The Woman Without a Face: Jack Craft Mystery, #1

By Kendall Hanson

It is 1875 and former stagecoach shotgun Jack Craft, the newest member of the just formed Denver Police, discovers a horrific murder unlike any he has ever seen. Was it random? Or revenge? With little to go on, Jack carefully untangles the thread of mystery surrounding the death of the woman without a face.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kendall Hanson
• Release date: Feb 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781929516391

Book preview

1

Why?

The thought popped into Jack Craft's head as he knelt over the faceless corpse lying on the stale straw of the stable floor. He reached over and gently brushed more of the straw away, first from the graying hair rimming her empty face and then down the front, revealing a pair of pale hands folded almost peacefully above the stark red gash running from beneath the victim's small bosom down to just above the area where her legs would join. Saying the word out loud pushed away some of the horror of what his eyes beheld.

Behind him, he heard the sound of retching. It was the short man who had fetched him off his beat scarcely half an hour ago.

The man, Ridgeley he said, had hung onto the sleeve of the Craft's wool coat as he dragged him along the street. You must come, marshal, the smell is horrendous.

We don't use that term now, Craft remembered to say as he recalled the speech Chief McCallin had given at the station two days ago. We prefer that citizens use 'constable' or even 'officer' instead of the common word most of us have grown accustomed to, the chief said as the men lined up for roll call. We are only just part of the marshal's office temporarily, but I believe that we will quickly become the most important bulwark against the criminal elements in the city. To Craft the distinction seemed unimportant, but as the newest member of Denver's constabulary, as McCallin liked to call it, he didn't imagine having much say in the matter.

Although the lower downtown of Denver was cramming new buildings together like hens being roosted, the houses here at the end of Fifteenth Avenue still had an acre or two between them. A few log cabins and mud huts were even left from pioneer days, but Ridgeley had pulled Craft toward a small house with a gingerbread trim on a broad front porch behind a meager grass lawn. The peeling paint on the clapboard siding suggested that its occupant had once had a bit of spare change, even though the stable behind the house, Craft noticed, was unadorned in any way. He could just see a wagon with a broken wheel parked behind the stable.

New horse-car rails ran along the street past the house, so the occupants here had likely abandoned their need to keep their own animal, he decided. The horse-car rails, in fact, extended for another quarter mile to the west where Craft assumed the driver would re-harness the animal for the return journey back into the city. Although this avenue was part of his beat, he seldom walked out this far since most of the trouble he dealt with was much closer to Denver's boisterous downtown.

As they neared the house, the smell became as rank and foul as the little man had described. The front door was jammed, so Craft went around to the back where another door with paned glass offered entry. The glass on this door also suggested the occupant was better off than most, so Craft hesitated to break a pane to unlock the catch. The last thing he wanted at the moment was a complaint from an unhappy homeowner. Landing such a well-paying job after seeking employment for six months was a stroke of luck and he had no intention of jeopardizing it.

Fortunately, when he tried the latch, the door yielded easily. Craft breathed a sigh of relief. McCallin was strict with his rules and seemed to look for reasons to reprimand them. Besides, the chief of police had not been pleased when his least favorite alderman had recommended Craft for the position.

The kitchen had clean plaster walls, a wooden sink, a small table with two chairs, a large wood stove with an oven and even one of the iceboxes that Craft had heard about but never seen. On the counter beside the sink, though, a startled mouse quickly ducked away from the bag of flour it had gnawed. It left little white prints as it scurried into a crack between the sink and the wall. Judging from the amount of flour the creature had spilled and the little spoors it had left behind, the bag of flour had been sitting out for some time.

The house held a silence that said no one had been inside it for a while. Bidding the small man to wait at the back door, Craft walked through the kitchen and found himself in a tiny dining room off of a small parlor. The parlor window looked out onto the street. Through a framed doorway, a narrow hall ran alongside a staircase leading to a second floor. Two other doors opened off of the parlor. One led to a larger bedroom with an armoire, wash table and a good-sized bed that hadn't been slept in. The chamber pot, too, was empty and dry.

The second door opened into a more cluttered space with a smaller bed, washstand, and some hooks that presumably were for clothes though none hung there now. The bed had been stripped, however, and just the wheat mattress was on it.

Marshal, do you see anything? the little man called to him.

Craft walked back into the kitchen. The house was not holding the horrible smell that the outside provided. When he looked down, however, he noticed a dab of dried blood on the edge of one table leg. Let's take a look in the stable, he said to the little man and brushed past him as he went into the yard.

Outside, five or six chickens ran free even though a blur of feathers on the ground suggested at least a couple of their number had met a violent end. The pen's door was ajar enough to allow them to escape, but it didn't look like it had been left open on purpose. On impulse Craft quickly checked the hen house. All the eggs were gone, but that might only mean a predator had gained access through the pen's open door. Still, the door was not far open, and it occurred to him that a coyote or raccoon making their way in would have widened the opening in passing. A human who had taken the eggs, though, might close it back carelessly.

The nearer they drew to the stable, the more obvious the source of the rank odor. Added to it now was the loud drone of what had to be a sizable swarm of flies. Craft pulled out the only handkerchief he owned to cover his nose and mouth. The little man stopped in the yard halfway and said, Are you going to open the door?

Craft nodded to him, but now the smell was almost choking him.

The door opened with a groan as the rusty hinges resisted his strength. A blast of odor staggered him and he pulled the door open as wide as possible, as much to let out the smell as to give him more light to see inside.

Dim light would have sufficed.

The flies were up and buzzing above a small stand of hay. Two small feet stuck out from under it, and they were centered in a dark puddle of blood that had dried days ago.

Craft removed his derby and batted the flies away as he could. Using his hat, he began to push the top of the hay to the side even as he looked around to make sure he hadn't stepped in any potential footprints on the dirt floor. Ridgeley had come to the door, but Craft waved him away. Don't come in yet. Stay outside while I see what we have. And watch where you step, we'll want to look at the footprints. The man nodded, and Craft could tell he was relieved.

It took a few minutes to clear the hay away so that Craft could see the body attached to the shoes. As the torso revealed itself, his stomach began to churn even though he had seen more than his share of the dead in a variety of ugly poses in his twenty-four years.

Nothing had prepared him for the missing face.

He reached down now and took one of the small hands in his own. The cold skin made him feel helpless, and he had the fanciful notion that if he just held the hand for a moment more, it would begin to warm and the damaged body would begin to repair itself. He could wish it so, but no amount of hope would return life to this body, and finally he replaced the hand as it had been and gave a deep sigh. He thought then of his mother who had recently moved with her lover to San Francisco. The dead woman reminded him of her somehow, and he had a quick sense of dread and concern that his mother was still whole, still alive.

The man at the door retched again. Craft would have joined him, but realized in that moment he was now the authority who would have to take charge of arrangements for this poor woman lying in the bed of hay before him.

He stood up and pushed the little man by the shoulder away from the doorway and out into the open yard. It's too horrible, Ridgeley burbled. I shall never be able to forget it,

It is horrible, but right now I need you to pull yourself together and go fetch my boss from the main station downtown, Craft said.

I don't think I can walk that far, the man said. I'm too sick now to do it.

I saw a grocer down the street, Craft said as he nodded toward the city. See if he has a boy who can run fetch some other officers. We'll need a wagon as well. Can you get that far, Craft said with a sudden hardness in his voice, or would you rather stay here with the body?

The man shook his head at the threat and made his way unsteadily toward the road as he mumbled to himself. Craft didn't need to guess what he was saying.

He stepped farther away from the stable and took a deep breath of air that, until a few moments ago, had seemed so polluted. Now it smelled fresh by comparison. Steeling himself to view the corpse once again, he went back inside and began to examine the ground around the body. The chickens had clearly been in the stable since the tragic event. Only one clear footprint could be made out from the jumble of the dirt floor. Craft found a pitchfork and rake, and set those alongside the track so that anyone coming in would avoid stepping on it.

With his handkerchief again in place, he renewed his examination of the disfigured corpse. Several strands of the woman's long gray hair had come undone from a bun woven around her head beneath the bonnet that had partially fallen off. Perhaps it was the bun that reminded him of his mother. Better not to think on it.

Looking at her neck, Craft decided she had been strangled in some fashion before this bloody work had occurred. Craft had seen similar marks around the bodies of men who had been hung with a rope. But these marks were thin as though she had been hung with a string. He had once seen a Frenchman use such a trick in a brothel dispute and had almost made short work of his victim before Craft clubbed him off.

What bothered him most, though, was what the murderer had done to her face. Using a knife or something just as sharp, he had cut out an oval that encompassed the chin, cheeks and forehead, and then he had peeled it away leaving only the muscle and bone to show as well as two eyeballs dangling from what was left of their sockets. The eyes bothered him no end, so he took his handkerchief away, unfolded it, and put it over the sight.

Craft stood up and walked back outside to wait for help to arrive. He had fought outlaws, drunks, gunslingers and just about every type of villain anyone cared to name, but when he took the job with the newly formed Denver Police and put on the little tin star with the number twelve on it, he never expected to see anything like this.

He tried to imagine someone who would have enough rage to cut the very face from their victim, but he couldn't fathom such an emotion. A sudden fear overwhelmed him. No woman on his beat could ever be safe from such a creature unless the murderer was caught and quickly. In all his years as a lookout, he had never allowed a woman to be hurt, and now in his first days as a policeman, a woman on his beat had been brutally victimized. It made him angry and helpless at the same time. He couldn't tolerate it. He wouldn't rest until he found this murderer. He wouldn't, and that was a promise he made to himself. But deep within, he began to doubt that he could keep such a promise.

2

McCallin stood over the body for a long time without saying a word.

The Chief had arrived in the station carriage about thirty minutes after Craft sent the little man to find someone at the station. Two other patrolmen came with him as well as Brennan, a man McCallin called the detective who had a badge but didn't wear it in public.

The man who had summoned Craft was burbling to McCallin how he lived with his wife in a cabin across the street and a bit east toward the city. The fall wind had blown the stench over to his place. At first they had just figured someone was slaughtering a steer, but when the smell had continued for a couple of days, they decided something else was up and his wife had insisted he find a policeman to investigate.

Craft had been with the Denver Police for less than two months, and already was beginning to doubt his decision. It's one thing to roust customers in a saloon or bordello, which he had been doing off and on as a lookout since he was about sixteen. It was quite different to find yourself walking up and down streets, mile after mile, every day, in any kind of weather, with always the feeling that at any moment someone could come up to you and beg you to put your life in danger by catching a burglar who might be armed, or breaking up a fight between two angry men who resented the interference, or stepping between two men determined to gun each other down, or worst of all, delivering a baby. All of those situations had happened to Craft in just his first two months, but the experiences paled beside what he had found this morning.

Brennan the detective was a deputy city marshal. Craft knew him slightly, but the police seldom had much to do with the city marshals who were charged with protecting the courts and catching the more hardened criminals, and from McCallin’s attitude about them, Craft had sensed a political motive was behind the separation as well. The police were charged with keeping the city peaceful and safe, McCallin would frequently remind them at morning roll.

Craft watched as the marshal walked around the body and murmured to McCallin in a voice too low for Craft to hear as he stood by the door and pretended he was not straining to hear what was said. The detective pointed to the stable door and then along a line to the body as he said something that McCallin obviously agreed to. Looking up at Craft, the detective said, No sign of a struggle in the house?

No. He wasn't sure whether to add Sir, so he didn't. Brennan didn't seem to care either. But it was curious that one bed was made and the others were completely bare.

McCallin frowned. Why do you think it curious?

I don't know many women who can stand an unmade bed.

And you are an authority on women, are you? Brennan chuckled.

More than most.

Craft's reply raised the detective's eyebrow and brought a smile to his lips. A ladies man, then?

Most older women seem to crave a sense of order. An unmade bed is an affront to their sensibility. I'm sure you've noticed that yourself.

Not among the women I'm ... most familiar with, he said.

The victim's house was tidy, Craft continued.

It doesn't matter, McCallin said. Clearly she was killed here in the stable. As Brennan pointed out to me, there's no trail of blood. She must have been standing just here when strangled.

But you have another theory, don't you officer, Brennan said without looking back at the Chief. Now Craft remembered. McCallin wanted the new police to refer to themselves as officers as though they were somehow in the army when technically, they were still deputy marshals like Brennan.

I found dried blood at the foot of one of the kitchen table legs. As though someone had mopped the floor, but missed a spot. That's all.

So you think she was murdered in the house? McCallin ran his hand over