The Alienist - Caleb Carr [211]
“Except at night,” Lucius added quickly, again holding up a finger, “when the city’s much less crowded, and he can familiarize himself with it at his own pace. Remember—he hasn’t yet killed during the day. He understands the nighttime rhythms thoroughly, but during the day—during the day I’m willing to bet he’s up there almost all the time.” Lucius’s forehead continued to sweat as he quickly went back to his desk and grabbed some notes. “We talked about the idea of a daytime job that keeps him on the rooftops after the Ali ibn-Ghazi murder, but we never did much with it. I’ve been going back over everything, though, and it seems to me to be the best way to track him at this point.”
I groaned once with purpose. “Oh, God, Lucius—do you understand what you’re suggesting? We’ll have to canvass every charity and mission society, every company that uses salesmen, every newspaper, or medical service. There’s got to be a way to narrow it down.”
“There is,” Marcus said, his tone only slightly more enthusiastic than mine. “But it’s still going to involve one hell of a lot of footwork.” He got up and crossed over to the large map of Manhattan Island, pointing at the pins that had been stuck into the thing to mark abduction and murder sites. “None of his activities have taken place above Fourteenth Street, which suggests that he’s most familiar with the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village. He probably lives as well as works in one of the two areas—our theory that he doesn’t have much money fits in with that. So we can confine our search to people who do business in those neighborhoods.”
“Right,” Lucius said, indicating the chalkboard again. “And let’s not forget all the work we’ve done. If we’re right—if the killer did start out his life as Japheth Dury and later became John Beecham—then he wouldn’t apply for just any kind of job. Given his character and background, some things would be far more attractive than others. For instance, you mention companies that use salesmen, John—but do you really think the man we’ve been studying would make much of a salesman, or would even try to get a job like that?”
I was about to argue that anything was possible, but then something suddenly told me that Lucius was right. We’d spent months putting details of personality and behavior to our killer’s vague image, and “anything” was most distinctly not possible. With a rather strange pang of dread and excitement I realized that I now knew this man well enough to say that he wouldn’t have sought a job that would have required him to either curry favor with immigrant tenement dwellers or hawk the shoddy wares of manufacturers and store managers, whom he would almost certainly consider less intelligent than himself.
“All right,” I said to Lucius, “but that still leaves a wide range of people—church workers, charity and settlement people, reporters, medical services…”
“You can narrow them down, too, John,” Lucius urged, “if you just keep thinking. Take the reporters who cover the tenements—you know most of them yourself. Do you really think Beecham’s a member of that group? As for the medical services—with Beecham’s background? When did he get the training?”
I considered all this, and then shrugged. “Well, all right. So the odds are he’s involved with mission or charity work of some kind.”
“It would be easy for him,” Sara said. “He’d have gotten all the religious grounding and terminology from his parents—his father was a powerful orator, after all.”
“Fine,” I said. “But even if we narrow it down that far, we’ll have a hard time checking them all