The Doctor moved quickly for the gate, but I lagged behind with Mr. Moore, who was struggling to get his jacket back on as he dragged the shovel and bits of rope. Taking these last items from him, I asked, “So you found it? The bullet, I mean.”

“Looks like it,” he answered, not wanting to get too hopeful before he was sure he had reason. “In very good condition, too. But as for whether or not it’s the bullet-only tomorrow will tell. I hear you had a little run-in with our Filipino, friend.”

I shook my head and let out a sigh of relief. “I thought I was dead for sure.”

“I doubt he meant anything like that,” Mr. Moore answered. “You’ve seen him work-if he wanted to kill you, it’s a safe bet you never would’ve heard or seen a thing.”

“Hunh.” I paused at the gate, realizing that Mr. Moore was right. “But then,” I said, as Cyrus came running down to join us, “what did he want?”

“That we do not know,” the Doctor answered, having figured out who and what I was talking about. “Though we must try to find out. However, what’s most vital right now, Stevie, is that you not mention the encounter to either the detective sergeants or Mr. Picton. As far as they’re concerned-as far as we’re all concerned”-he glanced once more into the cemetery, and then we all started to walk away-“none of this ever happened.”

“You won’t get any argument out of me,”Mr. Moore answered, taking a cigarette the Doctor offered him. “I’m not too proud of this little escapade.”

“Do you think Matthew Hatch will reach out from the grave, Moore?” the Doctor needled. “To rebuke you for disturbing his eternal rest?”

“Maybe,” Mr. Moore answered. “Something like that. You don’t seem too damned troubled along those lines, Kreizler, I must say.”

“Perhaps I have a different understanding of what we’ve just done,” the Doctor answered, his voice growing more serious. “Perhaps I believe that Matthew Hatch’s soul has not yet known peace, eternal or otherwise-and that we represent his only chance of attaining it.” Lighting first Mr. Moore’s cigarette and then one of his own, the Doctor took a drag and got more animated. “What I don’t understand,” he said, his mind jumping from subject to subject as nimbly as usual, “is what the devil they want. The man sends us a warning at Number 808-saves Cyrus’s life on Bethune Street-and now here, in another part of the state, he evidently attempts to deliver some sort of deadly message to Stevie. What can it mean?”

“Señor Linares,” Miss Howard answered, following the Doctor’s wandering thoughts, “evidently wants us to know that he’s aware of our movements-and our actions.”

Mr. Moore nodded. “It seems like as long as we’re not associating with his wife or trying to find the girl, we’re all right. But if we cross those lines…”

“Is that what the aborigine’s signals to Stevie meant?” the Doctor wondered. “That we can do what we like to and about Libby Hatch, so long as we leave the Linares family out of it?”

“Maybe,” Mr. Moore answered with a shrug.

“Well, then, why doesn’t the man just tell us as much?” the Doctor asked, his frustration growing. “Why all these cryptic messages, sent through a mysterious go-between?”

I was shaking my head. “I don’t think that’s what he meant…”

“Stevie?” the Doctor said.

“I don’t know,” I answered, puzzling with the thing. “It’s just that-well, that wasn’t the look on his face. El Niño, I mean. I was scared at the time, sure, but-looking back on it, I don’t think he was threatening me or warning me. It was almost like… like he wanted something.”

“The aborigine?” the Doctor said, as we approached Mr. Picton’s house. “What could he possibly want from us?”

“Like I say, I don’t know.” I brought my voice down to a very low whisper as we formed into a stealthy file to move back inside. “But something tells me he’ll let us know before too long.”

CHAPTER 35

We couldn’t have asked for the rest of our plan to play out any closer to its design. When we got back to Mr. Picton’s house, Mr. Moore carefully inserted the bullet into an empty gap in the planking we’d taken from the Hatches’ wagon, and the following morning we were all woken by the sound of Lucius’s wild shouting. He’d gotten up early to have a go at the examination himself, thinking that maybe the rest of us had missed something-which it now looked like we had. Poking around in the small hole with one of the medical probes, Lucius announced that he’d found an object inside what was definitely made out of some kind of soft metal; and while the rest of us got dressed and had breakfast, he and Marcus went about freeing the thing from the wood. It was an anxious time for the two brothers, and for Mr. Picton, too; and the rest of us tried to make it appear that we were also on edge. But to this day I don’t know how convincing we were.

Cheers went up from all sides when the last chips of wood gave way to the detective sergeants’ patient knife work, and revealed a large, almost intact, and very recognizable bullet. Marcus took the slug inside to the card table and set it down on the green felt surface for the rest of us to look at. I’d seen more than a few such missiles in my time, but I hadn’t ever taken the time to really study one as closely as I now did through one of the magnifying lenses. I was trying to get a glimpse of the identifying marks what Marcus and Lucius had told us about the day before; and they were there, all right, plain enough for anybody to see, or at least the grooves and lands were. As for any defects produced by the Peacemaker’s barrel, we’d have to judge that from a comparison bullet-which it was now time to obtain by heading into the backyard and putting the cotton bales to the test.

With the moves of an expert, Lucius fired the three bullets what he’d found in the pistol (and had slightly refurbished) into the cotton from across the yard. Only one of the cartridges showed the effects of time by failing to go off; the others ignited admirably, after which it was up to the rest of us to scour the cotton for the slugs, which we located inside of twenty minutes. Marcus and Lucius assured us that they were both in very good shape, so it was now time for the comparison work; but that, they warned, could take many hours. We all went back inside the house, where Marcus had set up the double-barreled microscope on the card table. Going on the assumption that we would eventually get a match on the bullets, we began to plan what other moves we’d need to make over the coming days in order to get a grand jury indictment.

Ordinarily, said indictment would’ve been a sure bet, grand juries generally being the stooges of district attorneys; but, as we all knew only too well, we had some special circumstances working against us in this case, and they demanded that we do more than just the usual homework. For Mr. Picton, that meant more long days in his office, continuing to go back over all the information on the case and putting together as many precedents as he could, along with determining what witnesses (expert, eye-, and otherwise) should be called to testify. For Marcus and Mr. Moore, meanwhile, it meant going back down to New York to perform a whole batch of crucial jobs. First, they’d have to officially notify Libby Hatch that she was going to be the subject of a grand jury investigation, just in case she wanted to appear at the proceedings and testify, as was her right. (Mr. Picton figured to make Marcus a special officer of the court, temporarily, so’s he could handle the notification.) Second, the pair had to try to find the Reverend Clayton Parker, a potentially crucial witness whose last known address in New York Mr. Moore would try to discover by heading over to the Presbyterian church that afternoon. Finally, if Libby Hatch decided not to have anything to do with the grand jury (as we figured would likely be the case), Marcus and Mr. Moore would have to stay in the city and try to watch her movements without getting their skulls broken by the Hudson Dusters.