In the Shadow of Gotham (37 page)

He had the means: he’d been trusted with ready access to everything at the research center, from files and financials to Fromley himself. He had also been in a unique position to monitor and hamper our progress, even as he pretended to help us. And
he had the motive: enormous debts resulting from an addiction to drugs or cards, I had not yet determined which. While his connection to Sarah Wingate remained unclear, the rest of it made perfect sense. And the image in my mind was confirmed by the name next to the doorbell at 508 West 112th Street.

Horace G. Wood
.

“You must have suspected him, the moment I told you about the Golden Dragon. You thought you saw him outside Nicky’s that first day, remember?” I made the comment in a bland enough tone, but I had to admit I was curious. I had met Horace just five days ago, but Alistair had worked with him for seven years. How could he have been so blind?

But of course, it was precisely because he
had
known Horace that he missed seeing it. We never scrutinize the familiar in the same way we do the unknown.

Alistair seemed to have retreated into a private world of his own. His face was wan, etched with lines of worry. He commented only that “the address confirms it.”

My heartbeat accelerated as we approached the door of Horace’s apartment.

“We don’t know that he has her,” I said, “but it makes sense that he does.” I rapped sharply on the door. “She was working at his desk this morning when she discovered the connection between the stolen funds and the amounts owed to the Golden Dragon. She may even have asked Horace about it.” I rapped again, and this time when no one answered, I pulled a thin metal file out of my pocket.

Alistair raised an eyebrow. “My understanding of the Fourth Amendment and police procedure may be rusty, but don’t you need a warrant for that?”

I shook my head. “It’s okay.” I applied more pressure to the pin tumbler lock. “If we were breaking in to look for evidence only, you would be correct. But when someone’s life is at risk, as Isabella’s is, then we’re completely justified.”

I didn’t tell Alistair, but for Isabella, I’d break through this door even if the law didn’t sanction it.

The pin stack lifted and the lock turned. “Got it.” I gave Alistair a grim nod and he followed me inside.

“Isabella? Horace?” I called out their names, but there was no answer.

Horace’s apartment was a railroad flat, which meant one room connected to the next like the cars in a train. We passed first through the room he used as an office or living area, then the kitchen, and finally entered his bedroom. The place was messy and strewn with papers, but I noted nothing out of the ordinary.

“I’ll search his front rooms; you try the ones here in back,” I said. While I had little hope we would find Isabella here, surely something in the apartment would lead us to wherever he had taken her.

I was searching through a mass of papers covering one corner of the living room when a crashing sound startled me. I returned to the back of the apartment, where Alistair stood in the midst of shattered glass and broken bottles. He had apparently ripped Horace’s medicine cabinet right off the wall and thrown it onto the adjoining bedroom floor, smashing it to bits.

His explanation seemed wrenched from somewhere deep within. “I’ve known him for years, given him every opportunity. I loaned him money. And look how he repays me.” Alistair’s throat was choked with emotion. “He has betrayed me personally and committed unforgivable crimes.”

His anger spent, he sank onto the bed and dropped his head into his hands.

After a moment, he looked up, and I was struck by the despair in his eyes. “You can’t believe he would harm Isabella. He knows her.”

My own gaze did not waver. “I know Horace’s betrayal has come as a painful shock. But you cannot let it dull your thinking. Isabella needs you too much right now.”

I bent down and began to sort through the contents of Horace’s medicine cabinet. “Now help me think.”

Alistair began stacking different medicine bottles onto Horace’s nightstand. “In retrospect, I suppose his behavior these past few weeks should have made me suspicious. He’s been restless. And despite the cool weather, he sweated constantly.”

“But you never noticed anything that suggested a criminal tendency?”

His response was dry. “You may not believe it, Ziele, but I don’t sit around and speculate about my associates and their propensity for crime.”

I picked up the jagged remains of two medicine bottles. Their
names were still visible. “He has a number of opium products here.” I passed Alistair the glass fragment that represented the remains of Greene’s Syrup of Tar. “He also has Soothing Syrup, Gray’s Cordial, and some laudanum—liquid opium.”

Alistair shrugged. “Ordinary stuff, typical of most people’s medicine chests. If he is addicted to opium to the extent his debt would suggest, then he needed far more than this. He needed the sort of fix you can find only in an opium den.”

“Let’s move on and search the other rooms,” I said. We worked in silence for several moments until Alistair shouted out that he had found something.

“What is it?” I asked, rushing into the kitchen.

“His appointment book,” Alistair said. “Look—he had four meetings with Sarah Wingate in the weeks leading up to her death.” He shook his head. “If she knew he had stolen the money, why didn’t she report him and be done with it?”

“I don’t know. They were negotiating something, perhaps.” I studied the appointment book carefully another moment. There were other meetings, as well, in the weeks before her death, but they were coded with initials.
F.A.E.
was each Tuesday. And each Friday night was marked
H.R.E.
I put the book in my pocket to examine later. Any evidence that did not point us to Isabella would have to wait—even the evidence that would certainly seal Horace’s fate in front of a judge and jury. We found a shoe box by his desk, containing deposit slips for the checks embezzled from the dean’s fund.

“I see why he had little trouble depositing them,” I said. “Although they’re made out to Alistair Sinclair/Center for Criminological Research, look how he signed and deposited them:
‘Make payable to Theodore Sinclair.’
The alias made it easier
for him to manage your money. As though you had given it to your son.”

Alistair seemed to ignore me, but there was a greenish cast to his complexion that concerned me.

“You all right?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, brushing off my concern.

In the same shoe box, we also found copies of IOUs he had signed for amounts in the hundreds of dollars. There was no formal name to show to whom he was indebted, but each paper had an odd symbol on its back. The Bottler’s mark, I supposed.

“We now have plenty of evidence of wrongdoing,” I said, placing the papers back in the shoe box. “But we’ve still no idea where he’s taken Isabella.”

I sat on the sofa in Horace’s front living room. Resting my chin on my hands, I gazed at Alistair. “You know the criminal mind better than anyone, Alistair. And you know Horace Wood. Help me. Where would he have taken her?”

“He’s comfortable in this neighborhood, where he lives and works,” Alistair said, thinking aloud. He sat in a drab floral armchair next to the sofa.

I caught his train of thought. “Yes. So he’s taken her someplace nearby. Someplace private—where it will be quiet and deserted on a Sunday.”

Alistair got up to pace the length of the room. “Yes, and someplace he can feel in control. He will not want to be interrupted.”

“What about the administrative building?” I asked. “No classrooms in it—only offices. And closed all weekend.”

Alistair shook his head no. “Not likely. The administrative building is quite secure; they even have their own key system,
designed to protect the academic and financial records kept there.”

“What about a classroom building, like the science or humanities buildings? Many students choose empty classrooms to study in the evenings.”

“Good idea, but it doesn’t offer certain privacy. Where else?”

“The chapel,” I said. “It’s always open for anyone who needs it.”

“That sounds more promising. It fits what I know—what I think I know—of Horace,” Alistair said. “Is there any other place?”

We thought a moment. The setting sun cast a brilliant beam through the window, illuminating something shiny on the armchair. I leaned over, reached down, and picked up a woman’s earring.
Isabella’s
. My voice rising with excitement, I said, “She was here, Alistair—look. This is her earring, isn’t it?”

“I think so.” There was doubt in his voice, but it didn’t matter—because I was certain. I could recall her clearly as she had been at dinner last night, wearing this exact earring: a small ruby set within a gold petal’s embrace. I shuddered to think what may have become of her now, but I forced my mind once again to focus. I would be of no use to Isabella if I could not think straight.

“So if he had her here earlier today,” Alistair said, “he will not have gone far.”

I offered another suggestion. “We’re near Morningside Park.”

He shook his head. “Too open and public.”

I looked out the window. Horace had a perfect view of St. John’s Cathedral’s rising stone arches—though admittedly it was still more a construction site than a functioning place of
worship. It was now near dusk, and in the glowing pink sunset, St. John’s was beginning to cast a shadow over—

That was when I realized it. Of course—
St. John’s.
It was just across the street and would be deserted this Sunday evening.

It made perfect sense, and Alistair agreed.

“Hurry,” I said as we raced down the stairs. “We should pray we are not mistaken—and not too late.”

There was no sign of light within the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. We moved quickly but watched our step, for even the surrounding sidewalks were littered with rough stones and the odd mason’s tool—tangible evidence of how J. P. Morgan’s recent donation had enabled work to resume on our country’s grandest cathedral, designed to rival the best in Europe. It was hard to imagine such a future for the pile of stone and dirt and wood that had yet to transform itself into anything resembling a building, much less a cathedral.

We were on Amsterdam Avenue approaching the main entrance when a hunched, dark figure rapidly approached us, taking us by surprise. I recognized him with a start, but it was Alistair who spoke first.

“Fred, thank God it’s only you.” Alistair breathed a sigh of relief. “You gave us a scare, coming from behind like that. I take it you’ve not seen Isabella. We have an idea she may be here.”

Fred gave us a skeptical look, but he agreed to join us. With him in tow, leaning heavily on his wooden cane, we entered the building. At first, the
clop clop
of Fred’s cane was all that we heard. On the stone floor, it sounded even louder than usual.

“We’ve made a mistake; no one’s here,” Alistair said.

We passed under the massive arches of the cathedral’s crossing, following handwritten directions meant to assist worshippers in locating the single finished room where services were held.

“I think this may help us,” I said, grabbing a lantern from where it sat against a wall. “Do you have a match?” Alistair did—but once lit, the lantern illuminated a three-foot radius around us, little more.

We followed the signs directing us toward a small chapel.

Clop clop.
Fred’s cane and our own footsteps together made a loud drumbeat that echoed throughout the cavernous stone halls.

“Shh . . .” I signaled for Alistair and Fred to be quiet.

It took a moment for us to ascertain that the sound we heard was actually a human voice, for our ears had to adapt to the strange echo that bounced from walls to floor and back again. I felt the tightness in my chest ease slightly as I registered the voice to be that of a woman crying for help.

Isabella
.

She had heard us. And her own voice was a welcome sign that she was still alive, that we were not yet too late.

“This way.” I motioned for them to follow me into a tight narrow stairwell leading down into the netherworld of the
crypt, just under the crossing. It was the only portion of the cathedral completed to date. I forced all superstitious thoughts out of my mind, reminding myself that the space we would enter was as yet a crypt in name only. It was too soon for anyone to be buried there.
But not too soon for anyone to die there,
was the thought that immediately followed, unbidden and discomforting.

We reached the bottom of the stairs. The space in front of us was a jumble of the same stone, wood, and dirt that had marked the exterior areas above us. It also seemed to be a workman’s storage area of mortar, stone, and even two elaborate stained-glass windows, yet to be installed.

I did not see Isabella right away. My eyes were first drawn to the straight rows of wooden chairs that filled the room. Now empty, they normally accommodated a handful of worshipping congregants.

She whimpered, and then I saw: She sat on a wooden chair at the front of the room, her hands and feet bound together with rope. A small table was beside her, where six small candles glowed. I opened my mouth to speak to her, but before the words had left my mouth, a whoosh of air swept the room, she let forth a chilling cry—and what light there had been was suddenly extinguished.