I nodded, a bit out of breath from my exertions, and ran back to the truck to comply. Warthrop and Morgan were engaged in a whispering heated argument when I arrived, Morgan emphasizing each point with a jab of his pipe stem into the doctor’s chest.
“A full investigation! A thorough inquiry! I cannot be bound by guaranties made under duress, Warthrop!”
As I jogged back to Kearns, he was consulting his soggy diagram and pacing off the dimensions of his “ring of slaughter.” He directed me where to jam the stakes into the ground, at four-foot intervals, until a nearly perfect circle had been marked out, around forty feet in circumference, the metal rod marking the center, the circle’s western edge coming within fifteen feet of the platform. Kearns admired his handiwork for a moment, and then clapped me on the shoulder.
“Excellent work, Will Henry. The Maori tribe who invented this method could not have done better.”
The hunting party had congregated by the back of the truck, each man having armed himself with a shovel. He motioned for them to join us, and they gathered round him, grim-faced, breath high in their chests, their bodies already aching with fatigue. Kearns addressed them in a low, urgent voice, “Night falls sooner than we anticipated, gentlemen. Quickly now. Quickly-but as quietly as you can. Dig, gentlemen, dig!”
Using the stakes as their guide, working in methodical rhythm, the men dug a shallow trench. The rocky, wet soil crunched beneath their biting blades, the sound somewhat muffled by the rain that now fell from the windless sky in a steady thrum, ten thousand tiny drumbeats a second, enough to soak us to our skins and plaster our hair to our heads. Oh, why had I left my hat at home! From the truck several yards away the laboring men looked gray and ghost-like through the opaque curtain of rain.
“Pellinore,” said Kearns, “a hand with my box, please.”
“Now, then, this box,” Morgan muttered as they eased it from the back of the truck. “I would like to know precisely what you’ve got in it, Cory.”
“Patience, Constable, and you’ll know precisely what I’ve got… Easy, Pellinore; set it down easy! Will Henry, grab my bag there, will you?”
He slipped off the silk sheet and pulled off the lid. The doctor stepped back with a sigh of resignation; he had known what was in the box before Kearns had opened it, but knowing and seeing are often two very different things. Morgan stepped forward to peer at the contents, and gasped, all color draining from his cheeks. He sputtered something unintelligible.
A woman lay inside the box, robed in a sheer white dressing gown, reposed as a corpse, eyes closed, arms folded over her chest. No younger than forty, she may have been pretty once; but now her face was fleshy and pockmarked with scars, perhaps from smallpox, her nose enlarged and blushed rose red from the burst capillaries beneath the skin, the result, no doubt, of years of alcohol abuse. Other than the diaphanous gown, she wore nothing, no ring upon her hand or bracelet upon her wrist, except around her neck was a tight band the color of dull copper, a metal ring affixed to the portion beneath her wide chin.
After a few seconds of appalled silence, Morgan found his voice. “This is the bait?”
“What would you have me use, Constable?” wondered Kearns rhetorically. “A baby goat?”
“When you asked for immunity, you never mentioned murder,” Morgan said indignantly.
“I didn’t kill her.”
“Then, where did you-?”
“It’s a woman of the streets, Morgan,” snapped Kearns. He seemed put out by the constable’s outrage. “A common tramp with which the gutters of Baltimore are choked to overflowing. A piece of rum-besotted, disease-ridden filth whose death serves a purpose far nobler than any she achieved in her miserable, squandered life. If using her offends your sense of moral rectitude, perhaps you would like to volunteer to be the bait.”
Morgan appealed to Warthrop, “Pellinore, surely there has to be another way…”
The doctor shook his head. “She is past all suffering, Robert,” he pointed out. “We have no choice now: It must be done.” He watched Kearns lift her still form from the makeshift coffin, a questioning look in his eye. Her head fell back, her arms slowly slid from her chest to dangle by her sides, as Kearns carried her into the ring of slaughter.
“Will Henry!” he called softly over his shoulder. “My bag!”
All work halted when the men spied his approach. Their mouths fell open; their eyes darted from Kearns to Morgan, who made a motion with his hand: Dig! Dig! Kearns gently lowered her to the ground beside the iron stake, cradling her head tenderly in his hands. He nodded toward the rope. I set down the bag beside him and handed him the end attached to the chain. He slipped the hook into the ring about her neck.
“I fail to understand what he’s so upset about,” he said. “The Maori use virgin slaves-teenage girls, Will Henry, the savage brutes.”
He gave the chain a sharp tug. The woman’s head jerked in his lap.
“Good enough.” He eased her head onto the muddy ground. Then he stood and surveyed the field. I looked to my right, toward the platform, and saw standing there a solitary figure, a rifle cradled in his arms, staring down at us, as still as a sentry on the watch. It was Malachi.
Though the monotonous rain droned on and the gray light heralding night’s inexorable arrival seemed to linger, unchanging, still there was a sense of time speeding up, a quickening of the clock, an acceleration of the march to battle. Two large barrels were unloaded from the truck, their contents, a pungent black mixture of kerosene and crude oil, emptied into the freshly dug trench encircling the sacrificial victim. Kearns ordered everyone onto the platform to review what he called the “Maori Protocol.”
“I shall take the first shot,” he reminded the rain-soaked, mud-spattered men. “You will wait for my signal to open fire. Aim for the area just below the mouth, or the lower back; anywhere else is just a flesh wound.”
“How much time will we have?” asked one.
“Less than ten minutes, I would venture, in this weather, more than enough time to get the job done, or this phase of it, anyway, but ten minutes will seem an eternity. Remember, there are only two conditions under which we abandon this platform: when our work is done or if our barrier is breached. Who is on the trench?”
A thin-faced man named Brock raised his hand. Kearns nodded, and said, “Stay by my side and wait for the order-do nothing until I tell you! Timing is everything, gentlemen, once we’ve marked the scout… All right, then! Any questions? Any last-minute reservations? Anyone who’d like to bow out? Now is your time, for now is the time.” He raised his face to the weeping sky, closed his dark eyes, and sighed deeply, a smile playing on his sensuous lips. “The bloody hour is come.”
We crowded to the edge of the platform, squinting through the gathering gloom, as Kearns knelt beside the body in the center of the circle and dug into the bag I had left there. He bent low over her, his back to us, blocking our view.
“What in the name of all that’s holy is he doing now?” wondered Morgan.
“I’m not sure,” murmured Warthrop in reply. “But I doubt anything that’s holy.”
To our astonishment the body jerked in a violent spasm, the legs kicked, the hands gathered mud and bits of grass into their fists. Kearns sat back to observe this phenomenon, and I heard the doctor breathe beside me, “Oh, no.” Kearns held his bowie knife casually in his right hand while he pressed the fingertips of his left against the woman’s neck.