Chapter Three

Grudgingly, almost against his will, Liam turned to see what the gaslight had revealed in the hall behind him: the bloody footprint coming out of Maggie’s parlor was joined by a string of others, less and less clearly marked, heading towards the outdoors.

Automatically he began his “photography” routine, a retentive brain and a safe-cracker’s eye for useful details recording everything he saw. The prints had been made by a man with small feet, hurrying in pointy-toed dress shoes and moving fast enough to leave scuff marks. Maggie’s house was well off the beaten path and on a Saturday night her lodgers would be in town, so what was he running from? Only one way to find out: Liam gritted his teeth and opened the door, recoiling as the hall filled with the reek of burnt gunpowder and death.

The room was dark and Liam hesitated to turn on the light. You’ll not be bringing her back to life by standing here sucking your thumb, he told himself. Fumbling for another Lucifer, he scratched it on the doorjamb and held it out to the gas jet …

It was as if that little pop! of igniting gas had turned on the sun, making everything in the room unnaturally stark and brilliant as it revealed Maggie lying on her back with her dead eyes staring up at the ceiling, her negligée (the blue one she’d loved so much, the one he’d bought her at the Expo in Philly) pulled down to her waist exposing her breasts, and up to her stomach, exposing her white thighs and the dark patch between them. In the middle of her chest, just under her breasts, was a small, bloody hole in a black halo of burnt powder, a great pool of darkening blood spreading from beneath her across her favorite Turkey carpet.

Liam collapsed to his knees next to her and grabbed her stiffening corpse, holding her tight and rocking back and forth as he ground his teeth and growled deep in his throat with pain. Tears poured down his face, the first he’d shed in a lot of years, since the winter of 1863 before the Draft Riots when he’d seen his mother’s body on a trolley in Bellevue.

“I swear, Maggie,” he grated out, “I swear to you I’ll make whoever did this pay.”

He held her for another moment, willing the tears to stop, then laid her back down gently, tugging at her negligée until it covered her the way she would have wanted it. Then he got to his feet, moving stiffly as though he’d aged a lifetime.

“Who did this?” he muttered as he looked around for clues, making sure that he’d forget nothing he saw when he remembered it later. He’d been a brilliant safe-cracker in his day, and only partly because of little tricks like using the doctor’s stethoscope he’d pinched from Bellevue to listen to the tick of the box’s heart as he moved the dial. The main reason he’d never been caught, until that disastrous favor he’d done for Mike’s Uncle Tolya, was the way he could photograph a room in his mind, visiting the target on some pretext ahead of time and committing it to memory so it would become as familiar as his own bedroom.

“It had to be somebody you knew, didn’t it Mags?” he murmured, looking around for any sign of who her caller had been.

Not Maggie’s boarders, surely. Mousy Arthur Morrison, the head accountant at Henderson Anthracite, would have been swilling whiskey at Maloney’s, getting up the courage to sweet-talk one of Boylan’s waitresses. And Hiram Kreutzer, Henderson’s holy Joe chief engineer, would still be at Mrs. Clark’s restaurant reading one of the Reverend Beecher’s sermons as he ate his pot roast and nipped at the bottle of blue ruin she kept in the cupboard for him.

And Lukas? He was a mystery man sure enough, known only by that one name. But earlier in the day Maggie had said something about him leaving for New York to do research on his book about the coalfields. If it hadn’t been for that, Liam would have been on his scent like a bloodhound. His very appearance made him seem a bit suspicious, like some eccentric out of a play: built like a bull gorilla and ugly as a prizefighter but always dressed in the height of fashion whether he was bending his elbow at Maloney’s or going down the mines “to see the lads at work first hand.”

But even if you had judged the book by its cover and picked Lukas for a Five Points plug-ugly disguised as one of his betters, you knew different the minute he opened his mouth: he had the mellifluous voice of some famous professor, someone used to being listened to attentively.

And Lukas wasn’t just some rough diamond polished smooth, either. Liam had been pals with “Little Adam” Worth, a celebrity among thieves and con men who could pass as a gentleman at the Harvard Club. But to someone with Liam’s uncanny ear for languages, even the Prince of Thieves had an echo of his hard-luck origins behind the Harvard cadences. Not Lukas, though. Liam could tell the man was a swell born and bred. The mystery was where? Liam could catch the foreign ring to some of his vowels but even he couldn’t be sure of Lukas’ native tongue.

Liam shook his head: it didn’t matter—none of the boarders made sense to him as a murderer. Not without enough hard facts to build a story, anyhow. First, the bullet. It must have gone all the way through Maggie, blowing out a spray of blood as it went—Liam could see the traces on the floor and the furniture behind her and it looked like she had fallen backwards right on the spot. He knelt down again and pulled her up by her left shoulder, far enough to see the size of the hole in her back. Big enough to put his fist in.

He shook his head again and stood up, looking towards Maggie’s bookshelves to see if that was where the slug had ended up. There. Maggie had loved the spunky suffragist writing in Victoria Woodhull’s “Weekly,” and one of her treasured bound volumes had a ragged hole in the spine right in line with where she’d been standing.

Liam crossed to the shelf, pulled out the volume and flipped it open: at the end of a channel with accordioned paper bunched up ahead of it was a big lump of lead. Liam turned it over, seeing from the way it had mushroomed that the head of the bullet had been notched, and from the base—which was still intact—that it had to be a .44 or .45. He put the slug back in the book for whatever bluecoat would show up to investigate; then, with a sick feeling of foreknowledge, he walked over to Maggie’s desk and pulled out the drawer. Sure enough, the pistol was gone, just a few spots of gun oil where it had lain on some papers.

Months ago, when some drunk from Maloney’s had tried to climb into her window, Liam had bought her a pistol to ease her mind. It was short-barreled and easy to handle, nickel-plated to make it look more lady-like but with enough punch to knock down a buffalo—a Webley British Bulldog in .45 caliber which he’d made even more lethal by cutting crosses into the slugs. Liam didn’t even have to check his mental photograph to know it wasn’t lying around anywhere, the killer must have pocketed it.

Clearly the man had been in a hurry—there had been a perfunctory effort at cleaning up but it was easy to reconstruct what had happened: Maggie struggling with her attacker, breaking away, grabbing the pistol, then wrestling with him till he shot her. Maggie was a fighter, she wouldn’t have gone easily …

Liam went back to her body and knelt next to it again, fighting his emotions until he could examine her coolly. Her right hand was balled into a fist, and there was a glint of gold between the fingers. Liam pried them open carefully against the resistance of the deepening rigor mortis, noting as he did that Maggie’s carefully tended fingernails were broken and that she had shreds of bloody flesh under them—whoever it was hadn’t gotten away scot-free, she had definitely left her marks on him.

Then, as her hand opened the rest of the way, Liam saw what she’d been clutching in her fist: a gold souvenir medal from the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. The killer must have been wearing it around his neck on a chain, and Maggie had gotten the medal and a scrap of chain in the struggle without his noticing it. Probably so fired up by then he wouldn’t have noticed if his nose was missing. Then a painful twinge as Liam noticed the inscription on the other side: “Love from Mags.” She must have torn it from around the killer’s neck. It took him a moment or two to get his mind cold again; after all, they’d both had plenty of other lovers before they met, and they’d both known it and not cared a damn.

He shook his head hard, clearing it: don’t be a hypocrite, McCool… Then he closed his eyes to check his memory picture again … something was out of place, something he missed the first time around … He turned and headed unerringly for a corner of the carpet at the other end of the room, rucked up slightly as if somebody had kicked it passing by.

Liam grabbed it and jerked it the rest of the way, already certain what he’d see: Yes, damn it to hell! Once they had decided to make their break for San Francisco Liam had asked Maggie to be their banker and she had kept their nest egg under a doctored floorboard—a half-dozen big Mason jars filled with silver dollars, a substantial number of gold eagles and some bits of jewelry, all the spending money they would have blown on foolishness in the days before they threw in together.

All gone. Just the empty jars and a couple of forlorn silver dollars that attested to the killer’s hurry. Liam sat down hard on the floor next to the cache, thinking it was a good thing he’d kept aside a money belt full of gold eagles as a secret reserve against bad luck but having to work hard to keep from yelling with anger at the thought of their vanished nest egg. All that work building it up all those months, all the fun they’d shared as they squirreled away a tidy grubstake, the money to buy the restaurant that Maggie planned to make California’s finest, the money that Liam had meant to use to let him buy a nice little house for his Gran not far from him and Maggie and start a bookstore that would someday put Brentano’s to shame. All those happy dreams stolen. Stolen by the same low-life son of a bitch who’d stolen Maggie’s life.

He shook his head briskly. It wouldn’t do to carry this black rage around inside. If he was to honor Maggie and their dreams he’d have to clear his mind and start over, to be as cool and determined as he’d ever been until he managed to get back to the city where he could see Mike and the boys. Once he was back they could pull a few jobs to help him rebuild his grubstake and give him time enough put his hands on Maggie’s killer. Then and only then he’d get out from under that old bastard Pilkington, collect Gran like he’d planned to do with Maggie and vanish like a puff of smoke, leaving the Eyes and the coppers scratching their heads. Up and at ’em, Liam me boy!

He got to his feet, walked over to Maggie, knelt down and kissed her gently, then stood again and walked over to the door.

“Good night, darlin’,” he said to Maggie. Then he turned the gas off and left.

Outside, the prints of the pointy-toed shoes were clear in the moonlight, sharply indented in ground that was still a little soft from the day before’s rain and still showing the murderer’s haste: heavy at front and light at back as he ran, with a distance between them that made Liam re-assess his guess at a small man. Small feet, but longer legs than he’d thought. And something else, what the hell was that? A furrow cut by something catching, skipping over the ground until it caught deeply again, cutting at an angle to the footprints and going on around the side of the house where it looked for sure like it would intersect with the running footprints …

Liam picked up his own pace until he turned the corner of the house and came to a sudden, disgusted stop as he reached a clearing there where Maggie had planned to build a garden shed. Fresh marks of torn bark showed white on a string of trees, right up to one that had a deeper gouge and the prints of a chain pressed into it.

The murderer had come here from who knew where, in a Stanley Flyer, a neat little two-seat airship with a super-quiet engine and a handy steam winch you could use to drag your anchor until you hooked a tree like a fish. Then all you had to do was hit the winch to pull you slowly and quietly down to the ground, where your Flyer would wait patiently till you were ready to jump aboard and soar off into the night.

He stood there for a moment, stewing. Then he was snapped out of it by a new series of hoots from Henderson’s emergency whistle, along with the distant clangs of the volunteer fire wagon. By now, everybody in town from the drunks in Maloney’s to the few peaceful and sober citizens to be found in Henderson’s Patch on a Saturday night would have turned out to watch the fire and read the “Coffin Notice” that he and the others had left on Henderson’s front gate.

Slipping back into the darkness of the woods and crossing himself against the return of the wolf-thing, he took off at a steady jog. By this time tomorrow, he would be in New York—as for the rest of it, he’d just have to take it one day at a time …