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By Root 1695 0

recently released as sane) who killed the children of a woman who had hired him to do menial work; or the thirteen-year-old girl in Washington whose throat had been cut in Rock Creek Park for absolutely no reason that anyone could divine; and the reverend in Salt Lake City who murdered as many as seven girls and burned their remains in a furnace. We studied all these cases and many more—indeed, every day presented us with at least one incident or criminal to hold up against our developing portrait for comparison. Without doubt, most of these examples involved behavior of a paroxysmal nature: either alcohol- or drug-induced rages, which would pass with the return of sobriety, or temporary brain malfunctions (such as certain rare types of epileptic seizure), which would go into remission on their own. Occasionally, however, there was a case involving careful premeditation, and when the assessments of the mental examiners in such instances were published, or when reports on the trials of the culprits appeared, they sometimes provided small grains of genuine insight.

Even Kreizler’s servants were contributing to the quest for a solution, either through example or direct participation. I have already described my own speculations concerning Mary Palmer and the possible parallel between her case and ours. Those thoughts were duly weighed and their salient aspects recorded on the big chalkboard, although Mary herself was never consulted about them, as Laszlo continued to insist that she be told as little as possible about the case. Cyrus, on the other hand, had managed to get hold of much of the reading material that Kreizler had assigned to the rest of us, and he devoured it eagerly. He made no comments during meetings save when asked, but at those moments he often proved quite insightful. At one midnight conference, for instance, when we were speculating on the mental and physical condition of our murderer immediately after he’d committed his crimes, we suddenly came hard up against the fact that none of us had ever taken the life of another human being. We all knew, of course, that there was someone in the room who had, but none of us felt much like asking Cyrus for an experienced opinion—none of us, that is, except Kreizler, who had no trouble posing the question in simple, straightforward language. Cyrus answered in much the same way, confirming that after his act of violence he would have been capable of neither elaborate planning nor extensive physical exertion; but we were all surprised when he punctuated this statement with some interesting thoughts on Cesare Lombroso, the Italian sometimes supposed to be the father of modern criminology.

Lombroso had postulated the existence of a criminal “type” of human being (in essence a throwback to early, savage man), but Cyrus stated that he found such a theory implausible, given the wide range of motivations and behaviors he’d recently learned could be involved in criminal actions—including his own. Interestingly enough, Dr. H. H. Holmes, the mass murderer who was waiting to be hanged in Philadelphia, had stated during the course of his trial that he believed himself to be representative of Lombroso’s criminal type. Mental, moral, and physical degeneracy had accounted for his actions, Holmes claimed, and so his legal responsibility should of course be considered as diminished. The argument had gotten him nowhere in court; and after discussing his and other cases, we concluded that our killer’s work could no more be ascribed to evolutionary retrogression than could Holmes’s. In both subjects, the intellectual capacity demonstrated was simply too significant.

And then there was the day that young Stevie Taggert drove me down to meet the Isaacsons under the Brooklyn Bridge. Stevie had been continuing to run “errands” for me on a regular basis, and the process of keeping this activity hidden from Kreizler had forged something of a bond between us, one that permitted straightforward communication. At any rate, we received word one morning that two young girls playing under the Rose