Kreizler put aside his piece of paper with great effort and looked up. “Did any involve children?”
“Two of the four,” I answered. “In the first, two girls were killed with their parents, and in the second an orphaned girl and boy died with their grandfather, who was their guardian. The problem is that in both cases only the adult males were mutilated.”
“Were any theories formulated?”
“Both were assumed to have been reprisal raids by war parties. But there’s an interesting detail in the case involving the grandfather. It happened in the late fall of ’89 near Fort Keough, during the period when the last great reservation was broken up. There were a lot of disgruntled Sioux around, mostly followers of Sitting Bull and another chief called”—I scanned my notes quickly with one finger—“Red Cloud. Anyway, a small cavalry detail stumbled onto the murdered family, and the lieutenant in command initially laid the crime off to some of Red Cloud’s more bellicose subordinates. But one of the older soldiers in the company said that Red Cloud’s band hadn’t launched any murder raids lately, and that the dead grandfather’d had a history of run-ins with Bureau agents and army men at another fort—Robinson, I think it was. Apparently the man had accused a cavalry sergeant at Robinson of trying to sexually assault his grandson. As it turned out, the sergeant’s unit was in the Fort Keough area when the family was killed.”
Kreizler hadn’t been paying much attention up to that point, but these last facts brought him around. “Do we know the soldier’s name?”
“Wasn’t included in the file. Hobart’s going to do a little digging at the War Department tomorrow.”
“Good. But make sure you cable the information we have now to the detective sergeants in the morning. The details can follow.”
We then went over the rest of the cases I’d culled, though for various reasons we eventually ruled them all out. After that, we dove into the stack of names that Kreizler had gathered at St. Elizabeth’s, and succeeded in eliminating all but a few of them over the next several hours. Finally, at well past one o’clock in the morning, I retired to my room and poured out a healthy whiskey and soda, which I only managed to get halfway through before I fell asleep in my clothes.
Thursday morning found me back at my desk at the Interior Department, lost in more stories of unsolved deaths on the frontier. Along toward noon Hobart returned from his brief trip to the War Department, where he’d discovered a disappointing fact: The cavalry sergeant who’d figured in the story about the murdered grandfather had been forty-five years old at the time of the incident. That made him fifty-two in 1896: too old to fit the portrait we’d painted of our killer. Still, it seemed worthwhile to make a note of the man’s name and last known whereabouts (he’d opened a dry goods store in Cincinnati after retiring from the army), just in case the age portion of our hypothesis turned out to be wrong.
“Sorry I couldn’t have brought better news,” Hobart said, as I jotted down the particulars. “Any interest in lunch?”
“Plenty,” I answered. “Pick me up in an hour, I should make it through the 1892 cases by then.”
“Fine.” He started to move away from the desk, then touched his jacket pocket and seemed to remember something. “Oh, John. I meant to ask you—this search of yours is definitely confined to the frontier states and territories, is that right?” He pulled a folded paper from his pocket.
“That’s right. Why?”
“Nothing. Just an odd story. I found it after you left last night.” He tossed the piece of paper on my desk. “But it won’t work—happened in New York State. Chops?”
I picked up the paper and began reading it. “What?”
“For lunch. Chops? There’s a splendid new place on the Hill. Good beer, too.”
“Fine.”
Hobart sped away to catch a pretty young archivist who’d just passed my desk. From the direction of a nearby staircase I heard the woman squeal, and then there was a slapping sound and a little yelp of pain from Hobart. Chuckling quietly at the fellow’s hopelessness, I leaned back in my chair to study the document he’d left me.
It related the curious story of a minister named Victor Dury and his wife, who in 1880 had been found murdered in their very modest home outside New Paltz, New York. The bodies had been what the document called “most foully and savagely torn to bits.” Reverend Dury had formerly been a missionary in South Dakota, where he’d apparently made enemies among the Indian tribes; in fact, the constabulary in New Paltz had decided that the murders were an act of revenge on the part of several embittered Indians who’d been sent east by their chief for that very purpose. This bit of “detective” work had been the result of a note from the assassins found on the scene that explained the killings and stated that the dead couple’s teenaged son was being taken back to live among the Indians as one of their own. It was quite a grim little tale, one that would have been of obvious use to us had its setting been further west. I put the paper aside, but in a few minutes picked it up again, wondering if there wasn’t at least a chance that we were wrong about our killer’s geographic background. Finally deciding to discuss the matter with Kreizler, I tucked the document away in my pocket.
The rest of the day offered only two cases that held out any hope of advancing our investigation. The first involved a group of children and their teacher who’d been slaughtered during their studies in an isolated schoolhouse; and the second, yet another prairie family who’d been massacred after a treaty violation. Realizing that the two accounts were meager reward for a long day’s work, I set my sights on the Willard Hotel, hoping that Kreizler had had better luck during his second day of research. But Laszlo had discovered only a few additional names of soldiers who’d served in the Army of the West during the fifteen-year span we were investigating, then been institutionalized in the capital because of violent, unstable behavior, and finally suffered from some sort of facial disfigurement. Of these few, only one fell within the general age range that we were looking for (about thirty). As we sat down to dinner in the hotel dining room Kreizler handed me the case file on this man, and I offered him the document that told the tale of the Dury murders.
“Born and raised in Ohio,” was my first comment on Laszlo’s find. “He’d have to’ve spent a lot of time in New York after his discharge.”
“True,” Kreizler said, unfolding the paper I’d given him as he set to work halfheartedly on a bowl of crab bisque. “Which presents a problem—he didn’t leave St. Elizabeth’s until the spring of ’91.”
“A fast study,” I commented with a nod. “But it’s possible.”
“I’m also not encouraged by the disfigurement—a long scar across the right cheek and the lips.”
“What’s the matter with that? Sounds fairly revolting.”
“But it suggests a war injury, Moore, and that rules out childhood distress over the—”
Kreizler’s eyes suddenly went very wide and he set his spoon down slowly as he finished reading the document I’d given him. Looking slowly from it to me, he then spoke in a tone of suppressed excitement. “Where did you get this?”
“Hobart,” I answered simply, putting the file on the soldier from Ohio aside. “He found it last night. Why?”
His hands moving quickly, Kreizler snatched some more folded papers from his inside pocket. Quickly flattening them on the table, he then thrust the pile across to me. “Notice anything?”
It took one or two seconds, but I did. At the top of the first sheet of paper, which was yet another form from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, there was a space marked PLACE OF BIRTH.
In that space had been scribbled the words “New Paltz, New York.”
CHAPTER 32
This is the man they originally wrote to us about?” I asked.
Kreizler nodded eagerly. “I’ve kept the file with me. I dislike hunches generally, but I couldn’t get away from this one. There are so many particulars that match—the poor upbringing in a strictly religious household, and the
