The Truth of All Things (6 page)

“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.

“Yes. Galton has worked out a system of classification. Unlike
the remainder of the man’s dangerously misguided notions, this appears to possess scientific merit.” Grey deposited the slides into a hard case that he returned to a compartment within his kit. “When we locate a suspect, perhaps we’ll be able to obtain another sample for comparison.”

Dr. Steig began his cuts to the torso in order to examine the internal organs and the contents of her stomach. Grey moved closer to the examination, while Lean elected to remain by the side table and made a point of closely examining the neatly folded pile of Maggie Keene’s clothing. He caught a scent and raised her shirt to his face and inhaled. An underlying current of stale sweat lingered in the fabric, but it was overpowered by Maggie’s cheap perfume. Morbid though it seemed, Lean found it a welcome relief from the surrounding odors and took another breath. Next were her white gloves, both of them. The killer had removed them before proceeding with his grisly work.

Lean held the right glove, itself like a hollow, phantom version of the dismembered and missing right hand. There was something on the glove, near the tip of the pointer finger. Lean examined it beneath the light of the gas jet. The fingertip was red, but there was something peculiar about the stain. The coloring did not look consistent with a stain from dipping the surface into blood. It looked incomplete, as if it had been absorbed and soaked through more thickly in spots. Lean turned the glove inside out and had his answer.

He interrupted the narrative of the doctor’s examination to show them his discovery. The stain had originated from within the glove. Grey took the glove and then held it up against where blood had dried on Maggie Keene’s body. The contrast was clear. The glove’s stain had dried deep red, while the blood on the body had already turned an iron-rich reddish brown.

“Is it blood at all?” asked Lean.

“A spectrometer test of some scrapings would tell us,” said Dr. Steig.

“It looks more like ink,” Grey said. “Red ink.”

Lean glanced down into the opened chest cavity of Maggie Keene.
His stomach nearly revolted. He was in desperate need of sleep, food, coffee, and fresh air, and so he announced he would need to get back to the Portland Company.

“I still have the internal organs to go, but my report should be ready tomorrow,” Dr. Steig said.

“I recommend just the clear medical facts,” Grey said. “Let’s leave our more speculative comments out of the official record for now. Do you agree, Lean?”

“Of course,” Lean said with a nod. He stood there in the fetid air of the underground morgue alongside a dead prostitute, the body mutilated by a meticulously scheming, pitchfork-wielding lunatic who liked to quote the Bible one minute and suckle at witches’ tits the next. He glanced up at the windows where, a world away, daylight existed.

L
ean tromped up the stairs to his family’s second-floor apartment on Hanover Street. He had stopped along the way at a police call box and learned that several drunks and vagrants had been rounded up but there were no good suspects among them.

After reaching the landing, Lean let his head rest against the doorframe for a moment. Inside was the unmistakable sound of Owen’s feet thudding across the apartment’s wooden floors, and he heard his wife call out for the boy to stop running. Lean turned the knob and lurched into the entryway. The smell of frying rashers washed over him, and he also detected the scent of coffee hovering in the air. His stomach growled in anticipation. He deposited his coat and hat on the rack and took several steps into the main room.

He needed sleep, but first he’d sit down for a minute with a book. Something to set his mind straight again. He paused at the bookcase, perusing the titles. He considered the Whitman he’d purchased just after the poet’s death three months earlier. But at this moment he
wasn’t up for the challenge. He needed something with recognizable patterns, something that adhered to the rules of classic poetic measures. He opted for a more sympathetic volume of Longfellow. Book in hand, Lean slumped into his favorite chair. He bent forward to untie his shoelaces, but before he could reach that far, he was met by the full-bore charge of his five-year-old boy.

“Daddy’s home!”

“Hello, boy.”

Owen catapulted into his father’s midsection, knocking him back into the chair. Within seconds the boy had scrambled down to the floor and was off again, pounding away across the room.

Lean could feel his eyelids sagging. He fought against it and was rewarded with the sight of Emma walking toward him, still in her morning robe, her long, dark curls not yet put up for the day. She was smiling, but even in Lean’s exhausted state he could recognize the thinly veiled mixture of relief and frustration in her deep brown eyes.

“Daddy’s home,” she repeated at a mere fraction of the volume of her son’s prior announcement.

Lean smiled, and his hand moved to her belly, where his widespread fingers pressed gently against her dress, feeling the taut, bulging skin beneath the fabric.

“How’s the wee one this morning?”

“Good,” Emma said. “Quiet, though. She was wondering where her father was.”

“She?”

“Just a thought.”

“It’s a good thought.”

Lean heard a scraping on the floor as his wife used her foot to slide a stool in front of him. With a herculean effort, Lean raised his feet enough to slip them onto the stool. He peeked out from under a drooping eyelid and contemplated his scuffed shoes.

“Have we any polish?”

“They are a bit rough, aren’t they? I’m sorry. I’ll get to them before tomorrow.”

“Oh, don’t worry over it.”

“Asks for polish, the first time in his life he’s ever mentioned shoe polish, then he says not to mind it. You’re a right piece of mischief, Archie Lean. And you’ve been smoking again. I smell that stink on you.”

At the mention of the offending odor, Lean’s hand drifted up to his shirt pocket. He felt the little nub of the killer’s cigarette butt. “You’d forgive me if you only knew.” His voice was faltering, giving in to sleep.

“I forgive you anyway.” Emma ran her fingertips across his forehead, brushing his thick, straw-colored hair to one side. “I’ll get you some eggs, and there’s rashers still warm.”

As Emma went into the kitchen, Lean withdrew the killer’s cigarette and held it to his face once more. He wrinkled his nose. It was a strange herbal mixture that he didn’t recognize. Was that it—was that the look he’d seen flashing across Grey’s face when he sniffed the tobacco? The surprise of recognition?