Chapter 20
Twenty
Steam
Oste understood why this innocent wasn’t tucked under a sheet and carted to the morgue. Action would have required an obvious place to begin, and this incident was lacking in that regard.
He crouched down inside the back storage room attached to the baths in Le Dauphin.
Cabinets and shelves stocked fabric and pitchers with varying degrees of clutter and disarray.
The light that spilled in from the room’s singular window illuminated the pale colors of the linens held in stark contrast to their dark stains of spattered blood.
There wasn’t a linen left untouched, but none were worse off than the dead girl lying on the floor.
Oste’s face was blank. It had to be, because if he allowed himself to fret and dwell for a singular moment, the weight of the brutal tableau would crush him for good. Feeling was for later. Feeling was for moments when he was allowed to.
He gingerly nudged around the gaping wound in her abdomen, but knew already what he’d need to tell the representatives from the viguerie.
The evidence was strewn about the floor, and they only needed his word.
He was glad they hadn’t bundled her up and moved her.
The constables could have missed something.
They could have left behind or tossed the pieces of her.
The brute hadn’t cut her beautiful red hair, though. That was something. It soaked up the sun and shone, unsure if it wanted to be russet or golden. Oste felt a pit in his stomach. At once, he wanted to see his wife.
No feeling. Not a shred of it.
“Docteur?” one of the viguiers asked aloud. Not every crime could summon the high judges.
His green eyes drifted over to one of the crimson piles.
“The killer removed—” Oste started, but his throat caught. He took a breath and started again. “The killer didn’t leave much, Maistre.”
Oste clamped his jaw shut and focused on the girl’s face instead. By some grace, it didn’t bear even a speck of blood. The brutality began at the neck, where he might have been staring at Frances’s injury from that balmy night.
Jehan re-entered the room and stepped carefully around the vestiges of the horror. He weaved his way past the two constables, then came to a halt alongside the viguier.
“She worked here, Maistre.” The lieutenant tucked his hands in front of him and kept his voice low and grave. “The others said her name was Alida, but the women think she assumed it; they suppose she was getting away from some sour business in Narbonne.”
The viguier was hesitant. “Did she…?”
“They told me she cleaned and locked up half the days. Considering the front door wasn’t broken in, I suppose our man waited until the last woman left, or hid somewhere.”
“No, no, I had wondered if she worked, as the others did.”
Worked. Oste worked his molars and focused on his task. A hip here, a thigh there. They were parts. Only parts. Parts with characteristics, and he was good at identifying what those were.
“No, Maistre. She refused.”
Le Dauphin existed in fragments just as Alida did.
The sigh of the viguier, Jehan’s nervous foot tap, the crying of the women further down the hall, the buzzing of a fly near one of the constables, and the gag of another who had his mouth covered so as not to vomit.
Pieces. This crime was made of pieces. Pieces didn’t require feeling.
“Docteur?” the viguier repeated. “You’ve been with her for some time.”
Oste knew what the man was trying to say.
He suspected everyone present thought the same, that they wanted to hurry up and make all necessary discernments so as to clean the room until it disappeared.
Boudiou, they probably would have been happy to close off the room and burn it.
He didn’t know how the attendants would ever be able to use the closet again.
“I suspect the injury to her throat was the one that killed her,” he murmured, then rose shakily to his feet. The heat of the nearby bath filled the room with unwelcome humidity, and his head felt significantly heavier. “And I observed a familiar patterning with her cuts.”
“Oh?”
“In my professional opinion,” Oste continued, “this was completed with the same blade as the one used on Frances.” The viguier’s face blanked, and Oste made a quick addition.
“The second girl. I suppose the killer simply had… more time and privacy this occasion. The dagger left a near-identical footprint.”
“Madman,” the viguier remarked. “Would he not have been soaked himself? Did no one in Cordeliers spot a crimson bastard fleeing down the road?”
“Not if he left through the thermals,” Jehan added.
He frowned, then turned around and gestured towards the dried footprints that grew smaller and smaller as they ventured out of the room.
He’d been keen to support Dorotèa’s theory about the killer’s escape routes.
“I presume he did. His prints lead towards the drop into the venting here.”
“And where does that lead?”
“This one joins the big waterway beneath the road, the main Roman one.”
“Ah, yes, so he might have gone anywhere.”
“I—Indeed, Maistre.”
Oste shivered, feeling a chill; it’d not have come from any draft the bathhouse might have generously donated.
The interior was hotter and more humid than the outside summer.
He professed his displeasure with a determined frown and rose from the remains of the girl.
Alida. Alida. Was that the only name they’d be able to come up with for the little stone they’d use to mark her resting place?
He pushed back up to his feet with a crooked stagger. His leg hadn’t appreciated his balled up crouch, or the amount of time he’d spent pouring over details of flesh that only ever would lead towards one conclusion: fiends walked amongst them, and they were called men.
Jehan’s hand twitched and started to reach out towards Oste when he carried out his meager wobble, but the physician had long since grown used to it, and he dismissed the lieutenant with a simple glance.
Jehan stood back at attention as though nothing had passed between them.
No weakness. No feelings. No falling apart.
“I can’t imagine very many men know where the waterways lead,” said Oste. He looked over his sleeves for new stains. “Are the militias familiar?”
The viguier spared Oste a hardened look.
It bid the physician’s shoulders pitch forward to accompany his nearly imperceptible cower.
He’d overstepped, and he knew it. His commission concerned physical bodies and the laws that kept them whole, not his accusative undercurrents directed towards the men charged to protect the populace.
Jehan might be the more active participant in investigations, and put Oste’s talents to use, besides, but the glares of greater men cared nothing for the status quo.
Jehan coughed into his fist. “My apologies, Docteur, that you were interrupted from your wedding festivities.”
Now it was the viguier’s turn to look put out.
The man’s brows furrowed, and he drew back far enough that the sun beam hitting his face struck his chest instead.
Oste looked back and forth between the two men.
This was a balancing act he wasn’t quite pleased to be thrust into, considering the dead girl at their feet.
“Were you?” the viguier asked.
Oste cleared his throat. “By a few days.”
“I didn’t know you took a wife.”
He blinked. He’d delivered reports to other viguiers and officials in the Palais more frequently, to be sure, but Oste for his part knew enough to be aware what tea this judge took, and that his own wife suffered from skin complaints, which Oste, of course, hand-delivered salves for once a week.
He was reminded, then, that the viguier and doubtless other men never extended the courtesy of familiarity, and never would.
Oste was one commissioned professional amongst several, and was certain his reputation, if exuded at all, tended to fall into two categories.
He might be the wolfcatcher’s son to them, if he was lucky.
Nothing more or less than a Lézin, which had largely been a respectable name for respectable people.
Or, he was that scandalous upstart. That undeserving annoyance who ought to have been satisfied with a smaller lot.
He was too controversial, and always would be unless someone came up with a way for him to shed his skin.
It was skin that was just a little too dark, from a mother a little too dubious, and he’d been guilty of the crime of running a confraternity that was a little too controversial instead of hiding everything that looked and behaved like a little too much in every regard.
Oste didn’t resent being a tool to men like the viguier; he loved what he did, and he saw the use in it. He did, however, resent the toolbox they stored him in.
“I did,” he replied. “Maistre Galoup’s daughter. Dorotèa?”
“Ah? I think I’ve seen her at Saint-Sauveur.”
The physician nodded. “She was a childhood friend.” He swallowed, then glanced down at the floor, or, the lack of a floor visible due to the massacre.
“If at all possible, Maistre, I should like to avoid conversations about my wife in such a place. A wicked room is ill-suited for her grace or our good fortune.”
“Of course, of course,” said the viguier. “Will you examine this girl further?”
“There’s nothing else I could do here.”
“At the morgue?”
“Enough for my final report, yes.”
“The First Consul has been pleased by the thoroughness of your reports. He praised your handwriting.”
Oste almost snorted. At the very least, the viguier was familiar with his scrawling. He supposed that sort of thing was terribly important in the Palais. “I will endeavor to keep it so neat.”
“You do that. Now, I need some air, lest I join her on the floor.”