Death & Honey Read online

  Somebody who must have been a medical person said they would confirm once they got the body back to the lab but that sounded reasonable.

  The inspector reached into the man’s back pocket. “Let’s see who you are, sir,” she said, and flipped open the wallet she fished out to check the ID. “William Robert Howe, age 27, Melbourne address.” She pawed through the wallet further. “A credit card and a tenner inside and some retail rewards cards. Nothing in here worth killing for, obviously. No cell phone, though. If that was taken and not the wallet, that could be the key. Sergeant, will you check with Melbourne and see what records we can find on him? I’d like to know when he got here and why he came, at least, but wouldn’t mind hearing a nice, clear reason why someone would want to shoot him in the back with a bow.”

  I said.

  Except you’re on snack penalty, Atticus reminded me.

 

  The problem is not the song but that you sang it when I told you not to.

 

  The apology was good. You can also help me solve this crime.

  I asked as the sergeant departed with the wallet.

  No. It’s north of here, across the Bass Strait, about four or five hundred kilometers.

 

  No, you’re getting your numbers mixed up again. It’s more than you can walk in a day, but it would be a short airplane flight.

 

  It’s a beautiful big city with lots of poodles in it. You’d love it.

  “What kind of arrow is this, does anybody know?” the inspector asked before I could answer. “Would it have been from a bow or a crossbow?”

  “A bow, I believe,” Constable Fosse said. “You can tell by the length and the fletching. That’s a regular sort of arrow, not a crossbow bolt.”

  I noticed that the inspector looked up at Atticus at that moment, confirming that his right arm really was missing, and he nodded at her.

  Yes, it is rare. And the inspector is realizing right now that because I only have one arm, I can’t have shot him. A crossbow might be able to be wielded with one hand, but not a regular bow.

 

  It was a possibility. She had to eliminate me as a suspect. It doesn’t mean I’m not an accomplice, but it does mean I’m probably not the murderer.

 

  As soon as the inspector believes I’m not the bad guy. Right now, I’m the guy at the crime scene and I’m a weird person who lives in the bush, so that’s two strikes against me. And she thinks I’m American, so that might be three.

 

  I’m rather hoping that trail you and Starbuck smelled will lead us to the killer.

  But we couldn’t get to that until the inspector left the poor guy to the forensics folks and asked Atticus a bunch more questions. She wanted to know why an American was so concerned about saving Tasmanian devils that he’d traveled around the globe to do it and lived in the woods. Atticus had done a lot of preparation for this kind of encounter, though, since he needed a cover for his Druidry. Soon after we got here, he figured that Owen and Granuaile could use some cover too, and the young apprentices that Owen was training would be full Druids someday and they’d probably need a job, so Atticus had his lawyers create a charity called the Gaia Stewardship, all legal and everything. He printed up some cards and just told anyone who asked that he worked for them. The Gaia Stewardship’s mission statement covered all sorts of “global natural emergencies,” and that statement was on a fancy-schmancy website and listed his alias, Connor Molloy, as a field operative. He let the inspector know all this and led her and Constable Fosse back to the den of devils he’d been healing. He didn’t say he was healing them, though; he pretended he was surveying them, noting their location and condition and so on to help Tasmanian biologists do the important work of saving them.

  “How do you find them?” she asked.

  “My dogs,” he said, though of course it was the elemental helping him find all the dens.

  “So, you heard the woman scream from here?” Inspector Badgely asked.

  “Yes.”

  She pulled out her radio. “Sergeant Naseer.”

  Her radio made a static click and then the tinny voice of the sergeant replied. “Yes, Inspector?”

  “Warn everyone first, but I want you to scream as loud as you can to see if I can hear it from where I’m standing now. Apologies for any embarrassment; I’m just checking out Mr. Molloy’s story.”

  There was a pause, and then, “Of course, Inspector. One moment.”

  While we waited, I asked Atticus what he would say if we didn’t hear anything.

  I’ll just say the woman screamed louder than the sergeant. It’s not an issue that they can use to arrest me. She’s just checking the plausibility of my story.

  A moment later, my ears pricked up along with Starbuck’s as we heard the sergeant scream. It was clear to us, but I wasn’t sure the humans heard it until the inspector nodded.

  “Okay. Your story hangs together so far. I’ll check up on this charity of yours and confirm your relationship with Detective Ibarra in the United States. I presume I can reach you on your phone?”

  “Yes, anytime, provided it’s charged.” She tested his number and once she was satisfied that it rang, she ended the call and said thanks for reporting the crime, she’d be in touch if she needed him.

  “Oh, one more thing: How long will you be in Tasmania?”

  “Another couple of months at least.”

  Inspector Badgely finally let us go after that and walked away with Constable Fosse. Atticus watched them go and had a tiny grin on his face, but I wasn’t sure why.

 

  No, admiring. She’s very smart, very thorough. Good at her job.

 

  What? No. I just met her.

 

  Oberon.

 

  No, Oberon, that’s definitely not it. Let’s forget about Inspector Badgely, all right?

  I asked.

  Yes, soon. We might have to go in under camouflage, though, to pick it up.

 

  Yes. I can’t change my shape or shift planes anymore, but I can still cast camouflage and do most of what I used to.

  We snuck back toward the crime scene, and Atticus spoke his Old Irish bindings to camouflage us so that our pigments looked like our surroundings. It wasn’t perfect invisibility, but it worked great when people weren’t paying close attention, and the police were all staring at the body and worrying about upsetting the bees. Starbuck and I found the scent again and began to follow it out. Atticus kept his hand on my back so he didn’t lose me, and we took it slow until we were safely out of sight of the police. Then Atticus dropped the camouflage and we moved faster.

  The trail flanked around clockwise in a flat half-oval and it was really strong in one spot. We told Atticus and he said, “Hold on.” He looked around behind us. “Yes. See through there? This is
where he waited and watched. You can see the arrow embedded in the tree from here, so this is where he stood when he took a shot at me. Probably where he stood to shoot William Howe as well.”

 

  “Not particularly. Where did he go from here?”

  Starbuck said, already snuffling ahead of me. I hurried to keep up and confirm, and Atticus trailed after us on his clunky human feet.

  We threaded our way through eucalyptus trees and all kinds of bushes that basically shouted “Urine luck!” because so many animals had peed on them, but we kept our noses trained on the human scent we were tracking. It was fun to track a human, and easy too, when they weren’t thinking about covering their trail.

  The trail ended at a muddy roadside. There was a shoulder there where someone had parked; we could see the tire treads in the muck. I’m not good at stuff like that, but maybe it was a Jeep or some kind of truck tire. The tracks seemed wide.

 

  “What?”

 

 

  “Stinky flowers?” Atticus said.

 

  Atticus snorted. “Well, I guess that would explain why she didn’t call the police.”

  Bee-wildered

  SOMETHING DIDN’T MAKE sense—I mean besides cats.

  “That’s an excellent question, Oberon. Let’s speculate.”

  Starbuck said.

  “Okay, that’s one possibility,” Atticus allowed.

  Starbuck muttered, his voice mournful.

  I said.

  “Wow. You’ve watched a lot of soap operas, Oberon.”

 

  “I think the key fact we need to establish first is whether she willingly joined the killer in his vehicle. That’s going to take some scent sleuthing. Can you trace their scents individually and see if there is any point where they intersect, perhaps walk together for a distance? And it would be great if you could isolate her scent from the perfume. She might not always be wearing it.”

  That took some work, especially isolating her scent from the perfume. But we were able to follow it into the forest in a slightly different trajectory than the killer’s. And their trails never crossed. Atticus asked me and Starbuck to stand where the scents of the two people ended and we wound up standing across from one another, side by side, except that there were truck tire marks in between us. I was following the lady’s scent and I was closest to the road.

  “All right, so Oberon, since you’re over there, that means the lady was the passenger because cars in Australia have the driver’s seat on the right side. I can tell by the treads which way the car was facing. Okay, now, starting there, I want to follow the scent trails away from that spot for a short distance. I just want to see how that works.”

  I moved from my spot directly forward for a few paces and then veered into the woods. Atticus stopped me there.

  “Oberon, look at what Starbuck did.”

  My little Boston buddy was also at the edge of the woods, but he was behind Atticus, from my point of view.

  “Starbuck, will you go back, please, and do that again?>

  He returned to his starting point, and then where I went forward from my spot, he spun around behind, taking a few steps toward the street.

  “Right there, Starbuck, is the scent stronger?” Atticus asked.

 

  “Good. So you see, Oberon? The driver—the killer—went to the back of the vehicle and stood there for a bit. Why?”

 

  “Exactly. So they parked here, went into the woods, the man killed William Howe—or Big Dead Bill—and then it gets really weird.”

 

  “Right. Either she is surprised by the death when she arrives and screams, or she had some other purpose—did she see you first or the body first?”

  Starbuck said.

  “Maybe when she saw you and Starbuck, she knew you had to belong to someone, so she screamed to bring me running?”

 

  “Maybe she wanted the body found. Think about it, Oberon: If we hadn’t been in the area, would anyone know right now that William Howe is dead? We’re technically in city limits, as the constable pointed out, but really, this is a preserve. This is not a high-traffic area.”

 

  “I don’t know. Apart from their actual identities, their motivation for the killing is the big mystery here. Being with the killer doesn’t mean the same thing as being allied with him; she was obviously outside of his direct control for a brief time.”

 

  “That’s a good point, Oberon. I’m not sure what to make of this lady. She was middle-aged, you say?”

  “I think so? A few wrinkles here and there but she moved well. It’s the hat that tells me she’s got some years on her. I don’t think humans wear hats like that until they’re older. It’s like they have to reach a certain threshold before they opt for daring headgear.”

  “Hmm. And she was for some reason involved in the execution of a twenty-seven-year old man from Melbourne. Strange indeed.”

  Starbuck asked, and then sneezed.

  Atticus checked the position of the sun in the sky. “It looks like it’s about lunchtime. The devils will all be asleep now, so what do you say we jog into town for something with gravy on it?”

  Starbuck said.

 

  “Oh, I already know what to do next.”

 

  “We find an archery club and use their members as a list of suspects. That killer was accurate at distance. That takes practice.”

  A Rose by Any Other Name

  LET ME TELL you an ill-kept secret: kangaroos are delicious. And they know it, too, which is why they’re so ready to fight. They assume, whenever you show up, that you are there to eat them because they’re super tasty, and they quite sensibly prefer not to be eaten. They taste like cows but much better. Leaner, richer, the meat a darker red. And Atticus will feed us some when he runs across a restaurant that serves it.

  We had kangaroo steaks and chili fries with no mustard on them, and after that, I was ready for a nap.

  “You can nap tonight while I’m working on the devils,” Atticus said. “We need to get to an archery club and track this guy down if you ever want to work off your snack penalty.”

  I agreed that Atticus had his priorities straight there, and he asked around about archery clubs. He doesn’t have a smartphone to look things up anymore; he just keeps a cheap basic phone for calls and texts.

  The server was nice and looked up the only one in the area and wrote it down for him; there was another one down in Hobart and that was pretty much it.

  “Look there, Oberon,” he said, showing me the paper with loopy handwriting on it. “If the killer’s local we should be able to get
a solid lead on him there.”

 

  “Huh?” He looked at the paper again more closely and his eyebrows shot up in surprise. “Oh. The second one is…her number.”

 

  “I guess so. Time to go.”

 

  Starbuck said, and yawned. He was ready for a nap too.

  “No, no, we should go.” He got up to leave and we trotted after him.

 

  “I am not.”

 

  “No, she was very pretty. That’s not the issue.”

 

  “No, Oberon, it’s simply the fact that I can’t get into a relationship now. We’re constantly on the move healing the Tasmanian devils of their cancer, and I can’t start something now and then continue to get ever farther away. The work must come first.”

 

  “I take time to play with you and Starbuck every day, Oberon.” We’d started jogging together toward this archery club. We do all our traveling that way now. “And I’ll point out that the time I’m spending helping you solve this mystery is time that I’m not working.”