The Angel of Darkness

by Caleb Carr

  The sheriff held up a hand. “Mr. Picton, sir, you can spare the effort. I’ll admit, I wasn’t in favor of this investigation, nor of this hearing, before today—but after what I seen and heard in there …” The man’s sun-creased eyes wandered to Clara Hatch; and it seemed to me like maybe a tear or two might come out of them. “Well, sir,” he went on, stroking his big gray mustache, “I’m man enough to admit when I’ve been wrong. And I’ve been wrong about this one.” He turned the tough eyes to Mr. Picton again. “We’ll get the woman up here, sir, provided the New York cops give us a hand. And all I can say concerning what comes after that is”—Sheriff Dunning held out a hand—“I hope the Lord stays with you, Mr. Picton. Because you’re doing his work.”

  Mr. Picton, who might’ve been expected to at least show some gratitude or emotion in response to this pretty earnest eating of crow, just shook the sheriff’s hand quickly and nodded, making it clear that praise and damnation from such people were all one and the same to him. “Well, the Lord’s work right now involves me talking to that crowd outside,” he said with a flick of his head. “So if you and your deputies will just clear me a spot on the steps …”

  “Yes, sir,” the sheriff answered quickly. “Right away. Abe! Gully! Let’s go, boys!”

  The three men moved toward the front door, what was still tightly closed, while the rest of us fell in behind them. A strange kind of thrill—exciting, but frightening and maybe a little sad, at the same time—was beginning to course through me, and I think that all the other members of our team felt the same way. As for the Weston family, the only parts of said emotion they shared were the fear and the sadness, that much was pretty obvious: they clustered around Clara like a human wall, as if they thought someone might try to snatch her right out of their midst. Given the mood outside the court house, such didn’t seem an unreasonable attitude, either.

  As the door cracked open, the same angry mumbling what we’d left outside two and a half hours ago started up again, and Sheriff Dunning and his boys had to do a little coaxing—and finally some straight-out pushing and shoving—to clear a little place at the top of the steps for Mr. Picton. Stepping out and putting a match to his pipe, Mr. Picton looked out over the bobbing, grousing heads with an expression of what you might call extreme disdain. After he’d let them shout at him for two or three minutes, he held his hands up.

  “All right, all right, get yourselves under some kind of control, now, if that’s possible!” he shouted. “Neither the sheriff nor I have any desire to declare this an illegal assembly, but I’ve got to ask that you listen to what I have to say very carefully!” The general level of noise died down, and then Mr. Picton scanned the faces in front of him more closely. “Is Mr. Grose still here?”

  “I am!” came the voice of the newspaper editor in return. He moved up to the front of the crowd. “Though I’m not too happy about standing in the midday July sun for hours on end, sir, I will say!”

  “Quite understandable,” Mr. Picton answered. “But the wages of rabble-rousing have never been just, have they, Mr. Grose? At any rate, I’d like you to get the following details straight, so I don’t have to repeat them endlessly during the coming weeks. The grand jury has met, and it has made its decision—and we all owe that decision our respect.”

  “Indeed we do!” Mr. Grose said, looking around with a smile. “I hope you’re prepared to respect it, Mr. Picton!”

  “Oh, I am, Mr. Grose,” Mr. Picton answered, delighted to discover that the editor was assuming that the state’d lost its bid. “I am. At this moment an indictment is being prepared against Mrs. Elspeth Hunter of New York City, formerly Mrs. Elspeth Hatch of Ballston Spa, formerly Miss Elspeth Fraser of Stillwater, New York. She is charged with the first-degree murder of Thomas Hatch and Matthew Hatch, as well as the attempted murder of Clara Hatch. All on the night of the thirty-first of May, 1894.”

  I’ll admit that I’d thought the crowd might break out into a good old-fashioned riot at this news. So I was surprised—as was Mr. Picton, from the look of him—when the sounds what came out of those citizens were ones of hushed horror, as if some ghost had just wandered across their collective path.

  “What—what are you saying?” Mr. Grose asked. Then he looked to Sheriff Dunning. “Phil, does he mean—?”

  The sheriff just gave Mr. Grose a long and serious stare. “I’d let him finish, if I were you, Horace.”

  As the crowd quieted, Mr. Picton—no longer quite so testy as he’d been—finished his statement: “We have physical evidence that will demonstrate the woman’s guilt, we have a powerful motive that will be supported by witnesses, and we have an eyewitness to the shooting. This office would not take action on a matter like this with anything less.”

  Mr. Picton paused, still looking like he expected some kind of an outburst from the crowd; but all he got was a sudden cry of “Jesus H. Christ!” from one man at the back of the herd, who immediately turned and started running down toward the trolley station. As he went, I caught enough of a glimpse of his face to be able to identify him: It was the waiter who’d taken care of us at Canfield’s Casino. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he’d been sent by his boss to find out the latest developments in the case, so that odds on the trial could be posted at the Casino for those of Mr. Canfield’s clients who didn’t get enough satisfaction out of roulette, poker, and faro. But the man obviously hadn’t been ready for what he’d heard, and judging by how fast he beat it to the trolley station, I guessed that Saratoga’s true gamesmen were going to be able to get some very long odds on a conviction from Mr. Canfield starting that night.

  As for the rest of the crowd, they just continued to stand and stare blankly at Mr. Picton, in the same sort of way that people all over town had stared at us when we’d brought Clara to the court house that morning: they were still resentful, all right, but added to the resentment now was the kind of confusion that an angry cow feels when it’s been smacked in the forehead with a shovel. It didn’t seem like most of them even knew what to do with themselves, until Sheriff Dunning stepped out in front of Mr. Picton.

  “That all, sir?” the sheriff asked.

  “Yes, Dunning,” Mr. Picton answered. “You’d better break them up—there’s nothing more to say.”

  “Nothing more to say?” It was Mr. Grose, his voice now very different than it had been before: the pompous arrogance was all gone. “Picton,” he went on quietly, “do you realize what you’ve already said?”

  Mr. Picton nodded, very seriously. “Yes. I do, Horace. And I’d be grateful if you’d print it in full in tomorrow’s edition.” His silver eyes moved out over the crowd as he smoked. “This isn’t a matter for sidewalk debate, ladies and gentlemen. The town of Ballston Spa and the county of Saratoga will be forced to search their souls, in the days to come. Let’s hope we can live with what we find.”

  With that Mr. Picton turned and came back inside, while Sheriff Dunning and his men gently started to break the crowd up. Closing the court house door slowly, Mr. Picton then approached the Doctor.

  “Well,” he said, “as you suspected, Doctor, we’ll have no disturbances—yet.”

  The Doctor nodded. “The sinister phenomena implied by this crime resonate far deeper in the human soul than anyone can immediately grasp. You’ve been struggling with them for years now, Mr. Picton—the rest of us, for weeks. And the townspeople? Simple anger wasn’t to be expected, at this point. Confusion will dominate for a time—perhaps a great deal of time. That will work to our advantage. For there is much to do before our antagonist arrives. And when she does, we may find that popular confusion will give way to something distinctly uglier …”

  The Doctor led us over to join the Westons, and then we set out as a group—minus only Mr. Picton, who had a lot of paperwork to take care of—to make sure that the family got home safe.

  On our drive back to town from the Westons’ farm, the Doctor told us about what had happened during the grand jury’s proceedings.
Though an emotional tale, it wasn’t a particularly complicated one: Mr. Picton had carefully laid out most of the physical evidence we’d assembled, and then gone on to paint, with Mrs. Louisa Wright’s help, a picture of Libby Hatch as a fortune hunter and a libertine, a willful, wanton character who, if she hadn’t been directly responsible for her husband’s death, had certainly expected that she was going to profit by it. When it had become clear that her children stood in the way of that profit, Mr. Picton’d stated flatly, Libby had attempted to eliminate them. The Doctor told us that Mr. Picton’s language had been so persuasive—and, true to Mr. Moore’s prediction, so fast and overwhelming—that it’d seemed like many members of the jury were convinced of his argument even before Clara Hatch had been called to testify. And when the girl had taken the stand, Mr. Picton’d asked her only four questions:

  “Were you in your family’s wagon with your mother and your brothers on the night of May thirty-first, 1894?” The answer had been a not-so-easy “Yes.”

  “Did you see anyone else during your ride home?” Answer: a firm “No.”

  “Then you were shot by someone in the wagon?” To this Clara’d just nodded.

  “Clara, was that person your mother?” A good minute had gone by before the girl could cope with that one; but steady looks of reassurance from the Doctor, and of love and support from Josiah and Ruth Weston, had given her courage, and finally she’d whispered, “Yes.”

  No one in the hearing room had made a sound as the girl stepped down. The members of the jury, the Doctor said, had looked just the same as the crowd outside the court house had when they’d gotten the news about the indictment: as if they’d all been hit with one enormous brick. Mr. Picton had wrapped up his business pretty quickly after that, and the jury’s assent to an indictment on two counts of first-degree murder and one of attempted murder had been very quick.

  It wasn’t the kind of story what would make anybody overjoyed or triumphant; and to be sure, all of us in the surrey—having seen what the day had done to little Clara—felt a deep sense of regret and sadness as we clattered back to Mr. Picton’s house. But underneath said emotions of the moment, for all of us, was something what maybe went even deeper: what you might call an unspoken feeling that we were, as a group, finally on something what my dice-throwing pals downtown would’ve called “a roll.” Our investigation, it appeared, had been transformed into a sort of quiet locomotive—and that locomotive was bearing down unstoppably, it seemed, on the woman who’d been committing so much mayhem for so many years. Evidence and testimony—hard won by hard work—were the ropes we were using to strap the golden-eyed killer onto the tracks. True, our responsibilities to Clara, to the Westons, to little Ana, and to our own safety were considerable—but our responsibility to keeping our engine running was the most important of all. And on that Friday evening, we appeared to have a full head of steam, and the way ahead looked good and clear. That was before Marcus came back from Chicago.

  CHAPTER 41

  The Doctor’d been right in supposing that the general state of what he called “moral confusion” what took hold of Ballston Spa during the days after the indictment of Libby Hatch would make our work easier. It wasn’t that we were suddenly looked on any kindlier by the townsfolk; it was just that they were too busy trying to make sense of the affair—and its long, horrible history—to pay us much mind. The fact that people like Sheriff Dunning had been so convinced of Libby’s guilt by what they’d heard during the grand jury hearing made it impossible for those vexed citizens to just write the upcoming trial off as the work of ungodly troublemakers from New York City; and it was hard for even them what hung on most stubbornly to the tale of the mysterious Negro to get around the fact that an eight-year-old girl who’d suffered years of physical pain and spiritual torment had stood up before a panel of adults and stated flat out that it’d been her own mother who’d in fact been the agent of it all.

  Libby Hatch—or, as she was labeled in the grand jury indictment, Mrs. Elspeth Hunter—was arrested at Number 39 Bethune Street in New York on Tuesday afternoon. Sheriff Dunning had gotten in touch with the New York City police on Friday, and had been referred to the Bureau of Detectives. Together with officers of the Ninth Precinct, the bureau had put Mrs. Hunter under surveillance right away, and reported that she didn’t seem to be making any moves toward beating it out of town. (During the time they were watching her, the city cops apparently didn’t experience any interference from the Dusters, which we took as a further demonstration that Libby didn’t intend to avoid capture.) Sheriff Dunning directed the Ninth’s detectives not to make any moves toward actually arresting the woman before his arrival, unless it suddenly started to look like she was going to bolt; then, on Monday, he took the train down to the city with two of his deputies.

  This slightly leisurely way of going about capturing a murderess had those of us on the Doctor’s team a little confused; but Mr. Picton explained that the longer we delayed Libby Hatch’s arrival in Ballston Spa, the longer we could take advantage of the eerie, spooked calm what’d descended on the town. So when he saw Sheriff Dunning and his boys off at the train depot, he didn’t urge them to go about their business too hastily, an instruction what Dunning took to mean that he and his deputies were free to enjoy a night in the big city before returning home with their prisoner. They were met at Grand Central Terminal by a couple of the detectives from the bureau, who proceeded to take them down to the Ninth Precinct’s station house on Charles Street. (Being unaware that any New York City detectives had been involved in Mr. Picton’s investigation, Sheriff Dunning spared himself the cold reception he almost definitely would’ve received if he’d dropped the Isaacsons’ names.) Together the lawmen decided to wait until Tuesday morning to actually clap the irons on Mrs. Hunter; and we were left to imagine what the sheriff and his deputies got up to that night, since it would’ve been tough to come up with anybody better suited to showing them a good time in the big city than the men of the Ninth. The fact that Dunning waited until Tuesday afternoon to pinch Mrs. Hunter seemed proof positive that he and his boys had taken full advantage of the cultural “resources” of New York. But as things worked out, a hangover wouldn’t have been much of a disadvantage to them on Tuesday: when they arrived at Bethune Street, they found Mrs. Hunter packed and ready to go—almost, Sheriff Dunning told Mr. Picton when he called from Grand Central Terminal before boarding the train north, like she was anxious for the trial to begin. Dunning went on to report that, barring delays, he and his deputies would be arriving with their prisoner at midnight.

  All through that Tuesday, the citizens of Ballston Spa had continued to stew over what Mr. Moore, true to form, insisted on calling the “moral implications” of the case. They had no choice but to stick with that activity on into the evening, as everyone began to anticipate Libby’s return in irons; in fact, it was starting to feel like brooding would keep the town occupied indefinitely, or at least until somebody came up with an explanation for the killings what would let their society (which, if it hadn’t actually produced Libby Hatch, had certainly believed her lies) off the hook. Of course, if they’d known that one of the only men in the entire country who was capable of coming up with such an explanation was at that point packing his bags in Chicago and getting ready to journey to their town, their mood might’ve been considerably different.

  But, fortunately for us, the only person who was as yet aware of the movements of Mr. Clarence Darrow was Marcus; and late on Tuesday afternoon, he returned from Chicago in advance of the mysterious midwestern lawyer. After exchanging warm greetings with the rest of our group at the depot, Marcus handed me his suitcase (which El Niño immediately grabbed, refusing to allow me to carry it), and then we all started walking up Bath Street toward the court house. We’d been ordered to bring the detective sergeant to said building just as soon as his train got in, being as even though Mr. Picton had many pressing matters to attend to in his office (the trial was slated to open on the fo
llowing Tuesday, August 3rd), he said there was nothing more important than learning about the background and tactics of the hired legal gun who was being brought in from so far away to face him. I figured that Marcus could’ve done with a hot bath and a good meal, after his long journey, but orders were orders. Besides, the discoveries that Marcus had made about Mr. Darrow were such that he himself was very anxious to share them with the rest of us. Because of this, the Doctor had cut his day with Clara Hatch short (he was still working with her as hard as ever) and joined us at the train station, ready to give Marcus his own version of the third degree: a version what included a box of the Doctor’s best custom-rolled smokes instead of bright lights, and a flask of Mr. Picton’s excellent whiskey in place of brass knuckles.

  Once settled into the big old leather chair in Mr. Picton’s office, whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in the other, Marcus began his report.

  “The vital statistics were easy enough to lay hands on, or at least most of them were,” he said, taking a drink from the flask, setting it aside, and pulling out a small notebook. “He’s either thirty-nine or forty—I couldn’t get the exact date of birth. Parents: a Unitarian minister who gave up the pulpit to become a furniture maker, and a New England suffragist. He seems to take after the father, for the most part—the old man never lost the crusading spirit. Darrow himself has had a lifelong fascination with Darwin, Spencer, Thomas Huxley—considers himself quite a rationalist. Oh, and he knows about your work, too, Dr. Kreizler.”