by S A Falconi
“Dr. Kraus!” Anabeth replied gleefully. “How fitting you should be here. Tell me, what was the last thing that bitch in Philadelphia said to you before she strung herself up?”
“Anabeth,” Kraus uttered, attempting to ignore the incitement. “Get on your knees and put your hands behind your head.”
Anabeth giggled at this but complied, slowly lowering herself to her knees. “I’d expect such perversion from my husband, Dr. Kraus, but you? You’re a gentleman.”
Abernathe was progressively getting closer, no more than ten feet from the makeshift operating table. Anabeth’s attention snapped over to Abernathe and he halted immediately.
“She’s my latest project, Frederick. Isn’t she beautiful?”
Abernathe gulped, the nauseating stench overpowering him. “Hands behind your head,” he grumbled.
Anabeth’s grin grew as she added, “I wanted you to see how I do it, how I purify my girls.”
Abernathe’s disgust began to cloud his judgement as he uttered, “You purify nothing, you crazy bitch.”
Kraus and Donaghue glared at Abernathe as they wondered what he was doing.
“Crazy? Crazy!” Anabeth sputtered, her tone growing in hilarity. “Am I crazy, Dr. Kraus!”
Kraus took several steps forward. “Afflicted, Anabeth. Just afflicted.”
“Afflicted …” she muttered before giggling. “Afflicted.” Abruptly, her left hand darted behind her back, reappeared with a glistening revolver in her grasp, and pressed the muzzle against her temple. “Afflicted!” she shrieked wildly.
“Shit, Anabeth,” Kraus gasped, “Don’t do this.”
“Do what, Dr. Kraus? Kill myself? Don’t all your patients do that, Doc, kill themselves?”
Kraus shook his head sorrowfully. “You need help, Anabeth. Treatment.”
Anabeth’s grin evaporated and a gruesome scowl fractured her delicate expression. “You can’t treat what I have. They couldn’t treat me before, so how the hell could they treat me now?”
“They can, Anabeth, but for God’s sake, you must put the gun down.”
Anabeth shook her head wildly, the muzzle still affixed to her temple. “Stop trying to fix me!” she screamed, tears beginning to run down her cheeks. “Stop trying to fix me!”
“Anabeth—”
But just as Kraus was beginning to speak, Abernathe charged at Anabeth. More from reaction than desire, Anabeth drew the revolver away from her temple and pointed the muzzle at her assailant. Just as her fingertip kissed the trigger though, Chapman’s revolver erupted.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
Chapman’s marksmanship was affirmed – all three shots struck Anabeth Bucke squarely in the forehead and she tumbled backward onto the blooddrenched floor. Detective Abernathe ended up stumbling headlong at Anabeth’s feet, his hands slamming to the ground just before the rest of his body could.
Donaghue and Kraus gawked in complete disbelief. The woman on the scant table was dead and Anabeth Bucke, the infamous East Side Ripper, was now dead as well. Donaghue thought he’d feel relief with the capture, the successful culmination of a long and arduous hunt. He felt neither relief nor triumph however. He felt empty, as dead as Anabeth Bucke and as dead as her anonymous victim. He couldn’t explain why – after all, no one deserved to die more than Anabeth Bucke. But when Anabeth died, so did the truth about Molly and why she left. Anabeth was Molly’s murderer, but she was her confidant long before that. Donaghue knew there was nothing that could bring his wife back to him, but he yearned to know why she left. Maybe it was that he hoped her departure wasn’t influenced at all by him? Maybe she was just lost – afflicted as Kraus would say?
A part of him wanted to scream at Abernathe, to demand an explanation for his foolishness. Kraus was going to convince her to subdue to apprehension, he just needed more time. But there seemed no point to Donaghue – no amout of berating or arguing was going to change anything. Anabeth was dead along with the secrets locked in her mind.
XIX.
The East Side Herald had never in its history sold as many newspapers as it did that next morning. Billing’s frontpage headline seemed to be a bugle’s call throughout the city of Denver:
Hunt for East Side Ripper Ends
Madwoman Slaughtered
By T.G. Billing
It is perhaps the greatest moment of this journalist’s illustrious career to proclaim to you, the fine citizens of Denver, that the infamous East Side Ripper, who’s claimed the lives of six innocent women, has been rightfully hunted down and killed. Expert skills of criminal investigation combined with a whisper of fortuity enabled Denver law enforcement to discover the identity of the East Side Ripper, Mrs. Blaxton Bucke. After discovering victims in outlying Georgetown and Leadville, investigators, led by Lead Detective Frederick Abernathe, tracked the perpetrator to a contradictorily expansive home in a wealthy neighborhood of Golden. Upon confrontation, sources say, the Ripper, in a final action of self-preservation, turned her revolver on law enforcement officers. As a result, Mrs. Bucke was thrice shot.
As stated by the mayor of this municipality, “Today marks a victorious day for both the Denver Police Department as well as the city of Denver as a whole. Because of the diligence and fortitude of Chief Harold Chapman, Lead Detective Frederick Abernathe, and the remainder of the Denver Police Department, the people of Denver may sleep at last with the comfort of peace of mind.” Detective Abernathe is to be awarded the Medal of Valor for his steadfast efforts and unwavering courage in the midst of indescribable danger and evil.
Nowhere throughout the two-page exclusive were the identities of the Georgetown, Leadville, or Golden victims’ names revealed, nor was the East Side Ripper’s christened forename ever given. As for Donaghue and Kraus, they were merely exonerated as persons of interest in the final phrases.
A copy of the newspaper rested on the rider’s bench next to Donaghue as he guided the horse and wagon along the dirt trail that slithered up the foothills just southwest of Golden. He stared out at the expanse before him, the yellowing Aspens clustered throughout the deep green hue of the pines creating the mosaic that was a hallmark of the Colorado wilderness. Above the western horizon was a pure blue sky completely void of cloud. The autumn breeze coursed over the shrubs and boulders strewn along the foothill, blessing the landscape with synchronous life. Donaghue found himself lulled by the symphonic nature of the wagon wheels crackling and crunching along the gravel road alongwith the clomping and clunking of Chief Chapman’s steed nearby. In the wagon’s rear rested a modest, rectangular box made of fresh-cut evergreen timber. The box slid and jostled periodically as the wagon bounded along the fractured slope.
Neither man spoke during the course of the trip. Some moments in life, the best moments in fact, were to be left untainted by the harshness of speech. In those moments, all a man really needed was the concerto of the country – the percussion of the wagon wheels, the brass of the horse’s shoes, and the whistling and fluttering of the winds. That, accompanied by the wayward wonderings of a man’s mind, was all the peace a man could really request.
Althought Donaghue was not a spiritual man in the slightest, the place to where they were headed – a minute flatland at the foothill’s summit – was a place that he held with deep regard. It was the place that he and Molly would go to escape the chaos of life, to listen to the wind tear across the Front Range geography, to gaze upon the minisculity of Denver in comparison to the expanse of the world beyond, to watch the candleflames of the heavens be ignited upon the sun’s triumphant descent. It was the place where they were informally wedded, the birthplace of their life as one. As such, Donaghue felt it only fitting that is should also be the place at which she should be laid to rest.
They reached the summit in due time and, after strapping the feedbags to their horses, Donaghue and Chapman fetched the pick axes and spades from the back of the wagon and proceeded to dig. Every strike of the iron tools was lost upon Donaghue’s ears, for all he could focus o
n was the concerto of the country and the echoes of his thoughts. What those thoughts were exactly, not even Donaghue could describe. Kraus would describe it as a muddled stream-of-consciousness, but Donaghue saw it more as a flipbook with no order, no sequence, no rhyme or reason, no purpose save for the purpose of reminder. The events of his life flashed before him in much the same way as they supposedly did just prior to mortality. Donaghue wondered what those events were for Molly. Did she recall all the disputes, the squabbles, the times she wished she’d never met the young and vivacious lawman of the west? Or did she recall the times of good, the times of glee, the times of unfiltered pleasure, the times though fleeting that blurred the disputes and squabbles, made them seem as though they never even existed? Despite what Anabeth Bucke had said, Donaghue believed it was the latter. He sincerely believed that.
Once the excavating was done, the mound of soil waiting patiently by the trench’s brink, Donaghue and Chapman trudged to the back of the wagon and took hold of the heavy pine box. They slid it off with surprising physical ease and carried it the short distance to the grave. Kneeling, they lowered the box slowly so as not to disturb that which rested so peacefully within. When the box finally touched the pit’s bottom, its leaden weight accepted wholly by the earth, Donaghue and Chapman released their grips and rose from the edge. With their spades they placed the soil upon the box, the dull thuds echoing in their ears with the reality of the act. Each was as hollow and thunderous as a gunshot, and as the act progressed, so also did the moisture accumulate in Donaghue’s eyes.
The act was finished far quicker than Donaghue expected or desired. Despite the misery enveloping him, he couldn’t bear the fact that it was done, that she was forever gone. He stood at the side and stared at the mound of moist, brown dirt that now hid his best friend, his mate. Chapman, standing beside the opposite edge, glanced back and forth between the ground and his exiled associate. He was disgusted with himself, completely disgusted. He’d done nothing to assist Donaghue throughout the ordeal. All he managed to do was drag Donaghue’s already tarnished name through the mud again, made everyone in town believe that he was the Ripper so that he could run off and solve the investigation himself. Chapman not only told Billing about Donaghue’s and Kraus’ involvement in the hunt for the Ripper, he begged him to make the two sleuths the feature of the article. Billing refused though. The gluttonous scribe would rather die than commit the professional suicide that would result from the commendation of the drunken, exiled lawman and his crackpot associate. Unfortunately, despite being a repugnant bastard, Billing was right. Donaghue’s reputation had been so grossly defiled that any form of praise would accomplish nothing except for destroying the praiser.
After much contemplation and rumination, Donaghue finally muttered, “Goodbye, Molly.”
~
Six months passed, a wrinkle in time that was more than enough for the populace of Denver to repress the memories of the East Side Ripper. Following Molly’s burial, Chief Chapman made an offer to Donaghue that likely would’ve lost him his badge – he offered to reinstate Donaghue as a detective. Understanding the detrimental effect of such an action, Donaghue refused outright. Donaghue’s name was eternally soiled, and although his soul may have been partially absolved by the powers that be, there was no chance that the populace of Denver would ever forgive him for his transgressions of old.
Donaghue couldn’t bring himself to return to the depravity of the Hanbury House though. Such an occupation and environment was plagued by purposelessness, a disease that led Donaghue to a life of which he wanted no part. Criminal investigation was what Donaghue was born to do – the hunt for the East Side Ripper affirmed that.
It wasn’t long before Donaghue decided to go into business for himself alongside his associate, Dr. Kraus. They started a private investigation firm, a small and exclusive operation that was to be utilized only by those who saw beyond the tainted façade of a drunken sleuth and an eccentric psychoanalyst. And it was a venture that was soon to gain international exposure, for Dr. Charles Kraus was presenting groundbreaking research at the International Conference of Physiological Sciences in New York City. His manuscript was titled, “Passage of an Iron Rod through the Head: The Peculiar Case of P.G.”