The Salem Witch Society (5 page)

“Or else he invented the distraction on the spot. And he’s the sort who always carries a dead pigeon for just such an occasion,” Lean said with a smirk.

“A troubling development in either case.”

Lean glanced at his pocketwatch. “We should be on our way. Dr. Steig’s probably started his examination without us.”

T
he cab carrying Lean and Grey hurtled along Congress Street, with only splashes of light from the streetlamps to reveal the scene. This was Portland’s principal avenue, the only one that ran the entire three-mile length of the Neck, as the peninsula was called. It was a city of slopes, curves, and dips carved by glaciers and now crisscrossed by a network of angled streets and blocks, unfettered by any sense of regularity and uniformity. Portland’s maze of cobbled roads was the result of two and a half centuries of fishermen and merchants driven by immediate necessity and that economy of steps that occurs naturally in a place where winters often lasted five months out of the year. Lean enjoyed the view at this hour: the public façade that met the commercial and social needs of the world stripped bare to reveal the city in dark repose. It was a scene reserved for those restless souls who were still awake, whether by choice, duty, or desperation.

Lean returned his
attention to his notes from the crime scene. Fatigue was setting in, and he worried that his attention was fading; perhaps he’d failed to record some crucial fact. He glanced at Grey, whose closed eyes and serene countenance betrayed no hint of the same concerns that plagued Lean.

“Tell me something, Grey. It seems impossible that you could have known it was a prostitute that had been murdered. The mayor’s worried. Thinks we have stumbled upon the very man we seek.”

Grey chuckled. “‘Stumbled’ would be an apt description.”

Lean sat, awaiting an explanation.

“Oh, it’s all quite simple. Your presence could only mean that a crime had been committed. I know that Dr. Steig occasionally performs postmortems for the city. His presence indicated that violence had been done. Knowing the doctor’s commitment to his patients, it’s a simple deduction that if this victim were still alive, Dr. Steig would have been away attending her.”

“You said ‘her.’ How did you know the prostitute bit?” asked Lean.

“Ah, I gleaned that from the mayor’s attendance.”

Lean opened his mouth to comment, but Grey cut him off. “I only mean that the mayor certainly wouldn’t be about at three in the morning for a simple murder. The victim was someone of social significance, or else the murder was so sensational it warranted his immediate involvement. I observed his comportment. He was not outraged or distressed as he would be if some woman of substance had been murdered. Rather, his movements displayed a gross aversion to this entire matter.”

Grey motioned as if wafting a smell toward his nose. “Also, I detected inexpensive perfume when shaking the doctor’s hand. He had touched the victim, a woman. So what type of woman, not earning the sympathy of our municipal leaders and wearing cheap perfume, is out at night, in danger of meeting her end in a manner so startling as to rouse the mayor?”

“All plain enough when you explain it that way.”

Grey turned his face
toward the small window, glancing at the buildings as they passed. “Everything that can be observed offers the opportunity to draw conclusions as to what must have occurred previously.”

As they turned off onto Bramhall Street and topped a short rise, Maine General came into full view. The four-story brick hospital, fronted by a spirelike tower, was still faint in the dawn light. The cab moved down Brackett Street to the hospital compound’s side entrance.

“One more thing, though. Inside the machine shop, you made a comment about my wife. I don’t wear a wedding band.”

“A man can be viewed the same as a crime scene. His appearance, his habits, his expressions, the questions he asks. They all reveal clues to his nature and his history. It’s just a matter of training oneself to note these traits, then cataloging them in the memory, contrasting them against those of different social classes, professions, and generations.”

“And so you figured I’m married. What else have you deduced about me?”

“It’s not really my place to say.”

“We’ve already stood together over a woman’s naked corpse, discussing her lunatic killer. I think we can speak openly.”

The cab drew to a halt, and the men hopped down.

“Very well, then. I should congratulate you on the impending birth of your child.”

Lean stopped dead in his tracks. “How … ? Remove your hat a moment.”

Grey did so, with a bemused caution.

“No horns on you. So how the devil did you know that? Dr. Steig said something.”

Grey
smirked. “There’s no magic trick. As I said, my conclusions about you follow the same path as the adduction of proof in a criminal inquiry. Drawing from the truth of one fact the existence of those other facts that most probably preceded it.”

Lean stared at him, silently demanding a more concrete explanation.

“In this instance your hat and your shoes.”

“What of them?” Lean inspected what looked to be a perfectly innocent bowler.

“The hat is on the far side of its better days but has been well tended. The ribbon about the base of the crown has been replaced recently, and the felt has been brushed within the past day.”

“So?”

“Having observed you over the past several hours, I note that you are not overly attentive to the finer points of your own grooming.” Grey gestured toward Lean’s coat pocket, from which dangled his crumpled handkerchief. “The care of your hat indicates a woman who takes pride in your appearance. A mistress is more concerned with her own. It’s a wife who takes such pains with a man’s hat. And yet your shoes haven’t been polished in days—weeks, even. You have an attentive wife but one who can reach the hat rack with much greater ease than she can bend to retrieve your shoes. A disorder of the spine is unlikely in a young woman. An altogether happier condition explains the known facts.”

“Fair enough. Still,” said Lean with a trace of a smile, “how long ago did you get into town?”

“Two months.”

“You’re safe by three months. But if you’re still around in October and the babe comes out with jet-black hair …”

Grey chuckled and approached the pair of double doors at the rear of the hospital. Lean was close behind but paused to turn his attention to the horizon. The hospital sat atop the northern ridge of Bramhall Hill at the terminus of Portland’s scenic Western Promenade. This location at the base of Portland’s Neck gave a full view of the peninsular city’s only abutting neighbor, the town of Deering. Farther off in the distance, Lean could see the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the peaks now tinged a pleasant rose by dawn’s outstretched fingertips.

Lean turned
his back on the panorama and walked up the two short steps to the doors. Fully aware of the scents that awaited him, he drew a last deep breath of the fresh air. He pulled the door open and glanced up, thinking a relief frieze of screaming, tormented souls above the lintel would have been more appropriate than the bare wall of bricks he saw there.

Formaldehyde mingled in the air with carbolic acid. Behind it all, Lean could still smell the ingrained stench of dead bodies. Maggie Keene was laid out on an examination table. The corpse had been stripped, and the young woman’s clothes were arranged on a sideboard. A sheet covered her from the pelvic bone to the ankles. Her abdomen was nearly as white as the hospital linen.

“As far as I can see, there was no struggle.” Dr. Steig held a scalpel and used it to point to the features of the body as he spoke. “No blood under the fingernails. No bruising or scraping at the back of the skull, her back, or elbows to indicate she was forcibly thrown down. Consistent with blood patterns at the scene. She was already lying down when the pitchfork struck her. The neck wound was fatal and, I suspect, the first inflicted.”

“Could she have been strangled before?” Lean asked.

Dr. Steig shook his head. “There’s a lack of hemorrhaging of the facial tissue. Also, the prongs missed the trachea, so I was able to observe that the tissue surrounding the larynx is undamaged. Nor was the hyoid bone fractured.” The doctor’s scalpel gleamed in the light of the gas lamps as it hovered over the two dark holes punched into Maggie Keene’s throat. “The right external jugular vein was nicked and opened to half an inch; the left common carotid artery was punctured and hemorrhaged. Death would have been instant.”

“She was unconscious, or near to it, at the time of death,” Grey said. “I detected an odor near her mouth.”

“Could be chloral
hydrate,” Dr. Steig said, then indicated the area of the missing hand. “It took the murderer three cuts to sever the right wrist. She was palm down, and I’d say the first blow was the highest there on the radius. The chip into the bone is shallow, a tentative blow. The second came in lower, and then the third blow succeeded.”

“A hatchet?” asked Lean.

“Given his strength, our man wouldn’t need three blows with a hatchet,” Grey said.

Dr. Steig nodded. “Furthermore, from the marks on the bone and the other cuts on the flesh, I’d wager the weapon to be more of a cutting blade, and curved. Still, he’s using it to hack more than cut. No surgical skills employed here.”

Lean smiled a bit. “Well, there’s one bright spot anyway. We can eliminate Jack the Ripper as a suspect.”

Grey answered absentmindedly as he bent in to examine the body. “Though it’s generally thought the Ripper had some medical training, at least one of the postmortem physicians, a Dr. Bond, opined that the killer didn’t have even the technical skill of a butcher or a horse slaughterer.”

“I was only joking, of course,” Lean said.

Grey turned his attention back to the body. “What about the two cuts to the torso?”

“Probably the same instrument was used,” Dr. Steig said.

There were two long cuts upon the young woman’s chest. The first ran from below the neck down to her abdomen, ending above and to the left of her navel. The second wound began above her right breast and sloped down to the left. The result was an imperfect, slanted cross sliced into her torso.

“From the angle I’d say he was close to her and on her right, slashing away from himself,” Grey said. “And again, with her already dead, there would be minimal splatter.”

“Yes, particularly from these cuts. Strictly superficial wounds,” Dr. Steig said.

Lean pondered that last bit
of information. “Then why cut her at all? She’s already dead. And they’d be deep wounds if they were struck in anger.”

“Clearly our killer was not swept up by emotions. Like everything else at the scene, these wounds were calculated,” Grey said.

Lean asked, “Was she assaulted, Doctor?”

“No apparent wounds to the generative organs. No signs that a sexual act was even attempted. No rips or tears on any of the garments. Nothing out of the ordinary there.”

“I’d say that fact itself is out of the ordinary, given her line of work,” Lean said.

“But the penetration of the flesh with the pitchfork, the cutting between the exposed breasts,” Grey said. “Possible indications of a violent, sexual motive.”

“Doubt it,” Lean said. “She remained dressed below the waist. Skirt, petticoat, chemise, the whole lot still on.”

“Perhaps he meant to attempt the act, but the watchman, still reeling from the effects of his drugging, stumbled in and ended the proceedings too early.”

“Pssh,” Lean snorted. “She was dead already—” Understanding flashed into his mind, and he groaned. “Must you make this any more revolting than it already is?”

“I cannot make this anything,” Grey said. “The facts exist as they are. We can only reveal the truth, and that is exactly what we must do, no matter how disturbing it may be. I’m merely pointing out that we have not yet established a motive. And while the lack of an assault, as well as some of the other details, speak against the attack’s being sexually motivated, it would be premature to eliminate some depraved carnal design.”

Lean’s dumbfounded look revealed his struggle to take in the full measure of what the man was saying.

“I assume you are not familiar with Krafft-Ebing’s research,” Grey said.

“A friend of yours?”

Grey smirked. “That such conduct may be inexplicable to you, or to society in general, does not make it impossible. We mustn’t lose sight of the fact that in all probability we are dealing with a highly disturbed individual.”

“I’m being reminded of that fact more and more.”

“You may not be far off the mark, Grey,” Dr. Steig said. “Look at her right rib cage.”

The dark layer of dried
blood that covered much of the torso was smeared away in a roughly circular patch two inches in diameter around a large, molelike protrusion.

“A witch’s tit,” declared Lean after examining the odd bump of skin.

Dr. Steig pointed with his scalpel. “Teeth marks in the smeared area. Like he was—”

“Suckling at it.” Grey reached for a magnifying glass from the tray of surgical instruments and examined the bloodied skin surrounding the dark protuberance. “We should prepare a cast for teeth marks. No facial hairs deposited here by the killer.”

“I did remove two separate hairs from above. They were plastered into the blood on the rib cage. Too long and fine for a beard. Both appear black.”

“The watchman scared him off, so he had no time to clean himself up,” said Lean. “Rushing away, he’d be quite a savage sight—lower face covered in blood.”

“Some blood on his hands also,” said Dr. Steig. “He took hold of her shoes and left a bloody thumb mark there.”

Grey moved to the sideboard to inspect the right shoe. He lifted his leather satchel over his head and set it down close by. Lean came over to observe as Grey took some filament paper and a small vial of liquid from his kit. He placed drops on the paper before placing it onto the bloody thumbprint to collect an impression. With a pair of tweezers, Grey set it between two glass slides, which he then clamped together.

“Fingerprinting, right?” Lean said.