Ring of Fire IV

by Eric Flint

  “Was she killed here?”

  He looked around the alley where the body had been found. Pointing at the ground, Gotthilf said, “No real signs of a struggle here. No drag marks, either. It looks like she was either carried here or walked here under her own power before she was killed.”

  “And either way,” Byron concluded, “her killer rather neatly arranged her body.” The up-timer shook his head. “That’s not good.”

  “Yah. If she walked here, she must have known her attacker or she would have struggled.”

  Byron waved at the coroner’s attendants. They pulled their rolling body cart over, bent and hoisted the body in one smooth motion and placed it on the cart.

  As they wheeled it away, Byron squatted after a moment, pointed to spots on the ground, and called out “Hey, Doc.” When the coroner stepped over, he continued, “Is that about the right amount of blood to have leaked out if the eyes were cut out here after she died?”

  Dr. Schlegel fingered his short beard as he considered the bloodstains. “Perhaps. There certainly wouldn’t be much more than that.” He frowned. “There wasn’t any blood on her face, though.”

  “Maybe the killer wiped it off,” Byron said. The doctor raised his eyebrows. “This guy went to some pains to neatly arrange her body. If he was that obsessive and tidy, he might well have cleaned her face as well.”

  “I’ll test for that,” the coroner said. He started to turn, then faced back to them and said, “Guy? You assume the killer is a man?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Byron said with a twist to his mouth. “We’ve had almost four hundred years more than you have to study murderers and their patterns. Not one chance in a thousand—maybe not in ten thousand—this was done by a woman.”

  “Indeed,” the coroner murmured, and an expression of loathing crossed his face. “Then I hope you find him soon, so he can be executed and buried in a potter’s field. This was heinous.”

  “We’re on it, Doc,” Byron assured him.

  The coroner followed his attendants out to their wagon and clambered up to the seat to head for the morgue. “You’re that sure it was a man?” Gotthilf asked his partner as the others drove off.

  “Oh, yeah,” Byron breathed. “A man with a very sick and twisted mind. I can feel it, Gotthilf. This is one very sick bastard, and we’d better catch him soon, or he may kill again.”

  “Agreed.”

  The two of them looked around the alley for additional information: anything that could be evidence. The problem with the hard-packed dirt streets and alleys in the Greater Magdeburg area, Gotthilf thought, was that in the absence of a recent rain they allowed no impressions. A nice patch of soft dirt or mud, there would have been shoe prints. Even if it had been paved with flagstones, concrete, or the up-timers’ oiled and packed pea gravel, it could have shown something. But the hard-packed dirt gave nothing to the detectives.

  After a few minutes, Gotthilf moved back to the rope that had been strung up between movable posts to block access to the alley. He carefully looked over the crowd gathered around the mouth of the alley. It opened out onto Kristinstrasse, one of the busiest of the major streets in the new city. Mostly women, he noticed, with a few apprentices and a passing pastor who slowed down to look as he was walking by. Nothing caught his eye; no one caught his attention.

  After a careful study, he beckoned to the patrolman. Pale in the face after emptying his gut, the young man still had wit and energy enough to move smartly to where he waited.

  Gotthilf took a good look at the patrolman in the early morning light. He was the scrawniest and possibly the ugliest man Gotthilf could remember ever seeing, with a beak of a nose, a somewhat receding clean-shaven chin, and a prominent Adam’s apple. Almost that was enough to hide the intelligence that shone from his eyes. Gotthilf reminded himself, though, that Captain Reilly would not hire stupid men, and that he, of all men, should not judge a man by his stature or appearance.

  But Gotthilf couldn’t help making the silent observation that if there was ever a face that deserved to be hidden by a beard, it was this one. He wondered why it was bare.

  He pulled out the latest of his many notebooks, flipped it open, and poised his pencil. “You are…” he began. The police force had grown enough that it was hard for him to keep track of all the men who weren’t in the detective squad.

  “Daniel Kierstede,” the patrolman furnished his last name.

  Ah. A bit of an eastern accent. Kierstede may have come from near Silesia. No surprise, that. Most of the patrolmen were not native Magdeburgers. Of course, something like two-thirds or more of the city residents hadn’t survived the Sack of Magdeburg in 1631, so the repopulation and massive expansion of the city had drawn heavily on people from all over central and eastern Europe. German speakers from every direction of the compass, plus the odd Pole, Hungarian, and Rumanian walked the streets of the city. That was reflected in the makeup of the Polizei as well.

  “Night shift?”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  “How long have you been patrolling this stretch?”

  Kierstede thought for a moment. “Since a week ago last Tuesday.”

  “Have you seen anything like this before, Kierstede?”

  “My God, no, Sergeant!” If anything, the patrolman’s pallor deepened and tinged with green in the growing early morning light. “Not even in The Chain have I seen something like this.”

  Gotthilf pursed his lips as he jotted a note. If Kierstede had been part of the patrols that watched over the most notorious tavern in the city, then despite his seeming youth and his size he was no rookie, as Byron would put it. Only the toughest, most alert, and sharpest of the patrolmen walked that part of Old Magdeburg, the city inside the walls, especially at night.

  “But you’ve dealt with dead people before, right?” Gotthilf asked.

  “Yes, Sergeant. I was part of the crew that had to break up that big fight at The Chain a couple of months back; the one that left three of the crowd dead and two more crippled, and cost old Johann Schwenkel his left eye and invalided him out of the Polizei.”

  Gotthilf nodded. That had been a bad night. Kierstede moved up in his estimation.

  “It’s one thing to deal with men beating each other to death, or cutting other men’s throats,” the patrolman continued. “But I was standing by Schwenkel when the knife cut his eye. I made sure the bastard that did it went down, then I turned to help him. The blood and the eye humor on his face, on my hands…” Kierstede swallowed convulsively. “And then to find a woman done to death like this, with her…eyes…” He swallowed again.

  “As you say,” Gotthilf murmured. “But what I meant was, have you found bodies laid out like this in this patrol area before today.”

  “No, Sergeant.”

  Gotthilf continued interviewing the patrolman, teasing out the information he wanted. Unfortunately, there wasn’t that much more information that Kierstede could provide. The body hadn’t been there when he made his previous pass down the street; it was there in the pre-dawn hour. No, he hadn’t seen anything else unusual. No, he hadn’t seen anyone else in the area. That hour of the morning, he very seldom saw anyone except other patrolmen. No, he hadn’t done more than touch her neck to see if she was alive. No, he hadn’t moved the body or anything else in the immediate area. Yes, he had whistled for his patrol sergeant as soon as he had realized what he had found.

  After going through everything with Kierstede twice, Gotthilf closed the notebook and slipped it and his pencil back into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Good work, Kierstede. Keep a very sharp eye out now, and if you see anything unusual on your patrols, anything that seems odd or out of place, bring it to either me or Lieutenant Chieske immediately. Also if you think of anything else. And don’t be surprised if we come back to you later with more questions.”

  “You think whoever did this is still around, then?”

  Kierstede was sharp, Gotthilf noted. “Yes.”

  A determined loo
k settled onto the patrolman’s face. “Count on me, Sergeant.”

  “We will.”

  * * *

  The next day the file and mail clerk dropped a folder in the In-box on Gotthilf’s desk. He ignored it until he completed reading and correcting the typed version of his last report, which he put back in the typist’s work folder and put in his Out-box. Hopefully Manfred the typist would get it right this time.

  That done, he reached out and picked up the folder. Flipping it open, he was faced with photographs of the dead woman. He flipped through them and sorted the close-up of her face to the top. No one looked good in the monochrome pictures the police photographer took, but she definitely looked bad.

  Gotthilf looked over at Byron’s desk and held up the photo. “Pictures of the dead woman from the photographer.”

  “Good,” Byron grunted, looking up from reports he was reviewing and signing. “Any word yet on who she is?”

  Before Gotthilf could respond, one of the patrolmen assigned to watch the front desk entered, followed by a young woman. He led her over to stand in front of Gotthilf’s desk. Gotthilf looked at him with raised eyebrows.

  “Sergeant Hoch, this is Fräulein Esther Frey. She has filed a missing person report.” He handed the report to Gotthilf.

  “Thank you, Schmidt.” Gotthilf turned his attention to the young woman. “Please be seated, Fräulein Frey.” He scanned over the report. Missing person was her older sister, one Margrethe Döhren. Different fathers, obviously; not that that was unusual with the turmoil of a decade and a half of war, especially around Magdeburg. There were lots of fractured and blended families now.

  The description given would probably match half the women in Magdeburg. Not much help there.

  Last seen: a day and a half ago. Gotthilf looked up at that. “Are you sure she’s missing? This isn’t a very long time.”

  The young woman nodded rapidly. “Margrethe’s never been gone this long. She always comes straight home after her work. She never stays out all night. She’s afraid of the dark, you see.”

  “Ah.”

  Gotthilf returned to the report. Okay, the missing woman worked for the Startzig family as a maid and child tender. He looked back to Fräulein Frey. “Have you checked with the Startzigs?”

  “That was the first place I went. They didn’t see her at all yesterday. Frau Startzig was quite angry.” Fräulein Frey’s fingers were twining about each other, for all that she was sitting still and her voice was mostly steady.

  Back to the report. Clothing she was last wearing…that list rang an alarm in Gotthilf’s mind. He put his pen down, and picked up a folder from his desk. He paged through it, then looked back to Fräulein Frey.

  “Tell me, Fräulein Frey, does your sister have any distinctive marks on her face?”

  This question obviously confused the young woman, but she raised a hand to a point right below her right eye. “She has three pox scars in a triangle right below her eye.”

  Bingo, as Byron would put it. He pulled the close-up photo of the eyeless dead woman from the folder and handed it to Fräulein Frey. “Is that your sister, Fräulein Frey?”

  “No…no…no!”

  For all the negatives of her response, it was obvious that the dead woman was indeed the missing sister. As Fräulein Frey began shaking and weeping, Gotthilf looked over to see Byron looking at him. “Ask and you shall receive,” ran through his mind.

  At least they had a name for the body now.

  * * *

  Several days later, Gotthilf was beginning to get very unhappy about the Margrethe Döhren case. He hadn’t been happy about it to begin with, needless to say. But no leads were turning up. Not one. Thus his current frame of mind, standing in an alley not far from the police station.

  He and Byron had interviewed Frau Startzig, the dead woman’s employer, who was shocked and horrified about the murder—and obviously feeling a bit put out by it, as well, as she mentioned more than once the disruption it was causing her family to have to seek out a new and reliable assistant maid and child watcher. But the good Frau had been unable to do more than identify the last time she had seen the victim, which was when she left work at her regular time on the evening before she was murdered. She had seen no evidence of anything unusual in her servant’s behavior; no indication that there might be any kind of problem either personal or otherwise.

  They had walked with Esther Frey as she had retraced her sister’s usual routes between their rooms in a very modest rooming house in the west of Greater Magdeburg to the Startzigs’ new house, which had been built in the Neustadt district of Old Magdeburg, in an area inside the walls that had been mostly destroyed by fire back in the 1620s and hadn’t been rebuilt until recently. Nothing unusual had been noted, although there was one route that came a little closer to The Chain than he would have liked if it had been his sister walking it.

  As the days passed, no residents or citizens had come forward to offer any information. Nor had any been gathered when they started doing interviews of those residents and businesses whose buildings were near the travel routes. Rumors, yes; plenty of those. Facts? Not a one. Nothing.

  Finally, after all that labor had developed exactly nothing, they were down to trying to tap the informers that Byron had been cultivating among those who were on the streets every day. And that brought his mind back to the present.

  “Talk to me, Hans,” Byron said, tapping his finger in the thin chest of the scruffy little man that they had just pulled into a nearby alley.

  “What do you want, Lieutenant?” Hans Schmidt—and wasn’t that a remarkable name, Gotthilf thought to himself—sounded very resigned. And he probably was, since he wasn’t much more than a failed thief who was just trying to keep body and soul together with whatever day work he could find.

  “I want the killer of Margrethe Döhren, is what I want.” Byron poked him in the chest again.

  “Who?” Schmidt sounded perplexed. “Oh, wait a minute…is that the one where her eyes were…” The little man’s face took on an expression of incipient nausea; which was appropriate, Gotthilf had to admit. The whole case was one to make a man sick.

  “Yah,” Gotthilf responded. “That’s the one. So give.”

  Schmidt shrugged, and held his hands out, palms up, looking back and forth between the two detectives. “Sorry, Lieutenant, Sergeant, I have nothing. Everyone is talking about it, but nobody says anything, if you know what I mean.”

  “Is that because they don’t know anything, or because they’re afraid to talk?” Gotthilf asked.

  “Everyone’s afraid, but not that kind of afraid. They would talk if they knew anything.” Schmidt ducked his head. “Nobody wants someone around who could do that to a woman. But no one knows anything—not that I have heard.”

  Byron muttered something, then said, “If anyone knew anything, if anyone had heard anything, who would it be? Who would be the best person to talk to us about this?”

  Schmidt fingered his straggling whiskers, combing a few crumbs out of them as he did so. “I don’t know…maybe Demetrious.”

  “Demetrious,” Byron said. “I don’t know that name.”

  “Old guy,” Schmidt said, “tall, sort of skinny, white hair. Not from around here.” By which he meant Thuringia or Magdeburg provinces in general and Magdeburg the city in particular.

  “Yeah, I gathered that,” Byron said. “That’s not exactly a German name.”

  Schmidt shrugged again, and continued, “He might be from Rumania, or someplace like that.”

  “So what does this Demetrious do, and where can we find him?”

  “He runs a cup game…”

  “A cup game?” Gotthilf interrupted.

  “Yah, the magic cups,” Schmidt replied, holding his hands palm down in front of him and moving them in circles.

  “Oh, God,” Byron muttered. “Don’t tell me we’ve got a thimblerig operator in town.”

  Gotthilf made a note to himself to ask Byron wh
at a thimblerig was later on. “But where do we find him?”

  “Last time I saw him, he was hanging around where Canal Road meets the main road out of the shipyards. Can I go now?”

  Byron jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Get.”

  Schmidt got.

  Gotthilf looked up at the darkening sky. “Tomorrow?”

  “Yep,” Byron replied. “He’s someplace warm and dry by now. We’ll look for him tomorrow.”

  * * *

  As it turned out, they didn’t go looking for Demetrious the next day. When Gotthilf arrived at his desk that morning, there was an envelope lying in the center of the desktop between the In-box and Out-box. He picked it up, curious about what it was. Middling quality paper; a manufactured envelope of the type sold in one of the new stationery stores that sold supplies to small businesses; and sealed, not just with adhesive on the flaps, but also with an irregular blob of wax.

  He looked over at Byron, who was seated at his own desk reading one of the ubiquitous reports that always seemed to appear in his In-box like mold suddenly appearing on bread overnight. “Do you know what this is?”

  “Nope,” Byron muttered, not looking up. “Saw it when I came in, but it’s got your name on it and says ‘Confidential.’ Figure you’ll let me know if it’s something I need to see.”

  Gotthilf looked at the handwriting; solid, even, with a bit of a slanted line. Educated person; probably male from the firmness of the strokes. He opened the envelope by breaking the seal and sticking a finger under the top flap to separate it from the other flaps.

  The envelope only contained two scraps of paper. One looked to be from a newspaper; the other appeared to be a fragment of a book page. It only took a moment to read them.

  “Scheisse!”

  Gotthilf heard Byron’s chair scrape across the floor and crash against a wall at the same moment that his partner appeared at his side.

  “Show me.”

  Gotthilf handed the scraps to Byron and waited for him to read them. This took a moment longer than it had taken Gotthilf, because the up-timer was not skilled yet in reading the fraktur script with which the book scrap was printed. Gotthilf was glad of that, because it gave him that much longer to slow his breathing and try to counteract the adrenaline surge that had spiked through him when he realized what he was holding.