A Circle of Crows

by Kelsey Kingsley

  I glanced at him as I chewed and said, “I’m an aide for my town’s mayor.”

  “Ye’re in politics?”

  I sighed and shrugged, before digging into the rice. “Yes and no. I’m more behind the scenes, really. I take phone calls, manage her schedule, and sometimes, I attend events in her place, but I’m not a politician. I just work for someone who is.”

  Brodie chuckled. “That sounds like ye work in politics to me.”

  Sniffing a laugh, I said, “Yeah, I guess I do. I just try not to focus on the political aspect of it, I guess.”

  He nodded. “So, ye dinnae like what ye do.”

  “It’s not that,” I protested, shoveling another forkful of rice into my mouth. “I like my boss, and I like making people happy with the work we do. I just don’t like the stigma that comes along with it, and I really don’t like how much time I have to put into it sometimes, when I’d rather be spending time with my son or si—”

  I stopped myself, realizing too late what I had almost said. Silently, I reminded myself that I no longer had a sister. There would be no more meetups after work for drinks, no more late-night TV binge-fests, and with every agonizing blow to my heart, I felt it shatter all over it.

  “Um …” I focused on my chewing and the container in front of me, as I fought my tears and asked, “Do you like what you do?”

  “Aye,” he replied in a hush, as if my momentary lapse in emotion had fazed him as well. “At least I used to, before I had to come back here.”

  “Where were you before?”

  “Edinburgh,” he answered, sighing as if saying the word left him exhausted.

  It wasn’t any of my business, but not wanting to think about Gracie and my broken heart for the time being, I decided to make it mine. “Bad memories?”

  He grunted a disgusted sound and tapped his fingers against the counter. “I divorced my wife and found out soon after that my father’s dementia had taken a severe turn for the worse, so aye, I’d say so.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Brodie shook his head, dismissing my sympathies. “What was worse was comin’ back. Fort Crow isn’t the most rivetin’ place. Not enough happens to keep me busy and thinkin’.”

  My eyes dropped to my fork, working its way through a valley of rice and vegetables, and said with an unintentional bitter bite, “Not enough bodies laying around.”

  “It’s a horrible thing, but murder happens,” he replied unapologetically. “I cannae bring the dead back, but I can bring their killers to justice, so, … I do.”

  I nodded slowly. “I get it. It gives you purpose. Makes you feel like,” I pulled in a deep breath and looked up, staring toward the stove and the brick wall behind it, “like you’re doing something good with your life.”

  “Especially when I dinnae have much else to live for,” he muttered, shrugging. “I’m an arsehole for even sayin’ it, but I don’t think I’ve used my mind this much in months.”

  “One person’s tragedy is another person’s triumph, I guess,” I said quietly, gently pushing the container away, as I realized I wasn’t going to eat anything else.

  Brodie was quiet then, gently tapping his fingers against the counter, while I silently drowned in my never-ending ocean of grief and hopeless despair. Soulless fingers reached up from the murky depths, threatening to drag me under and rip the life from my lungs, and I knew, if I didn’t shake myself free, I’d succumb to my own demise. I couldn’t do that, though. Not when her killer was out there and I had my son to worry about. So, I took a deep breath, to ask this man something, anything to take my mind off the image of her ghastly face and lifeless eyes.

  But Brodie spoke first.

  “I’ve never left a case unsolved, Rosie,” he said in a low, hoarse voice. “In fifteen years, I have caught every cold-blooded bastard that landed on my desk, and I swear to ye, this one will not be the first to slip through my grasp.”

  “You don’t know that,” I whispered, choked and weak.

  “I told ye earlier; I keep my promises,” he replied firmly, laying a hand against my shoulder.

  I turned to look at him, sitting there in a worn t-shirt and grey pajama pants. In my yoga pants and sweatshirt, perched on a stool in this kitchen, the setting suddenly felt too casual. It was too personal, and I had to scold my eyes for drifting downward, to the width of his shoulders and the breadth of his chest. A memory of telling Gracie to grab herself a hot Scot slithered gently into my brain, and I slammed my eyes shut as I turned away, giving my head a gentle shake as I took the container and slid from the stool.

  “I should get some sleep,” I told him, then held up the container. “Do you want me to keep this?”

  He shook his head. “Only if ye wanna save it for yerself.”

  I jittered my way through a nod and closed the container before putting it back in the fridge. I felt his eyes on me with every step that I took but not in a way that left me uncomfortable. I wanted to turn to him, I wanted to stay. I wanted to spend the night getting to know him better, without talking about my sister or death. But I ignored every one of those feelings and walked hurriedly to the kitchen doorway, to head back up the stairs and to the security of my room.

  But before I could leave, I stopped with my hand on the doorframe and said, “Goodnight, Brodie.”

  “Call me Alec,” he said, slicing through my resolve to only think pure thoughts with his voice made solely for fantasies.

  My eyes drifted shut to the awakening of lust as I swallowed and whispered, “Okay.”

  “Goodnight, Rosie.”

  “Goodnight, Alec,” I replied hurriedly, then ran from the kitchen, away from a man who I found myself wanting nearly as much as I needed him.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ALEC

  A grisly scrapbook of photographs was laid before me on the counter. Snapshots of Grace Allan, sprawled over a rock in a way I now saw as meticulous and clearly displaying her body in death. There was something so graceful about her position, the spread of her lithe arms and cross of her delicate ankles. Like a ballerina in quatrième devant. I already knew then that this had been no accident, but it was even more maddening now, looking at these pictures and seeing the precarious way she had been situated on the table-like stone, how anybody in my office could see and think otherwise. It was enough to drive me to insanity, and I wondered who it was to make that call.

  But that was an investigation for another day.

  Right now, I needed to find Grace Allan's killer, and I hoped that, with the information provided by Rosie, I was one step closer to catching the bastard. And I hoped it wasn’t anybody I knew.

  Rick wandered into the kitchen sometime around six in the morning. He glanced in my direction on his way to the refrigerator and asked, “Have ye been sittin' here all night?”

  “Aye,” I muttered, gripping my hair, as I stared at Gracie's pictures.

  “Makin' yerself mad isnae gonna catch the killer any quicker,” he said, taking the bottle of milk out and closing the door.

  “What do ye reckon these are?” I asked, ignoring his gentle scolding to point at a picture of her leg.

  “What?”

  “These marks right here,” I said, tapping at her thigh. “They’re bruises, but the pattern is … strange.”

  With a full glass in hand, Rick came over to peer over my shoulder at the picture. His brow furrowed over his thick-framed glasses as he squinted and grunted a noise he only made when he was thinking.

  “Did ye notice that when ye were doin' the postmortem?”

  “Aye,” he muttered. “I was wonderin’ what couldae caused it as well.”

  It was on her outer thigh, a dark purple imprint of something suspicious and peculiar. Its jagged stripe spanned the width of her thigh, and Rick and I stared at it, heads cocked, and brows crumpled, as if we could solve the mystery with the power of our combined minds alone.

  “Can ye get a better picture of it?” I asked, and he grunted in agreement.<
br />
  “Aye, I’ll do that.”

  I shuffled the pictures and paperwork into a neat pile and looked up to the clock on the wall. It was half past six. It was both too late to sleep or head out, and I shook my head at my inability to find rest while on a case. I never learned. It had been a crucial breaking point in my failed marriage, and one would think that’d be motivation to change. But it would be motivating only if I had planned to get married again, and I didn’t.

  But that didn’t stop me from abruptly looking up at the sound of Rosie entering the kitchen.

  “Good morning,” she said quietly, tightening her arms around her middle, as if she were bashful and hadn’t just spent the better part of a day in my company.

  “Did we wake ye, lass?” Rick asked, apologetically. Always a better man than me.

  Rosie shook her head and a few loose strands of her hair fell across her forehead. “No. I couldn’t really sleep. I tried, but …” She shrugged, keeping her gaze cast on the floor. “I just keep thinking about her.”

  In the state she was in, it seemed sinful to find her so gorgeous, but I did. There was such a breathtaking, quiet quality to her sadness, that I wondered if I would still find her as beautiful if she felt otherwise. But then, as I studied her full, rounded lips and the smooth, glass-like surface of her skin, I decided that, yes, I undoubtedly would. Any man who wouldn’t want to see her happy would have to be a monster, and I certainly wasn’t.

  “Aye,” Rick replied, nodding with sympathy. Then, looking at me with a firm glare, he suggested, “Alec, ye wanna make the lass a cup?”

  Immediately realizing that I’d been staring, I shook my head to snap myself out of it and hurried to the kettle. “Do ye like coffee? Tea?”

  “Um, tea,” she replied, sliding onto a stool.

  “What kind do ye like?”

  She thought for a moment, keeping her eyes on the counter and the stack of pictures and papers, then asked, “Do you have Irish Breakfast?”

  I snickered a bit, as I shook my head and opened a cabinet door. “No,” I replied, “but I do have Scottish Breakfast, if ye’re interested.”

  She sighed with sarcastic despair. “I guess that’ll have to do.”

  I filled the kettle and turned it on before glancing over my shoulder at Rosie and the morose expression on her face. A helpless sense of being washed over me, as I wished I could do more to help her, maybe even make her smile a bit. But what could I do at a time like this? The only thing that could make her smile, as far as I was aware, was to find the person that took Gracie’s life.

  Still, I had seen her smile before, even for just a moment, and I wasn’t about to give up on making it happen.

  “Can I interest ye in some breakfast?” I asked, and Rick raised an inquisitive brow at me on his way to the table.

  “I don’t know if I’m really all that hungry, to be honest,” she replied, as she reached for the stack of photographs. I quickly took them away, and her brow furrowed with irritation, and she said, “I’d like to see them.”

  “No,” I said, tucking the pile beneath my arm. “Ye wouldn’t.”

  “You had no problem showing me my sister’s body, or asking me to help you steal it from a crematorium, but you have an issue with me looking at some pictures?”

  Rick snorted from the table. “She makes a valid point, mate.”

  Ignoring my friend, I narrowed my eyes at her and replied, “Some things ye never get out of yer mind.”

  “And you think I’m going to forget the look of her face any time soon?”

  I felt no pride in what I had done the day before. I hated that I had needed to show her, or that I had asked for her assistance. I hated that she had been as involved as she was and had to be, in order for me to solve the case. But one thing I was certain she didn’t need to see, was the ceremonious display of her sister’s body laid out over the rocks of Coille Feannag.

  Still, she was adamant, and my resolve crumbled with a groan and a shake of my head. I pushed them back at her and braced myself as she slowly began to rifle through them. One by one, she looked through them without so much as a flinch, and it irked me how easily the human mind can be desensitized to matters so dark and grim.

  “What is this?” she asked, her voice rasped. She turned the photo of the markings toward me and pointed.

  “I dinnae ken,” I admitted. “We were just discussin’ that before ye came down.”

  She turned the picture back to her questioning eyes and said, “This part looks like a seatbelt buckle.”

  Crumpling my brow, I hurried around to peer over her shoulder. Without a second thought, my arms came down to the counter, locking her in and pushing my chest against her back, and for just a sliver of a moment, I thought how nice this was and how much I’d missed it. Then, just as quickly, I remembered what it was I was doing, and put my mind back on the right track.

  “See?” She tapped one mark on the woman’s thigh. “Right here. And here, this blank spot looks like the holes in the buckle.”

  I squinted my eyes, peering closer at the image that now came through to me, as obvious now as the sun streaming through the kitchen window. “Fuck,” I muttered beneath my breath. “I think ye’re right.”

  “I don’t know what this is,” she said, tracing her finger along the stretch of purple across her sister’s pale thigh, “but that is definitely a buckle.”

  Rosie turned her head, as I turned mine, and in that moment, our eyes, noses, and lips were so dangerously close, I thought I might accidentally kiss her from muscle memory alone. She smiled, and the pride reflecting in her eyes was enough to not only stop me from kissing her, but my lungs and heart stopped doing their jobs, too. I wondered if maybe I had died, right there and then, just from the impact of this woman’s smile alone.

  “Maybe I am a detective after all,” she said, her grin never faltering.

  “Maybe even a better one than me,” I replied, as I found myself returning the smile.

  Then, before I could take in another breath and smell the sweet floral scent of her hair, I took the photo from her hands and hurried to the table to show Rick. Because Rosie Allan was in Scotland to solve a murder, not to warm the heart of a pathetic, lonely Scotsman.

  ***

  Rosie went upstairs to wake TJ and get dressed, while I mulled over the plan for the day. She was right in wanting to first narrow the search to pubs with a larger, clear front window, but The Whispering Crow Inn was situated on the corner of Glaswell Street and Devonshire Road. There were eight pubs along Glaswell alone, another seven on Devonshire, and while I knew that not every one of them would have a picture window, it would still take a significant amount of time to investigate them all. Time was not on our side, and the more time that passed, the less likely we were to find Grace’s killer.

  “Gonna be a long fuckin’ day,” I muttered to Rick, as he filled a thermos with coffee.

  “Aye,” he agreed, glancing at the list of fifteen pubs. “But I reckon the company ye’re keepin’ will help the time pass a wee bit faster.”

  Looking up at him, I furrowed my brow and asked, “What’re ye implyin’?”

  “Ye think I’m blind?” He laughed, then tapped the arm of his thick, black glasses. “I’m seein’ everythin’ that’s goin’ on, my friend. Ye can’t pull the wool over my eyes that easily.”

  Glancing at the door and then back at him, I hissed, “There is nothin’ to see.”

  He laughed again, pulling his wool coat on and fastening the toggles. “Then, maybe it’s you who’s blind. Ye have those eyes examined recently?”

  “Ah,” I slashed a hand through the air dismissively, shaking my head and turning my attention back to the list, “get yer arse to work, ye fuckin’ bawbag. And don’t forget yer camera.”

  “Yes, dear,” he said, kissing the air in my direction. “And dinnae ye forget yer protection. I ken it’s been a long time.”

  Sneering through a grin, I pulled back the lapel of my jacket t
o reveal my baton. “I’ve got all the protection I need right here, laddie.”

  “Uh-huh,” Rick grunted, rolling his eyes and smiling. But then, his grin was wiped clean and his playful demeanor was replaced with a straight face and solemn eyes. “Be safe, Alec. Use yer head. If yer alone in this, ye need to mind yer back more carefully.”

  I nodded with every drop of sincerity as I could muster. “Ye have my word.”

  “Good,” he replied, smiling as he headed for the door, but I’d be blind to have missed the worried crumple of his brow as he left.

  And I wasn’t blind.

  ***

  TJ really shouldn’t have accompanied us on our search. Not only was the boy too young to handle matters like these, but he was also a thorn in my side if there ever was one. I knew it the moment we got into the car that he would hinder the search. But without knowing the extent of the threat they were under, I couldn’t with a clear conscience leave him alone at the house. So, take him with us, I did, and I silently wished the woman had left him in the States.

  “God, do you ever clean this thing out?” he complained from the backseat, pushing aside some rubbish from supper a fortnight ago—or was it lunch?

  “No,” I replied, lacking in reaction.

  “And you’re, how old? Forty-five? Fifty?”

  “Forty.”

  “Holy shit,” he muttered, snickering. “You look way older than that.”

  “TJ,” Rosie groaned, shaking her head. “Knock it off.”

  “What?” He laughed incredulously. “I’m just saying, he looks crazy old.”

  “He doesn’t look crazy old,” she disputed with an exhausted sigh.

  “Mom, come on,” he laughed. “You’re, what, the same age, and you look so much younger than he does.”

  “First of all,” she said with another sigh, “I’m thirty-seven, thank you very much, and second of all—”

  “Jesus, you don’t need to defend the guy.”

  “And you don’t need to insult him. He’s doing a lot for us, and—”