Monument to the Dead (19 page)

“That’s a very interesting story, Mr. Naylor.”

James had arrived.

I’d been so focused on watching Nicholas that I hadn’t
heard James’s approach, and apparently neither had Nicholas, so intent had he been
on convincing me—just as he claimed he had tried to convince the trustees, six of
whom had died at his hands. I wasn’t any more convinced than they had been—which,
when I stopped to think about it, meant that he would have had to eliminate me too,
since obviously I knew too much, and I was in his way toward achieving his goal.

James had spoken from the top of the stairs behind us, and then began to descend at
a normal pace. “I’d like to hear more of the details,” James said, sounding calm and
reasonable. “Say, back at my office?”

Nicholas wasn’t fooled. “Nice try, Agent Morrison. I can’t say I’m surprised. It was
only to be expected that if Nell was concerned about the deaths, you must be involved
as well. So you represent the official arm of the law, come to haul me in?”

James glanced briefly at me before answering. “That was the general idea.”

Nicholas smiled faintly. “Tell me, what do you think you can charge me with?”

“Right now I only want to hear the rest of your story,” James said.

Nicholas continued to look surprisingly untroubled. “You want to take me in for a
talk? How do you justify that? You have nothing on me.”

“I think you’re wrong there,” James replied, his voice as level as Nicholas’s. He
began walking slowly along the walkway on the river side, and I stood up and inched
away from Nicholas without taking my eyes off him. Finally Nicholas looked surprised.
Had he really believed he could get away with murder, six times over? And then decline
the FBI’s request for a conversation? I was beginning to believe that Nicholas had
a rather shaky grip on reality.

We must have made an odd tableau, the three of us, all in a row, bathed in golden
light, focused intently on each other. James was moving carefully toward Nicholas,
so I kept moving away, just as cautiously. So engrossed were we that none of us noticed
Phebe approaching. She leaned over the railing and called out, “Yoo-hoo. There you
are! I was afraid you were still on the grounds. The guard wants to go home. It’s
well past closing time.”

In the time it took her to say that, before she had even begun to absorb what we were
doing, our tableau collapsed. Nicholas, the most tightly wound, was startled by Phebe’s
unexpected appearance, and his hand crept toward his leather bag. He pulled out a
surprisingly large knife, and I found myself wondering if he carried that around the
streets of the city regularly. James’s focus on Nicholas hadn’t wavered, so he saw
Nicholas’s move and said urgently, “Nell, he’s armed!” and quickly moved to put himself
between us.

Which Nicholas took to be a threat. Almost by reflex, he brought the knife in front
of himself. James moved to deflect it and Nicholas held his ground, and the knife
was between them. I was behind James so I couldn’t see what was happening until James
stepped back to avoid Nicholas’s lunge, and then he tripped over me and we both fell
onto the stone steps, and James’s head hit with a
thud
that I could feel in my gut. When we all stopped, James was lying on top of me, pinning
me down, but Nicholas was left standing, blood on the knife, on his hand, looking
shocked. The whole thing couldn’t have taken more than a couple of seconds. And then
Phebe started to scream.

James wasn’t moving. He outweighed me significantly, so I couldn’t move either. “Call
9-1-1!” I yelled at Phebe, with little confidence that she was listening. She was
still screaming. God, would the woman never shut up? “Get help—now!” I yelled again.
She finally cut off the sound, looked down at us, then turned tail and ran back toward
the administration building, where I hoped she had the brains to find a telephone
or the guard.

I turned back to the bigger problem. Nicholas still hadn’t budged, apparently stunned,
but I could see that the import of what had just happened was beginning to sink in.
Attacking an FBI agent in front of witnesses was not a good idea, and he looked panicky,
which made him unpredictable and therefore even more dangerous. Maybe he had stayed
cool during a whole string of murders, each carefully planned and executed; but striking
a blow, up close, with a deadly knife, was an entirely different thing, and he clearly
hadn’t been prepared for it. I had no idea what he was likely to do next. Fleeing
seemed like a good option for him, but unfortunately James and I were more or less
in his way.

“James,” I hissed urgently in his ear. “Move!” No response. This was not good. I pushed
against him to try to move him away from me; he slid heavily down one step, and my
hand came back covered with blood. That spurred me to scramble and kick my way out
from under him, but when I looked at him he was barely conscious. Where was all the
blood coming from? He must have thrown his arm up to ward off Nicholas’s knife, because
his jacket sleeve was slashed and there was blood trickling rapidly down his arm.
But his head was bleeding, too, soaking his collar. Altogether there was too damn
much blood everywhere.

“James?” I said again, and this time he opened his eyes and managed to focus on me.

“Nell, go,” he rasped, and then he looked behind me. At Nicholas, who had finally
shaken himself out of whatever paralysis had gripped him and looked ready to . . .
what? Slash his way through the both of us?

I leaned over James again, while keeping an eye on Nicholas. “Like hell I’m leaving
you here.” Then I straightened up partway. “Nicholas, put the knife down,” I ordered,
trying to keep my voice steady.

“No, it’s a family heirloom,” he replied, his voice petulant. “Jim Bowie gave it to
Edwin. It’s part of my proof.” He took a step closer, the bloody knife in his hand,
gauging the angles. If he got past us, chances were he could disappear in the city
easily enough. But we were still in his way, despite the fact that James was not in
any shape to stop him.

But maybe I was. I did the only thing I could think of: I reached under James’s jacket
and pulled out his gun.

Now Nicholas looked confused: he hadn’t expected his staid boss to pull a gun on him.
I pointed it at Nicholas, holding it with both hands. Which weren’t shaking, I was
proud to see. “Put the knife down,” I said clearly and distinctly.

Nicholas looked at me as though I’d grown a second head. “You can’t be serious, Nell.”

That offended me. I was holding a loaded weapon and facing a man who had admitted
to killing at least six people and who had just stabbed James while I watched, and
he really thought I would just let him walk away? “I mean it, Nicholas. Put it down
now or I’ll shoot you.”

He cocked his head at me. “You wouldn’t do that.”

“Want to bet?”

He took a step closer, shifting his grip on the knife, and I pulled the trigger.

Phebe had gotten it together enough to make a phone
call. When the police arrived, they found a scene unlike any the Water Works had ever
known: An FBI agent covered in blood, some of which was spreading at a horrifying
rate over the marble steps, with the president of the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society
trying to stop the flow bare-handed—unsuccessfully—and another man huddled a few feet
away on the walkway, clutching his leg, also bleeding. I hoped fervently that the
bullet had shattered a bone, and that Nicholas would have a long and painful recovery—in
prison. His precious knife lay a few feet away, well out of his reach, but just in
case, I kept the gun nearby while trying to apply enough pressure to stop James’s
bleeding. I had made the decision to try to deal with his arm, because I was afraid
that Nicholas had managed to slash an artery there. I wasn’t doing very well. I comforted
myself with the thought that if James was bleeding, then he wasn’t dead; the bad news
was, he was losing more blood than I had ever seen in my life, and if this kept up
he would most certainly be gone shortly.

Understandably the police approached our little scene with extreme caution, guns drawn.

“Move away from the gun, ma’am,” one of them said.

I looked at him incredulously. “Uh, I don’t think so,” I told him as I kept trying
to maintain pressure on James’s arm. When he came nearer, the cop grasped the problem,
and he settled for kicking the gun out of reach.

Phebe came up behind the officers. She appeared to be hyperventilating, and I wondered
how on earth she’d managed to choke out “gun” to a 9-1-1 operator, but the police
presence was proof that she’d communicated the urgency of the situation. The cops
let me be, and one of them turned to call for an ambulance.

The other stared down at me, bewildered. “Can you tell me what happened, ma’am?”

I nodded down at James. “This is James Morrison, special agent with the FBI. The gun
is his. He was attacked by that man”—I nodded toward Nicholas, who was now all but
weeping in pain—“who’s under suspicion for multiple murders. I’m Nell Pratt, president
of the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society.” Like that explained anything.

“So the agent shot the other guy?” the officer asked.

“No, I did.” I didn’t elaborate—I was too busy with my pathetic first aid efforts.

The two officers exchanged looks. Then the first one said, “I’ve requested two ambulances.
Are you saying that we should detain him?” He jerked his head toward Nicholas.

“Yes.” So much blood. Where was the ambulance? I heard a siren in the distance—probably
stuck in Philadelphia’s rush hour traffic. I would be seriously angry if James bled
out because of traffic.

The ambulances arrived after what seemed like a year but was probably more like five
minutes, first one, then another, only seconds apart. One of the cops went back up
the stairs, waved the first EMTs over, and had a quiet word with them, pointing to
James, and when the EMT approached I struggled to my feet.

“He hit his head. Hard.” Like they couldn’t tell.

“Was he conscious?” one of the EMTs asked.

“Just for a minute,” I said. Was that bad?

The EMTs added a neck brace to their ministrations. I reluctantly backed away to allow
them space to work, giving Nicholas a wide berth. I looked down at myself to see that
not only my hands were bloody, but my clothes were as well. The blood was beginning
to darken and stiffen. I suddenly felt sick. There was so much of it.

The full view of me must have startled the police officers. The first one said, “Are
you all right, ma’am?” as he looked at all the gore.

“I’m not injured. All the blood is his.” I nodded toward James, who the EMTs were
transferring almost tenderly to a gurney. Once he was strapped in, they hurried to
haul him away, taking the steps carefully.

“Where are you taking him?” I called out.

“Jefferson,” one called back over his shoulder without stopping. Doors slammed in
the distance; the ambulance pulled away, siren blaring. I stood numbly while the second
crew appeared and the cops went through the same ritual: a word with the EMT, a nod
toward Nicholas. A gurney, a transfer, and he was gone.

“Where are they taking him?” I asked the nearer cop, not that I cared.

He answered, “Penn.” I nodded, as though it meant anything to me. “Ma’am, we’re going
to have to take you to headquarters and get your statement about what happened here.
As long as you’re all right.”

I bit back my first sarcastic response.
Yeah, sure I’m all right, standing here covered in blood. Business as usual.
Instead I finally said, “I want to go to the hospital.”

“With who?” one of them asked me.

Did they really not know? “The agent.”

“Are you a relative, ma’am?”

No. We were friends, lovers, something with no legal standing. I shook my head.

“Then you’ll have to come with us until we get this sorted out. Don’t worry, he’s
in good hands.”

I looked at my own hands, covered in blood. Then I looked around. “That’s my bag there.”
I pointed. “And that”—I pointed toward Nicholas’s bloody knife—“I know that’s evidence,
but it’s also a historic artifact, so take good care of it.”

The cops looked at me as though I was crazy. I didn’t care. I was just trying to protect
a small piece of local history, which had somehow become evidence of a major crime.
I was having trouble holding myself together at the moment. There was too much I didn’t
dare let myself think about, like how James was doing. Or if he was dead. I stifled
an involuntary sob at that thought.

“We’ll tell the forensic team. Come along now.”

With surprising gentleness one of the young policemen led me up the stairs and across
the lawn to a waiting police car parked in the driveway and handed me into the back,
behind the metal grill. They didn’t speak to me. I didn’t care. I felt like I was
muffled in invisible cotton: I could see and hear well enough, but everything seemed
so distant. I couldn’t process what had just happened. One minute we’d been having
a conversation, the next minute two men were lying on the pavement, bleeding. Idly,
I flaked away some of the drying blood on my hands. The officers hadn’t offered to
let me wash my hands, but why should they? My bloody hands might be evidence of . . .
something. I couldn’t begin to imagine what they must be thinking right now. The explanation
I’d given the cops was kind of inadequate—and why should they believe me? I realized
I was rubbing my thumb over the back of my hand, over and over. The blood wasn’t coming
off. James’s blood.

No, don’t think about that.
I bit my lip to hold back tears. Right now I had to focus, had to make sure I had
all my facts lined up. The police knew nothing about the string of murders; right
now they were working on what had just happened: an inexplicable stabbing and shooting
on the grounds of a department of the city. But the only way I could explain was to
give them the background. How much was I prepared to say about the murders and the
rest? Would they believe me? Would the FBI confirm anything? Could I possibly explain
what I, a civilian, was doing in the middle of it all with a gun belonging to someone
else, covered in blood?

The welcome silence continued as the police cruiser drew up at a door at the back
of police headquarters, a door I’d never been through before in my dealings with the
Philadelphia police. I’d always gone in the front; was the back door for suspects?
I was assisted out of the car and escorted into the building, up an elevator, down
a hall. I attracted only a few curious glances, but I supposed that someone covered
with blood was a common sight in this building. One of the officers stopped to confer
with a colleague at a desk.

“Where’s my bag?” I asked, feeling defenseless without it.

“It’s safe, ma’am.”

“I need to make a phone call.”

“You’re not under arrest, ma’am.”

“I know that. There’s someone I need to speak to.”

The officer riffled through my bag to make sure I didn’t have any more concealed weapons,
then handed it to me and pointed toward an empty chair at a desk. “Help yourself.”

I found my cell phone and hit Marty’s speed dial number, praying that she would pick
up. When she did I said abruptly, “Marty, James is at Thomas Jefferson Hospital. Nicholas
stabbed him, and he fell and hit his head. I’m at police headquarters, and I’ll have
to explain what happened. I’m going to tell them everything we figured out. Can you
go to the hospital?”

Bless her, Marty had recognized the crazy woman on the phone as me and she didn’t
quibble. “Will do. Do you need anything? If I don’t hear from you in a couple of hours,
I’ll come bust you out of there.”

“Fine. I just wanted you to know what was going on with James, and where you could
find me.” I hung up. At least Marty could stay with James. If he was conscious. How
hard had he hit his head?

“Thanks,” I told the officer.

“No problem,” he said. Then he led me down yet another hall and deposited me in what
I guessed was an interrogation room. The officer left me alone in the over-bright,
shabby room that looked just like the ones on all those cop shows, even down to the
glass wall on one side. The drab paint and the furniture made the blood on my clothes
and hands seem all the brighter, shockingly intense even if darker now than at first.

No clock in the room. Deliberate, no doubt. I looked at my watch, which they hadn’t
taken away from me. Was I a suspect? They hadn’t arrested me. But why wouldn’t they
have let me clean up? Were they trying to preserve evidence? Or just keep me off-balance?
Right now it didn’t take much to do that. It was approaching seven o’clock outside
in the real world. Inside this room it could be any time. I didn’t really care, except
for James . . .

What was I supposed to do now? Someone would come and interview me. I would answer
their questions, simply and honestly. I had nothing to hide. I—we—had had suspicions,
but nothing that we could take to the authorities, as wiser and more experienced James
had found out. If there was any blame to be spread around, some of it should land
squarely on his superiors’ heads; they had refused to trust his instincts when he
told them that he believed there was something very wrong going on, citing a lack
of proof.

What would Nicholas say? Could he come up with an explanation that would sound convincing?
What the hell was wrong with him, anyway? He was nursing a grudge that went back well
over a hundred years to a woman he had never known, who he decided had been cheated
of something. Heck, Nicholas admitted that
she
hadn’t believed that, or had chosen not to argue. She’d been content with her settlement,
so the grievance was all his. Of course, there was money involved—maybe even a lot
of money—which he seemed to think now belonged to him, but I didn’t have the legal
expertise to know whether anything he could come up with at this late date would have
a chance of breaking the trust. But the thing of it was,
he
believed it. And because of that, I was sitting here with bloody hands and a growing
lump of fear in the pit of my stomach.

Good God, I’d been working with a serial killer for months without realizing it. Hell
of an administrator I made. And a lousy judge of character.

I don’t know how much later it was when the door finally opened, and in stepped one
of my less favorite people, Detective Meredith Hrivnak. We’d crossed paths before,
and not happily, but at least she knew who I was, which saved a lot of explaining.

“Well, well, look at you,” she said, grinning. “You’ve gotten yourself into another
mess, huh?”

I indulged myself in a sarcastic reply. “I don’t think I’d call identifying a serial
killer and holding him for arrest a mess, precisely.”

If she’d had antennae, they would have twitched to high alert, but she managed to
keep her face impassive. “So you just can’t keep out of it, can you?”

“Believe me, that wasn’t my idea. Can you tell me how the FBI agent is?” I wasn’t
sure how much she knew or remembered about my relationship with James, but my need
to know overcame my caution.

She regarded me steadily for a moment, probably weighing her options. In the end she
said, “I don’t know.” She pulled out a chair and sat across from me. “So, let’s start
at the beginning. Who’s the guy with the bullet in his leg?”

“His name is Nicholas Naylor, and he works for me.” I took a deep breath and started
in, beginning with reading Adeline’s obituary on the train, to looking at other, similar
obituaries and realizing they were connected. Then I backtracked to when I had hired
Nicholas, and what he had been doing at Penn, and what he’d apparently been doing
(and concealing) at the Society. To how we’d ended up today at the Water Works, when
the police got involved, and why James had joined us there. It must have taken over
an hour, and by the time I was done I was empty and exhausted.

Detective Hrivnak hadn’t interrupted. She didn’t speak immediately when I had finished,
looking first at her notes, and then at me. Finally she said, “Just for the record,
you thought you’d identified a serial killer, and it didn’t occur to you to mention
it to the police? Us, or the state police? Anyone?”

I no longer had the energy to be indignant. “I only figured out it was Nicholas this
morning. Agent Morrison had been trying to get his people at the FBI to take a look
at it, and they said there wasn’t enough evidence that
any
murders had occurred. We had at least six victims, but all were elderly, and each
of them had been officially declared to have died of natural causes. We had no crime
scenes. We could connect them only through a very obscure small trust set up more
than a century ago. We couldn’t prove
anything
. Heck, if I had heard my own story, I would have shown me the door. Just what the
hell would you have done differently?”