Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

the auditorium was a bloody mess. A crimson trail of drag marks and splashes began at the mats and snaked across the concrete floor in the direction of the stage where the victim lay in a crumpled heap. She was face down on the handle of the sword with the blade sticking out of her side like a toothpick in a cocktail sausage. Siri and Phosy exchanged glances.
    “This one put up a fight,” said Siri.
    With Major Dung and half-a-dozen Vietnamese soldiers standing in the doorway watching, Siri and Sihot eased the victim onto her side. She was about thirty, short and muscular like victim one. The sword pierced her left breast, entering her chest between the fifth and sixth ribs. Not a frontal hit on the heart like the others but a hit nevertheless. Her face might once have been attractive but it now wore a death mask of horror. She had been in torment when the life left her, of that there was no doubt. She wore a thick denim jacket and, incongruously, culottes and running shoes. It appeared a mark had been cut rudely into her thigh but it was impossible to read as the area was awash with blood. It would need to be cleaned to see whether it was the same Zorro brand as appeared on the two previous victims.
    “That’s one a day,” Phosy said, looking back at the trail of blood. “How many damned more are there going to be?”
    “He got sloppy,” Siri said. “If we’re going to find evidence, this is where it’ll be. This is where he made his mistake. If you can get those sightseers out of here and give me half an hour, I’ll see what I can come up with.”
    Phosy yelled “Out!” and, to Siri’s surprise, the Vietnamese entourage left without a fight. The policeman followed them outside. The double doors slammed and the silence of the auditorium made Siri feel uneasy. Again he had the sense he was close to a spirit but it was holding back. He wondered if it knew it was on the other side. Some ghosts took a lot of convincing they were dead. He called out, “I know you’re here,” and his words seemed to cause some consternation in the afterlife. He caught the briefest of glimpses, no more than a flash, like two people on trains going in opposite directions. And the glimpse he’d been afforded was frightening enough. The spirit was incensed, its face contorted, its middle finger raised. He was mystified.
    It took him a few moments to catch his breath but no interpretation of the vision came to him. He walked unsteadily to the point where the blood trail began. The tumbling mats were leaning against the rear wall, six deep. At the level of his heart there was a puncture mark in the front mat. A narrow trail of blood trickled down from it to join a veritable atlas of spots and splotches about twenty centimetres from the ground. Thence a cascade to the concrete where a deep pool of blood congealed.
    Siri shuffled through the mats but the sword had only penetrated the one at the front. There were splatters on the mats and the wall. Beside the stack was a scratched wooden beam with two bolts at waist height. For some reason an inordinate amount of blood had spurted in its direction. Siri assumed it was at the level of the exit wound. It might have been an irrelevance but he was prone to remember even the smallest detail. There were bloody footprints leading to and from the mats. At first glance they appeared to have been made by the same shoes but Sihot would have to confirm that assumption. The footsteps leading towards the stage told a miserable story. They were meandering and interspersed with puddles of blood becoming more desperate as they reached the body of the victim. A body drained white as cigarette paper.
    He knelt beside her and turned over her bloody hand. There were deep scratches on her palms that he took to be defence wounds. What must she have gone through? She was a fighter, there was no doubt about it. Although the original colour of her shoes was unrecognisable, the tread seemed to match the footprints all around. The doctor was certain she’d have a lot more to tell him when they got her back to the morgue but he wanted to be certain he hadn’t overlooked anything in the auditorium. He made one more slow circuit. He retraced the blood trail, taking note of footprints which could have been those of another person or merely skid-marks and distortions. He returned to the mats, imagined her leaning back against them, skewered with a sword but not dead. How could she have gone so far once her