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By Root 1732 0

hours and offering his services to charitable organizations that dealt with children, particularly orphans. At first this had seemed an admirable way for a soldier to make use of his time—far better than the usual drinking and fighting with local residents—and Lieutenant Miller had not concerned himself with it. After several months, however, he’d noticed a change in Beecham’s mood, a decided shift toward the sullen. When Miller asked the corporal about it he received no satisfactory explanation; but soon thereafter the head of one of the charities showed up at the post wanting to talk to an officer. Miller listened as the man asked that Corporal Beecham be prohibited from coming near his orphanage again; when asked why he was making such a request, the man declined to say any more than that Beecham had “upset” several of the children. Miller immediately confronted Beecham, who initially became angry and indignant, declaring that the man from the orphanage was only jealous because the children liked and trusted Beecham more than they did him. Lieutenant Miller, however, could see there was more to the story than that, and pressed Beecham harder; the corporal finally became immensely agitated and blamed Miller and the rest of his superiors for whatever it was that had happened. (Miller never did find out the exact nature of the incidents.) All such trouble could have been avoided, Beecham said, if those officers had complied with his request to be sent west. Miller found Beecham’s manner during this conversation alarming enough to warrant sending him on a long leave. Beecham spent that leave mountaineering in Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

When he returned to his unit, at the beginning of 1886, Beecham seemed much improved. He was once again the obedient, efficient soldier Miller had first known. This image proved an illusion, however; and it was shattered during the violence that followed the Haymarket Riots in the Chicago area during the first week of May. Sara and I already knew that Beecham had been sent to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital after Miller had found him “stabbing” (as the doctors put it) the corpse of a dead striker during the May 5th melee in the northern suburbs; we now learned from the Isaacsons that this “stabbing” had borne a chilling resemblance to the mutilations of both Japheth Dury’s parents and the dead children in New York. Revolted and horrified at finding the blood-drenched Beecham standing over a carved-up corpse whose eyes had been gouged out with an enormous knife, Miller had not hesitated to relieve the corporal of duty. Though the lieutenant had seen men driven to acts of blood lust in the West, such behavior was uniformly predicated upon years of savagely violent encounters with the Indian tribes. Beecham, on the other hand, had no such history, and no such rationalization for his actions. When the regimental surgeon examined Beecham after the affair, he quickly pronounced him unfit for service; and Miller added his hearty concurrence to this report, prompting Beecham’s immediate dispatch to Washington.

Thus ended the tale that the Isaacsons brought back from the Dakotas. Having told it without pause, the two brothers had also been unable to eat, and now addressed their food voraciously as Sara and I informed them of all we’d learned in their absence. Then it was time for the hard news about Kreizler and Mary Palmer. Fortunately, Marcus and Lucius had by then both gotten most of their dinner down—the story destroyed what was left of their appetites. Both men were obviously apprehensive about the idea of continuing the investigation without Laszlo; but Sara stepped in with an even stronger sales pitch than the one she’d given me and within twenty minutes had convinced the detective sergeants that we had no other option than to press on. The story they’d brought back only gave her more ammunition with which to prosecute her campaign—for there was now little doubt in any of our minds that we knew the identity and history of our murderer. The question was, could we devise and execute a method