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By Root 2839 0

most boring objects in the place: sculptures, old (or, I should say, ancient) pottery and glass, and Egyptian artifacts. The Doctor figured that, given the señora’s description of the woman who’d snatched her baby, it was in the latter hall that we’d find our friends; and so we did. Mr. Moore and Miss Howard were near one carved and painted face of an Egyptian woman, holding up Miss Beaux’s sketch for a comparison and nodding, apparently agreeing that the eyes were a good match. But as they did so, Mr. Moore for some reason kept bursting into a tired, giddy kind of laughter. The detective sergeants, for their part, were going over a small stack of papers excitedly but with serious purpose. There weren’t many other people in the place at that hour, and when we approached our bunch they all lit up like it was six or seven holidays boiled down to one.

“It’s as positive an identification as I’ve ever seen anyone make,” Lucius said as he moved over to meet us, trying to keep his voice under control but seeming ready to burst out of his sweaty clothes.

“Amazing,” Marcus added. “From a sketch! Doctor, if we could ever get this idea accepted by the department, it would change the entire process of identification and pursuit.”

Miss Howard and Mr. Moore rushed over next. “Well, Doctor,” Miss Howard began, “it took a few days, but—”

“You won’t believe it!” Mr. Moore said, chuckling in that strange way again. “It’s too rich, Laszlo, you’re never going to believe it, I tell you!”

The Doctor was shaking his head impatiently. “I won’t if none of you tells me what the devil ‘it’ is! Kindly get some sort of a grip on yourself, Moore—and one of you, please, go on.”

Mr. Moore just lurched away, holding his head in a kind of exhausted wonder and trying to stifle further laughter. It was up to Marcus to reveal what they’d discovered: “Suppose I were to tell you, Doctor, that last year—at the very same time that we were investigating the Beecham case together—the woman we’re now looking for was working just down the street from your own house?”

I could feel my own jaw drop, and saw the Doctor’s and Cyrus’s do the same. But it was also plain that, though shocked by it, we all knew what Marcus was talking about :

“You mean—the hospital?” the Doctor murmured, staring off at an Egyptian mummy case without seeing it. “The Lying-in Hospital?”

Lucius smiled wide. “The New York Lying-in Hospital. Whose principal benefactor was and is—”

“Morgan,” the Doctor mumbled on. “Pierpont Morgan.”

“Which means,” Miss Howard added, “that even as you and John were being—entertained in Mr. Morgan’s house, this woman was, effectively, being paid by him to tend to mothers and newborns.” She glanced over at Mr. Moore with a smile what indicated doubts about his current mental condition. “That’s what’s got him so tickled, you see—that and sheer fatigue. He’s been that way ever since we found out, and I’m not entirely sure how to snap him out of it.”

Mr. Moore’s amusement was thoroughly understandable. It might have been heightened by the relief of locating our quarry, but its main source was definitely the discovery that the woman in question had once been in the employ (even if indirectly) of the great financier who had played a crucial, and at times troublesome, part in our investigation of the Beecham murders. The thing had a kind of poetic—and, yes, amusing—justice to it. You see, during that investigation Mr. Moore and the Doctor had been kidnapped and taken to J. Pierpont Morgan’s house for a showdown over the effect that the case was having on the city; and while the result of that meeting had been a useful one for our cause, it’d left the pair of them with something less than the warmest feelings for the country’s most powerful businessman, banker—and philanthropist.

Among his many other charitable activities, Mr. Morgan had been the main source of funding for the transfer of the New York Lying-in Hospital to a large mansion previously owned by Mr. Hamilton Fish, which stood, as Marcus had said, just half a block away from the Doctor’s own house,