Caleb Carr - The Angel Of Darkness

“Looks like a-a tiny hat,” Mr. Moore said.

“A baby’s hat,” Miss Howard said, indicating two little strands of delicate, braided cotton string what were used to tie the thing at the chin and a trim of white lace around its front.

“There’s something else,” Marcus said, still flattening out the fabric. He unfolded the back of the cap to reveal fine golden embroidery at its rear border: “ ‘A-N-A,’ ” he read out. The rest of us just stared at the thing as the detective sergeant looked up and out at the park. “Well… looks like west it was. She got rid of the hat in case somebody stopped her-probably the only identifying article on the girl.”

“Don’t jump to any conclusions, Marcus,” Lucius said. “She could have stuffed the hat in here and then gone the other direction.”

“I don’t know,” Mr. Moore said, standing between the obelisk and the benches. “It’s a good thirty or forty feet out of her way-that’s time she’s wasting, stuffing it in there. Plenty of other spots to hide it if she went east-starting with the construction site.”

“True, Moore,” Dr. Kreizler said, staring up at the obelisk. “But in addition, there is the question of where she chose to hide it-where precisely …”

“What do you mean, Doctor?” Marcus asked.

But the Doctor only turned to Miss Howard. “The Egyptian obelisk. It’s one of a pair. The other stands in London. Do you know what they are known as, Sara?” Miss Howard just shook her head. “ ‘Cleopatra’s Needles,’ ” the Doctor went on, looking back up. “An ominous title-she was quite a deadly woman, Cleopatra.”

“And yet,” Miss Howard continued, getting it, “the ‘Mother of Egypt,’ in her day. Not to mention the lover of Caesar and Antony -she even bore Caesar’s child.”

“Caesarion,” the Doctor said with a nod.

“What the hell are you two on about?” Mr. Moore demanded.

But the Doctor just kept talking to Miss Howard. “Suppose, Sara,” he asked, moving toward her, “that the apparent paradox is not a question, but the answer? Something connects the two sides of the character, the two faces of the coin. We don’t know what that connecting element is yet, but the connection exists. So that what we are faced with is not an inconsistency so much as a troubled unity. Aspects of a condition-related stages in a single process .”

Miss Howard’s face darkened. “Then I’d say we’re running out of time.”

The Doctor gave her a quick look of agreement, then called out, “Marcus! The children Nurse Hunter attended-how long did you say the average interval between their births and their deaths was?”

“Not more than a few weeks,” Marcus answered.

“Laszlo,” Mr. Moore insisted, in that way he did when he felt like the mental pack was pulling away from him. “Come on, what are you two talking about?”

The Doctor continued to ignore him and counted on his fingers. “She took the child on a Thursday-that was ten days ago.” He glanced at Miss Howard again. “You’re right, Sara-the woman may be entering a critical phase. Stevie!” I hopped it up to him. “Can we carry everyone in the calash?”

“Not at top speed,” I answered. “But I don’t see any cabs around.”

“I don’t want a cab,” the Doctor answered urgently. “We’ll need the time together to explain.”

“Well-traffic shouldn’t be too bad,” I judged. “We oughtta be able to go at a decent trot. Frederick ’s had a couple of days off, he’ll be game.”

“Then get him-now!”

As I shot off to fetch the calash, I heard Mr. Moore still asking what was going on and the Doctor telling him to hurry up and get into the carriage, that he’d explain what he and Miss Howard were thinking once they were on their way downtown. I pulled the rig around to them, and then Cyrus climbed up top with me, while Miss Howard squeezed between Lucius and the Doctor on the seat. Marcus and Mr. Moore roosted themselves as the detective sergeants had done during our commandeered cab ride, on the two iron steps on either side of the carriage.

“Where to?” I called back, though I was pretty sure of what the answer would be.

“Number 39 Bethune Street,” the Doctor answered. “With any luck the Hunter woman and her husband haven’t moved-and if they have, the new tenants may know where they are now!”

“It’ll be fastest if I cut through the park,” I said. “And use a few-shortcuts.”

“Then do it, do it!” the Doctor yelled, at which I slapped the reins against Frederick ’s haunches and raced off down the park’s East Drive, heading south.

Frederick had just bounded at a crisp trot off of the Central Park carriage drive and onto the broad grass plain of Sheep Meadow (a questionable thing for me to ask of him, I know, but a shortcut’s a shortcut) as the Doctor began to speak to his assembled colleagues:

“When we first undertook criminal investigative work together,” he said, “we accepted as our starting point the idea that the criminal mind could be, medically speaking, sound, and formed like any other healthy person’s-through the context of individual experience. I have seen nothing, professionally, during the last twelve months to convince me that the true incidence of mental disease among criminals is any higher than I thought then. Nor have I heard anything about this Hunter woman which would suggest that she suffers from either dementia praecox ”-which was the term alienists used in those days for what they’re now starting to call ‘schizophrenia’-“or one of the lesser mental pathologies. She may be impulsive, and extremely so-but impulsiveness, like extreme anger or melancholia, does not on its own indicate a disease of the mind. The fact that she is also capable of elaborate calculation, particularly within compressed time frames, supports the notion that we are dealing with someone who is quite sane.”

Mr. Moore shook his head and looked off toward Central Park West as we rejoined the carriage path. “Why do I find myself wishing we could be up against a lunatic this time?” he said with a sigh.

“You’ve got good cause to, John,” Lucius said. “Lunatics may be dangerous sometimes, but they’re a hell of a lot easier to track.” The detective sergeant started scratching at his pad again. “Please go on, Doctor.”

“We begin, then,” the Doctor continued, “with the notion that this woman is sane-she has kidnapped a child and may well have killed others, for reasons that we can postulate.”

“And what do we do if we catch her?” Marcus asked. “You’re talking about a real sacred cow, Doctor-no matter how many women knock off kids in baby farms, no matter how many crones make fortunes running abortion parlors, no matter how many mothers kill their offspring, people don’t like to get near cases that deal with women’s relationships toward children being anything other than healthy and nurturing. You heard Mrs. Cady Stanton the other night. That’s the majority opinion: if women are doing something bad concerning birth and kids, either they’re crazy or men and the society that men have created are behind it somewhere.”

The Doctor was trying to stop Marcus with an impatient hand. “I know, I know, Detective Sergeant, but it will be our job, again, to ignore popular sentiment and focus on facts. And the most salient fact is this: we are faced with a woman whose behavior embodies what appear to be two diametrically opposed attitudes and acts. The one is nurturing; the other, destructive. Perhaps even murderous. If we accept that she is sane, we must link them.”

“Tough,” Mr. Moore said. “Very tough.”

“Why, John?” the Doctor asked as we exited the comforting greenery of the park at its southwest corner, then passed by the Riding Academy and moved through some very sparse traffic around the Columbus Monument. “Who among us can’t claim to embody conflicting urges and conflicting goals at times? Take yourself. How often do you go out and ingest enormous amounts of a liquid poison, in the form of expensive alcohol, while at the same time inhaling dose after dose of a toxic alkaloid called nicotine-?”