The uni that woke me up this morning said there was a body dump, out over by Fort Independence where the river met up with the bay and the edge of Boston. I flew down to the scene, hovering slowly around the river’s edge. It was a hot day for Boston, but the humidity hadn’t kicked in bad. I took my time gliding down to the crew assembled to investigate.

“Detective Angus,” a young fairy called out as I touched down lightly nearby. I had to watch the landings these days, too many rough ones in my youth were killer on my joints. Damned knees, you’d think after two centuries on this planet, we’d have found the right magic to fix some joints, Gaia damnit.

“Oisin”, I replied, “they really put you out here already? Isn’t this just your third week as a detective?”

“Aye,” she said, “I requested to be paired for a murder to get me more exposure!”

“That’s lovely,” I lied sarcastically through gritted teeth. Of course, she would, a bright and young sprite of only thirty, but Oisin was already angling her way up the ladder at the precinct. “Let’s not get too excited though. Remember, this is a fellow child of Gaia, a brother or sister fae, fallen before their prime. Their death is a tarnish on us all, and must be given all due process and respect, not treated like the next level of a video game.”

She blushed and looked down at her tablet, averting her gaze from meeting my own cold eyes. I felt a little bad for browbeating the scout, but I’d seen too many cold-blooded horror shows over my two hundred years to not demand respect for the crime scene.

I started to walk over to the scene, where other fairies and pixies were in the process of photographing and bagging evidence to be processed back at the labs by the Divination divisions. The field Divination team must have already been out and wrapped up. I relented a bit on my young partner. “Talk to me Oisin, what do we know so far?”

“The deceased,” she started but I cut her off quickly again.

“Victim, Detective Oisin,” I said curtly. “I think we can safely say she didn’t do this to herself. Please continue.”

“Right, the victim was a tooth fairy registered to work out in the Watertown area. Her name was Opal. Identification says she was seventy-three. No next of kin listed, no surviving parents.”

“Did Divination come up with a time of death?” We came to a stop at the scene, the forensics collectors gave us space to work. “Or did they just put up the human deflection spells and run off to wait in their labs?”

A page flipped in her notebook as Oisin checked for my answer. The scene was grisly enough. Wings were ripped off the poor girl and torn to shreds nearby. She wore a bright glittering silver gown and had silver inlay ribbon to tie her hair back. The dress would have been as beautiful as her if it weren’t dirty and bloodstained. The skirt of the gown had been ripped and tattered, revealing thin pale legs disjointed and hanging limply. The large blotches of red and brown where her left heart had been was a giveaway on the cause of death. I snapped on a pair of gloves, the best influence I’d ever had from humans, not contaminating evidence with my own essence.

“Looks like Divination put up their wards and determined the time of death to have been around three yesterday afternoon.” She looked up from her notebook and knelt next to me by the corpse.

“That feels about right. Can you tell me anything about this crime scene by the victim, Oisin?”

“Sir?”

“The scene Oisin, what does it tell you about the crime?”

“I’m, ugh, I’m not really sure, sir. It looks like she was tortured and murdered sir.”

I nodded, then remembered, this is her first one, I was probably this clueless on my first one so long ago. “First, let’s look at the wings, here put these on.” I handed her a pair of gloves like mine. “Help me roll her over a bit.”

We rolled Opal on her side and I pointed to the exposed back of the gown, and the long jagged rips in her flesh. “See all the scabbed over blood and the bruising all across her back and shoulders here?” Oisin nodded. “That means they cut her wings off while she was still alive, the heavy bruising makes me believe they had something big and mean step on her and rip them out. They may have even torn the wings to shreds in front of her just to make it clear she wasn’t flying out.”

I rolled her back to her original position and nodded at Oisin to step back from the body. “Then we got the knees, check them out.”

“Broken, both of them. Also a lot of bruising. Sledgehammer?”

“Or a troll. That would fit in with the wings too. A strong, heavy fella with a granite grip.”

Oisin nodded again, bending to get a closer glance at the knees.

“Now,” I continued, “there’s a number of things notably missing from our crime scene. What are we missing, Oisin?”

She scanned the body and the surrounding park. I took a deep breath of the summer breeze rolling in from the harbor while she mulled over my challenge.

“Sir, her shoes are missing, and I think the murder weapon.”

“That’s a good start, Detective,” I said, letting her a little praise. “However, the big thing I see missing is a massive pool of blood. Plus, Divination declares the time of death as almost eighteen hours ago and someone just finds it now. What do those and the missing items tell us about Opal?”

Oisin clicked onto the issue almost immediately. “She was killed somewhere else and dumped here, right sir?”

I gave one quick nod. “Yep, looks like from the bruising and the bleeding on the back, the knees and wings were done while she was alive, but the actual cause of death would be that stab wound to her left heart. Right one still appears untouched, but that would just make a slow painful death as she bled out from the one pumping to the other. Anything else to tell you this is a body dump?”

She cocked an eyebrow and shook her head.

“The smell, Detective. We’re in the height of summer and the humidity is getting higher. Fairy flesh has a faster decay and putrefaction rate in higher humidity. Granted this humidity isn’t as bad as those two decades I spent down in New Orleans, but if she were killed here and left for that long, we’d have a smell and heavier decomposition by now. What’s that tell us about where she was killed?”

“She was killed inside somewhere cold, maybe with refrigeration. Not a warehouse, but maybe a meat packing plant or something similar?”

“Yeah, that’s about what I was thinking too,” I said. “Now here’s where I hope you’re not too squeamish, Oisin. Get down here with me.”

I knelt on one side of Opals body, her eyes stared out, sunken and vacant. I slid my gloved hand over them, shutting the eyelids. Then I tugged down on her chin, rigor was starting to set in, so I had to give a sharp yank to crack the jaw apart while Oisin was kneeling. She slammed her eyes shut when the jaw of the victim ratcheted open, the smell of decay flitted out like wisps of horror. Oisin almost threw up, but caught her gag at the last moment and held it back.

“Yep, take a look on in there.”

“No teeth?” She asked.

“It’s a message, one of the gangs in town, she pissed them off something fierce, and they are telling everyone why. No blood or bruising on the mouth, so the teeth were all pulled postmortem.”

“But, why?”

I sighed heavily. “It’s about teeth, to begin with. Opal here was a tooth fairy. I’d bet you check in with the Central Tooth Authority her turn in rates would be a lot lower the last few years. Know much about the tooth fairy trade, Oisin?”

She shook her head.

“This will probably surprise you, but the CTA was created to control the flow of human teeth. It’s been around long enough that few fairies are clued into it anymore, but by paying out about two dollars a tooth, the fairy keeps one and pays off the human with the other for a lost tooth. That’s the CTA trying to keep the fairies clean and ethical with a job though. Know what you can make from a human tooth?”

She shook her head again, she was going to get whiplash at this rate.

“Black Tar Mingin is what you can make out of it. An enterprising crew can grind a human tooth to dust, cut it with chemicals and a dash of enchantment and make enough Mingin to keep a goblin horde high for a fortnight.”

“From just a tooth?”

I nodded. “Some tooth fairies had been known to see the easy cash and take to reselling to the gangs. They do just enough of normal duty and turn-ins to keep their license to collect teeth but look at that gown, the silver ribbons. No way she afforded that on the normal fairy salary. Probably been paying off the child humans with heavier bribes too, some of these mule fairies think it’s a good luck homage to leave a five or ten dollar bill behind.” I shook my head, “but these things always have a way of catching up. Let’s head back to the station, we’ll check in with the Organized Crimes department on who’s using trolls and looking to gain turf over teeth recently.”

I took off and hovered briefly, waiting for Oisin. I saw her run a slender finger down Opal’s pale lifeless cheek and mutter, “poor girl” before she lifted off too to follow me back to the precinct.

Joel Spriggs has been writing online in various formats since 2016. He writes humor and urban fantasy, sometimes with a focus on refactored mythology. Joel is a regular contributor to Story of the Week. You can find links to his other works, or how to follow him on Twitter and Ko-fi via his profile.