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He pulled out his dagger and leaned forward, probing at the wound. There was something inside, which might be a very disgruntled catfish, but might be significant. “Hmmm…” Too deep in the wound to get with a dagger. He slid two gloved fingers inside, trying to get a grip on whatever it was. “Aha!”

When he looked up, Stephen was pointedly not looking at him. The paladin had turned slightly green.

“What are you getting squeamish about?” asked Piper. “You’ve seen dead bodies. You’ve made dead bodies.”

“Yes, but I didn’t poke around in them afterwards.”

“Feh.” Piper extracted his prize. “Bone chip. Damn.”

“Let me see.” Mallory crouched down next to him. “It looks like it, yes.”

Piper did not say something sarcastic about being grateful that the guard captain had confirmed what he, a doctor, had already identified. He considered this a great victory of restraint.

“Knocked off by the weapon, then?” asked Galen.

“Seems likely. I was hoping for wood splinters, honestly, then I could tell you it was a sharpened stake or a spear.” He turned the bit of bone over in his fingers, frowning. “It’s a long chip, though. I won’t swear he wasn’t impaled on some kind of sharpened bone.”

“So it might have been an accident?” asked Mallory hopefully.

“Maybe.” Piper shrugged. “I suppose it could have been a supremely bad accident with a supremely pointy tree. Though I would suspect a very well-polished piece of wood, because trees tend to leave bits of bark in the wounds.”

“Could they have simply washed out?” asked Mallory.

“Anything’s possible,” said Piper, in a tone that hopefully conveyed, “Not a chance in hell.” The handsome red-haired paladin hid a smile.

“Why would someone shove a polished stake through him?” asked Mallory, not rising to the bait.

“Maybe they thought he was a vampire.”

“A stake the size of a man’s thigh, though?” Stephen sounded doubtful.

“Perhaps they wanted to be thorough.”

Mallory grunted. The one advantage police had over paladins was that guards had no problem believing that someone would randomly shove pointy logs into other people. Paladins generally took a little longer to get there. Piper suspected that their sense of innocence and moral outrage kept regrowing, possibly through divine means.

“A gnole thinks this is one of the bodies,” said the gnole constable.

Piper looked over at the gnole, puzzled, but Mallory grunted again, apparently understanding. “The other two were decapitated,” he said.

Both paladins bristled. Piper felt his own stomach sink. “You mean from the smooth men?”

“No, no.” Mallory waved his hand. “Different sort of decapitation. Sorry. I realize we’re all a bit sensitive about that still.”

“Oh good, just a run-of-the-mill beheading,” said Galen dryly.

“I hear in other towns, they sometimes go whole weeks without anyone having their heads randomly chopped off,” said Piper.

Mallory scowled, and Piper realized too late that the guard captain was taking that as an insult. “No offense to your men,” he added hastily. “Those are all much smaller towns.”

“None taken,” said Mallory, in much the same tone that Piper had said, ‘Anything’s possible’. “I sometimes think of moving to one of those places. But those other two didn’t come from here. They washed up on the bank, just like this fellow did. Whatever killed him was upstream.”

“A body was in the water the same amount of time,” said the gnole constable. He reached out and tapped a claw on the dead man’s foot. “A body wore the same kind of boots.”

They all duly examined the boots. They were ordinary leather, not particularly distinguished, the kind sewn inside out so that the seams didn’t leak.

“Everybody wears leather boots,” said Mallory.

The gnole reached up with one hand and smoothed his whiskers down. In a human, it would have been a fussy little gesture. Piper rather suspected that in a gnole, it was the equivalent of taking a deep breath so that you didn’t yell. “A job-human wears wooden soles. A rag-and-bone human wears wooden soles. Even a sword-human—” he nodded to the two paladins “—wear wooden soles.”