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hat. And yet your shoes haven’t been polished in days—weeks, even. You have an attentive wife but one who can reach the hat rack with much greater ease than she can bend to retrieve your shoes. A disorder of the spine is unlikely in a young woman. An altogether happier condition explains the known facts.”
    “Fair enough. Still,” said Lean with a trace of a smile, “how long ago did you get into town?”
    “Two months.”
    “You’re safe by three months. But if you’re still around in October and the babe comes out with jet-black hair …”
    Grey chuckled and approached the pair of double doors at the rear of the hospital. Lean was close behind but paused to turn his attention to the horizon. The hospital sat atop the northern ridge of Bramhall Hill at the terminus of Portland’s scenic Western Promenade.This location at the base of Portland’s Neck gave a full view of the peninsular city’s only abutting neighbor, the town of Deering. Farther off in the distance, Lean could see the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the peaks now tinged a pleasant rose by dawn’s outstretched fingertips.
    Lean turned his back on the panorama and walked up the two short steps to the doors. Fully aware of the scents that awaited him, he drew a last deep breath of the fresh air. He pulled the door open and glanced up, thinking a relief frieze of screaming, tormented souls above the lintel would have been more appropriate than the bare wall of bricks he saw there.
    Formaldehyde mingled in the air with carbolic acid. Behind it all, Lean could still smell the ingrained stench of dead bodies. Maggie Keene was laid out on an examination table. The corpse had been stripped, and the young woman’s clothes were arranged on a sideboard. A sheet covered her from the pelvic bone to the ankles. Her abdomen was nearly as white as the hospital linen.
    “As far as I can see, there was no struggle.” Dr. Steig held a scalpel and used it to point to the features of the body as he spoke. “No blood under the fingernails. No bruising or scraping at the back of the skull, her back, or elbows to indicate she was forcibly thrown down. Consistent with blood patterns at the scene. She was already lying down when the pitchfork struck her. The neck wound was fatal and, I suspect, the first inflicted.”
    “Could she have been strangled before?” Lean asked.
    Dr. Steig shook his head. “There’s a lack of hemorrhaging of the facial tissue. Also, the prongs missed the trachea, so I was able to observe that the tissue surrounding the larynx is undamaged. Nor was the hyoid bone fractured.” The doctor’s scalpel gleamed in the light of the gas lamps as it hovered over the two dark holes punched into Maggie Keene’s throat. “The right external jugular vein was nicked and opened to half an inch; the left common carotid artery was punctured and hemorrhaged. Death would have been instant.”
    “She was unconscious, or near to it, at the time of death,” Grey said. “I detected an odor near her mouth.”
    “Could be chloral hydrate,” Dr. Steig said, then indicated the area of the missing hand. “It took the murderer three cuts to sever the right wrist. She was palm down, and I’d say the first blow was the highest there on the radius. The chip into the bone is shallow, a tentative blow. The second came in lower, and then the third blow succeeded.”
    “A hatchet?” asked Lean.
    “Given his strength, our man wouldn’t need three blows with a hatchet,” Grey said.
    Dr. Steig nodded. “Furthermore, from the marks on the bone and the other cuts on the flesh, I’d wager the weapon to be more of a cutting blade, and curved. Still, he’s using it to hack more than cut. No surgical skills employed here.”
    Lean smiled a bit. “Well, there’s one bright spot anyway. We can eliminate Jack the Ripper as a suspect.”
    Grey answered absentmindedly as he bent in to examine the body. “Though it’s generally thought the Ripper had some