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By Root 1733 0

have been the thousandth time that it was meeting me that had brought the boy to such an unhappy end. I had tried to prepare him for every possible danger—but how could I have foreseen that the greatest of those dangers would be to speak to me in the first place? And now here I was at the morgue, telling the coroner that I’d arranged for a funeral and that everything was to be taken care of properly, as if it mattered whether the boy’s body was buried in a nice patch of Brooklyn ground or thrown into the tidal currents of the East River and pulled out to sea. Vanity, arrogance, irresponsibility—all through the night my mind had been pulled back to what Kreizler had said after Mary Palmer’s murder: that in our dash to defeat evil, we had only given it a wider field in which to run its own wretched course.

Lost in thoughts of Kreizler as I wandered out of the morgue and into the dawn, I was perhaps less surprised than I might otherwise have been to see my old friend sitting in his uncovered calash. Cyrus Montrose was in the driver’s seat and he offered a small, sympathetic inclination of his head when he saw me. Laszlo smiled and stepped down from the rig as I stumbled over.

“Joseph…,” I said, my voice cracking from the cigarettes and brooding silence of the night.

“I know,” Laszlo said. “Sara called. I thought you might need some breakfast.”

I nodded weakly and got into the carriage with him. Cyrus urged the horse Frederick forward with a quiet click of his tongue, and soon we were heading west on Twenty-sixth Street very slowly, though the traffic at that early hour was light.

After several minutes I leaned back and rested my head on the folded cover of the calash, sighing heavily and staring at the half-lit, cloudy sky. “It had to be Beecham.” I mumbled.

“Yes,” Laszlo answered quietly.

I turned my head toward him without picking it up. “But there was no mutilation. I couldn’t even see how he’d been killed, there was so little blood. Nothing but a small hole at the base of the skull.”

Laszlo’s eyes went thin. “Quick and clean,” he said. “This wasn’t one of his rituals. This was pragmatic. He killed the boy to protect himself—and to send a message.”

“To me?” I asked.

Kreizler nodded. “Desperate as he is, he won’t go easily.”

I began to shake my head slowly. “But how—how? I told Joseph, told him everything we’d learned. He knew how to identify Beecham. Hell, he called me yesterday afternoon, to double-check on the details.”

Kreizler’s right eyebrow arched. “Really? Why?”

“I don’t know,” I said in disgust, pulling out yet another cigarette. “Some friend of his had been approached by a man who wanted to take him away. To a—castle above the city, he said. Something like that. It did sound like it might’ve been Beecham, but the man had no facial spasms.”

Laszlo turned away, and spoke carefully: “Ah. Then you didn’t remember?”

“Remember?”

“Adam Dury. He told us that when Japheth was hunting, his spasms went away. I suspect that when he stalks these boys—” Seeing the effect his words were having on me, Kreizler cut his explanation short. “I’m sorry, John.”

I threw my unlit cigarette into the street and clutched my head with both hands. Of course he was right. Hunting, stalking, trapping, killing—they all calmed Beecham’s spirit, and that calm was reflected in his face. Whoever the boy, the street cruiser, that Joseph had referred to was, he might in fact have been accosted by our man. Joseph himself certainly had been. All because I had forgotten a detail…

Kreizler put a hand on my shoulder as the calash rolled on, and when I next looked up we’d come to a stop outside Delmonico’s. I knew that the restaurant wouldn’t be open for another hour or two, but I also knew that if any man could arrange an off-hours meal, it was Kreizler. Cyrus got down from the driver’s seat and helped me out of the carriage, saying softly, “There you go. Mr. Moore—get a little food in you.” I found my walking legs and followed Laszlo to the front door, which was opened by Charlie Delmonico. Something about the look in his enormous eyes