CHAPTER 3
Friday, April 19
BREAKFAST DISHES AND WEAPONS CLATTERED AS THEY WERE DROPPED and snatched up respectively, and every man in the East Room was instantly on his feet. They rushed to the windows, to the door, spilling out into the hall, ready for any threat.
Adam, who’d been halfway down the stairs—passing the ever-present line of jobseekers, who’d still showed up this morning despite the tensions in the city—spun around and bolted back up. The scream had come from the second floor, past the offices.
By the time he got to the top of the stairs, the feminine screaming had stopped and the sounds of rushing footsteps had ceased.
A small crowd—Mr. Lincoln’s two secretaries, General Winfield Scott, Secretary Cameron, and the president himself—stood in the doorway of the oval room, where Adam and Lane had spoken yesterday. A young maid was sobbing hysterically into the bosom of another maid—older and sturdier, but wearing her own silent mask of shock and horror. The women who’d bunked on this floor—which included Mrs. Lincoln, her cousins, Miss Gates, some of the soldiers’ wives, and more servants—had clustered in the corridor just past the screen that separated the offices from the family’s residence.
Adam smelled the blood before he got to the door. It was so thick and heavy on the air, he wondered how he’d not scented it earlier. Probably the door to the room had been closed, locking in the stench. The others moved aside so he could pass through the doorway—actions he didn’t realize the significance of until later—and he stepped into the oval-shaped room.
He took only two steps over the threshold, then paused to take in the scene.
The man was dead; there was no need to get close to him to make certain. The gaping wound where his throat had been sliced from one side to the other left no room for doubt.
Adam murmured a prayer and closed his eyes for a moment, asking for peace, guidance, and safe passage for the soul of the dead man. Then he opened his eyes and, before taking any further steps into the chamber, looked at what lay before him.
The young man had crumpled to the floor onto his back with limbs splayed and blank eyes open in shock. His face was splattered with blood, and his mouth smeared with what looked like fingerprints. More blood, dark and congealed, soaked the front of his shirt and worn coat, along with the rug beneath him. His head tipped backward so that the gash across his throat resembled a dark, horrible mouth. A few dark flies buzzed near the opening.
No wonder the maid had been screaming.
Lincoln was the one to break the taut silence. “Adam.”
With a numb sort of acceptance, he turned to meet the president’s sober eyes. Adam exhaled deeply and nodded at the question in his friend’s gaze. Lincoln didn’t even need to speak; his request was clear and Adam understood: Another one. Tend to it, please, my friend. I place my trust in you.
Adam stifled a ripple of frustration that mingled with pity and horror from the scene before him. He wasn’t an investigator or a detective like Allan Pinkerton. Yet here he was again, faced with a seemingly insurmountable task for which he was unschooled and unprepared.
But when his attention returned to the dead man, a wave of sadness suffused him. Another death, another body, another violent scene . . . and surely there would be more to come.
But this one wasn’t on the battlefield.
“I need a lamp or candle,” he murmured, for the curtains on the window near the body were still drawn, and the maid had obviously been interrupted in opening the others by her discovery. There were two lamps that had been turned on by the door through which Adam had entered, and where everyone currently gathered.
The smaller doors on either side of the chamber, near the rear curve of the room, were closed.
Someone thrust a small lamp, turned up bright, into Adam’s hand and he murmured his thanks. He stepped closer, careful not to disturb any marks or bloodstains on the rug or floor and staying away from the area where the killer had moved—he could read the tracks even from the doorway. He bent to close the man’s eyes with the fingers of his right hand. Then he stepped back to give himself space so he could look down once more.
Somehow, even before the president spoke Adam’s name in that silent request, the others gathered in the doorway seemed to understand he would take the lead on this new and terrible problem. Adam supposed it was the least he could do, when there were so many other things for the president and his staff and cabinet to worry about. And yet there was a sense of fury and frustration simmering beneath his skin. He knew how to fight, how to soldier, how to protect what he loved and believed in, how to track and farm and build.
He didn’t know how to find and catch a murderer. He’d barely managed it the last time he’d been set to this sort of task—and some of that had been pure dumb luck.
Yet, despite the fact that the Confederates were breathing down the neck of the city, this poor, murdered man—a very young one, by the looks of his unlined, untanned, hairless face—deserved justice for whoever had taken his life. At least on the battlefield, the reason—if not the culprit—would be obvious.
“Who is it?” Adam spoke at last. Had any of the spectators come close enough to get a good look at the man’s face? “What’s his name?”
“I shook his hand yesterday,” said Lincoln quietly.
“He’s one of the Frontier Guard,” spoke up Cliff Arick, who was responsible for keeping the roster of members and schedule of their duties. “He joined up with Dan Clayton. Name’s Johnny—or maybe it was Jimmy?—Thorne.”
“I reckon I’ll need to talk with Clayton then,” Adam said.
By unspoken agreement, the cluster of men dissolved from the doorway in order to get back to the business of running a country and blocking an impending invasion, leaving Adam alone to examine the scene.
Though he brooded that he wasn’t able to contribute to that sort of wartime work at the moment, he understood that Johnny Thorne’s death must be attended to.
The weight of his responsibility settled over him, and he took it on—if not happily, at least readily. He reminded himself, in a mental voice that was very like his mother’s, that he was a tracker. An excellent one, in fact. That he read markings and residue left behind by any number of creatures—man or animal. This mansion with its oval library was an unfamiliar terrain, but the process, the discernment, the translation of his observations into facts, was still the same task.
He needed to know who the young man was—his name, his identity, what sort of person he was—to keep in his thoughts and heart as he attended to this terrible, impossible task so he could live the tracks.
That was what Ishkode had called it. And his grandfather Makwa as well: living the tracks.
So, for the time being, Adam stepped mentally out of the moment of horror over a young man’s violent death—and the fact that a murderer was quite possibly among them even now, here in the White House—and began to read what he could from the signs left behind.
A spatter of blood arcing over the wall, window curtains, and bookshelves.
Adam had butchered and seen it done often enough to know how, when an animal’s throat was slit, the blood squirted in a certain direction and pattern.
And how, though the wound was a lethal one, it didn’t cause instant or even immediate death. Adam’s fingers tightened as he imagined those last few moments of pain and fear, where Thorne’s hands would have scrabbled at his throat as he staggered in shock and disbelief. The dried blood on the man’s hands told the story, along with pools and smears all over the floor.
He thrust from his mind the horror Johnny Thorne must have experienced and forced himself to absorb the marks—the tracks, the footprints, the beginnings of the story—without emotion or pity.
Thorne was facing this direction, toward the door left of the window. Maybe he was walking out of the room. The killer hadn’t been facing him, slicing out toward him with a blade, for the blood wouldn’t have splattered as much.
; Yes. It would be easier to come up behind a man—take him by surprise. Grab him by the hair, and bare his throat to slice it open from the rear—rather than strike out toward him with a blade and hope to catch him straight across the throat.
Adam tested it himself then, with an invisible knife and imaginary victim, and compared his movements to the wound. The gash over Thorne’s throat wasn’t straight across but angled down on one side, so Adam tried it again, quickly and then more slowly, and noticed that his own slicing movement started slightly higher than it ended, as his arm drew back. He was right-handed by birth as well as happenstance, and when he compared his practice motion to the angle of the cut on the man’s throat, he concluded the murderer was also right-handed, for the cut angled in the same direction.
Johnny Thorne was a slight, skinny man; he’d have been easily overpowered by nearly any of the men currently barracked in the East Room. So whoever did it wouldn’t have had to be very large or strong. Young, Adam thought as he looked down at the boy’s smooth jaw. Maybe sixteen or seventeen? So young. Too young to be a soldier.
Was he someone’s brother? Son?
He gritted his teeth and curled his lips, for he knew Johnny Thorne wasn’t going to be the only too young soldier lying dead before this conflict with the South was over.
Adam forced his attention from those unpleasant thoughts to the rug beneath his feet, and what the shoe marks and blood smears on it and the uncovered wooden floor around the perimeter would tell him about the movements of the people in the room. He’d have to talk to the servant who’d found Thorne to learn how close she’d come to the body—there was a partial footprint near the edge that looked small enough to be hers.
There were other bloodstains as well. They were soaked into the wool of the frayed rug, which made their shape and any movement more difficult—but not impossible—to discern. Taking care to place his feet where they wouldn’t disturb any marks or splatters, Adam crouched next to the body and impatiently waved away the flies. His nose was filled with the scent of death: blood, raw internal organs, bodily fluids and waste.
The boy was clothed like most of his Frontier Guard counterparts: in heavy Levi-Strauss trousers like the ones worn by the goldminers, a simple white cotton shirt that had turned dingy with age and overwashing and was now colored with blood, a striped vest of chocolate brown, and battered boots that showed feet the rest of him hadn’t yet grown into. Over all of it, he wore a long, weathered coat of canvas, also marked with bloodstains.
He slipped his fingers into one of the pockets in Thorne’s coat, pulling out the few contents inside: a penknife, a piece of paper, a large button that matched those of his coat, and a few pennies. The small knife was unremarkable, with its bone handle and sharp blade, if not fairly ineffective. It would hardly be good for anything but whittling a stick or stabbing a piece of meat to eat.
The paper, though only a scrap, was of fine quality and appeared to be from a piece of formal stationery. A number was written on it in pencil—430—then another word beginning with L or maybe I. Adam might not have found the origin of the stationery of interest if he hadn’t recognized the portion of printed letterhead: les Hote.
Stationery from the St. Charles Hotel?
Hmm. He looked back over the young man, noting the worn boots for his too big feet, the frayed hem of his trousers and the patch on one knee, the loose button on his coat.
The St. Charles was a fancy, expensive establishment. And it was preferred by those who sympathized with the South.
Adam was lying on the ground, cheek and temple flush with the rug so he could discern the way its nap had been disrupted when a dainty buttoned shoe and the edge of a pale blue skirt came into view in his peripheral vision. He looked up and was only mildly surprised to see Miss Gates.
No, come to think of it, he wasn’t surprised at all to see her.
He was surprised he hadn’t heard her gasp or make any other sound of horror or shock.
However, even from his awkward position on the floor, he could see that her creamy skin had turned bone-white as she looked down at the remains of John Thorne. The fact that she hadn’t spoken was a testament to the set of her mind. He heard her swallow hard and saw the slight tremble of her fingers hanging by her side, next to the skirt.
“Miss Gates,” he began as he rose, thinking not only of the propriety of the situation, but also, as always, what his mother would expect him to do. “I don’t think—”
“I’ve seen dead bodies before,” she said. “I saw Mr. Billings, remember? And even ones . . . even as b-bad as this.”
“That doesn’t make it any easier.”
“No. I—”
“Miss Gates, I commend you for your—uh—dedication to your vocation, but I don’t think now is the time for you to be investig—”
“No,” she said. More firmly this time; with a hint of outrage. “No, you misunderstand, Mr. Quinn. This isn’t about me being a journalist and trying to get a story. Not this time. I . . . well, you shouldn’t do this alone. And the rest of them . . . they all—left. I’m here only to help you.”
He might have been more surprised if she’d begun to sing and dance in Ojibwe, but probably not much. “I see.”
Before he could think what to say next, she spoke quietly. “Whoever would do this must have been desperate. Very desperate. And very bold. To cut a man’s”—her voice wavered here a bit, then steadied—“throat in the middle of the President’s House, when it’s filled with soldiers and people . . . during a war. . . .”
Adam nodded. Yes, whoever had done this had taken a great chance. And one of the first things he needed to find out was when. Then he could begin to fill in the pieces, ask the questions, better read the signs. He hoped.
He wished suddenly that his Ojibwe friend Ishkode or his grandfather were here to help guide him. They knew so much more than he did.
“I’d like to cover him up,” he said after a moment. “Could you find something? A sheet? And would you speak to Mrs. Lincoln and ask her if she’s expecting Mrs. Keckley today? Or if she knows whether she’s left town?” There were other ways to get in touch with Dr. George Hilton—if he hadn’t evacuated along with half the city—but at least this would keep Sophie Gates busy for a bit while he finished examining the body and the area around it.
Adam was certain his mother would approve of this strategy.
“Mrs. Keckley is already here,” she replied. “I just saw her. What does she have to do with any of this?”
He didn’t have the time—or energy—to wonder how Miss Gates even knew who Mrs. Keckley was. The free colored woman was a celebrated seamstress in Washington, creating clothing for many of the rich and powerful. She’d become a regular visitor to the President’s House since outfitting Mrs. Lincoln for her first levee.
“Please ask her to send for Dr. Hilton—if he’s still in town. Mrs. Keckley can go with one of the soldiers or tell him where to find him.”
After Miss Gates left on her tasks, Adam continued to examine Johnny Thorne’s body and the bloodstains around it. He considered the fingerprints over the boy’s mouth. They were smeared, but blood splatters formed the outline of the prints. They were from the killer’s left hand as he held it over Johnny’s mouth, obviously muffling him as his right hand wielded the knife that slit his throat.
Grimly, Adam continued his initial examination. He didn’t move the corpse other than to lift the head and examine the blood-crusted hands to see if there were any other cuts or injuries. He didn’t find anything that appeared recent enough to have been inflicted during a struggle before he was murdered, but he was saddened to notice that beneath the rusty stains, Thorne’s hands were not the callused, work worn ones of a manual laborer.
Yet another sign of his youth and inexperience.
Adam was digging through the remainder of the young man’s canvas coat pockets when the soft swish of footsteps had him looking up.
“Hilton,” he said in surprise. “That w
as a mighty quick trip to fetch you here from Ballard’s Alley.” He smiled as he stood to greet the man who’d been instrumental in helping Adam to identify and catch a murderer last month.
He offered his hand to the doctor, and after the briefest hesitation, Hilton took it. They shook firmly.
George Hilton was about the same age as Adam—thirty or so—but barely reached six foot. His springy hair was cut very close to his scalp, as were the beard and mustache he wore. Hilton had broad shoulders and a muscular build, and skin the color of rich walnut. Though he had been convinced of the doctor’s abilities during the previous murder investigation, Adam still found it extraordinary that a black man somehow managed to practice medicine in Washington—in an area where Negroes weren’t allowed to go to school or to be taught to read or write.
“I brought Miss Lizzie to see Mrs. Lincoln today,” replied Hilton simply. “She thought she might need someone to talk to. The city is tense with fear and waiting.” Then his attention went to the scene on the floor and he made a quiet sound of remorse. “So young. And the war ain’t hardly started yet.”
“Mr. Quinn, Mrs. Keckley is here—” Miss Gates had returned, and she stopped herself when she saw that Adam wasn’t alone. She was carrying a folded sheet. “Dr. Hilton. You’re already here.”
“Yes, indeed, Miss Gates,” he replied with a little bow. The two had met briefly during the events of the investigation into Mr. Billings’s murder in March.
“What are you going to do?” she asked, coming into the chamber. Her gray eyes were alight with interest, though Adam noticed she didn’t allow her attention to linger too closely on the body of Johnny Thorne.
He took the sheet from her while debating whether it was worth the effort trying to convince Miss Gates to leave, but in the end decided to save himself the breath. Instead, he unfolded the cotton cloth and, waving the flies away again, began to draw it up over the body. The doctor bent to assist, but held up a hand for Adam to pause in his task.
“Well, miss, I suppose that depends on Mr. Quinn,” replied Hilton, looking down at Johnny Thorne from where he squatted next to the body. “He don’t need me to tell him the man is dead, and that he’s surely past any saving.”
Murder in the Oval Library Page 4