The Salem Witch Society (3 page)

“That’s right,” said Lean. “You see, what I find most peculiar about the body is that the killer must have intended—”

Grey held up a hand. “I must insist on silence as to all opinions, particularly those addressing the killer’s methods or motives, until I’ve finished examining the evidence.”

“Oh, come now, time is against us in this,” said the mayor. “The quicker you understand the nature of this, the better.”

Grey tilted his head with the air of a music teacher suffering the haphazard notes of an untrained child. “If you learn nothing else tonight, remember this: One of the greatest threats to a successful inquiry is letting yourself be led afield by a preconceived theory. The absurdly concocted theories of others can irreparably taint one’s objectivity. Even casual statements will conjure up familiar notions and memories of similar crimes, causing unwarranted importance to attach to irrelevant facts. The mind becomes set on finding what it now expects to see and fails to perceive that which is actually present.”

Lean could see the mayor bristling at the very idea of being lectured to. “Is that what they teach you in the Pinkertons?”

“No. One of the things I tried, unsuccessfully, to teach them in my brief tenure there.”

“All the same, Grey, believe me when I say you’ve never seen a case similar to this one, I mean to have a—”

Grey halted Lean again with a raised hand.

“Suit yourself,” Lean said. “Right this way.” The tarp, which Lean had set atop the upright hay fork earlier, remained in place. It reminded him of a soldier’s field tent from a long-abandoned battlefield, the canvas hanging limp and uneven from a single pole. Lean had only ever seen pictures of such sights, the Civil War having ended twenty-seven years earlier, before his first memories. It also reminded him of other images from that time, photographs of Portland.

Grey stopped beside him and announced the very same thought. “Like one of the old tents they set out after the Great Fire.”

Even though Lean had been a
toddler at the time, he had seen so many photographs and engraved images and heard so many tales that the event was seared into his mind almost as clearly as if it had happened only a month ago. A boy’s mishap with matches near stored fireworks on the Fourth of July, 1866, had quickly turned into a disaster. The resulting flames had ignited Brown’s sugar factory, and the fire then cut a swath through two hundred acres of Portland Neck, destroying two thousand buildings in the heart of the city. Ten thousand people were left homeless, with many forced to live temporarily in a makeshift village of canvas tents along the emptied grounds at the base of Munjoy Hill. The city rose up from the ashes within three years, refashioning itself more grandly in brick-fronted Victorian splendor.

“Let’s hope this scene isn’t quite so disastrous as that great inferno,” Grey said. “Maybe we can salvage some few clues after all the inexcusable trampling of the evidence.”

“I didn’t want anyone nosing around, stealing a glimpse of the scene,” Mayor Ingraham said.

Seeing Grey’s dubious stare, Lean added, “I was careful not to disturb the body.”

He helped Grey remove and dispose of the canvas. Grey stared at the body for a full minute, almost perfectly still. Finally he pulled a pencil and a thin notepad from his side pack and began to sketch and scribble as his head turned in all directions, his eyes shooting back and forth.

“You’re planning to photograph the body?”

Lean nodded. “Our man should be here shortly.”

Several minutes later Grey’s notepad disappeared into his bag. He took up a lamp, and he began to circle the body, pausing briefly where Maggie Keene’s clothes had been neatly stacked. He proceeded to kneel down on the wooden flooring near the bloody stump of the right wrist. With his pencil he reached forward and poked at a small lump sitting on the blood-soaked ground. He traced a very small circle in the air around the end of the right arm. “One candle burned down by the right foot, another here. She was on the ground when her hand was removed. The blade cut into the earth.” He stood again and pondered the area around the severed wrist. “Significant bleeding here, Dr. Steig, yet less of a stream than I would have expected from a sudden amputation.”

“Likely dead before the hand was severed,” answered Dr. Steig. “No pressure. The blood simply pooled.”

“The cuts on the chest were also inflicted posthumously?” asked Grey.

The doctor
shrugged. “I’ll know more when we get the body to the hospital.”

Perceval Grey continued to circle the corpse. “Lean, this pitchfork—you’ll need to confirm whether this is factory property. Did the workers leave it close by, or did our man bring it himself just for this purpose?” Grey moved a few more steps before pausing again at the young woman’s head, where he held his lamp close to examine her features. After studying the ground, Grey knelt and stretched forward until his own face was within inches of hers. He turned to Dr. Steig.

The doctor nodded. “Yes, the tongue’s been cut out.”

Lean stared in near shock as he watched Grey move close enough so that his lips were almost touching the dead woman’s. Grey gave several hearty sniffs before pulling away.

“Takes the tongue to stop her talking. But then why her right hand, too? Does he mean to keep her from …” Lean was mostly thinking aloud but noticed Grey and Dr. Steig waiting on him to finish the thought. “Maybe to keep her from writing as well. To keep her from revealing something. But why bother to cut the hand off after she’s already dead? Makes no bloody sense.”

“Interesting observation,” mumbled Grey. He regained his footing and moved along, careful not to tread on the damp earth surrounding the body. Upon reaching her left foot, he stooped and peered at the ground. His stare moved in a line away from the body’s left side, and he inched along in that direction.

“Two bloody marks, faint partial curves of the heel.” Grey pulled out his tape measure and noted the length of a dim reddish outline just visible on the floor. “Matches the footprints he left in the earth by her body.”

Lean moved closer
and saw the traces of blood. He set his own foot down parallel to the faint bloody outline of the killer’s heel. “Small feet.”

Grey was now measuring the distance between the prints.

“Based on his stride, our man is rather short—five foot two, more or less. And these are not hesitant steps. He was going somewhere.” Grey moved in the direction of the bloody footprints. Several yards ahead he stopped and held his lamp low as he gazed about.

“Ha! Here we are.” He pointed to a sheet of metal leaning against a workbench.

Lean and Dr. Steig moved closer to see what looked like traces of blood, smeared in a thin horizontal line, then back again at a downward angle.

“Almost looks like a seven,” noted Dr. Steig.

Grey shook his head. “No, he’s made the angle too severe.”

“Angle?” Lean blew his nose and shoved the balled-up handkerchief back into his coat pocket. “He’s just wiping the blood off his fingers.”

“If you bother to look closely, you’ll see a larger spot here. His thumb was planted, then drawn across. Then a second smudge, smaller. A new finger planted where the first line ended. Separate actions. Deliberately placed. He’s not wiping; more like he’s drawing.”

Lean turned his frown from the bloody lines to Grey. “What on earth is he drawing?”

“And why?” added the doctor.

“An interesting question, Doctor, and one, I believe, that you may be the most suited to answer as we pursue this inquiry. But in answer to the deputy, I believe that our man is fashioning some sort of diagram. What it represents I cannot yet say.” Grey lifted up the sheet of metal to get a better look.

“That’s not the only puzzle he’s left for us.” Lean took several steps back toward the body and waved at the gear hanging from the overhead crane. “You’ve ignored these chalk letters. Could be some sort of cipher. Or else Greek or some such.”

“Or nonsense,” Dr. Steig said. “It’s no foreign language I’ve ever seen.”

“I haven’t ignored it at all. And no, it’s not foreign. Quite the contrary—an indigenous tongue.”

Lean felt his face wrinkle. “A what, now?”

“A native tongue.
The language of the Abenaki tribes of Maine and New Hampshire.”

Dr. Steig grinned. “Well then, a wonderful coincidence that I called you here.”

“Coincidence?” Grey appeared almost offended by the word. “No. More likely your mind held some faint memory of having seen the language. An inkling that made you think to summon me in the first place.”

Lean edged forward. “So what does it say?”

“Kia K’tabaldamwogan paiomwiji.”
Grey studied the language for another moment. “I haven’t spoken it in many years. I’d say: ‘You … your reign, or maybe kingdom, has arrived.’”

Within seconds it hit Lean. “‘Thy kingdom come’?”

Grey nodded at Lean. “‘Thy kingdom come.’”

“The killer is an Indian,” Ingraham declared.

Grey held up a finger. “The killer can write in the Abenaki language. Nothing more is yet proved.”

Lean gave a small snort. “The evidence is quite damning, Grey. You must be sorry to see that he’s one of your people.”

Grey regarded him for a long moment, and Lean felt that, in some sense, his own measure was being taken. Perhaps he’d insulted the man somehow. “It’s no reflection on you, of course. Don’t let that concern you.”

Grey turned back to the chalk writing once more and said in a detached voice, “At the moment my only concern is with the one glaring question that is truly confounding me.”

“Just the one question, eh?” Lean couldn’t resist smirking at the effortless way Grey tossed out his conceits.

“Yes. Given the horrific and sensational display our man has set out for us here … how is it that we have never heard any news of his first victim?”

“F
irst victim?” Mayor Ingraham called out from where he’d been standing aside, watching the proceedings with evident distaste.

“What the devil are
you on about?” asked Lean.

“Tell me, Deputy, do you introduce the missus as your second wife?”

“What? No, I’ve only been married once.”

“Precisely. You simply don’t designate something as number two if there’s never been a number one.” Grey began to pace on a short course between the body and the metal sheet with the bloody lines. “He burned two candles. Left the stubs at the right foot and right hand. Two points of five on the body; hands, feet, and head splayed out in a pentagram. The angle formed by those two extremities matches those bloody streaks he drew.”

“Like a star,” Lean said, picturing his young son’s drawings, crisscrossing pencil lines forming a warped, five-pointed figure in a paper sky.

“Add to that he’s gone to the trouble of quoting the Lord’s Prayer. But only the second line. That makes three separate markings he’s left behind. All indicating a connection with the number two.”

“What does it mean?” asked Dr. Steig.

Grey shook his head. “A compelling puzzle. And once we have gleaned all we can from this location, I believe we will be forced to turn our attention to finding the first victim. Our man is going through quite a bit of trouble to paint us a picture. And right now we are missing half the canvas. We need to understand more of what he has done.”

“Well,” said the doctor, his eyes alight, “I should hope to learn something more once I get a proper look at the body.”

Lean paused from his frantic note taking. “I know you’ve got your own examination room, Doctor, but we’ll have to do this one by the book. Maine General Hospital.”

The doctor nodded agreement
as the sound of approaching carriage wheels grew louder.

“Must be the photographer. You can take the body as soon as he’s done,” said Lean.

“Then we can join you at the hospital after we collect one more piece of evidence and interview the watchman,” said Grey.

“I thought you were otherwise occupied. Could only offer a quick review,” Lean said. “Why the sudden change? That Abenaki writing give you a personal interest?”

“My willingness to take on this inquiry is born not of any personal interest but rather of pure and utter fear.” Grey stepped close and stared into Lean’s eyes. “Fear that the police department will conduct the investigation with the same lack of perception and imagination that they typically display. Fear that, given the complexity of this matter, the murderer will go free as a result.”

The two detectives remained fixed against each other until Dr. Steig interrupted. “Lean, shouldn’t you see about the photographer?”

“Yes,” Grey agreed, “you may want to go and safeguard his expensive equipment. There are criminals about, you know!”

“Your man’s quite a charming fellow,” Lean said as he walked to the exit with Dr. Steig and the mayor.

The doctor smiled. “He can actually be rather engaging, once you get to know him.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Outside, Dr. Steig’s driver was busy helping the photographer unload his cumbersome gear. Mayor Ingraham motioned to his own driver, parked across the courtyard.

“Gentlemen, I shall gladly leave the postmortem and the rest to you. The vision of the body is already enough to trouble my sleep for some time to come. Good night, Doctor.” The mayor then turned his attention to Lean. “Deputy, I shall eagerly await word of your investigation’s progress.”

Lean couldn’t mistake the mayor’s meaning. This was his investigation alone; neither Dr. Steig nor Perceval Grey would be held to answer for the failure to apprehend the murderer. Forty-five minutes later, Lean watched the doctor’s carriage rumble away into the darkness. The photographer had finished his work, and Dr. Steig was heading to the west end of town to conduct the autopsy. Lean glanced to his left, not yet seeing the first hint of morning at the far edge of the ocean. A few faint sounds drifted up from the easternmost wharves as the Portland waterfront stirred to life.

Inside, Perceval Grey
waited, pitchfork in hand, by the exposed circle of earth that had held the corpse minutes earlier. It had taken both men to wrest the grisly tool from the ground and free the body.