Renegade by Amy Carol Reeves Page A

I needed the distance, as the smell suddenly seemed more pungent. The tiny flies swarmed even amid the rain, and their buzzing roared unrelenting in my ears.
    I heard Abberline point out the “bite marks” on the throats and chests.
    There was a long silence and I heard Phillips give a tremendous sniff. Without seeing his expression, I could not decide if the sound came from boredom or deep reflection.
    “Have you located the kidneys, livers, and hearts of the victims, Abberline?” Phillips asked suddenly.
    “No, we have not.”
    “When I perform the autopsies, I’ll determine whether more organs are missing. All of these wounds appear to have been made by human teeth, nails, and hands. I see no evidence of any knife cuts.”
    “So the attacker was human?” Abberline asked.
    “Most certainly,” Phillips said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him, with a small pair of tweezers, place something in a small jar held by an assistant. Using a small cloth strip, he began swabbing at one of the wounds on the younger victim.
    “Abberline,” Phillips said, peering closer into the wound, “at least two attackers were involved here. Do a thorough check of the nearby asylums for missing persons. I doubt that your men will locate the organs.”
    A throat cleared. “Why is that?” Abberline asked.
    “Because I am surmising that the organs have been consumed,” Phillips said, standing and wiping his hands upon a nearby rag. From the tone of his voice, he might as well have been answering a question about the type of tea brand he preferred.
    “Guess we won’t have to worry about watchin’ out for them resurrection men around here no more,” one constable near me whispered to another.
    Consumed. I felt the strangest mixtures of emotion. Horror, at the thought that I had been in the cemetery possibly mere minutes after these murders occurred, overwhelmed me. That I had been pursued by the murderers, that they had somehow managed to take one of our children from the orphanage. It was an impossible but apparently real atrocity. What was this? Who were those bloodstained people who pursued me last night? Oddly, also I felt a bit of stark, dark amusement at how quickly Ellen had attained accurate information about the murders.
    When I had seen and heard enough, I turned toward Mariah’s grave. I had to see it before I left. As I walked, I kept looking behind me to make certain that I was not being followed. I hoped that Abberline hadn’t seen me here; if he had, he would certainly want to speak to me.
    Then, as I rounded a corner near Mariah’s grave, I was startled to see a man, in a very long coat, smoking a pipe as he leaned against a tombstone. He nodded politely at me, and I nodded back. I had never seen him before—I assumed he might work with Dr. Phillips, an assistant perhaps. He was probably somewhere in his forties, and he had a very distinct face—sunburned—and shocking ash-blond hair that was almost white. He watched me as I passed, and I heard him lightly hit his pipe against a nearby tomb to knock out the ash.
    I continued on my way.
    I found the place. The simple front of the granite marker seemed unmolested, reading only Mariah Anne Crawford 1869–1889 .
    But as I surveyed the surrounding dirt, I could not determine if the ground had been disturbed at all. Someone, probably a groundskeeper, had spread gravel all around the grave. And since Mariah had been dead only a few months, grass had not yet had much of an opportunity to cover the ground.
    I knelt in front of the marker, the tiny white rocks crunching under my kneecaps. I felt an overwhelming, almost hot emotion surge through me as I recalled Mariah. I remembered the look in her eyes, panic and determination to survive, before she fell to her death. After such violence she deserved peace, and if my darkest suppositions were correct—that she was somehow the woman I had seen the night before with the child—she was clearly not at peace. She must