“He’s right,” said Carrie. Slattery and Diddy were sitting at the big examination table in the now debugged Lispenard Street loft eating takeout from the Province Chinese Canteen a block away on Walker Street. Carrie was eating tofu salad with soy vinaigrette with a side of bok choy, while Max and Diddy were happily working their way through aromatic overflowing and dripping short rib and kimchi sandwiches. It was early evening and the rain was still pouring down, rattling on the high windows that overlooked the narrow Tribeca street.
“Right about what?” Max asked, squeezing a packet of hot mustard onto the last half of his sandwich.
“Any kind of publicity about our bog body would just inflame James Stone and the Rollneck brethren,” put in Diddy. “It could start a riot.”
“So we can’t go and interview Stone about this?” Max asked. He put the bun together and took an angry bite. “That’s not right.”
“No, it isn’t,” said Carrie. “But frankly I have to go along with our slick friend on Park Avenue. If we interviewed him it would mean passing on information that would be prejudicial to Lincoln’s interests, political as well as corporate.” She sighed and speared a lonely-looking piece of tofu with her plastic fork. “In a sense he owns the crime scene. He could probably make a case that he owns the bog body.”
“The body was a human being once,” said Slattery. “You can’t own a human being.”
“You could in 1863,” put in Diddy, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “My great-great-great-grandfather was owned by a man named Robicheaux at a plantation called Beaux Grande in Louisiana.”
Max scowled. “This is a murder investigation,” he said, wiping his mouth with a napkin. He reached out and grabbed a blob of mantou from the plastic container in the middle of the table and popped the gooey-sweet dessert bun into his mouth. “I’ll be damned if I let him get away with this.”
“We’ve got other directions we could go in,” said Diddy. “Don’t we?”
Max shrugged. “There’s a direct link between the murder of Barnabus Coffin and the murder of all these people in the present day who ate the chocolate coins from Lincoln’s thousand-dollar-a-plate fund-raiser.”
“But there’s no link between any of the dead people and Lincoln himself,” Carrie said. “The fact that they’re all black and that they were all found at exactly the same locations as the black people from the draft rights a century and a half ago could just be coincidence.”
“You know it’s no coincidence,” said Slattery.
“Tell that to Lincoln’s lawyer,” Carrie scoffed. “And wait until he finds out about this vampire stuff.” The urban archaeologist snorted. “I’d never work in this town again. I’d never work in Boston or Kansas City or anywhere else for that matter.”
“Good BBQ in Kansas City,” said Diddy.
“Shut up,” said Max.
“Yes, sir.” The young man grinned.
A sudden sound rang hollowly in the room. It was the strangest ring tone for a cell phone Carrie had ever heard.
“What the hell is that?” she asked.
“The Prince version of ‘A Case of You,’ the Joni Mitchell song where he leaves out the line ‘O Canada.’ Caused quite a row up north, I hear.”
“They should count themselves lucky if that’s all they have to worry about,” said Max bitterly. Diddy got up, crossed to his desk and snapped open the phone. He listened for a moment, his eyes swiveling around to lock with Carrie’s. The young man nodded, juggled the cell and jotted something down. He listened again for a moment, then closed the phone.
“Anything interesting?” Carrie asked.
“A message for you,” said Diddy, a strange note in his voice. “A man who said he had some important information about the sad death of Barnabas Coffin. He wants to meet.”
“What kind of information would that be?” Max said skeptically.
“He says he was a witness to the murder,” answered Diddy.
“Oh, right,” said Max, laughing. “How old did this guy say he was?”
“He didn’t,” said Diddy. “But he said he knows all about the double eagle.”
“Whoever he is, he’s got good information,” said Carrie, sitting up in her seat. “This is weird.”
“It gets weirder,” said Diddy, looking down at his notes. “He said to tell you that he knew a young lady named Echo Van Helsing and he was a friend of Kate Warne’s. He knows about the journal.”
“This is crazy,” said Max Slattery. “How the hell could he know about that? We only just found out ourselves. Did he happen to mention the name of the man who killed Mr. Coffin?”
“He did, as a matter of fact,” answered Diddy, his voice subdued. “A man named Adam Worth.”
“I’ll be damned,” said Max. He reached out for another wad of mantou cake. “Where are we supposed to meet this guy?”
“The Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum. Five o’clock tomorrow afternoon. And there is no ‘we.’ He wants to talk to Carrie, alone.”
“Not a chance,” said Max. “This guy could be our killer.”
“It’s a public place,” said Carrie. “You couldn’t get much more public than that.” She shrugged. “There’s no two ways about it; we have to find out what he knows.” She paused. “Did he tell you who he was? Did he mention his own name by any chance?”
Diddy nodded. “He said his name was Enoch Bale.”
Ryan Trusell sat in his dark, wood-paneled apartment in the Dakota and brooded, a drink close at hand, one of his very politically incorrect Havanas smoldering in a cut-glass ashtray beside him. All the curtains were drawn and only one light in the room was on. He liked it that way. Even as a child he’d embraced the dark, perhaps because the shadows of darkness hid his sins, real or imagined.
The sins were real enough now. The greatest sin of all in the Trusell bible: the sin of failure. Lincoln was furious; the plan was coming apart the more that foolish woman and her fat cop friend investigated. The coins had been their own secret joke, thumbing their noses at a society that was so soft it didn’t realize how weak it had become. The killings perpetrated by that lunatic Worth had been meant to provoke riots, to expose Stone’s so-called Rollnecks for the thugs they were. As Lincoln had once said at an insiders-only party, “Lynching’s gone out of style, so we’ll let our black brothers hang themselves.”
Not the sort of thing you’d say at a fund-raiser, but it was what the money in this town really thought. Harlem wasn’t a New York neighborhood; it was New York real estate. If you couldn’t send the blacks back to Africa, the spics back to Puerto Rico or the rest of them back to Cuba or Mexico or wherever the hell else they were leaking into the country from, at least you could send them to New Jersey. Screw the melting pot, and screw your poor, your tired, your huddled masses longing to be free. The object is, has and would always be cold, hard cash. There was no growth potential in liberty. Not a pleasant truth, but a real one for the rich and the superrich in this country; that was Lincoln’s credo, and in the past ten years he’d done everything to promote the idea. New York today, Albany tomorrow and then by God he’d show them how a country should be run! And Ryan Trusell would be along for the ride. Nothing too spectacular, no cabinet positions, nothing with a lot of work or exposure involved; something low-key and lucrative. Special counsel to the prez, that would do him just fine. He reached out for his glass of single malt.
“Not a chance,” said a quiet voice from across the room. Trusell screamed like a little girl frightened by a snake. He dropped his glass. It shattered as it hit the floor. A uniformed New York City policeman stepped into the weak, sour light. “You screwed up, Ryan; you screwed up badly.”
Trusell stared.
The man looked like a policeman. Sort of. He was wearing sergeant’s stripes, but his right hand was missing and blood was dripping onto his carpets. Trusell gagged. He could see the clean-cut stump of bone sticking out of the bloody, ragged wound at his wrist. The man stepped fully into the light.
“You!” Trusell said in a whisper, recognizing the man at last. For the first time he noticed that the man had a gold coin in his good hand, passing it across his knuckles in a rolling motion like a conjurer.
“You were supposed to give me riots, Ryan, my lad,” the one-handed horror muttered, his voice slurring as the jaw slipped down into its yawning position, the inside of his mouth a dark red maw. “You were supposed to give me the city, but instead you brought him back.”
“No, really,” stuttered Trusell. “We had an agreement, a deal!”
“Now I’ll have to do it myself,” muttered the horrible vision before him. The creature’s eyes blazed. They were the color of old blood and quick death. “Come here, Ryan. Get your due.”
“You promised…” Trusell moaned. “Eternal…power, life.” He moaned again. He stood and then stepped forward unwillingly. The red mouth shifted and began to drip wetly, the tongue curling back out of the way like a coiling snake. The fangs glistened like polished ivory.
“I lied,” said Adam Worth. Ryan Trusell screamed. Blood sprayed. The creature drank.