Eating Crow (The Birdman Series Book 1)

by Hayton, Lee

  Two weeks’ notice wasn't a lot of time in the best of circumstances. If Arnaud really did have a lease that left him that close to the wind, he must've been desperate. Although things in the house were altered or askew, there were no signs of damage or destruction. He'd taken care of her property the same way she would have. A first-class tenant if only a tenant had been what she was after.

  Victoria's stomach grumbled, and she picked up her purse to see how much cash was left. She couldn’t bring herself to use the food that Arnaud and Grace had stocked in her kitchen. Even the thought of using their milk for a cup of tea seemed wrong.

  So, a quick bite at McDonald's or Burger King were her best options. They were both within walking distance.

  Instead of setting off, Victoria sank down onto the sofa, head in hands. An unfamiliar crochet throw pressed in alien patterns against her back. The early morning wake-up call to make her flight, coupled with her reluctance to return at all, had combined to leave her exhausted.

  She didn't want to be back here. Not back in this depressing town where she'd spent so much of her life. She didn't want to be back in the house where everybody she'd ever loved had lived, then died.

  It would've been better if she'd just sold up. Cut her ties completely and move on for real. Instead, she'd made the same half-assed decision she'd made about everything else for the last year. Not quite committing to anything. Avoiding a decision with a weird compulsion to just let life take her where it would. The longer she could put off working out what to do with the rest of her life, the better.

  Now, all her savings were almost gone. The only asset she had was occupied by strangers. She'd been called back to the place she loved and hated to give evidence about the case she least wanted to think about.

  The gall of Mrs. Mancini. Lodging a wrongful death suit in regards to her son. Half the states wouldn't even listen to a case brought by a parent, and with good reason. Her son's itinerant career had never moved much above the starting wage. No union would touch him with a bargepole. Even if his death hadn't been justified, the court couldn't possibly believe that he'd have sufficient income to support his dear mother in her old age. More likely, she would've been supporting him.

  Victoria felt tiredness wash over her body. Her backbone tingled with chills, even in the early heat of the day.

  Insomnia had been her closest friend for a long time. Before she abandoned town, nights had been for pacing and worrying. Trying not to think. For the last few years, more even, she hadn't fallen asleep so much as fallen unconscious when her body finally overrode her brain to demand rest. The new sensation of sleepiness was so foreign, Victoria gave into it before she could think twice.

  #

  Victoria woke with a start when the sofa cushion beneath her shifted. With bleary eyes, she turned to see Grace perched on the opposite end; a glass of milk in hand and a sandwich on the plate in front of her.

  “You must be jet-lagged, huh?” Grace asked.

  “What time is it?”

  “Just gone four.”

  Grace took a bite of her sandwich, then nodded her head at the coffee table. There was a second plate with a cut sandwich on the table in front of her, and Victoria's stomach growled.

  “It's cheese and ham,” Grace said. “I just made you the same as mine, but if you don't want it or want to make something else, just wrap it and leave it in the fridge. I'll have it tomorrow.”

  “It sounds perfect. Thank you,” Victoria said. She tried to eat slowly but her empty stomach overrode her decorum, and she demolished the first half in five big bites. It gave the painful nibbling teeth of her ulcer something other than her stomach lining to bite into.

  “Did Dad find another place to stay?” Grace's voice was high and worried.

  Victoria shook her head. “Willis, the property manager, didn't have anything on the books. He refunded all of your rent money, though.”

  Grace nodded, her cheeks flushing red. “So, how long until we have to be out?”

  Victoria’s mind traveled back to herself at Grace's age. She'd never lived anywhere but here and spent her teen years stomping around muttering how she was going to get out as soon as she was able.

  How different would her story have been if she'd had to move on every couple of months? Her father always on the lookout for something cheaper. Something within easy traveling distance of any job he managed to find. Close to the school his daughter had settled into.

  Victoria made up her mind. Misery loves company. “You don't have to move if you don't want. You're welcome here if you can stand me hanging around.”

  Grace smiled and turned on the TV, settling for a program with a cast who were meant to be her own age but looked a decade older.

  Victoria stretched her legs out and ate the second half of her sandwich. What the hell would she do with three empty bedrooms anyway? About time the neglected old house was filled with life again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Detectives Stanton and Arbeck arrived on the scene, the first attending patrol officers had already secured the area. Vicious yellow tape, like the stripes on a wasp, formed a solely implicit barrier to entry.

  The dead girl lay in a recessed doorway behind the cordon.

  Rustling fall leaves, crisp brown, orange, and red, piled around her corpse. They offered as much cover as the loathsome blanket, encrusted with dirt, draped over her shoulders.

  A whiff of old, dried sweat and the sharp stink of urine swept around on the wind. Stanton winced in revulsion and turned away. There would be worse to come.

  Before setting out he’d looked up the missing person’s register. The most recent addition fitting the description was five days old. Unless this girl’s absence hadn’t made it onto anybody’s radar, they were looking at a decomp.

  Holding a tissue across his face—better than nothing—Stanton ducked under the tape. His partner, Arbeck, followed on his tail a second later.

  “Careful,” Arbeck said. “We don’t need Rogers on our backs.”

  Art Rogers headed up the local CSI division and wasn’t above chewing out the other units if they encroached on his territory. Once, as a grade one detective, Stanton had been subject to a minutes-long tirade about the value of thought before action. The terrible event that precipitated it, an inadvertent step into a muddied crime scene.

  Rogers’ department had to have a mold cast to eliminate Stanton’s boot print. He hadn’t forgotten again, but the memory still burned his cheeks with shame and impotent anger.

  The stench from the blanket should have been stronger this close, but another odor overpowered it. A mix of meaty rotting flowers and fetid grapes. Instantly recognizable. Instantly stomach churning. Stanton angled his body to the upwind position, so it didn’t get into his clothes.

  He accepted that it would, anyhow. It always did.

  “Hold still, little lady,” Stanton whispered. He pulled down the lip of the blanket. A mottled belt of bruising around the girl’s throat confirmed the suspicions of the first responders. Leaning too close, for a second his fingers touched cold, stale flesh.

  Disgust, frightful anger, and compassion overwhelmed him, stealing his voice. Stanton withdrew, nodding his head for Arbeck’s benefit.

  Before passing back under the tape, out to the safety of the fresh morning breeze, Stanton peered at the victim once more. The girl was young. Fifteen maybe but no more. Her pale face still retained the chubbiness of childhood. It would be a few years more before her cheekbones were fully defined, her chin fully chiseled.

  A few years she didn’t have.

  Once, the passage of time would have transformed her prettiness into beauty. Now, she’d swell with the bacteria and gasses of decomposition. Her skin would turn to gray, blue, and black.

  “When did you get here?” Stanton asked the female patrol officer, first attending.

  “Maybe ten minutes ago?”

  Her eyes kept flicking away from his to the doorway. To his, then away. The offic
er looked young, but Stanton had accepted more than a year ago that everyone looked young to him now. No one looked like they should be driving, be offering medical advice, or even be ushering him into a movie theater. He rubbed at the loose skin beside his eyes and made a note.

  “Who called it in?”

  “Didn’t give a name to dispatch. Just a man. Said there was a dead homeless kid in a doorway down here.”

  He could check it later, back at the station. They might be able to pick up a number. If the caller really wanted to remain anonymous, they’d discard their SIM card or toss their phone, but most folks didn’t bother. And the days of a pay phone on every corner were long gone.

  Arbeck elbowed him lightly, and Stanton turned to look. There was a small crowd of people forming. Looky Lous, curious to get a glimpse of someone whose life was worse than theirs.

  Rubberneckers were a pet peeve of Stanton. He fixed eyes on the largest, a man standing six-foot-tall whose weighty belly pressed against the tape. Keeping his gaze locked, Stanton advanced on him, skimming under the tape twice to reach him.

  “Sir,” Stanton said, allowing a note of anger and suspicion into his voice. “Can you tell me anything about this incident?”

  The man swallowed and shook his head. “I’m just on my way to work.” He glanced nervously at the assembled onlookers who’d decided to make him a focal point of interest. “Just checking to see what’s happening.”

  “Are you?” Stanton stared at him until the man withdrew a step, then another.

  “I need to get going,” the man mumbled. “Late for work.” He took another step back, then turned to walk out onto the road and crossed the street. When he tossed a glance over his shoulder, Stanton stared him down until he faced forward again.

  When Stanton turned back, others in the group had decided to use the opportunity to make their own getaways. His Captain would tell him to get names and addresses, but anything these folks could tell him would have days of other memories corroding it into uselessness. If there was anything useful there to find, in the first place.

  “That’s my shop,” a woman called out. She walked up to meet Stanton and returned his gaze squarely. “I’m the rental agent for it,” she clarified. A dead girl in the doorway for a few days already made it clear it was nobody’s shop.

  “And you just happened to be passing by, this morning?”

  She jerked her head across the street where a man was standing in a pawnshop doorway. At soon as Stanton turned his head, he retreated inside. Stanton knew him already, from when he’d worked theft. Harrison, Harrington, something like that. Made Stanton’s skin crawl, but the guy kept the records he was meant to, seemed above board.

  “How long since you’ve been down here?”

  The woman snorted. “The last time I had a showing. Six months, maybe.”

  “You don’t check to see they’re clean?”

  She shrugged. “I’ve got a guy on staff drives by a few times a month. He’s due again this week. He moves on any transients and sweeps up any needles. Stuff like that. If we don’t have any offers, we don’t do a lot of upkeep. We’re only paid on commission.”

  “Who was the last tenant?”

  “An Asian food market. The owner thought that because he could afford this street, the business would come. Lasted two months, then moved out before the next month’s rent was due. That was four months ago.”

  “Are these all month-to-month?” Stanton gestured up and down the street front.

  “Mine are. Don’t know about the rest.” She shifted worriedly from one foot to the other. “You’re not going to advertise this, are you?”

  “Ma’am, we don’t advertise crimes.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said, her face pulling tight with anxiety. “It’s hard enough to shift property this far from the college without this baggage. Homeless people are bad enough. Dead homeless people . . .”

  She trailed off, and Stanton nodded, relieved. Obviously, no one on the street had yet put it together as a murder. Long may that last.

  “I doubt anybody’s that interested,” he reassured her. “Can I have your name?”

  He wrote it down, along with her phone number, then crossed over to where his partner was looking along the street. “What’re you after?”

  “Shit, Stanton. I don’t know.” Arbeck straightened up, then arched his back until his spine cracked. “There’s nothing here, we may as well let these two secure it until the techs get here.” He waved at the uniformed officers. “We can do more back at the station.”

  “I know, it’s just . . .”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, but Arbeck nodded anyway. They’d worked together for long enough to earn the telepathy that went with it. “We don’t know for sure. It could just be a copycat. Shit, it could be natural causes for all we know. A runaway caught out by the cold.”

  Late fall, the nights could dip down pretty low. Stanton couldn’t remember it happening in the past week, but it could happen.

  They walked back to the car, side by side, in-step.

  “Collins is back in town, you know,” Stanton said.

  At Arbeck’s raised eyebrows he continued, “She’s got stuff coming up with the wrongful death suit. Captain wanted her handy. Keeps the lawyers off his ass.”

  “Right.”

  “Should give her a call, maybe?”

  Arbeck snorted. “Better you than me, Bud. I thought she’d made her feelings on the case absolutely known.”

  “Yeah, but that was when it was case closed.” Stanton opened the driver’s side door and then paused, looking over the top of the vehicle at his partner. “We’re gonna have to turn this over to that woman’s lawyer, you know. That deposition could take a hell of a lot longer than Collins expects.”

  Stanton was guiding the car smoothly back to the station before he decided. “I’ll call her when we get back. If we keep it out of the papers, she won’t have any other way of knowing. I don’t like the idea of them springing a surprise on her. She’d go ballistic.”

  Of course, now she’d probably go ballistic on him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “But Dad, you don't have to sit next to her. Honestly, the amount of perfume she uses.” Grace’s criticism on her classmate was accompanied by her holding her nose.

  “You need to make friends with girls your own age,” Arnaud said. His chiding tone contained a hint of dismay. “It'll help you settle in.”

  “If you cared about me settling in, then you wouldn't drag me to a new state every couple of months,” Grace said. Victoria could hear the anger behind the words, and she'd only known the girl for a day.

  “If you don't want to sit next to her, then tell the teacher you have a chemical sensitivity,” Victoria suggested. It earned a glare from Arnaud but an appreciative smile from Grace. “They take allergies far too seriously these days.”

  “Maybe.” The girl shrugged. “On the other hand, I don't want my entire math class thinking I'm sucking up to the teacher.”

  The pitfalls of junior high were a dangerous territory to navigate. Victoria remembered the arguments from when her sister Shelly was Grace's age.

  Victoria had the dubious benefit of being the “unexpected” child. One who’d appeared on the scene way too early for her mom and dad's comfort. The distance of eight years between her and Shelly lent her adult clarity to each problem her sister then encountered. Using that as a weapon against Shelly’s angst, never ended well.

  So much for being the cool older sister.

  “Well, if you're not going to make friends in class you should join an after-school club,” Arnaud continued. “I don't like to think of you hanging around here on your own.”

  Perhaps he hadn’t yet learned he wouldn’t win a battle with his teenage daughter. Perhaps, Victoria thought, he was simply an eternal optimist.

  “I'm not alone,” Grace said and pouted. “Vicky is here.”

  Victoria tried not to wince at the hated shorteni
ng of her name. “I won't be here forever. Just until I find a job.”

  “Good luck with that. Took Dad an age to find anything.”

  Victoria and Arnaud exchanged a quick, surprised glance over the table. Victoria didn't have the same societal restrictions that Arnaud would have encountered. Black man, strike one. Foreign black man, strike two.

  “I've lived here my whole life,” she said, instead. “I've made quite a few contacts.”

  “Another reason you should try to make friends at school,” Arnaud said, armed for another battle. “You'll be glad of them when you're out in the workforce.”

  A phone rang, and it took Victoria a moment to recognize her ring tone. She gratefully escaped to the lounge, picking it up on the fifth ring.

  “About time, Collins,” the voice on the line said. “I was about to hang up.”

  It took her a second, then she clicked. “Hi, Stanton. What's up?”

  “I heard you were back in town.”

  Victoria closed the door to her bedroom and moved over to the window. There were a couple of hundred thousand people in the county. For the speed of gossip, it may as well have been two hundred.

  “Yeah, I'm back in town. Would've been nice if you guys had stepped up and got the suit dismissed without me having to break up my holiday. How's Hank doing?”

  Hank was her old partner and the only person on the force she'd ever called by his first name. When she'd resigned from the job, he'd stepped down. A year early for official retirement but he'd swallowed his pride, talked his way around the rules, and got his full pension. And deserved to. Victoria had meant to call him.

  “Fine, the last I heard. Not causing any trouble, at least. Listen.” Stanton’s tone dropped deeper, introducing a thread of worry. Victoria closed her eyes. Not a call to catch up on old times, then. “When're you going to your deposition hearing?”

  The question caught her by surprise, not what she was expecting. It took her a minute to sort it through in her head. “Later this week, Thursday. Unless they tell me different. Why?”