Secret of the White Rose Read Online Free PDF

take it out of the overtime I never put in for,” I returned good-naturedly.
    As was typical, Mulvaney was not shuffling paperwork in his cramped office just off the entrance; instead, he circulated throughout the main room, arranging patrol duties and checking with each of his officers on the status of open cases. By now, Mulvaney had no doubt finished a meeting or two, completed a half-dozen telephone calls, and downed at least three cups of coffee.
    And coffee was what I required, after a late night with little sleep. I must have looked as exhausted as I felt, for Mulvaney flashed me a wicked grin.
    “I suppose there’s no chance you were out ’til wee hours with that lass you fancy, is there?”
    I followed him into his makeshift office, ignoring his obvious reference to Isabella Sinclair—Alistair’s widowed daughter-in-law, with whom I had settled into an easy friendship that defied all norms of social convention. Like me, she was rebuilding her life following a devastating loss: in her case, her husband, Teddy; in my own, my fiancée, Hannah, who was among the thousand victims killed in the General Slocum steamship disaster of 1904. Now Isabella assisted Alistair with his criminological research.
    And if I enjoyed her company more than I should, I remained mindful of the vast difference in wealth and class between us. The Sinclair family, with its impeccable social pedigree, counted themselves among the Astor Four Hundred. I, on the other hand, had grown up in a derelict tenement in the German immigrant section of the Lower East Side. The Sinclairs had a passionate interest in the criminal mind that drew us together when there was a case to investigate. But I was not one to forget the pronounced differences between us when there was no investigation at hand.
    “Have you seen the latest drawings?” Mulvaney momentarily switched topics, handing me a large blueprint plan. “Our proposed new building. They say we’re going to be the first precinct to have an all-automobile patrol. See”—he pointed to a large archway near the main entrance—“the vehicles will come and go through here.” He chortled. “’Course, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
    The plans Mulvaney had just shown me—for a new, modern station house to be built across the street from our current one—had been subject to one delay after another for so many years that most of us no longer truly believed new quarters would ever be built. No precinct needed space more than we did: Mulvaney’s station had jurisdiction over an area running from Fourteenth Street all the way to Forty-second, stretching from Park Avenue to Seventh Avenue. We were responsible for the Tenderloin as well as a tough area of Sixth Avenue dubbed Satan’s Circus—and our jurisdiction competed with the Lower East Side for the dubious honor of being the city’s most crime-ridden neighborhood. But crime here took a form I understood. The robberies, killings, kidnappings, and rapes might be brutal and ugly—but the criminal motives behind them were simple to understand. Greed and anger didn’t require much analysis.
    Unlike the murder scene last night.
    “I was out late on a case,” I said, taking the wooden chair opposite the massive oak desk covered with papers. “Unofficially, of course.”
    Mulvaney raised his eyebrows.
    “It will be all over today’s papers. A judge was killed. And not just any judge: the presiding judge of the Al Drayson case.”
    Mulvaney whistled under his breath. “You don’t say. And why did they call you?” He put out a hand. “No—let me guess. It had to be Alistair.”
    “It was,” I admitted. Alistair had a talent for involving himself in the more controversial and baffling cases of the day. Though, to be fair, during our most recent case investigating a series of theater murders, I’d been the one to involve him. His understanding of the criminal mind was unparalleled—a resource I had learned to take advantage of when