“We told you! one hissed. You’re pathetic! Cry! Kill! Rot! Die!”
I glanced at them, lined up around me, and rolled my eyes. “Yeah, yeah, later. You’re all so dramatic. Give me a second to do the funeral in style.”
I leaned further toward the bag, studying her. More clinical than anything, but sadly, I was no doctor, and, equally as sad, my crime shows apparently weren’t up to snuff. But curiosity’s a bitch, and she’d arrived at my doorstep, unsolicited.
My brain flickered as my eyes roved over the dead woman. I knew enough about her to fill in some of the blanks of what I was seeing. Her neck was bent, clearly snapped. Likely the cause of death and why Miss Cherry King went MIA from her two teenage boys fifteen years ago.
“Son of a nutcracker,” I muttered. “Liebling…you’re gonna hate me for telling you this. Really, really hate me. But hey—Mom’s not missing anymore. Just…inconveniently deceased.”
The courier shifted nervously. “Uh…you okay, man?”
I smirked at him, loud and flippant. “Perfect. Couldn’t be better. You? You brought me a corpse, and now you’re worried about my mental stability? How kind. What can you tell me about her medical examination report?
My demons erupted again.
“You can’t handle this. You’re weak. Everything ends!”
I waved them off like flies. I looked at the delivery boy and motioned to Miss King.
“Listen, I’m not paid enough to manhandle a corpse, I just deliver packages.”
I quirked an eyebrow at his holier-than-thou act, but shrugged and instead gave the body a little shove that had her toppling downward, and the man shrieked, reaching forward to stop her from falling onto the ground.
I clapped excitedly, pointing at the back of her neck to see the weird symbol…branded into her skin.
“Are you fucking kidding me, freak?” the guy yelled indignantly, trying to hold the stiff with unsteady hands.
I crouched closer, my eyes tracing every line, every crease of her face, the pale, stiff fingers that had once held her boys and been the comfort they needed. My stomach twisted at the thought of Randall missing his mother.
Strangulation. Neck snap. Definitely.
“You’re obsessed,” Geoff-demon hissed.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, waving at the air. “Later. Obsession’s my middle name.”
My eyes stayed on the faded but very deliberate brand, right behind her neck. A tiny ‘M’ was carved deep into her. The symbol smeared into the skin with fire and cruelty. My stomach sank.
That symbol. Why did it look familiar?
“Would you quit moving around? I’m trying to look at that mark!” I snapped at the struggling man, still working to get the body back into place on the tarp.
I muttered under my breath a sweet song, ignoring the rants and raves of the delivery boy.
“Figures the plot would thicken. Big, scary masked idiots playing god? What does ‘M’ stand for? Mommy? Machine? Muymuy?”
I continued spouting off random M-words when the package man growled and whacked my shoulder.
I short-circuited from the non-consensual love tap until the guy said, “Monty’s?”
Monty, Monty, Monty. Oh! A strip club? That place was super known for ‘extracurriculars.’
My brain flickered as I pieced it together.
Timing. Placement. Precision. Brand symbol. Strangulation.
Nothing about this screamed amateur hour. Everything screamed nice, clean, and terrifyingly tidy. This meant Randall’s mom wasn’t just…dead.
She was a message.
