A Matter of Breeding Read Online Free PDF

awful thing was that their sadness did not bind them more tightly, but instead seemed to drive them apart, each to experience grief individually.

Five
    ‘Yes,’ Werthen agreed. ‘It is apparent that the clothes absorbed a great deal of the blood.’
    The bloodstained remnants of clothing from victims one and two – seventeen-year-old Maria Feininger and eighteen-year-old Annaliese Reiter – lay in front of them in the makeshift crime laboratory of the Hitzendorf Gendarmerie.
    Makeshift because there were still those in the police who rejected scientific analysis of crime scene evidence, who still dealt with crime from the point of view of the criminal solely and not also from that of the victim or the physical evidence left at the scene of a crime. Werthen knew there were others, like Gross, making headway in turning criminalistics into a mainstay of police investigation, but until the time came that it gained general acceptance, it was relegated to such broom closets as the one they were currently in.
    At least Gross had influenced his former colleagues sufficiently to establish rules of dealing with evidence: these garments had been kept in a paper bag and were clearly marked.
    ‘We’ll know better after I send these to Vienna for analysis,’ Gross said. ‘Professor Gruber at the university in Vienna can analyze the quantity of dried blood and give us a good idea of the percentage of the total. Women of the size of the three victims will have a little over four liters of blood in the body. Fräulein Klein, the third victim, would, of course, have had more blood because of the baby she was carrying.’
    Werthen shuddered at the thought of the butchery of this third victim; he was grateful he had not been present to view the corpse. Pictures of the other two young women lay on the small desk in front of him, lit poorly by a kerosene lamp, the sole source of light in this windowless cubbyhole.
    What had been done to these victims was gruesome enough: multiple stab wounds and mutilations. Maria Feininger’s left breast had been cut off, while Annaliese Reiter’s right one had been crudely hacked off. Both victims had some sort of further spherical or circular wounds at the sternum. The Feininger girl’s wound had the right half of a sphere burned black while the entire circle was burned black into the skin of the Reiter girl.
    Werthen felt his gorge rising and shoved the photographs over to Gross.
    ‘All this just to show you up?’ Werthen said. ‘Mutilations and signs left simply to confound Doktor Hanns Gross?’
    Gross stared at the photos for a long moment. ‘Let us hope not, Werthen. Let us hope that someone is simply taking advantage of these heinous crimes to revenge a perceived wrong.’
    ‘Or killing women to do so. Gross, you must have made scores of enemies in the criminal class in your decades as an investigating magistrate.’
    ‘I was able to send a goodly number of unsavory characters to prison, if that is what you mean.’
    ‘Many of whom may have served their sentences and now be free men who hold a grudge.’
    Gross shook his head. ‘I do not believe any criminal with whom I had dealings would be capable of such hideous crimes as these.’ He thumped the photographs with his thick forefinger. ‘No one so beastly, so savage. Not on his own, at any rate.’
    ‘Then look to your former colleagues. Or competitors. Have you upstaged some fellow criminalist, poked at tender egos? You do have a brash way about you, Gross.’
    ‘Puncturing egos is one thing, Werthen. The proper revenge for that might well be a letter to the editor, not the disembowelment of innocent young women.’
    ‘Just thinking out loud, Gross.’
    ‘A rather sloppy habit.’
    ‘See what I mean?’
    ‘Should I put you at the top of the suspect list then, Werthen?’
    The spires of the old castle rose dramatically out of the surrounding pine forests like a stage setting at the Court Opera.
    ‘It is just as I imagined