The Daemoniac

by Kat Ross

As Myrtle had put it all those years ago, I’d looked but I didn’t see.

  I thought I knew now who had killed Becky. Who had lured or coerced Raffele Forsizi and Anne Marlowe and the others to their deaths.

  Who had nearly killed me in the Ramble.

  The ragpicker had been bait to draw me into a deserted area of the park, I was certain of it. She wasn’t taken from an elevated line, and the timing was too perfect to be a coincidence. I was getting uncomfortably close to the truth. The killer wanted me eliminated.

  But could I prove it?

  “What is it, Harry?” Connor asked with concern.

  I realized I was standing in the middle of the street and shook myself.

  “Nothing,” I said, unwilling to share my theory just yet. “I’m fine. Let’s go round up John and Edward. It’s time to go home.”

  As it turned out, they were waiting at the barouche when we arrived. The hour was past three, and the party was breaking up. I let Connor tell the story, still wrapped in my own thoughts. They were appalled at my near miss, but I could see John hadn’t yet forgiven me for dancing with James Moran. He sat next to Connor on the way home, and his goodbye when we dropped him off at Gramercy Park was polite but reserved.

  Mrs. Rivers helped me remove my torn, stained gown and I crawled into bed, expecting I’d never fall asleep. My mind kept returning to that narrow stone archway, and what lay beyond it, just out of reach of the silver moonlight. Fragments of images slid past. A bowl of bloody water. Billy Finn reading from a book with a black cover made of calfskin, or something even softer. The skin of another kind of animal.

  Pop Goes the Weasel! played senselessly in the background, faster and faster like some manic jack-in-the-box. I knew I would never again hear that song without remembering the glimmer of a cruel blade.

  But I had barely rested since Monday, and sheer exhaustion soon dragged me down into the depths of a deep and dreamless slumber.

  I didn’t wake for sixteen hours. The sun was already descending in its long arc when I stumbled downstairs to the kitchen. It had been eight days since Leland and Elizabeth Brady knocked on my front door. Myrtle would be home tomorrow.

  The end game was at hand.

  “You look like you could use a cup of coffee, Harry,” Edward said cheerfully, pouring one and setting it before me.

  Everyone was there. John, Connor, Nellie, Mrs. Rivers. Even my client.

  “I came to tell you it wasn’t Robert,” he said. “The body in the river. They haven’t identified it yet, but the poor fellow at the morgue was at least twenty years older and several inches shorter.” Brady swallowed. “Though it had been underwater for so long the face was…unrecognizable.”

  “I’m relieved to hear it,” I said, although I wasn’t surprised. “Have you been informed of recent developments?”

  “Yes, Mr. Dovington and Doctor Weston told me what happened last night. Thank God your boy came along.” He looked genuinely apologetic. “I’m sorry I dragged you into this, Miss Pell. I never intended to put you in any personal danger.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “But I fear that this person we seek will be enraged that they were interrupted. They will need to kill again right away. Tonight.”

  “Perhaps it’s time we went to the police,” Brady ventured. “I suppose I’ll lose my job, or worse, but we can’t put any more lives at risk.”

  “He’s right,” Nellie said. “You’ve taken it far enough, Harry. We should bring the authorities in.” She smiled. “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you get your fair share of credit for solving the case.”

  I framed my next words very carefully. I needed their help.

  “We could contact the police,” I said. “They would flood the elevated lines with uniformed officers. And our killer would get spooked. I don’t think the murders would stop, but the pattern would change. They’d find a new way to procure victims. It’s not hard, in this city. And we’d lose our one advantage. That the killer doesn’t yet know that we know the hunting ground.”

  No one spoke for a moment. Then John surprised me by taking my side.

  “The investigation would be back to square one,” he agreed.

  I cast him a grateful look, which he didn’t return.

  “I’m also certain that the killer has Billy Finn somewhere,” I added. “There’s a slim chance he could still be alive. If this lunatic goes to ground, it’s as good as signing Billy’s death warrant.”

  “So what are you proposing?” Brady asked.

  I took a deep breath. “That we conduct the search ourselves. We have Connor’s…associates, as well as another auxiliary force I’ve hired to assist. It should be enough to cover the Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Avenue elevated lines. We know the killer wears a soldier’s uniform and I don’t expect a deviation from that routine. We watch and we wait. Groups of three, I think. If they try anything, one of us will be there to stop it.”

  “And you really think he’ll strike again so soon?” Edward asked.

  “I think the killer has no choice anymore,” I said. “The compulsion is too strong.”

  “I wish to be there, if you’ll have me,” Brady said quietly, pressing a hand to his forehead. “If it is Robert, I don’t want any harm coming to him. He should be put in an asylum, not handed over to the hangman.”

  “Your presence would be welcome,” I said. “So. Are we all in agreement?”

  Edward, Harry, Brady and Connor nodded, Mrs. Rivers more reluctantly so. Nellie looked around and threw up her hands.

  “So be it,” she said. “Count me in. John Cockerill”—that was Nellie’s editor at The World—will certainly salivate over a first-hand account of the hunt for Mr. Hyde. Though I don’t have a very good feeling about this, Harry, and I’m telling you so for the record.”

  I looked around at the unsmiling but courageous group in the kitchen and prayed that I was making the right decision.

  “Then we meet back here at nine o’clock,” I said. “So far none of the murders have occurred before sundown, so that should give us adequate time to get in place. And wear your rattiest clothing, we want to blend in as much as possible. I’ll draw up the assignments.”

  Everyone left to prepare for what promised to be another long night ahead. I realized that I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d eaten, and Mrs. Rivers volunteered to whip up some pancakes and bacon, which Connor generously helped me devour.

  While she washed up, I composed a short telegram. Connor was on his way out to round up the Bank Street Butchers, so I gave it to him with strict instructions to await the response. If I was right in my suspicions, the answering telegram would confirm it.

  The trap had been set. Now I had only to spring it.

  Chapter 16

  Night fell swiftly as we assembled in the parlor of 40 West Tenth Street.

  I had again borrowed a set of Connor’s clothes and stuffed my hair into a cap, pulling the brim down low so it shadowed my eyes.

  My friends had followed instructions—even Edward, although I could see it pained him to wear baggy breeches with holes at the knees and a shirt so old it was the sickly grey of New York’s gutters after a rainstorm.

  Nellie, whose face was the most well-known, wore a floppy bonnet, while John had somehow managed to acquire the dour vestments of a Catholic priest.

  “Rupert’s,” he said when Edward raised an inquiring eyebrow. “Trust me, you don’t even want to know what he used it for.”

  The Butchers found the situation highly amusing. They sprawled on the carpet looking at the pictures in Connor’s penny dreadfuls and ribbing each other in some street dialect so riddled with slang I could barely understand a word. I did, however, learn their names: Clyde, Danny, Two-Toed Tom, Kid Spiegelman, Little Artie and Virgil the Goat.

  They were all between the ages of six and ten. Clyde was the tallest, Danny the fastest sprinter. Tom had been run over by a carriage when he was five, or at least his left foot had. Kid Spiegelman
could pick any lock ever devised in less than thirty seconds. Little Artie was blessed with wide blue eyes and a cherubic face that he used to con charitable institutions for orphans. And Virgil…he had fingers like fishhooks. Twice I’d emptied his pockets of sundry items, including mother’s favorite silver salt cellar. But every time I turned my back, they started bulging again.

  The Butchers had descended on the house like a pack of locusts, and Mrs. Rivers was in a lather rushing to and fro with plates of toast and jam that disappeared as fast as she could carry them from the kitchen.

  “Where’s Moran?” John asked, his voice tight. “It’s getting late.”

  “He’ll be here,” I said. “We had a deal.”

  But I was starting to worry. It was ten minutes past nine.

  I unfurled the telegram Connor had brought and reread it for the tenth time.

  It was the final piece in the puzzle. I had showed it to no one, unwilling to tip my hand until the right moment. It was critical that the killer be confronted in the act. There was no other way.

  “What line are we taking?” Brady asked. He’d dressed in plain workingman’s clothes, with suspenders and a bowler hat that emphasized his unfortunate ears.

  I examined the map spread on the table before us. “I’m not sure yet. I was waiting on Moran’s boys, but we may as well start divvying them up. Any suggestions?”

  Brady shrugged. “Downtown, the Third Avenue El, perhaps? It’s the only line I’m really familiar with.”

  “Alright. You, John and myself will take that one. Nellie, Clyde and Little Artie can ride the Ninth Avenue Line. Edward, Virgil and Tom can cover Second Avenue, and Connor, Spiegelman and Danny can take Sixth Avenue. Remember, use your whistles to summon a patrolman if you see anything. This person is extremely dangerous. If no police are around, at least you can follow and make an identification.”

  “There aren’t enough of us,” Nellie pointed out. “Not to cover four lines.”

  She was right, but I was unwilling to admit it.

  “We can’t just give up,” I said. “The killer is out there tonight. And so is the next victim.”

  Nellie sighed. “How will we know if one of the other teams gets lucky?”

  “We won’t,” I said. “So we should all rendezvous back here at three a.m. We’ll compare notes then.”

  “You really think we’ll find Billy?” Kid Spiegelman asked.

  The Butchers looked at each other.

  “He were the best stogger we had,” Artie said regretfully. “Dog-nipper too. Billy were a man of many talents.”

  “A right bane of the Philistines,” Tom agreed.

  “Ah, he’s cocked his toes up,” Virgil the Goat muttered.

  “No he ain’t!” Kid Spiegelman said. “Don’t say that. I won’t believe Billy’s a stiff til I see it with my own gagers.”

  “He’s not dead, and we’ll get him back,” I said. “I promise you.”

  The Butchers quieted down, but their skeptical looks made it clear that adult promises (or even teenage promises) were worth very little.

  I was just rising to rally my meager troops when a knock came on the front door.

  It wasn’t Moran. It didn’t surprise me that he wouldn’t come himself. A boy like James Moran never got his hands dirty when others could do it for him. He always kept a wide buffer between himself and his subordinates. It’s why Myrtle had never been able to catch him.

  But when I peered past the hard-faced young man on the doorstep, I saw two dozen others like him, slouching in attitudes of boredom across the street.

  Moran had kept up his end of the bargain.

  “We have four groups ready, one for each elevated line,” I said, relieved that none of them appeared to be the same thugs he’d sent after me two nights before. “Yours can cover the stations. Mr. Hyde’s never struck above Eighty-Ninth Street, so we can stick to the stops below that line. Focus on the east side. I think Ninth Avenue’s a long shot, since the killer just struck there. We’re looking for someone dressed as a soldier, or anyone who seems to take an unhealthy interest in women or boys travelling alone.”

  He nodded and leapt down the steps to join his companions.

  I returned to the parlor. “The reinforcements have arrived,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  John, Connor, Brady and I walked across town to Ninth Street and bought tickets, two of Moran’s boys shadowing us a block behind. A southbound train was just pulling in as we reached the platform. The Third Avenue Line ran every fifteen minutes all night long—they were called the Owl Cars. They weren’t as fancy as the Sixth Avenue Line, which boasted conductors in braided blue uniforms and décor in the Pullman style. John kept shifting on the hard wooden seat, trying in vain to find a comfortable position.

  We split up so we wouldn’t attract too much attention. I sat across from John, facing him as the benches ran lengthwise. Brady took the south end of the car, and Connor leaned by the doors. The car had room for about fifty people, but was only half-occupied at this late hour. Most were headed in the other direction. It was the usual random mix of humanity: workers coming off late shifts, revellers out for a night on the town, and a few who looked like they simply had nowhere else to go.

  The tracks ran level with the upper stories of apartment buildings, so you could see straight into people’s flats. I caught glimpses of women sewing by candlelight, bawling babies in bassinets, and once a snoozing cat on a windowsill that seemed unperturbed by the deafening screech and clatter of the passing train.

  There was no sign of our quarry.

  We rode to the Chatham Square stop, and switched to the uptown side.

  “I meant to ask, how are Parthena and Permelia?” I inquired sweetly, sidling up to John as we waited on the platform. “They seemed delighted to see you, although it’s a shame poor Parthena had that red spot right on the tip of her nose. She tried to cover it with powder, but it was just too big.” I peered down the tracks. “Oh well, at least it was a costume ball. The mask definitely helped.”

  The corner of John’s mouth twitched but he kept a poker face.

  “The Sloane-Shermans invited me to their country house,” he said. “It’s in some little hamlet called East Hampton. They say Newport has become terribly boring”—here he used a fluting high-pitched voice—”and swore that the Hamptons will soon be all the rage.”

  “Sounds charming,” I said. “If you don’t mind long conversations about crinoline and corgis.”

  “Yes, well, at least they haven’t tried to kill me lately,” John observed.

  “That was a mistake,” I said.

  “I’m glad you’re finally coming to your senses. How you could have—”

  “I don’t mean dancing with Moran,” I said, unable to resist provoking him. “I mean his thugs trying to kill me.”

  A man in a top hat glanced over at us with a frown.

  “Bless you, Father,” I said hastily, trying my best to look pathetic. “I’ll try St. Joseph’s then. Maybe they’ll have a cup of soup for a poor orphan boy.”

  I was spared John’s response by the arrival of the uptown train. It was much more crowded. At City Hall, the car filled with newspapermen and office workers. Most were male, and the women tended to travel in pairs, but plenty were alone. Some were young, some old. Blondes, brunettes, redheads. Pretty and plain. I wondered what it was about the four victims after Becky that had drawn the killer’s eye. There had to be something, some quality they shared. I didn’t think they were being chosen randomly, not in an absolute sense.

  I realized that I might never know. And in a sense, it was immaterial. All that mattered now was stopping the Hunter.

  If we didn’t do it this night, I feared we never would.

  We passed the Canal, Grand and Houston Street stations. People got on and off. I caught a glimpse of one of Moran’s boys standing in the shadows at Twenty-Third Street. He gave me the slightest shake of his head as the train pulled away. Nothing yet.

 
; We rode to Eighty-Ninth Street and back down again. It was past one. The cars began to empty. At Thirty-Fourth Street, our train stopped briefly between stations, a signal malfunction. I thought of the blizzard, and how it had so completely paralyzed the transit system New Yorkers were so proud of.

  It had begun at a little after twelve o’clock on Sunday night. By noon on Monday, the snow had piled in drifts of fifteen to thirty feet. Some of the gusts neared eighty miles per hour. The Great White Hurricane was upon us.

  Darkness came, and still the wind blew, and the snow fell. It seemed it would never stop. Carriages lay overturned in the streets. Anything that wasn’t nailed down—and even many things that were—had been blown willy-nilly into heaps. Power and telegraph lines, streetlamps, signs, all tossed into a mad jumble. The city looked like a battlefield.

  And still many of the elevated trains had crept along on their ice-coated tracks. The powers-that-be hadn’t planned for it. No one thought New York would ever face a storm like this. And by that point, the elevated was the only way to get around. So tens of thousands of people packed into the trains.

  It was absolute mayhem. Not surprisingly, many of the trains became stuck between stations for hours on end. Some of the more intrepid passengers attempted to walk (or by necessity, crawl) to the next platform and it’s a miracle none were blown off the tracks by the gale force winds. Ladders were deployed to rescue people, but they weren’t tall enough, so you had to hang down from the edge of the track and grope around with your toes for the topmost rung. All while being battered witless by the storm.

  The disaster would surely lead to a serious rethinking of public transit, I thought as we gave a jolt and the train began moving again. Something less vulnerable to the elements…

  “Perhaps we should give it up, check in with the others,” Brady whispered to me. He sat a few feet away. “It’s getting late, Miss Pell. This is starting to feel like a wild goose chase.”

  “Just a few more minutes,” I whispered back, although a small doubt was starting to worm its way into my heart. Could I have misjudged so badly?