presuming this is what he was after, of course.” I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t suppose you recognize the graveyard, do you?”
“The Ljósálfar do not bury their dead in such grim places.”
“No, but I dare say you’ve buried a few non-elves in them.”
Amusement warmed his eyes. “Possibly, but it’s not one I recognize. It looks too unkempt to be Deva’s main center, though.”
“It does.” I turned the photo around. A date had been written on the back, and there was a series of numbers underneath. I had no idea what the latter were.
