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It is late spring in Jamrock Quarter, and Lieutenant Kim Kitsuragi is questioning his hearing.
"I'm sorry, what was that, officer?"
In C-Wing’s sunlit bullpen, Patrol Officer Judit Minot hands a paper bag from the local patisserie to him, and repeats: “Emergency pastries.”
He peers inside the bag and raises an eyebrow.
“Really?”
Judit sighs. “Expense reports. You’ve seen how he gets.”
“Ah.” He pulls out a croissant with a thin line of raspberry jam down its side.
“Jude, don’t talk about me like I’m not fucking here,” comes a voice from the vicinity of Satellite Officer Jean Viquemare’s desk. Kim leans sideways to catch a glimpse of Jean sitting on the floor next to his office chair, surrounded by expense forms and looking like a pile of miserable old clothing.
“At least tell me you got—“
Judit smiles and drops another paper bag into Jean’s lap. “Pain au chocolat. No coffee, I’m not your assistant.”
There is the sound of chewing and a contented sigh. “You’re fucking irreplaceable, is what you are. Where’s the shitkid?”
“Caught a case,” the shitkid in question replies, having just walked into the room.
“Anything interesting?”
“Murder. Looks like the Madre. Pretty standard hit, it sounds like.”
“Where?”
“The, uh, Parc d’Argent? On the pond.”
Jean snorts from under the desk, and Judit cracks a small smile.
“Something funny?" inquires Harry.
“Of course, you don’t remember. It’s–”
“No, no, Jude, don’t tell them.” Jean hauls himself up from the floor, looking marginally less defeated. “Make it a surprise.”
“Well-”
Kim folds his arms. “This isn’t a dangerous surprise, correct, officer?”
“No, no, nothing like that, Kitsuragi. God.” Jean waves a hand dismissively. “It’s just, what would you call it? A folly? Let’s say, one of Jamrock’s less successful beautification projects.”
“Beautification.”
“You could call it that, yes. If you’re blind,” says Judit, with a touch more sarcasm than usual.
“You know, I read this really interesting magazine article about sound-based installation art the other day–-”
“No one cares, Harry. Enjoy the boats.”
*
The Parc d’Argent sits on the edge of a neighborhood quietly sliding down the income ladder from middle to lower-middle class. It is a ragged little space, more concrete and eternite than grass and flowers, but kept up with the kind of dogged civic persistence that fends off graffito and gentrification alike. A broad green turned mostly brown by dry weather surrounds a small pond, an old bend in the river Esperance long since cut off from the main flow.
Kim pulls the Kineema into a gravel lot, just near the patrol officer stationed at the scene.
(No one, especially Jean, expected Harry’s wrecked motor carriage to ever be replaced, but, in a series of furtive radio dispatches, the leaders of Precinct 41 had expressed to those of Precinct 57 that their officers solving a case, nearly dying in a gun battle, and discovering a new species deserved, perhaps, some kind of prize.
Fine, said Precinct 57. You get Lieutenant Kitsuragi.
Lieutenant Kitsuragi, replied Precinct 41, is not a prize, he is a person, and he makes his own decisions. Something else, if you please.
Kim had pulled his beloved motor into Precinct 41’s garages later that same week.)
The patrol officer stationed at the crime scene nods to the two detectives. "Victim's in the boat. The fucked-up one."
"What do you mean the fu-" Harry trails off as Kim utters a quiet oath under his breath.
The Parc d'Argent, ragged though it may be, sports a full compliment of pleasure boats for its little pond. The typical Revacholian skua boat is shaped like the bird at rest. Patrons sit between the skua’s folded wings and use pedals to guide the boat around. Some skua boats are larger and simply have a carved likeness of the bird perched on the prow, with long benches for multiple families of tourists and a space for a guide at the back. Skua boats like the ones in Parc d'Argent, however, are typically built for two.
At some point in ‘50, some prominent citizens of Couron had the brilliant idea of renovating some of Revachol’s crumbling public infrastructure. In their infinite wisdom, a contract was awarded for the rejuvenation of the Parc d'Argent fleet to some local, up-and-coming artists.
Obviously, no one had thought to check anyone’s oeuvres before the contracts were awarded.
Three of the floating skua boats were fairly normal. One was painted in the colors and motifs of the old flag of the Suzerain, and had been, in response, heavily vandalized. One had chips of some reflective material embedded in its wings, the last remnants of a colorful mosaic. Whatever had been done to the third had rusted away to point of illegibility.
The fourth boat was the fucked-up one.
The fourth had been completely torn down and redone. Instead of nestling between two wings, the seats of the fourth skua boat sat within its mouth - the boat reshaped as a grotesquely oversized beak with two chipped and peeling painted eyes on the canopy, the rest of its body a caricatured vestige at the aft.
And, in its uncaring maw, sprawled across the wooden seats: their victim.
The two detectives take in the scene in silence.
“Kim,” says Harry, finally.
“Mhm?”
“Kim, this bird has seen some shit.”
“Mm.” Kim takes out his notebook and begins to write.
Harry tilts his head to one side. “You think it’s a…metaphor, or something?”
“I don’t think it’s anything, except our crime scene. After you?”
Harry steps gingerly into the boat. “No, seriously, I’m thinking the boat ate this guy.”
“Ate him.”
“Yes.”
“Detective, this man has clearly been shot.”
“Maybe the bird did it.”
Kim pinches the bridge of his nose. “Could you please get out the autopsy forms.”
It was a clean job - single bullet through the forehead, minimal blood. Were it not for the position of the body–
“A Madre hit wouldn’t be this–”
“Conspicuous?”
“Precisely.” Kim draws a line in his notes. “Thoughts?”
Harry takes a deep breath and looks around, propping one foot on the boat's bench. His eyes narrow. "I'm thinking that bush over there is moving."
Kim follows his line of sight to the nearest patch of scraggly brush, which is, in fact, trembling.
He looks at Harry. Are you fucking kidding me, he expressly doesn't say. Harry nods, once. He hops back onto the dock, picks up a rock and throws it at the bush.
The bush stops moving.
Kim exchanges another glance with Harry. "Excuse me? RCM, please show yourself," he calls, his hand drifting towards his service weapon.
Harry throws another rock. There's a muffled curse this time, and as the two detectives approach the bushes, a man bolts out of the cover, looks frantically between the two detectives, and throws himself into the pond.
Harry, of course, immediately throws himself right after.
The pond is only knee-deep but Harry struggles and curses and dog-paddles as the unknown man hauls himself into the mica-studded skua boat and starts pedaling as fast as he can away from Harry, which takes him nearly into the opposite bank but does keep him ahead of the struggling detective, who is clearly not in the best of shape.
The world's slowest police chase continues for several minutes as Kim makes his way to the other side of the pond. His hands clasped behind his back, he walks patiently beside the frantically-pedaling suspect.
“I’m not entirely sure what the purpose of this is,” he says, casually. “This is, after all, a pond with no entrances or exits. And, of course, my partner is–” Kim glances behind the boat to find that Harry has, for some reason, veered off course and is splashing his way towards something else in the water that Kim cannot make out. He sighs.
“Please, do continue,” he informs the suspect, and walks briskly back over to his car.
Several seconds later, a piercing blast cuts through the morning air. On the pond, a flock of disgruntled geese suddenly appears, fleeing the noise, and, coincidentally, surrounding the fleeing skua boat. In the boat, the suspect seems to deflate, burying his head in his hands.
On the near bank, Kim takes his hand off the Kineema’s horn.
Harry comes out of the water dripping and heaving like a sea monster, clutching a small, black…something.
"Detective, are you alright?" asks Kim, trying and failing to discern what Harry had hauled out of the water.
The ink blot cradled against Harry’s chest suddenly sneezes.
“Oh,” says Kim. “A cat?”
"It jumped out of the bushes when the suspect bolted. Poor little thing. You didn't see?”
The cat--kitten, really--blinks huge yellow eyes up at him and shivers.
"No, no, I didn't," says Kim, feeling a certain amount of pity for the creature, despite himself. Revachol has its fair share of strays, after all. One gets used to seeing them pretty much everywhere. He had even been one himself, once upon a time. Kim looks at his partner, who is smiling at the cat, and briefly closes his eyes, resigned.
“It’s soaking wet. You’re soaking wet. Wait here.”
Kim returns from his car with a spotless dust rag and wordlessly scoops the kitten into it. He looks up at his partner and raises an eyebrow.
“Officer, you are not riding in my car like that.”
“C’mon, Kim,” wheedles Harry. “We solved the case! In, like, five minutes! That has to be some kind of record!”
They come to an agreement, Harry rides in the backseat. Kim zips the little kitten, still shivering, into his jacket’s breast pocket.
*
“Hey, Jean, hey, Jude.”
Jean swivels around in his chair. “Why are you covered in fucking pond weed? And what the fuck is that?”
Harry just shrugs as Kim sets his bundled jacket down on Harry's desk.
“Excuse me, miss, may I have this back?” Kim gently tugs his jacket away from the kitten, leaving it wobbling on the desk. “Thank you.”
“Oh, look at her,” says Judit, rubbing one of its ears. “Like a little owl. Une petit chouette.”
“Owl,” says Harry. “Are you a little owl, Chouette?” The kitten mews.
Jean groans. “For god’s sake, don’t name the thing.”
His heart isn’t in it. He can tell Harry is already besotted with the creature.
Perhaps they can keep it in the stables, he thinks. The Captain's horse could use a friend.
*
At the end of the day, Captain Ptolemy Pryce does the rounds with his second-in-command, Sergeant Svetlana Berdyayeva. C-Wing’s four residents are suspiciously peaceful.
Kim types steadily, the sound of the keys regular and orderly. Judit perches on his desk, talking her way through a sheaf of paperwork. Expense forms are in a pile on Jean’s desk, along with a small, black cat. Jean idly twitches the top sheet across the desk as Chouette watches, rapt. The light glints off the tiny silver badge that someone has tied around her neck.
Across from them, at his own catastrophically messy desk, Harry stares dreamily into the middle distance, having one of his usual conversations with nothing.
“Highly unconventional,” murmurs Berdyayeva.
“Mm. Suits them,” replies Pryce.