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By Root 2891 0

to do some fairly extensive work on their house, most of it in the basement. But being as the actual records concerning the construction were missing and the copy of the permit didn’t go beyond generalities, that was all that we could determine (and lucky to have that much, too). But Miss Howard had sat Mr. Moore down after they learned this and forced him to remember everything he could about said basement, which he’d actually been encouraged by Nurse Hunter to search. Miss Howard figured there had to be some kind of a clue in the area somewhere, so she’d sketched and noted its dimensions and everything that Mr. Moore could remember it containing. Nothing about the place had jumped out at them so far, but it was possible they were overlooking or misinterpreting something what the detective sergeants might think was important.

We’d reached Number 808 Broadway before Lucius began to explain what he wanted with Elspeth Hunter’s (or Libby Hatch’s) jacket with the big buttons, and the Doctor decided that we should wait until we got upstairs to grill him about it. Lucius wasn’t what you’d call a flamboyant or vain type of person, but like his brother’d said that night we fetched them from the Cunard pier, he did enjoy his occasional moment of intellectual grandstanding; and as we rode up in the elevator, the big smile on his face made it plain that he was pleased with the fact that none of us (except for Marcus, of course) had figured out what his plan was. For all that I was curious, I kind of admired Marcus for not spilling the beans and for giving his kid brother a moment to shine: it was an unusual outward demonstration that, underneath it all, the brothers really were deeply attached to each other, as they would’ve had to’ve been, to have survived their years of struggling together up through the ranks of the police force.

We got upstairs, and through the front windows of the office I could see that the clouds beyond the Hudson to the west were thickening, loading up with what looked like might turn into real rain. Everybody grabbed a seat, and Lucius stood by the big chalkboard, picking up a nib of chalk and shaking it around in his closed hand just the way the Doctor liked to do: Lucius had the greatest admiration for Dr. Kreizler, in a kind of boyish way that sometimes made him seem to want to emulate the man in small ways as well as big.

Repeating, for Mr. Moore and Miss Howard’s benefit, his belief that what we now required above all was proof that Nurse Hunter had the Linares baby and had actually attacked the señora in the Park, Lucius proceeded to explain why so simple a garment as a jacket with buttons could provide such proof. The bit about the buttons, once I’d heard it, was pretty obvious, and I felt a little like kicking myself for not having thought of it: the detective sergeants had been able to get a good set of fingerprints off of the piece of lead pipe they’d found by the Egyptian obelisk, and they needed a set of Nurse Hunter’s for comparison. They hadn’t wanted to actually steal anything from her house, being as she seemed like the type that would notice if even the smallest trinket was missing. And given that the Hunter house had turned out to be under Goo Goo Knox’s personal protection, it seemed a lucky thing they’d made the choice they had; but we still needed something that they could lift prints from for comparison. An article of clothing with buttons would suit best, as there weren’t likely to be any prints on the fasteners save her own; and big, flat buttons would be spacious enough to provide complete images of multiple fingertips.

That left the question of why Lucius wanted a jacket or a coat, something that Nurse Hunter was likely to wear at home and outside. This question in turn brought us into what was, for the rest of our group, a mysterious new world: hair identification. It seemed that forensic science had progressed to the point where a microscope could be used to determine if a given hair was human or animal and, if it was human, whether it had come from a particular person—provided