Gift of Shadows

Chapter 1

"If nobody else is going to say it, I will. Our victim has no eyes."

I glanced up at my partner from over my dark sunglasses. He wasn't wrong. The victim was also missing several organs — heart, liver, kidneys. That wasn't exactly unusual. It was the eyes that threw me.

I sighed and rubbed my neck. Who would have thought a day would come when missing organs would be normal to me?

From the corner of my eye, I saw the two paramedics staring at my legs from beneath my jacket. People always said that if women just covered up, guys wouldn't stare. If wearing a long jacket in the dead of winter next to a disemboweled body didn't make guys keep their eyes to themselves, what would? Maybe showing my badge with my terrible ID photo. I'd asked security if I could redo it when they handed me the card with my name, Fairuz Arshad, horribly misspelled, but no such luck. I would have complained about the EMTs but even if there was anyone to complain to, it wouldn't make a difference.

Without sparing them so much as a proper glance, I took a sip of my Tim Horton's coffee. It tasted like burnt water. Until my usual place reopened, or at least until I could get my Turkish coffee maker from my parents' place in Ottawa, it would have to be enough to feed my caffeine addiction. The paper cup was quickly cooling in the early February winds. I held it between my gloved hands, trying to keep the coffee inside at a drinkable temperature as I stared down at the body.

It was hard to tell just from looking at it whether or not this was a Special Crimes case. Homicide should have been handling this case, but my partner of nearly a year now, Rowan Oak, and I had been a couple of blocks away anyway. Plus, the missing eyes definitely suggested something not normal. It could have just been someone with a thing for eyes, or it could have been someone poaching them for spells. Or maybe the human-looking man sprawled out on the pavement surrounded by police tape wasn't actually human.

The Homicide department was going to have a fit either way, and I wasn't going to wait around for them to show up. I'd worked Homicide before Special Crimes. It might not have been in this neighbourhood, but it was all the same. This wasn't my first road trip. Rowan always insisted the expression was 'rodeo,' but that didn't make any sense to me. The point was, I knew what I was doing, and I knew that every second counted. If Homicide had a problem with that, they should have showed up faster.

I crouched down to get a better look at the body, moving an arm over my face to block the stench. Winter had kept the body from decaying some, but it still smelled like a corpse. I'd almost forgotten that smell. I didn't see as many bodies these days as I did in Homicide, and I wasn't as used to it as I had been.

White male, from the looks of it, with dark hair and a short beard trimmed close to his jaw. Maybe Caucasian. Mid-20s or so — it was hard to tell. He might have been of average build if he had all of his organs. On the left side of his neck was a tattoo of what looked like a compass. Of course, he had no ID on him. That would have been too easy.

We needed more information. A lot more information.

I rose back to my feet. "Let's let the medical examiner get him back to the morgue." I pulled the lid off my coffee cup and used my teeth to roll up the rim. Please play again, it said. As if I wanted to win more terrible coffee or a stale donut. Roll-up-the-rim-to-win was a stupid game. Still, I was tempted to, in fact, play again. Was this considered gambling? "An autopsy should give us a better idea of what's missing, or if this is even for us."

"I really don't think that's necessary," Rowan said. "Most of his organs are already on the pavement. All I see missing is the liver and kidneys."

Again, he was right. The victim's intestines were strewn around him, and the rest of his organs were spread around as though on display. Could this be ritualistic? The way his chest was open looked like something I would see in the morgue, not behind a Shopper's Drug Mart.