The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [351]
At about one-thirty the detective sergeants returned from the First Precinct house down on New Street, where the body of Libby Hatch’d been taken after its arrival at the police pier. From the First the corpse would be shipped on up to the morgue, a fact what made my spirit burn: I didn’t much like the idea of the murderess being in so much as the same building as Kat, even if they were both dead. Still, there was nothing to do about it, as an autopsy had to be performed on Libby. (The conclusions of said procedure, we later found out, were “inconclusive,” just as Mr. Moore’d suspected they would be.) As for El Niño, I half expected that he might telephone the house that night, just to make sure everything’d turned out okay; but then I realized that, so far as he was concerned, everything already had. His jefe had been avenged, and baby Ana would be returned to her mother; all that was left for him in New York was trouble with the law, and when I took the time to consider it I realized that I’d much rather he move fast to get safely out of town—and maybe out of the country—than slow down to risk contact with us.
For her part, Miss Howard had, according to plan, ‘phoned uptown to the French consulate straightway when we returned to the Doctor’s house, to inform Señora Linares that all was well and that, as soon as she had police protection, she’d bring Ana to her. We all knew that the detective sergeants were needed for this job, and that they’d best be armed when they carried it out: there was no way of saying what new servants Señor Linares had hired when El Niño’d come over to our side, or if they, like the aborigine, had been keeping watch over the Doctor’s house. But as it turned out, such caution wasn’t necessary: Miss Howard, Marcus, and Lucius got the baby back to her mother without any sign of trouble. When they returned, they told us that the señora was in the process of deciding whether to go back to her family in Spain or to head west, to those parts of the United States where new beginnings were the common coin, and where, I’d once hoped, Kat might’ve been able to get a fresh start on life. But the great and inexpressible joy the señora’d experienced when she’d been reunited with Ana, Miss Howard and the Isaacsons said, was enough to make such decisions seem of small importance for the moment, and had given our three teammates the powerful feeling that everything we’d been through had been well worth it.
Such may have been true, too—for them. For Mr. Moore and me, though, there would always be questions, questions about whether we’d been right in getting people we cared deeply about involved in a case what ended up costing them their lives. Such questions seldom come with easy answers, and they never go away: as I sit here writing these words, I can’t say as I’m any closer to quieting those doubts than I was at three A.M. that morning, when everyone finally went their separate ways and I sat for an hour in my windowsill, tearfully smoking cigarettes and seeing Kat’s eyes all over the starry sky.
There were, of course, the funerals to attend to, and after a simple ceremony for Kat at Calvary Cemetery on Wednesday afternoon—one what I was grateful to every member of our group for attending—we all boarded a train early Thursday morning to head back up to Ballston Spa and watch Mr. Picton get planted in the ground of the same cemetery on Ballston Avenue what we had, only weeks earlier, violated. It was sadness, affection, and respect, of course, what drew us so far to say our last good-byes to the agitated little man with the ever-blasting pipe who’d refused to let the case of the murders on the Charlton road die, and who, in death, had given us the legal leverage we’d needed to openly pursue Libby Hatch in New York. But curiosity pulled us north, too: curiosity about what Mr. Picton’s final