The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [198]
“Do you think Matthew Hatch will reach out from the grave, Moore?” the Doctor needled. “To rebuke you for disturbing his eternal rest?”
“Maybe,” Mr. Moore answered. “Something like that. You don’t seem too damned troubled along those lines, Kreizler, I must say.”
“Perhaps I have a different understanding of what we’ve just done,” the Doctor answered, his voice growing more serious. “Perhaps I believe that Matthew Hatch’s soul has not yet known peace, eternal or otherwise—and that we represent his only chance of attaining it.” Lighting first Mr. Moore’s cigarette and then one of his own, the Doctor took a drag and got more animated. “What I don’t understand,” he said, his mind jumping from subject to subject as nimbly as usual, “is what the devil they want. The man sends us a warning at Number 808—saves Cyrus’s life on Bethune Street—and now here, in another part of the state, he evidently attempts to deliver some sort of deadly message to Stevie. What can it mean?”
“Señor Linares,” Miss Howard answered, following the Doctor’s wandering thoughts, “evidently wants us to know that he’s aware of our movements—and our actions.”
Mr. Moore nodded. “It seems like as long as we’re not associating with his wife or trying to find the girl, we’re all right. But if we cross those lines …”
“Is that what the aborigine’s signals to Stevie meant?” the Doctor wondered. “That we can do what we like to and about Libby Hatch, so long as we leave the Linares family out of it?”
“Maybe,” Mr. Moore answered with a shrug.
“Well, then, why doesn’t the man just tell us as much?” the Doctor asked, his frustration growing. “Why all these cryptic messages, sent through a mysterious go-between?”
I was shaking my head. “I don’t think that’s what he meant …”
“Stevie?” the Doctor said.
“I don’t know,” I answered, puzzling with the thing. “It’s just that—well, that wasn’t the look on his face. El Niño, I mean. I was scared at the time, sure, but—looking back on it, I don’t think he was threatening me or warning me. It was almost like … like he wanted something.”
“The aborigine?” the Doctor said, as we approached Mr. Picton’s house. “What could he possibly want from us?”
“Like I say, I don’t know.” I brought my voice down to a very low whisper as we formed into a stealthy file to move back inside. “But something tells me he’ll let us know before too long.”
CHAPTER 35
We couldn’t have asked for the rest of our plan to play out any closer to its design. When we got back to Mr. Picton’s house, Mr. Moore carefully inserted the bullet into an empty gap in the planking we’d taken from the Hatches’ wagon, and the following morning we were all woken by the sound of Lucius’s wild shouting. He’d gotten up early to have a go at the examination himself, thinking that maybe the rest of us had missed something—which it now looked like we had. Poking around in the small hole with one of the medical probes, Lucius announced that he’d found an object inside what was definitely made out of some kind of soft metal; and while the rest of us got dressed and had breakfast, he and Marcus went about freeing the thing from the wood. It was an anxious time for the two brothers, and for Mr. Picton, too; and the rest of us tried to make it appear that we were also on edge. But to this day I don’t know how convincing we were.
Cheers went up from all sides when the last chips of wood gave way to the detective sergeants’ patient knife work, and revealed a large, almost intact, and very recognizable bullet. Marcus took the slug inside to the card table and set it down on the green felt surface for the rest of us to look at. I’d seen more than a few such missiles in my time, but I hadn’t ever taken the time to really study one as closely as I now did through one of the magnifying lenses. I was trying to get a glimpse of the identifying marks what Marcus and Lucius had told us about the day before; and they were there, all right, plain enough for anybody to see, or at least the grooves and lands were. As for any defects produced by the Peacemaker’s barrel, we’d have