They passed through the lobby of the Royal into the street, where the evening air smelled of refuse and wood smoke. The pedestrians on Montgomery were mostly male and mostly respectable, none obviously threatening. Haphazard light and deep shadow provided cover but made it harder to spot potentially hostile strangers. Jesse walked a little ahead of Mercy and Theo; Elizabeth walked a pace behind them, as if she were afraid they might dart away into the crowd.

The traffic on Market Street was denser and even more lively, but the livery stable where he had left the carriage bore a crude sign that said CLOSED. There was no visible light from inside. Jesse pounded his fist on the barn-sized door, but no one came. Which was worrying. There were animals inside—he could hear the nervous whinnying that followed his knock—and at this hour there should have been a hostler there to tend them. He looked at Elizabeth, who shrugged.

The big door wasn’t chained, so he pushed it open. The reek of horses and fouled straw wafted out of the darkness, along with the sound of the animals shuffling in place. There was no lantern at hand. Jesse had been carrying his pistol on his belt under his shirt; now he took it in his hand and kept it at his side. “Stay by the door,” he told Elizabeth. “Keep Mercy and Theo where you can see them.” She nodded and drew her own pistol from a pocket sewn into her day dress.

Jesse hugged the shadows as he began to move deeper into the building. On his right was a row of stalls; on his left an assortment of carts, wagons, and carriages. A tall window at the rear of the shed admitted enough reflected light to allow him to navigate without bumping into anything. As he passed a small alcove he spotted an oil lamp resting on an anvil, as if it had been left there in haste, and he paused long enough to lift the mantle and light the wick with a paper lucifer of the futuristic kind. The lamp gave off an acrid glare that penetrated into the dark places of the shed and made it instantly obvious why no one had answered his knock.

The stable hand who had accepted Jesse’s horse and carriage only a few hours ago lay motionless, sprawled behind a quenching barrel in the blacksmith’s alcove. The blacksmith in his apron lay facedown on a drift of urine-soaked straw, arms akimbo. The throats of both men had been cut. Their blood had collected in rusty pools. It had been there long enough to begin congealing.

Jesse felt himself grow cold—a literal coldness, a winter wind that seemed to travel from his heart to his extremities.

Some years ago, a knife-wielding Placer County miner had assaulted one of Madame Chao’s girls because she couldn’t make his pecker stand up. Jesse had helped his father evict the man. It hadn’t been easy, and he had taken a few cuts in the process, but the miner got the worst of it. Later, Jesse had tried to describe to his father the feeling that had come over him during the fight, a radiant chill that didn’t make him weaker but made him strong. I know all about that, his father had said: It was a Cullum trait, a blessing and a curse. Helpful in a fight because it numbed the nerves and left the mind cool and clear; dangerous because it made you less likely to turn and flee—almost always the wisest course of action.

Tonight Jesse didn’t turn or flee, just took the lantern in the icy fingers of his right hand and gripped his pistol with the icy fingers of his left. The coppery stink of shed blood was obvious to him now. It was what had made the horses skittish: They snorted and shuffled at every move he made, which convinced him that there was no one else here—no one living—except himself.

And he still needed a vehicle and an animal or two to draw it. So he pressed on until he found Aunt Abbie’s carriage, parked at the back. He was about to call in Elizabeth so she could help him put a horse in its traces when a faint odor caused him to pause and open the carriage door.

A body tumbled out and folded at his feet.

The smell of blood became overwhelming. The horses in their stalls rolled their eyes and began to rear and kick.

Jesse brought the light of the lantern to bear on the corpse’s face.

The dead man was Sonny Lau, though he wasn’t easy to recognize. His throat had been cut and his tongue pulled out through the bloody gap.

16

Elizabeth stood with Mercy and Theo at the stable doors like a good soldier, keeping an eye on passing strangers. Jesse was taking too long, though she could hear him moving down the straw-littered length of what was essentially a large barn, accompanied by the various unintelligible noises made by horses in their stalls. She glanced inward when a flicker of light caught her eyes. He must have found a lamp. Then a span of silence, more motion, ultimately a muffled thump.

Then Jesse was back at the entrance, beckoning her and the two runners inside.

He closed the doors behind them. She could see by the glow of the lamp that his face was clenched into an expression of shock and rage so intense she had to suppress an urge to back away. “What happened?”

He took her aside and answered her question in a monotone. He had found three corpses, he said: two men dead of knife wounds and Sonny Lau mutilated in the cab of their carriage. Sonny had been killed in the signature style of Roscoe Candy: “It’s his calling card,” Jesse said.

Anger boiled off of him like the reek of an overdriven motor. Although, Elizabeth thought, the metallic tang in the air probably had some other source. Reluctantly, she acknowledged the stink of spilled blood. “So what do we do?”

“We can’t use the carriage, it’s a charnel house, but we can steal another of these rigs. Help me harness the horses, and then—”

He trailed off. “What?”

“I don’t suppose you can drive one of these? Or maybe Theo—if he knows the way to the docks—”

“What are you saying?”

“Think about what happened. We left Sonny at the trinket shop. Sonny might have followed us, but why would he? My guess is that Candy’s men caught him not long after he talked to us. Maybe they were watching him the whole time.”

“Why would they be watching Sonny Lau?”

“Candy might have known that Sonny had a connection to Madame Chao’s. And if Candy’s men were watching Sonny, they would have raised a red flag if he met with an out-of-towner matching my description.”

“We saw Sonny twice today, and nobody stopped us.”

“By the time Roscoe got wind of it we were probably already headed for the Royal.”

Elizabeth pictured Sonny Lau as she had last seen him, an arrogant young Asian guy dressed like a riverboat gambler, and tried not to imagine how he must look now, butchered gangland-style by Roscoe Candy. “What do you think he told them?”

“As little as possible. Sonny would have put up a fight. But he’s only human, Elizabeth. In the end, he probably told them whatever they wanted to know.”

“Including the room number at the Royal.”

“But when they came looking for us, the room was empty. So they would have asked Sonny a few more questions.”

“Why here?”

“This is the closest livery stable to the hotel. Candy might have been lying in wait for us. But he’s not a patient man by nature.”

“You think he killed the stable hands, then Sonny?”

“Probably the other way around—killed Sonny on an impulse, then killed the witnesses. Leaving Sonny in the carriage was a message, aimed right at me. Candy wants revenge. He doesn’t care about Mercy Kemp or the City of Futurity.”

Elizabeth stared at him as the implications began to sink in. “They asked Sonny why you were in town. They asked how you contacted him. They would have asked—”

“About Phoebe.”

“He wouldn’t have given her up, would he? His sister lives in the house, too.”

“We don’t know what Sonny might have said. He might have given up Phoebe to protect his sister. And they left his body for me to find, because Candy knows the first thing I’ll do is go to Phoebe. They set a trap, Elizabeth. And I don’t have any choice but to walk into it.”