Steampunk! Part 6

It's after hours at the police department's favorite saloon, the Drunken Aeronaut, and jubilation, centering on Detective Wilkins, is in full swing. The PD is celebrating a successful conviction in the detective's biggest case yet, a hard case, the worst crime that Califa has seen in a hundred years. For three months, until Detective Wilkins snared him, the Califa Squeeze had the city in an uproar. He was crafty, and busy, with a modus operandi quite chilling: he crept up on his victims - in the bath, in an alley, at breakfast, weeding the garden - and squeezed the life out of them. Then he stole their jewelry and vanished. The city is not unfamiliar with the petty thief, but normally its murderers confine themselves to those who are asking to be murdered: other criminals, dollymops, street orphans, to name but a few unfortunates.

The Califa Squeeze was a different breed of homicide, shameless and daring. He chose his victims from the ranks of the utterly blameless: a city gardener, a lawyer, a lamplighter, a nanny. Innocent folks who kept to the law and expected, therefore, to die old and happy in their beds. By itself each murder was shocking, but when it became apparent that the heinous crimes had been committed by the same maniac, the city had erupted into a frenzy of fear and shrill indignation: the Califa Squeeze must be stopped!

Well, the great Detective Wilkins stopped the Califa Squeeze. Using his wiles, and his extensive underworld contacts, with a hefty dose of charm, and then some deadly browbeating, Detective Wilkins tracked the Califa Squeeze and caught him, red-handed, with the boodle. The terror of the city turned out to be a small mumbling shambling old man known as Nutter Norm, who had been living in a crate not far from the Islais Creek Slaughterhouse. The boodle, no longer quite so shiny after spending so much time in close proximity to offal, was discovered in a sack in the crate. When arrested, Norm protested that he had found the loot, but gentle (and not gentle) pressure from the Great Detective finally persuaded the old man to confess tearfully that he was indeed the dreaded Squeeze, though he couldn't explain exactly why he had done such great crimes for such little reward.

The trial lasted barely an hour. The jury, primed by Detective Wilkins's silky-smooth testimony, delivered a verdict after only twenty minutes of deliberation: guilty on all charges. Nutter Norm will hang. The jury went home, pleased that they had done their duty. The police adjourned to the Drunken Aeronaut to celebrate their hero, who would no doubt soon be called to Saeta House to be congratulated there by the Warlady Sylvanna Abenfarax herself. Until then, they are drinking champagne, eating oysters, and boisterously toasting the man of the hour.

Remember how I said not everyone in the department loves Detective Wilkins? Well, here we come to the one who does not: Constable Aurelia Etreyo, not splendid at all, but small and round and scowly. She sits in a dark corner, chewing furiously on a cheese waffle and furiously watching the other police officers pet Detective Wilkins. If Detective Wilkins is the department pride, Constable Etreyo is the department crank. She came to the PD the youngest graduate from the police academy ever, full of fever and fire to do good, catch criminals, make the city a safer, better place. Instead, she patrols the Northern Sandbank, the coldest, foggiest, most forlorn part of the city, where nothing at all happens, because there is almost nothing there. The Sandbank encompa.s.ses a series of tall hills, too tall to build upon, intermixed with sand dunes too sandy to build upon. Only two structures stand in the Northern Sandbank: the Califa Asylum for the Forlorn and the Nostalgically Insane and a windblown octagon-shaped house, now abandoned. The Northern Sandbank is the worst beat in the city.

Constable Etreyo's been on the job a year, and she's bitter. Constable Etreyo is an acolyte of the great forensic investigator Armand Bertillo, whose book A Manifesto of Modern Detection created the template for modern police work. A modern police officer, says Professor Bertillo, uses facts, not fists, to solve crimes. A modern police officer understands that crime can be measured, that criminals leave behind clues, which, when properly interpreted, make the resolution of the case obvious. Fingerprints, bloodstains, murder weapons, murder scenes, all these help the police answer the only question that truly matters in police work: who did it. The Bertillo System categorizes crimes and criminals into types that can be tracked, antic.i.p.ated, and caught. It is a thoroughly modern way of solving crime, as aloof from the dark old days as day is from night.

Unfortunately for Constable Etreyo, Califa is not a modern police force. Sure, the chief of police frowns upon interrogation via thumping, and they've done away with the old dirty, overcrowded prison in favor of the clean, silent penitentiary system, but otherwise the police force remains old-fashioned. Crimes are solved with a carrot or a stick, and order is kept through intimidation and fear - all practices that Detective Wilkins has made perfect, and the reason he sits at the apex of the list of people that Etreyo hates. Etreyo's attempts to persuade her fellow officers to employ the Bertillo System have gained her only ridicule. Her attempt to get the chief of police to endorse the Bertillo System failed miserably. Banished to the worst beat in the city, Constable Etreyo has grown snappish and mean.

So, snappish and mean, she sits in a corner listening to the jolly police officers bombard the Great Detective with praise and free beer. You probably wonder why she pains herself so. If the sight of Detective Wilkins makes her so sick, why not go where he is not? Well, first, she'll be fiked if she'll quit. And she'll be fiked if she'll be driven from her dinner. Also, she can't afford to quit. She's the second of ten children, and all her paycheck goes to the support of the other nine siblings, her parents, an elderly aunt, and a blind gazehound. She can't afford to eat elsewhere; the Drunken Aeronaut gives a police discount.

So Constable Etreyo sits and stews, cheese waffle growing soggy and heavy in her stomach. Detective Wilkins is recounting for the fourth time how he leaned on Nutter Norm: ". . . said to him, 'Dear man, I want to help you, I really do, but I cannot,' and here I paused and offered him a cigarillo; he took it, poor soul. I said, 'I want to be your friend, but you will not let me,' and he began to cry, and I knew he'd crack, the Califa Squeeze - I'd squeezed him -"

"Not!" Constable Etreyo's shouted interruption is so loud that the other officers are startled. Detective Wilkins is astounded by the interruption. He turns his gaze toward Etreyo's dark corner, sees her there, smiles, and says genially, "Ah, Constable Etreyo, welcome. How is your waffle? A bit sandy, maybe?"

The other officers giggle, and one of them slaps Detective Wilkins on the shoulder in a friendly sort of way. This friendly slap c.o.c.keyes the detective's straw boater and earns the slapper a most unfriendly look in return.

"Better to have sand in my teeth than sand in my eyes," Etreyo says. She hadn't meant to speak. The word had just exploded out of her, but now that she's said one word, it's easy to say a whole lot more.

"I cry your pardon, what do you mean?" Detective Wilkins asks.

"I mean, you've got the wrong man."

"But, dear Constable Etreyo, Nutter Norm confessed."

"He was scared and hungry and you promised him a bacon supper."

"Who would confess to murder - four murders - for a bacon supper?" Subdetective Wynn asks scornfully. He's one of Detective Wilkins's chief cronies.

Constable Etreyo can think of several occasions in her life where she would have happily confessed to murder for one slice of bacon, much less an entire bacon supper. But none of these fat plods looks like he's ever missed a meal, so they have no idea what a driving force hunger can be.

"I never get the wrong man," Detective Wilkins says.

"You've got the wrong man now."

"The jury said not."

"The jury did not know all the facts."

Detective Wilkins says, "What do you know of the facts, you who have spent the last weeks traipsing about sand dunes, looking after the safety of cows and crazies, whereas I have examined every crime scene, interviewed every witness, recovered the stolen goods -"

"Fingerprints," Constable Etreyo says. "Fingerprints."

Her words are met with an indulgent sigh (Detective Wilkins), eye rolls, and head wagging (the other officers.) Here goes Etreyo, they are all thinking, with her science.

"Fingerprints are unique," Etreyo continues. "No two prints are the same."

"So you say," Detective Wilkins says, "but can you prove it? There are millions of people in the world. Have you looked at the fingerprints of all of those people? What is there to say that my fingerprints are not the same as, say, a hide tanner in Ticonderoga, or a fisherman in Kenai?"

More laughter. The very idea!

She's heard this argument before, and so had Professor Bertillo; of course, they haven't looked at the fingerprints of everyone in the world. But Professor Bertillo had examined the fingerprints of more than ten thousand people and found not a match among them, and that is a big enough sample to support his theory that fingerprints are unique. Not that snapperheads like Detective Wilkins or his cronies will ever be convinced.

"In this case it doesn't matter whether or not Norm's fingerprints are unique," Etreyo says. "What matters is that they were not at any of the crime scenes. There were plenty of fingerprints, but none of them was Norm's. Which means he cannot be the Califa Squeeze."

Detective Wilkins now stares at her, smile vanished. He says softly, smoke from his cigarillo fluttering as he speaks, "Someone has been detecting behind my back."

This is true. Detective Wilkins had not ordered any of the crime scenes to be dusted for fingerprints; Etreyo had visited them after Detective Wilkins's exit and had done the dusting herself. She says, "You cannot execute an innocent man! And it's a matter of public safety. The Squeeze has to be stopped."

Against Detective Wilkins's own vanity, public safety has not much of a chance. He says, "I do not like people who detect behind my back."

"And I do not like officers who squabble in public," a new voice says. Ylva Landaon, the chief of police, has been standing at the bar for the last ten minutes, but the officers have been so absorbed in their drama that they didn't notice. Now, realizing her presence, they begin a mad scramble of doffing hats, saluting. Fiking great, thinks Constable Etreyo. Records room, here I come.

"You seem awfully certain that Norm is not the Squeeze, Constable Etreyo," Captain Landaon says.

"I am, Captain."

"But you can't prove it."

"Nutter Norm's fingerprints were not at any of the crime scenes."

"What does that prove?" Detective Wilkins says. "Perhaps he wore gloves! Did you think of that, Constable Etreyo?"

The other officers laugh, and Etreyo feels her cheeks flush with murderous rage. She swallows hard. "If he had worn gloves, he would have left smeared marks. But I didn't find any such marks."

Detective Wilkins scoffs. "All of this is irrelevant anyway. Norm confessed."

"Ayah, he did," Captain Landaon says. "Norm confessed, had a fair trial, and was found guilty. It is not the police's place to criticize the verdict. We uphold the law; we do not rule on it. Do you understand, Constable Etreyo? I will hear no more of these wild theories of yours. The case is closed."

Detective Wilkins and his cronies roar. They don't care if they send an innocent man to the drop. They care only for their reputations. They can laugh at her all they want; she knows she is right. But being right won't save Nutter Norm. Only proof that she is right will do that.

And, other than the fingerprints, she doesn't have any.

As you might guess from Etreyo's sudden declaration to Detective Wilkins, she's been following the case since the first murder was discovered. Unofficially, she's examined the crime scenes; unofficially, she's examined the bodies; and unofficially, she's read Detective Wilkins's reports. The man may be a snapperhead, but his reports are thorough. He doesn't follow the Bertillo protocols of measuring the crime scenes, or making sketches or photograves of evidence, nor does he dust for prints, but he looks for evidence, and he interviews witnesses. Now Etreyo feels she knows the case as well as Detective Wilkins does. Better, actually, for her understanding of the case is guided by the evidence. His is guided by his own opinions. There is no room in forensics, says Professor Bertillo, for opinion.

But she's gone over and over the case file a hundred times, and all she can do is eliminate Norm. She knows the answer to who the real killer is must be there, in the file, in the clues, somewhere, but she just can't see it. And so Norm will hang. She'd visited him in jail, a broken old man, crying for his life. He'd reminded her of her grandpa. He'd died, too, because her family couldn't afford the medicine to save him.

The case of the Califa Squeeze is a strange one. Four murders and no witnesses, this despite the fact that three of them took place in the middle of the day, with potential witnesses nearby. How could a murderer gain access to his victims and yet not be seen? In the case of the nanny, his charges were in the next room coloring when the crime happened, and they didn't hear or see a thing. In the lawyer's case, the only access to the murder room was through a door that was locked from the inside. There is no evidence that anyone had climbed in through the window.

There's no obvious motive, either. The petty nature of the items stolen would seem to preclude theft as a motive, particularly since they were all recovered. The Squeeze hadn't even tried to unload them. Detective Wilkins could find no connection between the victims, and neither could Constable Etreyo, following in his footsteps. According to the Bertillo System, there is always a motive. But she has no idea what it could be.

The criminal, said Professor Bertillo, cannot hide himself completely. He leaves traces of himself behind, and his fingerprints are his signature. Etreyo had dusted all the crime scenes for prints. She'd used the prints she'd covertly collected from her colleagues to eliminate their prints, and she was then left with only a few unidentified prints. The same prints keep showing up at all the crime scenes. They don't belong to any of the detectives. Etreyo knows these prints belong to the killer. But that knowledge doesn't bring her any closer to discovering who the killer is.

Constable Etreyo wishes she could consult with Sieur Bertillo himself, but he's a thousand miles away, in Bexar, and she can't afford the price of a heliogram, anyway. Cast down, she returns to the station house to file her end-of-shift report and change out of her uniform. She should just go home.

Instead, we find Etreyo back at the station, standing outside the door to the Califa City Morgue, smearing the s.p.a.ce between her nose and her lips with lavender pomade. No matter how many times she has been on the other side of that door, she cannot get used to the smell: decaying meat, quicklime, stale blood. The pomade doesn't erase the smell completely, but it certainly does cut it some. Her nose now armored, she pushes through the heavy wooden doors into the white-tile room beyond.

It's late and the morgue is shadowy and quiet. All the marble slabs are empty. The floor, newly cleaned, is slick and wet beneath her feet. Dr. Kuddle sits at the rolltop desk at the far end of the room, eating a donut and writing out a report. Etreyo's footsteps echo alarmingly as she walks past the slab, past the zinc trough where the bodies are washed, past the scales, still faintly rimmed with red, where the organs are weighed. Now, with everything cleaned for the night, the morgue seems peaceful; hospital-like. Of course, during the busy part of the day, it most closely resembles a slaughterhouse.

"I have to finish this report," Dr. Kuddle says peevishly. "That's why I am still here so late. I thought you were at the 'Naut, blowing your mouth off."

Dr. Kuddle doesn't believe in the Bertillo System, mostly because the system calls for extremely elaborate autopsies, and Kuddle is against anything that might increase her workload. But she likes Etreyo and humors her.

"How did you hear about that?"

"I hear about everything," Kuddle says. She hardly ever leaves the morgue, but she knows everything that is going on. "Don't bait Detective Gorgeous. He's an a.s.s. His day will come."

"He's going to be responsible for an innocent man's death."

"I doubt he'll lose any beauty sleep over it."

"It's not right."

Instead of answering her, Kuddle stands up. "Come on. I have something to show you."

"What?" Etreyo asks, following her.

"You shall see," answers Kuddle, opening the door to the freeze room. "Leave the door open behind you, will you? It's freezing in here, and I'm getting a cold, I'm sure."

The freeze room is indeed freezing, but its occupants don't mind the cold. Constable Etreyo shivers; not because of the cold but because she has a vivid imagination and can easily imagine herself lying on one of the blocks of ice, her dark skin frosted white, her flesh as hard as stone. She banishes this vision from her imagination and turns her attention to the figure that Dr. Kuddle has just unveiled.

Jacobus Hermosa, lamplighter. Throttled as he made his rounds lighting the gas lamps on Abenfarax Avenue. His partner had been working the opposite side of the street and hadn't seen a thing. Taken: one signet ring. Kuddle hadn't bothered to do an autopsy because the cause of death was so obvious: a crushed throat via manual strangulation.

"I've already looked at him. Twice," Etreyo says.

Kuddle holds up the lamp. "I was getting ready to release the body when I noticed something. Look. You can see how the killer gripped Hermosa by the neck; there's the shape of his thumb under the chin, and then the fingers, here, under the right ear. The killer used his left hand - his dominant hand, for sure, as he would hardly crush the life out of someone with his weaker hand."

"Nutter Norm is right-handed," Etreyo says. "So that proves something, I suppose, but it doesn't tell you who the killer is."

"But this will, or it will help. Look at the thumb mark. See, it's crooked, as though it has been broken and fixed, but the bone didn't set right."

Etreyo bends over the corpse. Hope is beginning to well up inside her. "That's a fantastic identifying mark. I can't believe I didn't see it before!" she says excitedly. "When I find a man with a broken thumb like that, I'll have him. And the fingerprints will prove it; they'll match some of the ones I found at the scene."

They leave Hermosa in the cold darkness. Back in the slicing room, Kuddle pours them both hot coffee. As they sip, and Etreyo contemplates the new lead, her excitement dampens. "It's a good clue, but it won't help Norm. I'm not going to find this guy before tomorrow afternoon."

"I've been thinking. The broken thumb brings to mind a recent corpse I had in here. An actor, he was, young fella. He fell during the rehearsal of that new melodrama that was going to open at the Odeon, the one about the Dainty Pirate."

"Did he fall off the stage?"

"No, out of the rigging. The scene was supposed to be on the ship, you know. Sixty feet down to the stage boards, and that was it for our young ingenue. Pity. He was pretty. He had a crooked thumb. I remember it because it was his only flaw."

"If he's dead, he could hardly be my murderer."

"Thirty years ago, I'd have said you were wrong. But I ain't seen a dead man walk in years. But it's still odd."

"Where's the corpse?"

"Well. No one claimed it, you know, and he wasn't a member of the theater company, so they wouldn't spring for a funeral. I got no budget for a potter's field; it ain't free, you know." Kuddle sounds a bit defensive. "Anyway, I sold it to a medico - dissection, I suppose."

She gets up, goes over to a filing cabinet, and yanks a drawer open. "Just for laughs, here. I read that Bertillo book you gave me, and it did seem interesting, so I started fingerprinting all the corpses that came in, to see if I ever ran across the same prints more than once." She pulls a card out of the drawer and whips it through the air toward Etreyo. "Pretty boy's prints."

Etreyo catches the card and lays it on the desk. She digs through her case and finds the cards she made of the prints she had taken from the crime scene, the prints she hasn't yet identified. And what do you fiking know?

She finds a match.

The case, already strange, is now turning even stranger. Clearly the chorus boy could not be the murderer; his fatal fall happened before the murders started. But the fingerprints match. That's irrefutable. Constable Etreyo remembers, uneasily, Detective Wilkins's gibe that she could not really prove that two people did not have the same fingerprints. Maybe this was the proof. If so, then she is nowhere closer to finding the true murderer. And she has no other leads. Leave no stone unturned, Sieur Bertillo advised. So, although she knows the dead chorus boy is a dead end (literally), she decides to check him out anyway.

The patrol room is empty; the swing shift is already gone to work, and the day shift has not started to trickle in. Constable Etreyo goes to the locker room and exchanges her spiffy uniform for a threadbare sack-coat suit. On her way out of the locker room, she tucks her shield into her breast pocket and drops her pistol into her pocket. A shadow blocks her way.

"Well, now, busy bee, where dost thou wander?"

"Get out of my way," she says, angling to push by Wilkins, but he does not give way. Detective Wilkins is much taller than she is and not very sober. These two qualities make him a substantial roadblock.

"What were you doing in the morgue so late at night?"

"None of your business."

"The captain said to leave my case alone. I hope you are following her orders, dear Constable. The captain would not be pleased to hear otherwise. You think the Sandbank is bad; there is always worse."

Her answer is a sharp heel to the toe of his mirror-shine-polished black boot. While he hops in anger, she breezes by him and out the door. Recklessly, she hails a hansom cab; with the help of a friend in the records division, she'll tab the expense to Detective Gorgeous. The cabbie asks her destination, and she glances, for the first time, at the address that Dr. Kuddle gave her. And she discovers it's an address she knows well, for it is on her beat: the abandoned Octagon House. Fike. The medico has given Dr. Kuddle a shill address.

"Where to?" the cabbie asks impatiently, peering into the cab through the little window behind his seat.

It's the only lead she's got.

A good detective always checks out every lead, no matter how paltry.

"Four-fifteen Sandbank Road," she orders.

The cabbie slides his window shut, and with a jerk and jingle of tack, the cab jolts forward. Normally, the journey to her beat is a long cold one, entailing two cold horsecar rides, one to the end of the line, and then a long trudge along Sandy Road to the intersection of Sandy and Sandbank, where her patrol shack sits. Today, she rides in stylish warmth and gets there in half the time of her normal slog. Still reckless, she orders the cab to wait, and the cabbie, with a shrug that says it's your diva, hunches down into the shelter of his greatcoat and takes out a warming flask and a Califa Police Gazette. "The Squeeze to Be Squeezed," the headline says. Etreyo grimaces as she walks away.

The gaslights of the city are now far behind; the house squats in fog-swirled darkness. As she approaches, a gust of wind flaps the front gate open. She walks up the stone walkway to the chipped marble stairs. The air smells of damp salt and something else, something that buzzes and crackles in the back of her throat. The bra.s.s knocker is missing its clapper; she raps hard on the door with her knuckles, but the sound is muted by the wind and the rubbing wheeze of tree limbs. As she expects, no one answers. She peers through a side window and sees darkness.

She's not supposed to enter a building without permission from the owners, unless it's an emergency, but a police officer can always find an emergency. Silently rehearsing her excuse - I heard a distant cry of help; I thought I smelled smoke - she rattles the front-door k.n.o.b. When that doesn't turn, she goes back to the side window, but it's stuck. She doesn't want to break the gla.s.s and alert anyone who might be inside, so she goes around back to find the coal chute. The iron door hangs ajar; it's a tight squeeze, but sometimes being small has its advantages. Detective Wilkins wouldn't fit, but then Detective Wilkins would probably just kick down the front door and be done with it. She goes feetfirst, with her pistol drawn, just in case. Five minutes later, she is standing in the kitchen, covered in coal dust.

The kitchen is empty, forlorn, no sign that anyone has cooked in it for years. The iron stove is rusted with salt moisture; the sink is slick with mold. As the name of the house suggests, the Octagon House has eight outside walls instead of four. In the center of the octagon, Etreyo finds a spiral staircase; up she goes, cautiously, gun still drawn, slowly, so as to make as little noise as possible. The shape of the house means that the rooms are oddly shaped; each floor has four square rooms and four tiny little triangular rooms, all arranged around the core staircase. The rooms are empty, with cracked floorboards and peeling walls. The house appears empty, but it doesn't feel empty. It looks abandoned, but it doesn't feel abandoned. The fog means that the night is lighter than usual, and in this light, Etreyo sees footprints on the dusty floorboards, fresh footprints. She's reached the top floor now, but there is still no sign of habitation. Perhaps they were here before and are gone now.

She's about to head back downstairs when the ceiling shakes and small bits of plaster rain down. She hears the sound of footsteps and realizes that there must be one more floor above her. Either that or someone is walking on the roof. But the stairs go no farther. She circles through the floor again, each room joining the other, until she's back where she started, and then realizes that one of the windows is actually a door leading to a staircase that coils around the house, nautilus-like. The footsteps move rapidly - two sets of them: one clompy, the other light.

She exits the door onto the outside stairway, which is rusty and rickety. With one hand she clutches the slickly wet railing. In the other she holds her pistol steady; she's never fired it in the line of duty, but she will if she has to. Fog roils around her; it's so thick now that the house seems to drift in a cloud, unmoored from the rest of the world. A tickle begins in the back of Constable Etreyo's throat, a tickle that becomes a sound, low and humming. The sound spreads from her throat up into her skull, down into her feet, tingling her blood, her bones, her nerves. The stairs rattle beneath her; above her, the fog flashes purple, once, twice. Lightning? But where's the storm? The rain? And no lightning that Etreyo has ever encountered before sounds like this: a high-pitched buzzing whine, like two saws being rubbed together. Her teeth tingle, and purple sparks arc down from above. She comes around the last edged corner of the octagon and sees an open doorway to her left. The doorway leads to a solarium: gla.s.s walls, gla.s.s ceiling, currently open to the foggy night.

In the center of the solarium, a waterfall of purple lightning pours down from a central pillar. The pillar stands on a scaffold; a table lies underneath, a human form stretched out upon it. Purple lightning dances and shimmers around the stretcher, envelops the body in eye-scorching purple fire. Etreyo thinks she has never seen anything so beautiful or awe inspiring. Or so frightening, either.

She shouts, but her words are lost in the high-pitched whine. On the other side of the roof she sees a dark figure silhouetted against the glow. She shouts at it again, and then, as she dashes forward, a strike of lightning flares off the center corona and zaps her. Stunned, she drops the pistol and feels a hand on her shoulder, pulling her back.