“There isn’t one,” Grace complained, one hand dragging across her eyes. “It’s the black of night, besides.”

“Our work isn’t done in the daylight,” Thornhollow said, rifling through the closet for clothing, which he tossed at her head. “Or rather, their work isn’t. If we’re to catch them while the deed is still fresh, we must keep the same hours.”

“What’s this?” A voice came from the doorway and Janey, the head nurse for the female ward, came into Grace’s room, confusion making lines on her otherwise young face. “Doctor! I know this girl is under your special care, but you’ll not be barging into her room in the middle of the night. Not in my ward, no, sir.”

“I apologize,” Thornhollow said, though he hardly sounded contrite. “However, we must work quickly to—ouch!” His sentence was cut off when Janey grabbed his ear.

“And I must work quickly as well, sir. You’re the doctor, and I’m to take your orders. But in the night these women are under my care, and I will not have a man walking among them, no matter how many degrees he has!”

“Grace,” Thornhollow said calmly as he was led from her room, “if you could meet me outside?”

She nodded dumbly and looked up to find that Janey had remained behind with her. “The rest of the staff said you don’t speak a word, but you can move your head yes or no as to whether or not you want to go with the doctor?”

The young nurse’s lips twisted when Grace acknowledged that she did. “All right then,” Janey said. “If it’s your will, I’ll not go against it. The superintendent said that the new doctor has some interests that might be taking him about in the middle of the night and you in his wake.”

The clothing Thornhollow had thrown at Grace now rested on her lap. Janey began sorting through the items. “Although I’d advise you to manage your own wardrobe from here on out. He’s given you three undergarments.”

Grace smothered a smile and let Janey help her dress in more suitable clothing, then followed the ward nurse to the lobby, where Thornhollow waited for her, his ear still red. They walked outside, where his carriage was ready and waiting, a driver in place.

“Doctor,” she said quietly once they were safely ensconced inside. “You said we must move quickly in order to catch them while the deed is still fresh. Who are they?”

“My dear Grace,” Thornhollow said. “I thought you understood. We’re going to catch murderers.”

It was a gruesome scene, lit by the flickering lamps of the policemen and the flashes of lightning that still ripped through the night. Thornhollow pulled his valise out of the carriage and held a hand out to help her down, while their driver hunched himself awkwardly against the pelting rain. Grace stymied the rush of nerves as she reached out of the safe anonymity of the gig for his hand, her face going instantly slack as soon as she passed through the doorframe. Even the mauled body on the pavement did not move her as she alighted from the carriage, each footstep as light and quick as a ghost’s.

“Gentlemen, what is the situation?” Thornhollow asked.

“You the fellow playing policeman, are you, then?” a portly officer asked as he stepped over the blood pooling in the rainwater. “You’ve still got a bit of a baby face, yet you want to be a doctor and policeman both? Want to take your paycheck from the asylum and mine alongside it?”

The younger policeman nodded toward the carriage. “A gig as fine as that, with a nice shiny horse . . . he doesn’t make that money up on the ridge.”

“And a driver too,” his partner added. “What you pay him to bring you out here this time of night? More than I make, I wouldn’t wonder.”

“Per my agreement with your commanding officer—decided upon when I applied for the job at the asylum—I’m being afforded every opportunity to learn more about the criminal mind,” Thornhollow said patiently. “Gentlemen, your job is nothing more than my hobby.

“As to my driver, his name is Ned, and he manages the asylum’s stables. He was kicked in the skull some years ago, bringing about the damage that made his new residence a necessity, though he harbors no ill will toward the species that brought the fate upon him. He chooses to live in the stables and spends his days carving small figurines of horses, as if in worship of the animal that delivered him from the necessity of having to interact with people such as yourselves. If I need him in the night, he’s there, without complaint. So, if you’ll step aside so that I can satisfy my curiosity, I’ll take myself and my assistant out of your immediate area as soon as possible.”

“I’d heard that about the asylum up on the hill,” the heavier man said, his gaze still on the driver. “That you give ’em regular jobs. I never heard the like of it.”

“Yes, we do give them regular jobs, and as I said, they do them without complaint, making them much more effective than any rational workingman I know.”

“Your assistant?” the younger man asked, peering at Grace. “How come we don’t have pretty girls to follow us around and carry our nightsticks, George?”

“I bet the doctor sees to her nightsticks, sure enough, Davey.”

Their words were lost on their target. Grace remained as she was, empty gaze riveted on the dead body, sketching the details of the scene onto the blankness that she had created inside herself.

“Don’t talk much, do you?” Davey snapped his fingers in front of her, but she didn’t so much as blink.

Thornhollow didn’t look up from where he knelt beside the corpse. “I wouldn’t antagonize the girl too much, if I were you,” he warned. “She’s a mental patient as well.”

“She one of them that just stares?” George asked, all attention on Grace so that he didn’t notice Thornhollow going through the victim’s pockets.

“Stares, yes,” the doctor said. “Although every now and then a fit of violence takes her. The staff has yet to figure out what causes them. The other day they sent her out to milk the cows and she ripped two teats clean off one of the heifers.”

Davey eyed Thornhollow with suspicion but edged away from Grace nonetheless.

“She get tied down a lot, eh, doctor?” George asked, his eyebrows up near his greasy hairline.

“I don’t know her history,” Thornhollow said as he touched an open wound on the dead man’s face. “Although the asylum practices the most humane type of medicine, so I severely doubt this young woman has ever been bound against her will.”

“Seems complacent enough,” Davey ventured again, curiosity overcoming caution as he moved around Grace in a semicircle.

“They should all be done in, make no mistake,” George said, his beady eyes narrowing on Grace. “Even the ones with the sweet faces such as hers. You don’t know what devil lurks inside if it’s like you said, tearing into a milk cow who done nothing wrong that day.

“You’d do better to practice your medicine on them that can be healed, Doctor. The works of such as goes on up at the asylum is an offense to nature. Ain’t no survival of the fittest at work anymore when we’re housing the idiots and stocking their kitchens with the food from our own larders. I work hard and I earn my bread for me and mine and seeing the likes of her staring there into the ground as if she don’t know up from down and she’s got a better roof over her head tonight than my little ones opens up a hole in my heart, it does.”

“The existence of said organ still being under great question,” Thornhollow said under his breath.

“What’s that?”

“I said this man suffered some damage to his organs.”

“That he did,” Davey agreed. “Some of us do take an interest in the mad, you know, sir, having so many here in our own town.” Thornhollow made a noise in his throat that was hardly encouraging, but the officer continued. “My papaw said he’s seen a time or two when more than one person from the same family ends up there on the hill. What you say to that, Dr. Thornhollow? Does madness run in the families? Or is it all skewed, and you never know who’s going to . . . to tear the tits off a cow, or something the like?”