Mr. Moore and Mr. Picton had a couple of quick drinks while I gave them a brief summary of my roulette strategy, and by the time they headed into the public room they were looking and sounding like they’d managed to drown their repulsion with the crowd. As for me, barred from actually watching the games, I was left to pick between heading into the ladies’ and children’s lounge and going outside for a smoke: not what you’d call a tough choice.
Wandering in amongst the long branches of a weeping willow what hung over one of the little pools of water in the park outside the Casino, I pulled at my starched collar and tie with an annoyed groan, wishing I could just take the things off. Then I lit a stick and began to think, not about what my earnings might amount to if all went well inside, but about what Mr. Picton had said in the dining room. It wasn’t what you’d call comforting, to think that by prosecuting Libby Hatch we’d be riling—and maybe even threatening—all those rich, powerful hypocrites and philanderers; and at first I thought it was just the unpleasant notion of what lay ahead that was starting to give me a distinctly nervous sensation. But soon I realized that the ripples in my stomach had a more immediate cause, something to do with the area right around me at that moment. I couldn’t say just what the uneasiness was, at first, but after a couple of minutes I put my finger on it:
I was being watched.
Spinning around, I stepped deeper into the branches of the willow and searched the darkness all around me; but there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere in that part of the park. All the same, I grew more convinced moment by moment that somebody somewhere was observing every move I was making. Pulling at my tie and collar again as I broke into a cold sweat, I started to shift from foot to foot, breathing very fast. Finally I called out, to what seemed like nothing but empty darkness:
“Who’s there? What do you want?” Realizing that I was being a bit unreasonable but unable to prevent myself, I shoved one hand into my pants pocket. “I’ve got a gun!” I called out. “And I’ll use it, I’m telling you—”
Suddenly a dark blur passed in front of me: dropping down, it seemed, from the sky came a fast-moving shadow, one what hit the ground softly but nonetheless caused me to shriek and jump back. Only by grabbing the trunk of the willow did I keep from falling into the pool; and though I heard fast footsteps moving away from me, by the time I looked up the person who’d made them was gone.
As I caught my breath I realized that I was now definitely alone: I felt that as certainly as I’d sensed the stranger’s presence. Whoever’d been hiding in the tree—probably some kid, I stupidly figured—must’ve been terrified by my mention of a gun, and had lit out, more scared of me than I’d been of him. Realizing that I’d dropped my cigarette, I lit up another and then started back for the Casino, laughing at my own foolishness and never realizing what a close brush I’d had with real danger.
I’d learn, though: for in a matter of hours, I’d confront that danger again, and see its face.
CHAPTER 33
Mr. Moore, Mr. Picton, and I didn’t do half bad at the tables that night, and as a result we woke up Saturday morning with what you might call a rosy outlook on the tasks what lay ahead of us. The Doctor and Cyrus had already gotten themselves together and headed back out to the Westons’ farm in a small hired gig; and Marcus and Miss Howard were in the backyard of Mr. Picton’s place, wrangling with three big bales of raw cotton what had been delivered earlier. Lucius, meanwhile, had set up shop on the back porch and was carefully examining every part of Daniel Hatch’s Colt and dusting the thing for fingerprints before he went about the business of dismantling, and refurbishing it. With everyone so usefully employed, it seemed safe for Mr. Picton to head up to his office at the court house and continue doing his research into cases what bore some resemblance to ours (what the legal types called “precedents”), while Mr. Moore and I headed into the dining room to have some of Mrs. Hastings’s excellent breakfast.
After we’d eaten, it was our turn to be pressed into labor: Lucius gave us a pair of magnifying lenses, a medical probe, and a couple of very sharp pocket knives, and told us to get to work on the section of planking and the driver’s seat from the Hatches’ wagon, which the detective sergeants had dragged around to the back of the house. We were supposed to go over every inch of these two items and, when we found something that looked like it might be a bullet hole, use the medical probe to see if there was in fact a metal object lodged inside. If there was, we were most definitely not supposed to try to pry it out: instead, we’d use the knives we’d been given to cut away all the wood around the thing, in order to keep it intact. Mr. Moore and I listened to these instructions with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, since it was clear that if we followed this procedure, it would take quite a while to free a bullet from the wood, even if we got lucky and stumbled onto one quickly. But we tried to keep the grumbling to a minimum, and before long we were wrapped up in the job.
It took about an hour to come across the first likely candidate for a bullet hole. I found a small opening in one corner of the section of board and was very excited to discover that when I stuck the medical probe into it I made contact with something what was most definitely metal. I called the detective sergeants over to get their opinions, and they agreed that what I’d found might indeed be a bullet. The important thing now was to make sure that while I was cutting the wood around the object away, didn’t touch the thing with the blade of my knife; a consideration that I, in the heat of my enthusiasm, confessed to not really understanding. If the bullet was recognizable as such, what did it matter if it had a couple of knife marks on it?
That, of course, was not the sort of question you generally wanted to ask Marcus or Lucius, unless you were in the mood for a very long lecture on some budding branch of forensic science. In this particular case, Mr. Moore and I were treated to forty-five uninterrupted minutes on the new field of ballistics, a clinic made all the more complete by Miss Howard’s participation. Put simply, ballistics seemed to amount to the firearms equivalent of fingerprinting: earlier in the century, an Englishman had discovered that bullets, when they passed through the barrel of a gun, were marked by whatever distinctive defects (nicks in the metal and the like) characterized said barrel. By 1897, when almost all pistols and long arms had rifled barrels, it’d been found that bullets were also marked by the rifling itself, which was made up of what were called “grooves and lands.” The grooves were the spiral tracks what were carved on the inside of the barrel (rotating toward either the right or the left) to make the bullet spin as it came out of the muzzle and thereby fly much straighter through the air; the lands were the spaces between these grooves. Bullets propelled through said grooves and lands were marked by lines that exactly reflected the specific rifling of the particular barrel. This system of identification had already claimed some success, though not in the United States: some years earlier, a French colleague of the detective sergeants’, one Monsieur Lacassagne, had matched the number, spacing, and twist of grooves on a bullet taken from a dead man to the barrel of a gun owned by a suspect. The man was afterward convicted, mostly on the strength of the ballistic evidence.
Now, this judgment had, the detective sergeants admitted, been a little premature, seeing as the lands and grooves of guns had never been catalogued even by manufacturer or model, much less by the individual characteristics of specific pieces; so it was possible that somebody else in France had owned a weapon with the same arrangement of lands and grooves as the gun what belonged to the fellow who’d been convicted. But the fact remained that there were now three ways to try to determine if a given bullet had come from a particular firearm: first, obviously, there was the caliber size; then there were particular marks left by defects in the barrel (not that every gun necessarily had such defects, but many did); and finally, there were the number and twists of the lands and grooves. Convincing as all this might’ve seemed, though, even a match between a bullet and a gun on all three counts couldn’t yet be considered the
last word on identification, being as, again, there was no central authority that required gun manufacturers to register the individual specifications of each of their models: the possibility still existed that a given bullet what matched a given gun according to caliber, defects, and grooves and lands had actually been fired by some unknown matching weapon. Oh, sure, ballistic experts like the detective sergeants could protest that the chances of any two guns having exactly the same specifications were somewhere in the neighborhood of a million to one; but even a million to one left room for doubt, and so, while ballistic evidence had become what you might call mighty handy to modern-thinking investigators, it still wasn’t accepted as legally conclusive.
By the time the Isaacsons and Miss Howard had finished explaining this bit of business to Mr. Moore and me, I’d pretty well finished the job of getting my bit of metal free of the board; but my spirits, which had started to race at the prospect of actually being able to put a bullet to the ballistics test, sank considerably when I realized that I’d spent the better part of an hour carefully preserving an old nail head. Such discouragement, though, was common to detective work, I knew that much: so I picked up my magnifying lens and continued going over the surface of the wood, looking for another likely hole.
Lucius, Marcus, and Miss Howard, meanwhile, continued their lecture, explaining what the younger Isaacson brother was up to with Daniel Hatch’s Colt: for ballistics didn’t begin and end, it seemed, with the matching of bullets to barrels. Lucius also had to carefully try to determine, based on the amount of rust and powder buildup on the Peacemaker, how recently it’d been fired, and how many times. The second question seemed easy enough to answer: there were three cartridges still in the six-shooter, giving the impression that three shots had been fired. This came as no big surprise: three was the number of bullets we’d expected to be involved in the shooting of Libby Hatch’s children. But, as usual when you were dealing with forensic science, things weren’t as simple as they appeared.
It was general practice, Miss Howard explained, for people who kept pistols in their homes to leave one chamber empty at the top position, so that if something or someone accidentally happened to catch the hammer without cocking it, the firing pinwouldn’t slam back down on anything but air. And as Lucius’s examination went on, the three of them became ever more convinced that Daniel Hatch had followed this procedure. Three chambers of his gun were, like I say, still loaded; but of the remaining three, only two had the kind of powder deposits that would indicate they’d been fired since the gun’s last cleaning. On top of that, the third empty chamber had a larger buildup of rust than the other two, indicating it’d been vacant longer. And as for the unlikely chance that somebody had found the gun, shot it, reloaded it, and dumped it back down the well, Marcus and Lucius felt they could rule that out by the measurement they took of the amount of rust in the barrel: the gun hadn’t been fired in years.
This was all very disturbing. For our theory that Libby Hatch had herself shot her three children to work out, we appeared to need three shots to’ve been fired; but only two had been discharged from the Colt. This gap perplexed Marcus and Lucius mightily, and as they continued to dust the gun for fingerprints, their faces grew as knotted as the old trees out in the yard. They did find several prints that matched Libby’s on both the gun’s grips and its trigger; and there was a partial print on the hammer what they felt comfortable labeling as hers, too; but there was no sign that she’d ever touched the cylinder, which appeared to rule out the possibility that she’d reloaded and refired the thing at any point. We knew that one bullet had traveled clear through Clara Hatch’s neck (and hopefully lodged in some part of the wagon, probably the underside of the driver’s bench); but if only one other shot had been fired, how could we account for two dead boys?
Their mood getting nothing but more glum, Marcus and Lucius carefully recorded all their opening findings on the condition of the gun, and then began to disassemble the thing to get it ready for the test firing. It was Miss Howard who brought hope back into the picture by coming up with a possible solution to the riddle of two bullets and three victims. Going for the stack of Mr. Picton’s files on the shooting, which were lying inside on the piano, she pulled out Dr. Lawrence’s postmortem report on the two Hatch boys, reminding us that nowhere in the thing was there any reference to exit wounds on either Thomas’s or Matthew’s body. And while Lawrence did say that there were powder burns on the children, he didn’t specifically state which children: Mr. Picton had assumed he’d meant all three, being as they’d all suffered gunshot wounds. But that might not’ve been the case. As for Libby Hatch’s statements about what positions the kids’d been in when they were shot, we couldn’t accept those any more than we could believe anything else the woman had said. So we were free, inside of certain limits, to imagine an entirely different sequence of events from the one that Mr. Picton had dreamed up on the basis of the reports.
Suppose, Miss Howard said, that little Thomas had, in fact, been sitting in Clara’s lap when the rig stopped. The girl had been shot in the chest, and there was no way that anybody could have shot her in that region without first moving Thomas out of the way. So, Miss Howard said, we had to figure that Libby had taken Thomas and stuck him somewhere else—probably in Matthew’s lap. Libby’d then shot Clara, an act what almost certainly would’ve made Thomas very upset, causing Libby to shoot him quickly. Now, the Colt .45 Peacemaker was a powerful gun: the bullet what’d struck Clara had traveled clear through her chest and neck. So the bullet what’d hit little Thomas would definitely have gone straight through him and into whatever was behind him—or whoever was behind him, if we now accepted the idea that he’d actually been sitting in front of Matthew.
This thought got Marcus’s and Lucius’s eyes twinkling again. Was Miss Howard suggesting, they asked, that the two boys had been killed by one bullet? To be sure, she answered; nothing else made any sense, given the state of the Colt. But before anybody went getting too happy, Miss Howard continued, we had to remember one thing: the single bullet might not have been traveling with enough power to make it through both bodies and into the front of the wagon’s wooden bed. If that was the case, we were in trouble; for among the many things Dr. Lawrence’s report didn’t mention was his having taken any bullets out of the dead boys. In other words, if the missing bullet wasn’t in the hunk of wood in front of us, then it’d been buried with Matthew Hatch in Ballston’s town cemetery (which was, it turned out, just around the corner from Mr. Picton’s house). This realization wiped the smiles right back off the detective sergeants’ faces, and also lit a new fire under me and Mr. Moore—joined, now, by Miss Howard—to tear the piece of planking and the driver’s seat into toothpicks in an effort to find the second deadly missile; because without it, we had no way of even suggesting that Daniel Hatch’s Colt had been involved in the shootings.
As we madly pursued our work, Marcus and Lucius went back to working on the gun. Mr. Picton eventually returned to his house for lunch; and over that meal we told him about our morning’s work, which he found intriguing but also very unsettling. Once he’d set back out for his office, we went to work again with even more determination; but the early hours of the afternoon went by without anyone making any discoveries.
The approach of evening brought the return of Dr. Kreizler and Cyrus, who took up positions next to us and joined in the search. Still, though, there were no hopeful sightings. We were beginning to run out of places to look, and it was Mr. Moore who first realized the dreadful implications of that fact. Along toward cocktail time his brow had become positively creased by discouragement; but when Mr. Picton came home and suggested that everyone quit working and have a drink before dinner, Mr. Moore forced himself to put on a cheery face, and urged the detective sergeants—whose eyes had gone bloodshot from a full day of very close work—to accept Mr. Picton’s invitation. The rest of us would be along, he said, in a minute, to which Marcus and Lucius nodded wearily and headed on
into the house.
As soon as they were safely out of earshot, Mr. Moore’s face filled with urgency. “All right,” he said, putting his magnifying lens down. “That’s it for tonight. Everybody knock off.”
“But why, John?” Miss Howard said. “There’s still some daylight, and not that much left to do—”
“That’s exactly the point,” Mr. Moore answered. “We’re going to need some part of this thing to be intact in the morning.”
I was still confused; but Cyrus had begun to nod in understanding. “It’s not here, is it, Mr. Moore?”
“The odds are against it,” Mr. Moore answered. “A forty-five-caliber bullet would’ve left a big enough mark that one of us would’ve seen it by now.”
“So why save some of the thing?” I asked.
“Because I don’t want Rupert to have to outright lie in court, or Marcus and Lucius to have to perjure themselves. There’s only one place that bullet can be—and we’re going to get it. Then, tomorrow morning, we’ll put it in what’s left of this thing and let them find it. None of us are going to be called to testify in this particular area, so we don’t need to worry about lying—and so far as the rest of them will know, they’ll be telling the truth.”
The Doctor’s eyebrows arched a bit. “John—you realize that you’re suggesting—”
“Yes, I know what I’m suggesting, Kreizler,” Mr. Moore said, moving away from the table. “But there’s no other option. We all know we’d never get a judge to order something like this without the mother’s permission.