“Not at top speed,” I answered. “But I don’t see any cabs around.”

“I don’t want a cab,” the Doctor answered urgently. “We’ll need the time together to explain.”

“Well-traffic shouldn’t be too bad,” I judged. “We oughtta be able to go at a decent trot. Frederick ’s had a couple of days off, he’ll be game.”

“Then get him-now!”

As I shot off to fetch the calash, I heard Mr. Moore still asking what was going on and the Doctor telling him to hurry up and get into the carriage, that he’d explain what he and Miss Howard were thinking once they were on their way downtown. I pulled the rig around to them, and then Cyrus climbed up top with me, while Miss Howard squeezed between Lucius and the Doctor on the seat. Marcus and Mr. Moore roosted themselves as the detective sergeants had done during our commandeered cab ride, on the two iron steps on either side of the carriage.

“Where to?” I called back, though I was pretty sure of what the answer would be.

“Number 39 Bethune Street,” the Doctor answered. “With any luck the Hunter woman and her husband haven’t moved-and if they have, the new tenants may know where they are now!”

“It’ll be fastest if I cut through the park,” I said. “And use a few-shortcuts.”

“Then do it, do it!” the Doctor yelled, at which I slapped the reins against Frederick ’s haunches and raced off down the park’s East Drive, heading south.

CHAPTER 15

Frederick had just bounded at a crisp trot off of the Central Park carriage drive and onto the broad grass plain of Sheep Meadow (a questionable thing for me to ask of him, I know, but a shortcut’s a shortcut) as the Doctor began to speak to his assembled colleagues:

“When we first undertook criminal investigative work together,” he said, “we accepted as our starting point the idea that the criminal mind could be, medically speaking, sound, and formed like any other healthy person’s-through the context of individual experience. I have seen nothing, professionally, during the last twelve months to convince me that the true incidence of mental disease among criminals is any higher than I thought then. Nor have I heard anything about this Hunter woman which would suggest that she suffers from either dementia praecox”-which was the term alienists used in those days for what they’re now starting to call ‘schizophrenia’-“or one of the lesser mental pathologies. She may be impulsive, and extremely so-but impulsiveness, like extreme anger or melancholia, does not on its own indicate a disease of the mind. The fact that she is also capable of elaborate calculation, particularly within compressed time frames, supports the notion that we are dealing with someone who is quite sane.”

Mr. Moore shook his head and looked off toward Central Park West as we rejoined the carriage path. “Why do I find myself wishing we could be up against a lunatic this time?” he said with a sigh.

“You’ve got good cause to, John,” Lucius said. “Lunatics may be dangerous sometimes, but they’re a hell of a lot easier to track.” The detective sergeant started scratching at his pad again. “Please go on, Doctor.”

“We begin, then,” the Doctor continued, “with the notion that this woman is sane-she has kidnapped a child and may well have killed others, for reasons that we can postulate.”

“And what do we do if we catch her?” Marcus asked. “You’re talking about a real sacred cow, Doctor-no matter how many women knock off kids in baby farms, no matter how many crones make fortunes running abortion parlors, no matter how many mothers kill their offspring, people don’t like to get near cases that deal with women’s relationships toward children being anything other than healthy and nurturing. You heard Mrs. Cady Stanton the other night. That’s the majority opinion: if women are doing something bad concerning birth and kids, either they’re crazy or men and the society that men have created are behind it somewhere.”

The Doctor was trying to stop Marcus with an impatient hand. “I know, I know, Detective Sergeant, but it will be our job, again, to ignore popular sentiment and focus on facts. And the most salient fact is this: we are faced with a woman whose behavior embodies what appear to be two diametrically opposed attitudes and acts. The one is nurturing; the other, destructive. Perhaps even murderous. If we accept that she is sane, we must link them.”

“Tough,” Mr. Moore said. “Very tough.”

“Why, John?” the Doctor asked as we exited the comforting greenery of the park at its southwest corner, then passed by the Riding Academy and moved through some very sparse traffic around the Columbus Monument. “Who among us can’t claim to embody conflicting urges and conflicting goals at times? Take yourself. How often do you go out and ingest enormous amounts of a liquid poison, in the form of expensive alcohol, while at the same time inhaling dose after dose of a toxic alkaloid called nicotine-?”

“And who,” Mr. Moore asked indignantly, “very often accompanies me?”

“You miss my point,” the Doctor answered. “Sometimes, after these bouts of marginal self-destruction, you must spend hours caring for yourself, nurturing yourself, as if you were a child. Where is the consistency in that?”

“All right, all right,” Mr. Moore said in annoyance. “But it’s a long jump from mocking my bad habits to showing how a woman can be nurturing-can be a nurse in natal care, for Christ’s sake-and harbor a desire to kill infants, and be sane, all at the same time.”

“Has your research helped you at all, Doctor?” Lucius asked.

“I fear not,” he answered with the same gloominess he’d shown on the subject for days. “As I’ve told Sara, there is precious little in the current psychological literature that touches on the subject. Both Krafft-Ebing and Freud are willing to discuss the sexual dimension of a mother’s relationship to her children, particularly in the context of male children. And such men will even discuss the desire of children to destroy their parents, either literally or figuratively, again emphasizing boys. In addition, there are some explorations of violence by men against children, although these usually occur within broader discussions of the secondary effects of alcoholism and drug addiction. But I have searched in vain for truly meaningful discussions of women attacking children that are in their care, whether the children are their own or someone else’s. The general consensus is that such cases are either extreme or delayed manifestations of postpartum psychosis or, where that cannot be made to apply, mental disease of unknown etiology. I’m afraid that legal records and explorations have been far more helpful than psychological ones, in this respect.”

“Really?” Marcus said with some surprise: he’d had a fair degree of legal training before joining the force. “Progressive thinking from lawyers-that’s a switch.”

“Indeed,” the Doctor replied. “And I don’t mean to imply that there’s been anything like a systematic study of the phenomenon in legal or judicial circles. But the courts are forced to acknowledge the realities that are placed before them-and those realities, all too often, include cases of mothers, governesses, and other adult women committing violence against children. Very often infants.”

“But if I’m not wrong,” Marcus commented, “the act of infanticide is usually laid at one of two doors in the legal system: poverty or illegitimacy.”

“True, Marcus-but there have been cases, even a few celebrated ones, that could not be explained by either the mother’s being too poor to support the child or her being unmarried. Nor could they be hidden under the rug with a sweeping pronouncement of some unknown kind of insanity. You will recall the case of Lydia Sherman?”

At the drop of that infamous name, which occurred just as we were making our way across Forty-second Street on Eighth Avenue, both of the Isaacsons and Miss Howard went into a kind of rapture.