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Dirty Who?
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Triple Shot
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Over Their Heads
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May
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Gunshine State
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The Perpetrators
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Treacherous: Grifters, Ruffians and Killers
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The Subtle Art of Brutality
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Let Me Put My Stories In You
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Zoë
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Revenge is a Redhead
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Cleaning Up Finn
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I’m Not Happy ’til You’re Not Happy: Crime Stories
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Two Bullets Solve Everything
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A New and Different Kind of Pain
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Texas, Hold Your Queens
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Les Cannibales
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Suburban Dick
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Federales
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A Brutal Bunch of Heartbroken Saps
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The Carrier
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Dead Clown Blues
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Fast Bang Booze
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Hurt Hawks
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Knuckleball
By Ryan Sayles
Goldfinches
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Dillo
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The Place of Refuge
The Hollow Vessel (*)
(*) Coming soon
Back to TOC
Here is a preview of the third Richard Dean Buckner crime thriller, Albatross by Ryan Sayles.
1
Autumn, present day
“I count four stab wounds in this one,” Clevenger says, down in a catcher’s squat as he points to the nun at my left. “The knife must have also caught her rosary. The beads are scattered everywhere.”
I look her over, no younger than her mid-sixties, waxen and still in her repose. Fully habited, she looks almost ephemeral lying in the wet street, as if even now she were dissolving into light to leave us. The strewn-about beads twinkled in the street lamps. A quiet suggestion of magic around this woman.
The scene: 9:00 p.m., double homicide. We’re down in the Burrows, the section of Saint Ansgar south of the river that cuts the city in half like a belt. You want a future, you go north. You want to see how humanity rots worse and worse each day, you go south.
Autumn has settled over us like a death shroud. Every morning the ocean to the west sends heralds of weighty, gray clouds to blot out the sun. The trees have responded by shedding their crumpling leaves, lost in a scatter from the cold winds. Everyone is turning up their collar and scurrying along briskly. Makes it hard to tell who is trying to hide their face because it’s unseasonable and who wants to be anonymous so they can victimize someone else.
Not a block from here is a small Catholic-run clinic, taking in drunks who need a place to sleep or mental patients off their meds. Helps to ease the burden on our hospitals and jails. The Saint Aloysius Gonzaga Mission, which spills a few nuns out into the streets here to collect the wretched, the OD’ing and the ostracized. Bring them back. Their beds always overflow. Their front door a revolving portal for medics and cops as those same OD’ing and wretched lose their shit, make the clergy dial nine-one-one. But the clergy do it all over again the next night. Christ said if we found Him naked and didn’t clothe Him, hungry and didn’t feed Him, we weren’t doing His teachings. Better to experience hell in this life than in the next, I heard once. And all the Burrows has to offer are shitbirds and scum to care for.
One of those nuns is sprawled in the street before me. Her soul in Saint Peter’s warm embrace at the Pearly Gates, her corpse soaking up the rainwater here. Arms laid out like she wants a hug. One leg askew as it corkscrewed when she fell, dead. The street is wet from a frigid rain an hour ago.
Her face, peaceful. Maybe when her last breath came, wheezing blood bubbles out of the stab wounds in her chest, her angel came to ease her home.
At least I hope so, because whoever killed her had no comfort in mind.
I kneel down, take a look at her right hand. “Defensive wound,” I say, pointing to the skin between her index and middle finger. It’s cut through about an inch deep. “She must have held up her hand to block a jab, and the blade went between her fingers and split them open.”
“Yeah,” Clevenger says softly. He’s always more somber when a woman is murdered. I’ve known him a long time, and he never holds a door for a man nor gives him pity when he cries, but a woman never touches a door handle when Clevenger is around.
Defensive wounds like that are common with stabbing victims. Anyone uses a knife against somebody else, to cut, stab or otherwise, and someone ends up with a bleeding split. Clevenger looks at her complexion. The lack of blood around her. The jab to the chest. “Killer must have hit an artery in there. Near the heart.”
I rise. “Bled out inside.” She’s so pale, yet there’s hardly any blood around her. If the killer was trying to rob her—and this at least appears to be a robbery—he’d be showing her the knife. The scary image. Big blade staring at her. She’d fall in line, give the robber what he wants. When she didn’t cooperate, or couldn’t—nuns aren’t known for having fat wallets—maybe the robber tried to stick her. Maybe just a flick of the wrist; something with which to turn up the heat. Show her he means business.
If he jabbed and went too deep, got the million-dollar shot and actually severed an artery, the sister would have bled out in the time it takes to realize what he’d done. Her guts filled with her loose blood, anywhere but in her veins.
The coroner will drain it all when she’s on the slab.
Clevenger stands, nods his head to the body lying ten feet away. “That one there, she took one stab wound to the gut and one slash to the neck.”
Second corpse, up in the muddy dirt nearby. Lying on her side in the fetal position. Got the artery in her neck. Blood spray. What a fucking mess. What a fucking nightmare. Nuns, of all people. Nuns. And there she is, dead and alone, soaked. Her blood running out from her front, looking like it was reaching out to the church and clinic beyond.
“Sister Mary-Helene, please,” the priest says, standing out of the way in the shadows on a nearby lawn. All I see is a silhouette of a man and, oddly, the white square of his Roman collar coming through the dark.
Clevenger pauses, raises an eyebrow as he turns to whomever just corrected him. Asks with a note of indignation, “Excuse me?”
The priest comes forward, the glow of a streetlight revealing him inch by inch. I get the feeling he’s not some bookish, I’ll-never-get-a-wife-so-I’ll-join-the-priesthood guy. There’s a power about him that’s neither from his arrogance nor from his position. Dude looks hard. Legitimately hard. And Cl
evenger just insulted him.
“Her name is Sister Mary-Helene, not that one, please.”
Clevenger takes it in. I see him process, those much-noted gears turning behind his eyes for a moment. Finally, “Thank you,” Clevenger says, sheepishly. “I hadn’t gotten that far, yet. Finding out their names.”
That’s the kind of thing cops get used to after a while. You see dead bodies. Dead children. Violated people. Ruined lives. They have to stop being people or it’ll eat away at your soul. That one human being would do this to another, it makes you lose all faith in humanity. You have to catalog the dead’s belongings, how they were laying when they died, where their blood and brains went after they were blown out their skulls, what was used to rape them. Photographs and reports. A mother, son, grandfather, mentor, businessman or nun, reduced to notes and celluloid. Details that hopefully help point the finger at the bad guy. After some time, it’s easier, it’s better, to say this one and that one. Names will come; they have to. But when the corpse is right there in the street, soaked in blood as rainwater collects in its blank eyes, it’s easier without them.
“She is Sister Mary-Pauline,” the priest says, pointing to the first corpse.
We have the immediate area taped off. Three black and whites parked along the road. Crime scene van as well. One of the uniforms comes up to the priest, making sure he doesn’t cross the line. The uniform looks back to Clevenger, and Clevenger waves the priest through. He gives the uniform his name, date of birth, all that jazzy info the police use to find you later. The subpoena list, we call it. Cross the line into the crime scene, give it all up. Controlled access.
Flight of the Fox Page 32