“You aren’t really going to examine each of them? Individually?” Lucas asked as several people carried in the Iron Maidens.
“Yep.” I changed my gloves and put the goggles back on. “Just stand them up, carefully.”
“Yes, ma’am,” one of the men said. They stood all five up and left. Gabriel Henders remained.
“Going to watch?”
“Not sure what you’re going to find that we didn’t, so yeah, I think I’ll watch.”
“Would you mind taking some notes then?” I asked.
“I could do that.” Gabriel Henders pulled out a notebook and a pen.
“Great.”
Xavier and Lucas moved the Scavenger’s Daughter and took seats on the steel table. Michael shook his head, took his camera and left. I was guessing he was going to follow orders.
The first maiden stood around five foot seven inches tall. Larger than most models I had seen. It was made of iron as well. The outside was bland, no special features or marks. Real ones tended to be painted, usually with the image of the Virgin Mary.
This one was coated to keep it protected from the elements. That was all though. I opened one side. There was still dried blood on the inside.
“Can we clean this?” I asked.
“Yes, it’s been processed.” Xavier got up and grabbed a steel shower head.
He turned it on. I carefully opened both doors. He sprayed the inside gently; the blood slowly began to run off of everything. It ran down the molded interior and into a drain on the floor.
“Thanks,” I said when he finished.
The spikes were definitely wrong. The back spikes were at least eight inches in length. The front spikes were twelve. I closed one of the doors and shined a flashlight in around it. The spikes here didn’t just touch, they overlapped. Definitely not intended to kill slowly.
The back of it even had spikes where the head would go. I stared at them.
“You seem very lost in thought.”
“I’m thinking of how awful this is, but how much worse a real one would be.” I opened the door back up.
“Ok, very carefully, hold these doors open.” I stepped into the maiden. Lucas and Xavier both grabbed a door. I let my body rest against the spikes in the back.
“That’s why the doors are so heavy,” I muttered.
“What?” Gabriel asked.
“The doors. They seem unnaturally heavy. Like there is more weight than just the metal. Come look from the side.”
“Ok,” Gabriel moved to stand by Xavier.
“See how much of my body is visible outside the maiden? Imagine shoving someone in against these spikes and closing the door. They are going to struggle and fight you every inch, unless they can’t.”
“I still don’t see your point.” Lucas said.
“If you closed the doors right now, the weight of them would pin me in, push me back against the spikes. It would be impossible for me to struggle against the weight of the doors, the force of a person and the spikes.”
“Gotcha.” Xavier smiled. “Now get the hell out of there, I have this vision of telling Nyleena that we dropped the doors of this Maiden and you bled to death before we could get you out.”
“Fair enough.” I climbed out. “The other problem. None of those spikes would have hit my eyes. There should be places to move the spikes. Too long, too many, not in the right places. Whoever made it had something to go off of, but it was a show piece, not a real maiden.”
“The eyes are important?” Xavier asked.
“Very, if you lived, you were blinded and branded by the marks of the maiden.”
“Did anyone live?”
“No one really knows. All the stuff we actually know about Iron Maidens comes from antiquity. You have to really scour the books to find it.”
“And you have.” Gabriel flashed me a grin.
“I have. I actually went to Germany for the specific purpose of seeing a real one. Real ones are incredibly rare.”
“How rare?”
“I don’t know, maybe thirty or so in the entire world. That might also be a gross overestimate. Most museum pieces are replicas.”
“You seem obsessed with the maidens, why?” Lucas asked.
“Because they are so wrong.” I told him. “You’re the psychologist, this is scary, yes? These long spikes, knowing you are going to be shoved in and die from it.”
“It looks terrifying,” Lucas agreed.
“Real maidens don’t. They have short spikes. The spikes screw in and out of different spots. There are two where the eyes are located, but no others are in the head of the maiden. The outside gets painted like the Virgin Mary most of the time. The spikes prick the skin, they don’t stab you. They never go deep enough to puncture an organ or sever a vein. You bleed to death. It’s like the Chinese ‘Death of a Thousand Cuts’ torture. This isn’t quick. It’s slow and excruciatingly painful. There’s a serious psychology to the Iron Maiden. It isn’t just about death, it’s about knowing you are going to die and it’s going to take several hours, maybe days for it to happen.”
“So the maiden is meant to kill, but it is also meant to psychologically torment you while you die.”
“Exactly. They weren’t ‘scary’ looking unless you knew what you were looking at.”
“That’s why you are obsessed with the maidens.” Lucas answered the question. “The killer would have known they were wrong, but went with them anyway.”
“Because he couldn’t get anything else.” I smiled at him, “because a Scavenger’s Daughter doesn’t raise suspicion, but an exact Iron Maiden would.”
“Because it wouldn’t have any psychological effects today,” Lucas smiled back.
“Exactly. Hence the question of the maidens.”
“Where would a maker hide his mark in a maiden?” Xavier grinned.
“My guess, one of the spikes. If it is the same maker as the other iron piece, then he would put it somewhere no one would look, because while he signs all his work, he is used to creating high quality replicas that are intended for collections.”
“Why do you think that?” Gabriel asked.
“Because you don’t just wake up one morning and look at a schematic and make an Iron Maiden. All the metal is coated with primer. He was expecting the maidens to be painted. He was expecting them to go to a private collection or a museum or both. Any blacksmith with a diagram could make the Scavenger’s Daughter, but only the most skilled could make an Iron Maiden. And he’s done it before based on how it was treated.”
“So we are looking for a blacksmith that creates replicas for museums and private collectors?” Xavier frowned, “who collects replicas of torture devices?”
“I have a replica of a ceremonial dagger that was used to cut out the tongues of people being put in a Brazen Bull.” I answered.
“I have no clue what that is,” Xavier said.
“It’s a torture device of the highest gruesomeness. On a scale of one to ten, it’s about a fifteen. Only impaling actually seems worse and then, only sometimes.”
“You seem to have gotten off topic. The maker’s mark?” Gabriel reminded me.
“Oh yes, so a maker’s mark. Check all of them. Check each spike on each maiden. Check the ring at the bottom where the blood drains. Check the tip of the spikes. Somewhere on these, there is a maker’s mark.”
“The FBI went over them with a fine toothed comb.” Gabriel said.
“And yet, they left the blood inside.” I pointed out. “Hard to see a maker’s mark if it is caked with blood. And a stamped piece of iron, even with primer on it, would collect blood. Wait, don’t clean all of them. Check to see abnormal blood spots. Particularly on the spikes.”
“Why the spikes?” Xavier asked, opening one of the others.
“If I were the maker, I’d leave my mark on the underside of one of the spikes. It would be there, but no one would see it.?
??
“What about this?” Lucas asked, pointing to a spike in the maiden he had just opened.
“What is it?” I asked.
“There’s a weird blood pattern on the bottom of this, where the feet would be.”
Carefully, I took a damp cloth from Gabriel and wiped at the spot. When it was clean, there was nothing there but a toenail. I gagged.
“Really? You can watch an autopsy but toenail clippings make you gag?”
“I don’t do well with snot, vomit, poop or urine either. Blood I’m fine with though,” I told them.
“Not really mother material then, are you?”
“I intend to never have children. Can you imagine miniature copies of me running around the world? Good lord.” I shook my head and went back to the cleaned maiden.
I began the process by searching the spikes of the maiden. That done, I searched the interior, then the exterior. I found no marks. I had just opened the doors again when Michael came in with food.
“I didn’t know if you were a vegetarian or not, so there’s a cheeseburger and a salad.”
“Thanks, I like both,” I took the cheeseburger, picked off the tomato and turned my attention back to the maiden. One door had swung shut. I frowned at it.
“Xavier, will you wedge those open for me?” I asked, chewing and talking with my mouth full.
“Gross, but yes,” Xavier said, also with a mouthful of food. He got off the table, I stole his spot.
“That’s why you wanted me to open the doors? So you could have my seat?”
“Pretty much,” I smiled and took another bite of the cheeseburger.
“And you just let her,” Xavier looked at Lucas.
“She smells better than you,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, you smell a bit like death,” I told him.
“I did an autopsy. Do you expect me to smell like Drakkor or something?”
“Ew, not Drakkor. Bvlgari,” I suggested.
My eyes fixed on the maiden again. There it was. Plain as day. I dropped my cheeseburger in my haste to jump from the table.
“What the hell?” Lucas asked, jumping off the table as well.
“Is it just me or does this arrangement of spikes look like an “H” with the cross-line being a sword?”
“It does, now that you mention it,” Gabriel chimed in.
“Could be your mind matrixing it.” Lucas moved closer.
“Or not,” I narrowed my eyes at it.
“Or not,” Lucas agreed, we were both leaning in really close to them.
“If either of you trip, you’ll both end up dead.” Xavier pushed his way in to look.
“I think you found your mark,” Lucas said.
“I think it matches the mark on the Scavenger’s Daughter as well.” I told him.
Michael and Gabriel had now stepped in to look at them. Michael took out his camera and began snapping pictures.
“Well, Cain, you were right, the answer was in the maidens.” Gabriel said.
“Actually, it is just a beginning. We know who made the maidens.”
“I’ll call Alejandro.” Lucas moved away.
“Damn, I guess I’ll eat the salad.” I picked the cheeseburger up off the floor.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t eat that now,” Xavier grinned.
Chapter 19