“Oh good Lord!” Fields involuntarily crumbled the note. “He was still alive!”

In the study, Lowell knelt down and put his head close to the floor. “You were still alive,” he whispered. “The great refuser. That’s why you were done in.” He broke it to Artemus Healey gently. “What did Lucifer say to you? You were trying to tell your maid something when she found you. Or were you trying to ask something?” He saw specks of blood still on the floor. He saw something else along the edges of the rug: squashed wormlike maggots, strange insect parts Lowell did not recognize, the wings and trunks of a few of the fire-eyed insects Nell Ranney had torn to pieces over the body of Judge Healey. He rummaged through Healey’s overflowing desk until he found a pocket lens and passed it over the insects. They, too, were traced with his blood.

Suddenly, from underneath piles of paper behind the desk, four or five fire-eyed flies shot out and bolted in a line toward Lowell.

He gasped foolishly and stumbled over a heavy chair, banged his leg hard against a cast-iron umbrella stand and fell over.

Lowell, with a thirst for revenge, brought down a ponderous law book methodically against each of the flies. “Do not think you can scare off a Lowell.” Then he felt a slight tingle above his ankle. A fly had slipped inside, and when Lowell lifted his pants leg, the fly, disoriented, twisted out and tried to get away. Lowell smashed it into the rug with his boot heel with childish pleasure. That was when he noticed a red abrasion just above his ankle where he had hit the umbrella stand.

“Damn you,” he said to the dead infantry of flies. He stopped cold, noticing how the heads of the flies seemed to have the expressions of dead men.

Fields murmured from outside to hurry. Lowell, breathing in irregular spurts, ignored the warnings until footsteps and voices could be heard from above.

Lowell took out his handkerchief, embroidered with JRL by Fanny Lowell, and scooped up the insects he had just killed, as well as the other insect parts he could find. Stuffing the cargo into his coat, he ran out of the study. Fields helped him wheel the settee back into place as the voices of his beleaguered cousins grew closer.

The publisher was parched for knowledge. “Well? Well, Lowell? Did you find anything?”

Lowell patted the handkerchief in his pocket. “Witnesses, my dear Fields.”

IX

The week after Elisha Talbot’s funeral, every minister in New England had preached an impassioned eulogy to his fallen peer. The following Sunday, the sermons focused on the commandment not to murder. When neither Talbot’s nor Healey’s murder seemed any closer to being resolved, Boston’s clergymen preached on every sin committed since before the war—culminating with the force of the Last Judgment in tirades against the police department’s futile work, with a mesmerizing spirit that would have made Talbot, the old tyrant of the Cambridge pulpit, tear up with pride.

Newspapermen asked how the murders of two leading citizens could happen without consequence. Where had the money gone that the aldermanic council had voted to improve police efficiency? To flashy silver numbers on the officers’ uniforms, said one newspaper sardonically. Why had the city approved Kurtz’s petition for policemen to be permitted to carry firearms if they could not find criminals on which to use them?

Nicholas Rey read with interest these and other critiques from his desk at the Central Station. In fact, the police department was making some real improvements. Fire-alarm bells were arranged so as to call the entire police force, or some part, to any section of the city. The chief had also ordered sentinels and scouts to deliver constant reports back to the Central Station, with all policemen ready for duty at the smallest sign of a potential problem.

Kurtz privately asked Patrolman Rey for his assessment of the murders. Rey considered the situation. He had the rare gift in a man of allowing himself to be silent before speaking, so that he said just what he meant. “When a soldier was caught trying to desert in the army, the whole division was ordered into a field, where there was an open grave and a coffin beside it. The deserter would be marched before us with a chaplain at his side and ordered to sit on the coffin, where he was blindfolded and his hands and feet bound. A firing squad of his own men would line up and wait for the command. Ready, aim… With fire, he would fall dead into the coffin and be buried on the spot, with no marker left in the ground. We would shoulder arms back to camp.”

“Healey and Talbot were done in as examples of some kind?” Kurtz seemed skeptical.

“The deserter could as easily have been shot in the brigadier general’s tent or in the woods, or been sent to a court-martial. The public performance was to show us that the deserter would be abandoned, just as he abandoned our ranks. Slave masters used similar tactics to make an example of slaves who tried to escape. The fact that Healey and Talbot were murdered might be secondary. First and foremost, we are dealing with punishments of these men. We are meant to fall in line and observe.”

Kurtz was fascinated but not won over. “Just so. Punishments by whom, Patrolman? And for what errors? If someone did want us to learn from these acts, wouldn’t it make sense they would do it in a way we could understand? The naked body left under a flag. The feet on fire. No sense in it at all!”

They must make sense to someone though, Rey thought. He and Kurtz might not be the ones being spoken to.

“What do you know of Oliver Wendell Holmes?” Rey asked Kurtz during another conversation as he was escorting the police chief down the steps of the State House to the waiting carriage.

“Holmes.” Kurtz shrugged, indifferent. “Poet and doctor. Social gadfly. He was a friend of old Professor Webster’s before Webster was hung. One of the last to accept Webster’s guilt. Wasn’t much help at the inquest of Talbot, though.”

“No, he wasn’t,” Rey said, thinking about Holmes’s nervousness at the sight of Talbot’s feet. “I believe he was not well, that he suffers from asthma.”

“Yes—asthma of the mind,” Kurtz said.

After Talbot’s body was discovered, Rey had shown Chief Kurtz the two dozen bits of paper he had picked up from the ground near Talbot’s vertical grave. They were tiny squares, each one no bigger than a carpet tack and each containing at least one typeset printed letter, with some showing barely discernible print on the reverse side. Some were smudged beyond recognition by the constant moisture in the vault. Kurtz wondered at Rey’s interest in the litter. This formed a general dent in his confidence in his mulatto patrolman.

But Rey laid them out carefully on a table. These scraps glowed with importance, and he was certain they signified something, as certain as he had been of the leaper’s whisper. He could identify the contents of twelve of the bits: e, di, ca,’t, I, vic, B, as, im, n, y, and another e. One of the smudged bits contained the letter g, although, in truth, it could just as easily have been q.

When Rey was not transporting Chief Kurtz to interviews with acquaintances of the deceased or to meetings with station captains, he would steal some free minutes to remove the bits from his trouser pocket and sprinkle the letters over a table. Sometimes he could make words, and he kept track in a memorandum book of the phrases that arose. He closed his gold-tinted eyes tight, opening them to double size with the unconscious expectation that the letters would string together on their own to explain what had happened or what should be done, like the dial-plates of the spiritualists, which, it was claimed, spelled out the words of the dead when operated by a sufficiently talented medium. One afternoon, Rey placed the station-house leaper’s final words, at least as the patrolman had transcribed them, amid the new jumble of letters, hoping that the two lost voices would in some way commune.