Where Monsters Dwell by Jørgen Brekke

Author:Jørgen Brekke [Brekke, Jørgen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Historical
ISBN: 9781250016805
Google: 7IVWAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1250016800
Barnesnoble: 1250016800
Goodreads: 17910098
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2011-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

20

Richmond, September 2010

September looked like it was going to be as hot as August, the air heavy with humidity. After the police got the results on the five-hundred-year-old piece of human skin that Efrahim Bond had sent to VCU for analysis, the investigation of the murder took a new turn. The volume that Mrs. Price had observed without a leather spine came into focus, and both the book and the binding were quickly located by Laubach in one of the desk drawers in Bond’s office.

“A book bound in human skin. Have you ever heard of something like this?” Felicia Stone asked her boss, shaking her head. They were sitting alone in her boss’s office, and Morris was loudly eating a carrot.

“Actually, I have. I’ve even seen one,” said Morris, a bit smug about the answer. She gave him an expectant look. She had long ago given up being surprised by Morris’s vast store of knowledge.

“The book is in the anatomy museum at Edinburgh University. My wife and I went there on our honeymoon a long time ago. That museum is unforgettable.”

“Really? What poor soul did the skin come from?”

“Not a poor soul—William Burke, a serial killer. One of the first we know of. You’ve studied serial killers—haven’t you heard of William Burke and William Hare?”

“Yes, that does ring a bell. They were grave robbers in Scotland in the nineteenth century, weren’t they? They sold corpses to anatomists.”

“That’s right. In Great Britain back then they could only perform dissections on people who’d been executed. But that couldn’t meet the increasing demand for corpses from a medical field that was rapidly expanding. So anatomists bought corpses from grave robbers to use in their studies and lectures. The authorities turned a blind eye to this practice. The problem with Burke and Hare was that they gradually switched from stealing corpses to producing their own. Altogether they killed at least seventeen people, and they sold the corpses to a doctor named Robert Knox. To this day we don’t know whether or not Knox knew where the bodies came from.”

“But how did Burke’s skin wind up on the spine of a book?”

“Well, the law finally caught up with Burke and Hare, and they were executed. Since they’d been sentenced to death, their bodies were legally available for dissection, ironically enough. During the dissection of Burke’s body, his skin was stolen. It resurfaced some weeks later as decorations on a number of objects, among them the notebook that I saw.”

“I have goose bumps!” said Felicia, looking at her arm. Her thoughts shifted to Ed Gein, the murderer Laubach had mentioned the first time they saw the body of Efrahim Bond. She recalled that after Gein was caught, they found a whole bunch of things at his home that had been made of human skin. Among them was a woman’s dress that Gein used to put on to play his dead mother, but also lamp shades and chair upholstery.

“Pretty creepy,” said Morris. “But Burke was probably not the only one in history that had happened to.

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