Dark Gods in the Blood

Chapter Twenty-Three

Kurtz discoursed. A voice! A voice! It rang deep to the very

last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds

of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he

struggled! he struggled!

-- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

"Conium maculatum," Hermione said as she walked into the visitation room and seated herself at their usual table.

Snape blinked. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me," she said. "Conium maculatum, otherwise known as garden-variety poison hemlock.** That's how he did it."

Rolling his eyes, Snape picked a piece of invisible lint off his shirtsleeve. "Narratives are generally most intelligible when presented in a linear fashion, Granger."

With a little huff, Hermione scooted her chair back from the table, rose, and began to pace. "Where is he, anyway? It should only have taken a few minutes for him to realize ..."

"Granger ..."

"And if he's Flooed Shacklebolt already, I'm certain he got ..."

Snape cleared his throat. "Erm ... Granger ...?"

Spinning on her heel, she ignored him again. "But he could have sent for Albus and that might've --"

"Granger!" he actually shouted, trying to attract her attention.

Frowning, she paused just long enough to regard him with obvious confusion -- in truth, she'd been so consumed with her thoughts that she'd quite forgotten his presence. "Yes?"

"Would you care to explain yourself or should I simply save myself the agony and leave?" he asked with narrowed eyes.

"Won't your Cuthrell do something particularly awful to you for that?" she countered.

Shoulders stiffening, something in his eyes flashed at her. "I find myself perilously close to not caring about the consequences, Miss Granger."

"Oh, well ..." Hermione said grudgingly. "It's quite simple, really. There's been another murder that's definitely been connected to Harry's death." She paused for effect.

Of course there was not one. "And ...?" he asked with a quirked eyebrow, seemingly unimpressed.

"Well, it seems that the Aurors finally conceded defeat and allowed a Muggle doctor to come in and do an official autopsy."

"Autopsy?" he echoed, uncertainty clear in his voice.

Internally, she delighted in the fact that for once, she knew about something Snape didn't, but she kept her external composure. "They analyze bodies after death in an effort to determine just what happened. Without magic, of course."

He smiled thinly. "Of course."

"And I read through the file, and I just knew that you should see it ..." she said, trailing off in her excitement.

"You read the file?" he asked. "By what means? Peeking in Ministry windows?"

Hermione couldn't resist herself this time and broke into a wide smile. "Of course not. Ron said that he thought I should take a look at it, just to see what I thought. And when I asked if I could bring it in to you, Ron asked Kingsley Shacklebolt and he said it would be fine. Actually, they seemed quite pleased about my idea. But the hospital wouldn't let me bring it in directly, of course -- Cuthrell has to approve it."

Snape snorted.

"But there's a note on top of the file -- he's got to contact Shacklebolt before he can turn my request down, so that Kingsley can explain the circumstances."

"I'm sure Cuthrell will find a way to protect my frail sensibilities," he said dryly.

Biting down on a giggle, Hermione sat back down at the table. "Well, the good thing is that our conversations aren't monitored, so I can tell you a fair amount about it."

He looked at her expectantly, silently.

"As I said, it appears as if the victim -- his name was Desmond, by the by ... Marcus Desmond, aged twenty-four -- had ingested a near fatal dose of hemlock not an hour prior to death."

"Hemlock ..." Snape mused aloud. "That hardly seems accidental. Not such a volatile herb."

She shrugged. "I thought so, too, what with the notoriety associated with hemlock -- Socrates and all that. So I did a bit of research, and it turns out, actually, that a fair number of people eat hemlock quite by accident. It bears more than a passing resemblance to parsley leaves, and its seeds rather look like anise seeds. But the time span isn't right for an accident. Time of death was put around four o'clock in the afternoon, and if he'd eaten it by mistake, one would think it would have been at a meal."

"So he was poisoned?"

"Oh, no," she said, turning a bit green 'round the gills. "Official cause of death, according to the report, was shock brought on by rapid blood loss. He was more than alive when the killer began cutting. But I have a theory about the hemlock ..."

He threw his hands up and gave her a mocking scowl. "Of course you do," he sighed. "I wager, Granger, that you spend large parts of the day coming up with various theories."

Hermione wondered at her sudden urge to stick her tongue out at him, as if it was Ron Weasley baiting her rather than Snape. "Anyway ..." she said sternly. "In my reading, I noticed that the onset of symptoms is rather swift -- nausea and irritation of the mouth and throat and salivation are the first observed, but all of these are so innocuous that they probably wouldn't be associated with anything too out of the norm. After a while, though, respiratory functions become impaired, and the victim experiences total paralysis, complete with loss of speech."

When she paused to breathe, Snape shot her a nasty look. "Has anyone ever pointed out that listening to you is exactly like listening to someone read a textbook?" But she could see the interested glint in his eyes that belied his words and so continued.

"Total paralysis," she repeated, dropping her 'lecture voice.' "Wouldn't it be possible that meant magical paralysis as well? After all, the disorientation associated with hemlock would certainly slow anyone's reaction time, magical or Muggle."

Realization dawned on Snape's face, and Hermione struggled to contain her delight. "You're saying that you've found a way around wandless protective magic."

"Possibly," she said calmly. "It's just a theory, of course."

"And no one would have noticed it before because their intent would usually have been to simply poison their target. Besides, we've gotten so used to dealing with wandless magic that no one's bothered to make an attempt on someone's life using Muggle means for centuries. Not since the Killing Curse was perfected." His words came more rapidly and his face slowly lost its usual grim cast. "Granger, do you --?"

She nodded. "I think that the killer somehow slipped in, administered the poison, waited for the onset of paralysis, and then killed each victim."

"Does the Aurory know about this?" he asked, unheard of excitement shining in his eyes.

Shrugging, Hermione allowed some of her own excitement to show. "They have the same file I do, of course, but ..."

His reply was cut off as the door slammed open and Cuthrell stood in the doorway, radiating fury. "This is the last straw, Granger!" he cried.

Snape's face hardened into his customary scowl, but Hermione kept her expression carefully neutral. "Dr. Cuthrell," she said pleasantly, standing to greet him. "I confess, I was expecting you."

"I demand to know the contents of this file!" he shouted, waving the manila folder in the air.

"I'm sorry," she replied in that same pleasant tone. "That information is restricted -- only Kingsley Shacklebolt, Ron Weasley, myself, and Severus Snape have access to that particular folder. If you contact Auror Shacklebolt, I'm sure he'll be able --"

Snarling, Cuthrell took a couple of instinctual steps into the room, toward Hermione, and she barely noticed Snape rising to his feet and advancing toward her himself. "Miss Granger," Cuthrell said venomously, "I indeed contacted your Kingsley Shacklebolt, and he patiently fed me a line of bullshit about Severus and murders and Harry bloody Potter. How you got him to spout such ridiculous nonsense, I don't want to know, but, Granger, you are undermining my patient's therapy and I will not have it any longer!"

Hermione found herself absolutely gobsmacked when Snape spoke up. "Three weeks ago, you allowed Albus to bring me a newspaper," he said in a bland, complacent voice that she never in a million years would have believed him capable of.

"That is completely beside the point," Cuthrell snapped, not bothering to put on his usual condescending manner to address his patient. "I will not be cut out of the loop like this. And what's more, how am I to know that Miss Granger here hasn't slipped something forbidden into this folder?"

"That is doubtful, Jake," said a congenial voice from the doorway.

Cuthrell spun around to face a mildly bemused Albus Dumbledore. "Er ... um ... Professor Dumbledore," he stuttered. "I didn't expect to --"

"Young Auror Shacklebolt notified me of your reticence to allow Hermione here to show her file to Severus," he replied agreeably enough. "And so I thought it might be prudent for me to make an appearance, only as Severus' legal guardian, of course."

Cuthrell paled. "Of course," he echoed.

Dumbledore gave him a little smile and Hermione noticed absently that his eyes were sparkling with more than his usual amount of mischievousness. "May I?" He held out a hand.

Cuthrell's pallor took on a decidedly green cast. "Certainly, Professor." And he placed the file grudgingly into Dumbledore's outstretched hand.

With a start, Hermione's jaw dropped as Dumbledore casually opened the file and began leafing through the pages, expressionless. "But ..." she stammered. "But ... you ... I mean ..."

"Yes, my dear?" he asked, taking his attention away from the file long enough to raise an eyebrow at her.

Unwilling to ask in front of a still-sickly looking Cuthrell, Hermione remained silent.

After a few eternal moments, Dumbledore snapped the folder shut and held it out to Hermione. "I see no reason Severus can't look it over, Jake," he said, still keeping his voice light and amiable, but this time, there was a sharp edge to it. "No crowbars or wands in sight."

"As if it would make a damn bit of difference," Snape grumbled, causing Hermione to start with surprise again.

Cuthrell swallowed uncomfortably, and she could tell that he wished he were anywhere but here. "Well, then," he said. "As long as we've established that I absolve myself of any --"

"Yes, yes," Dumbledore interrupted, finally allowing some of his impatience to bleed into his tone. "If Severus does anything inappropriate as a result of viewing Hermione's files, you're not held liable in any way." The sparkle in his eyes was gone, replaced by a flat fury that made Hermione understand completely when Cuthrell just nodded feebly and ran out of the room.

"Thank you, Professor Dumbledore, sir," she said politely as soon as Cuthrell was out of sight.

"Any time, Hermione," he replied in a quiet voice. "Kingsley has brought me up to speed on the situation. And as much as I would like to stay and chat with you two, I'm afraid I must get back to school. I was actually in the middle of handling an incident involving Peeves, an unfortunately large bottle of mustard, and a couple of Ravenclaws. Madam Pomfrey is probably getting quite testy waiting for me, so I must bid you good day, Severus. Hermione." With one last nod, he Disapparated, leaving Hermione and Snape to regard each other warily.

"Mustard?" Snape echoed, glancing about the empty room. "It sounds as if Peeves is slipping."

"Or the house elves have become less trusting," she contributed absently, still fingering the folder in her hands.

Giving her a disbelieving look, Snape snorted.

Hermione recovered herself at the sound. "Well ... let's get to it, shall we?" Tossing the folder onto the table, she sat down and looked up at him expectantly.

As he seated himself, a thought struck her.

"Erm ... I guess I ought to warn you ..." she began haltingly. "There are photographs. Muggle, thankfully, so it's not as bad as it could be."

"I don't follow," he said, wariness edging his voice.

"They're fairly ... graphic," she said, nervously swallowing. "I couldn't ... I mean ..."

He flipped the folder open in response to her stumbling and his eyes rounded. "Oh," he said quietly.

"You see?"

Snape reached out a single finger and ran it across the glossy paper, hesitation clearly mixed with disgust. "What the fuck sort of monster would do --?"

Her mouth was dry. "The report is under ... it looks like things got shuffled ..."

"I have it," he said, extracting a single sheet of paper from the jumble. "Or, part of it, at least."

Hermione allowed him to peruse the file in silence. Occasionally he would swear, but otherwise, he did not speak either. A single picture had slipped out of the pile and Hermione found her eyes drawn to it.

Marcus Desmond, aged twenty-four, loving husband and father of one, lay spread-eagled on an autopsy table, his insides on display for all to see. But from Ron's description, the doctor had not made that particular incision -- Desmond had undergone half of an autopsy prior to death.

While a half-hearted attempt had clearly been made to clean up Desmond's body, blood still spotted the white skin, standing out as brilliant red droplets on a stark canvas. She doubted it would ever wash off completely, but no doubt, they would try. Scouring Charms, Magical Stain-Removers, even good old-fashioned Muggle elbow grease. But they would always know it had been there, could probably always point to the exact location of every single spot.

Someone had thankfully allowed Desmond's eyes to slip closed, but Hermione found herself able to vividly imagine the look of terror that his eyelids hid. His lips were pulled back in his final grimace, revealing even, white teeth, and the set of his jaw indicated to Hermione that if he'd been able to, he would have died with a scream.

Total paralysis, she thought.

They'd been completely helpless in that moment. Desmond, Bones, perhaps Weaver, and maybe Cooke, and ... Harry.

All able-bodied men, full of the vigor of youth, rendered to powerless children in their last minutes. As some monster hacked into ...

Unable to bear it, Hermione closed her eyes, hoping Snape would move the picture.

"Three things," he said, voice sounding impossibly loud to her ears as he spoke into the silence.

"What?" she asked, opening her eyes and finding the folder blissfully closed, all pictures concealed within its depths.

"Three things," Snape said again, and she noticed a bleakness in his gaze that hadn't been there for a while. "One of them, I'm sure you already know."

She shifted in her chair.

"Firstly, which as I've said, I'm sure you guessed already, the victims must have known the killer. All of them."

"I suspected as much," she replied. "But I couldn't prove it. Not even to myself."

"It's not in the file," he said in the closest thing to a kind voice she'd ever heard him use. "But if poison was indeed used, it had to have been administered through food somehow, and you're right -- the time of death and the stomach contents suggest that the victim ate long before the hemlock was ingested. Which means that the killer got him to take it independently -- it couldn't have been smuggled into the house. The victim was tricked into taking it of his own accord."

"That makes sense," she agreed cautiously. "But you said there were two other things."

"I did," he said with a curt nod. "Did you happen to notice, Miss Granger, the coroner's notation about heart weight and condition?"

"Normal condition," she said, parroting what she remembered of the report. "Save for a piece severed off the left ventricle. Given that the weapon used was a knife, it could have happened by --"

"Knives generally are not strong enough to split the ribcage," he interrupted. "The killer had to be trying to get at the heart specifically. With something more along the lines of pliers."

"Well ..." Hermione said thoughtfully. "I was skimming one particular book ..."

Snape's lips curled into a definite sneer. "That must have been a conversation worth overhearing in Flourish and Blotts."

Huffing, she tried to mask her frustration and was sure that she failed. "Arthur Weasley got them for me -- well, for Ron, really, but Ron's not usually one for books -- from a friend of his who works in Muggle law enforcement. The same one who helped him arrange the autopsy, actually. But as I was saying ... in the book, it said that some killers have been known to take ... I think the book called them trophies, but I think it meant like a ... memento of sorts. They collect, oh, like jewelry or things like that."

"You're rambling, Granger ..."

"I am not," she protested. "I remember in one of the cases the book described, the killer took ... well, body parts. Like fingers and toes and such."

His nose wrinkled and Hermione was rather amazed when it occurred to her that she'd actually managed to disgust Severus Snape. "You're joking."

"He kept them in his freezer," she replied.

Staring at her for a moment, his nostrils flared in shock. "You're not joking, are you?"

She shrugged. "So maybe the killer ... took a trophy?" Her stomach twisted as she considered the implications -- that meant that somewhere out there, there was a little piece of Harry Potter, socked away in some madman's ...

"I feel nauseous," she muttered.

To his credit, Snape looked rather green himself.

With a sigh, Hermione yanked her mind forcibly away from the subject and tried to give him a smile. "You have a third point?" Please, her tone begged. Anything but this.

Clearing his throat, he accepted the segue with unease. "Uh ... yes ... that is ... I saw in one of the ..."

She watched him shuffle back through the papers with something very like amazement. Snape was actually disconcerted.

Posture easing back into his usual slump, he extracted a single photo from the file and pushed it toward her. "Look at that ... what do you see?"

First and foremost, she did not want to see anything. It was a close shot of the victim's -- she tried desperately to think of Desmond as the victim, not Marcus Desmond, loving husband and father of one -- torso. Or what was left of it, at least. "It's his chest," she said unnecessarily.

"There's a notation in the report that caught my interest," Snape said. "And it's actually quite clear in this picture. Apparently the coroner can tell somehow that the initial cut started at the base of the throat and went downward."

"Yes?"

"Look at the base of the throat, Granger."

Obediently, Hermione tried to focus on that particular facet of Desmond's -- the victim's body. "I don't see anything. The beginning of an incision ..." She gulped. "Blood spatter ..."

"Exactly," he exclaimed. "There's only one cut. No ... hesitation. Lacking hesitation cuts, the report said. And that means that the killer was ... skilled."

"Skilled?" she echoed.

Snape looked vaguely apologetic -- the expression did not belong anywhere near his face, she eventually decided. "Well ... desensitized, then. Not skilled enough -- the cut gets ragged as it continues down the torso, meaning that he probably doesn't cut things open for a living. But he certainly does it enough that he can make that first cut on the first try. It's not ..." He swallowed convulsively and Hermione saw one of his hands move toward his wrist. "It's not easy to do."

She decided not to press the subject beyond saying, "we know he's done this three times at least, and what you're saying is that he's probably done it a fair amount more."

"It would have been helpful to examine his previous victims," Snape said, hand drifting away from his wrist and coming to rest by his side.

She ignored him and began ticking points off on her fingers, making a mental list of the facts. "So, what we know so far is that the killer is most likely someone that the victims all knew, that he is intelligent enough to have figured out how to circumvent their wandless magic using poison, and experienced enough to go about it quite clinically."

"Don't forget that, according to you, he might be crazy enough to take bits along and stick them in his icebox," he added, grimacing.

"Right," she said, feeling her stomach turn again. "We've mostly got the how, then. Which leaves us ..."

"With the why," Snape completed uncharacteristically.

Cocking her head, Hermione studied him with disbelief. "Yes ..." she said faintly. "The why. Two whys actually. One, why does the killer kill at all, and two, why did he kill these three in particular?"

"The latter of the two sounds rather less daunting," he said.

"Although it's eluded the Aurory for close to three months now," she replied. "A common thread. Different jobs, different homes, different friends, but they've got something in common."

"Political affiliations?"

Hermione thought for a moment. "No ... Harry throws that off -- according to Ron, he was very careful to remain neutral."

For once, Snape did not have anything overly waspish to say, although she was certain he was thinking it, whatever it was. "Were they all in the same house at Hogwarts?"

"Bones was in Hufflepuff," she replied. "And besides, if we're right and there are more victims, I think I know at least two more -- Alisander Weaver and Romulus Cooke. And Cooke went to Durmstrang."

His voice had an unprecedented note of desperation in it. "Birthdays?"

"July, October, and February," she said, defeated.

Snape huffed to himself.

Squinting at the tabletop, Hermione spoke slowly and carefully. "Maybe ... I don't know ... it's probably stupid, but there's one connection that no one's mentioned. They're all wizards."

She could tell he was holding back a particularly acidic rejoinder by the pained look on his face.

"And ..." she said, still thinking hard. "None of them were particularly old. In fact, all of them were more or less in their prime, by wizarding standards. Burgeoning families, successful jobs ..."

"Perfect lives," she and Snape said in unison, faces mirroring their shock.

"Could ... could that be it?" Hermione asked timidly. "It seems so ..."

"It's something, Miss Granger," Snape said thoughtfully. "All of the victims had no other reason to die. Young, healthy, successful men, and for the most part, lacking enemies, if you ignore Potter's past."

They watched each other for a moment, neither one showing any particular emotion.

"Well ..." Hermione eventually said. "Kingsley Shacklebolt thought I was barking mad before. He'll have me committed once I tell him this."

-- -- -- -- --