whether or not any citizens of the town enjoyed climbing those formations as a pastime. Oh, yes, she’d been told, it was quite a popular sport—especially among those residents who had most recently arrived from Europe.
Both Kreizler and I were fairly stunned by this last item and needed time to absorb both it and the rest of the tale. Telling Sara that we would telephone again later in the evening, Laszlo rang off, following which we returned to the hotel bar to mull things over.
“Well?” Kreizler said in a somewhat awed tone, as we ordered a fresh round of iced cocktails. “What do you make of it?”
I took in a deep breath. “Let’s start with facts. The older Dury boy witnessed some of the most horrendous atrocities imaginable before he was old enough to make any sense of them.”
“Yes. And his father was a priest, or at least a minister—the religious calendar, Moore. Their home would have been regulated by it.”
“The father also seems to have been a very hard, not to mention a rather peculiar, man—though outwardly respectable, at least in the beginning.”
Kreizler mapped his thoughts on the bar with a finger. “So…we can assume a pattern of domestic violence, one beginning early and continuing unabated for years. It plants an urge for revenge that steadily mounts.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “We’ve got no shortage of motive. But Adam’s older than we’ve posited.”
Kreizler nodded. “While the younger boy, Japheth, would have been the same age as Beecham. Now, if
“But he’s not the one who witnessed the massacres and mutilations,” I said. “He wasn’t even born yet.”
Kreizler knocked a fist against the bar. “True. He would have had no frontier experience.”
Letting the facts recombine in a number of ways in my head, I tried but failed to come up with a new interpretation. All I could say after several minutes was, “We still don’t know anything about the mother.”
“No.” Kreizler kept rapping his knuckles on the bar. “But they were a poor family, living at close quarters. That would have been especially true during the Minnesota period, which would have been the most vivid time in the eldest son’s life.”
“Right. If only he were younger…”
Laszlo sighed and shook his head. “A host of questions—and the answers to be found, I suspect, only in Newton, Massachusetts.”
“So—do we go up there and find out?”
“Who knows?” Kreizler sipped his cocktail nervously. “I confess to feeling at a loss, Moore. I’m no professional detective. What do we do? Stay here and try to uncover more information about Beecham, at the same time pursuing any new leads we may uncover? Or go to Newton? How does one know when it’s time to stop looking at all possibilities and pursue one course?”
I thought about that for a moment. “We
“Moore?” Kreizler called after me. “Where the devil are you going?”
It took me just five minutes to condense the key aspects of Sara’s research into a cable, which I dispatched to the telegraph office in Fort Yates, North Dakota. The message concluded with a simple request: ADVISE COURSE.
Kreizler and I spent the rest of the evening in the Willard’s dining room, fixed in place until the staff informed us that they were going home. At that point, with sleep utterly out of the question, we went for a walk around the White House grounds, smoking and putting every conceivable twist on the story we’d heard that night, while simultaneously searching for a way to connect it to Corporal John Beecham. Pursuing the Dury lead would take time, that much was becoming very apparent; and while neither of us said as much, we both knew that should such time be wasted we would likely find ourselves, at the moment of the killer’s next attempt, no better prepared than we had been on Pentecost to stop him. Two courses of action, both full of risks, awaited our decision. Wandering about aimlessly in the Washington night, Kreizler and I were effectively paralyzed.
It was fortunate indeed, therefore, that when we returned to the Willard the clerk had a wire in hand for us. It had originated in Fort Yates, and must have been sent only moments after the Isaacsons got to that destination. Though brief, it was unhesitating in tone: THE LEAD IS SOLID. FOLLOW IT.
CHAPTER 33
The approach of dawn found us on a train and headed back to New York, where we planned to look in at Number 808 Broadway before going on to Newton, Massachusetts. It would have been impossible to do anything constructive in Washington—even sleep—once we’d had our inclination to pursue the Dury lead confirmed; the train ride north, on the other hand, would at least satisfy the craving for action and thereby allow us to rest easily for several hours. Such, at any rate, was my hope when we got on board; but I hadn’t been dozing in our darkened compartment for long when a feeling of deep uneasiness caused me to stir. Striking a match to try to determine if there was any rational basis for my fear, I saw Kreizler, sitting across from me, staring out the compartment window at the blackened landscape as it sped by.
“Laszlo,” I said quietly, studying his wide eyes by the orange light of the match. “What is it, what’s happened?”
The knuckle of his left forefinger was rubbing against his mouth. “The morbid imagination,” he mumbled.
I hissed suddenly as the match burned down to my fingers. Letting the flame fall to the floor and go out, I mumbled into the resurgent darkness. “What imagination? What are you talking about?”
“‘I myself have personally read this and know it to be true,’” he said, quoting our killer’s letter. “The cannibalism business. We’ve postulated a morbid, impressionable imagination as an explanation.”
“And?”
“The pictures, John,” Laszlo answered, and though I couldn’t see his face (or anything else in the compartment), his voice remained tense. “The photographs of massacred settlers. We’ve been assuming that our man must have been on the frontier at some point in his life, that only personal experience could have provided a model for his current abominations.”
“You’re saying Victor Dury’s pictures could’ve served that purpose?”
“Not for anyone. But for this man, given the impressionability created by a childhood of violence and fear. Remember what we said about the cannibalism—it was something he read, or perhaps heard, probably as a child. A frightening story that left a lasting impression. Wouldn’t photographs produce a far more extreme result, in a person characterized by such an obsessive and morbid imagination?”
“It’s possible, I suppose. You’re thinking about the missing brother?”
“Yes. Japheth Dury.”
“But why would anyone show such things to a child?”
Kreizler answered in a distracted tone: “‘Dirtier than a Red Injun…’”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m not certain, John. Perhaps he stumbled on them. Or perhaps they were used as a disciplinary tool. More answers to be found in Newton, I hope.”
I thought the matter over for a moment, then felt my head bobbing back down toward the seat that I was lying on. “Well,” I finally said, giving in to the bob, “if you don’t get some rest you won’t be fit to talk to anyone, in Newton or anywhere else.”
“I know,” Kreizler answered. Then I could hear him shifting on his seat. “But the thought struck me…”
The next thing I knew we were in the Grand Central Depot, being rudely awakened by the slams of compartment doors and the bumps of bags against the wall of our compartment. Looking none the better for our
