Innocent Bystander

by C. A. Asbrey

  He grasped his wife’s hand and forced it up, inching it toward the Leyden jar. “You know what’ll happen when her hand touches that knob on the top?”

  Abigail’s heart thumped but she fought to stay in control. “I do, but I also know it’ll kill you, too. You’re touching her and creating a circuit. You’re bluffing.”

  “You’ve got one bullet in that thing. You can try for a lucky shot, or come near enough to risk me grabbing the gun.” The blue eyes hardened. “You say I’m going to hang anyway, so what have I got to lose, bitch? Put down the gun.”

  “You don’t get away that easily.” Abigail pulled back the trigger and fired. The bullet hit Leyden jar which shattered into a thousand pieces and scattered everywhere, as well as blasting a hole in the frosted window behind it. The frantic sounds of dogs barking cut through the night air, accompanied by a symphony of voices in the street beyond.

  Bartholemew twisted away from the blast, tossing his wife aside. Madeleine screamed and tumbled head first into the bath while the man threw himself at Abigail. He grabbed the Derringer and flung it away, seizing Abigail by the shoulders and dragged her toward the water.

  He growled in her ear. “They’ll know how you died, slut. They’ll find your drowned bod—”

  Bartholemew was cut short, pulled away by strong hands which spun him around and smashed him on the jaw with a powerful punch. The man staggered backward out of the door. He slid down the wall, only to be confronted by an ‘old man’ with a gray beard who dragged him to his feet and kneed him in the groin. That wasn’t the end of the matter.

  “You like fighting women, huh?” The ‘old man’ pulled Bartholemew up once more and delivered another powerful smack to the face which burst his nose with a chilling crunch. A shower of crimson splattered over the floral wallpaper and the injured man rolled into a fetal position on the floor covering his face with his hands.

  “No more! Enough—I give.”

  Nat’s dark eyes glared down at him. “Yeah, I bet you do, you damned coward.”

  Jake helped Abigail to her feet, ignoring Madeleine floundering in the tub as she hauled herself to the surface. “Did he hurt you?”

  “No, I’m fine.” She glanced over at the bloody mess writhing in the hallway.

  “What? He wanted a fight. I gave him one.” Nat kicked out at the bundle sobbing into the hands grasped around his face. His eyes twinkled with faux innocence though his disguise. “I’d say fighting with an old fella like me is a pretty fair match.”

  “Jake,” gasped Madeleine, drinking in the blond man who still held an arm around her sister. “What are you doing here?”

  “He’s helping me.” Abigail sighed. “I had to get you away from this dangerous fool until I could find out what he was up to. And I did—” she darted a look at Nat, “—we did it, together.”

  Madeleine pushed her sister out of the way and threw her arms around a surprised Jake.

  “I knew you were a hero. I just knew it.” She seemed oblivious to the man holding his arms up like a surrendering soldier and pulling back from the soggy mess pressing against his chest. “You came back for me.”

  Abigail rolled her eyes. “For heaven’s sake, leave the man alone, Maddie. He’s doing a job. He’s not here for you. He’s here for Bartholemew.”

  All heads turned at the frantic banging and battering at the front door. Whistles blew, a sure sign that local police officers were outside and calling for reinforcements from the neighboring beats. A deep male voice carried over the clamor, booming through the door and echoing around the hallway.

  “Open up in the name of the law!”

  Jake frowned. “Abi?”

  “I suppose the bullet and the shouting attracted them.” She nodded. “I’ll go. Keep an eye on Bartholemew.” She cast an eye over the wet linen clinging to her sister’s lithe body. “Maddie, get some clothes on. You’re not decent, and the house is about to be full of men.”

  Chapter 19

  “This had better be good.” Honeybun strode into the house, following the police officer into the dining room Bartholemew used as a laboratory. “I was gettin’ ready for bed. My wife just put the cocoa on.” He stopped dead at the sight of Jake standing in the corner with his arms folded. “You? What’re you doing here?”

  “Remember I told you we were working on a man we suspected of killing a number of wives.” The lawman turned, his brow creasing at Abigail’s voice behind him. She walked through from the kitchen with a pot of coffee. “We found out how he does it. He almost killed a woman here tonight.”

  “You? Your hair,” stammered Honeybun. “You were blonde.”

  She gestured with her head for him to follow her into the corner and spoke in low tones. “That was a wig—a disguise. This is the real me. The victim is my sister, Inspector Honeybun. It was my suspicion which led to us looking into this man when she became infatuated. I knew there was something wrong with him. Please. She doesn’t know what I do. She only thinks I assist Dr. Prothero. She can’t know I’m a detective, or my mother would worry too much.”

  “Fine. It makes no difference to me. Dr. Prothero?” The detective’s gaze settled on the bearded old man with dark twinkling dark eyes. “Is this him?”

  “Sure. Call me anything you want.” Nat smiled and took the pot from Abigail. He set it down on the tray in the middle of the dining table, already piled high with cups, cream, sugar, cookies for the attending officers. “Help yourselves, boys.”

  The lawman grinned at Jake. “So you work with them too, huh? No wonder you didn’t want to join up. I could tell you were made of the right stuff.”

  “There’s no getting’ anythin’ past you, is there, Clay?” Jake grinned with a glint of humor dancing in his blue eyes.

  “Not much. No.” He tapped the side of his nose. “Instinct, you know. They can’t train instinct into you.”

  Everyone fell silent at the sight of Madeleine walking into the room, dabbing at her eyes with a lace-trimmed handkerchief. Every man’s eyes followed her, drawn like a moth to a flame to the charismatic woman with the lambent eyes. Her alabaster skin was so pale it almost seemed translucent against the dark bottle-greens and peacock-blues of her paisley patterned house dress. It was no more than a glorified dressing gown and respectable women would never be seen dead receiving company in such attire, but for once, Madeleine didn’t care what she looked like. The reality of her brush with death had sunk in as Abigail had explained the mechanism used by her bluebeard of a husband while helping her to dress. Somehow, her dishevelment did nothing to detract from her beauty, but only served to add a patina of vulnerability which acted like catnip to male protective instincts.

  She dropped into a chair and sniffed back tears, her loose amber hair still soaked from the incident as it dangled almost to the floor when seated.

  Abigail laid a soft hand on her sister’s arm. She placed an empty cup on the table. “An gabh thu tì no cofaidh?”

  “Cha ghabh idir.” Madeleine shook her head in refusal and clutched at Abigail’s caressing hand.

  Nat had never heard the sisters speak their native tongue in front of him, and he noted the way it was accompanied by gentle stokes of comfort and the first sign of any real affection between them. He already knew that the mother tongue was a method of communicating a primal love in hard times to the immigrant.

  “Mrs. Bartholemew?” Honeybun ventured forward as Madeleine’s green eyes met his. “Can you tell me what happened?”

  “The doctor has given her a sedative. She’ll need to sleep soon.” Abigail cautioned. “He’s looking at Bartholemew’s injuries right now. His nose is broken.”

  “It is?” The inspector’s lightness of tone showed he seemed none too upset by the notion. “How did that happen?”

  “I did it,” Nat replied. “He attacked Abigail. Jake pulled him off her, and when he landed in the hall, he tried to get away. I brought him down.”

  “You did?” The police officer eyed the ‘old man’
with a grin. “You must be fitter’n you look.”

  “Or he’s not as fit as he looks.” Nat winked adopting the comical fighting stance of a grandfather. “Huh? I guess it’s a bit of both. I got a lucky punch in.”

  “Your boss is a detective?” asked Madeleine.

  “I’m more of an expert they consult on scientific things,” Nat replied. “I don’t get involved in the detections very often. I helped look into the electrical side of this one.”

  “So who was that young man I met?” Madeleine thought back to when she had met Abigail’s Pinkerton colleague Tom Bartlett. “You said he was Dr. Prothero.”

  “His son.” Abigail slipped into the lie. “He’s a doctor, too, but a doctor of medicine. He works for the Pinkertons, too.” The words tumbled out as she thought on her feet. “When I told them of my suspicions about your husband they all started investigating as a favor to me.”

  “So explain these murders to me.” Honeybun frowned. “These women all died in their beds without a mark and no sign of poison? It don’t seem possible to me.”

  Nat picked up the broken pieces of the jar from the table and pointed to the lid’s ornate scrolling.

  “This here—the gilded goldwork looks like gold embossing, but that knob is real gold, and that wand screws into it to dangle down inside.” He held up another two pieces. “As you can see, they are lined with real gold, inside and out. That turns it into a capacitor. There’s no reason to go to the expense of putting gold on the inside where nobody can see it unless it serves a purpose. Do you know much about electricity, Inspector?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Neither did I until recently, but I had to bone up real fast. This is a Leyden jar. It’s a capacitor. It stores static electricity and discharges it in one direct charge. They generally have metal on the inside and the outside. The gold on the outside is made to look decorative, but it has a practical use in this case. These jars can pack a punch big enough to kill, in fact the man who first created them was killed by one. This Leyden jar has been disguised to look like an ordinary bathroom container. It was made to look ornamental so he could blast his victim with electricity without them fearing they were in danger when they saw him fiddling with it. He kept this cable under the floorboard to discharge the charge from the jar into the bath.”

  “You can normally spot a death by electrical injury.” Abigail handed the inspector a cup of coffee. “It enters the body on one side and shoots right through to the other, where it leaves the body. It burns, and every organ in its path is practically cooked. His wives had no mark, and when a pathologist investigated, he found nothing. That’s because Bartholemew found a way to push electricity through a victim without burning the skin. It’s not impossible. Farmers have been finding animals downed by lightning in fields for centuries, many without a mark on them. They only knew it was electrical injury because they knew there’d been a storm and looked for the signs under the microscope. No doctor would even think to look for it in a woman found dead in bed without a burn on them.”

  Honeybun drank in this information and scratched his cheek. “So how do you know he kills this way?”

  Nat settled on a chair, his hunched shoulders signaling he was still playing the part of little-old-man. “First of all, I had to find a way to send the current through someone without leaving a burn. I didn’t think it was possible until someone mentioned the animals killed by lightning. A bit of reading showed they had been standing in water or wet ground. That made me look more closely at why he put in a fancy bath and why it had to be made of expensive vitreous china. Cast iron conducts, where china doesn’t, so there was nothing conductive for the victim to touch to be burned. You see as soon as you touch something conductive which is attached to the ground, you earth yourself and burn. The electricity is always trying to get to the ground so if you get in the middle of that it will go through the body will leave a burn on the way.”

  Inspector Honeybun looked lost and flicked his gaze over to Jake to see if he could explain it in a more simple way, but the gunman merely shrugged and gave an enigmatic smile as Nat continued.

  “To put it simply, there are number of ways electricity can kill you, but the capacity to kill a human being depends a lot on the circumstances. People can survive a direct hit by a bolt of lightning, yet be killed by this little jar.” He raised his hand and started counting off on his fingers. “One—they can be burned, and their internal organs destroyed, as the arc of power goes right through them. That’s easily detectable, and didn’t happen here. It’s like a bolt of lightning.”

  He paused giving the inspector time to catch up.

  “Two—water is a powerful conductor of electricity as it tries to get to the ground. Electricity is always trying to make a circuit to the ground. If electricity hits the water, it can pass right through a person, especially if they touch something metal like a tap. In that case, there will also be burns. That didn’t happen, either. Even the chain on the plug was buried deep in the rubber. That means the water can still touch the metal and complete the circuit to the ground but a person couldn’t, so there’ll be no burns. Where there’s a circuit, there’s some kind of electric injury. That bathwater completes the circuit with the plug chain dangling down the drainpipe without anyone touching it.

  “Thirdly, people can be affected by a lower voltage just because they are in water. In that case, they will not be burned, just like the cows in the wet field. If they are in the bath they will probably drown. It’ll shock the heart into stopping temporarily, but they won’t come to, because they’ll drown. None of these women drowned, though. The doctor checked for that.” Nat’s eyes twinkled with a deep intensity. “And now we come to the most cunning method. It can be low enough voltage not to cause a burn, but with high enough amperes to stop the heart. Those women won’t drown because they’re already dead.”

  Abigail stepped forward to explain further. “It causes the heart to fibrillate—it just forgets how to beat properly, so it stops. If there are no burns because it’s low voltage, there are no signs as to why a healthy young person’s heart just stops. No doctor would think to look for that, and most wouldn’t even know what to look for in any post mortem examination.” Her eyes gleamed. “Not until now. There are a few experts who know what to look for, and I tracked them down today.”

  She started to pace. “He put them to bed and cleaned up the murder scene, claiming to have found them the next morning in their beds. This way of killing takes a lot of skill, Inspector. Get it wrong, and you’ll just make them spasm and they’ll drown, or they’ll be burned and there’ll be marks. I’ve read everything I could on the subject for weeks now. Thank goodness San Francisco has a good library. The jar was a mental trick—something they saw in the bathroom every day. Something innocuous and unnoticeable, but when you added a salt solution to both the jar and the bath, it was lethal. He’s an expert in electricity. He thought he’d stumbled onto the perfect murder.”

  Nat cut in again. “Think of the volts as a quantity of electrical power, Inspector. The amps are the power behind how fast the volts are delivered. The amps are the difference between dumping all the volts on you at once from a great height, or trickling out gradually. One will kill, the other will merely tickle. It takes between one and two hundred milliamps to kill a person by stopping their heart dead. The salt helped to drive the amps through the body at a voltage low enough for there to be no burns.” Nat added. “Attach a wire to the top of that gold globe on the Leyden jar and put that into a bath of salt water near the head and, well—I wouldn’t want to be in it.”

  “This is all beyond me.” Honeybun scratched his head. “So how would you know this has happened? It’s great havin’ a theory, but you need to convince a court of law beyond all reasonable doubt.”

  “I’ve spent the day with Mr. Toland,” Abigail agreed. “He’s the surgeon who is the leading expert in surgery and medical jurisprudence in San Francisco. When I explained my predicament, h
e took me to see a Father Joseph Neri, chair of the natural science department at St. Ignatius College. He is one of the country’s foremost experts on electricity and its effects right now. We conducted a series of experiments with such a bath, and we were able to recreate the exact same set of circumstances using both meters and a live subject.” Her slight wince straightened her mouth. “I was assured the poor duck was headed for the pantry in any case.” The fate of the bird was dismissed with an injured shrug. “There are men who have minutely examined the bodies of people and animals who were killed by electricity since microscopes were invented in the sixteenth century. The basal epithelial cells show an elongation of the nuclei. They call it nuclear streaming. They believe these are minute burns caused by joule heat from the passing of the electricity through the body. It’s different to a normal burn. There are no distinct borders in these electric burns. There’s a miniscule lattice-like formation between the injured and healthy tissues which radiate like branches. It’s completely different to what we see in a burn caused by normal heat. Those can only be seen under a microscope and a normal small town doctor would never think to look for that, especially for a young woman whose heart apparently stopped in her bed. They’d look for poison or asphyxiation and come up with nothing concrete.”

  “I ain’t got the faintest clue what you’re talkin’ about, ma’am,” frowned Honeybun.

  “A doctor will understand, Inspector. Basically, we can examine a dead person and identify that electricity is the only thing which could have caused the minute changes at a cellular level because they’re unique to electrical injury. Nobody thought to look for those changes up until now.” She paused. “We saw it in the duck. I’m also very sure we’ll see that in his late wives if we exhume the bodies or look at any tissues retained by the pathologist.”

  ♦◊♦

  Bartholemew’s blackened eyes were swelling and closing beneath the packing and bandaging strapped to the bruised face by the doctor. Honeybun’s wry grin displayed no sympathy as he checked the prisoner’s handcuffs. “Well, we’d better get this ’un to the station. Ain’t I seen you before somewhere?” He peered at the injured face, recognizing it, but unable to place him through the contusions and discoloration. “I’m sure we met recently.”