The Mute Swan: A Thriller Read online

  Kopke adjusted his glasses, avoiding eye contact.

  Wolfe grimaced.

  “I see,” Sailor said. “She had it tucked inside her bra.”

  Kopke nodded.

  “Did you touch or find anything else?”

  “No,” Kopke said. “I only checked for identity. Girls in our town usually keep their wallets in there.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Kopke looked down.

  “Either you’re a damn good pocket thief or you know your way to a girl’s heart.” Sailor stretched his stiff neck.

  “No,” Kopke almost tiptoed. “My sister and mother do it all the time.”

  Sailor wasn’t going to apologize. Everyone was a suspect. He looked back at Hannah whose left leg was awkwardly bent. The other looked straight but with a tilt. She looked like someone who died in the middle of turning in bed while asleep, neither on her back nor on her side.

  Her right arm lay softly on her stomach, but it seemed natural. Otherwise he would have thought of it as a clue to a pregnancy. But he was sure her killers wouldn’t do that. They would never mate with the bloodline. This was genocide.

  Her left arm was stretched to her left side in an unusually straight line. Odd. Either an obvious clue he hadn’t figured out yet or sloppy execution. Her palm was open. An apple lay an inch away from the tip of her forefinger.

  Not bitten, but cut in half.

  The cut showed the seeds inside, which confirmed Mother’s interpretation about the apple poisoning. Appleseeds from one apple weren’t enough to poison someone, though. They had to be crushed, blended, and mixed into food or a drink. But the point was made, as the appleseeds were one of the killers’ styles.

  But not their endgame.

  The pentagram shape inside was.

  Apples when cut horizontally revealed a natural five-pointed star shape inside. Most people won’t cut an apple horizontally. This was a recurring theme in the killers’ occult practices. Apples and pentagrams had been their most common signatures.

  Chapter 5

  “Who discovered the body?” Sailor said, noticing the apple’s insides had already turned brown. Apples oxidized within minutes, so it didn't give much of an indication of the possible time of murder.

  “Museum’s security,” Wolfe said.

  “I don’t see any.”

  “Shift ends at six. I permitted them to go home.”

  “They left the museum unlocked? Just like that?”

  “We’re not in the city. Things are different here. People trust each other. We’re good people.”

  "The kind of good people I wouldn't trust with my daughter." Sailor pointed at Hannah.

  Wolfe pursed his lips, hands on his belt, “Point is there is no security, and it’s too late to call for them. The feds will take care of all of this, so until then, deal with it.”

  “Did you at least interrogate security?”

  “They’re not suspects.”

  “You didn’t interrogate them? ”

  “I did. They only found the body. Saw no one enter or leave and knew nothing that would help us.”

  “What are their names?”

  “Come again?”

  “The security guards, what are their names?”

  “Why?”

  Sailor said nothing. His icy stare did.

  “Hmm..” Wolfe said. “Martin and…”

  “Frank,” Kopke said.

  “Look Mr. Sailor,” Wolfe pointed a hand midair. “The museum was empty all day and I don’t appreciate your—“

  “No one visited all day?” Sailor said.

  “No,” Kopke offered in an almost inaudible voice.

  “Like I said,” Wolfe continued. “the security men might have gone for a beer or answered a wife’s call while that sick man killed the girl inside. They aren’t responsible for—“

  “How do you know the killer is a man?” Sailor said.

  “I didn’t say it was a man,” Wolfe’s voice pitched up. “It just assumed—”

  “Mr. Sailor,” Kopke managed to speak louder, “No one visits the museum at this time of year. As a tourist attraction, we’re pretty much obscure. People prefer the Neuschwanstein Castle in the South.”

  Sailor still locked eyes with Wolfe, but Kopke’s words sounded about right. Most tourists were oblivious of the Spessart Museum’s significance. The Neuschwanstein Castle on the other hand welcomed over two million visitors a year. It was two cities away, and it ironically owed its fame to Disneyland who copied its architecture for their castle in the United States.

  “People prefer the Neuschwanstein Castle because of the Swan King, Ludwig II,” Kopke kept talking, more of a distraction, to break the tension. “Mr. Sailor, did you know that he later committed suicide? Tourists like stories of scandal and mystery like these.”

  Sailor nodded without commenting. Kopke was wrong about the latter part. Ludwig II’s suicide had been disputed later as murder. A fact Sailor had known for years. Ludwig’s execution, a few centuries back, had been by the same hands that killed Hannah today — probably for the same reasons.

  Sailor finally lifted his eyes off of Wolfe who exhaled audibly. Sailor had pressured him long enough to assume the man wasn’t hiding something. It was better to be feared than loved sometimes.

  “Even so,” Sailor addressed both men. “The Spessart Museum must have at least some sort of security alarm at night, right?”

  “Again,” Wolfe said. “My city is a heavily taxed city. The government thinks we make tons of tourist money, but we don’t. We truly can’t afford that much security. And usually we don’t need to.”

  “I can imagine that murder doesn’t happen here often,” Sailor said. “But you people don’t worry about someone stealing from the museum?”

  “Steal?” Wolfe chuckled. “What? Magic mirrors?”

  “I was under the impression that the artifacts were original.”

  “Fictional bedtime stories can’t be original because they’re, guess what, fiction.” Wolfe said.

  Sailor decided the conversation was going nowhere, so he turned and faced Hannah’s corpse.

  “I wonder why I haven’t seen her before,” Kopke commented. “I mean it’s a small town, you know.”

  “Did you see her before?” Sailor asked Wolfe.

  “A couple of times while driving by the outskirts,” Wolfe said.

  “Never talked to her?”

  “Hannah and her mother had only arrived a week ago. They talked to no one. Don’t you think it’s time you inspect the body?”

  Wolfe was right. All Sailor did was postpone the crux of the matter. He didn’t actually enjoy the unnecessary gossip to begin with. But it helped him delay the inspection of Hannah’s body until the drugs fully kicked in and his emotions were absent.

  It wasn’t the healthiest way to deal with the situation, but for a man inspecting the thirteenth victim executed by the same killers in the past five years, it kept him from losing his mind.

  Chapter 6

  Sailor knelt down and fought the feeling of imagining if he had been her father discovering the body. As a father himself, he understood the pain, and the need for closure - even revenge. But a father would be angry now, and dangerously emotional. That was what the drug was for. He looked at Hannah with cold eyes. His heart was busy pumping blood through his body to deal with the devil in his veins.

  The first thing he noticed was a line of blood out of Hannah’s mouth. Thick and grisly, all the way down her chin. Her mouth was partially open, and he could see her tongue was intact. No wounds inside.

  Cyanide victims sometimes spat blood, but her face looked too clean for this having been a consequence. To the killers, Hannah, in her current pose, wasn’t human. She was a mannequin made to convey a story.

  So where did the blood come from? How far below did it trickle from her chin? He couldn't tell yet because of the angle of her head, but didn't want to move her too soon. What if this wasn’t the desired c
lue to look at now?

  All he knew for sure was that, in a crime scene with minimal blood, this part meant something. Probably an x-marks-the-spot clue — at least part of it.

  He decided he’d revisit it in a few minutes as his eyes scanned her body for violations instead. No signs of strangulation or torture. He exhaled with appreciation. Death was an inevitability of nature. Humility was human-made; no wonder its first syllable was ‘hum.’

  Gently he slid his hand over her eyelids and closed them. Tampering with evidence or not, she was better off that way, instead of staring back at the ugliness of this life.

  Wolfe grunted impatiently in the back, but Sailor didn't acknowledge him. He wished he could say a prayer for Hannah. Sadly, he knew no words or hymns of prayer. It reminded him of whenever he visited his wife’s grave, he paid a pastor to say a prayer on his behalf.

  “But if you say the prayer, God will listen,” the pastor had argued.

  “Not if I don’t believe in the words.”

  Back to Hannah, Sailor was sure she had been lured and poisoned outside and then dragged in here. Which meant the museum itself was as significant as the crime scene. He tilted his head, and his vision caught the color palette the killers portrayed. Three colors. Mostly white, some black, and two spots of red from the blood and the apple. A significant palette of colors repeatedly showing up in fairytale books.

  “She looks like Snow White,” Kopke said, as if reading his mind. “I mean the white skin, blood on the lips, and black hair?”

  The weird boy with glasses seemed to have better insights into a crime scene than his superior officer.

  “Skin white as snow, lips red as blood, hair black as night,” Kopke continued. “And she is murdered in a museum about fairy tales origins. You get what I mean?”

  “You have a point,” he told the young officer. Why not have a sidekick to brainstorm with? “Do you know what the colors refer to?”

  “No,” Kopke’s knelt down beside Sailor, eyes wide and curious. “Do you?”

  “They represent the three stages of womanhood.”

  “What is that?”

  “An interesting idea, repeatedly used in Paganism,” Sailor said. “A girl was believed to be a maiden until her first period, hence the white color for purity,” he said. “Then she had her period and later became a mother, which is depicted as red. Later in life she became a crone — in some transcripts a witch — hence the color of hatred and envy, black.”

  “Fascinating,” Kopke said. “Though I must say I’ve never heard it before—bear in mind I come from a town that takes pride in its fairy tale origins.”

  “It’s too much of a complex adult idea for a children’s book,” Wolfe said.

  “It wasn’t meant to be a children’s book.” Sailor said, eyes scanning Hannah for clues. He couldn’t stop looking at the color red in the scene. It stuck out, so much that it must have meant something.

  “I read it to my children every night and you’re telling me it’s not a children’s book?” Wolfe tensed again. “Besides, what’s this got to do with what we’re doing here?”

  “So Mr. Sailor, I think there is something wrong with your womanhood theory,” Kopke came to the rescue again, “Since there was no mother, but a stepmother.“

  “Mother,” Sailor insisted, eyes going back and forth between the apple and blood from Hannah’s mouth. “In the Brothers Grimm German version of 1812, it was her mother,” Sailor realized that the index finger on Hannah’s open palm lazily pointed at the apple. Still it didn’t mean much. “They changed it to stepmother in the 1857 version.”

  “Why?” Kopke said.

  Sailor slowly moved Hannah’s chin and saw the blood trail continued sideways toward her armpit and seemed to stop there. “That’s a long story. Scoot over,” Sailor nudged Kopke and leaned over. From this angle he concluded that the line of blood had thinned enough to just stop — though it looks so unnatural. He had to stick with this a little more.

  “You found something.” Kopke said.

  “Shhh.” Sailor stretched out a leg and crouched in an awkward position. “The way the blood stopped here doesn’t make sense. It would either trickle down from her armpit and leave a mark on the floor or trickle a little further on her shoulder, and maybe her arms.

  “Let alone that the arm itself is in an unnatural position, too.” Kopke said. “Is the killer trying to tell us she bit the apple? Because, hypothetically had the line continued it would have met with her forefinger.”

  “What about it?” Sailor said.

  “I think that’s a splotch of blood,” Kopke said. “Maybe the one you’ve been looking for?”

  “You’re spot on, Kopke.”

  “I may be right but I don’t know what this means,” Kople said. “Who plans such intricate details?”

  Sailor reminded himself that he had seen so many of the murders he should be able to figure it out. He was close, but it felt like a conclusion he couldn’t dig up from the graveyard of memories in the back of his head. “They’re trying to talk to us through Hannah.”

  “You’re not talking about demon possession, are you?” Kopke didn’t realize he was trembling.

  “Nonsense,” Wolfe said.

  “Nothing supernatural here,” Sailor said. “It’s all real and absurd like the rest of our lives,” Sailor’s eyes went back and forth between the apple and Hannah’s mouth.

  The answer was simple and obvious, so much that he was disappointed with himself.

  He bent over from his awkward position and lifted up her arm. The answer lay on the floor underneath.

  Wolfe let out a muffled noise. Kopke mouthed the word fascinating.

  Hidden under her arm was another clue. Words, scrawled in her blood, a little smudged but still legible.

  Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand...

  Chapter 7

  The Bayer Watchtower, Lohr, Bavaria, Germany

  The man in the tower heard his phone beep.

  He pulled up his goggles and took off his gloves, revealing dried blood on his hands. He should have done a better job than let this bitch stain him, but he had to cut through the flesh on the back of her arm to draw enough blood to use for writing. He planned to wash it off soon. He wouldn’t want her bloodline to linger on him for long.

  The message on his phone was short but informative, though he was getting impatient with the games his superiors played. Had it been a common murder, he would have poisoned the girl, buried her, hid the evidence and gone home to his wife and children.

  But it wasn’t that simple. To the Colonnade, the murders weren’t a crime, but a celebration..

  The over-the-top clues they left behind for Sailor satisfied their lust for domination over their enemy. Finding one of their Swans was rare. Finding them together was pure luck. Their fucking precious Swans. Such a laughable description for such a dark past.

  “Damn it, Sailor, are you getting old or what?” the man said. “I don’t have all day.”

  Sailor had been inside for twenty minutes now. Forty more minutes to go and Bundespolizei, the federal police, was about to arrive. Being one of the few organizations the Colonnade hadn’t compromised, he wasn’t going to permit them the pleasure of meeting John Sailor. Too risky.

  The man with gloves feared that if Sailor didn’t get the message and leave early enough, he was going to have to shoot him.

  Chapter 8

  The Spessart Museum, Lohr, Bavaria, Germany

  “That must be a joke.” Wolfe said, reading the words written in German.

  Sailor tilted his head, as if looking for a missing component. The writing did actually say spieglein, spieglein an der wand, which would be translated to mirror, mirror on the wall in English, followed by three splashes of blood as dots.

  “I have to take a picture.” Kopke said.

  “Shut up, Kopke,” Wolfe grunted. “Let the feds take care of this when they arrive.”

  Wolfe’s words reminded Sailor of the sca
nt time he had. When Mother said an hour, he assumed she was being cautious. He had googled the German Federal Police’s headquarters and the nearest one was a hundred and twenty miles away. German highways, the Autobahn, were famous for their open limit speed, but the feds weren’t supposed to be maniacs. He decided he could get away with a little more time if needed.

  “The killer is either mad, or a genius who likes to play games,” Kopke said.

  Sailor didn’t listen to him. Jimmy Hendrix was singing "Purple Haze" in the back of his head. Music had always been Sailor’s imaginary friend when he needed to weed out the noise and see past the chaos.

  He thought about the killers writing half of the fairy tale phrase without the who is fairest of them all part. Why?

  In the original German scripts it said who was the most beautiful in the land . The words wall in English translated to wand in German, and land was simply land with a slightly different phonetic to the vowel a. It was a simple rhyme. Fairest of them all was invented by English speaking translators to rhyme with the English mirror mirror on the wall . Funny how digging deeper into sources of our most beloved books led to totally different meanings and intentions.

  Point was, the killers wanted the clue to lead Sailor to a mirror, which explained why they brought the girl to the museum.

  Sailor stared at the Talking Mirror on the wall.

  It looked underwhelming, to be honest. An ancient mirror with a dented frame. Old and amateurishly presented. No majesty or magic to it. Hung on a wall without much care or celebration. No swirling fonts on a golden plaque nearby. The only interesting thing about it was its frame. Red. The color that connected it to the killers’ web of clues.

  Approaching it, Sailor had to walk around that column with the rectangular base. Usually museums fancied open spaces, devoid of obstacles, but this place had been the Schloss in the past, a private castle that once belonged to a noble family. Built the old way, from brick and stones. It had columns.