escaped my attention. I found this length so tightly, so severely tied about the neck as to be virtually hidden from sight; it was completely buried in the flesh, again fastened by a sailor’s hard knot, which lay just under the left ear. Around it her flesh was much distended. I only came upon it by observing a deep crease encircling her neck. Passing my hand behind her ear, I accidentally felt, rather than saw, the small knot, which I supposed to have been the trimming of her collar, so deeply buried as to have been initially obscured from view.”
“From such description, would this arrangement alone not have sufficed to produce death?”
“It would have exactly. I would calculate she had been sexually attacked several times before expiring. Perhaps by as many as three men.”
“And previous to that?” Hays asked.
Dr. Cook hesitated almost imperceptibly. “I found her to have been a person of kerrect habits and chaste character,” he said.
A sudden sharp pain shot from the high constable’s right knee to his buttock, very nearly making him squirm. His physician, Dr. John Francis, had informed him he suffered from poor circulation and chronic arthritic dysfunction of the leg joints, particularly the knee, ankle, and hip, among other varied ailments associated with advancing years. Sitting or standing in one position for any prolonged length of time often resulted in excruciating discomfort for the high constable, although it was not in Jacob Hays’ constitution to complain. “Where is the body now?” he asked. “I’d like to view her.”
Dr. Cook frowned. “Because of the heat, I have found it necessary to inter her in a temporary grave. I’m afraid the state of her was untenable.”
“Yet you are convinced this is Mary Rogers? There is no question? Despite the profound decomposition of her features, you are sure?”
“I am sure. All circumstances point to it, and she has been positively identified.”
“By the law clerk and ex-suitor Crommelin?”
“Yes, by Mr. Crommelin. He and his friend came upon the body while I was making my preliminary examination.”
“His friend?”
“A gentleman giving his name as Archibald Padley, also an ex-lodger, also a law clerk.”
“What exactly did these two gentlemen do and say?”
“A curious crowd had gathered. They pushed through the throng for a closer look. At some point, Mr. Crommelin voiced alarm to my colleague, Gilbert Merritt, the Hudson County justice of the peace, that he feared he and his friend knew the identity of the corpse. After closer scrutiny, however, the companion backed off from his statement. He claimed, given the state of the facial features, he could not be sure. But this Crommelin knelt and took the arm of the corpse in his own hands, and carefully pushed up the fabric of her dress sleeve, proceeding to minutely study the hair on the forearm beneath, seemingly its quality and quantity. Following some moments of his examination in this manner, tears welled in his eyes. ‘I know her,’ he stated. ‘With certainty I know her! This is Mary Cecilia Rogers, and I am fearful this blow will kill her mother.’”
“Her mother?”
“Yes.”
“Those were his exact words?”
“Yes, that is what he said.”
“And you took his identification as fact.”
“I might have preferred a blood relative, the mother called in to question, for example, but frankly, the condition of the body was appalling, especially for such a relatively short time in the water. In this heat, her dissolution was of such rapid and profound nature, I feared to subject the mother, who I understood to be quite old and infirm, to any more anguish, or compromise the body any further, unless evidence be lost before being corroborated by another.”
“The New York coroner, for example?”
Dr. Cook smiled sheepishly and shrugged. His blue eyes sparkled. “If you will.”
“So you are hopeful to see the City of New York taking over this investigation, Dr. Cook?”
“My superiors are reluctant to take jurisdiction. After all, the victim is a resident of your metropolis, High Constable, not New Jersey. True, the poor girl’s body washed up here, but this outrage, you cannot possibly argue, very likely took place within the confines of your fair city, not ours. So in the end, I have to agree. Who, sir, better able to see this criminal atrocity to its logical end than a man of your remarkable skills and acumen?”
Because Old Hays had a daughter of his own, the last surviving of his children, the other four, all sons, having succumbed during the feral yellow fever epidemic of 1822, all within the short span of a sweltering, humid August weekend, the death of the segar girl Mary Rogers took on for him added significance. His cherished youngest, also a Mary, in her case Mary Olga, although called by family and friends exclusively Olga, was not that many years older than Mary Cecilia Rogers herself, and therefore the death of the segar girl evoked for him a special poignancy. Sarah, his wife of forty-eight years, had fallen ill from arrhythmia of the heart only January last. She had just made dinner, had taken her place at the table, when she lost consciousness and hit the floor, facefirst. She woke almost immediately, but as her eyes blackened, her organs began to fail, and within three days his most beloved was forever gone. Since then, understandably, his daughter had assumed a role something more than precious to her father.
Hays did not usually make habit of having his emotions become involved in his cases. He knew even if he had acted when first he had heard of this newest disappearance of the segar girl, there was surely nothing that could have been done. She was already dead.
Still, burrowing guilt had taken hold of him.
From the time of her first disappearance, Hays knew Mary Cecilia Rogers to be in her twenty-first year, having been born in Connecticut in 1820. Her mother, Phebe Mather Rogers, had married into the family of the sour Puritans Increase and Cotton Mather. But Phebe’s first husband, Ezra Mather, had died of an infection at thirty-seven, leaving her with two children, a boy and a girl. She remarried, this time to a descendant of another well-known Connecticut family, religious zealot and Quaker James Rogers, founder of the troublesome and dissenting Rogerene sect. Mary was born when Phebe Rogers was forty-two years old, the only child of that union. Hays recalled there had been some spurious talk that Mary was not Phebe’s child at all, but her granddaughter, the out-of-wedlock child of Phebe’s daughter, also called Phebe.
In 1835, when Mary was fifteen, James Rogers had been killed in a Long Island Sound steamboat explosion, leaving mother and daughter in a state of economic travail.
During the financial panic of 1837 they had moved to New York City, where they hoped there would be chance for better circumstance. At first they had lived at 116 Liberty Street at the home
