I was impressed at his bravado. Once again he had clearly taken over, asserted his superiority over the other men, and was enjoying it.
“But I must leave you now, gentlemen,” he continued after neither of the men spoke. “Miss Murphy has uncovered yet another piece of evidence that I must inspect right away. And I believe that I ordered both this room and the bedroom to be sealed off as crime scenes, until our inspections had concluded. So I’m not sure what you’re doing sitting here.”
“This is now my place,” Bobby said, sticking out his chin belligerently. “I make sure nobody steal from my father’s house.”
“If anyone did the stealing, I suspect it might be you, Bobby,” Daniel said. “Has the cabinet been thoroughly checked yet?”
“There was no need,” Captain Kear said. “We had a perfect suspect in jail. If you tell me that his fingerprints are not on the murder weapon, then I suppose we’ll have to start from square one again and go through that cabinet. I’ll arrange for a translator.”
“Notify me when you have him. I want to be there. I take it the cabinet is locked?”
“Yes, and I have the key.” Kear produced it from his top pocket, wrapped in a white handkerchief. Daniel held out his hand, took it from him, and inserted it into the cabinet. “We’ll leave it there and nobody will be allowed to enter this room. That includes you, Bobby.”
“This will be my house, I tell you,” he said angrily.
“Only if your birth certificate stands up to scrutiny under American law, and I rather fear that the old lady will be only too happy to testify against you. She’s still in the place, I take it?”
“Up in her bedroom. Doesn’t come down,” Bobby said. “Cook brings her meals up to her.”
“That’s fine,” Daniel said. “The two of them but nobody else, right, Kear? You and I will meet here when you’ve lined up your interpreter and we’ll conclude the last of the fingerprinting.”
“If you say so,” Kear said flatly, giving Daniel a look of pure animosity.
“Right. Off we go then.” Daniel made it sound like an invitation to a picnic. The other men rose reluctantly and went to the stairs ahead of us.
“Come, Molly,” Daniel said. Captain Kear was just passing around the screen when Daniel added, “And Kear, I suggest you release your suspect from the Tombs. I think we’ll have this case sewn up by the end of the day.”
With that he took my hand and escorted me down the stairs.
Thirty-one
The moment we stepped out into the street, Daniel waited until Kear and Bobby Lee went their separate ways, then grabbed my forearm and dragged me into a side alley.
“Now what’s this about?” he demanded.
“As I told you, there has been a second murder.”
“Why is it you who brings me this message and not one of my own men?” he asked, his face only inches from mine.
“I didn’t want to tell anyone else,” I said. “Especially not one of Captain Kear’s men from the Sixth Precinct.”
“You mean the murder hasn’t been reported to the police yet?”
I shook my head. “Nobody actually knows it’s a murder yet except for the woman who summoned me, and I’ve asked her to keep quiet until you see the body.”
“So who is it?”
“A Chinese girl at the settlement house on Elizabeth Street. The workers there thought she’d died of consumption but I recognized from what you had told me that she’d been suffocated.”
“May I ask what you were doing at a settlement house on Elizabeth Street? You are not still working on this case when I made it quite clear to you that it was solely a police matter?”
I could hear the anger rising in his voice.
“Before you get on your high horse,” I said, my own voice rising now, “it was Sarah Lindley, whom you met last night, who called me to the settlement house where she works in a volunteer capacity. Naturally she was upset at finding one of their residents dead.” I was rather proud of this explanation, which was nothing but the truth.
“And what does her death have to do with that of Mr. Lee? Is she the missing bride?”
“She was his former concubine who has recently escaped from a brothel,” I said.
Daniel’s eyebrows shot up at the mention of such subjects coming from the lips of a lady.
“How the devil did you find that out?”
“She told Sarah her whole story when she first came to them, of course.”
“And who do you think might have killed her?”
“Whoever killed Mr. Lee,” I said.
“And who do you suspect that might be?”
“I thought you knew,” I said. “I thought you said to Captain Kear that you’d been going on with the investigation and were about to make an arrest.”
Daniel looked around, but the alley was still empty. “That was only to justify my presence in the apartment,” he said in a low voice, “and to let him know who is the superior officer.”