Why Mermaids Sing by C. S. Harris

page from a ship’s log stuffed in his mouth.”
    Gibson nodded. “I spoke to Martin, the surgeon who did the postmortem on young Carmichael.” His lip quivered in disdain. “The man’s a bloody idiot. I asked him if the body showed signs of having been bound and gagged before death, and he said he’d never thought to notice. But you were right: Carmichael’s throat was slit and the body drained of all blood. The flesh was hacked from his arms.”
    “Not the legs?”
    “No. Just the arms.”
    Sebastian walked around the slab. He had to force himself to look, really look, at the mangled boy. “Barclay Carmichael’s body was found at dawn in St. James’s Park,” he said, “hanging upside down from a mulberry tree. Dominic Stanton was found in Old Palace Yard, again at dawn. Both very public places. Both young men were last seen the night before their deaths by friends whom they then left. Sometime between when they were last seen and when their bodies were discovered at dawn, both young men were set upon by at least one assailant, perhaps more. They were taken God only knows where, stripped of their shirts, their throats slit, and the blood drained from their bodies. Then the killer—or killers—hacked the flesh from Carmichael’s arms and from Stanton’s legs and dumped the bodies where they’d be quickly found the next morning.” He glanced up to find Gibson watching him. “Does that sound right?”
    “I’d say so, yes.”
    Sebastian blew out a long, slow breath. “Was there nothing to indicate where Stanton might have been killed?”
    “Just these.” Gibson walked over to pluck what looked like pieces of straw from the table and hold them out. “I found one in his hair, the others caught in his shirt and coat.”
    Sebastian took the fragile stems between his fingers and sniffed. “It’s hay.”
    “I asked Martin if Barclay Carmichael had hay in his hair and clothes. He said yes—although he couldn’t imagine why it might be significant.” Reaching for the sheet, Gibson shook it out over the body, his motions unexpectedly gentle as he smoothed the covering over the boy’s mutilated feet. He stood for a moment, his gaze on the silent, shrouded form before him. When he spoke, his voice was hushed. “What kind of person would do something like this? Butcher a human body like a slab of meat?”
    “You do it.”
    Gibson looked up, his lips pressed together so tightly that two white lines bracketed his mouth. “I dissect cadavers for knowledge, to help save lives, and I respect and honor every body that comes to me. Whoever killed those two young men was acting out some twisted hatred, not pursuing any scientific inquiry. He desecrated their bodies in a way that violates every standard of decency, every tenet of civilization as we know it.”
    “Yet we’ve both seen men do such things—and worse. Well-bred young men of birth and fortune.”
    There was a silence as both men’s thoughts drifted back to another time and another place, and a fellow officer who had once delighted in the pain and dismemberment of his enemies.
    “That was war,” said Gibson. “This isn’t war. And besides, he’s not here.”
    “No, this isn’t war. But he is here in London.”
    “Quail?” said Gibson.
    Sebastian nodded. “Captain Peter himself.”
    Captain Peter Quail was not the kind of fellow officer one easily forgot. A tall, lanky barrister’s son from Devon with corn-flower blue eyes, a shank of straight blond hair, and a ready laugh that came loud and often, he had served with Gibson and Sebastian in Portugal. He was every regiment’s dream with a cricket bat and poetry in motion on horseback. And he had taken a fiendishly sadistic delight in butchering informers—or men he suspected of being informers. He used to dump his victims’ mutilated bodies on their families’ doorsteps. As time passed, he developed what he considered his calling card—various parts of his victims’ anatomy sliced off