Free Four and Twenty Blackbirds by Mercedes Lackey

suddenly occurs halfway across the city, this crime happened so far outside of Tal's district he would never have heard of it, if the circumstances hadn't been so bizarre. Whoever, whatever was behind all this, "he" had moved his area of operation from the waterfront side of the city to the tenement district farthest inland.
    Once again, the poverty of the murderer and victim should have relegated the incident to a mere item in a few records. Tal heard about it over his morning meal in the common-room of the Gray Rose, and his first, cynical thought was that if the deaths themselves had not been so outrageous, the entire package of murder and suicide would have been put down as a sordid little sex-crime.
    Even so, the details were so unbelievable that he was certain they were exaggerated. It was only when he reached the station that he learned that if anything, the public rumors were less horrific than the truth.
    And that was enough to send cold chills over him.
    When he heard the official report for himself, he had one of the oddest feelings he had ever experienced in his long career as a constable. Part of him was horrified, part sickened—and part of him knew a certain sense of self-righteous pleasure. He knew what it was, of course. Hadn't he been saying something like this was going to happen? Well, now it had, and he had told them so. It was a base emotion, but—maybe it was justified.
    As Tal read the report, though, he found it very difficult to keep his detachment. A jewel-crafter (too unskilled to be called a full Jeweler) named Pym, who made inexpensive copper, brass, and silver-plated trinkets, was the perpetrator. A Gypsy-wench called Gannet was the victim. And what had happened to the poor whore at the hands of the smith palled by comparison with what happened to the Gypsy.
    Gannet showed up at Pym's workshop just before he closed, with a handful of trinkets she wanted him to purchase. That much was clear enough from a neighbor, who had probably been the last one to see either of them alive. The neighbor had been loitering about the area in front of Pym's shop and her own; other neighbors said she had "an interest" in Pym, and what they probably meant was that she had her mind set on inveigling him into marrying her. The neighbor was not pleased to see a younger woman show up at the shop, and drew close enough to hear the ensuing conversation. The Gypsy insisted that someone had sent her to Pym specifically to sell her goods, and although the jeweler seldom made such purchases, tonight he waved the wench into his shop and shut and locked the door behind her. That had been so unlike Pym that the neighbor suspected something illegal (or so she told the constables) and set herself to watch Pym's door.
    Right, Tal snorted to himself, as he read that particular bit of nonsense. More like, she suspected Pym of a bit of funny-business with a skirt, and was nosy and jealous enough to wait around for details. 
    But the Gypsy didn't come out, although there were lights and shadows moving about in the back of Pym's workshop all night long. And in the morning, the neighbor, whose imagination had been running at high speed ever since the girl showed up, knocked insistently on the door on the excuse that she had smelled something burning. Then she called the constables when Pym didn't appear to open his shop or answer the door.
    The constables, unable to rouse anyone, broke the door down. There was no one in the front of the shop, nor in the rooms above, but what met them when they opened the door to the workshop sent one of them running to empty his stomach in the gutter, and the other to rouse the entire station to come and cope with the scene.
    What was left of Pym lay on the floor in a posture of agony at the foot of his workbench. The girl lay spread-eagled on the top of his biggest workbench, also dead. Pym had used the entire contents of his workshop to make a strange display-piece out of the girl, beginning by