The rain didn’t let up for the duration of the night. The thunder was deafening, combined almost simultaneously with the lightning, it was almost impossible to get to sleep. The storm hovered right over the center of the city for a good few hours. It was a good night to be blind and deaf, and that cannot be said for most nights.

Rain cascaded out of trains and through cracks in highways and bridges; they didn’t provide very good cover. The leafy park ground turned to flowing brown sludge in the piles they were raked into, and slithered back over the park path. Open buildings howled with the wind. It was also a bad night to be homeless. This is something that can be said for most nights.

For better or for worse, this particular town did not have a very high homeless population, so there were not a lot of people left without shelter on this dark and stormy night. The number was to fall even more during the night.

A man or a woman wrapped in a patched-up downy coat panted through the flooded streets. The coat, usually puffed like a parachute, hung in heavy slabs. The person was headed towards a bus stop in the center of town. There was a canopy here, like there was for most bus stops in the city. This bus stop had a vending machine nearby, but a glowing advertisement for some bubbling drink, set against a blue backdrop with thousands of white bubbles. But otherwise it looked like any other stop. There was also a schedule protected from the elements by a plastic case, and under that a lit-up clock face to show you just how long you had to wait for the next bus. It was two in the morning, no buses for at least four hours. This homeless person was not here for a bus, though.

The person pulled off their thoroughly soaked jacket, wrung it out with thin, pale hands and patted it down a few times, then placed it on the bench. They then lay themselves on the jacket, pulled it around them, and went to sleep, surrounded by the rain, the reflections of the vending machine and clock faces in the tide rushing towards drains. This was about as good as it was going to get for the night.

It was still dark when this person woke up again. The rain had calmed a little, the wind was no longer screaming, but the sun had not risen yet, so not too much time could have passed. You do need to be asleep some time to dream, and the homeless man or woman was pretty sure they had just had a dream, although they may not have been sure what it was about. They didn’t have much time to worry about that before they noticed they were not alone. Someone was standing just out of the light of the clock and vending machine. It was hard to make out the eyes, they were wearing a dark hood. But with the stillness, they must have been staring, quite rudely I may add.

‘Find your own bench,’ the homeless man or woman grumbled and turned over, pulling the sleeve of the damp coat over themselves.’

The newcomer was not here to sleep, however. They were probably not even homeless. The chance that a person you will run into on the street is homeless is quite low, even on a dark night like this. This person also carried an implement that wasn’t very useful for the typical homeless person.

They raised this implement over their head a bright square of moonlight and lamplight, flickering in the rain. Then it fell with a whoosh just audible over the pattering all around. There was a metallic clang, among other noises, but nobody but the killer was around to see it. It was about four in the morning. The rain let up and hour later, but not much was left at the bus stop by then.

—

‘Do you have five dollars in coins?’ Ravel asked. ‘I’ll pay you back. I just want to get a drink. The bus stops in my area never have vending machines.’

Lei dug around her pockets for her wallet, then dug in her wallet for some coins. She handed them over to Ravel in exchange for a bill, which she put next to the seven hundred she received the day before, from the clown’s daughter. Ravel loaded the coins into the machine and inspected his options carefully.

Lei wanted to sit on the bus stop bench, but there was an awful-smelling damp black jacket lying on the bench and she did not want to have to touch it. She stood to the right of it and watched the white clock while Ravel picked his drink. Something still stank, and the humidity was not helping. ‘Smells like something died,’ she commented. ‘Wonder where it’s coming from.’

‘The rain could have washed up anything. You said there were bodies in the sewers.’

‘I guess. We’re pretty far from there, though, and this smells close…’ She eyed the jacket.

Ravel finally pressed the button for some new cherry flavored soft drink and waited for it to fall into the slot below. He waited quite a while. Then there was a dull thump from inside the machine, but the sound was not plastic against plastic. Ravel leant down to see what the problem was. He pushed the slot in and reached a hand in. Lei didn’t notice something was amiss until Ravel pulled his hand out with a yelp and immediately started thrashing his arm wildly, throwing something foul-smelling and hideous to the pavement. He continued to swing his hand around.

‘Cut that out!’ Lei snapped.

Ravel did so, although his hand shook in the air as though some horrible parasites had attached themselves to him and he still wanted to fling them off. His eyes shifted from her to the thing he had dashed onto the sidewalk. Lei followed his gaze.

It was a human hand. It was pale and relatively thin even though the damp weather had given it a spongy sort of consistency, the owner must have not had much to eat. It was cut off from the shoulder down in a crude fashion, by something sharp but not really intended for such business. The bones were splintering at the ends and the muscles hung out, like the last strings had to be pulled apart because they just didn’t want to cave to a blade. Blood seeped from the end onto the street where it had rolled. The skin, turned bloated by the damp, had a number of cuts running up and down the forearm. Defensive injuries?

Out in the damp air, it became clear just how bad the thing smelled, and it wasn’t just because the skin hadn’t been bathed in weeks.

‘A hand,’ Lei said with emphasis.

‘A hand,’ Ravel choked. ‘Sick. It’s sick. I think I’m going to be sick.’

Lei put a hand over her nose to try to block the smells out. ‘Don’t. If I smell vomit in addition to all this, then I’ll be sick too, and this whole thing is just going to get even sicker. I don’t think anybody wants that.’

‘What should we do? Should we call the police?’

‘I don’t know!’

‘What would your boss do?’

‘I don’t know about that either! I never know what he’s thinking. He usually just goes with the dumbest option available. He’d probably pick it up in his mouth and take it home. He doesn’t really care about hygiene.’

With some trouble, Ravel held back any more statements about how sick he was feeling. ‘Should… Should we bring it to him then? Would this kind of thing help him find and stop the killers he’s looking for?’

‘He’s only really looking for one killer.’ Lei’s eyes narrowed. ‘Come to think of it, I wonder what the cake-replacing protocol would be for this one. Would the Cake Killer bother replacing an arm? You know what, you’re right. Maybe we should take it with us after all.’ Lei suddenly began digging through her pockets and glancing at their surroundings, looking for something.

‘What are you looking for?’ Ravel asked timidly.

‘Don’t take your eyes off that thing,’ Lei instructed. ‘Stand real close to it, just in case there’s some lunatic out there waiting to snatch it away. I’m looking for something to pick that thing up with. It doesn’t look like I have any tissues or rags or anything with me. Dammit. Can we use your scarf?’

‘No,’ Ravel whined from his post over the arm. He touched the scarf lightly. ‘It’s special to me. It’s a keepsake… a keepsake from my dead mother, I mean grandmother! She brought it back after the war; she made it herself while she was visiting my grandfather. It’s made of the hairs of real redheaded children. There were so many of them killed in the war, it’s incredible. Their scalps were harvested and that’s what my grandfather was in charge of. It’s a… family heirloom. I plan to give it to my children.’

‘I thought you said there weren’t going to be any more lies,’ Lei said. ‘And that lie was especially disgusting. Please don’t tell that story again.’

‘I’m sorry. I won’t.’

‘Good. Huh. If I brought my jacket, I could use that, but I didn’t think I’d need it today. It’s still loaded with broken glass, it’s not like I could have worn it,’ Lei mused to herself. ‘Is there anything else?’

Her eyes shifted to the jacket on the bench. It reeked. As the sun peeked out from behind a cloud to shed light on the waterlogged city, the stains and tears in the old jacket came into full dazzling view. It really stank. But the bus was going to be there soon. Ravel was also looking at the jacket, but avoided saying anything. Lei sighed.

—

The bus skidded to a halt, sending up a crest of water from a pool that had gathered under the sidewalk. The unevenness of the road in this area trapped many puddles from escaping to the sewers where they belonged. The bus had parked right in front of one such puddle. When Lei and Ravel emerged from the bus with the stinking jacket, they planted their feet right into this puddle. As the unsympathetic bus driver shot off, they were hit with another spray of water kicked up by the tires.

After sending a few choice curses after the bus’s rear end, Lei staggered down the street to Val’s house. Ravel followed, wringing water from his shirt, scarf and the bundle of damp black fabric he was holding as far from his body as possible.

They came to Val’s front door. While Ravel was observing the street and its tumbleweeds of trash (which were now rather soggy) Lei rang the doorbell. She waited maybe ten seconds, then backed up a little and blitzed the door with a shoulder tackle. The door swung open and slammed into the wall behind it with a loud crack.

‘Is he okay with you doing that?’ Ravel asked in a voice that was straining to sound calm.

‘Morning, boss!’ Lei called into the house.

There was nobody in. Everything was still, there was not so much as the twitch of a cat’s whisker. Lei frowned and called out again. Ravel peered around the doorframe and took a fearful step in, unconsciously bringing the severed hand tighter to his chest. The hand did not appreciate being held in such a manner and dripped a dull reddish fluid onto Val’s wooden floor.

‘This place is huge,’ Ravel said breathlessly.

Lei took another brief survey of the house. Things seemed bizarrely peaceful and orderly. The television was on, showing the stock ticker as usual, filling the room with a steady stream of orchestral music. The chairs were aligned, either under the dining table or in the area in front of the television. The light over the sink was on, and there were no dirty dishes lying around as there usually were. A quick check revealed the dishwasher loaded with freshly cleaned plates and silverware. Val must have been doing some housework – at least, in some parts of the house.

A particular mess of note was where Val seemed to have emptied out one of his three refrigerators and put the contents all over the floor in front of it. It must have been one of his cake-holding fridges because there were seven cakes lined up side by side, all wrapped in foil or clear plastic. These cakes were in lousy shape, even worse off than the rotten-fruit monstrosity Lei had encountered on her first day. Their edges were all mashed in, icing pressed flat to the surface, they looked like they were moved often and not too carefully.

Apart from that, there were a few bottles of seltzer, a nearly empty jar of pickles, a slab of butter and a plastic tub of sliced turkey. Lei also saw a few opened tins of cat food. She hoped that Val had not gone ahead and eaten some just so his cat would do the same.

Next to the food lay four flat plastic rectangles, the kind that was inserted into grooes in refrigerators to make the shelves. Val had really cleaned everything out of his fridge. The food and racks had a fine layer of mist over their wrappings, still cold. They couldn’t have been left out very long.

‘Where is this guy?’ Ravel asked. He was still clinging to the black bundle they had brought in.

Lei tiptoed around the food and opened the center fridge. There were a few old blemishes on the white walls, but otherwise nothing.  It was completely emptied out. There was definitely space in there for a body or two. She closed the door and looked over at the side door. ‘Don’t know. He’ll turn up eventually.’

‘I guess we’ll wait,’ Ravel said. ‘Do you think he will mind if I put this down here?’ He lowered the swaddled hand onto one of Val’s cheaper-looking chairs very carefully, as though it were a baby, a cheap baby.

‘I doubt he’ll care, just put it anywhere you aren’t planning to eat on,’ Lei said.

Ravel quickly laid the jacket down on the chair where it continued to seep onto the floor. He then looked over himself for damages. Whatever had been festering on the jacket had transferred some brown slime to his arms. ‘Is there somewhere I can wash this off?’

‘Just use the sink in the kitchen. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the bathroom in this house. I assume he has one, though. Maybe it’s behind that door over there.’ Lei glanced over at the side door that Val often disappeared into. ‘I don’t actually know. That’s one part of the house I’ve never been in.’

‘Why is that?’

‘I’ve never been invited. Every time he goes in, he closes the door behind him. I assume it’s his bedroom, since there aren’t any blankets or nice pillows on the couches out here. It’s also where he seems to keep his clothes, and he doesn’t seem to wash those often so I can’t say I’m too eager to see them. He can keep that kind of thing private.’

‘That would explain some things,’ Ravel mumbled, ‘I thought his jacket from the other day looked an, uh… unnatural shade of brown.’

‘He also has this hideous shirt that he tried to wear out a few days ago. It looks like it’s made out of the corpses of ten other hideous shirts. Maybe he’ll try to wear it again today, if it’s the only clean one he has.’

At that moment, the middle refrigerator door opened and Val emerged out of it into the main room, looking cleaner than most people ever look in their life. He was wearing a freshly bleached button-down shirt and pressed black pants that Lei never would have suspected he even owned. His dark hair was looking almost unnaturally lustrous now that it was free of its usual corpse gunk or sewer slime or whatever else he usually wiped on it. He stopped with one foot out of the white walls and saw two dumbstruck kids sitting on his chairs.

His orange cat swirled around his feet and hopped out ahead of him. Val’s one eye flashed off color for a moment, but cleared as he recognized who he was seeing. He smiled innocently.

‘Morning, Lei. I’m cleaning the house.’

‘Oh, good,’ Lei said in a flat voice. ‘What were you doing in the fridge?’

‘I wasn’t in the fridge, I was cleaning the back of the house,’ Val said. He got out of the fridge and closed the stainless steel door behind him. He looked at the food he had left on the floor that was around his feet. ‘Oh, right. Hm. I should put all this back.’

‘You look all dressed up today. What’s the occasion?’ Lei asked.

‘I’m expecting somebody special,’ Val said happily. He looked around, as if he were expecting this special person to be in the room. He did not see them, and instead focused his disappointed eyes directly on Ravel.

‘H-hello,’ Ravel sputtered. ‘I don’t think I’m the person you were expecting. I’m not special at all. I can go now. Sorry to intrude.’

‘Not being special is nothing to be ashamed of. You aren’t thesomeone I was talking about, so there’s even less reason to feel down. But I have been expecting you. So this is the guy who was following us yesterday?’ Val asked Lei.

‘Yeah. His name’s Ravel. From what I gathered, he cares about catching killers too, and wants to help out. But he was scared that we were killers, which is why he was always watching us from afar.’

‘Us? Killers? That’s completely ridiculous,’ Val scoffed.

‘I know. It’s not like we’re completely unreasonable.’

‘I’m sorry if I offended you. Either of you. I just feel like there are so many murderers out there,’ Ravel said. ‘I really haven’t been able to trust anybody for a long time. That or they don’t trust me. Nobody I could trust believed me when I said there were killers out there until you guys, so I automatically assumed that I couldn’t trust you. I’m sorry.’

‘What a sad story,’ Val said. ‘But it’s true; you really can’t trust anybody out there, and they can’t trust you for that very same reason. But in here, you have to believe in yourself, and since you’re asking for a job, you must be very brave. You’re hired.’

‘What? No, I’m not here to-’

‘Oh, don’t worry if you aren’t free today. I’m always open to negotiate timetables with anybody who is willing to aid my pursuit of this corpse-stealing, cake-dropping fiend. A fiend who, to my shame, outsmarted me once again yesterday.’ Val sighed.

‘Don’t tell me you actually went back down to the sewers?’ Lei asked. But she already knew the answer without. He continued without comment.

‘If somebody wants to help, I’ll make time for them. You may have doubts, but it will be totally worth it, not just for the justice served but for the look on all those policemen’s faces when we unearth the hundreds – or thousands! – of bodies that have gone missing over the years. A real stat for the books. A thousand additional deaths on record, the town will never be the same! That will be the real reward! Just ask Lei.’

‘The real reward is I’ve made almost $3000 in two days,’ Lei deadpanned.

‘That all sounds very… interesting,’ Ravel said skeptically, thinking that he may have been right with his initial assumption that these two were not quite right in the head. ‘But if I may ask, what exactly is your job? Are you a detective?’

‘Sort of,’ Val said.

‘Don’t get him started,’ Lei advised quickly.

Val and Ravel hung in awkward silence after Lei’s interruption. Val turned his attention to the soggy black bundle lying on one of his living room chairs. He approached it brightly. ‘Well, back to the matters at hand. What did you bring me today? Smells fascinating.’

‘It’s not food this time.’

‘I’d beg to differ.’

Lei made a face. ‘Unwrap it and see.’

Val did so with great enthusiasm, tossing the sleeves aside to get to the prizes within. The waterlogged hand was pulled into sight. It reeked. The splayed out jacket didn’t soften the stench. Ravel turned away from it, looking quite green in the face.

‘Do you need the bathroom?’ Val offered. Ravel shook his head quickly, barely even recognizing he had been asked a question. Val shrugged and lifted the hand from its grimy bed. ‘Okay. It’s a hand.’

‘Ravel pulled it out of a vending machine this morning. I was wondering if this might be the sign of some particular killer. Or, uh, be something we can use to find the Cake Killer.’

Val looked at the hand intently and for a moment Lei was worried he was going to take a bite out of it just because he was that sort of person. But instead he stood up and walked over to his fridge. He opened the leftmost door’s freezer and dug around it in, pulling out a tray of things that were wrapped in plastic and looked suspiciously unlike food. He pulled the top piece off the pile and closed the fridge up again. He then held it up proudly for Lei and Ravel to see. They gawked.

It was a hand. That alone was quite striking but it was the same in color and boniness as the one they had found, and cut off in a similar place, in a similarly crude fashion. This one also had a number of cuts placed over the forearm as if they had been used to defend the owner from something. They must have belonged to the same person. It was the right hand to their left. Two peas in a pod. It just didn’t smell as bad, having been stored in a freezer.

‘Washed down the street this morning with the rest of the trash,’ Val said, looking back and forth between the two hands he held in his hands. ‘Normally this wouldn’t be my kind of thing, but I do know somebody who might be interested. Now that we have two, I think this is the perfect time to go pay him a visit.’

He threw one of the hands in Lei and Ravel’s direction. They both moved out of its path. It splattered to the ground, where they left it. Val walked over to the coat rack where his coat hung, looking suspiciously free of stain and slime. Lei never would have suspected it was such a vibrant shade of green when washed. Val suited up and eyed them. ‘Well? Grab your piece and let’s get moving.’

—

After noticing some hesitancy on the parts of Lei and Ravel, Val had agreed to put the dismembered hands into plastic bags for convenient transport, as being suspected of murder or lunacy by passerby tends to make things pretty inconvenient. But even with the hands concealed, Lei glanced nervously around them as they walked through the streets. Nobody seemed to staring straight at her, but there were more than few looks in their general direction.

They were probably looking at Val, who was swinging his bag around carelessly as he sauntered down the street in front of them. He was in an enormously good mood in addition to being ominously well-washed. He didn’t seem to care that he was toting a suspiciously shaped plastic bag and headed to the shadier parts of town.

Luckily, in these shadier parts of town, the streets cleared out a little, and Lei was put at ease. Ravel also stopped clinging to the bag so tightly. By then, the hand had leaked a good amount of juice into the plastic bag, but he wouldn’t notice until he went to get it out later. Val began inspecting the uniformly colored and shaped buildings around them for the one where his acquaintance lived.

They were all taller than the buildings in Val’s area, but more poorly maintained, ugly and square. There did not seem to be anybody living in any of these flats. Windows were heavily boarded up, and smashed where they were not. There was graffiti on walls, some left incomplete because the dilapidated fire escape had collapsed under the artist’s feet as they were working and sent them and their cans of paint falling to the ground. There were even some bottles of spray-paint left, but Lei was grateful that there were at least no bodies lying around.

Val finally stopped in front of a particularly terrible looking piece of work labeled #88, an old reddish brick block with only cracked concrete carvings as decoration, simple, uneven swirls resembling snails, enormous snails sticking to the walls. Lines of black mold were crawling up from the ground and down from the top where dampness gathered, building up in the numerous cracks and between the curls of the concrete snails. Every single window was broken, leaving bare holes into the building, but all there was to see of the rooms was walls and ceilings that were bare, if you didn’t count the stains. Perhaps as expected of the day, the place stank to high heaven.

It must have been again all sorts of housing regulations. No wonder nobody was living in it.

Lei approached Val warily. ‘Are you sure this is your friend’s house? If it is… it looks like they probably don’t want anyone going in there for a while.’

‘What makes you say that?’ Val asked, walking up to the door that was plastered with at least three large signs that shouted CONDEMNED – DO NOT ENTER. He gave it few firm knocks, right on the signs. The old unlocked door creaked open and, with a dying croak, snapped off one of its hinges.

Val patted the ruined door like it was a cat. ‘Look at that, the house is even welcoming us in. Would that happen if someone didn’t want us here?’

Lei chose not to say anything as Val jumped right into the awaiting hallway, plastic bag swinging behind him. She looked at Ravel blankly and shrugged.

The house smelled of wet trash and rot. It was no surprise. There was a great deal of trash lying around, and the walls were so ingrained with rot that some were darkened in huge patches by some kind of fungal growth. The floor was almost entirely black where anything was exposed, where there was carpet, things were even more unsightly. The humidity had peeled the paint and warped the doors and generally just made everything smell awful in such an enclosed space. The windows provided little to no light or wind, surrounded as they were by other tall buildings.

Val and his assistants creaked slowly through the hall that must have been a lobby at some point to an outcropping wall on the far side of the room, with strange, evenly cut indents. Val tapped the wall in the center, and a little ring of orange light appeared, surrounding a triangle pointing up. Upon closer inspection, Lei saw he had just pressed the button for an elevator.

There was a whirring and rattling from within the building with the effort to bring it to him. They heard the elevator car latch into place with a sickening crunch, followed by a screech as the hideously filthy wall split itself apart, grinding against the walls, to invite the waiting passengers in. The lights inside flickered. The walls and floor appeared to be covered with a shell of flimsy plywood and not much else.

‘I’m amazed that this place has a functioning elevator,’ Lei said.

‘Of course it does. My friend lives here. They can’t let the building go to waste.’ He stepped in calmly. The cab bounced slightly with his weight, as though on a bungee cord, and settled. One light bulb in its ceiling finally burst with the stress.

‘I think I’ll walk up the stairs,’ Ravel said hoarsely.

‘I’m afraid you can’t,’ Val said. ‘A fire burned a hole in the stairway between the third and fifth floor a few years back. It was quite the fire. Luckily, nobody died, even though the stairs burned out. They all got out using the untouched elevator. See, this elevator has saved lives; it is our friend in this mission. Don’t be afraid.’

Ravel desperately looked for a way out. Lei grit her teeth and dragged him over to the elevator. ‘We’re in a dangerous business anyway. Falling down an elevator shaft might be better than hacked apart by a mass murderer. Just get in.’ She turned to Val. ‘What floor?’

‘The roof.’

—

The elevator embarked on a jerky journey up twelve floors, hovering weakly between some of them as if to catch its breath. When this happened, Ravel had to lean his shoulder on the wall and catch his breath too. It took several minutes to get to the rooftop. But they did not fall down the elevator shaft.

The doors creaked open and Lei saw, not for the first time, what she was not expecting to see. Firstly, this floor didn’t fit in with the whole abandoned-death trap theme of the rest of the building. It was clean, the floors were of glossy white tile, and it was well lit, with plenty of sunlight and a great view of the deep blue sky and some of the taller buildings cutting through it.

The cleanliness wasn’t the only off-putting thing. It was not like a normal apartment rooftop either. It was covered up, sealed away from the outside by windows in a metal frame. It was a large enclosure made of glass, covering the top of the building, with a slight curve at the top of its frame, creating  done. It was effectively a huge rooftop greenhouse. Its contents were appropriately green as well.

Lei wandered between the rows of glass tables lining the area in front of the elevator. They were topped with flowerpots and crates filled with soil, but only the rows to the far left of the room were blooming. There were pots overflowing with everything from everyday pansies and tulips and common berry bushes to strange pink orchids and some unfamiliar white fruit. The plants were all in amazingly good shape, but not immune to the effects of fall. The ripe fruit and flowers cast a scent of heaven compared to the floor below. They were growing yellow and red, and were missing leaves in places, and what few that had were turned up at the clear roof, at the sun.

Some vines rooted in a pot near the wall had even clawed their way up the metal framework of the house, and been neglected for so long that they progressed over to the ceiling. A few hung down in loose, waving tendrils over the walkway.

‘So your friend also has crazy taste in housing,’ Lei said.

‘I came up with the idea first,’ Val muttered.

Lei raised an eyebrow.

‘We have the same architect.’ Val looked up, looked around with just a trace of smugness. ‘But this guy decided to go for the glass house first. It’s harder for him to expand, though; not much space to move once you’ve covered the whole rooftop.’

‘Where is this guy, anyway?’ Ravel asked, clutching the hand in the bag.

‘I don’t know. Maybe he’s not home.’

This did seem to be somebody’s home. There was actually a makeshift living area on the farthest side of the massive glass room, a bed, table and couch had been moved in, along with a tub under a faucet, a stove and of course, a fridge. Like Val’s, this refrigerator was bigger than one person should ever need. It was even bigger than Val’s. It had four doors in addition to a freezer (enough to store a whole two bodies more.)

‘Hello? Anybody home?’

‘Maybe he’s in the fridge,’ Lei suggested. ‘That’s where some people like to hide out.’

‘Nah. Like I said, he doesn’t have space to build extensions.’  Val skirted the right side of the room, with the less prosperous pots, towards a glass door that had been left open on the side. He stuck his head out and looked out and around it then drew his head back in. ‘You know what – I suspect he’s out.’

‘What, did he jump off the balcony or something?’

‘Well, he did leave the balcony door open.’

Lei stared incredulously at Val for a while. ‘So… is there any point in waiting for him to get back? Is he going to want to take a look at these hands even after taking a leap off a twelfth-storey balcony?’

‘I guess we’ll know when he gets back,’ Val said.

Lei looked at Ravel and shook her head. Ravel looked away, letting the bag sag at his side.

‘Throw that hand in the fridge before it goes bad, new assistant,’ Val instructed. ‘Old assistant, take a look at his desk and see what news you can find about dismemberments in the city.’

‘There’s been more than one case of dismemberment? I didn’t realize it was such a big problem,’ Lei said, heading over to the desk.

‘You did not realize murder was a problem, either. But they’re connected. Dismemberment is like a subset of murder, especially when it involves heads and necks.’

‘Are there a lot of them, too? Murderers hacking off limbs?’

‘Hey, I wouldn’t know. That this guy’s area of expertise.’

‘The guy who you say jumped off the balcony?’

‘Naturally.’ Val made a face. ‘Who else would I be talking about?’

‘The refrigerator is full of human feet!’ Ravel screamed, reeling away from the door he had opened.

‘Well, then that’s not the one you’re looking for,’ Val snapped. ‘You can’t put a hand in the foot fridge! Close the door before they thaw out!’

‘Then… then which one should I open?’

‘There are only four doors.  Your chance of finding the right one has increased by 25 percent. Here, let me – oh, this one has the heads. Wow, he’s got to empty this sometime. Okay, next one –’

Lei left Val to deal with a traumatized Ravel while she dug around the desk. It overlooked a particularly decrepit street, but had a great view of the skyline. There were just miles of quiet, run-down buildings backed by the glaring sky. She had to admit, the city didn’t look too bad if you kept your eyes up and forward.  Lei was distracted momentarily by the aerial view until Val called over to her.

‘Can I have a piece of paper and a pen? I want to write this guy a note so he doesn’t think the gremlins invaded his house again and left stuff in his fridge.’

‘Huh? Gremlins…? You know what, never mind. Just wait a moment.’

The desk had quite a few papers, but it was not as much of a wreck as Val’s desk was. The papers were stacked and held together with paperclips and clamps. They seemed to be numbered, too. But numbers were as much as Lei could read of them. They were in a foreign language that didn’t involve any recognizable characters, and to further secure their contents, all of the sheets were handwritten in someone’s explosively messy scrawl.

Lei flipped through one stack of papers for anything pertaining to the killers, or for a blank piece of paper for Val to write his note. All of the papers seemed very thoroughly used, completely covered in lines of unreadable characters. Lei continued flipping through the stacks, not inspecting the sheets very carefully anymore, until one caught her eye.

It was in quite a thin pile of papers, so it was more noticeable even though it was in the same unknown language. It was also in a different handwriting, each character was more slender and spiked, larger as though the writer had less of a grip on the language, and somewhat familiar. It was addressed to a person only referred to as R. It was signed with a familiar V.

The irresponsible writer of the letter had only used about a third of the page for their letter, making it the closest thing to a blank page Lei was going to find. She pulled it out of its pile and started searching for a pen. She scanned the desktop, and searched for drawers, and came up with none. There didn’t seem to be much other than stacks of paper. Finally, embedded in one of the stacks, she pulled a thick blue highlighter. In that stack, there were a good number of sheets written in blue highlighter.

‘Maybe your friend is out buying some new writing implements,’ Lei suggested.

‘He may very well be.’

‘I found this,’ Lei said, holding up the letter as well as the highlighter. ‘I have to say I’m surprised you two actually know each other and you didn’t just want us to break into a stranger’s house to sightsee.’

‘Of course not, I’m all about business,’ Val said. ‘And if he wasn’t relevant to the case, why would he have all this?’ He opened the fridge closest to him.

If Ravel had stumbled onto the foot fridge, and Val had opened the head and arm fridge in turn, this had to be the fridge for torsos. And there were a good number of them, too, maybe ten or more. The torsos, being more voluminous than heads or hands, had a bit of trouble fitting into the fridge. They were closely packed and one very pale, very grungy looking body looked about to slip out of its position. But these weren’t details that Lei was taking in. These were torsos with no arms, legs or hands. There were frayed brown stumps where these things should be. The stumps were dry, but they were so brutally cut that anybody would know that the removals had been made as unpleasant as possible.

‘My friend is serious about this. I am too. Although it’s not as nice to think about as the Cake Killer, dismemberment in a big problem, and one I can be concerned with if the need arises!’

‘I get the point. Would you close that thing already?’ Lei complained.

‘I’m glad you understand.’ Val closed the door. He took the paper and highlighter and began scribbling out a note to his friend. He began it the same way, with an R. He then tapped his temple in thought. ‘Hmm, what to say…’

‘What does it say?’ Lei asked. ‘The language, I mean… is it Chinese? Japanese? You know it?’

Val looked at the letter and shifted his eyes back to Lei. ‘Do you?’

‘Not a word.’

‘Me neither.’

Lei’s eyes narrowed. Val turned his attention back to the paper and threw a few lazy words onto the paper – in English. He signed it with his signature single V.

2x hands in fridge. you should come visit sometime! v.

‘Right, now we just have to wait for him to contact us back,’ Val said, sticking the note to the fridge containing the torsos with a magnet shaped like a flower. ‘We’re done here for now. Let’s head back. I’m starving. How about some cereal?’

‘I think I’ll pass,’ Ravel said, looking sicker than ever before and standing next to the elevator anxiously ready to go.

‘I know I’ve asked this a few times, but are you sure your friend is going to be okay?’ Lei muttered. ‘I know you’re not concerned, but I mean, we’re twelve floors up… should we even be expecting him to come back at all?’

‘He leaves like this all the time’ Val assured her. ‘It’s no big deal.’

‘By jumping off the balcony?’ Ravel asked faintly.

‘We can come by later, if you two are so worried.’ Val pressed the elevator button, smiling with amusement at Lei and Ravel’s incredulous concern. ‘He might even come back via the balcony. I wouldn’t blame him if he did. It’s sure as hell safer than this ancient elevator!’

The elevator rattled into place, and creaked its doors apart in front of them. The three of them got in. Ravel took one last look over the greenhouse. In the midday sun, it was amazingly bright and warm. It was even brighter and warmer than the world outside. It was somehow stifling. It wasn’t just the trapped air, though; there was something stifling beyond that. Something trying to claw its way up from below. But there was nobody living below, of course.

Lei grabbed the back of Ravel’s scarf and pulled him into the elevator as its faulty wiring threatened to cave shut and leave without him. And so they were taken back to the cool, shadowy, and altogether more familiar earth below.

—

When the three of them returned to Val’s house, they tackled open the door and were greeted with a warm, buttery smell. This was because Val had forgotten to put the slab of butter back in the fridge. It had melted all over where it was left on the floor and the cat had tasted it, stepped in it, then tread buttery tracks all around the house. While Val attended to the situation, Ravel sat down on an armchair in front of the TV and evaluated his day so far.

‘Lei, I think your boss is insane. We should call the police.’

‘Val’s crazy, but it’s not like he’s done anything illegal, yet,’ Lei said.

‘I meant we should call about the whole dismembering business, not on him specifically,’ Ravel continued. ‘Although the fact that he has a colleague keeping body parts in a fridge in a greenhouse does make me worry.’

‘Sorry about the butter,’ Val apologized as he threw the floor cleaner back into the cabinet under the sink. ‘I know you spent your own money on it, Lei. I can pay you back.’

‘Don’t worry about it. You’re paying me anyway.’

‘That is true,’ Val sighed. ‘And you are working so well considering the meager amount I’ve given you. Now that I have two assistants I might need to rethink that. Maybe I will give you a raise. Or maybe you two can share out the payments-‘

‘You don’t have to pay me. I don’t know how long I’m going to be here, anyway. This is all a little too much for me. The body parts and stuff. All on the first day. Knowing that killers could be anywhere…’ Ravel spoke so genuinely Lei thought he would bolt right then and there.

‘Nonsense,’ Val scoffed, ‘You’ll get used to it. And looking for killers is the best way to never encounter one. The universe never lets you find what you’re looking for. I mean, I haven’t found the Cake Killer yet, have I?’

‘Maybe if you were searching for a killer that was actually killing people, you’d have an easier time finding them,’ Lei said under her breath. ‘Or they would have an easier time finding you.’ Val heard her.

‘Whoa, all have some cereal and calm down. I won’t have death threats and negativity being thrown around in this house.’

Val immediately went to help himself to two bowls and a spoon. He opened the cabinet above the sink, revealing at least ten boxes of various types of cereal that were all radiant colors and no doubt loaded with sugar. He filled two bowls with a cereal that resembled tiny rainbow stars with chocolate chunks, drowned both bowls with milk, then put one on the floor. As he dug into his own bowl, he whistled the flimsiest whistle Lei had ever heard (with a mouth full of cereal, no less,) which called his cat over from under the stairs. The two started crunching away on their breakfast.

Ravel observed all this in mortified silence.

Lei shook her head and walked over to the television, turning it on. It was stocks as usual. A poorly recorded symphony was playing over the scrolling letters and numbers on screen and cereal crunching in mouths. Lei groaned, but the groan went unheard over the other noises. As the orchestra swelled, there was a screech from the street outside, and a knock on the door. Since Val made to effort to move away from his meal, Lei went over to see what it was.

She yanked the door open and came face to face with the front of a black jacket emblazoned with a skull, a snake, the words DAILY PANTS. The wearer of the jacket was a six-foot-tall biker with gristly bleached hair and a face like a bull with self-inflicted piercings. His bike was parked behind him. It was also black, emblazoned with a skull and a snake.

‘I have something for the owner of the house,’ he rumbled.

‘Just a moment,’ Lei said, and slammed the door shut. ‘Val, it’s one of those bikers. He has something for you.’

Rolling his eyes, Val hauled himself off his seat with his bowl and spoon, and sagged over to the door. He wrestled it open and looked his visitor up and down. ‘Good afternoon, sir. I hear you have something to give me?’

The biker nodded, unsmiling, then clenched a fist behind his back and, without warning, brought it forward up into Val’s face. He knuckled stopped just short of his nose. With the tight, hammy fist he held up a plastic bag that was covering something long, thin and foul. ‘Washed up from the sewers this afternoon. Put a bunch of guys off their lunch.’

Val  clipped the spoon with his mouth and used his freed hand to take the bag. ‘Thank you for your time, sir. Would you like to come in for something to eat?’

The biker’s bulldog face collapsed for a second as he looked over Val’s festively colored bowl of sugary goodness. But he pulled his face back into position quickly and turned back towards his motorcycle. ‘Not today. We’ve got a meeting over at the hospital parking lot. Two buddies of mine were hospitalized last night after driving through a window. We’re going to sign some get-well cards for them.’

‘I’m sorry to hear.’

‘They drove right through that window and fell two floors to the ground,’ the biker said gruffly.

‘Buildings are such dangerous creatures,’ Val said. ‘They are made to be used in such precise manners. When someone leaves them by some alternate means you never know if they are going to come back or not.’

The bike gave him one odd glance and decided not to take this line of conversation any further. ‘I should really be going now.’ He pulled on his black helmet, which also had a snake and a skull on it.

‘Alright then,’ Val said. ‘Thanks for your help. Drive safely.’ He waved at his friend with both occupied hands as the bike rumbled off. Then he backed into the house and kicked the door closed. He dropped the plastic bag onto the chair next to Ravel. ‘Getting mail is always so exciting. Open it for me while put my cereal away.’

Ravel peeled part of the plastic back and peeked into the bag. He grimaced and pulled away. Curious, Lei walked over carefully and took a look for herself. She backed off in a similar manner. It was human’s foot. She had not looked very carefully, and the wetness had taken its toll on the flesh, but if she were to guess, she would say it belonged to the same person as the hands. It had been chopped off at the thigh and was also covered in scratches, much like the hands. It was a foot though, and in the way of a long-unwashed dead foot, it stank worse than any other.

‘Those bikers are a real help,’ Val mumbled while shoveling the last of his cereal into his mouth. He dumped the bowl into the sink. ‘It’s surprising how much ground they cover. I had them on the lookout since I found the hand in the ditch this morning. It’s amazing what effort they put in for minimum wage, but I’m grateful.’

‘Wow,’ Lei said. ‘You’re like something out of Conan Doyle’

‘Don’t be crazy, I don’t even own one of those detective hats.’

‘Well, Holmes didn’t really wear a hat in the original series,’ Ravel said quietly.

‘Well you two don’t wear hats either. Does that make you famous detectives?’

‘I don’t see why you’re-‘

‘Forget about the hats,’ Lei commanded. ‘Val, I thought you said this kind of thing didn’t concern you. Why did you have that biker look out for more body parts?’

Val stared her blankly in the eyes as if she were saying something preposterous. His eyes flickered, scraping together an answer in the back of his mind. Who knew what the front of his mind was doing. Finally, he came out of his trance.

‘Oh, yes. You remember, when you brought the hand in this morning, you asked if it can help us catch the Cake Killer. The answer is “sort of.” As far as I know, the Cake Killer doesn’t take body parts, so I just give them to my friend at #88 to help him find the dismemberer. But I’m always on the lookout for full bodies. I have a pact with my friend that if we find a full set of body parts, I get the body, since my goals take priority over his.’

‘Are you kidding?’

‘So whenever I find a body part, I get the bikers to look for them for a few weeks in case they’re lying around in plain sight.’

‘Isn’t it easier to just go looking for new bodies?’ Lei asked. ‘They seem to be all over the place.’

‘For some of those bikers, it’s their only source of income, I can’t let them down.’ Val walked over to the bag and lifted the foot out, slime, stink and all. It was certainly bloated with copious amount of both. He looked over it lovingly. ‘And I’ve never actually managed to pull together a whole body so… I am interested in seeing what the Cake Killer does. In the meantime, two arms and a leg do not a body make. They’re still his. We should drop this off at my friend’s house. Come on.’

‘You mean the greenhouse?’

‘If you want to call it that.’

‘I was hoping I’d never have to ride that elevator again for the rest of my life,’ Lei grumbled.

‘We’re going back there?’ Ravel asked dimly. ‘But we just came back.’

‘The life of a detective is a hard one,’ Val replied, throwing the leg back into the bag with a gruesome splash. Ravel flinched as the bag set up a spray of rainwater, blood and other fluids one would rather not think about.

Ignoring him, Val pulled his coat over his white shirt that was less spotless than it had been earlier that day. ‘Ravel, grab that bag for me, will you? And Lei, bring a nice pen so I don’t have to write the note in highlighter this time.’

Lei looked at Ravel. Ravel stared back. Lei shrugged and Ravel looked like he was going to break out screaming. But he didn’t. He got up and picked up the bag, not even caring that it did not conceal the leg very well. So he got to hold the body bag again. Lei held the ball-point pen. Val held nothing, but marched just as happily has he had that morning. He whistled his horrible whistle all the way. Dozens of headaches were conceived, and even once they were out of the downtown area, the air of the empty alleys around building #88 trembled as if with pain.

—

‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ Ravel said again over the creaking of the elevator doors closing.

The noon sunlight blaring through the glass walls made the house hotter than ever. The leafy tendrils of the overhanging vines seemed distorted and warped by the air. With their red and yellowing leaves, the room blazed like fire. The only signs of the cooling winds of autumn going on outside was the weak breeze coming in from the open balcony door on the right ride of the room. Squinting through the haze, Lei saw that most distant reaches of house were cast over with a strange darkness. Someone had pulled a cover over the living area in the back. That had not been there before. And that meant only one thing.

‘Someone’s been here,’ Lei choked.

‘Of course,’ Val said. ‘Someone does live here, even if he doesn’t use the elevator to go downstairs. I wish you would stop talking about my friend as if he doesn’t exist.’ He walked through the blazing air between the rows between the glass tables and into the shadows ahead.

‘But we were here about an hour ago,’ Lei said, hastily following him. ‘We didn’t see anyone coming or going.’ The ground burned underneath her feet where the sun was beaming through the glass roof and driving into the white tile below. ‘And if he came home, why isn’t he here now? Why leave so quickly?’

‘If you haven’t noticed yet, this is not the best place for a greenhouse, and even worse for a greenhouse you are going to be living in,’ Val squinted out of the canopy over the burning white under the sun. ‘The architect told him, but no, he wouldn’t listen…’

Ravel started making his way over, but was so blinded by the glare that he stumbled into one of the many glass tables almost immediately. He reached his hands out to guide himself.

‘Don’t touch anything for too long!’ Val called, ‘It’s probably all burning hot!’

While Val was shouting out guidance, Lei looked around for any signs of the mysterious visitor, or homeowner, whoever he was. The sunspots in her eyes took a while to clear. Apart from the canopy being pulled up, there didn’t seem to be much changed about the room. The tub was empty and dry; the desk papers were exactly as she had left them, highlighter on top of the pile of papers. She wasn’t really willing to open the fridges to check out their horrific contents, but she supposed that Val would open them himself to put the foot in whenever Ravel managed to make his way over.

On the door of one of the fridges, Lei spotted one small difference. She leaned closer to the note that Val had pinned to the fridge with the flower-shaped magnet. In the same blue highlighter, another line of text had been added, a reply from the friend.

But it was in the foreign language, the same scribbled handwriting that all the papers on the desk were in. She couldn’t read it. She tried to commit some of the symbols to memory, for reference later, but the writing was so illegible that she could barely make out anything but the simplest of shapes, most of which just looked like stars and trees of varying complexity.

‘Look at that awful handwriting. He really murdered that highlighter,’ a voice said from over her shoulder. Lei turned around abruptly at the sound and ended up jamming her shoulder right into Val’s chin which he had placed directly in the path of a beating- again. He gave a cry of pain. ‘You did it again! I bit my tongue!’

‘Maybe if you gave me some elbow room, I wouldn’t have to!’

Val whined incoherently and nursed his bruised jaw. He waved a hand lamely over at the paper. ‘My friend wrote me a note. Can I get a closer look at it?’

Grumbling, Lei snapped the sheet off the fridge and threw it into Val’s hands. He looked over it for a while, focused like a laser on the single line added.  It took him quite a while to finish reading it. Finally, he raised his gaze up again and stared into space, getting his thoughts in order. Lei inched forward, skeptical that the note had been anything that revolutionary. Val was very still, until she was just a foot away. Before she could see the message again, Val burst forward and ripped open one of the fridge doors.

‘Lei, pull Ravel over here before he hurts himself and drops that foot. We need to get these pieces together. I can’t believe I missed something so obvious!’

Lei was more than happy to go and drag Ravel out of his white-hot glass hell maze and leave Val to flip through the piles of dismembered arms lying in the fridge.

When Val came across the two arms they had put in the fridge earlier that day, he gave a victorious whoop and pulled them free from their cohorts, and shoved the fridge door shut. Lei came over, leading a bewildered Ravel by the sleeve, just in time to see Val sweep all the papers on the desk to the side and toss the arms down in their place. He then returned to the fridge complex yelling, ‘Put the leg on the table!’

Lei went about this a little less eagerly. She tried to pull the leg out of the bag as cleanly as possible, and failed miserably. Blood and sludge oozed out of the bag and all over the table. She hastily moved the papers to the floor, as far from the table as possible. She then moved to try to contain the situation on the table.

‘Look at this, look at this!’ Val called. He charged over and slapped down another leg on the table, upsetting its twin in the bag. Lei gagged as the fluids in the bag let loose another spray, turning the desk an unpleasant shade of red, like steak juice but not quite so aromatic.

Stepping away from the desk, Lei looked over the scene. Two hands, scarred and cold, and now two feet. A pair of each on a cheap, soiled plastic desk. A wonderful sight if you were loose a few screws.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Val babbled. ‘I didn’t expect another piece to turn up so quickly, but this guy really gets around. My friend the gardener, I mean, not the body parts! Although that description works there too, ha ha ha-‘

‘Val,’ Lei said through gritted teeth, ‘I’m glad your friend is helping you find the body, but we didn’t need to lay this stuff out on the table to take inventory. I’m pretty sure we can all count to four body parts without seeing them in front of us.’

‘Ah, but it’s not numbers we’re looking for, but words.’ Val laid his now grime-covered hands on the frozen left hand they had found. He turned the hand around, flipped it sideways, extended its wrist, folded it, and seeing what he was looking for, smiled. He laid the hand down on the desk, with its scars up for his assistants to see.

‘You see, my friend’s English isn’t the best.’ Val found what he was looking for on the next hand much more quickly, and lay that one down too, scars up. ‘He really gets around, and he always sees things that nobody else can, but he can’t always read them. So while he spotted these things first, he needs me to read them. Do you see what it is yet?’ Val turned up the frozen leg now, and reached over for the one in the bag.

Lei and Ravel bent over the frozen arms and inspected them closely. It must have been the scars Val wanted them to see, as each limb was now lying with the scars facing up. But Lei didn’t see any words, much less anything in English. But in comparison to the handwriting of Val and his friend, the cuts did seem a little more carefully lined up. Maybe they were not just defensive wounds after all.

Frowning, Lei leaned closer. With the humidity, and the fact that nobody was tending to them, the scars had ended up pretty vicious looking, probably more vicious than had been intended.  Skin was peeling and missing in chunks at some areas, slipped off in odd triangular shapes. Some cuts were very thick and some were just grazes. But when you thought about what it must have looked like before the rain got into them, and the skin peeled and the bits were thrown into wet bags and tossed around before being transported into a fridge, the cuts could be perceived as somewhat organized.

The triangular shapes were actually the loops of “a’s” or “e’s.” When you pushed as upturned flap of skin down, a crescent shaped scar turned into a “u,” a sharp one may be a “v.” A message took shape. It became clear that someone had tried to cram far too much into each limb with an inappropriate writing utensil.

The left arm said, ‘Friends beware,’ the right arm said, ‘Everybody you see,’ the left leg, ‘I leave today.’ Val placed the last leg down gently onto its bag. This one said, ‘Don’t look back.‘

The three were very silent. There was nothing but the sound of the wind blowing through the door, rustling through the leaves.

‘That wasn’t very helpful,’ Val said slowly, not eager to break the dumbfounded silence. ‘Of course everybody is dangerous. I could have told you that. Except for the last part, of course, I’m not leaving anytime soon.’

‘Sounds like somebody was in trouble,’ Ravel muttered. ‘But why cut up a body to send a message to a friend?’

‘It doesn’t sound complete, either,’ Lei said. ‘We’re still missing a few body parts. Maybe the message is longer than that. I mean, who knows what they wrote on the torso. Or… the head.’

‘And who were they sending it to? These things have been turning up all over the place!’ Val rubbed the filth on his hand all over the side of his face pensively. Lei and Ravel both took a step away from him. ‘Maybe the rain messed up the plan. Two of them did come out of sewers. But the one in the vending machine had to be on purpose.’

‘Where did your friend pick up that other leg?’ Lei asked. ‘Did his message say anything?’

Val looked briefly over the paper he still had in his hand. ‘Nope.’

‘Can I see it?’

There was an awful moment where Val gave Lei a look so guilty a policeman (even the policemen of such a ridiculous town) would have nabbed him on the spot. He then set his shifty eyes on the paper. And then, in an instant, he tore it into three pieces, crumpled them up and put them in his mouth, along with whatever corpse goo had transferred from his hand. Ravel made a croak like a frog. Lei’s jaw could have dropped to the ground floor.

‘What the hell is wrong with you?’

Val chewed no more than twice, and swallowed. He back towards the desk, scrutinizing the shocked faces of his assistants. Before either could make another remark, he raised a finger to his mouth and whispered, ‘Shhh… someone is listening.’

He looked up at the canopy. Ravel and Lei did so to. Although it blocked out the sunlight, darkening the entire living area, there was a particularly dark spot sitting right above their heads. It was not too heavy to fall through the glass, but not so light that it was unnoticeable. It may have been a trick of the light or the sagging tarp, but when you stared long enough, part of it seemed to move.

‘It’s a person all right,’ Lei murmured. ‘Maybe two. Is there a crowbar around here?’

‘What do we do? Should we try to leave? They’ll definitely hear the elevator if we try…’ Ravel looked about them in a panic.

‘Let’s try this,’ Val said, edging towards the side of the room. Lei’s eyes widened as he reached out gave the canopy a heroic yank.

The tarp fell away from the ceiling – and all over the room and inhabitants below. Lei threw her arms up and pawed the rough material out of the way as it rained down, cursing Val as she could over the rustling. It wasn’t until she managed to wrestle her way out of the tarp that she saw the rustling was coming more from the upset stacks of paper she had laid on the floor. She didn’t get a good look at them, though. The light hit her eyes like bricks, sending her reeling for cover. Through tears and heavy squinting, she saw a shadow up above make a break for the right side of the roof – where the balcony door was. She raised her boots onto the fallen canopy and followed, barely able to see where she was going. She ran right into something hard about waist height, and almost collapsed.

‘Look out for the table!’ Ravel called out.

‘Too late,’ Lei whimpered. She steadied herself. At least now she was seeing clearly – as clearly as one could in that dazzling light beaming through the greenhouse roof. The shadow travelling across it was casting an impossibly deep black cloud over the floor, a cloud drifting a lightning speed towards the balcony with the clang of shoes on glass as it went. Lei set her eyes on the shadow and followed it. She vaulted over the table and ducked out the balcony door just as the listener reached the same spot.

As soon as she exited the greenhouse, she felt the wind roaring all around her. She had to stop to readjust her balance and vision again. The glass dome in front of her glowed like a second sun, one that was close, almost too close and too hot. But on that sun, there was a large, strangely shaped sunspot right in her face. She couldn’t make out many distinguishing features, but it was human shaped, panting like a human, all human except for its hands, one of which sagged at its side like a club, the other tipped with a third sun, a square burst of light that caught Lei in her unfortunate eyes as soon as she noticed it.

‘Lei, did you stop him?’ came Val’s voice from some far-off planet, or from within the sun.

She blinked several times, very fast. And as luck would have it, a cloud drifted overhead. The dazzling dome faded slightly, and she was able to see what was in front of her just before it passed by.

Perhaps it was unsurprising that it was yet another man in a large black hood, with deep eyes and a rude stare. Lei barely had to look at these features now to know that she wasn’t going to get anything useful out of them. What she was interested in, was the thing in its hand, what had looked like a club. It was, also perhaps unsurprisingly, a human torso, scarred and thoroughly dismembered, ready for delivery to the killer’s ‘friends’. The other hand held the square sun, which was in fact an axe.

While a very striking image for a photographer, to Lei none of this was all that surprising.

‘What are you going to do next?’ Lei taunted as calmly as she could. She tensed herself to dodge the axe and catch the torso if they were to pass by her in any way. The axe, of course, would take priority. ‘Scream like all your friends? Why don’t you actually surprise me?’

Shockingly, the killer took her up on that offer.

First, he looked down at his feet, at the glass. He seemed to be considering something, perhaps regarding the greenhouse. His eyes were hidden, but his body sagged, he seemed more anxious than angry at the whole ordeal. Lei frowned. He was unnervingly still. Then, ready to bid goodbye to his precious foothold, just as the clouds moved on to reveal the raging sun again, he jumped.

Lei’s vision was hit with the dual impacts of the sun bursting free from the clouds, then blacked out again by the shadow leaping over her, a shadow with an axe and a human torso trailing behind it. She dropped to the floor instinctively, and the whole mass soared overhead and then dropped over the side of the balcony. All she saw when she turned around was the tip of the black hood disappearing behind the wall of red brick, and after a moment, the starts of the scream, the long and dire, expected scream – but all that was cut off with a crack and a smash of something either hitting trash cans at a high speed.

Then, other than some metallic rattling, there was nothing.

Bracing herself, Lei stood up and look a single glance over the balcony wall. It was, as she thought, a long twelve floors down. At the bottom, on the grey concrete street right below, a gathering of empty trash cans had been upset, and had burst from their neat little rows into an explosion all over the street. There was a patch of red spreading from the middle of the mess. The metal can lids, catching the harsh sunlight, blinked up at her in a daze where they were not splattered. Among them, a single square sun stood still and upright, embedded in a crack in the sidewalk.

‘What happened?’ Val cried as he emerged out of the doorway. ‘Wow, it’s bright out here.’

‘Good news, bad news. The good news is, I think the killer is taken care of,’ Lei said. ‘And if we get down there, we might be able to find another body part.’

‘Oh?’ Val said, peering down. ‘I see. Too bad for him. His message did say he was leaving today and not looking back. But that’s not important. What’s the bad news?’

‘The bad news,’ Lei said, turning back inside, ‘Is that if you still think your friend somehow jumped off this balcony and lived, he’s not going to be very happy about what we did to his house.’ She looked in and saw Ravel still untangling himself from the canopy, papers in some foreign language flying all around him. The desk in the corner had been spared the dropped canopy, but the arms and legs had fallen off the table and were not roasting on under the greenhouse sun, they appeared to be melting.

‘I think I hear the police,’ Ravel said dismally. Sure enough, there were sirens off in the distance. ‘How are we going to explain this?’

‘Let’s get downstairs before we think about that,’ Val said, ignoring the mess and heading straight for the elevator. Lei looked over the mess for a moment, rubbed her eyelids, and decided not to think about it either. She headed to the elevator too.

‘Oh, Lei, did you bring a pen for me?’

‘Yeah. Still thinking of leaving a message?’

‘Of course. I’m not that uncourteous.’ Val snatched a piece of paper that had blown all the way to the other side of the room, and took the pen from Lei’s hand. He tapped his against his corpse-stained face in thought. ‘Hm, he never leaves much extra space on his notes. I’ll have to keep this short and sweet. I know–’

There was a break in. We scared them off. You’re welcome

Val dashed over to the fridge and pinned the note on with another flower-shaped magnet. Then he ran back over to the elevator and tripped on the tarp, laughing to himself. As their boss waded through the canopy he had brought down himself, Ravel seemed ready to crack his own head open on the nearest wall. Lei patted his shoulder somewhat awkwardly in ways of consolation, but the approaching police sirens were all he was aware of. Lei let him be.

Somewhere in the furthest recesses of her mind, she hoped that Val’s friend really wasn’t going to come back. Whoever the mysterious gardener was and however he managed to leave from his balcony, this wasn’t going to be an easy mess. It was a wonder how he put up with his so-called friend. It was a wonder how anybody could.

—

The day continued in a somewhat predictable manner. Right on track, the three stooges were taken in by the police for questioning. Apparently the trash can explosion had disturbed residents in houses all the way downtown, and the police knew only one place where so many trash cans were gathered, so here they were. While Val and his assistants were loaded into a police car, some officers checked out the mess. They carefully removed the axe from where it was lodged, and closed in on the big red splatter at the center. They inspected the axe curiously. It was simply designed, but quite robust, quite expensive.

And while all this went down, a cautious, lean figure scaled the roof of a nearby building, a plain concrete block only four stories high. He darted under a non-functioning satellite dish and leapt over the wall onto the roof of another building. Then he leaned out over the edge of that rooftop and grasped onto a snail-like carving in the wall of the neighboring building and vaulted into an open window. His black clothing swept out behind him like smoke, but nobody was looking up at that moment, all the officers were occupied with the giant metallic mess.

The figure sprinted over the remains of a carpet and through a collapsed doorframe into the fire escape. This was the part of the fire escape that had burned up in that fire so many years ago. The stairs had been completely destroyed, and now there was nothing but a chasm between the fourth and sixth floors. The figure was grateful for the extra security. He laid his hands on the jagged walls and began climbing. He climbed until he came to a floor where the wall had also been burned out, around the top of the fifth floor. From this hole, the window to a neighboring window was visible. The climber shuffled up to the hole in the wall and steadied his footing.

Nobody below saw the wisp of blackness shoot from one building to its taller neighbor. They were too busy trying to get a better look at the body on the sidewalk below. In the police car, Ravel caught sight of the fallen carcass and immediately began making a mess on the carpet.

The climbing figure walked as normal up the staircase of the tall neighboring building until the thirteenth floor. He peered out the window in front of him. From here he could see the top of the glass dome, gleaming in the afternoon sun. But it was not gleaming as vibrantly as he would have liked. He frowned and leapt down, from the thirteenth floor of one building to the rooftop of another, landing on a rusted air-conditioning complex. He strode slowly over the dome. There were some footprints here that didn’t belong.

He could also now see that someone had made a wreck of the inside of the greenhouse.

Below, the officers began chatting excitedly. Val leaned all the way over Ravel and Lei to try to get a look, only to be shoved back into his seat. Lei rolled down the window and gestured quite obscenely for him to be quiet. From inside the car, they heard a cry of, ‘Why, it’s the well-known jewel thief who robbed the convention center last week!’

‘To think he’d be hiding out here…’

And look – in the trash cans.’

As the officers unveiled all the booty the dead robber had stowed in the trash cans, Lei’s blood ran cold. The robber was the only body there. From what she could see, the robber, while in black, was in no way the quiet jumper she had seen on the rooftop. It had to be somebody else. There should have been more than one body dropped anyway… but the dismembered torso was nowhere to be seen.

‘The torso is gone,’ Lei whispered.

‘I wonder what the message was,’ Val said, not looking very concerned at all.

An officer came over to the car at that moment, interrupting their thoughts. He was saying, half to them and half to his cohort, ‘There’s a huge reward for capturing the guy, dead or alive. These kids deserve to know.’

So while Val and company were being rewarded for their unintentional good deed, the dark, smoky figure had made his way across the greenhouse roof and over to the balcony. He slid down onto it and entered into the open door. And like Lei, his blood stopped cold. His house was a wreck. His carefully written papers were strewn across the floor. His glass tables had been knocked out of line, as if some dunce had gone walking into them. The canopy he’d put above the back half of the greenhouse was torn down, coving the floor but not the fridges. He rushed over to check on them and nearly tripped over a severed hand.

A severed hand! Outside the fridge! He grabbed it quickly, in his fingertips (it was sopping wet, having been given a good amount of time to thaw out) and continued over to the fridges. Luckily, they were still cold. The sun hadn’t ruined them today. He breathed a sigh of relief and tossed the hand in. His teeth clenched once again when he saw that another hand had been removed.

Cursing in mixed tongues, he stomped around the living area, picking up what he could. As he was rolling up the tarpaulin canopy, he passed by the fridge where his note had been pinned. Now there was a new notice. It was written in the margins of a page on the fifth known dismemberer in the city, who he had aided in the capture of a year ago. He wondered where the rest of the report was.

Pulling it off the fridge, he started trawling around for papers to organize. It was amazing how his visitors had managed to spread his neatly stacked and clipped papers all over the room, in every corner, under every table.

Somebody else could tell him what was written on the body parts.

While the owner of the greenhouse was cleaning up, Val was getting rewarded $5000 for capture of the jewel thief. Lei noticed that he received it a little more brightly than usual. He shook the officer’s hand profusely, and once they were freed from custody, he gave $4000 to Lei and Ravel to split between them.

‘You’re taking an awfully large share today,’ Lei joked.

‘I’m expecting someone special, remember?’ Val said, smiling broadly.

‘Ah,’ Lei said, exchanging looks with Ravel, who looked oblivious.

‘It was nice having two hands on the case today,’ Val said, using a rather inappropriate turn of phrase. ‘Two sets of hands, anyway. And Ravel, I hope you will be around to help in some other time, some other place.’ Val gave Ravel a victorious pat on the back that made him look like he was going to hurl again.

‘Yeah, although you might want to take a rest after this,’ Lei advised.

‘Yes, have a good night’s sleep and come back tomorrow,’ Val said, as though that was all one needed to recover from seeing a ruined corpse spread all over a sidewalk amongst trash cans full of gold. ‘My friend would like to meet you. You two are quite similar in some ways. Is that a scarf made of the hair of real red-headed children?’

Lei made a face. But that question, above all else, seemed to snap Ravel out of his trauma. ‘How did you know?’ he asked weakly.

‘Lucky guess. But really, come by tomorrow,’ Val said.

As the day drew to a close, the sky dyed red, and the greenhouse went from a dazzling second sun to a regular ball of fire, as stars do when dying. The air grew cool. From not too far away, a motorcycle screeched. The owner of the greenhouse pulled the tarp back into place and sat down at his desk to organize his papers in peace. He noticed the exchange written in blue highlighter was gone. At least Val had done that much to oblige him.

He didn’t bother to read Val’s second note very carefully. It was Val, so it was probably a lie, and he didn’t have time to deal with that. Sorting those papers back into their correct sections was going to take all night. As he got started, the smoky black figure regretted his poor handwriting. It didn’t make re-organization easy. But at least his numbers were legible and his eyesight was good. His friends always told him that.

The sun set and the glass house faded until it was almost invisible in the violet night, until the moon rose above it. It was beautiful when it wasn’t blinding, but nobody was there to see it. Nobody was watching from the other buildings, and the only resident in a square mile had fallen asleep.

—

Elsewhere in town, a man sat at a table in a very large room. There was classical music playing from the television, because that was what always played on the stock ticker channel. This man had pale hair and skin, and very deep eyes not unlike that of the criminals Lei had encountered. One was simply just dark but the other was so deep that it went on and on, and there was no eye to be seen. All there was was a black hole. He was resting his head on his interlocked fingers, with his elbows resting on the table. It was pretty late at night.

The room was dark, all the lights out except for the light hanging directly overhead, and the television. Although it would be impossible to tell if someone or something was lurking in the shadows, it was quite relaxing with closed eyes. He didn’t see something approach, its footsteps were so silent. There was nothing then but the sound of pianos and violins, with the occasional bass note or thump of a drum. A nice, easy, predictable tune, but so layered and dense it drowned out any focus, whittled it down.

As the man dozed off on the table, somebody swept by and dropped a bottle on it. He was faintly aware of it, but it could have been a dream for all he knew. He continued to let himself believe he was dreaming as a dark, wild shadow emerged behind him, reaching out a thick but fast claw out from within itself and clamping the back of the sleeping man’s chair. A white smile tore through the shadow, and then rushed forward towards the neck of its victim. His eyes opened halfway.

‘I wasn’t sure if you were still awake,’ the man said in a muffled voice, without bringing his head up. The shadow grinned and dropped out of the darkness. A mess of black hair and mismatched eyes now loomed over his shoulder. The man turned slightly to greet the monster of the house. ‘Evening, Val.’

‘Good evening,’ Val said, his chin still right over the man’s shoulder. ‘You’re late.’

‘The rain flooded a few roads. I’m sorry.’ Val didn’t move. ‘And I see you still haven’t learned about personal space. You’re going to get your jaw broken standing so close behind someone.’ The man said it all without heart; he knew his advice was not going to be taken.

‘You’re not the only one who tells me that. I know someone’s going to get me one day,’ Val said. He gripped the back of the chair and pulled it backwards onto its two back legs, teetering precariously in his grasp. ‘But I know you’re too careful to let that person be you.’ His friend barely acknowledged that he could be dropped on his back any second. He just sat back on the chair and faced Val, completely at ease, one eye and one empty hole staring up the mismatched eyes and sharp smirk hanging above. Things were surprisingly calm in those few fragile seconds that could have ended in injury or insult or sickness, and interactions with one or the other often did.

Eventually, Val’s smile lost its edge, and he eased the chair back to its four legs. He walked around to the other side of the table. Dipping in and out of the shadows, he placed two cups down, tall greenish glasses, and nudged the bottle forward into the light. At this, his friend showed the first sign of disturbance he had bothered to show so far.

‘You bought it today? That stuff is expensive.’

‘I got paid today too.’ Val uncorked the bottle and poured the blood red liquid into two glasses. ‘I’d have gone for something even bigger, but I had to split the money with my assistants.’

The glasses were green. With the red wine they turned brown, or black, as you know is the way with those colors. Not the color of something you’d want to drink unless you knew what it was before seeing it. Val’s friend took the glass from across the table and had a sip. Val helped himself to his own glass.

‘You have assistants now?’ the man asked when he’d half-finished his serving.

‘Yeah. They’re nice kids. They’ll probably come by tomorrow to meet you. They deal with the murders surprisingly well, all things considered. The girl, Lei, she chased a murderer off the roof today, and that’s how we got paid. Well, the police said he was a jewel thief, but she chased the murderer.’

‘Was he a jewel thief or a murderer?’

‘There were two very distinct men, although the police didn’t seem to get it. The man we got paid for finding, he was a jewel thief. The man Lei chased off the roof, he was the murderer. Well, a dismemberer. They both fell off a building.’

‘I see,’ Val’s friend murmured. ‘Another dismembering murderer. You introduced your assistants to your gardener friend, then?’

‘I wanted to. By some chance, he was out the whole time. We never recovered the whole body, so I’ll let him keep all the parts we found, although I was hoping we could find the rest. There was a very interesting message carved into each piece. But the murderer supposedly dropped a torso when he fell, and the torso disappeared.’

‘What parts did you find?’

Val thought things over, swirling the glass in his hand and staring into its murky brown or red depths. ‘Two arms. Two legs. And with the torso, although that’s out of our hands now.’

Val’s friend finished the contents of his glass, leaving only a few shreds of grape skin at the bottom. He reached under the table and brought up a plastic bag and brought it up to the tabletop.

The plastic bag contained a round object wrapped tightly in another plastic bag. The round object pressed against its wrapping in certain places, the places where a nose, brow and lips would be. Val stared down at his sleepy friend, who said quietly, ‘One thing about travelling late, you have less reason to worry about people seeing you with a suspicious looking package.’

Val’s face lit up and he went at the package like a lion on prey. His friend pulled the bottle of wine out of his path and brought it over to the counter in the kitchen area. ‘I found it at my usual bus stop. You know what I realized only recently, it’s one of the few stops with a vending machine. I should bring coins on my next trip.’

He looked over at Val, who was completely absorbed in untying the little knot at the top of the bags. They were giving him some trouble. ‘So, are you going to tell me what the other body parts had written on them?’

‘Sure,’ Val said, but he didn’t indicate he was going to do so anytime soon.

His friend waited patiently for half a minute. Val was like a child opening a birthday present. But that could only be amusing for so long. His friend yawned. ‘You have fun. I’m going to take a shower and get some sleep. You okay with that? I’m exhausted.’

‘Go ahead.’ Val unwrapped the severed head and lifted it from its wrappings triumphantly. Finished with this task, he turned to face his friend. ‘You don’t have to ask me, this is your house too.’

‘I suppose that’s true.’

Val smiled lightly at these words, or maybe he was smiling at the words carved into the severed head. The head had been left out to the elements longest, dragged through public transport and through streets and certainly looked worse than the other parts had. The eyelids were swollen firmly closed, as were the purple lips. The skin had turned the shade of rotten pear, and the color was not far off. Most jarring, however, was the hair – it seemed flawless in comparison to the rest. This would be what gave away this man or woman’s identity. Val smiled. The strands were still firmly rooted, still brilliant red that it had been in life. Val almost couldn’t resist brushing it out of the way with his fingertips to get a better look at the words carved into the forehead.

There was only one word on this body part. It was somewhat of a letdown. But then, a head doesn’t leave much space to carve messages into, so perhaps it was to be expected. Without the torso, the message still didn’t make much sense, either. But the day was over, and it was ending well all things considered, so to it felt appropriate, and Val was somewhat grateful.

The word on the head was nothing but, ‘goodbye.’

Val put the head back down in the bag. ‘Friends beware. Everybody you see. I leave today. Don’t look back. Goodbye. Hm. Well, that’s not good news.’

‘So the town has lost another…?’

‘Sure did. Who knows if he actually managed to get away?’ Val turned one shining eye back. ‘But at least you’re back.’

‘And it’s good to be back. It always is. ’ His friend passed by his shoulder on his way to the bathroom, a room that Lei and Ravel never did uncover. It was, naturally, behind the door that they never did pass through.

He took one more look back. ‘Goodnight, Val.’

‘Goodnight.’ Val kicked back on his chair to muse things over and twirled his friend’s passing scarf around his arm as he passed by on his way to the side room door. The scarf swirled over his hand like a wisp of smoke, but white. ‘Welcome home.’