The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [248]
But good intentions and keeping your nose to the grindstone don’t always pay off, and by the weekend we hadn’t turned up anything what would’ve passed for useful information. It began to look almost as if there’d been some deliberate attempt to wipe away any trace of Libby’s existence. Our travels eventually took us pretty far north, around the southern shores of Lake George and into the edge of the Adirondack forest; and though the countryside got nothing but more beautiful, the towns also got nothing but smaller and less frequent, until it took the better part of the day just to reach them and most of the evening to get back home. One thing, at least, was for sure: if Libby Hatch had truly been born and raised in a town in Washington County, then neither she nor her family had gotten out and around much—assuming, of course, that she hadn’t killed the lot of them off years ago, an idea what began to haunt my thoughts more and more on those long, useless trips from village to village. For her part, Miss Howard didn’t seem to like the idea of continuing to look for a needle what might not even be in our assigned haystack any more than I did; and I knew that she also shared my desire to sit in on some of the Doctor’s interviews with Libby Hatch. But she kept me and El Niño on the job, knowing that any clue to Libby’s past what might be used in court would mean a lot more than our being entertained by the battle of wits what was taking place under the Ballston court house.
We did get nightly reports about those meetings, though, as we sat around Mr. Picton’s dining room table for what, given all our activities, usually turned out to be very late suppers. During the first of these meals the Doctor explained that Libby’s attitude toward him had been typically changeable: she’d started with expressions of deep injury, as if the Doctor—someone whom Libby’d expressed admiration for when they first met—had done her some kind of deliberate hurt by trying to lay not just the Linares kidnapping but the deaths of the kids she’d had care of in New York and the murders of her own children at her door. Such was a smart position for her to start from, the Doctor told us: whether consciously or unconsciously, Libby was trading on every person’s secret horror of accusing a mother of horrible crimes toward the children she is supposed to watch over, and on society’s hopeful belief that what Miss Howard called the “myth of maternal nurturing” was in fact as solid and reliable as the Rocky Mountains. But once it became clear that the Doctor wasn’t going to let his own uneasiness overrule his intellect, Libby had quickly moved on to what was, for her, an equally familiar role: the seducer. She’d begun to coyly tease the Doctor about what secret longings and desires must be hidden underneath his detached, disciplined exterior. This, of course, also got her nowhere, and so in the end she’d been forced to rely on the last of her most accustomed behaviors: anger. Throwing the victim and temptress acts aside, she’d become the punisher, and sat petulantly in her cell, giving the Doctor short, resentful answers to his questions—many of them, he could tell, outright lies—and punctuating the statements by telling him how sorry he’d be one day for ever tangling with her. But what she didn’t realize was that this change in attitude itself gave the Doctor just what he was looking for: Libby’s ability to analyze what he was trying to do and come up with a series of different but carefully planned responses