“The first victim is a brunette based on her roots, although it is dyed much darker at this time, roughly 5 feet and six inches tall. Good teeth, blue eyes, Caucasian, with a recent pedicure and manicure,” Xavier was speaking into his recorder again.
“X-rays indicate she has over 200 fractures, some minor stress fractures, some major fracturing of the bones. Her spinal cord has been severed, but the skin remains unbroken. Her ribs all have multiple fractures, two have broken off completely. One pierced her liver, the other her heart. She was already dead when it happened.”
He looked at me, “are you sure you want to be here for this?”
“Nope, I am sure I don’t. I would rather be doing a lot of other things than watching you cut her open, but I was ordered to be here.”
“Go get a coffee or soda; I’ll be out in just a minute. We have cause of death and I think we can fairly easily agree that your torture hoop is a good match. We’d need the exact hoop to know for sure, but a circular item that caused intense pressure is the only thing I can see that would make these types of fractures.”
“Great, want anything?”
“Coffee, black.”
I left the room and got Xavier a coffee and me a Mountain Dew from the vending machines. When I returned he was sitting outside. He looked at me.
“You’re positive that the hoop thing could do that kind of damage?”
“The Scavenger’s Daughter is a precision device. It’s a giant iron ring, like you’d find on an old fashioned barrel. At the top of the ring, there is a mechanism. Like a screw that either tightens the hoop or loosens the hoop. I can’t think of anything to compare the mechanism to at the moment. The hoop gets larger or smaller depending on how it is turned. As it tightens, the victim, who is kneeling in the fetal position, becomes constricted. The tighter it gets the more damage it does. Since it is mechanized and forged iron or steel, it is pretty durable. I found records of torturers taking it too far and victims spontaneously start bleeding from all their orifices because there is just nowhere in the body for the blood to flow. So it finds an exit. There was an incident where the hoop slipped and cut off a head. It wasn’t intended to be deadly, it just happened once in a while.”
“Now it is being used for that,” Xavier commented. “And why deviate? He’s been sticking to the pictures; why not stick to the pictures?”
“Too gruesome or hard to fulfill?” I suggested.
“How do you figure?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to get more gruesome than drawing and quartering or impaling. The Pear of Anguish and the Skull Crusher are both mechanized and easy to use. The torture wheel would be the only difficult one, but if you can get five Iron Maidens, you can get a torture wheel. He isn’t sticking with just mechanized forms. Impaling requires wood, not metal and isn’t mechanized. Drawing and quartering was done with horses, now days it could be done with cars, but it wouldn’t work without more than one person. The four corners of movement are what make it really terrible.”
“Stop, explain that.” Xavier said.
“Ok, with drawing and quartering, you were tied to four horses or oxen, normally. Each animal was then ‘encouraged’ to run the direction they were pointing. This caused massive damage and pain. Being pulled in four directions at once is what really caused it. If only one horse or ox moved, the others would actually go with that one. In rare cases, they’d stay stationary, but that meant the victim usually only lost a limb. When all of them were moving, one would get a torso or the torso would be ripped in half as well as the limbs being pulled off. If you were tied to four cars and only one of them moved, the same thing would happen. You’d lose a limb, you wouldn’t actually be quartered. If you only use two animals or cars, the victim tended to tear in half and the arms came off. The legs were so firmly attached that they often remained connected. So you need four points of motion to draw and quarter. Are we positive that they were drawn and quartered and not just hacked off?”
“Oh yeah, they were ripped apart.” Xavier encouraged.
“Meaning four points of motion. Horses or oxen?”
“We don’t know, there was no manure found at the scene.”
“No manure when he would have had to use animals? Oh, wait,” I frowned hard. “There are two other ways. Neither was used very often. It’s very messy for the person doing the drawing and quartering. One was called corralling, four horses, locked in a corral. You spook one, it begins jerking and tugging, spooks the others, however, since they are in a corral, they can only run so far. The limbs were usually wrenched off, joints dislocated as the horses attempted to bolt. Most of the time, they ended up running in a circle, but since they were joined together by the victim, it was an awkward gait that did more damage to the bodies. The second doesn’t have a name. And you have to find two trees, but you tie limbs to the trees and a third to the horse, the horse takes off, the force exerted removes two of the limbs. You stop the horse, retie and do it again. You can effectively draw and quarter someone doing it, but it takes longer and you get bloody.”
“None of that makes me feel any better. If anything, it makes me feel worse. The killer would be covered in arterial spray. The only good thing is the victim would die of blood loss pretty quickly once the femoral artery was torn. Anything else?”
“You found no maker’s mark on the Iron Maidens? What about the stakes?”
“Oak, looked hand cut, but the ends were sharpened with a grinder.”
“That’s odd. Why use a grinder on them? If you took the time to cut the stakes by hand, why not hand sharpen them?”
“I don’t know, but they were all the same length or at least within an inch of being the same length. The bottoms weren’t cleaned; we found axe marks on them. But it was a common hand axe. They were all within an inch of being the same diameter as well.”
“So he selects and hand cuts the wood he wants to use for the stakes, but uses a grinder to sharpen them? That’s the only modern thing about it.”
“Think it means something?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he was just tired from chopping down the trees.”
“What are you thinking, Ace?”
“I’m not. I’m chasing my tail. The grinder doesn’t make sense. The Scavenger’s Daughter doesn’t make sense. We’ve missed something, but I can’t figure out what.”
“Think it is something psychological?”
“Maybe, but it could be something historical. The Scavenger’s Daughter is a very late Medieval creation, but impaling has been around since the beginning of time. It was easy and effective.”
“And the others?”
“Well, as I said earlier, it was believed for a long time that the Iron Maiden was fiction. It was described as early as the 1200’s, but no one had seen one until the 1800’s. It went out of fashion around the 1500’s, if not earlier. The Iron Maiden is a female torture device. The others are all unisex.” I thought for a moment about that.
“Damn, that’s it. They all have something that isn’t exactly right for its use in the menagerie. The Iron Maiden was a female device. Drawing and quartering was an improvised device, they did it mostly in the rural areas, where torture devices weren’t so common. Impaling had a long history, but it never became wide-spread except when Vlad Tepes was in power, it was his favorite. The Scavenger’s Daughter was mostly about humiliation and was a late Middle Ages device created in England. It almost doesn’t fit the time-line and unlike the others, it wasn’t intended to be used as a death sentence.”
“Think that fits?” Xavier asked.
“No, but I can’t think of anything else for the randomness. We have devices that require master blacksmiths, a wooden stake that requires very little skill and horses or oxen. The only thing we can tie together are the Scavenger’s Daughter and the Iron Maidens.”
“You keep coming back to the Iron Maidens.”
“You examined the bodies, r
ight?”
“Yes.”
“Did you see what they actually do?”
“They pierce holes in you. Most of the women died from trauma to their organs.”
“Uh, no, they shouldn’t have.” I looked at him.
“What do you mean, they shouldn’t have?”
“Iron Maidens have spikes, but not long spikes. The intention was to prick the victim all over their body and let them slowly bleed to death. The eye stakes were the most important piece; they were carefully measured to not puncture the brain.”
“These punctured the brain. Front and back.”
“That’s wrong.” I told him. “A true Iron Maiden doesn’t have spikes at the back of the head. They have very small spikes that stick out the back, but it was mainly to keep the women in them from moving around. The front was two doors that closed and the spikes were positioned with pinpoint accuracy to not nick major veins or arteries, not puncture the brain and they weren’t long enough to go into the body more than an inch or so. The women literally bleed to death over hours or even days. That’s what the hole in the bottom was for, so that the blood could drain out. There was usually a person watching to make sure the blood wasn’t draining too quickly. If it was, the maiden was opened and the spikes adjusted.”
“These spikes were not adjustable, Ace. And most measured between eight and twelve inches long. The women didn’t live very long in them. After all ten were dead, they were shoved into them, two at a time and sealed back up.”
“You’re positive that it wasn’t done at the same time?”
“Positive. There were two different sets of puncture marks. One before death and one after death, the ones after death were all one-sided and much worse. There was tearing of the skin, but no bruising around them.”
“Whoever built the maidens didn’t have proper schematics and probably thought they were being built for show. Replicas tend to have longer spikes to make them look more terrifying because few people understand how they actually worked.”
“I didn’t,” Xavier agreed.
“We need to find a master blacksmith who deals with replicas; high quality replicas and we need to find his maker’s mark inside the maidens.”
“You keep talking about a maker’s mark.” Alejandro’s voice suddenly floated to me. I looked up and saw the rest of the unit walking down the hall.
“The Maidens were built to be show pieces, not actual torture devices. True maidens had short spikes, not long ones. They were meant to prolong death, not make it quick and brutal. However, a replica show piece would have longer spikes that were not adjustable. Our torturer would know that. But for whatever reason, doesn’t have the ability to get an accurate replica. This means there has to be a maker’s mark somewhere inside or outside the maiden.”
“We didn’t find any marks.” Alejandro reiterated.
“Did you find any spots that looked like they had been ground down then? Someone who builds something like that is going to brand it as their work. It’s complicated and only a master blacksmith would have the skills, even today it would have to be hand forged.”
“No spots that looked ground either,” Alejandro assured me.
“Well hell,” I stared at him. “I still want to examine the maidens, but it can wait.”
“Good because we found something else in the woods.” Alejandro gave me a look.
“What?”
“Lucas, go get it.” Lucas disappeared and came back with a hoop. There was a device on top that worked as a tightening mechanism. I stared at the Scavenger’s Daughter. There was blood on the ring.
“You two can go over this. I’m having the maidens brought here. They should be here in the next couple of hours,” Alejandro pointed to Xavier.
Lucas handed the hoop over. Xavier took it gently between gloves. I frowned at it.
“It’s iron.”
“Very perceptive,” Alejandro frowned back at me.
“Who works with iron anymore? I was really expecting it to be steel.”
“Well, it isn’t.” He turned and walked away.
“Don’t take it personally; he doesn’t like women, smart people or people who don’t cower at his feet.” Michael smiled at me. “You seem to fall into all three categories.”
“Why are you considering hiring me to work for someone who can’t stand me?” I turned to Lucas.
“Because the rest of us like you and he’s just the guy who barks orders.” Lucas turned to Xavier.
“What?” Xavier asked.
“I didn’t see blood on any victims, but we found what appears to be blood on the thingy.”
“I noticed. Doesn’t mean a victim didn’t vomit it up and it get cleaned up from everything but the hoop.” Xavier countered.
“But if it isn’t the victim’s…”
“Yes, Lucas, I had already had that thought, but I am trying really hard not to get my hopes up.”
“Just so long as we’re clear.”
“Crystal.” Xavier took the hoop into the examining room we had just left.
The bodies had disappeared. I didn’t know where or when they had left, but a part of me was glad. Xavier pulled over a steel table.
“What'cha think?” He asked, lying it down.
“I think it’s iron and I think that for some reason that little fact is important. What do you think?”
“I think I have never seen anything like it and I’m going to need help taking it apart.”
“Sure,” I found the latches and screws and began disassembling it. As I did, I put each piece carefully onto the table. Xavier labeled each with a number and a letter.
“All done,” I said.
“That was much faster than I anticipated.”
I shrugged in response. The hoop section was actually two pieces, hinged together at the bottom. As the screw on top was turned, the pieces moved together or apart at the top. They were oiled and moved easily, sliding over each other perfectly. It was a detail most people would have missed.
“Why do you keep playing with that?” Xavier finally asked, as I closed the hoop for the umpteenth time.
“Because it fits so perfectly well together. It looks round, but it really isn’t. See, this side here is actually just a fraction smaller than the other so that when it closes, the smaller side of the hoop slides under the band on the larger side.”
“Ok and that’s significant?”
“If they were the same size, it wouldn’t work. Metal doesn’t like to move into the same space as other metal. It’s a minute detail, but the one that makes the entire thing work.”
“Fascinated by the details?”
“Yes.”
“Does it tell you anything?”
“That the person that made it knew exactly what they were making and how it worked.”
“Unlike the maidens?”
“Or exactly like the maidens. Iron Maidens just don’t look scary. This doesn’t either, but Iron Maidens should look scary because of what they do. There’s a psychological aspect to it. Just because you build a replica that isn’t exact, doesn’t mean you don’t know what it is. It just means you know the psychology of it.”
“That sounds like Lucas’s department.”
“It is, but all torture carries aspects of psychology. Back in the day, when these things were used, the populace knew and understood exactly what they were. Five hundred years later, give or take, and the populace doesn’t understand torture the way they used to, so you have to intensify it to make it understandable. This isn’t meant to be lethal; therefore, the scary factor drops. It is meant to work and be uncomfortable and break bones. I think we can see that just by looking at it.”
“You must be a riot at dinner parties.”
“I stopped being invited to dinner parties long before I started studying torture.” I ran my fingers over a piece of the Scavenger’s Daughter.
“Are we looking for somethin
g specific, other than DNA?” Xavier asked.
“I’m not looking for DNA or fingerprints. I’m searching for a maker’s mark. You get to do the medically stuff.”
“You’re obsessed with maker’s marks.” Xavier smiled and rolled his eyes.
“If you were making items like this, items that required this much work and skill, wouldn’t you flaunt it?”
“I see your point.”
“Good, got any magnifying goggles or something?”
“Think it’s that small?”
“Some are no bigger than the eraser of a pencil. They appear as flaws in the metal.”
Xavier handed me a pair of glasses. I put them on and the world grew much bigger. Slowly I turned the hoop between my fingers, examining every millimeter of the band. There was nothing on it. I grabbed a piece of the handle.
There it was. A small imprinted stamp. It was less than a centimeter square in size and stamped on the underside of the turning handle.
“Here!” I pointed excitedly. “We need pictures or something of it. What do you do with it?”
“We need a geek,” Xavier drew a cell phone out of his jeans.
He spoke for a few minutes. We waited a few more minutes. Then Michael, Lucas and Alejandro all walked into the room.
“You look like one of those goldfish with the weird bubble eyes,” Michael said, coming around the table.
“Thanks, look here.” I pointed to the spot. “We need to somehow get a picture, blow it up and find out who made it.”
“Yeah, I got it,” Michael was already rummaging around in his bag. He pulled out a small camera.
“Your maidens will be here soon,” Alejandro said. “Giovanni, get that photo out and find out who the hell made this thing and if they’ve made anything else.”
With that, Alejandro whisked himself out of the room. He walked silently, but his absence was noticeable in the room. It seemed freer.
“He’s like a dark brooding bear,” I said, narrowing my eyes at the closed door.
“He takes a lot of getting used to,” Michael took more pictures.
“Dr. Cain,” Special Agent Gabriel Henders entered the room.
“Yes,” I blinked at him, wondering if he had been waiting outside the door for Alejandro to leave.
“I have your maidens,” he said it with a frown.
“Great! Bring them in.”
Chapter 18