It was the crows. What a lot of noise they made, that’s what alerted him. He figured it must be an owl, napping mid-morning high up in a tree, and the crows in their spite were determined to not let it rest.
One of those February days when the sky is a pure cerulean you never see at other seasons. The wind chill blowing off the white wastes of the frozen river hard and sharp like the sunlight, at minus-twenty degrees it moved like cold steel through the trees. Their dazzling blue shadows.
There was no owl. The tree, a tall pine, held nothing but a hundred crows, all complaining, flaffing their wings, ascending then descending from the upper boughs, up and down again and again to the carrion on the ground below, intent on carrying bits of it away.
The red snow.
That’s what caught his eye. How vivid blood appears on a bright winter day.
*
The police.
“Is he able to write the confession?”
“Sir?”
Detective Lili LeBlanc can’t decide which answer to her superior’s question would best confer advantage: an honest one, the evasive one, or a straightforward refusal to play along with his game.
“Do you mean, sir, has the suspect literacy enough to write a confession?”
“If not, LeBlanc,” he reacts impatiently, “you know what to do.”
“That depends.”
“No, you’ve got a fine body, Lili. It’s your chance to score!”
Distracted by her superior’s careless choice of words, Lili for a moment recalls stepping out of the shower that morning, seeing herself naked in the full-length mirror. Not bad, she had thought. Even with skin pale as suet, and hair so nondescript it’s impossible to say what colour it is.
Considering what my body’s been through, and how long it’s been around, it’s actually pretty good. Too bad I’m the only one who gets to see it!
Her sudden smile at this wayward thought disconcerts her superior.
“What’s so funny?” he snaps, “This is homicide we’re talking about!”
“Maybe it takes more than meat to make a murder.”
He sighs and pushes back from his keyboard on the silent wheels of his tall, black-leather chair.
“Don’t be so disagreeable, Lili. What more d’you want?”
“Evidence.”
He shows his teeth, derisively.
“There’s no obvious motive,” she continues.
“None required! The suspect is a known transient, and mentally deficient.”
And that’s why, she reflects to herself, you won’t make the effort to get this right!
“And you caught him red-handed,” he adds.
“Red-handed, yes. That doesn’t mean...”
“It’s your job to make it mean what I say it means.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Lili. The suspect was covered in blood... What more d’you want?”
“There are too many missing pieces.”
“Like what?”
“You must have noticed?”
“Why should I? What’s missing?”
“Eyes, nose, tongue, liver, intestines, fingers and toes... nether bits. All gone.”
Lili’s superior pauses a moment to reconsider.
“Ah!” he then exclaims, “you’re suggesting there’s not enough of the victim left to interpret as bona fide homicide? Is that it?”
He laughs.
“Quelle horreur!” he laughs.
“You may find it funny now sir, but...”
“But what?”
“You know you wouldn’t, if it happened to someone you cared about.”
“Oh really, LeBlanc... Only a woman would say something like that.”
*
“How can one mourn from within this conundrum the data condemns us to,” the woman says to Detective LeBlanc; who does not understand the inference, but intuitively gets the point.
“What’s to mourn?” the woman’s companion adds. They’re here to identify the body.
All three look at the covered remains in the morgue.
“There’s not much left,” advises Lili, pulling back the sheet, revealing the loosely reassembled remnants of a human being, it’s head sans facial features.
“It might be him,” the man says, “It might not be. So what’s to mourn?”
“Loss,” the woman whispers, “times desire equals grief.”
“My wife taught sociology,” the man informs Lili, “at the university. Before the coup.”
There is suddenly too much silence in the tiny examination room.
“It was the crows,” Detective LeBlanc explains, “They ate rather a lot of him.”
The woman tenderly touches one end of the body, an intact scalp of curly black hair.
“Maybe you should arrest them?” the man suggests.
“The crows?”
“Yeah!”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Again, Lili is perplexed to find the right answer, but the woman in mourning supplies it in her place.
“Birds,” she says, pulling the sheet further down to uncover more broken naked pieces of a young black man, formerly fit, strong, and now very incomplete, “do not answer to Man’s Law.”
“Well, they should,” the man replies, turning away so he can’t see.
“Man’s Law,” she states, “is as wanting as my Son!”
She falls on the corpse, weeping.
*
Lili’s superior had examined the crime scene with impatience. He was freezing, shivering, he didn’t know how to dress for the winter weather, and his own inadequacy had angered him.
“Vermin,” he said, waving an elegantly gloved hand at the crows, “They’re like illegal immigrants... They shouldn’t be here.”
Lili listened to the wind in the pine, her eyes squeezed tight against the brilliant glare of sunlight on snow. The crows, suspicious of so many human interlopers, were now silent, perhaps entertaining their own disagreeable thoughts about how such a generous feast could be taken away from them before they’d had the chance to peck it down to the bare bones.
“I never seen him before,” the suspect said. A small man in his late thirties, weathered face with long, unkempt hair and scraggly whiskers, dressed in many layers, topped with a very over-sized, blood-stained parka.
“What were you doing here?” she asked.
“What d’ya think?”
“You tell me.”
“Hangin’ out.”
“You’ve no warmer place to go?”
“No way. Think I like freezin’ my arse off out here, just fer the fuckin’ fun of it?”
“What about your friends?”
The suspect stares at Lili like he doesn’t understand.
“Why are you covered in blood?” she continues asking.
“Oh, yeah, ‘cause me, stupid arsehole that I am, thinks I can help that poor bastard. But he were dead before I even seen him.”
“What do you think happened?”
The suspect is surprised by the question.
“Me?”
“Yeah. Here’s this dead guy in the trees, at least a hundred metres from the nearest road, no other signs of violence except what the crows have done... So...?”
The suspect stares and waits for her to continue.
“There’s no tracks in the snow to show what direction he could have come from.”
“No?”
“How did he get here?”
The suspect shrugged.
“So what happened?” Lili asks again, “What did you do?”
“I... Fuck... I done nothin’.”
“There’s your tracks. There’s tracks of a skier, and over there,” she points, “two people on snowshoes.”
“I didn’t see none of ‘em.”
“Why did you call us?”
“Me?”
“Someone called from the dead man’s phone. It must have been you.”
“Naw. What phone?”
“There are no other tracks.”
Lili listens again to the wind gusting and roaring in the pine tops, and understands very well how any tracks made here are covered again fast by the drifting snow. Often completely, but in other instances, a trace will remain in the pattern and shapes created by the wind rearranging the frozen fragments of ice and snow. Other than the suspect’s own footsteps, none other remain near the body.
Only the crow’s.
“Did you hear anything else? Anything at all?” she asks again, giving him a chance.
“No. Just them crows. I thought they was goin’ fer an owl.”
“What happened?”
“I... Then I just see’s ‘im, like. Not movin’. Blood. That’s what I see. Fuckin’ crows all over him.”
“Is that all?”
He doesn’t reply.
“I’ll have to take you in for further questioning.”
“I done nothin’ wrong,” he answers.
“You may be the last person to have seen the victim alive.”
“No I ain’t. I told you... Hey, you arrestin’ me?”
“Yes.”
“Fuck.”
“I’ll make sure you get a lawyer, if you want one.”
The man looks like he’s about to cry.
“Lawyer?”
“To make sure your rights are respected.”
“Fuck.”
LeBlanc keeps silent. He looks a question at her but says nothing.
“What?” she demands.
“Do I get somethin’ t’eat?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He almost smiles.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” he says, “No one does.”
*
“Ha!” Lili’s superior grins, pulling his chair up, staring closely at his screen, “Two birds with one stone, eh? No, three! Four even! Ha, good work!”
Lili understands her superior’s glee and doesn’t like it.
“Those two old birds that came in to ID the victim, they’ve claimed refugee status!”
“Why does that matter?” she asks.
“We’re sending them back! And that unhoused fool you’ve arraigned on a wilful murder charge, what chance has he got? None! Your career is shaping up, Lili!”
“Not so fast Stanley.”
He smiles back confidently.
“Stanley?”
“Was it you who sent me flowers on Valentine’s Day?”
“Me? Never mind that, Lili. It’s your career that’s important. How it reflects on mine.”
“So why would I...”
“I know what you’re going to say,” he interrupts, “but remember, LeBlanc, while the law moves ever so slowly, you needn’t worry. Just take my advice. Think what it’s going to look like on your CV when those birds are in hand.”
“There’s another problem. How exactly did the victim come to die?”
“That’s not a problem at all.”
“Take a another look.”
She drops a paper file on his desk.
“Pathologist’s report. Every bone in his body broken. No wonder the crows made easy pickings of him, he must have fallen from thousands of feet.”
Lili’s superior flips through the papers.
“He was dropped?” he finally says.
“He’d been deported,” Lili adds.
“Deported? I don’t get it.”
“He’d been working in the States. Undocumented. There was a message left on his phone.”
“A message?”
“Four words. Ignorantia legis neminem excusat.”
“Meaning?”
“I looked it up, sir, a legal term. Loosely translated it means zero tolerance.”
Stanley pushes his chair back, and says nothing, for once lost for words.
Detective LeBlanc stands waiting to be dismissed.
“So they just threw him out?” he finally says, the habitual cynicism failing momentarily.
Lili waits.
Her superior remains silent, the magnitude of what may be happening in the world today slowly sinking in.
She wonders, briefly, what it would be like. To fall like that. Having a good body in such circumstances wouldn’t make much of a difference, one way or the other.
Would it?
Falling like that. Nothing to stop you. No one to help you.
Even if someone saw what was happening, chances are, they would turn and pretend not to see.
Which is why, Lili says to herself, I’ll keep looking...
Even if what I’m sure to witness is totally unexpected and beyond any reasonable chance of redemption, there’s still no good reason to turn and look away... So...
I’ll keep my eyes wide open...
In case there’s something I can do to help...
Anyone who might need it.
“Keep looking, sir.”
“What?”
“Don’t turn away.”
[end]