Page 11 of Lovely Violent Things

Which I did, technically. A tent has been erected just off the boardwalk of the public hunting grounds, where portalets and coolers of water are accessible. I’ve had to stop every few hours to tend to my menstrual flow, something I haven’t had to deal with in months. Not since the accident that claimed my fiancé and pregnancy.

Every time I change a sanitary napkin, the emotional wound is scraped open with fresh pain. Only now, there is also the appalling guilt of Kallum and I together.

I may have gotten a logical answer from my doctor for why this is happening to my body, but it’s not enough to calm the rising panic every time a visual of him between my thighs surfaces, and I see him tasting me, carving my skin…

A cramp twinges in my pelvis, and I touch my stomach, willing my thoughts back onto the task before me. An ache builds behind my eyes and my vision starts to blur. I ignore the dull throb in my head and push past the weariness pulling at my muscles.

A sinister voice crawls up from the trenches of my mind to whisper that if I stop—if I allow my thoughts to drift to anything other than the obsessive need to dissect this crime scene—I’ll be dragged right down to the abyss, to those flashes of memory I’m barely holding back.

The dam can’t break.

Since the moment Kallum slashed his palms and painted my body with his blood, images of the Cambridge murder have been assaulting my mind. Each time, a fragment longer, the grainy picture becoming a degree sharper.

All from the killer’s perspective.

“I’m just tired,” I mutter to myself as I suppress the imagery of a dead man’s mutilated face.

Despite what my mind is trying to make me believe, I had no reason to kill Professor Wellington six months ago…a stranger to me.

No motive. No evidence. No crime.

When reciting this mantra starts to lose effectiveness, I read the script inked on my forearm. The verse by Voltaire reminds me that I’m here in this moment. I only have to focus on this scene.

So I immerse myself fully. I imagine the Overman’s tongue exhibit already constructed when the Harbinger brought his victim to the hunting grounds. With the time constraint, he had almost thirty minutes to kill the victim by slicing his throat, remove the antlers, sever the head, then stage the scene.

He spread the arms along the woven thread backdrop and tied each wrist to a tree to resemble the wings of the moth. The face was chalked in black and white to portray the skull on the moth’s thorax. Every detail is precise to the previous Harbinger crime scenes.

The only anomaly is the antlers affixed to the victim’s head. Unlike Landry, where the antlers were strapped via a leather band, the victim has implants. An extreme measure taken by the offender to modify his higher men into his construct of the Dionysian Mysteries.

This is our first glimpse into what the missing victims have been subjected to for the past five years.

The Harbinger killer removed the antlers from the victim, but not by carving them out of the flesh; he sawed the horns off at the base of the bone.

This particular detail has been what’s kept me here, questioning the intent. Removing the antlers completely would be more authentic to the Harbinger’s desire to depict the moth.

Was it his intent to desecrate the Overman’s higher men? Or was it done purposely to reveal something about the Overman suspect?

The antlers have not been recovered.

While walking in the footsteps of the killer, timing each action he had to take, the blinking light of a firefly catches my notice. “What are you doing out so late,” I whisper to the insect. “Or this early, rather.”

I watch the nocturnal insect bob around one of the barren trees. My gaze drifts down and, as a detail comes into focus, my breath stills.

My mud boots make a squelching sound as I maneuver toward the spotlight and angle the beam on the wrist of the victim. The thread has been wrapped around his wrist several times. But there in the plied twine is a long fiber.

I retrieve a pair of tweezers and pluck the coarse string from the thread. Before I bag it, I use my phone to take pictures. After I’ve labeled the evidence sleeve, I hand it off to one of the task force agents overseeing the crime scene.

It could be nothing more than factory transfer on the skein of yarn. I’m sure just about every ball of yarn out there has different fibers and string from other skeins spooled in the same warehouse.

As my thoughts meander down that path, my wrist flares with an itch, and I circle my fingers around the rope burn. As if on cue to save me from my spiraling thoughts, I spot Devyn making her way up the boardwalk. She’s carrying a cardboard container with two coffee cups.

I remove my gloves and stuff them into my pocket, then hoist myself onto the edge of the weathered planks. I extend a hand to accept a coffee, and she raises the carton out of reach.

“No, ma’am,” she says. “This is not for you. You are cut off from caffeine.”

She’s dressed in black tactical pants and a matching rain jacket with the HRPD logo embroidered on the left breast. Her dark hair is pushed out of the way with a thick headband.

I feign insult with a scowl. “How am I supposed to function without mocha-flavored caffeine?”

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