Content warning: body horror
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They raised the yellow tape over my head and let me onto the scene. The air thickened with the smells of copper, metallurgy, leftover scrap, paint, thinner. Blood, of course.

“Nobody touch nothing,” I said. Flatfoots gave me the evil eye and got out of my way. I thumbed my camera drone to life and let it flit and snap.

Three-point lighting flooded the scene with washes of pink and blue. The chalk circle was there, centered, again. Somewhere in the fumes of acetylene there was probably incense.

The vic’s head and neck rose out of the body of an old Triumph Rocket III motorbike, one of the old wheeled ones. A gas guzzler. The face froze in a roar of rage or terror, chrome horns riveted onto its head. The blood mixed with oil and rust and pooled down below. I checked the fuel gauge—empty. It had run all night before it was found.

“We know who did this,” said one of the buzzcuts.

“Shut up,” I told him.

“It was broadcast.”

“Of course it was.”

He scowled. “Why do we need you to to solve this murder?”

“Murder?” I looked back at the Triumph. Not a centaur—two wheels made this a satyr. Symbolic of wild excess and temptation. The motorbike usually meant freedom, but the empty gas gauge told a different story. The victim was no doubt alive at the beginning. This was the end of the road, as it were. The broadcast made it a performance. A sacrifice to a dying god of a dead culture.

“I guess it is a murder,” I said, finally. “But is it a crime? Or is it art?…”