Monument to the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  “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.

  CHAPTER 28

  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?”

  Detective Hrivnak had
the grace to look chagrined. “I’m not saying I agree with you, but okay, I can understand why you did what you did. But it might have been smart to run it by someone, to cover your own asses.”

  “We tried!” I shot back. “How is it that a bunch of women in the back office at a cultural institution managed to figure it out, when nobody else could?” I slumped back into my uncomfortable chair, my brief anger spent. “When can I get out of here?”

  “Now, I guess. I’ve got nothing to hold you on—well, maybe illegal use of a handgun, but I think there were extraordinary circumstances. Good shot, by the way. I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Whatever else she might have said was cut off by the sound of an argument in the hallway, and I was pretty sure I recognized Marty’s voice. “You have no right,” she was yelling. Someone tried to placate her in a quieter tone, but she was having none of it. “Where are you keeping her?”

  They were outside the door now. It was snatched open, and Marty barged in. “Nell, I . . .” She stopped dead when she got a good look at me; I had forgotten that I was still covered with blood. Marty looked stricken, and she said in a gentler tone, “You’re coming with me, Nell.”

  I glanced at Hrivnak, who nodded, then I stood up and followed Marty.

  She didn’t say anything as we navigated our way through the anonymous grey hallways back to the parking lot, but she kept one hand on my elbow, in case I showed any signs of running into a wall, which was a real possibility. Outside, I was startled to see that it was still light. I stopped and drew in a deep breath, scented with bus exhaust. “How is he?”

  Marty didn’t answer immediately, as if weighing which answer would hurt the least. I held her gaze until she answered reluctantly, “We don’t know. He lost a lot of blood—as I suppose you know. They’re worried about cranial bleeding. He’s not conscious.” She looked at my clothes. “What the hell did Nicholas stick him with, anyway?”