“Son-of-a Bristol whore,” said Sharpe. “Oh, pardon, Dr. Coran, but what the deuce is it?”
Schuller couldn't hide his confusion, nor the shakiness where he stood on the balls of his feet across from Jessica, staring at the blackened flesh. He finally asked, “Is it some sort of emblem?”
“Lettering…”
“What's that?”
“It appears to be lettering of some sort, but I can't make it out. Was there anything of the sort on the other two bodies?”
“No, some swelling of the tongue, but no… no branded letters on the underside of the tongues, no,” replied Schuller. “But then…”
“But,” Jessica finished for him, “there'd been no reason to look below the tongue, right?”
“Exactly, and what with the understaffing here and the overworked help…”
Sharpe, more interested in the message than the verbal jousting between doctors, firmly asked, “Can you make out what it says?”
“Small lettering. Guy had to use jeweler's tools or tattoo parlor tools or a hot brand to make this happen,” Jessica replied, again thinking there may well be some connections unforeseen between Tattoo Man and the crucified dead here in London.
Sharpe, craning to see, demanded, “You can read it with the glass, can't you, Dr. Coran?”
“It's partially obliterated from where the integrity of the skin has collapsed in on itself, but the first letter appears to be M.”
“Anything else?”
“M-i-h-i,” she slowly read, each letter qualified by her tentative tone, like someone reading a chart in an optometrist's office. “I think, but don't hold me to it. And the message goes on.”
“Saying what?” Sharpe bent over her shoulder now, trying desperately to have a look, pushing against her, close enough that she could smell his cologne. “Can't say without closer examination.”
“What will that require?”
“What I really must do is cut out the tongue, strip the skin, and place it beneath electron microscope magnifica-”
“Ironic… Cut out his tongue? The man made a living with that tongue,” said Dr. Schuller, sounding disturbed.
“There's more to the message, Doctor,” she countered.
“I realize that, but suppose it's a mere affectation, say as you suggest, like a tattoo or tongue piercing, and all your time in cutting and searching for linguistic evidence is ail a blind corridor?”
“Sharpe, it's your investigation,” she said. 'Tell us what you want.”
“You're certain there's more to the message?”
“Absolutely, but the only way to get at it is to remove the tongue, spray it with a fixative and fillet it flat, and skin the portion with the message. It's the only way we can tell the age of the brand and whether or not it came about when he was still alive or after death.”
“What the bloody hell does Mihi mean?” Sharpe wondered aloud.
No one in the room knew the answer.
“Sounds kinda Hawaiian to me,” Jessica said. “Have you a linguistics expert on call?”
“We do. Father Luc Sante. He's a Catholic priest as well.”
“Get him in here, then. I think Mr. Burton has made one thing clear. He wants to tell us something after all, and here I'd judged him wrong, thinking him stonily silent.”
“I caution you not to rush headlong into this decision, Richard,” Schuller said, putting a hand on Sharpe's shoulder and stepping him aside to huddle and whisper like boys playing football.
Schuller's assistant-the marble black eyes appearing a bit droopy and unfocused from a definite lack of sleep or no lack of drugs-nervously swallowed and tried to find anywhere to look but into Jessica's eyes. His demeanor said, “Yes, we royally screwed up here,” but he kept the words to himself. Sharpe suddenly walked away from Schuller, his teeth set, his jaw squared. Then he announced in clear defiance of Schuller, “Fillet the damned tongue.”
This made the other men laugh nervously. Jessica snatched out her scalpel case. Using the stainless-steel scalpel her father had given her when she graduated from medical school, she tugged at the tongue with forceps in one hand and worked to slice it off with the other. As usual, removing a tongue proved no easy task, as the last fibrous threads stubbornly held on. Finally, with two quick flicks of her wrist, Burton's tongue lay in her hand like a baby trout.
“Short of peeling the skin, I'll try filleting the tongue and sectioning it as thinly as possible to fit below the eyepiece of the largest microscope you have, Dr. Schuller. I don't think we'll need to bombard it with electrons, so we won't need the electron microscope. That would only destroy the physical evidence anyway.”
“Evidence of what?” Schuller remained skeptical.
Jessica went about the business of sectioning. She examined the other words of the small, cryptic message below the lens of a huge microscope that Schuller's assistant had pointed out to her. She read aloud what she saw before her. “P-no, it's a b-followed by e-a-t something mater.” She then read aloud the entire message, “Mihi be eat a mater.”
“Sounds like Greek,” said the Egyptian assistant.
“More likely Latin,” replied Sharpe. “Something about beautiful or blessed mother, mater being mother, and if you put the b and the eat and an a together, it's beata, beautiful or quite possibly blessed. Blessed mother, which pertains, of course, to Mary, Mother of Christ,” explained Sharpe, qualifying with, “But don't quote me. Father Luc Sante… he would know, most certainly. We've used him in cases before, often cases involving psychotics. He's a psychotherapist as well.”
Stuart Copperwaite appeared from nowhere at Jessica's shoulder, asking, “What's this?”
Jessica was startled into dropping the portion of slippery tongue she'd balanced beneath the microscope lens, only to further obliterate the message. “Sonofabitch,” she muttered under her breath. “Damnit,” she more clearly cursed and stared at Stuart Copperwaite whose shoulders lifted like those of a puppet on a string.
“I am sorry,” he pleaded, trying to help her lift the slippery fish from the floor, but managing only to cause more havoc.
“Will you just back off?” she shouted.
Copperwaite gasped and backed away as she had asked.
The message had been ripped and torn and parts of it were down the drain on the floor where it had splattered.
“We may have to exhume the other bodies to have a clearer look at this,” she pointedly said to Sharpe. Then Jessica turned to Dr. Raehael and said, 'Take a few photos of what remains of the wording, Doctor.”
The little Egyptian nodded, his mouth agape, displaying good teeth.
“O'Donahue's tongue can't be intact after all this time. Maybe Coibby, but I doubt it,” Schuller thought openly and loudly. “Soft tissue decay.”
“Coibby then!” Jessica firmly replied. “We've got to know what we're chasing after in the dark, and this, gentlemen, is the first bit of light we've had. It may prove a false light, but for now, it behooves us to treat it as a divine light, a gift.”
“Right you are, Doctor,” agreed Sharpe. “If the others have this same mark on their tongues, then it originated, most likely, with the killer. I shall see to the exhumation order personally.”
Shouldn 't have released the damned bodies to begin with, Jessica thought. The thought colored her features, but she withstood the desire to throw it into Schuller's now less than smug face. “As for me, I'd like to find that hotel room you promised, Inspector Sharpe. Get some rest, maybe a bite.”
“Absolutely. I'll see a car is waiting for you. Doctor.”
With that, Jessica tore from the postmortem room, ripping her surgical mask and gown away, tossing them into a large, green hamper. Her mind played over the possible single clue left them by the killer. The words Mihi beata mater reverberated in a chant, a tight, enticing, rhythmic chant.
SEVEN