Samantha still wasn’t sure how The Peregrine had known about the underground tunnels, but at least she knew how he’d accessed the main building: he’d come in through the basement.
She was still marveling over the panache needed to break into their headquarters when Morgan and Eun entered the room. Eun looked pale, his shirtless body covered by bandages.
Samantha moved to fuss over his wounds but Eun waved her away and sat down heavily in a chair. "There’s another masked man in town," he said. "Calls himself The Dark Gentleman."
Samantha straightened up. "That’s odd. Sovereign’s had its share of vigilantes in recent years, but most of them don’t bother hiding their identities."
"Now we have two," Eun muttered, obviously still smarting from his wounded pride.
Morgan allowed the two younger members of the team to continue the discussion while he stepped into an adjacent room. He picked through some of the papers they’d accumulated on the various suspects. Something was bothering him, but he wasn’t sure what… Obviously Melvin had thought about sharing something with them and then changed his mind. Was there some connection between Smithson and Hansome that they hadn’t picked up on? And if so, how did it all play into the horrific murders of those girls?
He tapped a photo of Hansome and whispered, "I hope Lazarus can find you, shyster. I’m betting you have the answers we need."
The duo of Lazarus Gray and The Peregrine had traced the radioactive isotopes in Hansome’s bloodstream, following the trail to a small rental property on the outskirts of town. A sign in the front yard indicated that the A-frame house was for rent by the owner and Lazarus noted that the painted phone number on the sign had peeled away, leaving only the first couple of digits.
"This is a front," The Peregrine said, standing outside the front door. There were no streetlights around and the interior of the house was dark, so both men held sterling silver penlights.
"What do you mean?"
"Nobody’s really trying to rent this property. If they were, they would have repaired that sign. And the house itself is filthy… smells like something’s died here. Recently."
Lazarus knew what his friend was implying and he moved forward, taking up position to the right of the door. The Peregrine took the left and they nodded at each other before Lazarus took a few steps back and lowered his shoulder. He crashed against the door, using all his impressive strength to shatter the barrier.
The interior was cloaked in an almost stygian darkness and the odor of death was far thicker than before. The Peregrine followed Lazarus into the house, using his penlight to locate a small lamp. He turned it on, bathing the living room in a dull yellow glow. What they saw was stomach churning and, even for men as used to the unusual as these two were, shocking.
There were human, dog, and cat skeletons nailed to the blood-red wallpaper, many of them arranged in obscene positions. In between the bones, the wallpaper had been covered with odd drawings of horned demons, acts of bestiality, and crying faces.
The skeleton of a human male, its bones held together by twine, dangled from the center of the ceiling. Large wings forged of leather and wood had been attached to the skeleton’s back and goat horns had been glued to the top of the skull.
A long table was set against the back wall. It was waist-high and carved from some form of shiny blood-colored wood. Its bowed legs were carved to resemble great serpents, their fanged mouths reached upward. At each of the four corners was a black candle resting in bronze holder. The holders were shaped like skulls, the lower the jaw of each protruding out to hold the candle in place. A stone basin lay in the center of the table and as Lazarus approached it, he recognized the presence of human bones and dried blood.
The scene was disturbingly familiar to Lazarus. In his old life, he’d witnessed things like this as a member of The Illuminati. It had been horrors like this that had led him to turn against his friends, eventually bringing about his death and resurrection in Sovereign City.
The Peregrine allowed Lazarus to investigate the strange table and its horrible contents. He opened the other doors, finding a bedroom that looked like it had never been touched; a kitchen that was so filthy that it nearly caused him to retch; and a bathroom that contained a very nasty surprise.
"Lazarus," The Peregrine said, placing the back of a gloved hand over his nose and mouth. "I found Hansome."
Lazarus appeared almost instantly, looking past the masked man at the lumps of flesh that lay in the tub. The soapy water was filled with bleach, cleaning away much-needed evidence. Hansome’s body had been neatly cut up into six pieces: his head, his torso, his arms, and his legs. Several large buckets filled with the man’s blood lay outside the tub and plastic tubing rested on the counter top next to the sink.
"There goes any doubts about Hansome’s kidnapper being related to the girls’ killer," The Peregrine murmured. "Guess he’s branching out to the other gender."
Lazarus knelt beside the tub, holding a handkerchief over his nose. His eyes watered from the strong bleach fumes that hung in the air, but he wanted to check on a suspicion he had. He grabbed hold of Hansome’s head and lifted it from the bath, carrying it out of the room and setting it gently atop the bloodstained table in the living room. While The Peregrine watched in mounting curiosity, Lazarus pulled up a chair and sat facing the dead man’s terror-stricken face. After pulling out a magnifying glass, he leaned so close to the decapitated head that their noses were almost touching.
"What are you doing?" The Peregrine asked, no longer able to contain himself.
"Are you familiar with the work of Willy Kühne, professor of physiology at Heidelberg?"
The Peregrine searched his memory and slowly nodded, beginning to see where his companion was going with this. "He studied retinal chemistry, didn’t he?"
"Yes. He theorized that the retina behaves not only like a photographic plate but like an entire photographic workshop, in which the artist continually renews the plate by laying on new light-sensitive material, while simultaneously erasing the old image. By using the pigment epithelium, which bleaches in the light, he set out to prove that it might be possible to take a picture with the living eye. He called the process optography and its resulting products optograms."
The Peregrine found himself getting wrapped up in the science behind the matter. "And the rabbit’s eyes held an image of the bars," he whispered to himself.
Kühne had created a famous optogram by using an albino rabbit, whose head had been fastened so that it faced a barred window. From this position the rabbit could only see out onto a cloudy sky. The rabbit’s head had been alternately covered with a cloth, to allow its eyes to acclimate to the dark, and then exposed to bright light. After this, the rabbit was decapitated, with its eye removed and cut open along the equator. The rear half of the eyeball, containing the retina, was laid in a solution of alum to set. The next day, Kühne had seen printed upon the retina a picture of the window with the clear pattern of its bars. This had been repeated in other experiments, leading Kühne to state that the final image viewed before death would be fixed forever, like a photo. If death were to occur at a moment when the pupils of the eyes were hugely dilated — because of fear, anger, surprise, or some other strong emotion — the retinal optograms of the deceased would be even more detailed.
"Do you see anything," The Peregrine asked.
Lazarus nodded, his eyes staring into those of the dead man. Reflected there, as clear as day, was the face of the devil.
Theodore Groseclose couldn’t sleep. He was sitting in his study, a glass of warm milk in his hand, unable to stop thinking about the events of the past few days. He’d liked Claudia. She was smart and pretty, the sort of combination he always enjoyed having around the office. It was hard for him to visualize her body having been violated in the ways he’d heard. What sort of monster could do that? Who could snuff out a beautiful girl’s light like that?