The cab smelled, the way cabs often do. In the day of Uber and Lyft, it almost seems like a safe assumption that taxis would be interested in upping their game. Judging by the stench—an awkward mix of cheap wine, Lysol, and menthol that was somehow both subtle and pungent—it was clear they didn’t much care so long as passengers chose them. And Derek had picked the cab over his other options. After a flight that seemed to be made up of more hours than it actually was, he felt a little cheated. Was “smells pleasantly” too much to ask for?

“Where are you headed, sir?” the driver asked. He didn’t have a thick southern accent, but it was noticeable enough to the passenger.

“Denton. 626 Gabe Avenue,” Derek responded in a voice that was both bored and irritated. The cabbie just nodded and the passenger continued his trend of not speaking. He had said less than ten words on the plane and saw no point in adding to that count in the taxi.

He had been warned before leaving New York that Texas was under constant construction, but hadn’t considered what that reality looked like. Arriving at an unfinished airport and driving down a road that had half of its lanes closed gave him some insight into the stereotype about Texan drivers. Their aggression on the road made complete sense given all the orange cones and broken concrete.

The drive from DFW International Airport to Denton should have taken about half an hour, at least according to Google Maps. The trouble with that estimated time frame was that it only existed in an ideal of world of no traffic or stoplights or construction stops. Fifty four minutes after leaving the airport, the cab pulled up in front of the address.

“Comes out to $85.65,” the cabbie announced once he put the car in park. Derek reached into the back pocket of his slacks and removed a crisp hundred dollar bill. Before the driver could even offer change, Derek grabbed his briefcase and exited the vehicle, closing the door with a soft thud that left the cabbie no choice but to leave the premises.

Staring at the one story house, Derek let out a sigh, the kind of sigh only desperate men and women breathe out, the kind full of pent up anger and dissatisfaction. The details of the structure blurred into nothingness; the siding could have been lime fucking green and Derek wouldn’t even have noticed. He had looked at too many houses like this in his life for the particulars to make a lasting impression.

The front door would be locked. It always was by the time he showed up, but he always tried it just in case. Maybe one day some cop would fuck up and leave the damn place open so Derek could get to work without having to walk into a police station. The door didn’t budge as he turned the knob, so he fished the card he had been given out of his wallet and dialed the first number on it.

“Denton Police Department. If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911. How can I help you?” It was hard to tell if the voice on the line was coming from a flesh and blood mouth or if it was a recording.

“Sgt. Williams, please,” Derek responded, his voice still carrying the edge only tedium can create. He knew he should have been nicer, but it was too late for that.

“Can I ask who is calling before I transfer you?”

“Derek Francis.”

“One moment please.”

There was no static-infused music while he waited on hold, just a no-nonsense silence that he much preferred. It gave him time to think, though he had more than enough time for that in general. Thinking was all he did some days. Before he could fall completely into the rabbit hole of thought, the line clicked.

“Sgt. Williams. Who is this?” Derek had wanted the voice to be gruff, mean even, so the customer-service politeness of it was grating on his already frayed nerves.

“Derek Francis. I’m calling to inquire about the death of Marshall Mendoza. His publisher said you’d be expecting me.”

“Yes we did receive information that his publisher would be sending someone. How exactly can I help you, Mr. Francis?”

“Well, I’m outside the deceased’s residence and would like to get in and look around. If that wouldn’t be too much to ask.” Derek’s request was sickly sweet and he knew what kind of face Sgt. Williams was likely making. The police officer’s probable frustration brought a sort of smile to Derek’s face.

“Sir that is an open crime scene. I can’t grant a civilian access to it until it is closed.”

“Good thing I’m not just a civilian. Send the detective in charge of the case to the residence and they can review my credentials. Or I can contact your city’s DA and have this conversation with them.”

There was another silence, this one born out of subdued rage that just made Derek’s smile widen. The Sargent didn’t want to be told what to do or threatened, especially by an outsider. Cops were all the same no matter what city: proud and willing to fight for that pride. Derek got a kick out of it every time he had to deal with it.

“I’ll send somebody.” Click.

Derek took a seat on the porch, knowing there was little he could do outside of waiting. Actually, there was a lot he could do, a lot he should do, but he knew that for the moment at least he should operate within the confines of the law. There would be plenty of opportunities in the next few days for illicit behavior.

Ten minutes crawled by as he sat there. He had let his thoughts wander again, allowing them to graze in whatever pasture they found themselves in. None of them went too deep, and he was thankful for that. Deep thoughts were a distraction, and he didn’t feel like being distracted. A Denton Police cruiser pulled up to the curb in front of the house and two uniformed officers stepped out. When Derek stood up to greet them, they both placed hands on their side-arms.

“I know we’re deep in Trump country here, but you don’t have to draw your pistols just because a black man with dreads stands up,” he greeted, his words a savage joke. Part of him—the violent part that he rarely acknowledged—wanted them to draw, wanted the excuse to bleed them dry. As they approached, he pulled a manila folder out of his briefcase and held it out, ignoring the impulse to gut both officers. One of them took it, flipped it open, stared incredulously, and then handed its contents to his partner.

“Who…who are you?” the first officer asked after reading through the few pages in the file. They indicated that one, Derek Francis, had valid private investigation licenses for all fifty states as well as in Puerto Rico and Guam, that he had been deputized in fourteen states (including Texas) as an officer of the law at the state level, and that he was currently in the employ of a New York publishing house. What wasn’t in the file was Derek’s military career, his stint in the CIA, or those few years he worked for the Catholic Church as an investigator.

“I’m just a man on a case, something the two of you should understand. I am allowed into this residence, crime scene or not, and would appreciate one of you unlocking the door.”

The second officer concluded his review of Derek’s credentials, ending on the contract between him and the publishing house. The man was correct; he had jurisdiction here in his capacity as a hired investigator.

It was late in the day, about 7:45 PM, and the cloud-covered sky was beginning to darken. Night was falling as the two officers unlocked and opened the door for Derek Francis, who told them to leave, that he could manage from here. When both balked and tried to explain that that went against policy, he just smiled.

“Shove your policy up your collective ass and get the hell out of here. I’ll lock up and bring the keys back to the precinct when I’m done. I still have to speak with the detective in charge of this case. And since neither of you are that detective, scram!”

As with the cabbie, Derek didn’t give them a chance to argue. He just took the keys out of the door and closed it behind him in the officers’ faces. He just wasn’t in the mood to deal with that amount of bullshit, not when he already had an idea of what had happened here.

“Marshall Mendoza,” he whispered as he made his way into the house, surveying the sparsely-furnished living room with eyes well trained at surveying. “Two time national bestselling author currently working on your ninth novel. And now you’re dead, suicide according to the preliminary medical examination. Though we’re still waiting on the official autopsy. What are they going to find when they cut you open, I wonder.”

There was nothing of import in the living room, but that was to be expected. Mendoza probably never spent time in this part of the house, based solely on the amount of dust carpeting every surface. It was in the office, Derek knew, that he would likely find what he was looking for.

It was only a two bedroom house, so the search wasn’t going to take a terribly long time. Flipping on the light in the room closest to the living room, Derek stumbled into Mendoza’s bedroom. A bed, a table, and a dresser were all that occupied the space. The author probably did nothing but sleep there, and even that would be pushing it. Turning the light back out, Derek walked away.

The next room was the busiest in the house. It had a desk under the window, one that was crowded and crammed with books and notebooks and pens and several empty bottles of bottom shelf whiskey. There was a clearing in the center where a computer used to reside, but the cops had bagged it as evidence.

Beside the desk was a filing cabinet, also supporting books. Derek found nothing useful in either drawer, just some tax information, a couple of bills, and a receipt for new wallpaper aside from the dime-store novels stashed inside. Two of the walls were obscured by bookshelves, but there was no discernable order to them.

After rifling through everything in the room, Derek made his way back to the desk. He opened the singular drawer and upended it, spilling pens and paperclips and several more small books onto the floor. The bottom of the drawer was marred and scratched. Mendoza had taken an X-Acto knife to the particle board, scribbling just two words over and over again: the owls.

“So it is the owls again,” Derek mused as he examined the drawer. There were no other such scribblings on any other surface in the room, and Derek spent the next several hours checking them all. Mendoza had clearly been careful, at least in regards to the scratching. Derek would have to check the hard drive of his PC before he could be sure.

Before leaving, he popped his head into the bathroom. Mendoza had been found four days ago in his bathtub, both wrists slit according to the publisher. There had been no water in the tub when he was discovered. The tile floor was one large red-stain, Mendoza’s final story written in his own blood. He had left no note.

Derek inspected the restroom, taking extra care not to disturb the stain. There was nothing in the cabinets or the drawers, no towels or toiletries, and no more scratches. The walls looked new, even the parts coated in crimson, and Derek knew he would have to cut the new paper away and check underneath. Pulling a sharp knife from the inside pocket of his blazer, he stood on the toilet and began to slide the blade through the thick wallpaper. Removing roughly a square foot, he found what he had been looking for.

“There you are,” he sighed as he looked at the words scratched into the walls.

“Don’t let them out,” they read.

He’d have to replace the square, but it was almost two in the morning. He had had a long flight, a smelly cab ride, and had to deal with the arrogance of a college town’s police force. Rest or high doses of caffeine were in order. Stopping at the bathroom door, Derek growled and turned around. It wasn’t like him to half-ass anything.

Square of wallpaper replaced and both rooms in the shape he had found them, Derek walked out of the one-story house. His watch read 2:38 AM. Wave after wave of exhaustion broke on him in that instant, and he felt that he might drown under their pressure. Unfortunately, he still had a long walk to the police station ahead of him.

It took an hour to trudge from Mendoza’s house to Denton’s police department, an hour under the Texas stars and heat. Seeing stars did a little good for his nerves, but only a little, and he arrived at the station in much the same mood he had been in when he had to deal with two of Denton’s finest. Approaching the lone officer manning the front desk at this ungodly hour of the morning, he twirled the keys around his fingers.

“Marshall Mendoza’s house,” Derek proclaimed as he placed them on the desk. The officer took the keys and then looked at the investigator in an almost apologetic way, that lying form of pity people often invoke when they really don’t give a shit what happens to you.

“Derek Francis,” came a customer-service oriented voice from behind him, “you’re under arrest.” Another officer—likely one of the ones he had called racist—slapped bracelets on his wrists and led him away.

“Did you boys stay up all night just for me?” Derek mocked as they led him to one of three interrogation rooms. So much for getting any amount of rest tonight.

“Who are you?” Sgt. Williams demanded as he stormed through the door. His quiet voice didn’t really do the movement into the room justice. That voice was at odds with his large frame. “Who are you really?”

“Francis comma Derek,” Derek began, the irritation overtaking the boredom in his voice, “hired by the publisher of one, Marshall Mendoza, to collect a final manuscript. You confiscated my briefcase, so you already know as much.”

“We looked through your belongings. What the fuck does a publisher’s assistant need a sawed-off shotgun for!? Or a can of gasoline?”

“Really? You’re going to ask about a gun in Texas?”

“How did you get an illegal weapon on a plane?”

“Long story.”

“You aren’t going anywhere, so you might as start talking.”

“Seventy-two hours. That’s as long as you can hold me since you have no legal reason for arresting me. And you shouldn’t ask questions you don’t actually want the answers to.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means exactly what it means: you won’t like the answers I give you. So quit asking me questions.”

“I will ask as many—”

Derek didn’t let him finish the statement.

“You will shut the fuck up and give me my phone call. And if you don’t, I’ll have your goddamn badge.”

Williams should have had some macho-man response ready to go, but something about the quiet way Derek made his demands shut him up. There was power in that voice, power that the Sargent didn’t understand or even really recognize. He escorted Derek to the phone bank.

“Let’s hope your city’s DA is awake already.”

The conversation was quick, tense, but subdued as if someone had wrapped the whole thing in cotton. After only a few seconds, Derek held the phone out to the Sargent.

“He’d like to speak with you.”

“Williams! Give this man access to whatever he fucking needs to access. If I have to come down there to ensure you don’t interfere with his investigation, I will!” Click.

Derek just held up his hands, still encased in handcuffs, with a sarcastic smile on his face.

“What do you need?” Williams asked, barely holding his ire back.

“I need to look through the files on Mr. Mendoza’s computer, which your department has impounded. I need to see his body. And I need a full autopsy performed on it in the next six hours.”

Sgt. Williams grabbed Derek’s arm as he tried to walk past, holding on tight.

“How?” was all he could ask, trying to grasp what gave this stranger such authority.

“Magic. Whole lotta magic.”

Derek made his way from the Sargent and over to the evidence room, looking not only for his belongings but those of Marshall Mendoza. Collecting his briefcase, wallet, and blazer, he also procured the author’s laptop and a thick stack of papers. He leafed through those quickly.

“Has anybody else looked at this?”

“It’s evidence. So yeah.”

“Sarcasm is unbecoming, son,” Derek said before turning to walk away. The clock on the wall read 5:16 AM.

The cop shop would soon be infested with personnel and Derek’s boredom was becoming panic. Something told him he wouldn’t have a few days to deal with the problem that was Mendoza; he’d be lucky if he had a few hours. He made his way back to the interrogation room, needing the quiet space to read and think. The Denton Police Department wouldn’t have much choice but to let him.

Settling himself into the hard-backed aluminum chair, Derek began reading through the thick stack of papers. It wasn’t the manuscript he had been hired to procure, but was in fact the reason he had agreed to this job in the first place. The only surprising thing about the pages was that they didn’t start like the rest; there was no build up, just insanity on paper from page one.

“They’re in the walls. They’re in the floors. They’re in my bones. They’re in my head.”

The pages went on like that, all sixty odd of them. Derek had seen this all before, the same frenetic writing about owls in places owls shouldn’t be, but never this concentrated. His first encounter had come courtesy of a painter four years ago. The artist’s words were less frantic as this author’s, but the content had been much the same: the owls were getting closer. That painter had swallowed a bullet, leaving behind nothing but a stack of pages and several grotesque paintings that may have been of owls.

Derek laid the pages aside, booting up Mendoza’s laptop. A year and half after the painter, a violinist turned up dead, strangled with one of her strings. The hardwood floor of her loft was scratched into oblivion, the words “the owls” taking up a majority of the space. She had also left several dozen pages detailing where the owls were.

The PC took its damn time getting logged in, and Derek was losing patience. The pattern fit, but he still didn’t know what that meant. Mendoza was number four, at least the fourth that Derek had seen, and he was no closer to an answer than when he first found that painter’s brain matter splattered all over the canvas. There had been a poet about a year ago, bled to death from a nick in the femoral artery, who left behind the same stack of pages, the same inane writing on the wall.

All three of the creatives had been deemed suicides. The first two had been cremated without autopsy. The poet, however, had been buried. It wasn’t the first grave Derek had robbed, but what he saw when he cut the young man’s chest open wasn’t right. That was the only way he had been able to describe his feelings of revulsion and terror at the lack of organs he found.

Before he could relive that night, the laptop finally stopped loading. Derek quickly poured over every file, looking for any reference to owls. There was none on the machine. Mendoza must have kept all the madness to the pages sitting next to the computer, the desk drawer, and the bathroom walls. That brought some small amount to relief to Derek as he read through the author’s most recent manuscript, the one he had been hired to collect, until he read the final chapter. Pulling a flash drive and a large magnet from his briefcase, Derek saved the manuscript to the drive (deleting the last chapter) before sliding the magnet over the computer’s hard drive. He would have to wait to light the pages up, but he could take some small solace in having wiped the PC.

It was closer to seven than to six when he left the interrogation room, looking for the morgue, both the wiped PC and the pages in his briefcase. His thoughts wanted to be free again, to dive deep this time, but he couldn’t let them, not right now. They would be much more than a distraction if he allowed them to wander.

The morgue was on the other side of the building, down two flights of stairs, one of the few basements anyone would find in Texas. Nobody sat at the desk in front of the double doors, so Derek just pushed them open, needing his answers now. A medical examiner was drinking coffee when he barged in.

“Can I help you?” the young-ish woman asked.

“I need a full autopsy done on Marshall Mendoza and I need it done now.”

“Ah, yes, you’re the one Sgt. Williams mentioned.”

“That’d be me. Can you get on with it?”

“A bit pushy, aren’t we?”

“Just in a hurry.”

“Sir, you can’t be in here for an autopsy.”

“Do you have an observation room?”

The ME couldn’t tell if the stranger was kidding or not. An observation room? At the morgue? When Derek didn’t flash a smile or start to chuckle, she knew he was serious. Dead serious. It was hard not to laugh at her own private joke, but staring at the face carved out of stone staring down at her, she kept her mirth to herself.

“We don’t. You can wait outside if you like.”

“I’ll be right outside the doors.”

Derek stalked back out of the morgue, taking a seat at the unoccupied desk. If a guard or officer was supposed to be posted here, fuck them. He needed to be close. Running his hands through his thick hair, Derek tried to take several steadying breaths. He had been in Denton less than a day, and the pattern was holding, but that didn’t mean a hell of a lot. Here was another creative loner rambling about owls before offing himself. If the medical examiner found what he expected her to find…

A thorough autopsy can take several hours, but Derek knew this wouldn’t be a thorough autopsy. She would find in Mendoza’s chest what he had found in the chest of the poet. And then what?

“Fuck!” he whispered, his voice shaking, with fear or exhaustion he couldn’t tell.

All it took was an hour before the ME opened the door, her smock almost crisp, bone saw still in her hands.

“What…what is…what is it?” she faltered, but Derek had already brushed past her and into the morgue. Mendoza’s body was on the first slab, his chest cavity open but far from inviting. Derek’s heart began to pound and thump, louder and louder, until the cadence was the only thing he could hear.

There were no organs inside Mendoza’s chest, no blood or viscera, and no visible spine. The top of the dead author’s rib cage and sternum were laid on the table next to him, but they were the only real indication that what Derek was looking at was in fact a human body. Inside was black, blacker than black, a void so deep it hurt just to look at. Derek pulled the overhang light down and angled it just right to see what he was looking for. Within that void was a maze, walls and tunnels that probably circulated throughout all of Mendoza’s body. It cascaded down, traversed far past where the body’s back should have stopped it. Derek reached his hand inside, felt the cold of the abyss and the coarseness of whatever the walls were composed of before backing out of the morgue as calmly as possible.

“That isn’t a goddamn body! What the fuck is it?!” The ME was in hysterics as Derek exited the morgue, but he had no words with which to comfort her.

“Burn it,” he said between her bouts of screaming. “Burn it now. And if anyone asks, I told you to cremate the remains. Do not tell anyone what you saw.”

He didn’t wait for her to comply, just turned and walked away. Derek didn’t stop by the evidence room or to say goodbye to Sgt. Williams. He just walked out of the precinct and into the early morning Texas heat. Same pattern, same fucking words, same fucking maze. Before he could let the implications set in, he fished his phone out of his pocket and dialed his current employer’s number.

“I have the manuscript and need a flight back to New York,” was all he said, the boredom back in his voice.

“Very good! We’ll email you the flight details. You really do—” Click.

Derek wasn’t interested in hearing the rest of the compliment. His thoughts had settled onto the final words of the author’s soon-to-be-posthumously-published book, the words he had deleted, the words he had read in the poet’s last poem, in the journal of the violinist, in the last painting of the painter. Words that Derek could now hear scratching at the inside of his skull.

Don’t forget there are owls in the walls.