Chapter 12 · The City Wants Silas

The lab report came back at dawn. James read it twice in the precinct hallway, under the gas lamp that still hissed even though the sun was up.

The poison wasn't arsenic. It was strychnine, cut with chalk dust and sold as stomach tonic. Batch number matched a shipment that killed four dock workers last month. The bottle in Vivian's glove had fingerprints on the glass.

Not hers. Silas Crane's.

James folded the paper. His hand didn't shake. It should've. The whole case just flipped.

"You sure?" Captain Morris leaned over his shoulder, smelling like coffee and old tobacco. "The Ashford boy?"

"Not the Ashford boy." James kept his voice flat. "The man pretending to be him."

Morris grunted. "City's not gonna like that."

The city found out anyway. It always did. By noon, the newspaper had a special edition. MIRACLE HEIR LINKED TO POISON RING. By one o'clock, the radio stations were reading the lab report on air, and by two, there was a crowd outside the Ashford Hotel.

James stood on the precinct steps and watched them gather. Fifty people. Then a hundred. Someone threw a rock through the hotel's lobby window. The crash echoed down the block.