The Werewolf of Bamberg by Oliver Pötzsch

been severed with a knife or simply ripped off. Before turning away, Jakob took one last look at the toes. He froze suddenly, then stood up again and looked all around him.
    “Two of this woman’s toenails have been ripped off,” he said.
    “What?” Martin Lebrecht frowned. “Are you trying to say she has been tortured?”
    “I can’t be sure of that, but what point would there be otherwise in pulling someone’s toenails out? So she wouldn’t have to cut them again?”
    “Or perhaps because the rats have had a feast on the corpse?” Hieronymus Hauser suggested, without any reaction to Jakob’s sarcastic remark.
    Jakob Kuisl shook his head. “Believe me, my brother and I know what it looks like when someone’s nails have been pulled out. We’ve done it ourselves often enough, haven’t we, Bartholomäus?”
    Bartholomäus nodded silently, and Jakob had the feeling that the two others were distancing themselves a bit from him and his brother.
    After a while, he bent down over the girl’s corpse and began sniffing noisily, his huge nostrils flaring out like sails. Again he noticed the strange, musty odor that he had wondered about the previous night. Now it was far fainter, barely perceptible.
    “What in the world is your brother doing?” the horrified captain whispered.
    “He . . . well, he has a good nose, a sensitive one,” Bartholomäus tried to explain. “Sometimes he smells things that no one else can. Almost like a bloodhound.”
    The others remained silent as Kuisl examined the wound in the neck more closely. The edges were frayed, as if the murderer had used not a sharpened knife, but a saw or a jagged sword.
    Or claws?
    Kuisl put the thought aside and concentrated on the cut to the chest. Pulling the edges of the wound apart, he noticed that the breastbone had been almost cut in half in one place. Evidently the murderer had been interrupted while he worked. The wound was in the upper third of the breastbone, directly above the heart.
    He paused.
    Was that possible?
    “Why are you stopping?” asked the clerk, who had been watching him with great curiosity up to that point. “Did you find anything?”
    Jakob hesitated, and then shook his head. “Just a hunch. But too vague to say—”
    “Now come out with it,” his brother interrupted. “Always the mystery! That’s what I couldn’t stand about you back then—even if you were usually right,” he added, grumbling.
    “Speak up,” Martin Lebrecht insisted.
    “The perpetrator cut through the skin and evidently wanted to open the chest with a saw, or something like it,” Jakob said finally as he turned to the circle of onlookers. He pointed at the clean incision. “This, unmistakably, is the act of a skilled workman. My brother and I probably disturbed him, and the question is why he was doing that.”
    “And what do you suspect?” Hieronymus asked.
    “The deep incision is right at the level of the heart,” Jakob replied. “I myself have made incisions like this in order to examine the inner organs of a body. I think . . .” He hesitated. “Well, I think the murderer wanted to cut out the girl’s heart.”
    For a while no one said a word, and the only sound was the constant rushing water of the Regnitz. Finally Martin Lebrecht cleared his throat.
    “It doesn’t matter whether or not this is sheer nonsense,” he finally said. “One thing must be clear: this assumption is never—I repeat, never —to be mentioned outside the walls of this guardhouse. If the bishop gets wind of it, great misfortune will come to this city—a misfortune like the one known all too well by the older men among us.” He cast a gloomy look at Bartholomäus. “If that should happen, Master Bartholomäus, I promise you there will be much for you to do here in Bamberg.” His voice failed him. Finally, he continued in nearly a whisper. “God in heaven, will this horror never end?”

    “If I’d known our new aunt was sending us on so many