Early Winter

“Minos,”

A gentle flash filled the room as Minos, christened Luminous Fetch, depressed the trigger on his camera. He grimaced, inspecting the shot. Crumbs of shattered crystal covered the sideboard, its source, a broken decanter that now served as a macabre centerpiece.

“Minos!”

He looked up with a start.

“Damn it Fetch, you’re meant to photograph the scene, not wade through it.”

“Shit,” Minos lifted his heel from the blood that had pooled around Catherine Winter’s body.

“Hold still.”

Minos held his shoe clear of the blood as Dianne mopped it clean with a paper towel, careful to step around the remains herself.

“Thanks. Sorry, must have been absorbed.”

“Or distracted? That’s not like you. Watch your feet.” Dianne sealed the towel in a zip-lock bag before putting it away in her jacket. “I won’t mention it if you don’t.” Unlike him, she had no problem with blood.

Great. Minos hoped the tread of his sneaker heel wasn’t too conspicuous in the blood. Not all the cops he worked with had Dianne’s tolerance for forensic photographers. He wasn’t haemophobic as such, but homicide really wasn’t his area.

“Is there a problem, light bulb?”

Cox, whose imposing figure now dominated the doorway to the kitchen, ranked somewhere near the bottom of the constabulary tolerance ladder, and Minos in particular had earned an honoured spot near the top of the man’s shit list. But if Cox really wanted to rattle his cage, Minos thought, he needed to start with better jibes. ‘Light bulb’ – pfft – high school stuff.

Minos had just opened his mouth to answer when a cat leapt past Cox’s ankles with a snarl. The grey streak made a beeline for its mistress’s head, lapping at the congealed blood.

“Shit, Minos can you get it out of there?”

Minos wrapped a hand under the feline’s belly and carried it out the way it had come, avoiding the accusing eyes of Cox as the animal scurried away.

“Damn it, Ron!” Dianne snapped again. “I told you to keep the fucking zoo outside, is that so hard?”

“What? Do I look like your cat herder?”

Crouching down, Minos held his breath as he took another shot of Winter. It was hard to tell which smell was more pungent – Winter’s corpse, or the blend of molted hair and cat piss from the furry army outside.

He managed to shut out Dianne and Cox’s arguing as he retreated to the corner of the room to review the photos. Nobody knew much about Catherine Winter, except that she was sixty-eight, and seemed to have acquired a new cat for every one of those years. In fact, she only had twelve, but their omnipresent meowing gave credence to the myth.

He’d caught the body from every useful angle. From the head, facing the doorway, facing the sideboard…

“Have you identified the murder weapon yet?” Dianne asked Cox. She was studying the sideboard with interest.

“No. But no gunshot or stab wound. Weapon was blunt but heavy enough to do some damage. That much blood—-”

“There’s no blood splatter on the sideboard. It’s far too localized.”

Minos watched Cox’s shoulders twitch. The man was doing that far too often of late.