Unkillable: The Futurist, #1

By Dean C. Moore

As a futurist for the FBI, Adrian Maslow's job is to forestall any unpalatable future. The idea that someone wielding next-generation, world-ending tech will get past him has him losing sleep and possibly losing his mind.

And the job just gets tougher every day.

The future is coming at him faster and faster. Between the genetic enhancements and the nano-enhancements of his adversaries, his underfunded department is up against it. And now comes The Unkillable Man.

If the prototype is perfected, and it gets out and into the hands of America's enemies… This time, the FBI's Futurist Department may not be able to move fast enough.

Join Adrian as he and his four female confederates--a spy, an assassin, a coroner, and a topnotch shrink--race to keep the future intact, navigating impossible hurdles to do so.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean C. Moore
• Release date: Feb 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9798215091050

Book preview

ACT ONE

JUST BETWEEN US

ONE

Adrian couldn’t get his eyes off the smoke trailing up from the cigarette in the ashtray. It was about the one detail of the scene that didn’t matter. Not nearly as important, say, as the dead body on the bed. The blood spray on the wall that reminded him of the fanning tail of a peacock probably deserved to rank higher on the list of notables too.

The sliding glass door was ajar.

There was a breeze blowing that was quite refreshing actually. A not entirely incidental detail when flesh was rotting proximate to one’s nose. Though this early in death, the body smelled more of alcohol than decay. The Johnnie Walker Red saturated the room like an antiseptic spray determined to erase all trace evidence.

The man must have been made to drink it by the gallon as rapidly as he could guzzle it. He would have died from it and it alone.

Which meant the blood spray was what? An opportunity? A chance to deflect the real intent of the murder onto someone with an m.o. requiring a knife and plenty of blood? There could have been other reasons for it, of course, but none so fun. Or so imaginative.

The room was hot, explaining the open door and the desire for breeze.

How long had it been hot, the temperature dialed up? Long enough for Dead Boy to sanitize the room with his alcohol-saturated sweat? How much aerosolized alcohol did it take, at what temperature exactly, and for how long, to sanitize a crime scene of this size? Note to self: study math or befriend a mathematician. Would alcohol be enough to do it? Maybe not.

There was a hint of Clorox in the air. The scent masked by a perfumed smell that was likewise fairly mild. Neither was any match for the Johnnie Walker Red, certainly.

Adrian had counted twelve room fresheners on his way in, plugged into the wall sockets; four in the bathroom, six in the main room, and two in the kitchenette. Though he’d made these observations somewhat absent-mindedly. Strange for such a small place, even for the lazy with cleaning.

If Clorox had been mixed with the room freshener, say nine parts Clorox to one part room freshener... Where was that mathematician when you needed one?

Maybe his killer was a mathematician, among his many other aptitudes. Or perhaps just a chemist; you had to have a pretty damn good aptitude for math to do chemistry too.

Crows were flying in and out of the room, staying long enough only to snatch a piece of the body, an eye, an ear, a piece of entrails, and make off with it.

By rights he should have closed the door, sealed off the scene, and protected the evidence.

But he was in the mood for some comic surrealism. So he let the scene play out. Soon the CSI team would be here, the NYPD, and the FBI, all of which he frequently consulted, and that would be that. Everything which followed would be so orthodox, so by the book. Just thinking of the tedium coaxed a yawn free. Pity homicides were never as interesting in real life as they were in the movies.

Besides, Adrian suspected the real crime scene staging was what he was seeing right now. Their killer probably had more to say with his pet crows than with any evidence left in the room.

Pets they were, to be sure. These things had been trained to systematically dismantle a body. It was Adrian’s guess, they’d be all too happy to dismantle him, too, if he got any closer. He could be wrong about that. He was all too keen to misread a scene of late, if only to escape the ennui of the predictable. Was this killer trying to save him from such a dismal fate? Was the universe truly that kind? Was this the killer’s idea of social outreach? They say a mind is a terrible thing to waste. Certainly Adrian felt his was.

Would the sliced-off body parts flown away with by the crows lead to additional clues? Clues that would lead to a killer desperate to get caught? Or would they be more misdirection to allow Adrian to build a case against someone not guilty of the crime so he could continue to develop this romance with the real killer?

And then there was that damn cigarette in the ashtray. It was still smoldering.

Adrian had never sparked a cigarette just to watch it go out on its own, but he imagined, even unattended, those things didn’t stay lit forever; five, ten minutes tops, and it would be out. So what were the odds he’d be drawn to the scene of the crime, ahead of the police, ahead of knowing what he was actually getting into, only to arrive less than ten minutes after the killer had fled the scene?

Was he the subject of a frame? With a Luis Bunuel-like flare for the dramatic, as his killer had, why be so pedestrian?

Adrian already knew one thing. He was going to have to work damn hard to keep the real killer off the FBI’s and the NYPD’s radar, and to frame someone who deserved to go to prison, if not for this crime, then certainly for something far, far worse. The alternative was unthinkable. The alternative was to put an end to the budding relationship with a very talented killer doing his best to save Adrian from perpetual ennui. What kind of friend does that to another friend?

Adrian suspected there was something in Manic’s invitation to the crime scene he was missing that probably offered more clues than anything additional his eyes could alight upon right now.

He let his mind float back to earlier that day, the series of happenings that had led him here, on his first date with Manic. He didn’t know the killer’s real name, but if he was good enough to lock down a crime scene so tight not even Adrian could unravel every clue in one sitting, well, that required the kind of planning and attention to detail that required tremendous mental energy. And so, Manic, wasn’t a half bad name for his friend. 

THE MORNING HAD STARTED with coffee and criminals: the hoodlums on TV in one of his favorite Bogart films, The Maltese Falcon; the hoodlums outside his door. As to the latter, beyond Adrian’s front window, the bald, Lou Ferrigno-sized neighbor was beating on his golden retriever for straying into Adrian’s yard to pick up his paper, thinking he was caught up in a game of catch with his owner. The poor dog had Alzheimer’s and Adrian was going to return one night and kill his owner for being an insensitive bastard. At least that was the plan until he read in the newspaper about the CRISPR units in every university and virtually every DIY lab. There were several universities and several DIY labs open to the public downtown. Surely he could utilize one of those CRISPR units to give his neighbor a gene-altering virus that would eat his brain and teach him some empathy for his retriever. And they could just take care of one another thereafter in their alternating moments of lucidity. The plan hatched, he shifted his attention to the other crimes in progress going on outside his window.

To get a better vantage point on the situation, he decided to take a walk.

It was a quiet suburban neighborhood in Brooklyn. These people’s every waking moment was a crime. It was the only way they could survive the ennui. If there was one thing Adrian knew, it was the need to compensate for boredom with acting badly. It was that or go paint a Mona Lisa. Who had the talent and the time? He’d moved here hoping for a little understanding. But suburbanites are short on understanding, long on perfidy. Take the wife cheating on her husband with another chick and their Irish setter; it was a strange ménage-a-trois, not the least of which because the dog had more hair than the wife. But since moving to the burbs, he’d seen stranger. Their little drama was playing out just two houses down, the one he was coming up on now.

Don’t let people tell you the burbs are boring. Boring is just the fertilizer. What suburbanites are is covert, not in your face, like city people, who just don’t know how to hide their craziness. There was, for instance, the distinguished looking, grey fox of a husband embezzling his wife (the one being cheated on by the pussy-licking Irish-setter and the cunt-licking wife). Their eighteen-year-old, long-haired, pot-smoking son is jacking off in his room to snuff films. The teen’s heavily tattooed friend, with a defined but shrinking body chiseled by too much crank, made the videos for him, which is what makes his friend so cool. The friend says the films are karma-free because all he needs to do is find people who are happy to pay for you to end them in suicide-by-proxy. They’ll even sign a waiver. So there’s not even any jail time if they get caught, and forget about the ethical quandaries. Adrian knows this because this is what passes for bedroom talk on a weekday between teens who can’t bother to go to school because mommy’s getting cunnilingus from a dog with a tongue longer than daddy’s dick. Not that suburban kids need an excuse to act out, so maybe that dig wasn’t fair.

In the same family is sixteen-year-old Elsa, with pale skin and doll eyes. She’s pretty vanilla as the rest of the family goes. She made a plaster of paris likeness of Zac Efron to scale with an erect phallus and she humps it in her room every chance she gets. The parents have seen Zac’s hard on (it’s a matter of some debate whether it’s to scale too or not) and think it’s a rather comical way of hanging up her clothes. At least she keeps her room clean.

All that in one household? Surely they were the exception. Why, yes, they were. They were exceptionally boring compared to the rest of the neighbors.

Adrian had the dirt on everybody. He had one of those snazzy in-ear hearing-aids the size of a pencil eraser that couldn’t be detected and he used it to jack up his hearing. It was like having one of those miniature satellite dishes you see the Special Ops guys using in movies to hear conversations through walls. But how clumsy is that? Hardly a go-anywhere-anytime solution like Adrian’s. Of course, Adrian had his specially modified by people known only to the FBI. There were a lot of FBI agents running around now, and CIA and NSA and other alphabet soup agents using Adrian’s modified in-ear hearing aids.

He was a bit of a national celebrity, not just for the odd cases that he seemed particularly dialed into that nobody else could make forward progress on, but because of his little artsy inventions. So they gave him a lot of rope. He could probably be a serial killer himself and they’d find a way to excuse it, or at least to get him to channel his predilections in ways that could help them, say by killing other serial killers.

But he digressed. He was looking for clues in his mind that pointed to his new suitor, Manic.

So far he was coming up empty.

He continued rifling through his memories of earlier that day.

He had been circling back to the house, nearly through with his morning constitutional and his Peeping Tom via in-ear mike routine, when some stranger accosted him. His FBI entourage, typically invisible, came out of hiding and swarmed the thirty-some, unshaved man like flies on shit before he could get all the way to Adrian. They tackled him to the sidewalk.

One of the team was rifling through the perp’s pockets. He pulled out something, scanned it, and then brought it over for Adrian’s inspection. Scanner had a nondescript face that would have made him a far more effective criminal than an FBI guy. When committing a crime you wanted people to forget you; when climbing the FBI food chain, you wanted them to remember you.

We’ve been aware of this guy for some time now, Scanner confessed. Just didn’t think he was smart enough to get past our barrier. But he fooled facial recognition with that makeover. Adrian glanced away from Scanner at his accoster lying prone and pinned to the sidewalk, his head craned up defiantly, as they were peeling off his face. He had to admit, that disguise might have gotten past him too. Once unmasked it was easier to see why that guy wasn’t slipping past anybody. The face was scarred and the look behind the eyes tormented. He couldn’t have done better having TROUBLE tattooed on his forehead.

What is that you have in your hands? Adrian asked Scanner.

The canister is essentially a nanite-bomb. You drop it, it explodes, sending nanites everywhere. The blast can take out an entire neighborhood, or at least that’s what our engineers tell us. The microscopically-sized robots chew through about that much before they break down or just run out of gas. We let him continue his work in hopes he’d get the runaway effect perfected. He threatened to take out the whole planet with it. We were curious to see if he could perfect the nanites to that degree.

So, who’s the menace, him or you? Adrian’s scolding tone probably felt to the FBI rube like he was throwing battery acid all over his cool fascination.

Ah, don’t be that way, Adrian. Just intellectual curiosity is all. If we could figure out how he did it, we might figure out how the next bastard is going to do it.

So, you’re a bunch of saints then?

"Well, that’s how we see it. But judging by your tone..."

Adrian smiled half-heartedly. Relax, soldier. I know how the game is played. It doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves from time to time just how insane it’s gotten.

Yeah, no shit.

They both glanced back at Face. They had him with his hands cuffed behind his back and practically levitated off the ground, there were so many FBI guys clutching him.

Good work, fellas! Adrian said, raising his voice to make sure the whole team could hear. Can’t tell which cases are more interesting any more, mine or yours. The agents perked up. They went from feeling down on themselves for nearly failing at their jobs to feeling on top of the world. Adrian honestly couldn’t say why he was of a mood to throw them a bone. Considering his day hadn’t even started yet and that protective bubble around him only intensified the nature of reality, rather than insulated him from it. Hell, the nightly news was a far better insulator from reality, he thought cheekily.

I just wanted you to be proud of me, Adrian! Face shouted, struggling to get free of his shacklers.

He’s not proud of you, asshole, he’s proud of us, one of them growled at him.

Come on, guys, you’re going to tell the media the great Adrian Maslow stopped me, right? Not you guys. You guys are nothing.

Adrian shook his head and walked off, his back to Face, who was making some pained noises, no doubt in response to the agents not caring much for his remark. 

Adrian really didn’t connect the earlier incident with The Crow Caper until now. It was just possible that the perpetrator, who killed the guy in the flat Adrian found himself in a short while later and trained the birds, had found a way for Adrian’s accoster to penetrate his protective bubble by turning him into the Face. Surely, Adrian’s life would seem all the more boring once he’d been reminded of all the juicy cases no longer reaching him, being filtered by his team as not worthy of reaching the great Adrian Maslow. Not worthy, maybe, but hell, a B-grade crime or an A-grade crime like this one involving the nanite bomb executed by a B-grade criminal still beat the hell out of nothing at all.

Adrian didn’t get the impression that Face had the least sense he was being played any more than Adrian realized at the time he was being played. So, he felt there was no point in pursuing Face, a.k.a. End Times in a Nano Mist Canister Guy, any further.

Soon after leaving the drama of Face behind him on the sidewalk, Adrian returned home.

He remembered smelling the pot of coffee on the kitchen counter and deeming it too ripe for serious consideration. He poured some into a thermos, and slipped the thermos into his trench coat. Possibly the lab boys could find a strain of bacteria in it that could cure cancer. Or perhaps they could isolate the poison meant for him? Maybe Face hadn’t been the only one to penetrate the barrier around him this morning. He made himself a fresh pot of coffee. 

The fact was there had been nothing else out of the ordinary about his morning. If truth be told, he’d been drawn to the crime scene because he routinely listened to the police radio. And there had been chatter of crows flying in and out of a high-rise window. They were flying in empty-beaked, and flying out with something in their craw. It could have been dog food. But big black-ass birds that had scared the hell out of him ever since he was a kid... this he had to see. It was time to chase down those demons.

Hard to pin that chance piece of radio chatter on his suitor. Then again, there was the woman’s voice that had made the 911 call. The tremor in it, meant to indicate a very old and fragile woman. Only it wasn’t an old woman. It was a young, very much in-shape person pretending to be an old woman, and doing a great job at it. But Adrian was an opera fanatic. And he knew just what an accomplished voice was capable of. The performance was so good he still couldn’t tell the cops whether the voice he heard was a woman’s or a man’s, despite it being deliberately disguised to sound female. He’d seen enough operas with males playing female parts and vice versa to know, this was not as difficult as you might think, though not particularly easy, either.

Yep, he’d been quite certain before he even jumped in his car and raced over to the crime scene that it was the murderer making the 911 call. There are people who listen to Cher, gay guys mostly, who are convinced she’s singing directly to them through her lyrics, like she’s channeling their pain somehow. That’s how Adrian felt listening to Manic on the line.

Every Sherlock needs his Moriarty. Maybe Manic was his.

The only thing putting a crimp in Adrian’s sleuthing was he wouldn’t put it past himself, or some twisted part of his psyche, to invent the guy if he didn’t actually exist. So the possibility that Manic’s mystique could be part of a psychotic break couldn’t be ruled out. No matter how elaborate the ideation. In fact, last he checked, elaborate ideation was part of the diagnosis.

KLEPSKY ENTERED THE apartment with the dead body that had been keeping Adrian company. Paced up the hall. Past the bathroom on the left. And shot straight into the studio apartment’s main room, with the bed folded down, that used up most of the thousand square feet or so of space. It was still anybody’s guess if he was going to venture far enough to take in the entrance to the kitchen at the far end of the room on his right. Far less step through the sliding glass doors onto the narrow margin of a patio overlooking the Trump Tower.

His protruding, square jaw could jackhammer a man’s head clean off if he just started chinning the guy at the Adam’s apple. His trench coat and his fedora indicated he belonged back in the Bogart movie Adrian was watching when he left his house this morning. But it was New York. It wasn’t just the drag queens that got to wear drag here. In L.A., everyone got into character. In New York, everyone was a character. He shouldn’t fault Klepsky for looking like he belonged next to Bogart in a B-grade movie, not when Adrian could see himself in the Bogie role. The two of them were definitely cut of the same stuff. Gritty. Hard-boiled. Often shady.

Klepsky was FBI. He was also a kleptomaniac. He’d already pocketed a couple items on his way to confronting Adrian. He couldn’t be bothered to notice the dead body or to take in the crime scene in any way. He was like a horse with blinders, and he was galloping towards Adrian.

The items Klepsky had pinched? A clear glass ashtray. A colored glass candle holder. He brought them for the wife so she’d have something to hurl at him. He knew he was impossible to live with. He felt he owed her as much. And he didn’t want her spending his hard-earned money replacing the glassware in the house every couple of days.

What brings you here, Adrian? he said stopping about a foot from him, lighting up a cigar. The tip of the cigar brought them that much closer.

Maybe you’ll notice the dead body?

Of course there’s a dead body. You certainly aren’t going to come out to feed the birds.

They’re vultures, and they’ve been carting off the evidence of a crime the whole time I’ve been here. You could have me arrested for that.

Like I give a shit who killed who, and why, unless you give me a reason.

The blood spatter on the wall? Remind you of anything?

Klepsky threw a glance at the wall mostly to humor Adrian, not because he could really be bothered. Yeah, looks like the ass end of a peacock.

You might want to check your data base for similar m.o.s, see what comes up. Adrian was already starting in with the misdirection, to help out his friend Manic.

And the missing body parts, Klepsky said, glancing at the body, the ones the birds made off with?

I’d have your people chase them down. My guess, the birds were trained and they’ll lead us to more clues. He’s laying out a breadcrumb trail.

A murderer who wants to solve his own murders for us. He snorted. Wish they could all be that accommodating. Klepsky took another puff on his cigar. Unlit, it had smelled like rich, loamy earth, like walking into a barn. Lit, the far-too-complex-to-describe aroma was closer to what it felt like as a kid lying face down in a meadow inhaling: herbs and weeds and flowers, worms and insects and bird droppings, and broken fallen leaves.

Adrian’s mind continued working on the case, the real one, not the wild goose chase he was sending Klepsky on. It was Adrian’s guess Manic shot Dead Vic up with something to keep the guy from passing out on him, from croaking, and from vomiting all the liquor he was force-feeding him back up, and to exaggerate the amount of perspiration he was gushing. He was just as sure the mystery substance would leave no forensic trail. It was one of those leads that on a standard investigation would mean a lot, and be worth chasing down. But this was no standard investigation, so Adrian refused to be distracted by it. His friend, Manic, wouldn’t do that to him, wouldn’t permit standard police work to lead anywhere pertinent.

What really brought you here, Adrian? I have to know before I can justify the kind of manpower and the kind of interest you want me to invest in this case.

Just a gut feeling.

Klepsky took another puff on his cigar and studied Adrian. You and your hunches. That all you giving me for now?

Yep. If I were you, I’d forget about my gut feelings, throw my ass in jail. I’m your most likely suspect.

Your inklings have gotten me three promotions in less time than it takes most people to get one. You’re a fucking lightning rod for super-predators. The ones that would push everyone else off the FBI’s most wanted list, if only we knew they existed.

You flatter me, Klepsky. I don’t deserve it.

Klepsky made a dismissive sound with his lips that sounded a bit like a fart. I’ve seen your place. Short wave radios, police band radios, satellite dishes that pick up news from all over the world, computers loaded with software that hack coded satellite transmissions. You’ve got access to every agency’s files, even the ones they don’t want you having access to. For anyone else, hell, for a savant working at NASA, it’s just white noise, the static snow you used to see on those rabbit ear TVs. But not you. I bet you can’t even explain how you do what you do.

Sure I can. I trust my intuition. It’s a lot smarter than I am. Yours is too. So is everybody else’s. Only most people refuse to listen to it. They’re culturally programmed not to. We’re trained to be more reasonable than that. Tell me, Klepsky, ever meet a reasonable serial killer?

Klepsky snorted and took another puff on his cigar. His people swarmed in through the door like angry bees looking to take on the birds in a territorial dispute. Shit! The vultures are stealing the evidence! shouted one of them, pulling his gun and shooting one of the crows, which from this close up, Adrian could attest, looked fucking huge. The other agents followed suit.

Put your guns away! Klepsky shouted.

But Quick Draw couldn’t be snapped out of it. Klepsky decked him with a fist to the face. Klepsky had a fist bigger than most faces. A build that allowed him to box either heavy-weight or junior heavy-weight back in his youth. So it only took one punch to put the guy out of commission. Probably for the next week. The rest of you idiots, Klepsky barked, start chasing down those birds and find me the missing body parts. Don’t touch them, just report in on your location.

How are we supposed to chase birds, sir? one of them asked.

How the hell should I know? Klepsky, still in a barking mood, spat back. Call one of our bird guys and find out.

We have bird guys? the same doubting Thomas said.

We’re the FBI! We have bird guys. We have guys who specialize in detaining and interrogating aliens. We have guys who can translate three thousand year old languages that haven’t existed for at least that long.

Ah, where are they, sir?

Fuck if I know. Go find them, and go find those birds, or you’re on the next train to Alaska, and you won’t be riding first class either. I’ll stick your ass where they ship the donkeys. That goes for the rest of you! You see this here? Klepsky made a big gesture to include everyone in the room. You’re the Indians in those cowboys and Indians movies. You’re just here to die, you got me? The more of you die and the faster you die the better the movie. You want to live, you better figure out what no Indian before you ever figured out.

Yes, sir. Whichever one said it, they were all filing out the door like cockroaches after the lights flicked on.

The CSI team poured in on their heels. Klepsky turned to Adrian. What should I do with these guys?

Adrian shook his head. They won’t find anything. But sic them on the scene anyway. Not like you can take my word for it. You have to cover your ass.

You got that right. He turned to the CSI people. Well, what you waiting on?

What do we do about the birds, sir? asked one of the CSI guys.

Chase them out of your way! Klepsky said.

Ah, I wouldn’t do that, Adrian coaxed. Those things are trained. You go at a crow, you better go at it with a shotgun.

Klepsky calmed down on the revelation. Yeah, okay. To the rest of the team, he said, Just work around them then without pissing them off. Better yet, let them have the damn body, just concentrate on the rest of the crime scene.

Yes, sir.

Wait. Klepsky checked to see if the guy still had his face. Nope. His teeth. Nope. His fingers. Nope. His ears. Nope. Tattoos. Nope. Yeah, go ahead. There could still be a lot of forensic evidence he was sacrificing but he was choosing to go with Adrian’s gut. He was probably thinking something like, Damn Adrian for letting the birds get this far. Damn him for not leaving him more of a choice in the matter.

Adrian took a few steps towards the door. Where are you going? Klepsky said, still sounding testy.

To clear my head. My job isn’t as easy as yours, Klepsky. I never know what my next step is. So I have to feel my way in the dark for a while. Get lost before I can be found.

You got a process, I get that. But I got an addiction. You feed my habit with more clues on a regular basis that help me to catch my bad guy or I’ll have your head on a plate.

Adrian smiled wearily at him. Klepsky wasn’t kidding, and Adrian knew it. They were the best of friends for two people who couldn’t stop using one another. But, as Klepsky indicated, it was a relationship that hinged on pure codependence. Nothing like Adrian’s relationship with Manic. That relationship was less selfish and more selfless; something in his gut told him so.

TWO

The seagulls’ shrieks stabbed at Adrian like acupuncture needles, relieving stress when they damn well should have been causing it.

The beach sand beneath his bare feet pressed against him with a million tiny points of contact, reminding him of how it felt to wear those reflexology sandals. But this was far worse. And still the response on his nervous system was paradoxical. He may as well have been sand-papering off the skin on his feet, so why should that feel good?

The cold wind fought him with each step, forming a formidable wall one minute, pushing him along the next. Then it would disappear entirely, only to rush back in from some new direction, like a tempestuous child that would not be ignored.

The surf roared, isolating him from the traffic noise from the road just behind him and back a ways. He could scream to high heaven for help, and no one would hear. It was the perfect place to murder someone. Even repeated stabbing, followed by wrestling in the sand—assuming the person was that determined to stay alive—would be interpreted from a distance as insatiable lovers devouring one another on the beach, playing, frolicking, wrestling, sexing, caressing, hugging, squeezing, desperate to get closer. Especially with nothing but an eternity of sea to stare out at and remind them of just how close oblivion lay ahead, so best get on with staving it off with some lasting memories.

The shrieks of the seagulls were becoming more insistent. Maybe they expected to be fed. These public beaches encouraged such nuisance behavior. The birds seemed bright enough to know that the humans would happily feed them just to get them to quiet down.

In a smart-ass move he turned out his pockets and opened his trench coat wide to convey that he had no food to give them and turned around three hundred and sixty degrees.

That was when he grew conscious of the startling incongruity.

They weren’t seagulls.

They were the same damn crows from the crime scene three days earlier.

Hitchcock’s Birds had nothing on these things.

They had been mimicking the sounds of seagulls the entire time to throw him off. Most people don’t realize crows are among the smartest birds around and can mimic most anything. They were surpassed in their mimicry only by Mocking Jays, which weren’t nearly as smart or as aggressive.

Something else was creeping Adrian out.

He couldn’t quite put his fingers on it, as if being stalked by these creatures wasn’t haunting enough. 

Finally the other shoe dropped.

They weren’t crows.

They were ravens.

The two types of birds looked damn similar, and their territories overlapped throughout the U.S. But ravens were bigger in size, like Red-Tailed Hawks. He should have picked up on that. On reflection, he could understand how he’d been duped.

Crows fly in packs.

Ravens fly in pairs.

Why then were these ravens acting like crows?

That would take even more training to get them to go against their natures.

Of course, they were even smarter than crows.

What’s your killer trying to say, Adrian? Such smart birds might well be bored with their lot in life too, and might well be looking for a challenge. They might bond rather well to someone who could supply them with the right trials. One more clue that his serial killer was far more focused on Adrian, and on forming a bond with him, than on the actual victims? Or just one more chance to read-into evidence something that wasn’t there?

The birds, having gotten his attention, took to the air at once, with a synchronized shriek. One of them dropped a human ear at his feet.

He bent down to pick it up with a pair of forceps and a plastic bag; no self-respecting detective left the house without some minimal amount of forensic equipment. As he did so, he watched the birds flying off. But they weren’t going to be so accommodating as to fly off in a given direction. So, no more clues to be had there, other than that his tormentor, with a flair for the dramatic, had thought of everything.

He brought the baggie with the ear inside up to his face. "Well, Celine, it has been a while since we’ve hooked up. This seems as good an excuse as any."

THREE

C eline? You think you can make some room for me? Adrian said, dangling the severed ear in the plastic bag in front of her.

If that’s a sly reference to your dick, no, Celine Carter looked at him sharply, not without a whole lot of lube within reach. You really tore me up last time. Made me feel positively post-menopausal.

Adrian smiled. I love how you can be standing over an eviscerated body with blood all over you thinking about sex. I like that in a woman.

And I hate how I keep mistaking someone with a fast tongue for someone who is guaranteed to be good at cunnilingus. I mean, the tongue ought to be in such better shape than most people’s.

He smiled at her, partly to acknowledge the joke, partly as a conveyor of sexual innuendo. Dutifully chastised. More cunt-licking next time. Less poking.

"No, more cunt-licking and more poking."

Make up your mind. I’m forced to do enough multitasking in my day job.

She shared with him an I-hope-you-can-read-the-warning-signs-on-this-face smile and returned to the corpse on the mortuary slab whose chest she was vacating, one organ at a time. Just give me a second to finish hollowing this guy out.

And I thinking it was just me you took everything out of.

She glanced up at the ear in his hand absently as she continued her work with the gloves on and the dispensing of the organs into the various stainless steel bins, like she was getting Thanksgiving dinner sorted. What’s with the ear?

Perfectly preserved after an entire day. No sign of tissue decay. The guy it belongs to was saturated in booze when he died. Thought that might be explanation enough and then decided, nah. The ear had also been inside the beak of a raven for God knows how long, exposed to the elements and the creature’s digestive juices, and the sharpness of the beak itself. All in all, it looks a little too perfect.

She was speaking distractedly, her eyes still on her dissection, when she said, You realize the degree of decomposition varies not only from individual to individual but also differs in different bodily organs? The spleen, stomach, intestines and the pregnant uterus are earlier to decay. But, on the other hand, the kidney, heart and bones, and pieces like your ear are later in the process. Much later.

He made a sour face to indicate