The Empty Mirror Read Online Free Page A

for spending more time in the company of cat burglars and safecrackers than he did with his own fiancée.
    Truth be told, neither his parents’ expectations nor his own need for an easier, safer way to make a living had caused him to leave criminal law. No. It had been Mary’s last words to him at the Semmering sanatorium.
    “Poor Karl,” she’d whispered, her cheeks abnormally flushed, her auburn hair splayed out upon the pillow. “Ambition is a fine thing, but you will miss me. Someday you will understand the opportunity we lost.”
    And so, after her death, he had quit criminal law, the one thing he could blame for coming between them. He had gone into the more refined and sanitary field of civil law as a sort of penance. Now, looking at this poor young woman on the slab in front of him, he felt a tightness in his chest. Mary had been right: He did miss her.
    Gross had meanwhile stripped off hat and coat and set to probing the body with his large and rather hairy hands. Hepinched the mouth, opening the lips, but was unable to unclench the jaw.
    “Relatively fresh one,” the criminologist said casually. “Rigor mortis has not yet worn off.”
    As he said this, the young woman’s nose suddenly fell off, revealing pink cartilage and two gaping holes. Werthen gasped, but Gross merely sighed and righted the stub of flesh as if it were clay on a modeling statue. He examined with the same sort of dispassion the woman’s ears, hands, feet. The farther down the body Gross moved, the more Werthen felt he must get air.
    Thankfully Gross seemed to have no interest in knowing if sexual violation had been part of the crime. Instead he returned to the head, lifting the onionskin eyelids to peer into the lifeless pupils, then turned his attention to the corpse’s neck.
    “Just so,” Gross muttered to himself. “You might want to take a look at this, Werthen. The killer’s signature.”
    Gross adjusted the woman’s head-careful to unseat the severed nose first-exposing the carotid artery on her neck. There, midway up the neck, was a small, clean cut that went through flesh and yellow fat and sinew.
    Werthen swallowed hard, nodding.
    “I assume this incision was made,” Gross said, “after she was dead.” He readjusted the head, but it flopped over to the left.
    “That is, after he broke her neck,” Gross continued. “Just like the other four victims. The second cervical vertebra has been cracked like a walnut. The cause of death.” Gross replaced the nose. “And this bit, too. Noses cut with a single clean swipe and then left somewhere on their persons.”
    Werthen swallowed again. This was not the adventure it had seemed just a couple of hours ago. But at the same time the resemblance of this victim to his fiancée made the case all the more urgent. He would find the murderer of this poor girl, a proof of his love for Mary.
    “If she was already dead, why the incision?” Gross asked, butit was rhetorical. He waved his hands over the whiteness of the corpse.
    “To drain the blood,” Gross answered his own question. “All five of them were squeezed as dry as a shirt on laundry day.”
    Werthen made no reply. He only wanted fresh air now.
    Gross replaced the sheet. Slowly he slipped his coat back on, donned his hat, then looked at Werthen with cold, clear eyes: “The work of a madman, you surmised last night. Do you still believe that?”
    Werthen managed to find his voice. “Who else could do such a thing?”
    Again Gross caught him in his penetrating gaze. “There may be other explanations, my dear Werthen.”
    As they left the autopsy room, the pathologist had moved on to a new corpse.
    Gross cut away quite happily at the sausage on his plate, then piled a miniature dripping haystack of sauerkraut atop it before plunging the heavily laden fork into his mouth. Werthen sipped at his glass of mineral water and tried to gain appetite by watching the lunchtime crowd around him in the
Gasthaus
, but it was not