Scottish Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 1)

by Stephen Penner

This having been settled, Aunt Lucy relaxed and the two of them finished a hearty, if sometimes quiet breakfast. What conversation there was danced delicately from subject to subject until it was agreed that once the breakfast dishes were done, Maggie would head into the college for the morning, then meet her aunt and uncle at the shop to go out to lunch together. They agreed to meet at 12 o'clock. Give or take. Maggie had a habit of being five minutes late for everything. Might as well get that out in the open from the start.

  * * *

  The MacTary's house was southwest of the college by some distance, approximately halfway between the Old Aberdeen campus and the city's modern center. By the time Maggie was ready to head into the campus at nine o'clock, the city's streets were filled with activity. Overcoming Aunt Lucy's initial concerns, Maggie had succeeded in convincing her that she could in fact walk safely to the college. Maggie wanted to see the city and could think of no better way than a pleasant stroll from the nice residential neighborhood to the campus. The MacTary's woolens store was also within walking distance of the college and so it would be no problem meeting them for lunch at noon.

  The walk proved interesting enough, as Maggie took in the sights and sounds of residential North Aberdeen. Rows of townhomes began to give way to shops as she approached the college. A cool but pleasant autumn breeze sent leaves scurrying past her feet and tussled her auburn hair playfully. While still several blocks away, Maggie could see the unmistakable top of the King's Tower, its stone crown visible over the shorter residences and shops. Seeing this reminded Maggie once again that she was finally really there. She was finally going to spend her year in Aberdeen.

  The university actually consisted of three different campuses strewn across the city in a manner not entirely unrelated to its historical development. Farthest away was the modern Medical Institute located quite a distance northwest of the city center. In the heart of the city, down near the waterfront, sat the Marischal College campus. Originally founded as Marischal College in 1593, its enormous gothic stone building—at one time the second largest such building in the world—was later acquired by the University of Aberdeen and came to be used primarily for lectures and concerts. And approximately two miles due north of the Marischal College, straight up King Street, lay the original Old Aberdeen Campus.

  Nestled between King's Street and Bedford Road, with High Street splitting it down the middle, the Old Campus consisted of thirty odd buildings for students pursuing subjects from agriculture to zoology. Located at the center of campus, snaking its long crooked way between High Street and Regent Way was the Taylor Building, home to all of the modern languages, including the Celtic Department, and also the Elphinstone Institute on the Culture of the North of Scotland. Across Regent Way stood Elphinstone Hall, which in turn was connected to the original King's College Building. In this building was housed the university's historic collections, including ancient manuscripts in the original Gaelic and Latin. The King's College building also could boast the university's most recognizable landmark, a large stone crown sitting astride intersecting stone arches at the pinnacle of the King's Tower. The crown Maggie had spied over the building tops as she approached her new school.

  As Maggie turned from Bedford Quay to High Street, she got her first good look at the university. The King's Tower stood ahead on the right, followed by rows of gothic architecture which simply looked like a college should look. An irrepressible smile beaming on her face, Maggie crossed High Street and entered onto the Old Campus of the University of Aberdeen.

  A directory map stood at the curb and although Maggie had looked at maps of the campus when she had applied several months earlier, she had no recollection of exactly where the Taylor Building was, at least not as it related to her present location. She would also need to know where the University Office was. A brief survey of the board suggested the quickest path lay straight up High Street, with a right turn after the King's Tower. She started on her way, eyes darting happily from interesting architectural feature to ancient tree to students walking past her speaking in that distinct Scottish burr. The other students about that morning didn't seem to be staring at her, confirming that her time spent thumbing through mail order catalogs of average priced British department stores had not been wasted. While she knew she probably still looked like an American, at least her appearance didn't scream it. And her effort to blend in, she assured herself, was an attempt, not to hide her nationality, but rather to show respect for the culture whose ancient languages she would be studying. Really.

  The Taylor Building was actually a series of five long halls, connected at their ends in a zig-zag fashion, so that the narrow end of the first structure abutted High Street, then receded to meet the end of another hall which stood parallel to High Street. This pattern was repeated until the fifth and final hall which stood next to the Regent Building, home to the languages center. Maggie stepped from High Street and followed the Taylor Building back toward its end. The University Office was located behind Taylor and Regents, so she was heading in the right direction. As she came around the first corner, however, her eyes were drawn not to the disappointing non-gothic architecture of the halls, but to the blue-and-white tape cordoning off a courtyard which lay between two buildings to her left. Maggie looked around. She could see some activity in the courtyard. She walked over.

  The tape blocked entry to a large courtyard tucked between a 'J' shaped building on the left and a shorter, more compact one to the right. Through the other side she could see a parking lot and a road beyond it. The other entrances to the courtyard had also been tied off with the same blue-and-white tape, as had each doorway to the buildings which flanked the grassy field. One such tape came loose of its moorings and flapped in the autumn breeze, coming to a gentle rest on the rubber-soled shoe of Aberdeen Police Inspector Robert Cameron.

  The shoe led up to a suit in an unremarkable shade of gray, under which was tucked a rather ugly mustard colored tie, and over which rested a slightly worn tan overcoat. Inspector Cameron's white hair was cut very short so as to minimize the visual effect of his receding hairline which retreated sharply on either side, leaving a small snowy peninsula over the middle of his forehead. However, despite the haircut, whenever he looked down, as he was doing just then to gaze at the police tape wrapping itself around his shin, not only was the receding hairline in full view, but one could also see the bald spot starting on the back of his head.

  "Thompson!" he barked.

  A slightly built officer sprang from where he had been crouching by some bushes next to the J-shaped Edward Wright Building. "Yessir?"

  "Tie this back up," the inspector lifted the ribbon with his foot. "And see that it's done right this time."

  "Yessir!" and the young officer was quickly at his task.

  Inspector Cameron turned, hands in the pockets of his trench coat, and surveyed the crime scene. On the stone path only a few feet before him chalk outlines marked where the victim had been found near eleven o'clock the night before last. The stones of the pathway were still stained with blood. A lot of it. The students who had found her body while on the way home from whatever it was students did nowadays had assured the police that they had not moved the body an inch. The police had had no difficulty believing that. The victim's body—and body parts—had been arranged meticulously in a pattern whose significance could only be guessed at. When he himself arrived at the scene, only a few minutes after the first constables, the Inspector had been struck at once by both the brutality and the familiarity of the scene.

  The young woman's body, or what was left of it, had been laid at an angle across the pathway. Her arms had been placed at her sides and her legs pushed together. Her shirt had been cut away and her pants pushed down, but rather than exposing evidence of sexual abuse, the peeled back garments revealed the open, bloody and all but empty abdominal cavity of the victim. The killer had cut her stomach open like a cereal box, folding the flaps of skin and muscle to either side. Then each and every
internal organ, from her lungs to her intestines, had been carefully and skillfully removed. Most of the organs would be found hidden under a nearby bush, all except five of them which lay in a bloody circle around the corpse. About three feet directly below her toes had been a pile of intestines sitting in a pool of blood and waste. To her left, the right as Cameron looked down, had been the stomach, a good five feet from the girl's left wrist. On the other side, the same distance away, a pile of reddish-gray goo the coroner had assured Cameron had once been the girl's bladder stuck evilly to the stone path. And above her head, again three feet or so away, was a combination of organs. Three for one, one might say. Centered directly above the girl's head, on line with the centerline of the prone body, sat the red, deflated remains of the girl's heart, flanked on either side by one of two gray, bloody lungs. Finally, the killer had placed on the bridge of the victim's nose, between two carefully closed eyelids, a single flat stone, approximately two inches wide.

  It had taken almost twenty minutes before they had been able to find the rest of the girl's internal organs, hidden in a bloody, gory heap behind some bushes on the other side of the courtyard. The precision and meticulousness of the killer extended also to his desire to leave as few clues as possible to his identity. No murder weapons were anywhere to be found, and every finger-, palm- and footprint had been deliberately smeared into uselessness. The fact that the killer had kept the knife worried Cameron. It suggested he intended to kill again. The fact that the killer had succeeded in obliterating any decent clue as to his identity frightened the Inspector. It suggested he might get his chance. They needed to act quickly to catch this madman.

  Cameron looked out over the dozen or so officers scouring the scene for additional clues, some piece of physical evidence which might shed some light on who had done this. And why.

  "Warwick!" He yelled out to one of his sergeants. He was careful to pronounce it 'Warrick,' not 'War-wick' as he had done years ago when he had first met the rookie officer. 'It's pronounced "Warrick,"' she had explained, 'like the castle.' She had then launched into a rather long-winded, and utterly uninteresting, soliloquy on the proper pronunciation of the English name.

  "Yes, sir." Sgt. Elizabeth Warwick stepped quickly from where she had been crouched inspecting cracks in the stone pathway. She was in her thirties, with soft features and short blond hair; and although she was tall for a woman, she had to tilt her head back significantly to look up at the solid 6'3" frame of Inspector Cameron.

  "Tell me what we know so far about our victim's identity," Cameron instructed.

  "Right," Warwick responded sharply. Most other officers would have reached for their notepads at this point, but Elizabeth Warwick's mind was a steel trap. No wonder she had made sergeant so quickly. "Name is—Name was Annette Graham. Canadian. Visiting student from MacGill University in Montreal. She lived at the Don Street flats up the way."

  She pointed through the parking lot toward St. Machar Drive.

  "That's all we know so far," she continued. "I've sent Richards over to the University Office to find out more."

  "Good." Cameron rubbed his chin. "Cause of death? I mean besides being deprived of every one of her vital organs?"

  "Cause of death still undetermined," Warwick frowned slightly. "We still haven't got the official word from Dr. W—"

  "Cause of death: strangulation."

  Both officers turned to see Dr. Andrew Wood, the coroner, walk up casually.

  "Although it was bloody hard to tell," he added. "Here."

  The slightly built, 70-year old Dr. Wood, with his light blue sweater and shock of white curls, handed the inspector a manila envelope marked simply, 'Graham, Annette Camille.'

  "With all that trauma," he went on, "it was hard to see at first exactly what took her life. But the lacerations to the abdomen are post-mortem. You can tell by the bleeding pattern. Only the wound to the throat occurred while her heart was still beating."

  Warwick suppressed a wince. Cameron just listened with no expression, save perhaps fatigue.

  "That wound," Dr. Wood continued, "was caused by a rather thick wire—metal most likely, although it could have been nylon, I suppose, or something similar. The wire cut rather deeply into the outer layers of flesh, but not as quickly as a thinner wire would have done. Her hands had blood smeared on them, although I suspect it was her own blood. Most likely she clawed at the wire while she was still conscious."

  The three just stared at the chalk markings on the path. After a moment, Inspector Cameron said, "Thanks for bringing this out, Andy. You could've just left it at my office."

  "Oh, no trouble," the coroner said as if he'd just dropped off a cake for the local charity bake-sale. "I was on my way to the college anyway. I," he drew himself up importantly, "am a lecturer at the medical school. I need to speak with administration regarding the schedule. They've put my lectures on Wednesday evenings. That simply won't do. It conflicts," he explained earnestly, "with my jazz band rehearsals."

  Warwick looked up at Cameron, but he had not reacted to Dr. Wood's conundrum.

  "Good to see you, Andy," was all he said.

  "Good to see you, too, Robert. Elizabeth." He nodded to Warwick, then turned and departed.

  Cameron looked down at the manila envelope, then handed it to Warwick. "Add this to the file, Sergeant."

  The inspector extracted his pipe from his coat pocket and began fishing for something else, presumably his lighter, in the other. "Now we need to find out more about our victim. Have we searched her flat yet?"

  "Sergeant Willis took some officers over there just this morning," was Warwick's reply.

  "Willis," the word oozed from the inspector's lips like poison.

  He found his lighter and lit his pipe.

  "Sergeant," he said, exhaling the first breath of sweet-smelling pipe smoke.

  "Yes, sir?"

  "Why don't you head over to the victim's flat? Check up on Willis." He smacked contemplatively on his pipestem. "I just don't trust that man sometimes."

  Warwick's expression didn't change.

  "Nice enough fellow," Cameron went on. "Just incompetent."

  "Yes, sir," and she turned on her heels and headed directly toward the Don Street flats to the north.

  Inspector Cameron watched the sergeant turn the corner around the Edward Wright building, and then let his thoughts return to the murder. He considered the positioning of the organs around young Annette Graham's body, then gazed down again at the white markings on the path and hoped to God he was wrong.

  6. Friendly People

  The registrar's office was located on the second floor of the University Office building, a modern structure with a distinctive entryway that reminded Maggie of both the Parthenon and a bus shelter. Her first order of business was to make sure that she was properly enrolled in the university. Heading inside, she quickly found the office and in no time was being told that she couldn't study there.

  "I'm sorry. We're not expecting any more visiting scholars this semester," the remarkably average-looking, middle-aged woman behind the counter was saying. "I'm afraid you'll have to reapply next semester."

  "But I'm already enrolled." Maggie cursed herself for having left her acceptance letter at the MacTary's.

  "I really don't think so, miss," the bureaucrat said politely. "We don't have a file on you." It did not escape Maggie's notice that the woman had not actually looked for any file.

  Maggie exhaled audibly. "Will you please just check the enrollment list for the Celtic Department?"

  The woman didn't move at all, but instead just raised a suspicious eyebrow. "What did you say was the name of the grant you claim you received?"

  Maggie closed her eyes. This would likely not help matters. "The Ladies Albannach," she said through clenched teeth, "but—"

  "No. I'm afraid I've never heard of them." The woman crossed her arms as if that were that. "Sorry."

  Maggie was trying not to lose her temper. "Look," she started, l
eaning onto the counter and into the woman's comfort zone. "My name is Margaret Devereaux. I am a visiting student from the United States. I have already been accepted into post-graduate study in the Celtic Department. I am not here to get your approval. I am here to do nothing more than to confirm that you are aware of my presence on campus, and to find out whom I should contact in the Celtic Department to make arrangements for my studies."

  The woman opened her mouth to respond, but Maggie cut her off.

  "Check the enrollment list. Please."

  After another moment's hesitation, the woman shrugged, said something under her breath, then turned and disappeared into a maze of wooden file cabinets. After a minute or so, she returned with a few sheets of paper and a file in her hand.

  "Yes. Well. It appears," she stammered, "that you are correct, miss." She sounded almost disappointed. "You are enrolled in the Department of Celtic. And apparently we do have a file on you, although I usually create all the files and I don't recall seeing your name before."

  The woman smiled weakly at Maggie. "In any event, you are classified as a post-graduate visiting scholar. As such, you are not eligible to receive credit for any undergraduate classes. Essentially you are expected to do your own research and you can audit any courses you feel might be relevant, after you obtain permission from the instructor, of course."

  "Of course," Maggie replied dryly. "Does it indicate there who my faculty advisor will be or do I need to go over to the department to find that out?"

  "Let me see," the woman opened the file she had sworn didn't exist. "Yes, right here. Professor Craig Macintyre. With a small 'i.' Oh, he's a very nice man."

  Maggie thought the woman might be blushing.

  "He's one of our newest—and youngest—professors," the woman continued. "Studied at Oxford, I think. Or Cambridge. Or some such. In any event, he's quite a charming young fellow. You'll like him."

  "I'm sure."

  "Oh, but you should head over to his office right now. It's in the Taylor Building. Do you know where that is?"