Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

This was all very disturbing. For our theory that Libby Hatch had herself shot her three children to work out, we appeared to need three shots to’ve been fired; but only two had been discharged from the Colt. This gap perplexed Marcus and Lucius mightily, and as they continued to dust the gun for fingerprints, their faces grew as knotted as the old trees out in the yard. They did find several prints that matched Libby’s on both the gun’s grips and its trigger; and there was a partial print on the hammer what they felt comfortable labeling as hers, too; but there was no sign that she’d ever touched the cylinder, which appeared to rule out the possibility that she’d reloaded and refired the thing at any point. We knew that one bullet had traveled clear through Clara Hatch s neck (and hopefully lodged in some part of the wagon, probably the underside of the driver’s bench); but if only one other shot had been fired, how could we account for two dead boys?

Their mood getting nothing but more glum, Marcus and Lucius carefully recorded all their opening findings on the condition of the gun, and then began to disassemble the thing to get it ready for the test firing. It was Miss Howard who brought hope back into the picture by coming up with a possible solution to the riddle of two bullets and three victims. Going for the stack of Mr. Picton’s files on the shooting, which were lying inside on the piano, she pulled out Dr. Lawrence’s postmortem report on the two Hatch boys, reminding us that nowhere in the thing was there any reference to exit wounds on either Thomas’s or Matthew’s body. And while Lawrence did say that there were powder burns on the children, he didn’t specifically state which children: Mr. Picton had assumed he’d meant all three, being as they’d all suffered gunshot wounds. But that might not’ve been the case. As for Libby Hatch’s statements about what positions the kids’d been in when they were shot, we couldn’t accept those any more than we could believe anything else the woman had said. So we were free, inside of certain limits, to imagine an entirely different sequence of events from the one that Mr. Picton had dreamed up on the basis of the reports.

Suppose, Miss Howard said, that little Thomas had, in fact been sitting in Clara’s lap when the rig stopped. The girl had been shot in the chest, and there was no way that anybody could have shot her in that region without first moving Thomas out of the way. So, Miss Howard said, we had to figure that Libby had taken Thomas and stuck him somewhere else-probably in Matthew’s lap. Libby’d then shot Clara, an act what almost certainly would’ve made Thomas very upset, causing Libby to shoot him quickly Now, the Colt.45 Peacemaker was a powerful gun: the bullet what’d struck Clara had traveled clear through her chest and neck. So the bullet what’d hit little Thomas would definitely have gone straight through him and into whatever was behind him-or whoever was behind him, if we now accepted the idea that he’d actually been sitting in front of Matthew.

This thought got Marcus’s and Lucius’s eyes twinkling again. Was Miss Howard suggesting, they asked, that the two boys had been killed by one bullet? To be sure, she answered; nothing else made any sense, given the state of the Colt. But before anybody went getting too happy, Miss Howard continued, we had to remember one thing: the single bullet might not have been traveling with enough power to make it through both bodies and into the front of the wagon’s wooden bed. If that was the case, we were in trouble; for among the many things Dr. Lawrence’s report didn’t mention was his having taken any bullets out of the dead boys. In other words, if the missing bullet wasn’t in the hunk of wood in front of us, then it’d been buried with Matthew Hatch in Ballston’s town cemetery (which was, it turned out, just around the corner from Mr. Picton’s house). This realization wiped the smiles right back off the detective sergeants’ faces, and also lit a new fire under me and Mr. Moore-joined, now, by Miss Howard-to tear the piece of planking and the driver’s seat into toothpicks in an effort to find the second deadly missile; because without it, we had no way of even suggesting that Daniel Hatch’s Colt had been involved in the shootings.

As we madly pursued our work, Marcus and Lucius went back to working on the gun. Mr. Picton eventually returned to his house for lunch, and over that meal we told him about our morning’s work, which he found intriguing but also very unsettling. Once he’d set back out for his office, we went to work again with even more determination; but the early hours of the afternoon went by without anyone making any discoveries.

The approach of evening brought the return of Dr. Kreizler and Cyrus, who took up positions next to us and joined in the search. Still, though, there were no hopeful sightings. We were beginning to run out of places to look, and it was Mr. Moore who first realized the dreadful implications of that fact. Along toward cocktail time his brow had become positively creased by discouragement; but when Mr. Picton came home and suggested that everyone quit working and have a drink before dinner, Mr. Moore forced himself to put on a cheery face, and urged the detective sergeants-whose eyes had gone bloodshot from a full day of very close work-to accept Mr. Picton’s invitation. The rest of us would be along, he said, in a minute, to which Marcus and Lucius nodded wearily and headed on into the house.

As soon as they were safely out of earshot, Mr. Moore’s face filled with urgency. “All right,” he said, putting his magnifying lens down. “That’s it for tonight. Everybody knock off.”

“But why, John?” Miss Howard said. “There’s still some daylight, and not that much left to do-”

“That’s exactly the point,” Mr. Moore answered. “We’re going to need some part of this thing to be intact in the morning.”

I was still confused; but Cyrus had begun to nod in understanding. “It’s not here, is it, Mr. Moore?”

“The odds are against it,” Mr. Moore answered. “A forty-five-caliber bullet would’ve left a big enough mark that one of us would’ve seen it by now.”

“So why save some of the thing?” I asked.

“Because I don’t want Rupert to have to outright lie in court, or Marcus and Lucius to have to perjure themselves. There’s only one place that bullet can be-and we’re going to get it. Then, tomorrow morning, we’ll put it in what’s left of this thing and let them find it. None of us are going to be called to testify in this particular area, so we don’t need to worry about lying-and so far as the rest of them will know, they’ll be telling the truth.”

The Doctor’s eyebrows arched a bit. “John-you realize that you’re suggesting-”

“Yes, I know what I’m suggesting, Kreizler,” Mr. Moore said, moving away from the table. “But there’s no other option. We all know we’d never get a judge to order something like this without the mother’s permission. Not based on the little evidence we’ve gathered so far.” He paused, waiting for arguments; but none came. “I’ll check in the basement for a shovel,” Mr. Moore went on. “We’ll do the job tonight.”

Miss Howard, Cyrus, and I looked at one another in a little shock; but the Doctor summed up all our deeper feelings by saying, “Moore’s right. It’s the only way we can be sure.”

All five of our heads started nodding slowly; but much as we may have agreed that Mr. Moore’s plan was the only way to both get what we needed and look out for Mr. Picton’s and the detective sergeants’ legal and ethical positions, that didn’t change the fact that we were contemplating a grisly, frightening, and illegal action, one what had gotten many people hanged-or worse-over the centuries. It took, you might say, a little adjusting to.