The Alienist - Caleb Carr [142]
Yet even if we hadn’t been distracted by the thought that events were proceeding without our being able to affect them, I doubt that we would have gotten very far in this endeavor. True, we had a couple of fairly solid starting points: first, the assumption that the killer’s deep hatred of immigrants had resulted in the disposal of bodies at Castle Garden and the Ellis Island ferry; and, second, the belief that his preoccupation with the cleansing power of water had caused him to select two bridges and a water tower as sites for the other murders. But how could we extrapolate from these elements sufficiently to guess what site he would choose next? One suggestion was that he’d return to another bridge; and, if we assumed that he wouldn’t repeat himself in this regard, we were left with either the old High Bridge over the East River at the northern end of Manhattan (an aqueduct that carried Croton Reservoir water into the city) or the nearby Washington Bridge, which had opened a few years earlier. Marcus, however, realized that the killer probably knew that his pursuers were gaining ground on him. Based on the timing of his attack on Cyrus, for example, it seemed certain that it had been he who had put us under surveillance earlier in the evening rather than vice versa. A man who was paying that kind of attention to his antagonists’ activities would likely guess that we were anticipating his return to a favored type of locale and go elsewhere. For Marcus’s money, it was the killer’s hatred of immigrants that offered the best chance of revealing the probable next murder site; and, following this line of reasoning, the detective sergeant argued that the man would head for someplace like the docks belonging to those steamship lines that packed huge numbers of desperate foreigners into the lower decks of their vessels and brought them to America.
When we finally did get an answer to this deadly conundrum, it was so obvious as to make all of us feel quite ashamed. At about four-thirty, just as Kreizler was walking into our headquarters, Sara telephoned from Mulberry Street, where she’d gone to find out what was happening.
“They’ve had a message from Bedloe’s Island,” she said, as soon as I’d picked up the earpiece. “One of the night guards at the Liberty statue—he’s found a body.” My heart sank, and I said nothing. “Hello?” Sara said. “Are you on the line, John?”
“Yes, Sara. I’m here.”
“Then listen carefully, I can’t talk long. There’s already a pack of senior officers getting ready to head out there. The commissioner’s going with them, but he’s told me we mustn’t show ourselves. He says all he can do is try to prevent any coroners from examining the body before it’s sent to the morgue. He’ll try to get us in to see it there.”
“But the crime scene, Sara—”
“John, please don’t be thickheaded. There’s nothing anyone can do. We had our chance tonight and we botched it. Now we’ve got to get what we can, when we can, at the morgue. In the meantime—” Suddenly I heard loud voices in the background on the other end of the line: one of them I recognized as Theodore, another was unquestionably Link Steffens, and then there were several others I couldn’t place. “I’ve got to ring off, John. I’ll be there as soon as I’ve had word from the island.” With a click she was gone.
I gave the others the details, after which it took several minutes for everyone to absorb the fact that despite our weeks of research and days of preparation we’d been unable to prevent another murder. Lucius, of course, took it especially hard, believing himself responsible now not only for a friend’s cracked skull but for a boy’s death. Marcus and I tried to be sympathetic, but nothing we could say would console him. Kreizler, on the other hand, took a very unemotional line, and told Lucius that since the killer had been observing our efforts there was little doubt that he would eventually have found some way to stage a successful attack, if not