it was possible. But the pit in my stomach told me not to pin my hopes in that direction.
Quite literally, I had been chasing a ghost—and that must have been the real killer’s plan. As long as we tracked the long-stale movements of a dead man, the real killer remained safe. What had foiled his plan was the unpredictability of the Hudson waters, which had washed up Fromley’s corpse too soon. Only a few more months in the water, and—if it were still possible to identify the body as belonging to Michael Fromley at all—it would have been impossible to determine an accurate time of death. We would have continued to blame Fromley as the killer for lack of other evidence.
I lost all track of time as I continued to think. I considered those whom we would now treat with renewed interest as suspects. Angus MacDonald, who had devoted his life’s work to the Riemann hypothesis, only to have a young female graduate student beat him to the solution, immediately came to mind. I wanted to believe the older man’s attestation of innocence, but now we would need to revisit the possibility he was involved. Lonny Moore, the student who had tried to sabotage Sarah Wingate’s academic success, was also a likely suspect—along with any of the other men at Columbia who had resented Sarah’s feminist agitation. One of them might have managed access to Fromley and the research center without much difficulty. I would need to discuss that with Alistair come morning.
Whichever culprit I sought, somehow Fromley remained the key. It had to be someone with access not only to Fromley’s thoughts and murderous fantasies, but also to Fromley himself—assuming the confession letter sent in the box to Isabella proved to be Fromley’s real handwriting. So Fromley remained important: no longer as a suspect to be tracked down, but as a guide to the real killer. The murderer we sought had the ability to kill—but more important, he had the ability to frame a murder scene that had deflected all our suspicions to Fromley.
That thought led me unavoidably back to two uncomfortable suspicions. The first involved Mamie Durant and her mysterious connection with Michael Fromley. She had known where he lived—when even Alistair and the Wallingfords had not. Why? The second involved Alistair, whose own secrets were now inextricably connected to this case. I could no longer consider Fromley without examining Alistair’s methods at the same time. What information was he still withholding from me? And how did it bear on this strange twist involving Fromley?
I sat down on a bench and gazed blankly at the river, watching the interplay of light and dark cast by the shadows of early-evening dusk. I reached into my pocket, pulled out the locket Sarah had worn, and stared at her picture. Who had killed her? And why?
I would find the answer only once I had uncovered the oddest triad of connections: among Sarah Wingate, Michael Fromley, and the real murderer himself.
Sunday, November 12, 1905
CHAPTER 21
The autopsy results came swiftly the next morning and they were definitive. Dental records confirmed that the washed-up corpse was indeed Michael Fromley. And, by measuring the extent to which it had decomposed, Coroner Jennings was confident that Fromley had spent at least two to three weeks in the river. Together with the bullet fragment found lodged beneath the corpse’s sternum, which suggested Fromley had been shot before his body was dumped into the Hudson, this information placed us firmly back at square one. It did not matter that Fromley had died within the city’s jurisdiction, and thus, technically speaking, was not ours to investigate. His death called into question everything we thought we had discovered about the Wingate murder.
I delivered the news confirming Fromley’s death to Alistair personally at his apartment on West Seventy-second Street and Central Park West. He lived at the Dakota, a sandstone and yellow brick building with some Gothic features. The low iron fence surrounding it, which was decorated with grotesque human and serpentine figures, made it seem particularly uninviting this dismal Saturday morning, as cold rain poured from dark clouds that all but obscured the daylight. Alistair proved equally unwelcoming; the moment I told him the news, he skulked away to his library in silence.
Isabella—who must have heard voices in the hallway from her apartment next door—came almost instantly to Alistair’s apartment to offer me coffee and breakfast. At her request, Alistair’s housekeeper, a matronly woman named Mrs. Mellown, put on coffee,