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By Root 3144 0

’t gotten the point. Dr. Kreizler tried to get his friend’s mind off the thing by going over the front page of the Times. But the news there wasn’t such as would cheer any of us up. The police had finally captured Martin Thorn, the suspected culprit in the “mystery of the headless body,” and, true to Detective Sergeant Lucius’s prediction, he’d never left the city during the whole time the manhunt for him had been going on. We had some reason to believe that the distraction of the case would continue a bit longer—though a confession had been gotten out of Thorn, it conflicted with all the “evidence” and theories the police had assembled—but at best the case would be resolved in a matter of days. An even greater worry was the fact that Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Mr. Roosevelt’s closest friend and political ally in Washington, was openly urging President McKinley to take stronger action against the Spanish Empire in all contested matters: the American war party was getting impatient, and though we didn’t know just what that would mean for our investigation, it didn’t seem to indicate anything good. Finally, there was a report of more personal importance to both the Doctor and Mr. Moore: Madame Lillian Nordica, one of their favorite singers from the Metropolitan Opera, was critically ill in London. The Times made it seem like she was at death’s door, though we eventually found out that the report was exaggerated; but even the possibility of such a loss was enough to cause the Doctor to join Mr. Moore in downhearted silence.

The rain didn’t let up much as we drove downtown, and neither did the stench on the street, which was a very bad sign: weather of that variety, coming at that time of year, could take quite a while to blow on out of town. As it turned out, that day did indeed mark the start of the first really dangerous period of the summer, the kind of natural phenomenon what the papers had taken to calling a “heat wave.” For the next week, average temperatures would not fall below the eighties; and even at night, the humid air and lack of wind would make sleep just about impossible. This situation was not helped by the fact that our investigation soon narrowed down to the tedious business of continuing the search for a talkative member of the group of women whose kids had been under Nurse Hunter’s care at the Lying-in Hospital (a job what had me driving the detective sergeants and Miss Howard to dismal parts of the city or, worse yet, out to the suburbs, over the next few days), as well as waiting for Mr. Moore to hear from his old pal up in Ballston Spa. By the following Monday, some of us were beginning to doubt the existence of this person. Mr. Moore had sent not one but two cables to the man, telling him what we were up to, but he’d had no reply. Such didn’t necessarily mean anything, one way or the other; but it was, given our circumstances and the weather, cause for much frustration.

Add fear to that mix, and you had a truly rocky time. This last emotion came first in the form of occasional appearances in the Stuyvesant Park area by members of the Hudson Dusters. They made no threatening moves, being as they weren’t interested in getting into a scrape so far outside their territory; but it was clear that they wanted to remind us that they were around, and that—cops or no cops—we’d, be better off minding our own business. Unsettling as these visits were, they didn’t compare to the several sightings by some members of our team—including me—of El Niño, the Filipino pygmy employed by Señor Linares. Like the Dusters, this little man made no attempt to attack or even threaten any of us; but he was there and watching, knives and arrows at the ready should our investigation actually start to move forward in some kind of dramatic way.

As all of this was happening, the detective sergeants also had to pursue their investigation of affairs at the Doctor’s Institute. They hadn’t reported their progress on this matter to anyone in our group; hadn’t said anything about it at all, in fact, excepting the time they’d requested information