Lies That Comfort and Betray Read online

  “Nora?”

  “The Marlowe footman didn’t recognize the girl as working in any of the houses facing onto the park. The police thought we might know who she is since the letter was found in her pocket.”

  “Had it been opened?” Geoffrey asked.

  “I didn’t ask, sir. The patrol officer said the detective in charge of the case handed him the envelope and told him to find out whether anyone here had gone missing.”

  “Dear God.” Prudence felt the blood drain from her face.

  Cameron decided not to repeat what else the policeman had told him. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  “I’m afraid Nora Kenny has been found, Miss Prudence.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Nora Kenny’s body lay hidden in a bed of pine boughs within the gated enclosure of a small private park to which only the residents of nearby houses had keys. Less than half the size of Gramercy Park, it was a nod toward the landscape gardens of English country houses, but too small for statuary or a miniature lake. A narrow path meandered through sculpted hollies toward one tall Japanese pine; strategically placed benches provided quiet retreats for tired nannies and aged dog walkers. It had never before been desecrated by violence or invaded by city policemen.

  New York Metropolitan Police Detective Steven Phelan stood with hands in his pockets, hat brim pulled down low over his face. All he’d been after when he sent a beat cop to the MacKenzie mansion with the envelope found in the victim’s pocket was a quick identification. Instead an ex-Pinkerton and a society belle had come poking their noses into his case.

  Coppers and Pinkertons rarely got along well with each other, and Phelan didn’t expect Geoffrey Hunter would be an exception. They’d met two or three years ago, on a case that never made it to court because of what Hunter uncovered and the police missed. Now a private investigator out on his own, Hunter might not be part of the world’s most famous detective agency any longer, but once a Pinkerton, always a Pinkerton.

  Prudence MacKenzie had been in all the papers last spring, some sort of family scandal Phelan hadn’t paid much attention to at the time, but he recognized the name. He also remembered the rumor he’d heard that Hunter and Miss MacKenzie were partners in a private inquiry firm. Which meant they’d be asking questions and demanding answers.

  Nobody needed to know that within minutes of viewing the body Phelan dispatched a patrolman to bring the city’s senior investigative officer to the crime scene. He had a bad feeling about this one, and Chief Byrnes agreed with him. What had been done to the victim’s corpse was so out of the ordinary way of killings that anyone with half a brain would make a connection to the bloody remains Jack the Ripper was leaving on London’s streets. The worst of it was they’d have to wait for more killings if what they feared possible proved to be true.

  For the time being, they’d deny any attempt by the newspapers to conjure up a Ripper copycat. The city didn’t need to be plunged into the kind of panic that sort of speculation would cause. Chief of Detectives Tom Byrnes stayed at Colonial Park only long enough to satisfy himself that Phelan understood what was at stake. Nothing less than the reputation of the department. Consider what was happening to the police in the London slum of Whitechapel. The elusive Ripper had made Scotland Yard a laughingstock.

  Byrnes and only Byrnes would talk to reporters. No one else. The public would get just enough information to put their minds at ease. Not a word more. There was no copycat Ripper in New York City and there never would be. Period.

  *

  Geoffrey Hunter tried to block Prudence from the sight of what lay on the ground, but he should have known better. She’d insisted on coming to identify the body instead of sending Cameron or the housekeeper, and now she stepped around him.

  “Is it your maid?” Detective Phelan asked.

  Hunter and Miss MacKenzie weren’t the general public, but they weren’t coppers either. Private investigators occupied some middle ground that made each side uncomfortable with the other. Hunter had a reputation for being a valuable asset if he was working with you and an implacable obstacle if he wasn’t. The girl’s father had been one of New York’s most influential judges; she was female, but she had connections.

  Phelan would have to humor both of them. It was an awkward position to be in. He didn’t like it one bit. “Can you identify her, Miss MacKenzie?” he repeated. “Is it your maid?”

  Only the victim’s head was visible. The rest of the body was loosely covered in hessian as though a cocoon of rough burlap had been painstakingly peeled away and then draped back over what it contained.

  “It is. She looks like she’s sleeping.” Prudence would have bent down to stroke the alabaster cheek, but Phelan shook his head and Hunter held her arm. “I don’t see any marks on her face.”

  Phelan hesitated, then shrugged his shoulders. “The coroner did his examination, then he laid the burlap over her again for the removal. She was tightly wrapped when we found her.” He’d seen Hunter stop and talk to the Bellevue coroner while the policeman at the gate fumbled with the latch to let him out. The ex-Pinkerton probably already knew the details that would be spelled out in the autopsy report as soon as it was written. That was the kind of investigator he was. Miss MacKenzie would have to learn the hard way that victims of violence were seldom a pretty sight.

  “Her throat’s been cut.” Phelan twitched back a corner of the burlap wrapping. The single deep slash that had nearly decapitated Nora Kenny was dry and crusty in the morning light, dark red and black with congealed blood.

  “What else?” Prudence’s voice was tense but steady.

  “Are you sure, Prudence?” Geoffrey asked. “Once you’ve heard and seen what was done to her, you’ll never be able to forget it.”

  She had turned away before the coroner finished answering Geoffrey’s questions and taken a few steps along the path to distance herself from what they were discussing, not ready to hear all of the horror of Nora’s death. The young doctor had glanced at her sympathetically and lowered his voice, recognizing the effort she was making to steel herself for the identification.

  “I need to know what the family will have to face.” Agnes Kenny’s daughter had once been able to run like the wind, Prudence thought. How still she lies now.

  “Nora Kenny was gutted,” Phelan said.

  It was the kind of blunt description one copper might give another over too many beers at the end of a shift. It was, Prudence recalled, exactly the phrase the coroner had used, though he hadn’t realized she’d heard him. These men, Geoffrey included, lived in a world she had only recently become aware of, a place where ugliness and cruelty were common, where a woman’s life could be taken as easily as that of a steer in one of the slaughterhouses.

  Prudence had to do it herself; neither of the men looking down at Nora’s body would subject a lady to what lay hidden beneath the burlap. Phelan had seen the damage done to Nora when the coroner examined her; Geoffrey knew from the doctor’s brief description that more than a life had been taken. Before she could change her mind, Prudence stooped over her childhood friend and pulled the hessian from her body.

  She felt Phelan’s eyes on her face, sensed that Geoffrey had moved closer, as if to protect her. Never let them know what you’re thinking or feeling. The Judge used to say that about sparring lawyers and juries, but it could be applied just as easily to policemen and partners. Was Phelan an adversary? Would Geoffrey think less of her if he knew how hard she was struggling not to remember how much Nora had once meant to her?

  Nora’s coat stuck to the burlap so that when Prudence pulled it back from the body, the two front panels of the woolen fabric came with it. From the neck up, it was Nora; below the neck stretched a carcass that had been emptied of the organs that gave it life. One look and Prudence closed her eyes. Geoffrey had been right. She would never be able to forget her first sight of what one crazed human could do to another.

  Detective Phelan waited only until he was sure Miss MacKenzie
would not faint, then he covered Nora decently again, hiding even the gaping neck wound that looked like a bloody smile. He gestured toward the stretcher bearers leaning against the fence, motioning them forward.

  “You’re having photographs taken?” Hunter asked. He knew Prudence was testing herself, but he was determined to distract her from the worst of what had been done to the girl lying at their feet. He’d seen wrappings fall off bodies as they were lifted onto the canvas slings used by mortuary attendants; it was not something he wanted Prudence to have to experience. She had already stretched her courage to its limits. Now she needed time to recover.

  “His name is Jacob Riis,” Phelan said, nodding toward the young man balancing a tripod on the uneven ground. A small box camera had been screwed onto the faceplate of the tripod.

  Riis held a magnesium flash pan in one hand, reaching for the lens of the camera with the other. When the powder ignited he moved quickly and dexterously, capturing the images on glass plates he handled as deftly as if they were pasteboard playing cards.

  “He knows what he’s doing. He’ll have the pictures printed up for me by the end of the day.”

  “Scotland Yard photographed the Ripper’s victims in London,” Geoffrey commented.

  Phelan didn’t seem to have heard him.

  “Riis is an odd bird, part newspaperman, part reformer,” the detective said. “He tells me he spends his nights in the tenements taking his flash pictures wherever and whenever he can. He works the Mulberry Street beat as a police reporter for the Tribune and does extra commissions like this one to earn money for his tenement supplies. I didn’t ask him when he sleeps.”

  “The Scotland Yard photographs were printed in all the London papers,” Geoffrey continued. “I don’t imagine your Chief of Detectives Tom Byrnes wants to chance being left behind if this turns out to be the biggest murder investigation New York City has ever had. I’ll lay odds that one of those reporters standing in the street over there compares this murder to the ones in Whitechapel we’ve been reading about. He’ll christen your killer the American Ripper. All holy hell will break loose.”

  That was it then. Hunter had zeroed in immediately on what Phelan and Byrnes planned to keep from the press. Phelan wondered uneasily what his superior would have to say when he found out that the ex-Pinkerton and his female companion also knew about the throat cutting and the evisceration, the Ripper’s signature modus operandi. Hunter and MacKenzie weren’t press reporters, so technically Phelan had kept to the letter of Byrnes’s restriction against talking to the newspapers, but he might have stepped over one of the chief of detectives’ invisible lines when he allowed them to linger over the body. You never knew what might tick him off.

  The morgue workers lifted Nora onto their stretcher and began carrying her toward the entrance to the park and the death wagon waiting in the street.

  Geoffrey’s eyes swept the ground around the spot where the body had lain. Unless Jacob Riis had managed to take photographs of the way it looked before being churned up by heavy policemen’s boots, whatever evidence might have been there was now lost. “Whoever killed her had to have had a key to get in through the gate.”

  “Or he was a skilled lock picker. No scratches that my man could detect around the keyhole, but that could just mean our killer is good with his hands.” Phelan answered Geoffrey’s next question before he could ask it. “I’ve had patrolmen checking every foot of the fence for a place where a section could have been lifted out. Nothing. It’s as solid as the day it was put up.”

  He knew what Hunter was doing, and he was willing to go along with it. Miss MacKenzie looked better already. She was listening intently again. Somehow she had managed to banish from her conscious mind—for the moment, at least—what must have burned itself into her memory. She was concentrating on getting the job done. Maybe Allan Pinkerton had known what he was doing after all when he recruited a certain type of woman to serve with his male operatives.

  Just before they reached the entrance to the park, the Bellevue attendants stopped and lowered the stretcher to the ground. They stepped back to allow another man to approach and then kneel down beside the corpse. His right arm made the sign of the cross over the remains of Nora Kenny. A faint scent of oil wafted through the clear winter air.

  “That’s Father Brennan from Saint Anselm’s. It’s the closest Catholic church,” Detective Phelan told them. “I recognize him. There’s three of them at Saint Anselm’s; they take it in turns. He must be the one on call today.”

  Prudence watched Geoffrey study the priest, mentally filing away Father Brennan’s every gesture and even the curve of his back as he bent over Nora’s body. It’s the Pinkerton training, she thought. Nothing is unimportant. She felt as though she were a student learning a valuable lesson. Her father had instructed her in case law; now she was absorbing the rituals of detecting in the same way. Suddenly she wasn’t thinking of the burlap covered mound on the stretcher as her childhood friend. It had become a victim, the object of an inquiry.

  The priest got to his feet and walked beside the stretcher bearers to the morgue wagon. He rested one hand on the remains as if loathe to let them go. Once the body was loaded into the dark interior of the van, Father Brennan disappeared amongst the crowd of onlookers.

  It was time to get rid of Hunter and his society girlfriend. Let them know their interference would not be welcomed. The body had been identified. They weren’t needed any longer. Phelan had no particular grudge against the pair except that he wanted them and their questions out from under his feet. He had a feeling they could cause him more trouble than they were worth. The patrolman guarding the park gate held it open so they could pass through.

  “Since it’s one of Miss MacKenzie’s servants who’s been killed, I’m sure the police will understand that our firm will be looking into the matter.” Geoffrey Hunter’s smile was brief and grim.

  “Just so long as you don’t get in the way,” Phelan said. He tipped his hat to the young woman whose poised demeanor had surprised him, shook hands with Hunter, and turned back toward where Jacob Riis was packing up his camera. Phelan thought he’d handled the situation as well as could be expected under the circumstances. The important thing, as far as Chief Byrnes was concerned, was that the Metropolitan Police find the Irish maid’s killer before a couple of private investigators did. And one of them a woman. The department would never live down the embarrassment of it.

  In Phelan’s experience, husbands, fiancés, and lovers killed the women they claimed to cherish. Nora Kenny wasn’t married, but according to Miss MacKenzie, she had been engaged. Open and shut case, he decided. The fiancé followed her to the city, caught her with another man, bided his time, then killed her. Carved her up like the Ripper he’d read about in the papers. He was smart enough to want to shift suspicion elsewhere, but not clever enough to outwit Steven Phelan.

  Two or three days and the detective would have the case wrapped up. Byrnes would be satisfied and the women of New York City could sleep safely in their beds again. Until the killing was repeated. He devoutly hoped it would not be, but he’d seen too much not to believe anything was possible.

  *

  “Chief of Detectives Tom Byrnes is a tough cop,” Geoffrey said as he and Prudence made their way through the park gate. “And smart. He’s the one who came up with what he calls the Rogues Gallery, photographs of everyone his men bring into the stations. He published a book a couple of years back, Professional Criminals of America. Looking at some of those faces is guaranteed to rob you of a night’s sleep. Byrnes doesn’t think much of the way London is handling their Ripper, and he hasn’t bothered to keep his opinions to himself. If New York City has its own Ripper, he’ll have to prove he can do better than Scotland Yard.”

  “And we’ll have to do better than Chief Byrnes and Detective Phelan,” Prudence declared. “This is what you were talking about the other day, Geoffrey, isn’t it? The copycat. I can’t bear that it’s Nora he chose for
his first victim. She didn’t deserve to die like this.”

  “No one does, Prudence.” Geoffrey looked across the street where a burly policeman in a dark blue uniform frock coat was keeping a small group of reporters and the curious at bay. “The reporters beat the morgue wagon,” he said. “They always do.”

  “Do we know when she died?” Prudence asked.

  “The coroner said she was well into rigor. He estimated time of death at close to midnight. And she wasn’t killed here. She was rolled up in that hessian somewhere else and carried here. That’s all he could tell me.”

  “I can’t imagine that Nora had any enemies, Geoffrey. The only time she left her family on Staten Island was to come into the city to work for me, usually not for longer than a few days or a week at most.”

  “More often than not people end up dead because somebody they know wants them that way. That’s the direction Phelan’s investigation will take. In this instance, I think he’s wrong, but I can’t say I’d do any differently if I were in his place. He doesn’t know Nora Kenny and her family the way you do.”

  “He’ll want a quick resolution of the case, won’t he?” Prudence mused. “He’ll say that since Nora was out by herself in the city streets well after dark, she was probably the type of girl who liked to take chances. He’ll insinuate that she brought it on herself. Blame her for her own death. I’ve heard that kind of argument before, Geoffrey, when someone’s maid was discovered to be in the family way. The woman is always at fault.” Prudence had yet to learn that anger never got you anywhere with the police.

  “I’d like to have seen what was in the envelope Phelan found in Nora’s coat pocket,” Geoffrey said.

  “It was probably a bill for the stewing hens,” Prudence said. “Why didn’t Nora leave it in the basket? If she meant for Cook to find the birds before she got back, surely she would have slipped the envelope in with them. To be sure Mrs. Hearne knew who they were from.”