Capturing the Devil (Stalking Jack the Ripper #4)(16)

Movement caught my attention a second before Thomas knelt in front of me, his expression uncharacteristically kind. For a fleeting moment, I wondered how I looked through his eyes. Did I seem as wild as I felt? My heart thumped as quickly as a rabbit’s, but my instincts weren’t to flee; I wished to draw blood.

Thomas touched my brow, then traced his finger across my hairline, soothing a knot I hadn’t realized was forming. I relaxed at his touch. Marginally.

“You’ve got a certain aura of murder that’s—quite honestly—a strange mixture of alluring and troubling. Even for me. What is it?” he asked. I turned the journal around, pointing out the Frankenstein passage. He read it, then searched my face. “I remember your brother was intrigued with Galvani’s

experiments with electricity and dead frogs, and Shelley. But that isn’t what’s bothering you.”

“In one article the wounds described on Martha’s body were focused around her throat and lower abdomen.”

Thomas’s gaze moved back over the Frankenstein passage, his own brow creasing at my seemingly abrupt change in subject. “Emma’s wounds were thought to be too different from the five murders that took place in Whitechapel,” I said, growing more confident as I spoke. “Her attacker neither went for her throat nor stabbed her.”

Thomas swallowed hard, no doubt remembering with vivid detail the atrocities that had been done to her. “No, she’d been brutalized in other horrific ways.”

“Indeed.” Someone had ruptured her peritoneum by inserting a foreign object into her body. We’d never been sure if it was machinery or something else that had done the damage. Gears were found at the scene, something we later realized were part of my brother’s plan to pass electricity into dead tissues.

“Nathaniel speaks of Jekyll and Hyde in his letter,” I continued, “but this passage points back to his preoccupation with Dr. Frankenstein and his monster.”

“I’m afraid I’m not quite following, Wadsworth. Do you believe your brother was using gothic novels as his source material for his killings?”

“Not entirely. I believe Nathaniel might be responsible for Miss Emma Elizabeth Smith’s death. He was obsessed with fusing machine and human together. Her attack fits with that. It also fits seamlessly with Galvani’s experimentations. Dr. Galvani demonstrated that a dint of electricity could make a frog’s muscles twitch postmortem. Nathaniel tried to improve upon his theory and take it even further by bringing humans back to life using a larger electrical charge.”

“I thought we established Miss Smith as a likely Ripper victim,” Thomas said carefully.

“We did. But it doesn’t fit. Even if his method of killing shifted as his deadly talents grew, her murder was not the ultimate goal. Not like the others. She’d been brutalized, but I don’t believe he wished to slay her. He wanted her to live.

That was his entire point. Nathaniel wasn’t interested in killing things. He longed for a way to bring them back.”

Thomas was quiet and perfectly still.

“Nathaniel killed Emma, but he was never Jack the Ripper, Thomas. He was the man who made Jack the Ripper. Or perhaps befriended him.”

Thomas glanced at the dates I’d hastily scrawled. A battle of emotion crossed his features. “If Nathaniel attacked Emma in April, perhaps her death disturbed him. It would seem that there may have been a part of him that couldn’t cross that line again. At least not himself.” He looked me over carefully. “Did he exhibit any early behaviors that would hint to savior ideologies?”

At first I went to shake my head, but a memory surfaced. “When we were children, he used to become physically ill if he couldn’t save a stray cat or dog.

The thought of something dying was unbearable to him. He’d lie in bed for days, crying or staring at the ceiling. It was terrible and there wasn’t anything I could do to bring him out of that dark place.” I inhaled deeply, trying not to get lost in thoughts of the past. “If Miss Martha Tabram is the first true Ripper victim, that means Nathaniel had nearly four months to create his own monster. He says in his own words”—I jabbed the letter—“that he worked with another. I imagine my brother urged these killings on and profited scientifically from the organs acquired, but another person actually committed the rest of the murders.”

“That does not make your brother innocent,” Thomas said gently.

I lowered my head. If my theory was correct, Nathaniel had forged a person into a blade, making him far from innocent. And yet confronting his guilt—yet again—caused a visceral ache I didn’t anticipate. We humans could not help loving our monsters. “I know.”

Thomas rolled his head from side to side. “There’s still a possibility Nathaniel only followed the murder of Miss Smith from the papers. Perhaps the true murderer sought him out, or vice versa. At present, we’re speculating. You know what your uncle says about that.”

Speculation was pointless. Facts were what we needed. I looked at the stacks of journals on Thomas’s bed. My brother had written volumes of notes. I feared it would take years to unravel each new thread he’d knotted away. Thomas stood behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders, slowly working the tension from them.

“It’s only a puzzle in need of solving, Wadsworth. We’ll figure it out together.”