God, that sounded boring. He wondered what Wy was doing, and what she was wearing, and how quickly he could get her out of it that evening.

They had woken up that morning to make love, do form on their new deck, showered together, made pancakes and eaten them together, and he’d left her reluctantly when it was time to go to work. But then that was always the case. She had disappeared out of his life once. He didn’t ever want that to happen again, and some part of him lived in fear that she would.

The window was open and a mild, cool breeze carried in the scents of autumn, woodsmoke, unpicked berries rotting on the vine, fallen leaves decomposing. He heard a noise like the sound of someone knocking on a metal door. He looked around to meet the beady black eyes of a huge raven sitting on a spruce bough almost exactly level with his gaze.

“Fuck,” he said.

“Kraaaack—kraaaaaaaack,” the raven said.

The bird wore coal-colored feathers that looked as if they’d been oiled. He was at minimum two and a half feet beak to tail and had fed well enough this past summer that he significantly bent the branch he was sitting on.

“I thought I left you behind,” Liam said. “Like a long fucking way behind. Like far enough behind I wouldn’t have to put up with you anymore.”

“Koo-kluck-kluck-kloo-kluck,” quoth the raven.

“Do it to me again and again” Donna Summer sang behind him.

“Kraaack!” With one beat of his iridescent wings the raven was aloft and gone.

Liam spun around and picked up his phone. “Hey, Brillo.”

“Yeah, yeah, happy fucking Monday to you, too, Campbell.”

At least he wasn’t operating at a Barton decibel level today. “You have the results back from the DNA?”

“Yeah, the kid is definitely Joshua Petroff.”

“How soon can you release the body? His family wants him home.”

“As soon as I sign off on the paperwork.”

“Let me know and I’ll send Wy to pick him up.”

“Yeah, listen, I got something else going on here. Something weird.”

“Weird?”

“Yeah, weird. As in freaky, creepy, spooky. Weird. I told you how the kid died, somebody bashed his head in.”

“I remember.”

“Yeah, well, I think the same weapon that killed the kid was used to kill Erik Berglund.”

Liam sat up so fast he pushed himself away from the desk and banged off the windowsill behind him. “What?”

“I told you, weird, right? There’s a kind of corner, almost but not quite a right angle to the impact depression in both of the skulls. I measured and it’s almost exactly the same size in both. It’s higher up on the kid and lower down on Berglund, but I’m pretty sure the same thing was used both times.”

“You realize Joshua Petroff and Erik Berglund were killed thirty years apart?”

Brillo sounded testy. “I can read a report.”

“Are you sure the wound on Berglund’s head wasn’t from the old injury?”