absolutely empty.
“Just as he found it, is how he left it,” Mrs. Piedmont said. “He was that way, Mr. Beecham.”
Under the guise of deciding whether or not we wanted to rent the room, Sara and I went through the wardrobe and the chest of drawers, without finding any trace of human activity. There was simply nothing in the ten-by-twenty-foot confines of that chamber that would have made you believe that it had ever been inhabited by anyone, much less by a tortured soul whom we suspected of having done away with at least half a dozen children in a bizarre and brutal fashion. The lingering scent of decay in the air only reinforced this conclusion. Eventually Sara and I told Mrs. Piedmont that, though it was indeed a lovely little room, it was nonetheless too small for our purposes. Then we turned to go back downstairs.
Sara and our hostess, who once again began blathering about her cats, had already reached the staircase when I caught sight of something just inside the door of Beecham’s room: a few small stains on the bland, striped wallpaper. They were of a brownish hue, and in a pattern that indicated that whatever the substance was—and it could easily have been blood—it had hit the wall in a hard splatter. Following the path of the stain, I arrived at the bed; and, seeing as Mrs. Piedmont was now out of sight, I pulled the mattress up to have a look.
A stench hit me, suddenly and hard. It was identical to that which I’d detected on entering the room, only of an increased strength that immediately made me close my eyes, cover my mouth, and want to retch. I was about to drop the mattress again when my eyes opened long enough to catch sight of a small skeleton. A furry hide was stretched over the bones, though in some spots the hide had rotted away, revealing the dried remains of inner organs. Old, rotting string was wound around the four legs of the skeleton at the feet, and next to the rear legs lay several sections of jointed bone, almost like tiny vertebrae—a tail, I realized, that’d been cut into pieces. The creature’s skull, barely covered by a few small patches of skin and fur, lay some eight inches from the rest of the skeleton. Both the mattress and the spring beneath it bore broad stains of a color that matched the splotches on the wall.
I finally let go of the mattress, then jumped out into the hall and took out a handkerchief, dabbing at my face. Resisting one more urge to vomit, I took a few deep breaths and stood at the top of the stairs, trying to determine if I felt sound enough to navigate them.
“John?” I heard Sara call from downstairs. “Are you coming?”
The first flight of stairs was a bit tricky, but by the second I was doing much better; and when I reached the front door of the house, where Mrs. Piedmont was standing in the midst of her mewing cats, holding Sara’s hand, I even managed to arrange a smile. I thanked Mrs. Piedmont quickly and then stepped out into the cloudless night, the air of which seemed especially clean given what I’d been breathing inside.
Sara followed me, still talking to Mrs. Piedmont, and then the same gray-striped cat bounded out onto the stoop. “Peter!” Mrs. Piedmont cried. “Miss Howard, could you…?” Sara already had the animal in her arms, and she handed it to Mrs. Piedmont with a smile. “Cats!” Mrs. Piedmont said one more time, and then she called more goodbyes and closed the door.
Sara came down the steps and joined me, her smile shrinking as she studied my face. “John?” she said. “You’ve gone pale, what is it?” She stood still and then grabbed my arm. “You found something up there—what was it?”
“Jib,” I answered, wiping my face again with my handkerchief.
Sara’s face screwed up. “Jib? The
“Let me put it this way,” I said, taking her arm and starting the walk back toward Broadway. “Regardless of what Mrs. Piedmont may say, cats do
CHAPTER 40
Sara and I got back to Number 808 Broadway just a few minutes ahead of the Isaacsons, whose mood on entering was little better than ours had been several hours earlier. In a flurry we told the detective sergeants of our adventures that evening, as Sara wrote the details of the encounters up on the chalkboard. Both Lucius and Marcus were profoundly encouraged at our having been able to trace at least some of John Beecham’s movements, even though the trips to the Census Bureau and Mrs. Piedmont’s house had—to my way of thinking, at any rate—left us in effectively the same position we’d been in that morning: with no idea where Beecham was now living or what he was now doing.
“True, John,” Lucius said, “but we do know much more about what he’s
“Maybe the bitterness is just too powerful,” Marcus said, considering the question. “Maybe he can’t so much as pay lip service to what his father stood for, even for the purposes of finding a job.”
“Because of the hypocrisy within his family?” Sara asked, still scratching away at the board.
“That’s right,” Marcus answered. “The whole notion of church and missionary work may just make him instinctively too violent—he can’t pursue it, because he wouldn’t be able to trust himself to keep up appearances.”
“Good,” Lucius said, bobbing his head. “So he takes the job at the Census Bureau, which doesn’t seem to put him in any danger of revealing himself, accidentally or otherwise. After all, a lot of the men who got jobs as enumerators lied on their applications, without anyone discovering it.”
“The job also satisfies a big craving for him,” I added. “It gets him into people’s houses, and close to their children, whom he can learn about without seeming to be interested—which eventually poses a problem for him.”
Marcus took over: “Because after a while he starts having urges that he can’t control. But what about the boys? He didn’t meet them at their homes—they didn’t live with their families, and he’d already been fired, anyway.”
“True,” I said. “That’s an open question. But wherever he went after the Census Bureau, he’d want to have continued access to people’s private affairs—and hopefully go on visiting families in their homes—in order to do research on his victims. That way, even though the boys are living in the disorderly houses, he’d be able to sympathize and commiserate with their specific situations—which would be a very effective way of getting them to trust him.”
“And which is also the element that’s been missing from the charity workers we’ve interviewed,” Sara said, standing away from the chalkboard.
“Exactly,” I said, opening windows to let the evening air into our slightly stuffy headquarters.
“I’m still not sure, though,” Marcus said, “how this helps us figure out where he is
That prompted a few minutes of silence, during which all our eyes wandered toward the pile of photographs that sat on Marcus’s desk. That pile would grow, each of us knew, if we failed now. Eventually, Lucius spoke up in a grimly determined voice:
“We’ve got to stay with what got us here—follow his confident, aggressive side. He didn’t show fear or panic, in his dealings with the Census Bureau and Mrs. Piedmont. He made up elaborate lies and lived within them for extended periods of time without losing control. Whether he’d been killing steadily throughout that time, or whether getting fired from his job brought on a new wave of violence, we don’t know. But I’ll bet he hasn’t run out of confidence yet, even if part of him does want to get caught. Let’s assume that, anyway. Let’s assume he’s been able to find another job that gives him what he wants—use of the rooftops, and a way to move among the tenement population without having to try to help or appeal to them. Any ideas?”
It was hard to watch a streak of creative thinking and good luck die, but die ours did at just that moment.
