Page 56 of The Cabinet of Dr. Leng

“Have a care, there!” she snapped as the young woman—half her size—did her best to slide the sleeves into place. “I’m not one of those longshoremen you go carousing with on your day off!”

In due time she was out the front door and being assisted down the steps of her Fifth Avenue mansion and out to the carriage standing at the curb. Williams, her coachman, opened the door and, with the help of the maid, assisted Mrs. Cabot-Flint into the conveyance. She paused to wipe a dubious finger along the outside of the gleaming ebony door. It was Williams’s duty to make sure that, whenever she made her calls, the brougham was spotless, despite the mud, ice, and filth of the roads.

Once she had been bundled inside, Williams climbed into the driver’s seat, took up the reins, and they lurched off with such a jackrabbit start Mrs. Cabot-Flint rapped with annoyance on the front window with her mother-of-pearl cane. Didn’t the fellow recall that her liver was acting up, and the doctor had warned her to avoid sudden movement? Actually, perhaps the doctor hadn’t specifically mentioned her liver, but she knew that organ was very delicate in a woman of her age and constitution.

She settled back—none too happily—in the seat as they set off down the avenue. Thank heavens, at least the ride would be short. She was due for her private costume fitting—refitting, to be precise, the dressmaker had made wretched work of it the first time around—and none too soon, because thesoiréewas just under two weeks away.

Her thoughts were disturbed by a sudden neighing of horses, followed by a shout, so close it might almost have come from the opposite seat…and then a violent jolt forced her to grab her cane with both hands to avoid slipping forward in the carriage.

What on earth? Of all the intolerable—!

She was about to open the passthrough to excoriate Williams when she saw the cause of her consternation. Just after they had passed Forty-Ninth Street, a carriage—coming out of nowhere—had almost collided with her own, causing her horses to shy and rear against their reins. Williams had nearly been thrown from his seat.

This was outrageous. Mrs. Cabot-Flint had heard tales of the young bloods and dandies who raced gigs through Central Park with all the abandon of Roman charioteers—no doubt emulating Ben-Hur, the ill-bred protagonist of that year’s most sensational novel. But this was Fifth Avenue, not some dog track, and such behavior was not to be tolerated. She was of half a mind to tell Williams to call a constable.

She saw he was speaking to the other driver in none-too-friendly terms. This was rather unlike the mild Williams. She noticed that the other vehicle was not some cheap buggy or rockaway such as a cabman would use, but a sumptuous private carriage, whose gigantic, muscular driver was dressed in expensive livery. It appeared no damage had occurred and nobody was hurt—yet. She opened her window partway to order Williams to get back onto his seat, drive on, and leave this gaucherie behind.

Yet now Mrs. Cabot-Flint received a greater surprise. For the door of the other carriage opened and a striking young woman descended and approached the coachmen. It was most shocking that a woman of means should exit her conveyance in the middle of the street, let alone involve herself in an argument among servants. And yet there she was, wearing a visiting dress of striped blue satin, wasp-waisted and worked with white organdy and gold silk. As Mrs. Cabot-Flint stared, the woman removed her bonnet of matching blue satin, revealing glossy dark hair, styled short. The bonnet itself, she couldn’t help but notice, was embroidered with pearls and trimmed with an aigrette in pure jet—extremely expensive and of the latest Parisian fashion.

As she watched, Mrs. Cabot-Flint saw the young woman, having defused the altercation, was—merciful heavens!—approaching her own window.

The woman might be wealthy, thought Mrs. Cabot-Flint, but was unknown to her—and, thus, to New York society. Although she resolved to keep a distantfroideur, she could not very well ignore her completely. She opened her window the rest of the way.

The woman, having replaced her bonnet, stopped outside the carriage and gave an exceedingly graceful curtsy. “I’m terribly sorry if my coachman’s error caused you any discomfort or mortification,” she said in a cultured European accent. “I hope you will accept my apologies.”

Mrs. Cabot-Flint looked down at the woman—whose cool, oddly distant violet eyes held her own—and nodded gravely.

She waited for the young lady to say more, but to her surprise she merely turned and went back to her own carriage, stepping into it without assistance and closing the door. A moment later, her man gave the reins a shake, and the coach began to move away. Mrs. Cabot-Flint noted it was drawn by a matched pair of magnificent gelded black Percherons with white stars on their foreheads, and as the equipage passed by, she saw that it was a clarence coach of the finest workmanship, its dark wood gleaming with yellow-topaz inlay.

On the side of the door was a coat of arms.

A moment later, the carriage was out of sight. Rousing herself, Mrs. Cabot-Flint gave a knock on the passthrough with her cane, urging Williams to stop his loitering. As her own carriage began moving once again, its owner’s mind continued to move as well. She had heard that a young European woman of great wealth and high rank—a baroness, or perhaps even a countess—had taken possession of that unusual marble mansion whose construction had exhausted its original owner’s fortune. That mansion was close by—on the northwest corner of Forty-Eighth Street. The clarence must have been pulling away from the curb near that very spot.

As she continued down the avenue in her own splendid Victorian coach—rather drab compared to the other vehicle—the thoughts of Mrs. Cabot-Flint fastened on the young woman herself. Everything about her, from the way she had intervened in the coachmen’s squabble to the cool and direct manner with which she’d apologized, spoke of a person operating above society’s rules. And that gigantic coachman of hers could have passed for one of the Prussian Imperial Guard. Everything about her radiated nobility.

Curiosity among New York’s “Four Hundred” about the new resident of the marble mansion was high. If Mrs. Cabot-Flint was the first to make her acquaintance, it would be a social victory of no little consequence.

Settling back again in her seat, she made a mental note to stop on the way back from the dressmaker’s and leave her card at the mansion, now receding in the glass panel at the rear of her coach.

37

June 1

Thursday

VINCENT D’AGOSTA WAS CURIOUSto meet the FBI agent from Denver who’d contacted him about the Mancow homicide. The call, coming out of nowhere, was a game changer. Up to that point, he and his team had made little progress. Despite the museum being packed with security cameras and guards, a comprehensive review had revealed nothing out of the ordinary. It was incredible someone had managed to sneak in, lure Mancow into the freezer, lock him in, and depart without being caught on tape—but there seemed no doubt that was what had happened. Dr. Mancow himself seemed above reproach, with no criminal record or history of unethical dealings. The NYPD forensics lab had analyzed the sabotaged freezer door without finding anything promising—no latents beyond the small circle of technicians who used the freezer on a regular basis. The DNA analyses were still pending, but he had little hope they would yield anything useful. The freezer was filthy to begin with, and there was probably well-preserved DNA of people and animals going back a hundred years in there.

Then out of the blue came this call from an agent who identified himself as Coldmoon, regarding a homicide on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Incredible the two murders could be linked, but as the agent began laying out the progress of his own investigation, there was no doubt they were. The case was breaking open—a huge relief. And it was turning more interesting, at that.

Coldmoon. Odd name. D’Agosta glanced at his watch. He was to meet the agent at the museum in half an hour to give him a walk-through of the crime scene. Unfortunately, they would be joined by what he’d started to think of as the Triumvirate: the museum’s meddlesome director, Lowell Cartwright; security chief Martin Archer; and public relations director Louise Pettini. There was no way to avoid their tagging along: the Triumvirate had been in a flutter of anxiety ever since learning the FBI was getting involved.

The museum lay only a couple of blocks from the 20th Precinct, where he was reviewing case files that day, and he decided to walk instead of getting a ride in a squad car. He needed to clear his head and think about how to best liaise with the feds. And it was a beautiful day, a fabulous early summer afternoon, not a cloud in the sky, the air fresh and clean.

He moved briskly down Columbus to Eighty-First, then east toward Central Park West. The museum’s security entrance was a circular drive underneath the Great Rotunda. Within ten minutes, he was passing through the metal detector, putting his service piece on the nearby table and picking it up on the other side. Naturally, the Triumvirate was hovering.

“Lieutenant Commander,” said Archer, leading him into the large security foyer where Cartwright and Pettini were waiting nervously. “Agent Coldmoon just arrived.”

D’Agosta turned to see a surprisingly young agent, dressed in a sharp blue suit, his black hair a bit long by FBI standards and parted in the middle, which along with the knifelike nose served to accentuate the Native American features. He was tall and thin with high cheekbones, black eyes, and looked fit in a rangy way. D’Agosta thought with a twinge of embarrassment of the tire around his own waist. When he was Coldmoon’s age, he was…well, also a bit overweight. At least he’d quit smoking those damn cigars.

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