Free Darkness on the Edge of Town by J. Carson Black Page B

Same price?
    MUSICMAN: Two thousand more.
    DARK MOONDANCER: Verification?
    MUSICMAN:  Turn on the local news.
    DARK MOONDANCER: That one?  You’re in my jurisdiction! Let’s meet.
    MUSICMAN: I never meet my clientele. It’s not good to mix business with pleasure.
    DARK MOONDANCER: You do it all the time, mix business with pleasure LOL. But seriously, we are an exclusive club, you and I. Please come visit.  Bring a friend. 
    MUSICMAN: My plans are fluid at the moment.  
    DARK MOONDANCER: Fluid? There’s a pun.  So you are still here. I would have thought you’d be a thousand miles away by now.
    MUSICMAN: Parting is such sweet sorrow.
    DARK MOONDANCER: Don’t be cryptic.  I’d love to know what’s going on in your mind.
    MUSICMAN: Shall I make the shipment or not?
    DARK MOONDANCER: By all means.  As before, payment is forthcoming.  But if you’re planning an extended stay, do give serious thought to my invitation. You might not come this way again.

    Musicman thought: We have less in common than you think . 
    Dark Moondancer’s desires were base, his enthusiasm clumsy.  He didn’t get the subtle distinctions; he was just another cretin saturated with blood lust, looking for a vicarious thrill. The guy reminded him of a comic book character—way over the top. 
    Still, he paid the bills.
    Musicman pulled up the photograph he intended to use: baby ducks following their mother across a lawn.  Beautiful, the play of sunlight and shadow on their soft yellow down.  So innocent.  And yet beneath the surface resided a dark secret. 
    A secret that, truth to tell, shamed him. 
    He wouldn’t do it if he didn’t need the money.  So far he’d ignored Dark Moondancer’s hints about escalating the violence—it just wasn’t his way.  Even with this one—who’d made him so fucking angry!—he’d stopped short of fulfilling Dark Moondancer’s requests.  Partly because he didn’t like the sight of blood (although he’d proven that he could deal with it if he had to), and partly because he didn’t like Dark Moondancer or anybody else calling the shots.
    This was his show.
    Musicman knew, though, that Dark Moondancer was getting impatient.  The gravy train wouldn’t last forever. 
    Utilizing a user-friendly software program he had downloaded from the Internet, Musicman embedded the first photo into the picture of the baby ducks.  He pulled up another scenic from his photo library—boats in a marina. 
    He would send four pics in all.  Each pic would be encrypted and require a password to open.  Dark Moondancer would have the baby ducks, but he would not have the real picture underneath until Musicman got his payment.  Only then would he send back the encrypted password. 
    He pictured Dark Moondancer looking at the little duckies, wishing he could see what was underneath. 
    “Water water everywhere, nor any drop to drink,” Musicman intoned.  He hit the SEND button, consigning the ducklings and their invisible cargo into the ether.

13
    “Her hyoid was broken,” Cochise County ME Carmen Sotomayor said as she snapped off her gloves and dropped them into a BIO HAZARD container. 
    The smell of sawed bone clung to Laura’s nostrils, almost as bad as the odor of death.  The last thing Carmen Sotomayor had done before sewing Jessica Parris back up was to use an electric saw to open up her cranium to examine her brain. 
    Laura thought the killer had been crafty, but now she knew to what extremes he had gone to avoid detection.  He’d bathed the girl’s body and washed her hair, clipped her fingernails, even given her a douche. 
    The douche was necessary.  He had sexually assaulted his victim after death, not before. Post-mortem sex was another indication that the killer didn’t want to risk abrasions to Jessica and to himself.  Whoever he was, he knew something about the collection of evidence.
    She looked at Jessica Parris, small and forlorn on the stainless steel autopsy table.