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By Root 1764 0

” Sara and I glanced at each other quickly, both of us shaking our heads to indicate that we had not divulged the story. Theodore smiled gently. “You remember my bout with Kreizler in the Hemenway Gymnasium, Moore? And the night we had afterwards? At one point he and I were rearguing the question of free will—quite congenially, mind you—and he asked me when I’d learned to box. I told him how my dear father had built me a small gym when I was a boy and taught me that vigorous exercise represented my best chance of overcoming illness and asthma. Kreizler asked if, as an experiment, I thought I could force myself to live a sedate life—to which I replied that everything I’d ever learned and held dear required me to be a man of action. I didn’t realize it right away, but I’d proved his point. Then, out of curiosity, I asked him about his own father, whom I’d often heard mention of in New York. His aspect changed—drastically. I’ll never forget it. He glanced away, and for the first time he seemed afraid to look me in the face—and then he grabbed at that bad arm of his. There was something so instinctive in the way he did it, at the merest mention of his father’s name, that I began to suspect the truth. Needless to say, I was utterly aghast at the thought of what his life had been like. And yet I was fascinated, too—fascinated by how different that life had been from my own. How does the world look, I often found myself wondering, to a young man whose father is his enemy?”

Neither Sara nor I could offer any answer to the question. For several minutes the three of us just sat in silence; and then, from outside, we heard Alice shout vehemently:

“I don’t care if he is a Strix varia varia, Theodore Roosevelt, Junior! He’s not going to eat my snake!”

That brought quiet laughter from those of us in the study, and got us back to the business at hand.

“So,” Theodore said, with another pound of another book on his desk. “The investigation. Tell me this—now that we have a name and an approximate description, why not make it a standard manhunt and let my men turn the city upside down?”

“And do what when they find him?” Sara replied. “Make an arrest? With what evidence?”

“He’s been a lot smarter than that,” I agreed. “We’ve got no witnesses, and no evidence that would be admissible in court. Speculations, fingerprints, an unsigned note—”

“Which shows at least several signs of deceptive script,” Sara threw in.

“And God knows what he’ll do if he’s captured and then released,” I went on. “No, the Isaacsons have said from the beginning that this is going to have to be a flagrante delicto case—we’ll have to catch him at it.”

Theodore accepted all this with several slow nods. “Well,” he eventually said, “I fear that presents us with a new set of challenges. Kreizler’s departure from the investigation, you may be surprised to learn, won’t make things any easier for me. Mayor Strong has learned of the rigor with which I’ve been searching for Connor, and why. He views that search as another way in which this department might be connected to Kreizler, and has asked that I not jeopardize my position by letting my personal relationship with the doctor make me overly aggressive. He’s also heard rumors that the Isaacson brothers are pursuing an independent investigation of the boy-whore murders, and he’s ordered me not only to stop them, if the rumors are true, but to proceed with great caution regarding the case generally. You probably haven’t heard about the trouble last night.”

“Last night?” I said.

Roosevelt nodded. “There was some sort of a gathering in the Eleventh Ward, supposedly to protest the handling of the murders. The organizers were a group of Germans, and they claimed it was a political event—but there was enough whiskey in evidence to float a small ship.”

“Kelly?” Sara asked.

“Perhaps,” Roosevelt answered. “What’s certain is that they were on their way to getting well out of hand before they were broken up. The political implications of this case are growing more serious every day—and Mayor Strong has, I fear, reached that deplorable