Cold Vengeance

CHAPTER 45

New York City

DR. JOHN FELDER SLOWLY CLIMBED THE STAIRS of the Forty-Second Street branch of the New York Public Library. It was late afternoon, and the broad steps were busy with students and camera-wielding tourists. Felder ignored them, passing between the marble lions that guarded the Beaux-Arts façade and pushing his way into the echoing entrance hall.

For years, Felder had used this main branch of the library as a kind of retreat. He loved the way it mixed a sense of elegance and wealth with scholarly research. He’d grown up bookish and poor, the son of a dry-goods salesman and a public-school teacher, and this had always been his haven away from the commotion of Jewel Avenue. Even now, with all the research materials available to him at the Department of Health, he nevertheless found himself returning to the library again and again. Just entering its book-perfumed confines was a comforting act, leaving the squalid world behind for a better place.

Except for today. Today felt different, somehow.

He climbed the two flights of stairs to the Main Reading Room and made the long walk past dozens of long oaken tables to a far corner. Setting his case down on the scarred wooden surface, he pulled a nearby keyboard to him, then paused.

It had been half a year, roughly, since he’d first become involved with the case of Constance Greene. Originally it had been routine: another court-appointed interview with a criminal psychiatric patient. But it had quickly become more than that. She had been like no other patient he’d encountered. He’d found himself mystified, perplexed, intrigued — and aroused.

Aroused. Yes, that too. He’d finally come to admit it to himself. But it wasn’t just her beauty — it was also her strange otherworldliness. There was something unique about Constance Greene, something that went beyond her evident madness. And it was this something that drove Felder on, that pushed him to understand her. In a way he did not quite understand, Felder felt a deep-seated need to help her, to cure her. This need was only sharpened by her apparent lack of interest in receiving help.

And it was into this strange tinderbox of emotion that Dr. Ernest Poole had just intruded. Felder was aware his feelings about Poole were mixed. He felt a certain proprietary interest in Constance, and the idea that another psychiatrist had previously studied her was oddly annoying. Yet Poole’s own experience with Constance — quite unlike his own, apparently — promised perhaps the best chance yet of penetrating her mysteries. The fact that Poole’s clinical evaluations were so different was both perplexing and encouraging. It could offer a uniquely three-dimensional vantage onto what would be — he felt increasingly certain — the case study of his career.

He put his fingers on the keyboard and paused again. I was indeed born on Water Street in the ’70s — the 1870s. Funny: Constance’s intensity of belief, coupled with her photographic, as-yet-unexplained knowledge of the old neighborhood, almost had him believing she was, in fact, a hundred and forty years old. But Poole’s talk of her lacunar amnesia, her dissociative fugue, had brought him back to reality. Still, he felt he owed Constance enough benefit of doubt to undertake one final search.

Typing quickly, he brought up the library’s database of periodicals. He would make one last search, this time of the nineteen seventies and later — the time frame during which Constance could reasonably be expected to have been born.

He moved the cursor down to the “search parameters” field, then paused, consulting his notes. When my parents and sister died, I was orphaned and homeless. Mr. Pendergast’s house at Eight Ninety-one Riverside Drive was then owned by a man named Leng. Eventually it became vacant. I lived there.

He would search for three items: Greene, Water Street, and Leng. But he knew from past experience he’d better keep the terms of the search vague — scanned newspapers were notorious for typos. So he’d create a regular expression, using a logical AND query.

Typing once again, he entered the SQL-like search conditions:

SELECT WHERE (match) = = ‘Green*’ && ‘Wat* St*’ && ‘Leng*’

Almost immediately, he got a response. There was a single hit: a three-year-old article in The New York Times of all places. Another quick tapping of keys brought it to the screen. He began reading — then caught his breath in disbelief.

Newly-Discovered Letter Sheds Light on 19th-Century Killings

By WILLIAM SMITHBACK JR.

NEW YORK — October 8. A letter has been found in the archives of the New York Museum of Natural History that may help explain the grisly charnel discovered in lower Manhattan early last week.

In that discovery, workmen constructing a residential tower at the corner of Henry and Catherine Streets unearthed a basement tunnel containing the remains of thirty-six young men and women. Preliminary forensic analysis showed that the victims had been dissected, or perhaps autopsied, and subsequently dismembered. Preliminary dating of the site by an archaeologist, Nora Kelly, of the New York Museum of Natural History, indicated that the killings had occurred between 1872 and 1881, when the corner was occupied by a three-story building housing a private museum known as “J. C. Shottum’s Cabinet of Natural Productions and Curiosities.” The cabinet burned in 1881, and Shottum died in the fire.

In subsequent research, Dr. Kelly discovered the letter, which was written by J. C. Shottum himself. Written shortly before Shottum’s death, it describes his uncovering of the medical experiments of his lodger, a taxonomist and chemist by the name of Enoch Leng. In the letter, Shottum alleged that Leng was conducting surgical experiments on human subjects, in an attempt to prolong his own life.

The human remains were removed to the Medical Examiner’s office and have been unavailable for examination. The basement tunnel was subsequently destroyed by Moegen-Fairhaven, Inc., the developer of the tower, during normal construction activities.

One article of clothing was preserved from the site, a dress, which was brought to the Museum for examination by Dr. Kelly. Sewn into the dress, Dr. Kelly found a piece of paper, possibly a note of self-identification, written by a young woman who apparently believed she had only a short time to live: “I am Mary Greene, agt [sic] 19 years, No. 16 Watter [sic] Street.” Tests indicated the note had been written in human blood.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has taken an interest in the case. Special Agent Pendergast, from the New Orleans office, has been observed on the scene. Neither the New York nor the New Orleans FBI offices would comment.

No. 16 Watter Street. Mary Greene had misspelled the street name — that was why he’d missed it before.

Felder read it once, then again, and then a third time. Then he sat back very slowly, gripping the arms of the chair so tightly that his knuckles hurt.