The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [22]
“Do you, now?” Hogan answered. “Well, they won’t want any Zulu boy taking them away from their scientific studies—”
But the Isaacsons had already turned at the sound of Cyrus’s voice. Seeing him, they both smiled. “Cyrus!” Marcus called. “What are you doing here?” The detective sergeant glanced around, and I knew he was looking for me. I already had a finger in front of my mouth, so that when he saw me he’d know not to say anything. He got the message and nodded, still smiling, and then Lucius did the same. They both got up off their haunches, and for the first time we could see what was lying on the oilcloth.
It was the upper part of a man’s torso, which had been cut off just below the ribs. The neck had likewise been severed, in a way what even I could see was not the work of any expert. The arms had also been hacked off of the hunk of flesh, which looked fairly fresh. That and the fact that there wasn’t much of a stench seemed to indicate the thing hadn’t been in the water all that long.
At a nod from Cyrus, Lucius and Marcus drew aside with us, and friendlier greetings were exchanged in whispered voices.
“Have you changed professions, Stevie?” Lucius asked, indicating my hat as he mopped at his head with a handkerchief.
“No, sir,” I answered. “But we needed to get here in a hurry. Miss Howard—”
“Sara?” Marcus cut in. “Is she all right? Has anything happened?”
“She’s at Number 808, sir,” Cyrus answered. “With a client and Mr. Moore. It’s a case that they seem to think you may be able to help them with. It’s urgent—but it’s got to be unofficial.”
Lucius sighed. “Like anything else that might actually advance forensic science these days. It’s all we can do to keep this bunch from taking these remains and feeding them to the lions in the Central Park menagerie.”
“What happened?” I asked, again looking at the grim quarter of a corpse on the oilcloth.
“Some kids saw it floating out in the river,” Marcus answered. “Pretty crude job. Dead less than a few hours, certainly. But there’re some interesting details, and we need to record them all. Can you give us five minutes?”
Cyrus nodded, and then the detective sergeants went back to their work. I could hear Lucius as he began to list various details of the thing to the other cops, his tone showing plainly that he knew it was useless and growing maybe just a little haughty as a result: “Now, then, Captain, you will note, I’m certain, that both the flesh and the spine have been cut with some kind of crude saw. We can rule out the possibility of any medical student or anatomist stealing body parts—they wouldn’t want to damage the organs in that way. And these rectangular patches of missing skin are extremely interesting—they’ve been deliberately cut away, in all likelihood to remove some kind of identifying marks. Tattoos, maybe, since we’re on the waterfront, or perhaps simple birthmarks. So the murderer almost certainly knew his victim well….”
Having seen enough of both the butcher’s work on the ground and the way that the cops alternately laughed at and ignored what Lucius was saying about it, I turned to look at the boys who’d found the body. They were all still full of the shock and excitement of the thing and were continuing to jump around and laugh nervously. I took note that I knew the skinniest of their number and drifted over to talk to him.
“Hey, Nosy,” I said quietly, at which the skinny kid turned and grinned. I didn’t have to tell him not to call out my name in front of the cops: he belonged to the gang of boys what ran with Crazy Butch, one of Monk Eastman’s lieutenants, a group that I’d served with for a time before my incarceration on Randalls Island, and he knew I wouldn’t want any contact with the bulls, being as, once you were a kid that they’d marked as a troublemaker, they took a kind of sick pleasure in riding you wherever they found you, whether you’d done anything wrong or not.
“Stevepipe!” Nosy whispered, pulling his sheet of canvas tighter around himself and rubbing at the large, oddly shaped protrusion