by Hadena James
The curtains were still closed when Xavier and Lucas let themselves back into my room. I was on the bed, eyes closed, blanket tossed over me. I had rested my eyes and my body, but I hadn’t slept. My mind had been churning over details.
“Should we wake her?” Xavier whispered.
“I was never asleep,” I answered, not moving. I heard them both come further into the room.
“The museum employees are strange, but that isn’t a crime.” Lucas told me.
“There’s an anecdote that I want to share with you,” I sighed and rolled over to face the other bed in the room. Lucas and Xavier were both sitting on it.
“Ok,” Xavier said expectantly.
“How do you tell the difference between a historian, an anthropologist and an archeologist? By how they begin their conversations, because by the time the night is through, we all have the same three things to talk about.” I told him.
“What’s that?” He asked.
“Sex, death and religion,” I thought for a moment. “It should apply to sociologists as well.”
“Is that helpful?” Xavier looked puzzled.
“Yes. We have a clue; so to speak, we think we know how the killer is getting victims, how the victims are being held and why they are being picked. The question now becomes, how long does it take to find ten women who have violated that code and fit the body profiles? Days? Weeks? Months? I’ve been considering the care and planning that goes into the torture devices, without realizing the care that goes into the victims. And obviously, they don’t just pick ten women. They have back-ups in place. Our killer proved that by finding an eleventh that fit so perfectly into the Hanging Coffins after the unexpected death of one of the chosen. It just suddenly hit me. This is not an easy thing. Especially in these days. I should have thought of it this morning, when I watched all the people scurrying about. All the different shapes and sizes of people, most of them cookie-cutters of each other in personality. Yet, they are finding perfect women at the drop of a pin. That doesn’t happen. They are putting just as much care and time into picking the victims as they are picking the torture. In my mind…”
Lucas interrupted, “it means that each victim is picked for a precise torture as well.”
“That’s exactly what I was thinking. So, I got to considering offenses. Drawing and quartering was a thief’s punishment most of the time. So did those ten women have sticky fingers? Tepes impaled debtors, were those ten drowning in debt? Or if they were being impaled for another reason, was it for their religion? The Crusaders impaled ‘heathens’. The Romans impaled Christians and other ‘heathens’. The Ottoman Empire impaled non-Christians and then went even further when they broke from Rome and began impaling Catholics for not being Orthodox. The maidens were used on female heretics and adulteresses. It was scarier than a scarlet A on their chest. The Scavenger’s Daughter was used as punishment for a plethora of crimes, but again, it wasn’t meant to kill, just maim and embarrass. There’s a break from the pattern there. However, in England, the scavenger was an alternative to the stockade. Considering it is being used on females, I’d guess women who nag or women who have cuckolded their husbands. And yes, being a nag was a punishable offense in medieval England and other places in Europe.”
“You think each committed a different offense?” Xavier frowned at me.
“Haven’t you ever heard the saying ‘let the punishment fit the crime’?”
“Who hasn’t?”
“Well, if they were all the same offense, why not just use one punishment? Why go through all the trouble of multiple punishments? Especially the very elaborate punishments? Did you find out how long it took to make the maidens?”
“Michael said about 18 months.”
“See, 18 months of planning and preparation to kill ten women. It would be…” I shrugged unable to think of a word I wanted.
“What?” Lucas asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t imagine planning a murder for 18 months and then grabbing ten random women in one night. If I’m right about restraining them using Hanging Coffins, that’s another 12 months just waiting for the opportunity to grab the women. Even if each coffin is ordered through a different master smith, that’s still got to be a month or more worth of work. They are so precise.”
“Michael checked. The smithy that made maidens also completed an order for three Hanging Coffins by the same company. It took him roughly five weeks for each Hanging Coffin.” Lucas sighed.
“So I was right about the coffins and the time. Before any of this began, our killer had to have those coffins. The guy that made the maidens was probably very quick with the coffins. They require skill and precision, but they aren’t as consuming as the maidens. A different smith might have taken longer on his order of coffins.”
Alejandro burst into my room. His face was set in a scowl, hard lines appearing on his forehead. It looked like he was grinding his teeth.
“Locking my door is pointless around here.” I noted that he had broken it from the hinges.
“This was delivered to you.” He handed me an envelope.
It was a brown, legal size envelope. It was padded on the inside. I could see the bubble circles. What I couldn’t see was what was inside the envelope. Carefully, I undid the clasp and the tape that held it.
“Ew,” I said as I looked inside.
“Severed finger?” Xavier asked, trying to look inside.
“Nope, teeth,” I got out of the bed and poured them onto a napkin on the table.
“All of them are canines and there are twenty of them.” Xavier poked one with an ink pen.
“I’m not sure why I was given teeth.” I looked at Alejandro.
“Really? I thought you knew everything.”
“These are not recent removals either and none of our victims were missing their teeth.” Xavier was now bent over them, looking at them through a magnifying glass. I wasn’t sure where it had come from. I suppressed a giggle I felt rise up, he reminded me of Sherlock Holmes.
“You mean there are ten more victims?” I asked.
“At least ten women who don’t have canines,” Xavier corrected, “I’ll know more when I can look at them under controlled conditions. If they were pulled out while alive, could mean that’s all they did. If the tissue was dead when they were removed…”
“What do you know about teeth?” Alejandro asked.
“Very little. They were often scavenged from battle fields to make dentures. Um, some cultures remove a few teeth as a sign of this or that. A few removed all of them when they got married. People have long been pulling teeth that bothered them. Even the Egyptians did it. Some of the more violent cultures wore them on necklaces to show how many they had killed. That’s about it.”
“In other words, these mean nothing to you.” Alejandro slammed the dresser into the wall with enough force to put a hole in it.
“That would be correct. Considering they are canines, I’d go with vampire myth, but an anthropologist would be the person to ask about teeth, not a historian.”
“Why send them to you?” Alejandro asked.
“Because I have bad teeth.” I retorted before I could stop myself.
Chapter 32