I thought of the bird eyeing the rabbit in my backyard.
“I don’t think so, let me check.”
I pressed the phone to my chest, muffling Finn in the middle of whatever he was muttering. From the middle of the hall that runs through the center of the house, it is possible to see the front and back doors simultaneously. I looked at both, but all I saw was the white light of the sun streaming through the edges of the doors.
“Finn? Hang on, I’m going to open the front door,” I whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” he asked with another cough.
“I don’t know,” I said, and returned the phone to my breast. I grabbed a walking stick from the umbrella stand in the corner, and then opened the door.
I peeked out. “No, there’s nothing here.”
“Well… that’s good. Maybe this prick is more intimidated by me,” Finn said.
I didn’t bother to remind him that I’d already had my own message, inside my house, and my tires slashed.
“Anyway,” he continued, “anyway, it’s disgusting. The thing looks like it’s been dead a few days. The eyeballs, Jesus, the eyeballs look like SpaghettiOs. All mushed up.”
“You said it was nailed to the door? When? Did you hear anything?”
Finn coughed. “It wasn’t there last night, that’s for damn sure. I came home from O’Toole’s, worked out for a while, then went to bed. I didn’t hear a thing.”
Finn lived in the middle of town, on a busy main street in an old Victorian that had been converted into two units. The other Victorians on the block were filled with young couples and families, and there was a corner store with late hours across the street.
“Ask around, maybe someone saw something,” I said, then paused. A dead crow with a deli ticket nailed to a cop’s door sounded like something out of a bad Mafia movie. Come to think of it, so did leaving a message written in lipstick on a woman’s mirror.
“Finn, this all strikes me as a bit over the top. Theatrical almost. And it doesn’t make sense. We’re to believe a hardcore killer-a guy okay with tearing open Nicky’s throat-resorts to silly threatening messages?”
He sneezed into the phone. “I don’t know, I just know it’s creepy as hell. What am I supposed to do with this thing? Fingerprint it?”
I sighed. “Keep the ticket, bag the bird. Bring both to the station tomorrow.”
“Where the hell am I going to put a dead bird?”
“I don’t know, Finn. Put it in a box or something. Jesus. You sound like a twelve-year-old girl. Don’t you have an empty shoe box? Double-bag it and put it on your porch. Maybe the raccoons will ignore it.”
He muttered a few words I chose to ignore, then he was back on the line. “What are you doing anyway? Eating bonbons? Watching Sex and the City?”
I rolled my eyes. “I think we need to take a closer look at the parents.”
“The Bellingtons? The mayor’s a little busy with chemo treatments and collecting votes. He’s hardly out trolling the streets and nailing dead birds on his officers’ doors.”
“No, the McKenzie boys; their parents. Finn, what if… what if the kids were killed because of their parents?”
It sounded so crazy when I said it out loud. This was old history.
Finn was silent.
“Hello?”
“Yeah, I’m thinking. They were all cleared, weren’t they?”
I paced the house, stepping over Seamus, who watched me like I was an idiot. Any walking other than outside was sort of pointless in his mind.
“Yes, they were cleared. And on the surface, they don’t have any one thing in common, not all of them together. But what if there’s something else? What if, I don’t know, there’s some event, something in their past, that ties them and the Woodsman together?”
Another cough. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. What’s with all the hacking, don’t tell me you’re getting sick.”
“Nah, it’s the damn cat. Fucking allergies,” Finn said.
I stopped pacing. “I thought you said it was a bird?”
He replied after the briefest of pauses. “It is a bird. The cat is Kelly’s.”
And then I heard another voice in the background, screechy and squeaky like a tire taking a bad turn, and I laughed.
“Don’t tell me Kelly Clameater is back to Kelly Maneater?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself.
“Don’t be crude,” Finn said. “You know her name’s Clambaker.”
Finn must have walked into another room; I couldn’t hear the squawk anymore. Kelly had what you might call a five-alarm set of pipes, the sort of voice that stopped people in their tracks and made them pray to the Lord to just make it stop.
“I thought after she went, um, after she decided she was more into girls, you guys were finished?”
“She’s had a change of mind,” Finn replied, and I could hear the smirk in his voice.
“Uh-huh. She brings her cat?”
“Sometimes.”
“Uh-huh.”
A double beep saved me from any more details. I checked the caller.
“Finn, it’s Sam. Let me call you back,” I said, and changed lines. “What’s going on, Sam?”
“I’m not calling too early, am I?”
His voice was muffled by a low whirring noise that suddenly picked up in intensity.
“No, not all-but Sam, what is that? A blender? Can you turn it off? I can barely hear you.”
The noise stopped. “Sorry, yeah. It’s a juicer; I just bought it. I had one of those coupons for Bed Bath and Beyond. So listen, I was going over the inventory from Nick’s room, you know, the one Moriarty and Finn did? Three years ago?”
“Uh-huh,” I said, back at the dining-room table. I glanced over at the thick stack of files I had yet to go through.
“Everything seems pretty typical, normal, you know, for a kid,” he said. “But under his bed, they found a piece of paper and a gold necklace, both items tucked up into the mattress, sort of hidden. The necklace has a pendant, maybe a daisy. I’ll read you what was on the piece of paper. You got a pen?”
I grabbed my notebook and ripped out a clean spiral-edged sheet. “Go.”
Sam cleared his throat, then said, “I can only see death and more death, till we are black and swollen with death.”
“Is it Nicky’s writing?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Sam said. He chugged something and swallowed thickly. “Creepy, though, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “So they found a necklace and a note under the bed. Anything else?”
“I’m still looking. Oh, and Gemma, I got a message at the station. Some lady called looking for the chief and that new temp, what’s her name, Angie, she passed the message on to me. The lady’s name is Kirshbaum, with a K. She said she’s got important information, for the chief’s ears only. Ring any bells?”
I flipped through a mental Rolodex and paused at the K’s, then kept flipping through. “No, I don’t think so…”
“You sound unsure,” Sam said.
I snapped my fingers. “You know those late-night lawyer commercials, where they get you off a murder charge for two hundred bucks? I swear, that’s the guy’s name. Kirshbaum. Carson, or Kyle. Something like that.”
“Hang on,” Sam said. “I’ll Google it.”
I waited and gnawed at a dry cuticle.
“Canyon Kirshbaum?”
“That’s it. Canyon Kirshbaum. Is there a photo? He’s kind of a big guy.”
Sam grunted. “No photo, just a crappy Web site. What kind of a name is Canyon? So, what? Maybe it’s his wife that called?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Might not even be the same Kirshbaum. I’ll give them a call tomorrow. I’m sure it can wait a day. She’s probably some local busybody playing Agatha Christie.”
“You mean Miss Marple. Agatha Christie was the author,” Sam said.