Dancing With Danger (Goode Girls #3) - Kerrigan Byrne Page 0,27
of the entire city’s safety on his shoulders. “We’ll look into it.”
“When?” she inquired.
“When we’re able.” He ran a palm down his face and glanced at the door through which his wife had disappeared a quarter hour past. “I should go find Pru.”
“When will you tell me what you find?” Mercy stood as well, thinking she needed to bathe before tonight. “The coroner will have his autopsy done tomorrow maybe, the day after next?”
“I report to you now, do I?” Morley regarded her with a sardonic glare.
“I promised Mathilde I’d find her murderer.”
His arch look softened. “And that is lovely of you, Mercy, but women like Mathilde—who keep the company she kept, and indulge in the vices she enjoyed—they often find themselves in dangerous situations. And they just as often meet such an ignoble end at the hands of men who leave no evidence for us to follow.”
“There is evidence, Morley, there’s the boot print.”
“Which is compelling, but not absolute. Any number of men could have left that print, and it’ll be difficult to use something like that to convict in court.”
Mercy scowled at him. “You’re acting as though you’re preparing me for her murder to never be solved.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing.”
His answer paralyzed her. Morley got to where he was by nabbing and convicting more murderers than anyone in the history of Scotland Yard.
“How could you say that?” she accused.
His gesture was cajoling as he placed a warm hand on her forearm. “We are stretched so thin, Mercy. I’m endeavoring to hire more officers, but detectives are difficult to come by. There is a rise in gang violence because the substances of the streets have spilled into the solariums of the wealthy and powerful. I’m putting down migrant riots and trade strikes. We’re in the middle of a crime wave, and I’m doing my utmost to keep hundreds of women and children who are still alive, that way.”
“What are you saying?” Aghast, she stepped out of his reach. “That the murder of one measly drunken socialite doesn’t merit investigation? Do you agree with Trout when he said Mathilde isn’t worth the trouble it would take to find her justice?”
“Of course not.” Morley ran frustrated fingers through his hair, tugging as if to pull a solution out of it. “I’m saying an investigation like this is rarely simple and almost never timely. We will do what we can for Mrs. Archambeau, you have my word. In fact, this is just the sort of case the Knight of Shadows takes interest in, eh?”
He gave her a friendly nudge to the shoulder.
Mercy nodded, more to get rid of him than anything.
“Let this go, Mercy. Let justice take its course.”
The Knight of Shadows was an effective vigilante, to be sure, but no one knew how to contact him. He was a man. He did what he liked.
Oh, she’d let justice take its course...
Because justice, as everyone knew, was a woman.
Chapter 8
“How did this happen?”
Raphael knew to expect the question, but he never ceased to flinch upon its asking.
Because it produced a maelstrom of emotion he couldn’t escape.
Guilt. Shame. Pain. Hatred.
Most of all, hatred.
Less toward the men who had done this to his brother, than the one who had brokered it.
He still seethed.
Grappled rage into submission as he watched Dr. Titus Conleith palpate his brother’s ruined face for the final examination before tomorrow’s reconstructive surgery.
Raphael detested everything about hospitals, though this one was nicer than most.
The glaring awful whiteness of them, the smell of solutions and cleansers. Of shit and blood and food and death. Even the neatness of them rankled. Rows of beds full of misery. Nurses dressed in smart uniforms, their hair held in severe knots beneath starched caps.
It made him all the more determined to die whilst young and healthy.
Gabriel was the only soul alive that could get him through these doors.
If his brother could suffer such indignities, the least Raphael could do was be there.
He only had to watch.
They had visited Dr. Conleith several times in the past handful of weeks, and never once had the surgeon savant made the dreaded query.
How did this happen?
How did Gabriel come to be without a large portion of his nose? How was it that his ocular bone had split so completely as to cave in, leaving him unable to properly open his left eye? How had the skin of his cheek ripped all the way through, from the corner of his mouth to his temple, only to be stitched together by a