Page 21

I let out a breath. “Can he describe who killed him?”

“No. They wore ski masks.”

“They?”

“There were—three, he says. All men. No one whose voice or body he recognized.”

“Did they drug him?”

“No. He was… working outside. Covering some of the plants because it was supposed to snow.”

It had snowed that night. We’d walked through it on the way up the path to the house.

I thought back. A few of the front beds hadn’t been covered. “They kept him from finishing winterizing the front beds,” I said into the phone.

A pause, presumably while Ward relayed that to Gregory. “That’s right,” the medium confirmed. “He’s not happy about the roses,” Ward relayed.

“Oh, shit. No. Roses do not appreciate being snowed on.” I wasn’t sure what to do about that. I didn’t actually know much about plants, but you don’t grow up around an herbal expert without picking up some things—like you have to cover roses in a ton of leaves or straw and then put blankets over them or they pretty much just die in upper-midwestern winters. I had no idea now if they could be saved. “Tell him I’m sorry.”

Ward did. “He says that at least the herbal beds were all taken care of. So those should survive until spring.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I had no idea what Elliot intended to do with the house—or the gardens. He didn’t live in Shawano. He had a place and a business in Madison, where he’d been working for the last decade. Packing up to move back to the ass end of the north woods probably hadn’t been high on his list of priorities.

“Can… can Gregory tell me anything else about his killers?” I asked, feeling terrible for changing the subject, but also needing to get as much information as I could.

“One of them smoked,” Ward informed me. “He could smell traces of cigarettes on him.”

“Strong?” I asked. “Or like he’s one of those guys who smokes outside so his wife or whatever doesn’t know.”

A pause, then: “The second.”

So not someone who might be identifiable as a smoker. It helped, but people who were trying to hide a habit were harder to pull out of a crowd than people who were chain-smokers. I’d take what I could get, though. “Anything else?” I asked. “Height? Skin tone? Accents?”

A longer pause this time. “They were all around Gregory’s height,” Ward told me. “One maybe an inch or two taller. One a little shorter. All of them wore gloves, although one guy’s were short enough that Gregory could see pale skin. They all sounded local.”

It figured. First, we were in northern Wisconsin, which isn’t exactly the diversity capital of the world. Second, most of the people of color up here are Mamaceqtaw, and they knew and generally liked Gregory and Elliot. Third… Well, look up the stats. The most likely demographic to kill an Indigenous man in the US is white and male.

Honestly, the most likely demographic to killanyonein the US is white and male. As a member of that demographic—or a former member, if you factor in my sub-species, even though I am technically whiter now than I used to be—it’s not something to be proud of, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Most of the time, murderers are white guys. Sure, it’ll vary based on location and type of murder and the ethnicity and race of the victim—you’re more likely to see intra-racial murder than inter-racial murder—but still. Most killers are white men. Whitehumanmen, despite all the anti-Arcanid propaganda out there.

Nevertheless, having Gregory confirm it meant that I was working with facts, not odds. Facts were better. I jotted down notes on the pad—I preferred taking notes on my phone, but I was talking on my phone and didn’t want to accidentally hang up on Ward. “Weight?”

“The shortest man was less heavy than the others, but the rest were ‘average,’ whatever that means.”

I wrote it down, but Ward was right. ‘Average’ mostly just meant that they weren’t big or small enough for the witness to have noticed. And that usually had a range, for the average adult human male, of about forty pounds, depending on how well he carried it. It’s surprising how generally bad people are at noticing things.

“Anything about their clothes?” I asked. “Or watches or anything like that?”

“Dark clothes—dark jeans or cargos, dark sweatshirts. One of them had a piece of duct tape over a logo on their shirt.”

I blinked. “Why?”

“What?” That was clearly Ward, not Gregory-by-way-of-Ward.

“If they were there to kill him,whydid they bother to hide their faces and cover up a sweatshirt logo?”

A pause. “I don’t know,” Ward answered. “And neither does Gregory.”

“Fuck,” I muttered. Because I could put the pieces together.