On top of the pile was a dense tome, whose tiny font proclaimed it to be A New & Detailed Account Of Recent Variations In The Treatment & Pathology Of The Liver. Virgil struggled to get past the first paragraph. He would not let Thorne see him beaten, not by a book for which he had bled, and so he pushed through. By the end, he knew nothing about the liver, but he had acquired a fuzzy sense that he could be more than a thug and a warped understanding of the scientific method that would guide him to his death.

It took more brains than Virgil had to become a surgeon. It was far easier to become a cop. When his leg was healed, he took his stolen library under his arm and bid his gang goodbye. Puberty had been kind to Virgil, springing him past six feet and giving him muscles enough to batter any hoodlum the Lower West had to offer. That was enough of a résumé for the still-young New York Police Department, which put the sixteen-year-old to work solving the mysteries of the Westside streets. Once again, he could play tyrant, armed now with badge, pistol, and baton instead of his club.

And of course, as he had done all his life, Thorne followed.

Their natural brutality made ordinary police work simple. Even the rumor that they were walking a new beat was enough to make burglary, purse-snatching, pickpocketing, and bar-brawling drop to nothing. Solving petty crime was fun enough, but it was murder they lived for. Give Virgil a killing, a bombing, an assassination, or even a particularly daring heist, and the would-be scientist sprang to life. No cop ever went through so many notepads. While investigating the killing of an alderman found stabbed through the heart in the middle of a stretch of virgin snow, Virgil collected so many sheaves of interviews that he had to requisition a second office to store the overflow. After compiling enough notes to fill one of Carnegie’s libraries, he announced that the alderman had been murdered by his brother, a champion archer who fired the knife from a bow, a hundred yards away. As was customary in the golden years of the NYPD, Virgil settled the matter himself, breaking the brother’s neck, weighing him down with chains, and leaving the river to take the body away.

Such decisiveness made him a legend on the police force, but it was his earthy wit and scientific pretensions that made Detective Carr a star. Long before the onset of fingerprinting or crime scene photography, Virgil Carr styled himself a scientific detective, and he backed up any arrest with enough pseudointellectual hogwash to fill the front page of the New York Sentinel.