What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

was just finishing what looked like a quick breakfast of oatmeal and ale.
    Sebastian rasped one hand across his unshaven cheek. “I didn’t.”
    Gibson grinned. “Neither did I.” He swung his wooden leg awkwardly over the bench and stood up. “Come see. I’ve a few things that might interest you.”
    Following his friend along the weedy path, Sebastian took a last, deep breath of cold air and ducked his head to enter the small stone outbuilding that served Gibson as a dissection room. There was a dampness to the room that he didn’t remember from before, the dankness accentuating the pungent stench of death and decay.
    “I spent a good hour simply washing the mud off her,” said Gibson, limping to the body that lay white and cold on the altarlike slab. Sebastian was glad to see the surgeon hadn’t actually started cutting yet. “The slices on her neck were made by a two-edged knife, probably a sword stick, such as a gentleman might carry hidden in his cane or walking stick.”
    Sebastian nodded. He had such a walking stick himself. As did Hendon.
    “It was done like this—” Gibson demonstrated by slashing his arm through the air, first one direction, then the other. “Your killer cut back and forth, over and over again.” He let his arm fall. “There must have been a fair amount of blood splattered around that chapel.”
    “So I hear.” Sebastian studied the savagely hacked flesh of Rachel York’s neck, and remembered what his father had said, about being so covered in blood he’d had to throw away his greatcoat. Whoever had done this must have walked away from that church drenched in blood. As Leo Pierrepont had said, the attack had half severed the head from the neck. And Sebastian was left thinking, How had the Frenchman known that?
    “Because of the way it was done,” Gibson was saying, “there are slashes running from both the left and the right. But if you look closely, you’ll see that the cuts made from left to right are longer and deeper, which tells us that the man you’re looking for is right-handed.”
    “And fairly strong?”
    Gibson shrugged. “She was a small woman. Any reasonably-sized man could have overpowered her, although she did fight him. She wanted desperately to live, this woman.” With remarkable gentleness, he picked up one of the hands lying so pale and still against the granite slab. “Look at how the nails are broken and torn here—and there,” he said, pointing. “Not only that, but I found traces of skin embedded beneath two of the remaining nails on her right hand.”
    Sebastian glanced up in surprise. “You mean, she scratched him?”
    “I’d say so, yes. But I suspect it was before he pulled the knife on her. There are no cuts on her hands.”
    Sebastian ran his thoughts back over the men he had spoken to; none had borne signs of having been scratched—at least, not in any place that was visible. “So she probably scratched him while he was raping her.”
    “I’m afraid not.” Paul Gibson laid Rachel’s hand back down on the cold stone. “She was raped after she died. Not before.”
    “ What? How can you be sure?”
    The Irishman leaned over the body. “Look at the bruising around her wrists and on her forearms. You can see where she struggled against him. But there’s no sign of bruising on her thighs. There would be, if he’d been forcing her legs apart, holding her down. Nor is there any bruising on her feminine parts; only a slight inner abrasion that could have come after death.”
    He swung away to pick up a shallow, enameled basin from the long, low table that stood beneath the small paned front window. “But this is the most telling piece of evidence,” he said, and Sebastian found himself staring at a torn piece of satin, now so stained with blood it was impossible to guess at its original color.
    “Presumably, it’s from her dress. I found it inside her. He must have shoved it into her when he entered her. The minor abrasions she suffered from the rape couldn’t be the source of all this blood. This blood must befrom her throat. Which means that by the time he mounted her, he’d already killed her.”
    The damp cold of the room was starting to penetrate through the cheap wool of Sebastian’s coat. He brought his cupped hands up to his mouth and blew on them, his gaze drifting back to the still form lying on that slab. He was remembering what his father had said, about seeing the bloody fingerprints on her bare white