Page 15 of There Are No Saints

3

Cole

It takes several weeks for the rumors of Carl Danvers’ disappearance to begin swirling around the art world.

I’m sure the Siren office reported his failure to arrive at work.

Maybe the cops even visited his pretentious apartment in Pacific Heights. They won’t find anything there.

I’ve already heard whispers that he was deeply in debt, that he was depressed, that he once made a joke about throwing himself off a bridge.

Nobody’s saying the word “dead.”

That’s the thing about murder: no body, no crime.

It’s devilishly difficult to prove that someone is dead if they simply disappear.

I’ve made every trace of Danvers vanish.

The last of him resides in the industrial bin I brought out to the mine. I doused it all in bleach. Not just any bleach—highly concentrated oxygen-producing detergent. It causes hemoglobin to degrade, destroying the ability to harvest DNA.

I dropped the bin down a three-hundred-foot deep shaft, hidden inside a cave. There are 47,000 abandoned mines in California, nine hundred just in the Bay Area.

I doubt my dumping ground will ever be discovered. If it is, the remains I’ve deposited are unlikely to be identified, and impossible to link to me.

The bones withinFragile Egoare, of course, a different story.

Creating the sculpture was an action of uncharacteristic flagrancy. Accepting the purchase offer tonight was even more hubristic.

But there is no art without sacrifice, without risk.

The fact that Danvers’s bones will be displayed in the lobby of a tech firm gives me even greater pleasure than removing his annoying existence from my life.

I felt deeply peaceful as the bin disappeared down the shaft.

I’m hollowed out, cleansed, ready to rest.

The night is misty and cold. I’ve never seen another soul within a dozen miles of this place. The bare ground looks blue and ink-soaked, like an alien planet.

Not alien to me. I know every foot of ground, which is why the bundle deposited on the path catches my attention like a flaming neon sign.

There was no bundle when I walked this way before. No cars parked anywhere along the road leading up to the trail.

Instantly my eyes dilate, my nostrils flare. I listen for the slightest sound of movement, of someone close by. Every blade of grass, every pebble, stands out in acute detail.

The only thing I see is the bundle itself.

It’s not a bundle at all, but a girl, contorted and bound.

I can smell her coppery blood in the damp air.

I know at once who left her here: Alastor-fucking-Shaw.

Fury consumes me like a pyre.

How dare he follow me here.

He crossed a serious fucking line between us, encroaching on my ground, disrupting my process.

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