Capturing the Devil (Stalking Jack the Ripper #4)(18)
“Inspector?” Uncle asked, stepping into his way. “Will we have access to the body?”
Byrnes paused, considering. “She’ll be in the morgue at Bellevue until they take her to Blackwell’s Island along with the other unclaimed bodies. If I were you, I’d go tonight. Sometimes corpses don’t make it ’til morning. Especially not on Misery Lane.”
The morgue on 26th Street—appropriately referred to as Misery Lane—ought to have been called a crypt. One from the likes of Poe’s macabre imagination or the beginnings of a sinister vampire tale. It was dark and dank and smelled of rot and human waste. If I allowed my mind to wander, I might convince myself I could hear the faint beating of a buried heart.
Located one story below the foreboding hospital above, bodies lay stacked in heaps on wooden tables. I’d never seen such disregard for the dead before and swallowed my horror down. Corpses were shoved so closely together, I wondered how they’d moved new bodies onto adjacent tables without knocking the others over in the process.
Uncle paused at the threshold, his gaze landing on each body in various states of decay. He removed a handkerchief from his inner pocket, eyes watering. One
corpse nearby had already begun to bloat, and the fingers and toes were the blackish blue of death.
A man in a butcher’s apron glanced at us, then went about his business of inspecting the bodies. Candles burned ominously close to the corpses. Two young men dressed in black stood in the shadows, watching the coroner with bored interest. He snapped at them, motioning to a cadaver that seemed quite fresh. “This ought to do. Take it and be off with yourselves now.”
Their boredom transformed into a gleam of hunger I knew well as they stepped forward and claimed the proffered dead. They hoisted the elderly male corpse onto a wheeled stretcher, hastily tossing a sheet over it as they pushed it out of the room. The sound of wheels turning rumbled down a corridor. At my furrowed brow, Thomas leaned in to whisper, “Medical students.”
“Interns.” The old man turned back to us, eyeing my uncle with thinly veiled annoyance as he pulled a pocket watch out. It was nearly midnight. “You the professor from London?”
“Dr. Jonathan Wadsworth.” Uncle glanced around the room again, the flickering light reflecting in his spectacles like flames. I fought a shiver. He looked like a vengeful demon. “I’m told the body of Miss Carrie Brown is here.
Would you mind showing it to us?”
“The whore?” The coroner’s sour expression said he most certainly minded the interruption, especially for someone as lowly as a prostitute. I clenched my hands. “If you must.” He jerked a thumb down one long, narrow aisle of cadavers. “This way.”
Thomas, ever the gentleman, swung his arm toward the two men retreating down the row of the dead. “After you, my love.”
I gave him a tight smile and followed Uncle, my cane clicking in alternating soft and hard thumps as I walked over mounds of sawdust on the tile floors. I wasn’t frightened of the corpses—those I found strangely comforting. The atmosphere and disregard for their scientific study made my skin crawl. Well, that and the maggots wiggling around the bits of bloodied sawdust, which hadn’t been swept away in quite some time.
At the end of a row of bodies, close to where a lone bulb buzzed above us, we stood over the remains of Miss Carrie Brown. Much to my dismay, she’d been washed. Swathes of pale flesh marbled with deep blue veins were marred only by the stab wounds. Uncle closed his eyes for a moment, likely trying to collect his anger. “She’s been cleaned.”
“Course she has. Won’t do us any favors to keep her dirty and stinking while
she’s here.”
A blatant lie. None of the other bodies had been cleaned. He’d probably tried tidying her up to sell to the doctor in the operating amphitheater above. A potential Jack the Ripper victim would be quite a draw. Thomas reached for my arm as I took an unconscious step forward. I wouldn’t resort to violence, but part of me wished to strangle this man. Miss Carrie Brown had already been forced to sell herself in life; these men had no right to auction her flesh in death.
“Did you photograph the body before wiping away evidence?” I asked.
“You a nurse?” The coroner squinted at me. “Doctor’s sending all sorts down to collect his specimens now.”
My nostrils flared. Thomas carefully stepped beside me. He was worried for the old man’s safety, not mine. “Miss Wadsworth is exceptional with postmortem studies. Her inquiry is a valid point, sir. Blood evidence is often overlooked, but we’ve found instances where studying it proves most beneficial to tracing a murderer’s killing blows.”
“Did that fancy London schooling help Scotland Yard find Jack the Ripper?”
He shook his head. “You’ve got thirty minutes before the meat cart comes for her. Unless you’ll be following her to the island of unclaimed bodies, I suggest focusing on what you came to do.”
Uncle held a hand up, both a command and a request for my silence. Fuming at the ignorance of that rude man, I silently counted to ten. Fantasizing about all the ways I could flay him open until I found peace once more. Uncle pulled an apron from his medical satchel and handed it to me, his focus straying to my leg.
“If this is too much—”
“I’m fine, sir.” I set my cane against the cadaver table and tied the apron about my person. “Shall I make the first incision or assist while you do it?”