The Alienist - Caleb Carr [68]
The elevator at Number 808 was a large, caged affair, quite new, and it took us quietly back up to the sixth floor. Here we discovered that great progress had been made during our absence. Things were now so arranged that it actually looked like human affairs were being conducted out of the place, though one would still have been hard-pressed to say precisely what kind. At five o’clock sharp each of us sat at one of the five desks, from which vantage points we could clearly see and discuss matters with one another. There was nervous but pleasant chatter as we settled in, and real camaraderie when we began to discuss the events of our various days. As the evening sun dipped above the Hudson, sending rich golden light over the rooftops of western Manhattan and through our Gothic front windows, I realized that we had become, with remarkable speed, a working unit.
We had enemies, to be sure: Lucius Isaacson reported that at the conclusion of his examination of the other two murdered boys, a pair of men claiming to be representatives of the cemetery from which the bodies had been taken had appeared at the Institute, demanding an end to the proceedings. Lucius had gathered all the information he needed, by then, and decided not to put up a fight—but the physical description of the two men that he gave, right down to the bruises on their faces, matched the two thugs that had chased Sara and me out of the Santorellis’ flat. Fortunately, the two ex-cops had not recognized Lucius as a detective (they had probably been fired before his arrival on the force); but it was nonetheless apparent that, as we had no idea who was commanding these men or what their object was, the Institute was no longer a safe place to conduct business.
As for Lucius’s examination itself, the results were just what we’d hoped for: both bodies bore the same knife marks that had been found on Giorgio Santorelli and the Zweig children. With that confirmation, Marcus Isaacson took two more pins with red flags and stuck them into the large map of Manhattan, one at the Brooklyn Bridge, and one at the Ellis Island ferry station. Kreizler posted the dates of those killings—January 1st and February 2nd—on the right-hand side of the large chalkboard, along with March 3rd, the day Giorgio had died. Somewhere in those months and days, we all knew, was one of the many patterns we needed to identify. (That pattern would ultimately prove far more complex, Kreizler believed from the start, than the apparent similarity of the number of the month and the number of the day.)
Marcus Isaacson told of his efforts, still unrewarded, to establish a method by which “Gloria” could have gotten out of his room at Paresis Hall without being seen. Sara informed us that she and Roosevelt had worked out a scheme whereby our group would be able to visit the sites of any future murders that were obviously the work of the same killer before they were disturbed by other detectives or by the heavy hands of coroners. The plan represented another risk for Theodore, but he was by now fully committed to Kreizler’s agenda. For my part, I related the story of our trip to see Harris Markowitz. When all this business was concluded, Kreizler stood at his desk and indicated the large chalkboard, on which, he said, we would create our imaginary man: physical and psychological clues would be listed, cross-referenced, revised, and combined until the work was done. Accordingly, he next posted those facts and theories that we had so far discovered and hypothesized.
When he had finished, it seemed that there were precious few white marks on that enormous black space—and at least some of the few, Kreizler warned, would not remain. The use of chalk, he said, was an indication of how many mistakes he expected himself and the rest of us to make along the way. We were in uncharted country and must not become discouraged by setbacks and difficulties, or by the amount of material we would have to master along the way. The rest of us were a little confused by that statement; Kreizler then produced