The envelope contained telegrams from three cities. Contacts in law enforcement, the identities of whom Jackaby did not feel compelled to reveal, had responded quickly from Brahannasburg, Gadston, and Glanville. The telegraph office had collected and sent the posts all together, per the detective’s request. Two or three more would likely arrive soon, he told me, but from just one he could extrapolate the content of the rest. They all bore the same message in various shorthand phrases, and the message was simple: murder.
I looked over the pages while we climbed down the spiral staircase back to Jackaby’s office. CONFIRM INCIDENTS IN BRAHANNASBURG -STOP- read the top sheet. DETAILS FIT DESCRIPTION -STOP-NOVEMBER ELEVENTH BUTCHER COD NECK WOUND -STOP-DECEMBER FIFTH POSTMAN COD CHEST WOUND -STOP-DECEMBER TWENTY-SEVENTH TRANSIENT COD CHEST WOUND -STOP-
“Cod?” I asked as we descended.
“Cause of death,” he said simply.
ALL INCIDENTS UNSOLVED -STOP-NO RELATED CASES ON RECORD -STOP-ASSISTANCE WELCOME -STOP- There the message ended. A quick glance at other pages revealed similar notes with varying dates and occupations of victims from Brahannasburg and Gadston.
“My God,” I said, reading over the pages a second time. “But there are so many!”
“Yes. Mr. Bragg seems to have been following a trail of serial murders extending back for several months, probably longer. The marks on his map, N. Wd. and C. Wd., denote neck wounds and chest wounds. It seems our killer favored the chest. All of them appear just beyond the jurisdiction of New Fiddleham, which shows that the killer made an effort to keep the authorities in the dark. Bragg’s attempts to connect and shed light on these deaths only brought him to his own, it would seem.”
Back in Jackaby’s office, the detective unfolded the dead reporter’s hand-drawn chart and placed it on top of a massive, finely detailed map already shrouding most of his desk. He rummaged in a drawer and produced a small box of pins with fat, shiny heads. He emptied the box onto the surface and compared the two maps.
In the flat section of his desk, we could see that the two maps corresponded well. Bragg had been diligent in his copying. Jackaby began marking each of the original Xs with a pin on the larger map, jamming the points deep into the wood and effectively tacking the chart in place for the time being. From across the desk I scooped up a few pins and helped him finish the job.
“That’s the lot,” I said.
“Not quite,” said Jackaby.
I scanned the original map again and counted out the marks. Jackaby swept the extra pins back into the box while I checked. We had stabbed all twelve points. The detective handed a single pin to me, with a somber, purposeful look. I took his meaning and, leaning in to find the right section of the city, plugged Arthur Bragg’s own pin into the map. Thirteen shiny markers stood like polished gravestones.
“Bragg was not marked on his own map for obvious reasons. What else do you notice that sets his death apart from the other murders?” he asked.
I looked at the map. Bragg’s pin looked very alone in the center of the chart. The others stood in little groups of twos and threes, circling his like school-yard bullies.
“He’s the only one in New Fiddleham,” I ventured.
“Very good. What do you make of that?”
A frightening thought occurred to me. “It means . . . that the murderer kills a few victims in each city, then moves on to the next. Now he’s here in New Fiddleham . . . and he’s only just begun!” I had been to the theater, and knew very well that a revelation like that one merited a dramatic chord from the pipe organ and a collective gasp from the audience, but in the real world, the words were left to stand on their own.
“Clever,” responded Jackaby, “but also wrong.” He pulled a ball of twine from the top drawer and glanced up at the board, where our list of dates still sat in neat, chalky rows.
“October twenty-third,” he read, and tied the end of the string to the corresponding pin in Gadston. “And next was here, on the thirtieth.” He drew the twine to the opposite side of the map, looping it around a pin in Crowley. “Then November fifth, down here.” The line cut across the map again, down to Glanville, then up to Brahannasburg. He brought the string back and forth. The murders were never in the same town twice in a row, rarely even in an adjacent town, but always bouncing around to alternating corners of the map. The end result resembled a sloppy starburst, with lines zigzagging across New Fiddleham. Finally, Jackaby snipped the end and tied it to the lonely pin in the middle of the mess.
“He planned his marks to delay detection for as long as possible,” Jackaby said. “Weeks, even months would pass before he returned to the same location, allowing time for attention to die down. Because he jumped jurisdictions, we might have seen even further months of this before police forces finally began to work out that they were even tracking the same culprit. Thanks to Bragg’s stumbling onto the plot, the killer was forced to break his own rule in a rather significant way.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“He killed where he lived. By the pattern of deaths before now, he had avoided New Fiddleham, but he clearly gravitated around it. Police tend to look with suspicion at a man in the center of a pile of dead bodies, and so our killer carefully perpetrated his crimes just beyond their vision. His home is here, though. I’m quite certain of that.”
“What—here in town?” I asked, my eyes darting inadvertently to the window and the dimming light of the early evening. The moon was low in the sky but already clearly visible in the waning daylight, an almost perfect orb of white framed by the sinister, dark fingers of barren branches. “Wouldn’t it be easier for a monster to hide out in the forest? Lurk about in the shadows and come out at night, or something?”
“It’s possible, certainly—but we have reason to suspect we are looking for a man, and a man of property,” Jackaby said. “Hatun claims to have gotten a good look at the murderer. The creature she described may or may not actually exist, but I believe she was there as our villain attempted to flee out the window. He left his traces on the windowsill, but not on the balconies below, which corresponds with her account. Now, if you were a cold-blooded killer, capable of tearing a hole through a grown man’s chest, would you be worried about facing a hobbling, gray-haired old lady?”
“I suppose not.”
“Ah, but if you could not see who or what awaited you? Then, like our cautious fiend, would you not find an alternative escape, just to be safe? If the culprit looked down upon the alleyway and saw nothing, as Hatun says, then that shawl of hers may have the power to alter perception, after all. If the villain could not see Hatun, then he has a home, and if he has a home, we can be confident it is within New Fiddleham, and if he dwells within New Fiddleham, then not a soul in the city is safe.” Jackaby finished at a rush, and stopped, at last, to breathe.