The Formula for Murder (36 page)

From the map Wells and I had pored over, Okehampton is a left turn when reaching the main road.

A barely audible chuckle comes from the woman. “Yes, the laboratory is no longer in Okehampton.”

“It doesn’t matter where you are taking me. My companions are extremely capable of finding me. You will be caught. You don’t believe it because you are so desperately caught up with your desires, you are not thinking clearly. And you, sir,” I tell Burke, “we know about your gang and the killing of the artist. If you want to avoid the hangman, you’ll do no more crimes for this woman.”

Burke grins. “You really have me scared. Is that what’s gonna happen?” he asks the countess in a mocking tone. “This woman’s gonna have me meet the hangman?”

“No, that won’t happen—not that you haven’t earned a trip to the gallows many times over.” She directs her next comment to me. “We are going to a manor owned by a duke and loaned to me. No one would dare invade its grounds. And when we leave, there will be no sign we were ever there.”

She has a continental accent, Italian, I think, but there is a British edge to her English.

“Do you believe in God?” I ask, curious about how she deals with the evil inside her.

“My personal beliefs are drawn more from the East.”

“Really? Has it occurred to you that the punishment for the evil you have committed in this life is to be reborn as a worm in a cesspool?”

She leans across the carriage and slaps me, hard, across my face.

I freeze for a second and then start to move forward to swing at her when Burke blocks me with his arm and an ice pick comes up and pricks me on my neck under my ear.

“Settle down,” he says.

“If you cooperate and do what you are told, you won’t be harmed,” the woman says.

Won’t be harmed?

Does she really expect me to believe that? Murder has followed in the wake of this woman and Lacroix and she assures me that no harm will come to me if I play along? But I keep my mouth shut because the more I say, the more opportunities they will have to hurt me.

It seems we’ve traveled for more than an hour before we turn off the main road and follow a side path to tall iron gates.

The glow of a full moon breaks through the foggy haze, enough to reveal the manor house that commands the top of a hill in the distance.

The estate is almost castle looking, truly fit for a grand nobleman bearing the title of duke.

I don’t see any lights in the house.

From the distance, the house appears dark and forbidding. As we draw closer it becomes evident that the house is also made of moors granite, but the stone has been finished.

The carriage follows the curve of the road up to the main building and we continue past it to a coach house. Two large mastiffs chase the carriage, barking.

“Don’t bother trying to run,” the countess warns me. “There are no neighbors and the dogs will treat you as game to kill.”

The door to the carriage storage house that is used for foot traffic opens and a young woman comes out.

62

Hailey comes to me to give me a hug and I push her hands away.

I am not surprised a bit. The fact that she is still alive has been gnawing at me for some time, but I just didn’t want to face it. Instead, I buried the revelation deep inside me.

“I’m sorry,” Hailey says. “But everything will be all right, I know that for sure. They promised me you won’t be harmed.”

I smile sadly at her. My jaws are tight. I don’t have the urge to strike at her like I did with the countess before she slapped me. Instead, I feel like hugging and crying with her—after I grab her and shake her and scream my lungs out about how she could be so stupid.

“Please, Nellie—”

I get right into her face. “People are dead and I’m going to be joining them. Do you think that sorry might be a little inadequate right now?”

“No, that’s not going to happen, you won’t be hurt.”

“How can you say that? I’ve been kidnapped with an ice pick at my throat by murderers who have left bodies in their wake.”

The mastiffs come sniffing up to me and I let the big male smell my hand.

How could I have so misjudged her? My editor at the paper had called her a loose cannon and told me I better learn how to duck because you never know in which direction she will go off.

She is ready to cry. “Please, come inside, you must meet Anthony.”

“You make it sound like I’ve dropped in for a bit of tea. Did you happen to notice that I have been kidnapped by thugs who kill people with ice picks and a madwoman who wants my blood?”

“Get inside,” Burke snaps.

“Come, please,” Hailey begs me.

She reaches for me and I brush away her hand. With nowhere to run or hide, I reluctantly follow her into the coach house.

The main room, large enough to park two large coaches, has been made into a research laboratory. A long table in the center has microscopes, test tubes, Petri dishes, Bunsen burners, surgical instruments—the tools of the trade by researchers in the biological sciences. I suspect that Dr. Pasteur’s laboratory in Paris isn’t much different except for one thing: I see many glass containers filled with a deep red liquid that I’m certain is blood.

A chimpanzee is lying on its back, tied down to a table, with tubes to its throat.

“It’s sedated,” Hailey says.

“The whole bunch of you should be sedated. I’m sure the poor thing would rather be dead than live through the horrible things you’re doing to it.”

I wince when I see more chimps in cages. I wish I could free them.

“Anthony does research with chimpanzees because Darwin says we are descended from apes.”

“Where is my cage?”

Tears run down her face and her features twist as she quietly sobs.

I’m not in a forgiving mood. “Those can’t be real tears for me, the people your friends have killed, or these poor creatures. You know why they call your kind of crying crocodile tears? Crocodiles shed tears when they are eating their victims. I’m just another victim to be devoured.”

“No, Nellie, you have to understand, Anthony is taking his research where no one else has ever gone before.”

“Has it occurred to you what he’s doing is criminal?”

“He’s doing work that will go down in history.”

“I’m sure he will. Right beside Jack the Ripper.”

“Nellie, I thought if anyone would understand it would be you. You have such an imagination and are so daring. You’ve seen with your own eyes what Dr. Pasteur has accomplished with research.”

“Pasteur saves lives. He doesn’t take them away to give vain women beauty treatments.”

“You’re wrong on two counts.”

The pronouncement comes from behind me and I spin around to face the man who spoke the words.

Anthony Lacroix.

He is slender, with thin blond hair combed straight back, narrow features, and emerald green eyes that focus on you, with an intense, fixed gaze that is almost an impolite stare.

His fervent features convey the impression of determination. But there is also the hint of a bad temper and a handsome fragility to him, the sort that would make him a mother’s favorite and cause her to open her purse strings for him even when he misbehaves.

Exhaustion shows on his face, as if he has been operating at a super speed for a long period and is on the edge of collapse.

“Dr. Pasteur has saved lives by developing rabies and anthrax vaccines,” he says, “but those discoveries came at the expense of others who were infected with the diseases by bad doses of the medicine before the process became a success. The same is true about smallpox and other maladies. The cures served the common good at the expense of a few.”

“I don’t recall murder being part of the scientific method for beauty treatments or anything else.”

“I haven’t murdered anyone.”

“Splitting hairs,” I interrupt him. “Maybe you didn’t do the deed, but you condoned it.”

“
You
have no notion at all of the nature of my research. You are wrong if you believe I am trying to make women look prettier. The spa is just a place to provide the money to finance serious research.”

“You may fool Hailey, but I saw a poor woman in Bath crying for her child and a nice old gentleman in the moors—”

“Your small mind will never comprehend my work,” he snaps. “Take her upstairs. And keep an eye on her. We don’t want her wandering around. The dogs will attack strangers.”

As I follow Hailey up the stairs to the second level, she tells me they are staying in the servants’ quarters so Lacroix can be closer to his work. I am only half listening because my concentration is on one thing only—escape.

“He works day and night, barely taking time off to eat. He sleeps very little, a few hours here and there, never a full night.”

“He’s a murderer and you’re an accomplice to his crimes.”

She stops on the stairs and spins around to me. “
Stop it.
”

Her voice is quiet, but with desperation.

“He’s not any of those things.” She starts to say something else, but looks back down the stairs.

Hare, the other ice pick thug, is at the bottom of the steps, looking up at us.

We go up to the landing and move away from the stairway, into a sitting room with a hallway to the right were I assume bedrooms for servants are located. Closed French doors lead out onto a small balcony and I wander over to get a look through the windows. There’s enough moonlight for me to identify a pasture behind the carriage house.

“Anthony isn’t a murderer,” she tells me in a low voice.

“Why don’t you ask the artist in the moors who got an ice pick in his back or another man who got one in his brain?”

She shakes her head, frantic, and puts her hands over her ears. “They’re not things Anthony would do.”

“See no evil, hear no evil. Tell that to the police when they come for you and to the hangman when he puts the rope around your neck.”

She stares at me, swaying, ready to collapse, and sits down on the couch. I take a seat on a chair facing her.

She really doesn’t understand.

I find it incomprehensible.

She’s a grown woman. Yet this is not the first time she did something bizarre. Because of Hailey’s own traumatic background I found reasons to justify why she aided a woman in New York who killed her abusive husband. But I can’t comprehend how she can close her eyes to these atrocious crimes against innocent people.

Is she completely devoid of reason and common sense?

“Hailey … tell me what you think is going on here.” I gesture toward the stairway. “What is being done down there? Why have people been killed? And please, don’t tell me they haven’t. I witnessed the murder of two people and there’s three more I know of, beginning with Lady Winsworth and a child.” I actually hadn’t seen Archer being killed, but looking at his still warm-blooded body was close enough.

For a moment we sit in silence.

Hailey finally meets my eye. “We’re prisoners. Anthony is doing research on rejuvenation, on defeating the aging process of our bodies. You call it beauty treatments and it’s true that women like the countess want to stay beautiful longer or get back their youthful appearances, but that is not the true purpose of his research. He does that work because wealthy women are willing to finance his research if they think they will get what they want.”

“Who do the thugs downstairs with cowboy boots and ice picks work for?”

“They work for Dr. Radic and the countess. She put up most of the money that Radic used to build the spa in Bath. She controls everything.”

“How many of these hired killers are here?”

“Only the two you’ve seen.”

“That’s two too many. So your Dr. Lacroix just shuts his eyes to what’s going on around him and you shut yours, too. Why?”

She avoids my eyes.

“Because … because you love him.”

We sit in silence for a moment.

“Hailey, listen to me. It’s not adding up. You say you and he are being held prisoner. Those two brutes were away from here, kidnapping me. So was the countess. Why didn’t you just leave?”

“We are not prisoners like that. Anthony’s research can’t continue unless the countess keeps financing it. And keeps the police from bothering him. She has powerful friends. He didn’t hurt Lady Winsworth deliberately. When blood transfusions are done, sometimes people die.”

Sometimes people die.

She said it as if she is speaking about nameless people in a textbook, not a woman and child of flesh and blood, real people with loved ones saddened by their loss. Good lord—she is so mesmerized by Lacroix, so infatuated, that she simply takes whatever he says as the gospel, no matter how strange it may be.

“Was she getting blood? From a child? A little girl?”

Hailey nods. “Yes. But the woman had a bad reaction.”

“So did the child.” I shake my head, trying to get the pieces rattling inside to fall into place. “What a … a horror story. You simply fell for this man and tolerate this insanity?”

“It’s not just that.” Her eyes are that of a wounded doe. “Anthony needs my blood.”

63

Inspector Mulcher, the highest-ranking police officer in the Okehampton district, is not happy about getting the local manager of the telegraph office out of bed to open the wire station. Nor is he pleased about planning a widespread search for a
foreign
woman in the middle of the night, waking neighbors and sending them down the streets to wake others and have them gather into groups to spread out and hunt for the woman.

A police officer for thirty-two years, most of his police duties had centered around stolen livestock and an occasional domestic dispute. The only serious case he had ever investigated had been that of a woman who split her husband’s head with an ax, and he had been a young officer when that occurred.

Like the telegraph office manager, he had been awakened by banging on his door and shouts from strangers outside. Then he listened with some astonishment about a woman being kidnapped—not
any
woman he was told, but a famous American newspaper reporter, Nellie Bly, and that the kidnappers drove the most expensive brand of carriage in the kingdom.