LITMIR.BIZ

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Trisha heard her mother scream.

      “Má!”

      She raced toward her mother’s screams for help. She found her back in the den, standing in front of the altar cabinet, her mouth gaping as she faced the Buddha.

      Trisha saw the bird immediately. Or what was left of it.

      She hadn’t noticed it there before. It was a small bird. A sun conure, she remembered. The coloring blended in with the oranges, almost disappearing there on the plate with the offerings. The dead bird had been placed before Buddha, a sacrifice.

      The head was missing.

      Her mother covered her mouth with both hands as if to hold in her screams. Trisha backed out of the room, her eyes still on the Buddha and its strange offering. Her back hit the doorjamb. She let out a small mewling sound.

      Má turned to look at her. The expression on her mother’s face, how she stood so still, reminded Trisha of a deer catching scent of something.

      Má whispered Mimi’s name under her breath before calling it out louder and louder. She pushed Trisha aside and ran back into the hall.

      They found Mimi on the floor of the room she used as an office. She wore one of her beautiful white St. John suits. Where her aunt had been stabbed, the blood blossomed like some crazy Rorschach test over the white knit.

      Her eyes were empty, bloody sockets. And there was something stuffed in her mouth.

      It was the bird’s head.

      This time, Trisha screamed right along with her mother.

      2

      No one ever gets used to death.

      It could stab you through the heart or spray your guts across the wall with a bullet. It could slam into you on the sidewalk and knock you right out of your shoes.

      Quick. Clean.

      Or it could be a dark business. Strange and wicked. Bent.

      Detective Stephen “Seven” Bushard watched his partner walk around the victim’s body. The woman lay dead on a canvas of her own blood, her arms and legs posed as if captured midrun. The white suit seemed almost like an accent, as if maybe there’d been some attempt at a pattern. White carpet, red blood—white suit, red blood. A pebble dropped on a quiet pond.

      Seven’s partner, Erika Cabral, knelt alongside the victim to examine her face.

      “The parrot’s head in the mouth is a nice touch,” she said.

      “Looks like Polly got more than just a cracker.”

      Erika rolled her eyes at him, never big on his jokes. Seven’s partner was dressed in a simple corduroy jacket and jeans, her thick chestnut hair pulled back in a messy topknot. On anyone else, the outfit wouldn’t turn heads. But the fit of the jeans, the slight peek of cleavage…If she wasn’t such a ball buster, his Latina partner could lead half the force by the nose.

      “You ask me,” she said, “someone didn’t like what the vic had to say.”

      “Could be,” he admitted.

      “Ever heard the expression, don’t kill the messenger?” Erika asked.

      Tran was a well-known psychic, a woman paid to see the future.

      The crime scene tech, Roland Le, had already taken video of the scene and had moved on to stills. He snapped photographs in a carefully choreographed dance they knew all too well. Seven had seen it a hundred times, death. But he’d never get used to this.

      Whoever killed Mimi Tran was a grade-A whack job.

      The victim had been sixty-one, information delivered by the officer who had first arrived on the scene and secured the premises. He’d interviewed the two women, relatives of Tran, who’d been unlucky enough to step into this nightmare. The medical examiner would set the time of death, but Seven could take a stab at it just by the smell in the room. Another blazing day in sunny California and the place reeked of death.

      Mimi Tran liked the color white: white carpet, white leather couch, white lacquered Italian office furniture. The color choice made a stunning contrast to the blood.

      He knelt down to examine the near-black splatters on the carpet. Teardrop shapes led toward the door, then, abruptly—almost as if she’d been spun like a top—the trail turned in on itself, bread crumbs leading back to where the victim had fallen. Mimi Tran looked to be about five feet nine inches tall, approximately 160 pounds, no easy pickings. And still, someone had tossed her around like a rag doll.

      There’d been no signs of a forced entry. The vic had an elaborate security system that had been disarmed. Both facts indicated the victim knew her killer.

      Seven stared at the blood on the walls and the white sofa. However it had gone down, Mimi Tran had put up a fight.

      The body now lay on the floor, bloody sockets where her eyes should have been and a bird’s head shoved inside her mouth. The blood where she had been stabbed flowered across the white wool of her suit like some flashy pattern by those designers his sister-in-law loved so much. Chanel or Gucci. Tran still wore some impressive jewelry—diamond studs the size of fat peas, gold bangles shining from her wrists, a dragon pendant with fiery rubies for eyes—taking robbery off the list of motives.

      On the wall, there appeared strange markings, like maybe someone had dipped a finger in Mimi Tran’s blood and started to paint some weird wallpaper design, then changed his mind. There were exactly fifteen marks, each no bigger than a man’s palm. To Seven, they looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Or maybe one of those cave paintings you see in museums. The tech on the scene had already tested the stuff and made a preliminary determination. It was blood.

      “My best guess?” Roland said. “He used a feather from the bird. You know, like a paintbrush.”

      Erika came to stand next to Seven. Still staring at the body, she asked, “You okay?”

      She said it like it was nothing, just a little chitchat between friends. But he knew what she meant.

      Of course she’d ask.

      He shook it off. “Just tired of this shit.”

      They didn’t often get cases like this. Gang shootings, traffic accidents, domestic disputes gone bad—the everyday stuff, sure. But this was different, like some sort of ritual killing.

      “I want a couple of close-ups of the markings on the wall,” Seven told the tech.

      “Tell me something I don’t know.” Just the same, Roland knelt down to take the stills.

      They’d dusted for fingerprints and interviewed the relatives. They’d confiscated Tran’s laptop and PDA. Every nook and cranny of the scene had been documented. Pretty soon, the coroner’s office would remove the body for autopsy.

      And then they’d have to figure out what the hell it all meant.

      Seven stepped closer to one of the bloody symbols painted on the wall. He frowned, staring at the marks, trying to make them out. Two horizontal lines curved around a small circle…an eye? Made sense, given the condition of the body. Taking out a pen and notepad from inside his jacket pocket, he made an attempt to copy the image.

      He tried to figure out what it might mean. Someone was watching—all-knowing and all-seeing—lording his omnipotence over the now blinded victim?

      “Roland? These make any sense to you?” Seven asked, pointing out the bloody images on the wall.

      The tech shook his head. “It’s not Vietnamese, if that’s what you’re asking.” He looked over at the body. “Neither is that.”

      But Seven might argue with him there. No one was immune to this kind of violence.

      “The niece said she had an appointment to pick a lucky day for her wedding,” Seven said, moving on to the next symbol, a shaky copy of

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