The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [222]
All of this attention caused me to start shifting my feet. “But—” I said quietly. “But—she’s gone.” My heart beating faster by the second, I soon found it impossible to keep my voice down. “She’s gone! She went to California—”
“We don’t know that, Stevie,” the Doctor said evenly. “And there doesn’t seem to be anyone else that Moore could possibly be referring to.”
I’d started to shake my head even before he’d finished talking. “No,” I said, in an effort to convince myself, as much as anyone else. “She left, she’s gone!” But then I remembered the glimpse of Ding Dong I’d caught on the Twenty-second Street pier before our departure from the city, and my voice died away as I realized that my argument wasn’t worth the air it took to voice it.
“I’m afraid I’m a bit behind, here,” Mr. Picton said, puffing on his pipe and seeming to sense that the moment was a tricky one. “It may, of course, be none of my business, but—who are you all talking about?”
The Doctor—once he saw that, though I was still upset, I was starting to get myself under some kind of control—turned to Mr. Picton. “It is the friend of Stevie’s of whom you’ve heard us speak—Miss Devlin. We had thought that she’d left the city for California.” He glanced my way once more. “It would appear that we were mistaken.”
“But that’s splendid!” Mr. Picton’s warm, loud words threw me and everybody else in the room off kilter for a second; I looked up to give him a very puzzled stare. “Well, I mean,” he went on, with warmhearted sincerity, “the girl’s been a great help with the case so far, Stevie. If she’s still in New York, what better person to continue to ask for assistance?”
The thought, one what none of us who actually knew Kat would have come up with, was strangely comforting, and I found that it had the effect of calming the pounding in my head and my chest, to the extent that I could even nod a bit.
“That’s true, Stevie,” Miss Howard said, in her most encouraging tone. “We don’t have any reason to believe that Kat won’t do what’s right. She has so far, after all. Whatever her flashes of temper.”
Even Cyrus, who knew best of all of them how open to question Kat’s participation would probably be, tried to be positive about the notion: “They’ve got a point, Stevie—she’s a tough girl, and Lord knows she’s unpredictable. But she’s done right by us at every turn.”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I guess that’s so …” But I wasn’t going to buy into the thing fully until I saw a look of certainty in the Doctor’s face.
I turned—but the look wasn’t there. “We have to hope, Stevie,” he said, one of his eyebrows arched. He’d never lied to me in the past, and I think he knew I wouldn’t’ve wanted him to start at that point. “It’s all we can do. But it won’t be blind hope—that much, at least, is the truth. She has truly been a help to us in this business.”
I just nodded again, swallowing hard and ready to move on to some other subject, being as I wouldn’t be able to begin to come to real terms with the question of Kat ’til later, when I could have a few smokes on my own.
Thankfully, the Doctor moved everyone’s attention on to other matters by going back to the telegram. “The final question, then—and I fear the most perplexing—is who the devil this ‘Chicago lawyer’ Moore mentions may be.”
“Perplexing, indeed!” Mr. Picton said, standing up and heading over to his window. He glanced out it and started to tug at the bristly ginger hair on his head so hard I thought the stuff might start coming out in clumps. “Chicago … why in God’s name Chicago? New York has the best criminal trial attorneys in the country—and with Vanderbilt behind her Libby could have any one of them!”
“Maybe Vanderbilt’s got some special contact in Chicago,” Lucius said. “He must have some reason for going that far afield for help. After all, he’s no fool.”
“No,” Mr. Picton agreed, kicking at a pile of papers on the floor.