The Alienist - Caleb Carr [168]
Late Wednesday, after the conclusion of my first long day in the Interior basement, Kreizler and I met to compare notes in his room at the Willard. The superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s had proved as troublesome in person as he had been over the telephone wire, and Kreizler had been forced to resort to Roosevelt—who, in turn, had asked a friend of his in the attorney general’s office to place a call to the man—in order to gain access to the hospital records. The process had taken up most of Kreizler’s day, and while he’d had time to amass a list of names of soldiers who’d served with the Army of the West and subsequently been sent to St. Elizabeth’s because of questionable mental stability, his overall mood when we met was one of severe disappointment: for while the man who’d been the subject of the original letter we’d received from St. Elizabeth’s had indeed been a soldier, he’d apparently also been born and raised in the East, and never served anywhere west of Chicago.
“No roving bands of marauding Indians in Chicago anymore, I suppose?” I asked as Laszlo stared at a sheet detailing particulars of the man’s background and service.
“No,” Kreizler answered quietly. “It’s a true pity. There are many other details that would recommend the fellow.”
“Best not to dwell on them,” I said. “We’ve got plenty of other candidates. So far Hobart and I have picked out four cases of mutilative murders in the Dakotas and Wyoming—all committed when both Sioux groups and army units were close by.”
Kreizler put aside his piece of paper with great effort and looked up. “Did any involve children?”
“Two of the four,” I answered. “In the first, two girls were killed with their parents, and in the second an orphaned girl and boy died with their grandfather, who was their guardian. The problem is that in both cases only the adult males were mutilated.”
“Were any theories formulated?”
“Both were assumed to have been reprisal raids by war parties. But there’s an interesting detail in the case involving the grandfather. It happened in the late fall of ’89 near Fort Keough, during the period when the last great reservation was broken up. There were a lot of disgruntled Sioux around, mostly followers of Sitting Bull and another chief called”—I scanned my notes quickly with one finger—“Red Cloud. Anyway, a small cavalry detail stumbled onto the murdered family, and the lieutenant in command initially laid the crime off to some of Red Cloud’s more bellicose subordinates. But one of the older soldiers in the company said that Red Cloud’s band hadn’t launched any murder raids lately, and that the dead grandfather’d had a history of run-ins with Bureau agents and army men at another fort—Robinson, I think it was. Apparently the man had accused a cavalry sergeant at Robinson of trying to sexually assault his grandson. As it turned out, the sergeant’s unit was in the Fort Keough area when the family was killed.”
Kreizler hadn’t been paying much attention up to that point, but these last facts brought him around. “Do we know the soldier’s name?”
“Wasn’t included in the file. Hobart’s going to do a little digging at the War Department tomorrow.”
“Good.