The Alienist - Caleb Carr [175]
Both Kreizler and I were fairly stunned by this last item and needed time to absorb both it and the rest of the tale. Telling Sara that we would telephone again later in the evening, Laszlo rang off, following which we returned to the hotel bar to mull things over.
“Well?” Kreizler said in a somewhat awed tone, as we ordered a fresh round of iced cocktails. “What do you make of it?”
I took in a deep breath. “Let’s start with facts. The older Dury boy witnessed some of the most horrendous atrocities imaginable before he was old enough to make any sense of them.”
“Yes. And his father was a priest, or at least a minister—the religious calendar, Moore. Their home would have been regulated by it.”
“The father also seems to have been a very hard, not to mention a rather peculiar, man—though outwardly respectable, at least in the beginning.”
Kreizler mapped his thoughts on the bar with a finger. “So…we can assume a pattern of domestic violence, one beginning early and continuing unabated for years. It plants an urge for revenge that steadily mounts.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “We’ve got no shortage of motive. But Adam’s older than we’ve posited.”
Kreizler nodded. “While the younger boy, Japheth, would have been the same age as Beecham. Now, if he committed the murders, then fabricated the note, disappeared, and took a different name—”
“But he’s not the one who witnessed the massacres and mutilations,” I said. “He wasn’t even born yet.”
Kreizler knocked a fist against the bar. “True. He would have had no frontier experience.”
Letting the facts recombine in a number of ways in my head, I tried but failed to come up with a new interpretation. All I could say after several minutes was, “We still don’t know anything about the mother.”
“No.” Kreizler kept rapping his knuckles on the bar. “But they were a poor family, living at close quarters. That would have been especially true during the Minnesota period, which would have been the most vivid time in the eldest son’s life.”
“Right. If only he were younger…”
Laszlo sighed and shook his head. “A host of questions—and the answers to be found, I suspect, only in Newton, Massachusetts.”
“So—do we go up there and find out?”
“Who knows?” Kreizler sipped his cocktail nervously. “I confess to feeling at a loss, Moore. I’m no professional detective. What do we do? Stay here and try to uncover more information about Beecham, at the same time pursuing any new leads we may uncover? Or go to Newton? How does one know when it’s time to stop looking at all possibilities and pursue one course?”
I thought about that for a moment. “We can’t know,” I finally decided. “We don’t have the experience. But—” I got up and headed for the cable office.
“Moore?” Kreizler called after me. “Where the devil are you going?”
It took me just five minutes to condense the key aspects of Sara’s research into a cable, which I dispatched to the telegraph office in Fort Yates, North Dakota. The message concluded with a simple request: ADVISE COURSE.
Kreizler and I spent the rest of the evening in the Willard’s dining room, fixed in place until the staff informed us that they were going home. At that point, with sleep utterly out of the question, we went for a walk around the White House grounds, smoking and putting every conceivable twist on the story we’d heard that night, while simultaneously searching for a way to connect it to Corporal John Beecham. Pursuing