The Alienist - Caleb Carr [89]
CHAPTER 17
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The notion of our killer’s being an experienced mountain and rock climber had first occurred to Marcus, he explained, when I brought the boy Sally’s story back from Paresis Hall. But when he’d tried to find evidence of such activity at the Williamsburg Bridge anchor, and then at the Hall, he’d come up with almost nothing, and thought of abandoning the idea. His mind kept being brought back to the idea, however, by the speed with which the man had negotiated some pretty tricky spots, as well as by the absence of any ladders or other, more conventional climbing apparatus. There could be no other explanation, to Marcus’s way of thinking: the murderer had to be using advanced mountaineering techniques to get in and out of the windows of his intended victims’ rooms. That the man was especially expert was indicated by the fact that he must have been carrying the boys when he left the buildings, since they almost certainly knew nothing about climbing. All of this was consistent with the idea, already stated by the Isaacsons at Delmonico’s, that the killer was a big, powerful man. Faced with all these considerations, Marcus had done some more detailed research into climbing techniques, and returned to the bridge anchor and Paresis Hall.
This time, his better-trained eye had indeed found marks on the exterior walls of Ellison’s joint that could have been left by a climber’s nail-studded boots, as well as by pitons, large steel spikes that climbers drive into rock with hammers for direct hand and foot support, and also as anchors for ropes. The marks were hardly conclusive, so he hadn’t mentioned them at any of our meetings. But at Castle Garden Marcus had discovered distinctive rope fibers along the rear edge of the rooftop: a further suggestion that the killer was a climber. The fibers seemed to lead to the front railing of the roof, which turned out to be very solidly anchored. That had been the point at which Marcus had told us to lower him down the rear wall of the fort, where he found more marks that matched those he’d discovered at the Hall. At that point, Marcus had begun to work out a probable sequence of events for the Castle Garden killing:
The murderer, with his latest victim on his back, had climbed to the roof of the fort using pitons. (The watchman hadn’t noticed the sound of the hammering because, Marcus had learned, he actually spent most of his time sleeping, a fact of which Marcus was sure the killer was aware.) Once on the roof, our man had committed the murder, then wrapped a rope around the front railing and rappelled back to the ground. This last was a European term for the technique of descending a sheer mountainside by way of a rope that had been looped around a secure anchor point above. Both strands of the rope were then dropped, so that the whole could be pulled down by the climber when he reached the bottom. As our killer lowered himself along the wall, he’d been able to remove the pitons he’d used for support earlier.
Satisfied with his reasoning, Marcus had first attempted to find specific evidence to support it at Paresis Hall, since the Santorelli murder was long past and there weren’t likely to be any policemen around. But then he’d realized that at the Hall the killer would have been descending from the roof, not coming up from the ground, and probably wouldn’t have used pitons at all (the marks Marcus had originally thought to be left by pitons at that site were therefore made by something else, probably something altogether unconnected to our case). So Marcus had returned to Castle Garden just before meeting me, and continued a search of the grounds that he’d barely begun the night before—I’d been right when I thought he was looking for something just before our hasty departure from that place. The few cops who were positioned at Castle Garden that afternoon