by Kat Ross
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?
We pulled into Twenty-Third Street and the gates opened. John’s head nodded sleepily at the far end of the car, Connor across from him. Only three people boarded.
Two young men whose unsteady gaits and flashy clothes signalled a long night of carousing in the Tenderloin. And a man of roughly the same age with dark, wavy hair and a mustache. A handsome man once, but whose sagging features revealed a dissolute life filled with bitterness and heartbreak.
I had seen that face many times. In a photograph taken a thousand miles away, white-capped mountains in the background
Robert Aaron Straker.
Brady started like he’d been goosed and went to rise, but I quickly laid a hand on his arm and shook my head. Not yet.
I turned my face down and studied my feet, silently urging Brady to follow suit. After a moment, he did, but I could see the vein pounding at his temple.
Straker looked around and took a seat midway down the car. He wore the navy uniform of a federal soldier. The third button down on the left was missing.
I tried desperately to catch Connor’s eye. He finally turned and I mouthed the word wait, then pointed to John. Bless Connor, he understood immediately. He sauntered over to John and casually sat down next to him, whispering in his ear. John’s eyes popped open in almost comical surprise.
We excha
nged a long look. Then John shut his eyes and pretended to go back to sleep.
My heart pounded. I wasn’t entirely sure what would happen next. There had been too many variables to foresee them all.
We stopped at Twenty-Third Street, then Fourteenth Street. Straker stayed on the train. He kept looking around, his hands writhing in his lap like snakes.
At Canal Street, a girl got on. Alone. She was just a slip of a thing, still in her teens. Auburn hair, high cheekbones, wide mouth. She looked a bit like a younger Elizabeth Brady. Her delicate face was painted, and her dress exposed an expanse of pale bosom. A working girl.
She clutched her purse and studiously avoided Straker’s gaze. Something about him disturbed her. But I could see he was watching this girl. Not obviously. Not in a crude, leering fashion. But his eyes kept flicking in her direction and then away, like he couldn’t help himself.
The line ended at Chatham Square. The cars emptied. The girl boarded the spur line that continued to South Ferry. Straker followed, and so did we.
Just before the gate opened, John came up behind me.
“I say we take him now,” he whispered in my ear. “Between Brady and myself, I doubt he’ll give us much trouble.”
“Just wait,” I whispered back.
“Fine, but I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said, and then the doors hissed shut and the train started to move.
I hadn’t seen any of Moran’s boys for a while. We were spread too thin. I just prayed they’d be waiting at the next stop.
Because despite John’s innate confidence, I wasn’t sure that ten men would be enough for what we had to do.
17
The girl got off at City Hall. She was eager to leave the train and the odd soldier who seemed to be watching her out of the corner of his eye. She may not have noticed how deathly pale his hands were, how the nails were caked with dirt or some other dark substance. How his eyes never stayed still. The dark circles beneath them, like half-moons carved into the gaunt flesh of his face.
She may not have noticed all those things, but she glanced back over her shoulder as she hurried down the platform stairs, and it was the look of a hare as it senses the passing shadow of a hawk. Some instinct that a predator is near.
Straker walked towards the stairs, staring straight ahead. And then a figure moved to block his way.
One of Moran’s.
“Where ya goin’, boy-o?” the kid asked softly, a menacing grin on his face. He had blonde hair and a pug nose, and looked like an older, much scarier Billy Flynn.
Straker didn’t respond, but his fingers gave a nervous twitch.
“You like pretty little doxies, huh? Like to cut ‘em up? See ‘em bleed?”
Straker tried to dart around the boy, but another moved in, armed with a crowbar. They stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the stairs to the street. The platform had emptied. I heard a clock tower chime three.
Straker whirled around. When he saw the four of us arrayed in a line behind him, his face froze.
Brady pulled off his hat. “Please Robert, don’t do anything foolish,” he implored. “Let me help you!”
For a moment, Straker’s mouth worked but no sound came out. The blood drained from his face. He raised a shaking hand and then one of Moran’s thugs bowled into him, grabbing him by the arms. He did scream then, an inhuman howl that made my hackles rise. It went on and on, only stopping when the other kid slapped a hand over his mouth.
“Dear God,” my client said faintly.
I kept my eyes on Straker. He’d gone limp, like an exhausted animal caught in a leg-trap.
“What do you want to do with ‘im?” one of them asked me.
“We’ll summon a police officer,” I said. “It’s City Hall. There must be one nearby.”
Brady took a step forward. “You should have come to me,” he said sadly. “Before this all got…out of hand. You were always too proud, Robert.” His voice broke. “We were like brothers. I could have helped.” He took another tentative step.
It was as though some invisible force existed between them, one that repelled rather than attracted. Because at that moment, Straker suddenly came back to life. With a wild cry, he wrenched free of his captors. It all happened very fast. I saw one of them try to seize his collar, and get swatted away as if he weighed nothing at all. Something small and white dropped from Straker’s hand to the ground. In a flash, he vanished down the platform steps and into the night, Moran’s boys on his heels.
Brady and John made to follow them, as Connor cursed a blue streak under his breath.
“Wait!” I cried.
They turned back impatiently.
“Let Moran’s boys catch him,” I said.
“But they’ll beat him senseless, or worse!” Brady exclaimed. “I vowed to be there at the end, and by God, you won’t stop me, Miss Pell!”
John looked at us in confusion. I took a deep breath.
“You look unwell, Mr. Brady,” I said. “Have you been suffering from headaches?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Bishop’s Effervescing Citrate of Caffeine. It’s for severe headaches. I smelled it on you earlier.”
Brady frowned. “We don’t have time for your little games—”
“And those half-healed abrasions on your right palm. Where did you get those, if I might ask?”
“What?”
“I think you got those when you choked Anne Marlowe with the chain. Am I right, Mr. Brady?”
His cheeks reddened. “This is preposterous!”
“Alright. Let’s talk about the earth caked on your boots then. I noted a petal from a Virginia rose when you crossed your legs. They only grow in the Ramble.”
John looked from Brady to me, then back to Brady, and rushed over to stand at my side.
“But all that was just icing on the cake. I realized something last night. George Kane made me think of it. You’ve been so clever, but you made a mistake. A mistake I’m ashamed to admit I should have seen right away.”
Brady just looked at me, his features utterly impassive.
“You said that you went to Straker’s flat the day after the murder. You stood behind him as he gazed into his shaving mirror and ranted about being possessed. And yet you failed to notice the bowl of bloody water directly in front of you. It would have to have been there. If Straker killed Becky Rickard, he would have gone straight home to wash the blood from his hands. And yet you acted as though you’d never seen it before when we all went to the flat. That got me thinking, Mr. Brady, that you’ve not been entirely truthful.”
I bent down and picked up the crumpled piece of paper that had fallen from Straker’s hand.
“So I cabled your wife earlier this evening at her parents’ house in Connecticut. She confirmed that you’ve started suffering from recurrent nightmares. Very bad ones. That you wake up, screaming in the night. And that the night before she left, she found you standing in the garden like an automaton with no recollection of how you got there.”
A shadow passed over Brady’s eyes, so quick I might have imagined it.
“Then there’s your position. You’re a real estate agent. And what is it real estate agents do?”
“They spend most of their time travelling around the city,” John said slowly.
“Exactly.” I thought of the map I’d seen on his office wall. “The trains are your domain, aren’t they, Mr. Brady? Here’s what I think happened. I think you left Mr. Straker and returned to Becky’s flat. She let you in. Why wouldn’t she? I’m sure you had some excuse. Some final detail to settle. Then you stabbed her. Thirty-one times. But that wasn’t enough, so you bit her. You chewed her to a pulp, Mr. Brady.”
My client’s features looked frozen, like the wax figures they posed in the windows of the city’s finer department stores. But his pupils had contracted into empty black pinpricks.
“And then remorse struck,” I said. “You covered her face so you wouldn’t ha
ve to look at it. Afterwards, you went to Straker’s flat, where you washed up and took his uniform. I don’t know why he ran. Perhaps he suspected something. He certainly seemed terrified of you just now. You got the key from the landlord then, not four days later as you claimed. I should have checked that, but I didn’t. You smoked a cigarette and destroyed Straker’s rooms in a rage that he wasn’t there. Then you returned to your office and became Dr. Jekyll again.”
Brady’s pale blue eyes glittered in the dim light of the station. “But why would I do such a thing, Miss Pell?”
It was the one question I had no answer for.
“And Straker?” John asked, plainly struggling to keep up. “Why was he here?”
I held up the paper I’d retrieved from the platform. “I expect this is a note to him, supposedly from Elizabeth Brady, saying she’s afraid of her husband and asking Robert to meet her here in the uniform she had delivered this morning. It would be no great feat for a man to imitate his wife’s handwriting. I imagine Straker was eyeing that girl simply because she bore such a strong resemblance to Elizabeth.”
I handed the letter to John. He read it and looked at me with a satisfying degree of awe.
“That’s exactly what it says,” he muttered. “More or less.”
“You didn’t like the way things were going, so you decided it was time that Straker took the fall,” I said to Brady, whose hands had clenched into tight fists. “You never wanted to hire me in the first place. It was Elizabeth who insisted. But you were relieved when you saw how young I am, and a woman no less. You must have thought I wouldn’t get very far.”
“And you was sadly mistaken,” Connor chimed in.
The faint rattle of a southbound train broke the silence.
“All I want from you now is Billy Finn,” I said. “You have him, or someone would have found the body. You don’t seem to care much about hiding your victims. I think you used him to get to Straker. If you tell us where Billy is, there’s a chance you’ll escape the noose.”
I felt a vibration through the soles of my boots. The headlights of the train suddenly broke around a corner and lit the platform in a blinding wash.