The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [121]
This might seem to’ve been so much of what the Doctor called “hypothetical” thinking—and so, in fact, it was. But nobody who’d ever seen the cold glare that could come into Elspeth Hunter’s golden eyes would’ve doubted for a second that she was capable of such an act. Still, the thought that we were up against somebody we now had good reason to believe had killed not only a whole group of infants but at least one full-grown adult male was more than a little frightening. In fact, it seemed like every day or two we were coming across some new revelation about the woman what proved her to be dangerous in a way we hadn’t anticipated. Such didn’t make preparing for our break-in to her house any easier. But other than carrying more and bigger firearms, there really wasn’t much of a way to improve on the plan itself; and when Miss Howard showed up on Thursday morning with one of Ana Linares’s little nightgowns, my part in that plan became more pressing: I now had to spend long hours making sure Mike was properly trained, being as an awful lot was riding on his nose.
Along with the nightgown, Miss Howard brought confirmation of what the Doctor had speculated about during and after his trip to the Museum of Natural History: Señor Linares did in fact have a Filipino aborigine in his employ. He was a spooky little character who gave the señora goose bumps and who she wouldn’t allow to sleep in their house, forcing the little man instead to pass his nights out in the yard. The pygmy, known only as “El Niño,” had been a Linares family servant for many years, but the señora was unclear about exactly what his duties were—though when Miss Howard told her about our encounters with the man, she was able to put together a much better idea. Miss Howard’s revealing this information had only put another strain on the Linareses’ marriage, which, it seemed, was close to falling apart: the señora’d told Miss Howard that if she hadn’t been a good Catholic, she would’ve already left her husband.
To top all this off, we had the now-daily headlines in the Times about the “mystery of the headless body,” following the case as it began to dissolve, before the Police Department’s helpless eyes, into the kind of boring domestic murder what Detective Sergeant Lucius had originally predicted it would turn out to be. By Tuesday the theory that the victim was one of the escaped lunatics from Long Island had been pretty well exploded, and the police were instead putting up the idea that the deed had been done by the same crazy butcher who had similarly killed and dismembered a young girl, Susie Martin, in a famous case a few years back. This theory, handed to the cops like a Christmas present by the pathologist who’d investigated the Martin case, took all of about two minutes to fall apart: various people with missing loved ones had shown up at the morgue to view the headless body parts, and by Wednesday no fewer than nine of these visitors had positively identified the things as being the remains of one William Guldensuppe, a masseur at the Murray Hill Turkish Baths.
The cops had (reluctantly, I was betting) pursued this lead, and by Thursday they had discovered not only that Guldensuppe had been living for a long time with a lady friend, a certain Mrs. Nack, in a house in Hell’s Kitchen, but that said lady friend had recently developed an attachment to another man in their building, Martin Thorn. Guldensuppe, Nack, and Thorn had been seen and heard by other residents of their neighborhood openly fighting about the situation. Mrs. Nack was quickly found by the bulls and given a dose of the old third degree: she confessed, after twenty-four straight hours of brutal treatment, that she and Thorn had killed Guldensuppe together