Tortured Dreams

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter 17

"The first victim is a brunette based on her roots, although it is dyed much darker at this time, roughly 5 feet and six inches tall. Good teeth, blue eyes, Caucasian, with a recent pedicure and manicure," Xavier was speaking into his recorder again.

"X-rays indicate she has over 200 fractures, some minor stress fractures, some major fracturing of the bones. Her spinal cord has been severed, but the skin remains unbroken. Her ribs all have multiple fractures, two have broken off completely. One pierced her liver, the other her heart. She was already dead when it happened."

He looked at me, "are you sure you want to be here for this?"

"Nope, I am sure I don't. I would rather be doing a lot of other things than watching you cut her open, but I was ordered to be here."

"Go get a coffee or soda; I'll be out in just a minute. We have cause of death and I think we can fairly easily agree that your torture hoop is a good match. We'd need the exact hoop to know for sure, but a circular item that caused intense pressure is the only thing I can see that would make these types of fractures."

"Great, want anything?"

"Coffee, black."

I left the room and got Xavier a coffee and me a Mountain Dew from the vending machines. When I returned he was sitting outside. He looked at me.

"You're positive that the hoop thing could do that kind of damage?"

"The Scavenger's Daughter is a precision device. It's a giant iron ring, like you'd find on an old fashioned barrel. At the top of the ring, there is a mechanism. Like a screw that either tightens the hoop or loosens the hoop. I can't think of anything to compare the mechanism to at the moment. The hoop gets larger or smaller depending on how it is turned. As it tightens, the victim, who is kneeling in the fetal position, becomes constricted. The tighter it gets the more damage it does. Since it is mechanized and forged iron or steel, it is pretty durable. I found records of torturers taking it too far and victims spontaneously start bleeding from all their orifices because there is just nowhere in the body for the blood to flow. So it finds an exit. There was an incident where the hoop slipped and cut off a head. It wasn't intended to be deadly, it just happened once in a while."

"Now it is being used for that," Xavier commented. "And why deviate? He's been sticking to the pictures; why not stick to the pictures?"

"Too gruesome or hard to fulfill?" I suggested.

"How do you figure?"

"I don't know. It's hard to get more gruesome than drawing and quartering or impaling. The Pear of Anguish and the Skull Crusher are both mechanized and easy to use. The torture wheel would be the only difficult one, but if you can get five Iron Maidens, you can get a torture wheel. He isn't sticking with just mechanized forms. Impaling requires wood, not metal and isn't mechanized. Drawing and quartering was done with horses, now days it could be done with cars, but it wouldn't work without more than one person. The four corners of movement are what make it really terrible."

"Stop, explain that." Xavier said.

"Ok, with drawing and quartering, you were tied to four horses or oxen, normally. Each animal was then 'encouraged' to run the direction they were pointing. This caused massive damage and pain. Being pulled in four directions at once is what really caused it. If only one horse or ox moved, the others would actually go with that one. In rare cases, they'd stay stationary, but that meant the victim usually only lost a limb. When all of them were moving, one would get a torso or the torso would be ripped in half as well as the limbs being pulled off. If you were tied to four cars and only one of them moved, the same thing would happen. You'd lose a limb, you wouldn't actually be quartered. If you only use two animals or cars, the victim tended to tear in half and the arms came off. The legs were so firmly attached that they often remained connected. So you need four points of motion to draw and quarter. Are we positive that they were drawn and quartered and not just hacked off?"