Requiem [COMPLETED]

Investigative Unit

"Sven, I just don't feel right about this. She thinks I'm going to have this great paper about family genealogy and Indian reservations and we're looking for murdered relatives."

"Want my advice?"

"Will I like it?"

"Of course not, it'll be based on a logical analysis of reality." He opened a beer.

I screamed and his beer went flying. "Jesus Christ Sigrid!"

"Sven, kill it!"

He sat forward, peering around me until I pointed dramatically and he spied it. "No, spiders are good. They eat mosquitoes and flies."

"It's October. All the other bugs are hibernating or dead. Kill it."

"No, how do you even know what it is, you're on the opposite side of the room; unless it's someone's escaped pet tarantula you can't possibly see it. And I'm not killing someone's pet unless they have your head in their jaws."

"It tried to bite me."

"You can't see their tiny little jaws! It was probably terrified of the giant that popped open their nice dark cabinet suddenly."

"Like a scary monster out of the dark."

"It's not a monster; they're like, a really small land octopus. You have nothing to do directly with their ecosystem until you kill them for existing."

I ground out between my teeth, "I will fucking kill you."

"No you won't," my brother replied indignantly, matter-of-fact. After a moment it seemed to register that I'd been using a figure of speech. "Oh, so now manslaughter doesn't bother you? You see how animal cruelty is a warning sign for sociopaths?"

"Oh my god, I'll go get the vacuum. Just shut up. Forget it, I'm not...I'm just not."

"I hate it when you leave a thought hanging, now I'll never understand what the hell you meant... and you're an eco-terrorist," my brother muttered as I wheeled the vacuum over from the closet to the kitchen. It only took a minute to murder and dispose of all evidence my 'victim' had ever existed, while Sven scowled at me.

"Just skip it, you won't win," I told him. "Give me advice about Rita."

"Look Sigrid, you can't tell your advisor the truth. She'll react one of two ways. 1) She'll think you're maybe not completely crazy, but definitely unbalanced and/or dramatizing something in order to try and commit some kind of sordid revenge, or 2) she'll be dismayed that you're pulling her into something that's so intimately grotesque. 'Hi Rita, Sven says our grandpa has orchestrated the deaths of over half our family and secretly buried them. Want to help me with this project and get yourself sensationalized in all the papers?' You have to keep her in the dark on our motives and the back story. Just say that we're interested in finding the historic pioneer family graveyard that's been lost or misplaced. No one will have to know the import of it."

"Yeah, but how do we get around grandpa?" I snorted. "We probably won't be able to do anything in the end anyway. He won't let us."

"Let me work on that," coaxed Sven. "I'll talk with Charlie's brothers and see what's going on in town with different people and feel out possibilities."

"Like what?"

Sven rolled his eyes and looked at me judgmentally. "Like who's pissed at grandpa, and who needs some favors done, and if there's anything I can leverage with John Orhen or-- whoever else is the new fucking cop, what's-his-name."