The Cutthroat

1

On the second floor of New York’s finest hotel, the Knickerbocker, at the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s Chief Investigator sized up a new client through the reception room spy hole. The Research Department had provided a snapshot dossier of a “stiff-necked, full-of-himself Waterbury Brass King worth fifty million.”

Isaac Bell reckoned they had their facts straight.

William Lathrop Pape looked newly rich. A broad-bellied man in his early fifties, he stood rock-still, gloved hands clamping a gold-headed cane. His suit and shoes were English, his hat Italian. He boasted a heavy watch chain thick enough to moor a steam yacht, and his cold gaze bored through the front desk man as if the young detective were a piece of furniture.

Research had not discovered why the industrialist needed private detectives, but whatever William Lathrop Pape’s troubles, he had pulled numerous wires for a personal introduction to Joseph Van Dorn, the founder of the agency. As Van Dorn was three thousand miles away in San Francisco, it had fallen to Isaac Bell to extend the favor requested by an old friend of the Boss.

“O.K. Bring him in.”

The apprentice hovering at Bell’s elbow raced off.

Bell stepped behind Van Dorn’s desk, cleared candlestick telephones and a graphophone diaphragm out of his way, and laid down his notebook and fountain pen. He was tall and about thirty years of age, built lean and hard, with thick golden hair, a proud mustache, and probing blue eyes. On this warm spring day, he wore a tailor-made white linen suit. The hat he had tossed on Van Dorn’s rack was white, too, with a broad brim and a low crown. His made-to-order boots were calfskin, well worn and well cared for. He looked like he might smile easily, but a no-nonsense gaze and a panther’s grace promised anything but a smile were he provoked.

The apprentice delivered Pape.

Isaac Bell offered his hand and invited him to sit.

Pape spoke before the apprentice was out the door. “I was informed that Van Dorn would make every effort to be here.”

“Sincere as Mr. Van Dorn’s efforts were, they could not free him from previous obligations in San Francisco. I am his Chief Investigator. What can the Van Dorn Detective Agency do for you?”

“It’s imperative that I locate a person who disappeared.”

Bell picked up his pen. “Tell me about the person.”

William Lathrop Pape stared, silent for so long that Bell wondered if he had not heard. “The person’s name?” he asked.

“Pape! Anna Genevieve Pape,” said Pape, and fell silent again.

“A member of your family?” Bell prompted. “Your wife?”

“Of course not.”

“Then who?”

“My daughter, for pity’s sake. My wife wouldn’t…” His voice trailed off.

Bell asked, “How old is your daughter, Mr. Pape?”

“Eighteen.”

“When did you last see Anna?”

“At breakfast on February twenty-seventh.”

“Did she often go away for long periods of time?”

“Of course not. She lives at home, and will until she marries.”

“Is she engaged?”

“I told you, she’s only just turned eighteen.”

Isaac Bell asked a question that he was reasonably sure he already knew the answer to. “When did you report that the girl was missing?”

“I’m doing that right now.”

“But today is March twenty-fourth, Mr. Pape. Why have you waited so long to raise the alarm?”

“What does it matter?”

“It is the first question the police will ask when they get wind we’re looking.”

“I do not want the police involved.”

The tall detective had a steady, baritone voice. He used it to speak soothingly as if explaining a disappointment to a child. “Police involve themselves when the facts of a case indicate the possibility of foul play.”

“She’s an innocent girl. There’s no question of foul play.”

“Policemen suspect the worst. Why did you wait so long to raise the alarm if Anna’s disappearance was unusual?”

Pape gripped his stick harder. “I suspected that she ran away to New York.”

“What did she want in New York?”

“To become an actress.”

Isaac Bell hid a smile. The situation was immensely clearer.

“May I ask why you have come to the Van Dorn Agency at this juncture?”

“She should have come home with her tail between her legs after a couple of weeks.”

“Are you concerned for her safety?”

“Of course.”

“But you still waited another week after those ‘couple of weeks’?”

“I kept waiting for Anna to come to her senses. Her mother has persuaded me that we cannot wait any longer… Listen here, Bell, she was always a levelheaded child. Since she was a little girl. Eyes wide open. She’s no flibbertigibbet.”

“Then you can comfort your wife with the thought that a girl with Anna’s qualities stands a good chance of a successful career in the theater.”

Pape stiffened. “She would disgrace my family.”

“Disgrace?”

“This sort of behavior attracts the newspapers. Waterbury is not New York, Mr. Bell. It’s not a fast city. My family will never live it down if the papers get wind of a well-born Pape on the stage.”

Bell’s manner cooled. “I will have a Van Dorn detective familiar with the theater districts work up the case. Good afternoon, Mr. Pape.”

“Hold on!”

“What?”

“I demand you personally conduct the search if Van Dorn can’t.”

“The agency parcels out assignments according to their degree of criminality. Mr. Van Dorn and I specialize in murderers, gangsters, bank robbers, and kidnappers.”

At the moment, he was supervising investigations into train robbers derailing express cars in the Midwest, bank robbers crisscrossing state lines in autos, Italian gangs terrorizing the New York docks, a Chicago jewel thief cracking the safes of tycoons’ mistresses, and blackmailers victimizing passengers on ocean liners.

“A temporarily missing young lady is not the line I’m in. Or are you suggesting she was kidnapped?”

Pape blinked. Obviously accustomed to employees obeying his orders and his whims, the industrialist looked suddenly at sixes and sevens. “No, of course not. I checked at the station. She bought a train ticket to New York— Bell, you don’t understand.”

“I do understand, sir. I was not much older than Anna when I went against my own father’s wishes and became a detective rather than follow him into the banking business.”

“Banking? What bank?”

“American States.”

“You made a mistake,” said Pape. “An American States banker faces a lot more lucrative future than a private detective. Take my advice: you’re a young fellow, young enough to change. Get out of this gumshoe business and ask your father to persuade his boss to offer you a job.”

“He is the boss,” said Bell. “It’s his bank.”

“American States. American Stat— Bell? Is your father Ebenezer Bell?”

“I mention him to assure you that I understand that Anna wants something different,” said Bell. “Your daughter and I have disappointed fathers in common— Now, by any chance have you brought a photograph?”

Pape drew an envelope from an inside pocket and gave Bell a Kodak snapped out of doors of children in a summer camp theatrical performance. Anna was a cherubic, expressive, fair-haired girl. Whether she was levelheaded did not show — perhaps a tribute, Bell thought with another hidden smile, to her thespian talent.

“Shakespeare,” said Pape.

Bell nodded, engrossed in memories the picture brought forth. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“How did you know?”

“They made me play Oberon when I grew too tall for Puck— Anna’s a pretty girl. How old was she here?”

Pape muttered something Bell couldn’t understand. “What was that, sir?” He looked up from the photograph.

The Brass King had tears in his eyes. “What if I’m wrong?” he whispered.

“How do you mean?”

“What if something terrible happened to her?”

“Young women come to the city every day,” Bell answered gently. “They eventually find something they want or they go home. But, in either event, the vast, vast majority survive, enriched, even happy. I would not start worrying needlessly. We’ll find your daughter.”

2

Eighteen-year-old Anna Waterbury read Variety aloud to Lucy Balant, her roommate in Mrs. Shine’s Boarding House for Actors. They had pooled nickels to buy the show business magazine and — like a sign from Heaven, thought Anna—Variety headlined the new Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde tour about to cross the country on Barrett & Buchanan’s private train.

“‘Jackson Barrett and John Buchanan — matinee idols who ignite melodrama like dreadnoughts on a rampage — will trade title roles as they did on Broadway. The chief interest centers around the struggle between the good and evil halves of the same man. Isabella Cook portrays the innocent love interest tormented by Hyde. Miss Cook returns to the stage after two years’ retirement, during which she was married and widowed by the late Theatrical Syndicate chief, Rufus S. Oppenheim, who drowned when his yacht exploded.’”

Anna whispered, “Can I tell you a secret?”

Lucy was reading the Wanteds over her shoulder. “Look! ‘Wanted for Permanent Stock. General businesswoman. Must be tall, young, experienced, and have good wardrobe. Join at once. Sobriety, wardrobe, and ability essential. Long season. Money, sure—’ How tall is ‘tall’?”

Anna said, “It’s a secret.”

“What?”

“You have to promise never, ever tell anyone.”

“O.K., I promise.”

“There’s a man who’s going to coach me to read for a role in a big hit.”

“Is he a teacher?”

“No! Much better. He’s a producer. A Broadway producer who knows someone in a big hit.”

Anna’s friend looked skeptical, or possibly envious. “Did he take you to Rector’s?”

“Rector’s? No!”

“Anna! A sport should at least treat a girl to a Beef Wellington. I mean, what does he want for ‘coaching’?— Why are you laughing?”

“Because three weeks ago I wouldn’t have known what ‘a Beef Wellington’ meant.”

Anna Waterbury had learned so much so fast since coming to New York, Beef Wellington was the least of it. “I am,” she said, “the only graduate in the history of St. Margaret’s School for Girls who knows to ask whether a road offer includes train fare.”

Not to mention who supplied costumes. And to dodge theatrical managers who got the artist, coming and going, by appointing themselves her agent. And to never, ever take a job with the circus. Not that anyone had offered her any job in anything, yet.

“Welcome to Broadway,” Lucy fired back. She was jumpy, waiting to hear if she got the understudy part in Alias Jimmy Valentine, a big sensation based on an O. Henry story, which was sending a road company to Philadelphia. They had both tried out for it, but only Lucy had been called back for a second reading.

“No,” said Anna. “He’s not like that. He’s a sweet old thing.”

“How old?”

“I don’t know — old as my father. He limps, on a cane. Besides, he’s married. He wears a ring. He doesn’t hide it. He’s full of wonderful advice.”

“Like what?”

“Give the star the center of the stage and stay out of his way.”

“What’s his name?”

“I can’t tell you his name. He made me promise— Why? Because the cast would resent me if they knew he got me the part.”

“What big hit?”

Anna dropped her voice even lower, and she looked around, though who else could fit in their tiny room? “This!” She waved Variety. “The spring tour for Jekyll and Hyde! I can hardly believe my luck.”

There was a brisk knock at the door, and their landlady flung it open with an unusually warm smile. “Lucy Balant, you have a visitor.”

Bouncing up and down beside Mrs. Shine, cap in hand, was a callboy from Wallack’s Theatre. “Stage manager says to pack your bag!”

Lucy was out the door in minutes. “Good luck, Anna. Don’t worry. It’ll be your turn next.”

Anna went to the narrow window and craned her neck to watch Lucy trotting alongside the callboy. She had a strong feeling that it really would be her turn next. What would she do if the nice old gentleman asked her to dine at Rector’s? She knew in her heart that she did not have to answer that because he wouldn’t. He really did want to help her. Although maybe after she got the part, he might ask her there to celebrate. Fair enough. As long as he brought his wife.

3

Isaac Bell hurried out of the Chinese laundry.

A broad-shouldered hard case in an overcoat and derby blocked the sidewalk.

“Care to tell me why the Chief Investigator of a private detective agency, with field offices in every city worth the name, and foreign outposts in London, Paris, and Berlin, is personally sleuthing for one missing young lady?”

“I wondered when you’d show, Mike. Your plainclothes boys were pretending not to watch me exiting Hammerstein’s stage door.”

“I train them to dislike surprises.”

Captain “Honest Mike” Coligney commanded the New York Police Department’s Tenderloin station house. His precinct included much of the Theater District and the hotel and boardinghouse neighborhoods where actors lived. Bell had worked closely with him years ago on the Gangster case, but operating on the same side of the law at sharply different angles made them competitors as much as allies. The policeman danced an elaborate ballet with the politicians who bossed New York City. The private detective was beholden to none. Coligney had six thousand cops backing him up, Bell had the Van Dorn Agency’s ironclad guarantee: “We never give up! Never!”

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” said Coligney. “Where you been?”

“Out west.”

“What brought you back?”

Bell gave him a copy of Anna’s picture. Now that the captain had the police “involved,” as Pape had put it, he intended to recruit extra eyes.

“Sweet-looking kid,” Coligney said. “A hopeful actress explains why your sidekick Archie Abbott is hanging out in the theatricals’ saloons. The blue-blooded Mr. Archibald Abbott IV having been a thespian before you brought him into the agency.”

Bell remained reticent.

The captain probed drily, “It might even explain why Harry Warren’s Gang Squad is knocking on rooming house doors, though I’m not sure how far detectives disguised as gangsters will get with rooming house landladies. But it still doesn’t explain why you are gumshoeing personally — is the lassie’s father a big wheel?”

“Not a Rockefeller or Judge Congdon, but big enough. Truth is, I had a couple of light days and felt sorry for the poor devil. He’s self-important and self-admiring — the richest man in the Brass City — but Anna is his only child, and it became clear to me that he loves her dearly.”

“Any luck?”

“Not a lot. I found a stage manager who sort of remembers hearing her read for a role. Archie found a callboy who told her ‘no parts.’ Harry found a landlady who thought she’d been looking for a room, three or four weeks ago. That would fit the time she left home, but if the name she gave was hers, she changed it for the stage.”

“So did Lillian Russell.”

“This one’s become ‘Anna Waterbury.’”

“Homesick.”

Bell and Abbott had made the rounds of dance and music schools, and the cheap eateries patronized by young actors starting out and older ones on the way down, and Bell was now finishing up low-cost laundries in the theater neighborhood. They had shown Anna’s photograph to landladies, young actors and actresses, and stage door tenders; a few thought they recognized her. In a tiny dressing room crammed with chorus girls at the Broadway Music Hall, Bell had found one who recognized her picture and recalled the name Anna Waterbury. So he was reasonably sure she was in New York, but still had no clue where.

“Hospitals?” asked Coligney.

“No Papes, no Waterburys.”

“Morgue?”

“Any unidentified young women I should know about?” Bell replied, doubting there were. He was neither especially concerned about young Anna’s safety nor surprised he hadn’t located her yet. New York was a huge city, and there were thousands of jobs for actresses in the vaudeville and dramatic theaters, in musicals and burlesque, and the road shows they spawned.

“None as of an hour ago,” said Coligney. “Good to see you again, Isaac. Congratulations, by the way. I heard you finally persuaded Marion Morgan to marry you.”

“Thank you. If there’s a luckier man on the planet, I haven’t met him.”

“Lord knows what she sees in you.”

“She’s funny that way,” Bell grinned back, and they shook hands good-bye.

“Say hello to Joe Van Dorn.”

“Can I tell him you’ll lend a hand?”

The captain nodded. “I’ll pin up Anna’s picture and have my sergeants mention her at roll call.”

Two days later, running out of options and growing concerned, Isaac Bell mounted the front steps of a brick mansion on a dimly lighted cross street in the Tenderloin. The doorman stood six-four and weighed two-fifty. “Good evening, sir. It seems years since we’ve had the honor.”

“Good evening, Skinner. Would you tell Mr. Sayers I want to see him?”

The doorman whispered into a voice tube.

Nick Sayers, handsome proprietor of the Grove Mansion bordello — known as the “Ritz of the Tenderloin”—kept him waiting ten minutes. He was dressed in evening clothes and reeked of top-shelf cologne.

“Mr. Bell. Dare I ask? Business-business or pleasure-business?”

“Advice, Nick. In your office.”

Sayers led him up the grand staircase and into his richly appointed office. He sat at his desk and offered Bell a chair. Bell took notice of a glass display cabinet filled with remarkably specific pornographic ceramic figurines. Sayers beamed proudly. “I’ve become a collector. Turns out, not every Staffordshire potter produces statues of spaniels — what sort of advice?”

“Who recruits girls at Grand Central Terminal?”

“Not the Grove Mansion.”

“I am aware that you don’t lure them personally, Nick. Who does it for you? Who ambushes pretty country girls when they step off the train? Who promises a cushy life?”

“Mr. Bell, I’ve really never felt the need to recruit. Young ladies come to the Grove Mansion as volunteers.”

“Nick.”

“Why don’t I parade my girls by you? You can see with your own eyes that they could work in any house in New York. They work here because they want to.”

“Nick. The Van Dorn Detective Agency was not founded yesterday. Cheap pimps hunt poor farm daughters who can only afford steamers and trolleys at ferry piers and trolley stops. High class resorts like your ‘Ritz of the Tenderloin’ troll Pennsylvania Station and Grand Central for the class of girls who can purchase a railroad ticket to run away from home. I am looking for one particular well-off girl. I know she came by train. I know she arrived at Grand Central because she journeyed from Connecticut. I want to know who to interview at Grand Central. And I am running out of patience.”

“Patience?” Sayers got indignant. “Isaac! You helped me, a long time ago, and I helped you. I call us even steven.”

“Isaac instead of Mr. Bell? Sounds like you’re paying off ever-bigger friends at Tammany Hall.”

“It would pay you to remember how to get along in this town. How dare you barge into my house, making threats?”

“Threats?”

Isaac Bell stood up, draped a big hand on the glass cabinet, tipped it forward, and slammed it down to the floor, shattering glass and smashing ceramics.

Sayers gasped in disbelief. “Do you know what those cost?”

“That was not a threat,” said Bell. “Who is snagging girls at Grand Central?”

Sayers reached for his voice tube.

Bell said, “If you call Skinner, you’ll need a new doorman. That’s not a threat, either.”

The bordello procurer at Grand Central ran his operation from Nyren’s, a fancy station shop that sold French perfume, kid gloves, and silk scarves. Exquisitely dressed and barbered, he had the kindly, twinkly-eyed manner of an unmarried uncle. “May I help you, sir? Something for a young lady friend, perhaps?”

“I don’t have a young lady friend.”

Nyren delivered an indulgent wink. “Well, until you get one, why not something nice for your wife?”

“What I want,” said Isaac Bell, “is a private conversation in your back room with each of your young gents who waylay girls off the trains and steer them in here.”

The twinkle hardened with an edge like limelight. “I don’t know what you are talking about. If you haven’t come to make a purchase, please leave my shop.”

“But first I want to talk to you, Mr. Nyren. I’m looking for this girl.”

He held out Anna’s picture.

Nyren pretended to study it. “I still don’t know what you are talking about, but I never met this girl.” Then, in an act that made the tall detective believe him, he dropped his mask long enough to leer, “I can assure you I never forget a pretty face.”

“I will watch your shop for you while you round up your young gents. One at a time.”

“I will call a policeman.”

“I will, too,” said Bell, “and it won’t be one of the New York Central rail dicks you paid off. It will be his boss.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“A friend of the young lady’s family. Get them in here — now!”

Three swaggered into the shop, one at a time as Bell ordered. They were young, well dressed, and it was not hard to imagine a frightened girl falling for their polished manners and charming smiles. Bell greeted each politely. “I’m not here to put you out of business. I’m looking for one particular young lady and I would appreciate your help. My appreciation will take the form of a monetary reward.”

“How much?”

“One hundred dollars,” said Bell. The figure, two months’ earnings for a day laborer, captured their attention. “Have you seen this girl?”

Two shook their heads. The third said, “I remember her.”

“When did you see her?”

“Let me think… Month ago. Maybe five weeks.”

The time was right, and Bell asked, “Did you speak?”

“Tried to. She wasn’t buying any.”

“What happened?”

“She just brushed past like I wasn’t there and kept going.”

“Did one of the other boys accost her?”

“No. Only me.”

“How do you know?”

“I followed her out on the street.”

“Did you really? Which way did she go?”

“Across 42nd.”

“West?”

“Yes.”

“How far did you follow her?”

“Fifth Avenue.”

“Why’d you stop?”

“She was walking like she knew where she was going. Or knew what she wanted. So I figured, this is not a girl I could convert.”

Bell remained silent, and the brothel recruiter added, “Want to hear something funny?”

“What’s that?”

“I saw her a few weeks later — last week.”

“Where?”

“Over on Broadway. She was strolling with an old swell. You tell me what she’s about.”

“What did he look like?”

“Old.”

“Stooped over? Bent?”

“No. Tall guy like you.”

“What color was his hair?”

“Gray.”

“Beard?”

“No, just a mustache.”

“What color were his eyes?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t that close. Say, maybe I could go now? Maybe you could give me a piece of that hundred?”

“Maybe I could,” said Isaac Bell. “You called him a swell. What was he wearing?”

“Homburg and a cape. Looked like he walked straight out of the operetta. Even had a gold-headed cane.”

“Frock coat under the cape?”

“No. More like a pinchback.”

“Pinchback?” Bell asked. “A bit up-to-date for an operetta.”

“I thought so, too. Maybe the young lady took him shopping.”

Bell passed him a one-hundred-dollar bill. “Here you go. Take a week off, give some poor girl a break.”

“If I don’t get her, some other guy will.”

Four men followed Isaac Bell from Grand Central and paced him on the other side of 44th Street. Snappy dressers — presentable for the neighborhood, if somewhat flashy in two-tone shoes — they might have been out-of-town buyers just off the train, or junior advertising men, except for their socks. The modern breed of Gopher street gangster favored yellow hose. They were still there when he crossed Fifth Avenue. A traffic cop shot them a look, but he had his hands full sorting carriages from motor trucks.

Bell did not expect them to make their move on the block between Fifth and Sixth. Shared by garages and carriage houses, the Yale, New York Yacht, and Harvard clubs, and the Iroquois and Algonquin hotels, there were too many people. At Sixth Avenue, he crossed quickly under the El and stopped suddenly in the shadows of the overhead train trestle with his back to a stanchion.

4

The Gophers cut across traffic and blocked the sidewalk. Up close, scarred faces and missing teeth left no doubt they meant business. For reasons often debated by the Van Dorn Gang Squad, the shortest Gopher always did the talking.

“Friend of the family?”

Isaac Bell said, “Out of my way, boys.”

The others took up the chorus and edged closer.

“Mr. Do-good?”

“Friend of the family.”

“You’re gonna learn — stay outta people’s businesses.”

The tallest made two mistakes. He forged ahead of the others and he lowered one hand to reach for his blackjack. Bell took advantage with a one-two combination that knocked the gangster to the pavement. Guard up — left hand and forearm protecting his chin and gut, right positioned to slough off a punch or throw his own — he bloodied a nose with a lightning jab and back-stepped as fast as he had waded in.

“Last chance, boys. Out of my way.”

The short guy laughed. He thrust out his hand with a sharp twist and his blackjack slid from his sleeve into his palm. “Last chance? Gonna fight three of us?”

“Not while wearing my best suit.”

Bell flared open his coat, revealing the use-polished grips of the Colt automatic in his shoulder holster. “I will shoot two and fight the last man standing.”

Isaac Bell headed to the Bellevue Hospital morgue late the following afternoon, where he showed Anna’s photograph to a recently appointed assistant coroner.

“I have no Anna Pape. And no Anna Waterbury.”

“Any unknowns?” Bell asked.

The new assistant was working hard to modernize the obsolete institution that had been run for too many years by a commission of elected, often unqualified, and occasionally corrupt coroners. Improvements included making a record of the dead with photographs. He flipped through the file pages, and Bell agreed when he said, “No kids like this one — funny you should ask, though. We might have a younger woman coming in later. Sounded like a murder. One of the bosses went over himself.”

“Where?”

“In the Tenderloin.”

Bell asked for the address, caught the trolley across 34th Street, and strode swiftly down Eighth Avenue to West 29th Street. Captain Mike Coligney was standing outside a run-down building of flats. He was talking to a coroner Bell did not know personally and ignoring shouted questions from newspaper reporters held at bay by uniformed cops. Bell walked past, exchanged a private glance with Coligney, and waited half a block away until the official drove off in a Marmon.

Coligney greeted him gravely. “Sorry, Isaac, she could be your girl.”

“Who found her?”

“The actor who lives here claims he came home from a month in the Midwest. He swears he didn’t know her. We’re holding him while we check, but it looks fairly certain he only left Pittsburgh this morning — the show he was in got canceled. She’s been dead at least a day.”

The reporters’ shouts grew insistent. At an imperious glance from Coligney, his cops herded them farther down the street. He said to Bell, “I have six daughters. I won’t have salacious speculation about a child from a good home. It’s not that she was some unfortunate streetwalker.”

“Did the neighbors hear anything?” Bell asked.

“Not in the flat. Not in the hallway. Not in the lobby. We’re guessing she came under her own steam. In which case, she knew her killer.”

“Unless she was carried in.”

“We’ve got no witnesses to that. No, it looks personal. Vicious. Jealous rage.”

“May I see her?” asked Bell.

Coligney hesitated. Bell said, “A fresh pair of eyes can only help.”

“You’ll write me a report.”

“Of course. Thanks, Mike.”

Coligney raised a cautioning hand. “I don’t have to tell you not to touch anything. But just so you know before you go in there, Isaac. She’s really been carved up.”

5

Isaac Bell stood still and catalogued the location and condition of everything in the room. Personal possessions — Shakespeare plays on a shelf by an easy chair; busts and engravings of the actors Booth, Mansfield, Irving, and Jefferson; photographs of leading ladies, signed and framed; and a glass box stacked with programs — confirmed the actor’s alibi as much as the punched train ticket he had shown Captain Coligney’s detectives. It was more a home than a rented room, and it had been left neat as a pin, drapes drawn, bed made, wardrobe closed. Dust thinly layered tabletops, and a spiderweb linked the busts, but a landlady or a neighbor must have watered the house plant, a healthy geranium, during the month he was away. The windows were shut tight, and Bell guessed the air would smell musty if it weren’t for the blood scent that lingered. He made a mental note that the killer had known the place was empty. The actor was lucky his show hadn’t closed a day earlier or he’d be dead, too.

She was on the bed, on her back, still half in her overcoat. Her hands were positioned at her sides, open, one in a glove, the other bare. Her palms bore no cuts. She had not fended off the knife. Her face, too, was unmarked, neither cut nor bruised. But it was swollen, and her skin was tinged blue. With her cheeks rounded in death, she looked remarkably similar to the cherubic photograph taken when she was fifteen.

A circle of horizontal bruises around her neck paralleled the deep slice in her throat that had nearly cleaved her head from her torso. The absence of cuts on her hands, her blue-tinged skin, and the bruises gave Bell hope that the killer had strangled her before he went to work with his knife.

The tall detective moved at last and stepped deeper into the room.

Pools of blood had soaked her coat and the bedspread, but none had fountained onto the headboard and the walls, which Bell took as further evidence that her heart had stopped beating before arteries were severed. He counted ten crescent-shaped slices on her arms and legs; they varied in length, but were all shallow and had bled very little. Puzzled and curious, he copied them in his notebook.

He inspected her fingernails. Two were broken, but he was surprised to see neither the blood nor torn skin he would expect from her scratching her killer’s wrists as she fought to live. For fought she must have, if only at the last moment. One of her boot heels was partly torn from the sole as she kicked against the floor or the bedpost.

Bell was inclined to concur with the cops that she had come to the flat voluntarily, but less inclined to assume it was for a tryst. Even discounting for a doting father’s blindness, he thought that Anna’s age, her sheltered upbringing, and a passion to succeed in the theater all suggested an innocent girl unlikely to strike up a liaison so soon after leaving home.

The cops had put great weight on the viciousness of the assault, characterizing it as the rage of jealousy. Or the anger of rejection, thought Bell. He was thinking she could have been lured to the apartment under a pretext that had nothing to do with a tryst. But he was painfully aware that when it fell to him to report to her father his daughter’s fate, he wanted to soften the blow, no matter how slightly.

If only, he thought, I had found her in time.

“Stop right there,” said Captain Coligney when he saw the expression on Isaac Bell’s face. He raised a big hand that would have halted a freight wagon. Bell pounded down the front steps and brushed past him, heading for Broadway and Times Square.

“Leave him to us,” Coligney shouted. “We’ll get him.”

“Not if I get him first.”

Fifteen minutes after he left the house where Anna was murdered he was looming over the desk of the New York Times drama critic. “Mr. Klauber, I am Isaac Bell. Our mutual friend, Walter Hawley, introduced us at the Amen Corner shortly before he died.” Walter L. Hawley had been chief political reporter of the Evening Sun.

“Bell? Certainly,” Adolph Klauber drawled in a Louisville, Kentucky, accent. “In the insurance line, if I recall. What’s up, Mr. Bell? You look mighty upset.”

Bell said, “Within minutes, actors are going to telephone you to tell you that a young actress named Anna Waterbury lived in their boardinghouse. I want the address.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Miss Waterbury was just murdered.”

A blurted, unbidden “What?” died half voiced.

Fury had contorted the handsome features of the tall, powerful man looming over his desk. Klauber flinched and swallowed hard, in sudden fear for his own life. Then a transformation as startling as the critic had ever witnessed on any stage changed Isaac Bell’s face again. Rage hardened to deliberate, measured, everlasting resolve. He spoke in a voice as cold as an Arctic sea.

“The vicious cutthroat who killed the poor girl slaughtered her so gruesomely that the newspapers will be printing extras. I am betting that some actor who knew where she lived will telephone you. Her neighbors will help me identify the cutthroat.”

“Why would they telephone me?”

“Because before you became a critic, you were an actor, Mr. Klauber. Who would you have telephoned when you were struggling for a place in the theater? The police? Or a famous drama critic who used to be an actor and is therefore sympathetic to the backstage standpoint.”

“I hope — no, I trust — I would not have been so crassly ambitious.”

“You forget the indignities suffered, the disappointments, and the poverty. From what I’ve seen the past few days, the theater is a hard life, and it’s easy to get lost.”

“Well,” Klauber conceded, “everyone’s got to make a living somehow.”

His telephone rang.

Isaac Bell bounded up the front steps of Anna Waterbury’s boardinghouse — two time-battered, nineteenth-century town houses merged into one, mid-block, on a cross street off Broadway. He knew he would be lucky to have five minutes before cops and reporters besieged it. The front door was flung open before he could knock. A pair of vaudeville dancers, the woman in swirls of silk, the man in white tie, looked crestfallen.

“You’re not Mr. Klauber.”

“Mr. Klauber sent me,” Bell lied. “We need your help. What are your names?”

“Heather and Lou,” said the woman, who was an extraordinarily beautiful brunette with long dark hair.

“Heather and Lou, how well did you know Anna?”

“Only from the supper table,” said Heather.

“Do you recall the last time you saw her?”

“Yesterday. She never came home last night.”

“Did she leave with anyone?”

“She left alone.”

Bustling up behind the dancers came their landlady, Mrs. Shine, a round woman with suspicious eyes and a work-worn face. She looked appalled when Bell asked whether she had known Anna, and she protested that she ran an orderly house and she could not be held responsible for what her boarders did away from the house.

“Did she have a boyfriend?”

The landlady crossed her arms. “Not on this premises.”

“Would any of your other boarders know whether she had a boyfriend?”

“Only Lucy Balant. They shared a room.”

“May I speak with Lucy?”

“If you take yourself to Philadelphia,” said the landlady, and one of the hovering dancers explained, “Lucy is an understudy in Jimmy Valentine—”

“Oh my Lord,” groaned the landlady. “Look at them!”

From one direction pounded a phalanx of police, from the other a mob of reporters. Uniformed cops were trailing plainclothesmen. The reporters were shouting questions.

Isaac Bell hurried uptown to the Knickerbocker. He wired instructions to the Philadelphia field office and several other offices around the continent, issued orders to every detective in the bull pen, then raced across town to Grand Central Terminal, where he caught a train to Waterbury, Connecticut.

He was in the Brass City in less than two and a half hours, but the newspapers had beat him to it. No one answered the telephone when he called from the Waterbury Station, and when he got to the Pape home, a three-story brick mansion flanked by stone turrets, he found reporters milling outside the spiked fence.

A thug in a black coat and fedora guarded the gate, and two flanked the front door — Pape Brass company cops, Bell assumed. He palmed his Van Dorn badge to shield the flash of gold from the reporters. “Mr. Pape is a client. If he wants to see me, tell him let me in the back door.”

He received the polite “Wait here, please” that he expected. Private cops treated Van Dorns with kid gloves, hoping to be remembered next time the agency’s Protective Services branch was hiring. The guard hurried back. “Walk around the corner. One of the boys will take you through the side gate.”

Bell was ushered down a service alley and in the servants’ entrance. A liveried butler led him through the house and across an immense drawing room dominated by a pipe organ. He knocked on the door to a library that doubled as Pape’s home office and left Bell face-to-face with the grieving father.

“I can only say how sorry I am, sir. I promise you that we will never give up until we bring her killer to justice.”

“She’d be alive if you had found her.”

6

Isaac Bell bought the New York papers from a Bridgeport newsboy who ran onto the train when it paused in the station. All hewed the same line — guided, Bell was certain, by Captain Coligney — that an innocent young woman of a good family had been lured or forced to the room where she was murdered. None raised the possibility that Anna might have known her murderer.

Deprived of the salacious, the papers fell back on a tried and true comparison to the ultimate evil. Back in 1888, nearly twenty-five years ago, a string of murders in London were a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. To Bell’s day, in 1911, reporters routinely likened them to any unsolved knife attack against a woman.

“The cops reckon a boyfriend,” Bell told a hastily organized squad of his best available detectives. He had wired others who were out of town to report to New York, but he would manage with these for a start.

“A boyfriend is my instinct, too. Or at least someone she knew and trusted. There’s no evidence, so far, that she didn’t go to the flat voluntarily. And the way he cut her up strongly suggests jealous rage. That said, we have no one who witnessed her arrival at the flat, no one who saw her being carried, dragged, or marched into the building. Would they have? Probably, but no guarantee, particularly late at night.”

“Any sign of knockout drops?” asked redheaded Archie Abbott.

“The assistant coroner conducted the autopsy, which means it was scientifically sound. Chloral hydrate is swiftly metabolized, but he found no alcohol in the contents of her stomach, either.”

The detectives nodded their understanding. The taste and odor of chloral hydrate were masked by alcohol, so it was a reasonable bet the killer had not slipped the victim knockout drops in a drink.

“Chloroform?” asked Harry Warren. The grizzled Gang Squad chief was one of Bell’s closest confidants.

“The assistant coroner told me that the odor would have dissipated by the time her body was discovered. I certainly didn’t smell it. But the autopsy revealed something unusual. Her neck was broken. Which takes a mighty strong hand. Anna was petite, but it does suggest we are looking for a big bruiser who doesn’t know his own strength. Nonetheless, the main point is this, gents: it is imperative that we establish whether she went there voluntarily, vital that we confirm whether she was acquainted with her killer or was attacked by a stranger. If it was personal, we will discover his name. If it wasn’t personal, then a vicious cutthroat is prowling the city and may kill again. Either way, I want him in the electric chair.”

“Why would she go with the man if he wasn’t a boyfriend?” asked a young detective still on probation.

“Hope,” answered Bell.

“Hope for what? That he’ll become a boyfriend?”

That drew some smiles, which faded when Isaac Bell said in an icy voice, “Anna wanted to be an actress. She hoped for a role in a play.”

Lucy Balant walked home to her shabby hotel, exhausted. She had never been so tired in her life. She hadn’t spoken a word of Alias Jimmy Valentine yet, hadn’t set a foot onstage except to rehearse lines with the stage manager for the roles she stood by for. But that didn’t mean she didn’t work. They paid her, fed her, and housed her, and in return the company required her to do any job needed. Skilled with a needle, she assisted the wardrobe mistress. Long days started very early in the morning, repairing costumes and washing them in the theater’s old-fashioned laundry, cranking them through the wringer, then racing up six flights of stairs to the roof to pin them on clotheslines, and ironing them when half dry.

She plodded up the stairs and into her room, shut the door, and leaned against it for a moment of peace and quiet in the dark. This was their last night in Philadelphia, then on to Boston, where maybe one of the regular actresses would get sick, or quit, or fall off the stage and break her neck.

“Lucy?”

She jumped, her heart leaping into her throat. A tall figure was in her room, standing in the shadow between the bed and the wardrobe.

“Don’t be afraid.” A woman’s voice, thankfully.

A raven-haired woman in her twenties stepped into the light spilling through the window. “I have to talk to you.”

“How did you get in here?”

“I let myself in.”

Lucy’s heart was still pounding. “I locked the door when I left.”

“I picked the lock. Lucy, my name is Helen—”

“Picked the lock? You forced your way into my room. What are you talking — why are you here?”

“I must talk to you. My name is Helen Mills. I am a Van Dorn detective. There is no reason to be afraid.”

“I am afraid. What are you doing in my room?”

Mills had recently been promoted to full detective — the first woman for the Van Dorn Agency — after graduating college. Quick to see opportunity and quicker to act, it only occurred to her belatedly to put herself in Lucy’s shoes. How would she or any woman alone feel if the door to her hotel room turned out not to be the protection she thought it was?

“I am sorry. This case is so important, I forgot my manners.”

“If you ever had any to start with— Case? What case? Why didn’t you just wait in the lobby? Or you could have found me at the theater.”

“I am sorry,” Helen apologized again. “But I wanted your full attention.”

“You have it. So what do you want?”

Helen Mills said, “I have terrible news and I need your help. Your roommate Anna is dead.”

“What? No! She was fine when I left New York.”

“Anna was murdered.”

Lucy staggered back a step and struck the bed, which nearly buckled her knees. “No, she…”

“I have to ask you some questions. Your answers could help us find the man who murdered her. I’m sure you’re upset.”

“How would you feel?”

“I would be very upset…”

“What do you mean murdered? What happened? Who’s the man?”

“We don’t know, yet. If you can manage to answer my questions, you can help us find him.”

“But why? That doesn’t make sense. She’s a really nice girl. She wouldn’t hurt anyone.” Still in her coat and shaking her head, Lucy sat on the bed. “She read for my part. If she’d gotten it instead of me, she wouldn’t have been killed.”

“Did she have a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Would she have told you if she did?”

Lucy said, “I would have known it. All she cared about was getting a role. That’s all she wanted. That’s why she left home, and it didn’t sound to me like her home was bad. I think she had a wonderful home.”

“Did she have a man who was hoping to be her boyfriend?”

“No one I saw.”

“Was there any man she might have gone with to an apartment?”

“I doubt that,” said Lucy. “She was Miss Innocent. I’d be amazed if she ever kissed a boy.”

Helen said, “But for some reason she went to an apartment with a man.”

“Alone?”

“Apparently.”

“Well, that’s a surprise, I must say. A huge surprise— Oh…”

“What?”

“No, it couldn’t be. He was too old.”

“Who was too old?” asked Helen.

“Some old man, a Broadway producer, was coaching her to read for a role.”

“Can you describe him?”

“No, I never saw him. She just told me about him.”

“How old?”

“She just said ‘old.’ He limped. I think he used a cane. And he was married. Or, at least he wore a wedding ring. She really thought he was going to help her get a role.”

“Did she read for the role?”

“I don’t know. She said he knew someone important in the show. She was sure she would get the job.”

“Did she say in what play?”

“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The spring tour. Barrett & Buchanan are taking it on the road.”

Isaac Bell was expecting her to wire a report. Instead, Helen Mills went straight to the Broad Street Station and took the train to New York City. Racing uptown from Pennsylvania Station, she stopped at the Almeida Theatre, where Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde had been playing before it went on tour, then hurried to the Van Dorn field office at the Knickerbocker.

Bell was issuing orders in the bull pen and detectives were rushing out. Ordinarily, they would welcome her with big greetings, but tonight all she got were grim nods. Bell sent Harry Warren on his way and conferred quietly with Archie Abbott, who had been his best friend since they boxed in college. An actor before his socially prominent mother demanded he quit the stage, Archie knew the ins and outs of show business.

Finally, Bell beckoned her to join them.

Helen Mills had apprenticed under Isaac Bell and become his protégée. Mr. Van Dorn had ordered her on the Philadelphia posting to broaden her experience. She hadn’t seen Bell in months, and the first thing she noticed was a face so joyless, it looked hacked from granite. She exchanged a quick glance with Archie, who confirmed with a nod that Bell was deeply shaken by Anna Waterbury’s murder. She went straight to business.

“I found Lucy Balant.”

“A wire would have saved time.”

“Wires can be confusing. I thought this was too serious a case not to report in person.”

Isaac Bell raised an eyebrow and gave her a knowing look. Helen Mills possessed a strong drive to be in the heart of the action. Not a bad quality in a detective. At least when tempered with common sense. “Go on,” he said. “Report.”

She told Bell what she had learned and concluded, “It seems to me that it’s a question of how old that producer was. Too old to be strong enough to kill?”

“Young people,” said Bell, “see everyone as old. The middle-aged recognize middle age. And the old see everyone as young. Anna was only eighteen.”

“Young enough,” said Archie Abbott, “to believe a man who claims he can pull wires to get her a role.”

Bell said, “For all we know, he’s only thirty-five and limps because he got shot in the Spanish — American War or hit by a trolley.”

Archie said, “He picked the right show to lure the poor girl. Jekyll and Hyde is a sensation, packed with modern scenic effects. Barrett & Buchanan are going to clean up with that tour.”

“I saw it with my father,” said Helen. “Women were fainting in the aisles.”

“Who played Hyde? Barrett or Bu—”

Bell cut them off. “Helen! Before you go back to Philadelphia, go to the Almeida and ask did Anna Waterbury read for a part in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

“I stopped on my way here,” said Helen. “They’re rehearsing a new play. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has already left for Boston— Do you want me to go to Boston?”

“No, I’ll wire the office.” Bell signaled an apprentice who rushed to his desk. Bell handed him a copy of Anna’s picture. “Run this over to Grand Central. Put it on the night mail to Boston. On the jump!” To Helen he said, “The Boston boys will have it in the morning — what’s the matter?”

Helen Mills said, “Talking to Lucy made me realize something. If the murderer wasn’t Anna’s boyfriend or didn’t even know her, what happens to the next girl he catches alone?”

7

“Would you tell me your name, miss?”

Most girls in the business made up a name. But Lillian Lent had decided that if she was giving away everything else for two dollars, why stop at her name, if acting friendly with a decent sport could lead to a buck or two tip. This sport, decked out in an old-fashioned cape and limping on a cane — and doffing his topper, no less — had nice manners. He even looked her straight in the face as if he remembered he was talking to a human being. He might disappoint her, but she bet he’d be charitable, so she raised her head — he towered over her — to look him back in his eyes, and answered with the biggest smile she could smile without showing her rotten teeth, “I am Lillian.”

“What a lovely name. It suits you.”

“Thank you kindly, sir.”

“What is your family name?”

“Lent — like the holiday — but I’m not religious.”

“Lillian Lent. Alliterative. Very pretty. It suits you. When did you come to Boston, Lillian Lent?”

“How do you know I’m not from Boston?”

“Your accent sounds like Maine.”

“Oh. I guess it does. I’ve been here a couple a three months. Maybe four.”

“Did you grow up on a farm?”

“Potatoes. Now you know why I came to Boston.”

“Shall we go for a walk, Lillian?”

She had read him wrong. She had assumed by his manners and his costly boots that he would spend money for a room. But at least out of doors, on a chilly spring night, went quick. No doubt about that. She let him steer her into the dark of the Common, saying, “A walk it is,” and still hopeful about a tip.

When Chief Investigator Bell’s orders clattered in on the private telegraph, detectives in the Van Dorn field office atop Boston’s South Station drew straws. Who would hold down the fort? Who would conduct interviews in a theater full of actresses and showgirls? They used matches for straws.

James Dashwood had learned magic tricks and marksmanship from his mother, who had been a sharpshooter in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. He palmed a long match before they drew.

The street and sidewalks were blocked by railroad express wagons lining up to enter an alley between two theaters. Stagehands and teamsters were loading in for the marquee that promised

Dodging horses, sidestepping manure, Dashwood passed under the next marquee, which proclaimed

He breezed past a sign on the ticket window that read

and into the lobby, where he learned from an advance man, buttering up the Globe drama critic, that there weren’t any showgirls. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde wasn’t a musical. But a bright-eyed kid arranging the opera glasses concession assured him they had plenty of actresses.

“I’m trying to run down a girl who read for a role in New York. Who should I ask?”

“Stage manager. Mr. Young.”

“Where’s he?”

“Running rehearsal.”

“Why are they rehearsing? I thought they already played in New York.”

“We’re squashing Broadway sets to fit a Boston stage. If they don’t rehearse, the actors will crash through flats and fall into the orchestra pit.”

“What orchestra pit? It’s not a musical.”

The kid looked at Dashwood like he’d just got off the boat. “We still need music. Incidental music. How we gonna introduce scenes and fire up drama?”

The young detective slipped inside the empty house and waited while his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting. Rows and rows of seats were empty, except for two large codgers in silk top hats, and a lanky fellow with a tangle of long hair and a scraggly beard.

Dashwood eased quietly down the rows and sat when he was close enough to distinguish faces on the stage.

Beautiful actresses were rehearsing getting strangled.

“Say, kid?” he whispered to the opera glasses boy, who was hustling down the aisle with an armload of programs. “How come both guys are strangling them?”

“Mr. Barrett and Mr. Buchanan exchange the roles of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. They have to rehearse both as villain and hero.”

Jackson Barrett and John Buchanan actually looked quite similar — so alike, they could pass for brothers. They were big, vigorous men in their early forties and Arrow Collar model handsome, except when one did the strangling. Then, while the stage lights grew faint, his whole stance changed. Hunched low, expression transformed, Mr. Hyde appeared smaller yet, in some mysterious way, even stronger, and left no doubt he would make short work of the girls.

“Who are the rich guys?”

“Angels.”

“What?”

“Our investors — Mr. Deaver and Mr. Deaver — the moneybags.”

“And who’s the scraggly fellow over there?”

The boy looked where Dashwood had nodded. His cheery expression darkened. “The troublemaker.”

Dashwood looked more closely. “The troublemaker” was younger, early forties, than his appearance suggested. “What’s he doing here?”

“Snuck in like you.”

A woman screamed.

The cry of abject terror whipped Dashwood’s head around. She wasn’t on the stage but somewhere in the dimly lit rows of empty seats. The detective was up in a flash, running to help, a hand plunging for the pistol under his coat. She screamed again. Now he saw her across the empty rows. She stumbled, wracked with convulsions, clutched her breast, and collapsed into the aisle.

“Miss Gold!” thundered a strong voice from the stage.

Mr. Hyde had straightened up to John Buchanan’s full height.

The fainting victim scrambled to her feet. “Yes, Mr. Buchanan?”

“One piercing shriek will suffice, Miss Gold.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Buchanan. I thought the moment required—”

Jackson Barrett strode forward and cut her off in tones as thundery as his partner. “Young lady, we plant you in the audience to ‘faint from terror,’ to encourage the rumors that our grisly Mr. Hyde will so overly stimulate Boston ladies that they swoon. The ‘moment requires’ that you convince potential ticket buyers—not overly distract the audience that’s already purchased tickets to see me and Mr. Buchanan and Miss Cook onstage.”

“Yes, Mr. Barrett.”

“Get back on the floor.”

“Stretcher bearers,” roared Buchanan. “Enter and exit swiftly.”

Actors, clad in white like hospital orderlies and a nurse, raced down the aisle. They rolled Miss Gold onto their stretcher and hauled her away, with the nurse trotting alongside taking her pulse.

The rehearsal resumed.

An incredibly beautiful actress entered, and Dashwood recognized the famous Isabella Cook, whose picture was on every magazine stand. She seemed to glow in the light. Buchanan burst from the shadows, hunched as Mr. Hyde, and growled at her. Before she could recoil, the shabby man with the long hair jumped from his seat, shouting,

“Those are my words! I wrote that.”

Barrett and Buchanan advanced to the edge of the stage, shoulder to shoulder, and peered into the lights. “Who’s that out front?”

“I wrote that. You stole my words.”

“Good Lord,” shouted Barrett. “It’s Cox — again. Out, damned liar!”

Buchanan ordered, “Remove that fool from this theater.”

“I wrote that. Those are my words.”

“Mr. Rick L. Cox, you are a lunatic, get OUT of our theater!”

Ushers stormed down the aisle and dragged Rick L. Cox out the doors.

“Mr. Young!” demanded Buchanan. “How did he get in here?”

Young, whom Dashwood had already determined was the stage manager, ran to them, wringing his hands. “I am terribly sorry, Mr. Barrett, Mr. Buchanan. It won’t happen again.”

“Bloody well better not.”

“Crazed lunatic.”

The stage manager turned to the gaping cast and stagehands. “Ladies and gentlemen, may we resume, as we are raising the curtain in six hours?”

Rehearsal continued.

Dashwood established from a purloined program that the stage manager’s full name was Henry Booker Young. Almost as tall as Barrett and Buchanan, and nearly as handsome, the rail-thin Young was bounding around in shirtsleeves and vest, listening to the stars, and hurrying down to the orchestra pit to confer with the conductor. When he came out into the house to check the lighting, Dashwood trailed him back up the steps and through a door beside the stage.

Backstage was busier than a farm at harvest.

In a single glance about the high, narrow space, James Dashwood saw crowds of actors and stagehands, enough rope to raise sails on a square-rigger, and a gang of cussing carpenters attempting to assemble half a New York City subway car. Overhead in the towering flies floated a full-size biplane — another “sensational scenic effect,” Dashwood surmised. Riggers were struggling with ropes, trying to keep it from swaying, and Dashwood had a sudden insight that illusion in the theater was forged with heavy objects.

He made himself invisible in the folds of a curtain and waited for a lull in the activity storming around the stage manager. At last, Henry Young announced, “Lunch, ladies and gentlemen. Back in half an hour.”

Actresses, actors, and stagehands stampeded into the wings, and James Dashwood found himself alone with Henry Young. He followed him onto the stage and froze, transfixed by the auditorium. It looked as if each of the thousand seats was an eye staring at him.

He edged sideways into the far wing and bumped into a table arrayed with knives, clubs, swords, and blackjacks. It looked like the aftermath of a police raid on a street gang. But when he picked up a gleaming dagger, he discovered it was made of rubber painted silver.

“Put that down!” shouted the stage manager, running full tilt from the opposite wing.

“Sorry, I—”

Young snatched the rubber dagger from his hand and placed it reverently where it had been. “This is a property table, young man. The props are laid out in the order the actors will pick them up. Never, ever, ever molest a property table. Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Dashwood straightened his shoulders and stood taller. “I am Detective James Dashwood, Van Dorn Agency. May I ask you a question?”

“About what?”

“Do you recall a young actress named Anna Waterbury reading for a role before you left New York?”

“No.”

Dashwood showed him Anna’s picture. “Do you recall seeing her?”

“No.”

“Is it possible someone else heard her read for a role?”

“No one reads unless I conduct the reading.”

“So you are quite sure you didn’t see this actress?”

“I am positive. All character bits for actresses and actors were filled long before we left New York.”

“There was no reading in New York?”

“None! Excuse me, young man, I have an opening night in five and a half hours.”

“Thank you, sir. I appreciate the time you gave me.” Dashwood extended his hand, and when he had the stage manager’s clamped firmly in his, he said, “You know, sir. You look so familiar.”

Henry Young preened, and admitted, “I trod the boards years ago. Perhaps you saw me in a play.”

Insulting a subject was no way to get him to talk freely, so James Dashwood did not confess that he spent his small amounts of free time and money at the movies.

“I’m afraid I haven’t been to a play since high school.”

“I toured high schools— Now, young man, as I said, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opens in Boston tonight — provided a hundred disasters are set straight in the next five hours. Good-bye.”

Dashwood wired New York.

Then the detective burrowed into the file drawers that contained the Boston field office’s collection of wanted posters. Apprenticing for Isaac Bell, James Dashwood had learned the power that came from memorizing criminals’ faces. He was sure he recognized the Jekyll and Hyde stage manager, and he wondered whether he had seen Henry Booker Young pictured with a price on his head.

8

An old woman walking a dog found Lillian Lent’s body the second morning after she died.

The Cutthroat, who had murdered her, slipped among the morbid, who were watching the police detectives, cops, and reporters, and edged close. They had kicked aside his cape, with which he had so lovingly covered her, and had thrown over her instead a soup-stained tablecloth. That said all that had to be said about so-called human decency.

He moved away and edged toward the bench on which her life had become his before he suddenly had to drag her corpse deep into the bushes. A trysting couple had interrupted him before he could continue with his blade. This morning he had been unable to resist the impulse to attempt to recover the moment by inhaling the atmosphere.

The wind stirred the leaves under the bench. Suddenly he saw the white blur of a handkerchief. He patted his pocket, but even twenty paces away he knew it was his by the gleam of pure silk. White as snow, except for the red splash of his embroidered initials.

He searched his coat, found a half-empty packet of cigarettes, rubbed the wrapper against the inside of his pocket, then strode to the bench and knelt to retrieve his handkerchief.

“What have you got there?”

A sharp-eyed cop had followed him.

“What is that you’re holding?”

“I noticed something that could have been dropped by the man who killed the poor girl,” the Cutthroat answered.

“Hand that over!”

“I presume officers of the Boston Police Department read Mark Twain.”

“What?”

“Pudd’nhead Wilson? Twain’s plot turns on the science of fingerprint identification.”

He rose with the cigarette packet clasped in his handkerchief and held it before the cop. “Don’t touch it! Here, give me your helmet. I’ll drop this inside, and your detectives can retrieve it at the station house without smudging the fingerprints.”

The cop whipped off his helmet and turned it over like a bowl. The Cutthroat dropped the cigarettes inside.

“Thank you, sir.”

“The least a citizen can do,” said the Cutthroat. “Remember, don’t touch it. Leave that to the experts.”

He pocketed his handkerchief and sauntered off.

James Dashwood got a long-distance telephone call from Isaac Bell.

“Lillian Lent, the girl killed in the Common, was she cut up?”

Dashwood wondered how the Chief Investigator had caught wind of the murder of a lowly prostitute two hundred miles from New York, but he was not surprised. “No. Just strangled.”

“Do you know that for sure, James?”

“I saw her at the morgue with my own eyes, Mr. Bell. Only strangled.”

“No mutilation?”

“No blood.”

Dashwood listened to the telephone wires hiss. He waited, silent, knowing that the Chief Investigator did not clutter thinking time with small talk.

“How did you happen to be at the morgue?”

“You had your Anna Waterbury killed in New York, Mr. Bell. I figured it was worth checking for a connection. I spoke with the coroner. He confirmed there wasn’t a mark on Lillian except for the bruises on her throat.”

Again, a long silence. Finally, Bell asked, “Did you check her fingernails?”

“That’s the one strange thing. She didn’t scratch him.”

“Any broken nails?”

“Several, but none that looked freshly broken.”

“No skin under them, no blood?”

“No.”

“Might she have been wearing gloves?”

Dashwood said, “She was not a girl who could afford gloves. Besides, she died quick. It looks like her neck was broken.”

“Broken?” asked Bell. “By a blow?”

“No. The coroner said it happened while she was strangled.”

“A strong man.”

“Probably. But she was a tiny little thing. Wisp of a girl.”

“But otherwise not a mark on her?”

“No cuts.”

“Thank you, James. It was a long shot. Send me your full report. Immediately.”

Isaac Bell hooked the earpiece, jumped to his feet, and paced the detectives’ bull pen. Fact was, he could pace from 42nd Street to the Battery and back, but none of his leads, if they could be called leads, had gone anywhere. As time passed, it looked increasingly unlikely that his detectives would turn up a witness who saw Anna with whoever got her inside the flat where she died. Equally unlikely was the prospect of finding a witness — other than the procurer he had already interviewed at Grand Central — who saw her with any man anywhere during her weeks in New York.

He told the Van Dorn operator to place a long-distance call to the Philadelphia field office.

“Helen, I want you to go to Waterbury, Connecticut. Get Anna’s mother to talk to you. Find out if the girl kept a diary. If she did, read it.”

“To find if she had a boyfriend, who might have followed her to New York?”

“Exactly.”

“I thought you were sure she didn’t.”

“I’m not sure of anything anymore, including whether the murder was personal. So we’re back to the question we ask about every crime: Who had motive?”

“Who had a motive?” asked Joseph Van Dorn.

“A boyfriend, or a disappointed suitor, or a lunatic,” said Bell.

“In other words,” growled the Boss, “you’ve learned nothing about him.”

The powerfully built, red-whiskered founder of the Van Dorn Detective Agency was a hard-nosed, middle-aged Irishman who had immigrated to America, alone, at age fourteen. Prosperous now by his own hand, “the Boss” had been born with little more than the charm and natural good cheer to cloak his fierce ambition and a deep hatred of criminals who abused the innocent. His manner, that of a friendly businessman, had surprised many a convict who found himself manacled facedown on the floor, having allowed the big, smiling gent to get close.

Isaac Bell had apprenticed under Joseph Van Dorn. The Boss had introduced the banker’s son to the lives lived by people he dubbed “the other ninety-seven percent of humanity” and had trained a champion college boxer in the “art of manly defense” bred to win street fights with fists, guns, and knives. To say that Isaac Bell would march into Hades with Van Dorn on short notice would be to underestimate his gratitude.

“Your report states that Mike Coligney’s plainclothes boys found her body.”

“The actor whose home was the apartment where the girl was murdered used his landlady’s telephone to call the police.”

“As well he should, for a police matter,” Van Dorn said sharply with a sharper glance at his Chief Investigator.

Bell said, “He called the police because he had no way of knowing that Anna Waterbury’s father hired the Van Dorn Detective Agency to find his daughter.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that the client believed in us and trusted us. The Van Dorn Detective Agency is morally bound to find her killer.”

Joseph Van Dorn shook his head. “The police have the men — patrol officers and detectives and their informants.”

“We are more qualified to find the guilty man and build a case that sticks.”

“It is a police matter,” said the Boss. “Leave it to the police. They know the neighborhood.”

“I’ve already sent Helen Mills to Waterbury to persuade Anna’s mother to let her read the girl’s diary.”

“What for?”

“In case,” said Isaac Bell, “the murderer didn’t live in the neighborhood.”

9

When the Springfield, Massachusetts, Christ Church choir practiced for Easter service, every singer cocked her ear to hear Mary Beth Winthrop set the standard for the first sopranos.

Tenors and basses responded,

Mary Beth Winthrop raised her eyes to the stained-glass rose window and prayed:

Faster. Put on some steam.

Glaciers rumbled at a quicker tempo than choirmaster Fluecher conducting the boys through endless “Who is the King of Glory”s.

Faster, please.

Mr. Fluecher heard a note he didn’t like and stopped them dead. Rapping his knuckles on his music, he compared the tenors’ pitch to a derailing freight train.

A fire. A small fire in a wastepaper basket.

The smoke would drive them out of the church and in the confusion no one would notice her gallop to the Shubert Theatre. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which had come to Springfield for a week, straight from Boston and New York, was leaving today for Albany. But not before Barrett & Buchanan replaced the soprano who sang “Amazing Grace,” a cappella, in the funeral scene. A piece of a biplane had fallen on the poor girl and a wonderful opportunity had blossomed only five blocks from Christ Church at the Shubert.

Right now, at this very moment, they were hearing singers try out for the role while Mary Beth — who sang in perfect pitch always, “and even would in a locomotive factory,” Mr. Fluecher claimed when he held her up as an example to the others — was stuck in choir practice. Not only could she outsing each and every one of them, she could also act circles around any girl in Springfield.

Maybe her yellow hair was not as long and thick as she would like, which wasn’t to say it was stringy. And she knew she wasn’t as pretty as the girls who couldn’t sing on pitch. Not with her round moon face. Except, when she looked closely at pictures on sheet music and magazines, the stars’ faces were as round as dinner plates — a shape that caught attention and projected their voices. So it didn’t matter not being as pretty. She would get the part. If she weren’t stuck in choir practice.

At last, it was over, and she ran all the way to the theater.

The sight of pieces of a New York City subway car rolling from the stage door alley on a freight wagon told her she was too late. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was leaving town. Company members were walking to the railroad station, the stagehands were striking the sets, and the Shubert’s manager was directing assistants on ladders who were changing the marquee:

Mary Beth Winthrop wandered away, numb with grief, until she sank to a park bench and wept. She had missed the reading. Some other girl got the role.

“Are you quite all right, miss?”

She looked up. An older gentleman with a kind face was leaning over her, balanced on a cane. “What’s the matter?” he asked, and when her tears flowed harder, he sat beside her and offered a snowy handkerchief with his initials embroidered in red. “Here, miss. Dry your eyes.”

She did as he said, and sniffled, “Thank you, sir.”

“Can you tell me what’s the matter?” he asked again, and Mary Beth Winthrop found herself suddenly pouring out every hope and dream in her heart to a complete stranger. He listened intently, nodding, never interrupted. When she was done, he asked, “Would you tell me your name?”

“Mary Beth.”

“What a pretty name. It suits you. Don’t worry, Mary Beth. You’ll get another chance.”

“In Springfield? Never. Nothing like this ever comes to Springfield. Jekyll and Hyde was my only way out of here. I’ll have to stay home and marry some stupid—”

“No, no, no. I meant you’ll get another chance today.”

“What do you mean? For Jekyll and Hyde?”

“Of course.”

“But they’re striking the sets. They’re leaving.”

“I’ll arrange it.”

“Are you in the company?”

He smiled. “No.”

“Then how can you arrange it?”

“Do you know what an angel is?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“In the theater, an angel is a man who invests money in a show — puts up the cash. So, no, I am not a member of the Jekyll and Hyde company. But they regard me as their friend. Their very, very good friend. Now, do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Are you ready?”

“Yes. Yes!”

“Then come with me.”

He walked her to a small hotel.

“We’ll go in the back way. The stage manager stays in the annex. But he wants it private.”

“Isn’t he loading the train?”

“He’ll be saying good-bye to an old friend, if you know what I mean, before he joins the train. But before his old friend joins him, we — that is to say, you — will sing for him. Are you ready?”

“Yes.”

“Did you bring your music with you?”

“Right here.”

“Good. In we go now. Just let’s make sure we are not spotted. Because he will be very unhappy if we inadvertently give him away. And you do not want to sing for an unhappy man— Oh, by the way, if you are shocked, you have every right to be. But please remember, not everyone in the theater behaves this way. There are plenty of happily married, faithful thespians — and even some stagestruck angels.” He tugged off his glove and showed her his wedding ring.

Mary Beth clutched her music and followed him up the alley. He opened a door and led the way up a narrow back staircase, opened another door, glanced down a hall, then touched his finger to his lips for silence and started down it, with Mary Beth close behind. He opened the door with a room key, slipped in, and beckoned her to follow. It was a small room, barely large enough to hold a bed and a steamer trunk, where she would have expected an armchair.

On the trunk was the familiar red and white wagon call card you displayed on a door or in the window to signal the Adams Express driver of a delivery to be picked up. The call card partly covered an address written on a shipping label:

He closed the door, tossed his cane on the bed, and shrugged his cape off his shoulders.

“Look at me,” he said.

Mystified, she looked up and sucked in a startled breath. She had not realized how compelling his gaze was. His eyes were a stony shade of blue, and they pierced hers with the concentrated force of bottled lightning. “Where…” she started to ask. Where was the stage manager? Her eyes drifted back to the address label. She recognized the sender’s name, a deacon in her own church. “Where—”

He snapped his fingers.

“Look at me!”

The rigor in his voice rivaled the force of his eyes, and for an awful moment she felt that she had no choice but to obey. At the edge of her vision she saw his hands fly at her face.

Quick and athletic, the young woman dodged instinctively, whipping her head back and away from his hands. Only when she tried to scream and could not make a sound did she realize that he had tricked her into exposing her throat.

Half the sport, half the pleasure of the game, was to plan the plan. Plan, anticipate, hope. And savor, knowing they would never catch a master of self-discipline and restraint. This time, the Cutthroat had planned as painstakingly as he had for Anna Waterbury in New York. Then all he had had to do was wait. And hope for the exact right candidate to come along. God bless her, she had. Unlike Lillian — when he found himself stalking Boston Common on sudden impulse — there would be no interruptions in Springfield, no lovers rutting in the dark, no unfinished job, no dog walkers, no cops.

The room was paid in advance, booked for a week. It was situated at the end of the hall in the back of the house. The hotel across the alley catered to salesmen, who were out working all day, carousing in saloons half the night, and stumbling home so blotto they would not notice a pig slaughtered next door. The room had its own private bathroom with a deep porcelain tub longer than the girl was tall.

10

The express wagon driver swore to anyone who would listen that his horses knew how to read. Or if his team could not read, they at least had a fine eye for the shape and color of the Adams call card. He never had to tighten the reins to stop when they saw the red and white rectangle hanging from a doorknob.

A heavy steamer trunk bound for the Arizona Territory was waiting to be picked up, the charges prepaid. He wrestled it into the wagon and continued his rounds until he saw the company’s one-ton power wagon, which ran on a twenty-eight-cell Exide electric battery and bore the sign THIS WAGON CARRIES INTERSTATE COMMERCE TRAFFIC ONLY.

He hailed the driver, and they transferred the Arizona trunk.

“Heavy.”

They noticed the return address and laughed. “Bibles.”

The power wagon delivered the trunk to the freight depot attached to Springfield’s Union Station, where it was put aboard an Adams Express car on the Albany-bound Boston section of the Lake Shore Limited. The train was broken up in Albany, the Chicago-bound passenger coaches hooked to the Lake Shore, the Adams Express car shunted to a New York Central fast freight headed for St. Louis, via Buffalo, Cleveland, and Indianapolis.

The fast freight was hauled by Mikado 2-8-2 locomotives especially suited to speeding on the flat, water-level line. They were scheduled to be replaced with freshly watered and coaled engines every two hundred miles. But the first Mikado never made it past Herkimer, New York. Steaming at forty miles an hour, it was suddenly switched off the main line. It jumped the tracks before the surprised engineer could hit his air brakes and plunged down the embankment into the Mohawk River, dragging five express cars with it.

Scant moments behind it, the New York Central’s 20th Century Limited extra-fare passenger flyer was overtaking on the next track at eighty miles an hour. Like a cracking bullwhip, the caboose on the back of the wrecked train had been flung off its rails onto 20th’s track. The rocketing Limited’s engineer saw it in the beam of his electric headlamp. He slammed on his air brakes, threw his Johnson bar across its full arc to reverse his drivers, and prayed.

It was no coincidence that a top Van Dorn detective like white-haired Kansas City Eddie Edwards was riding in the express car on the 20th Century Limited. Isaac Bell had his best railroad specialists hunting a gang of train robbers, and Edwards was headed for points west, riding free. Van Dorns were welcome guests in the rolling fortresses when crack passenger trains carried fortunes in gold, jewels, bearer bonds, and banknotes. Amenities were sparse — a Thermos flask, a mail sack for a mattress, a canvas bag of hundred-dollar bills for a pillow — and sleep was interrupted to draw guns at station stops, but the famously tightfisted Mr. Van Dorn liked saving money on train fares. He also wanted his men rubbing shoulders with express agents, who had the latest information on criminals in the robbery line.

The instant the 20th Century Limited’s brakes and back-spinning drive wheels brought the speeding train to a grinding, clashing halt, Edwards grabbed a riot gun. The conductor pounded on the locked door. “Fast freight on the ground.”

Edwards piled out with the train crew to help, still gripping the riot gun in the event that thieves had caused the wreck. The veteran detective’s instincts were proved right by the sudden crackle of rifle and pistol fire. The express agent ran back to guard the 20th’s express car. Eddie Edwards ran toward muzzle flashes in the dark.

He established that three or four train robbers were raking the wrecked train with gunfire and that a single express agent was firing back from an overturned car. Then he leveled his pump-action weapon in the direction that would do the most good and opened up. The train robbers had the advantage of numbers and their rifles’ longer range. Detective Edwards had a rapid-firing weapon and ice water in his veins.

An all-roads rail pass personally endorsed by Osgood Hennessy, the president of the Southern Pacific, was among Isaac Bell’s most valued possessions. He was greeted warmly on a New York Central & Hudson night mail racing out of Grand Central, and he arrived at the Mohawk River crash as dawn was breaking.

A wreck train was lifting a caboose off the track with a crane. Freight cars lay half in the water. Crates and trunks were scattered on the riverbank. Hundreds of yards of track had been torn into heaps of twisted steel and splintered crossties. The entire site was littered with spilled clothing, paper, and shattered barrels spewing excelsior. Clumps of those thin poplar-wood shavings that had cushioned the barrels’ contents, tossed on the wind like miniature tumbleweeds.

Eddie Edwards greeted him with the lowdown.

“They chocked a switch frog with iron wedges. That shunted the fast freight onto that siding. As she was steaming at forty miles per hour, she jumped the tracks. And that’s just the first thing they did wrong.”

“What else did they do wrong?”

“Derailed the wrong train. They thought they were robbing the Twentieth Century, which was coming along next. She was doing eighty, and if they’d derailed her, she’d have flown across the river and halfway to Canada.”

“That makes no sense,” said Bell. “The bunch we’re tracking never made that kind of mistake.”

“They’re not ours,” said Edwards. “Just some amateurs who went drinking until it sounded like a good idea.”

“I wondered about them working so far east.”

“I got three of them chained to a tree. To call them criminals would be an insult to the outlaw classes. Sorry you came all the way up here.”

“Might as well have a look while I am,” said Bell.

Edwards showed him the switch frog jammed open with metal wedges. They worked their way across the torn-up siding and down the embankment. The wreck gang would have its work cut out for them, laying a new siding so they could position their crane to lift five express cars out of the river. There was paper everywhere. An empty steamer trunk floated, turning lazily on still water. Suddenly caught in an eddy, it drifted into the main current, sinking deeper and deeper. Barrels floated after it.

“What’s that white thing?”

“Looks like a mannequin. For a show window.”

“There’s another.”

A half dozen of the wax fashion display forms floated from a partly submerged railcar. “Like they’re going swimming,” said Edwards.

Isaac Bell peered intently at the debris along the riverbank and suddenly strode toward it. Edwards hurried after him. “What do you see? Is that another one?”

“It’s not a mannequin.”

It was the body of a petite blond woman, her throat and torso horribly butchered. Bell counted ten crescent-shaped cuts on her limbs.

“What are those cuts?” asked Edwards. “Like crescent moons.”

“Same as he did to Anna Waterbury,” said Bell. “Identical.” Mystified, he showed Edwards his notebook and copied these in under them.

“Same killer?”

“Same monster.” Bell covered her body with his coat.

“How the heck did she end up here?” asked Edwards.

“Which car did she come out of?”

The detectives wrote down the car numbers they could see.

“Syracuse,” said Eddie Edwards, “is the Eastern Region Office.”

Two hours later the Van Dorns were poring through timetables and manifests with the chief dispatcher for the New York Central’s Eastern Region, which covered lines from New York City and Boston that converged at Albany, where the fast freight train had been made up.

“The New York Central & Hudson Railroad,” said the dispatcher, “serves half the people in the nation. Of that half, three-quarters are on lines that could have conveyed the poor girl’s body to Albany.”

He pointed at a map that covered an entire wall and shrugged apologetically. A legend on top listed thirty-six cities, towns, and regions to which the railroad took passengers on through cars. “Are you sure she was not inside some container?”

“We don’t know,” said Bell. “Her body fell on the riverbank. Whatever she was inside of smashed open and drifted away.”

“But with no address label, how are we to ascertain where she started her journey?”

“We will eliminate all places from which those five cars did not come.”

“They came from Albany. They were loaded in Albany. The contents could have come from anywhere served by our lines, as far south as New York, as far east as Boston, and from any of the express companies. No, I am terribly sorry, Mr. Bell. But without a proper address label, I cannot help you.”

“Find out whether any of the cars were shipped and sealed intact by an express company.”

“I will try.”

Bell fired off a telegram in Van Dorn cipher to Grady Forrer, who ran Research.

Isaac Bell learned from Eddie Edwards, whom he had instructed to stay with the New York Central dispatcher in Syracuse, that one of the smashed cars derailed into the Mohawk River belonged to the Adams Express Company. It had originated in Boston, hooked to the Boston section of the 20th Century Limited, and stopped in Worcester, Springfield, Pittsfield, and Chatham on its way across Massachusetts.

Van Dorn Research turned up a newspaper story about a Springfield girl who had not come home from choir practice. Her name was Mary Beth Winthrop.

The morning mail brought a photograph.

As had happened with Anna Waterbury, her attacker had not marked her face, and Bell recognized her instantly. He raced to Springfield. At the Adams Express office in the freight depot, he presented the credentials of an insurance investigator with Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock, a venerable Hartford, Connecticut, firm that was willing to legitimize masquerades by top Van Dorns in exchange for sound and very private detective work. Bell asked for a list of every item put aboard the express car that fell in the Mohawk River.

Ironically, the display window mannequins he and Eddie Edwards had seen floating in the river had been shipped by a Springfield factory. The mannequin crate could have had room for a body, but a telephone call to the factory eliminated the possibility.

“We pack ’em tight,” said the manager. “So they don’t bang into each other.”

The only other item shipped that day large enough to hold a body had been a steamer trunk bound for Scottsdale, in the Arizona Territory. The express company clerk looked puzzled.

“What is it?” asked Bell.

“I hadn’t noticed before. No reason to — the freight was prepaid. But the shipper was old Deacon Price.”

“I would like to meet Deacon Price.”

“You’ll have something of a wait. He was buried last week.”

Isaac Bell hurried back to New York and assembled the detectives he had recruited to hunt Anna Waterbury’s murderer. As was Van Dorn custom, they had adopted an informal moniker: the Anna Squad.

Bell said, “Not only did the killer assume an innocent man’s identity to ship the trunk, he also rented the room where he lured her in the deacon’s name. So any trail for the trunk has gone as cold as he intended. However, despite the effort he made to put time and distance between him and the body, we’ve been dealt something of an even break by finding this poor girl weeks or even months ahead of his schedule.”

“How will that help us, Mr. Bell?”

In what did not appear to be an answer at first, Bell said, “Similarly, Anna Waterbury was discovered by chance sooner than he had intended when the occupant of the apartment where he killed her returned home to New York earlier than expected.”

Detective Harry Warren, the Gang Squad chief, spoke up. “If it’s true that these killings in New York and Springfield are connected, if they were committed by the same man, then he’s had lousy luck twice — an actor fired and a train derailed. What are the odds of that kind of coincidence?”

Isaac Bell said, “You’ve put your finger on it, Harry. The question we must answer is, how many times has he had good luck?”

“Good luck?”

Warren and several others looked puzzled. Grady Forrer, chief of Research, nodded blankly. But Helen Mills, whom Bell had reassigned to New York after she managed to read Anna Waterbury’s diary, which put a stop to boyfriend talk, and young James Dashwood, whom he brought down from Boston, both raised tentative hands.

“That is a terrible thought, Mr. Bell,” said Mills.

“Yes,” said Isaac Bell. “How many of his victims do we not know about?”

Dashwood said, “You’re suggesting the possibility of many murders, Mr. Bell.”

Silence settled over the bull pen.

Isaac Bell broke it.

“I am not suggesting, I am asking how many. And I am asking every operator in our Anna Squad, how many more before we catch him?”

Isaac Bell got home to Archie and Lillian Abbott’s East 64th Street town house after midnight. Built only four years ago as a wedding gift from Lillian’s father, railroad baron Osgood Hennessy, it had included within its limestone walls a private apartment for Archie’s mother. She had lived there until she left to be with Archie’s younger sister, who had borne twins. Now it served as Isaac and Marion Morgan Bell’s home on the occasions they found themselves both in New York.

Marion had just gotten in herself, having worked late directing a two-reel comedy at the Biograph Studios. Her straw-blond hair was still pinned up high on her head so it didn’t get in the way when she looked through the camera. The effect was majestic, revealing her graceful neck and setting off her beautiful face like a golden crown.

They agreed each was starving and met in the kitchen. Bell mixed Manhattan cocktails, sliced bread and toasted it on the gas range, while Marion melted cheddar cheese with ale, Worcestershire, mustard, and an egg for a Welsh rarebit.

She was a well-educated woman, with a Stanford University law degree, and with experience in business, before she began making moving pictures. Bell often relied on her incisive mind to talk out thorny cases, as she had unusual powers of observation and a way of approaching problems from unexpected angles.

“What about the girl in Boston?” she asked when he had filled her in on the grisly Mohawk River discovery.

“Lillian. The prostitute.”

“You’re sure your murderer didn’t kill her, too?”

“Dashwood looked her over at the morgue. She was not cut.”

“None of those strange crescents?”

“Not a mark on her.”

“Only strangled?… Was her neck broken?”

“Yes.”

“Do I recall correctly that Anna’s neck was broken, too?”

“Yes.”

“And am I right in assuming that both girls’ necks were broken ‘accidentally’?”

“So to speak. Both were small girls, and he would appear to be very strong. The bruises on their throats indicated that he meant to strangle them. There are better ways to break a neck, if that’s your intent.”

Marion pondered that silently, and they went on to discuss other things, including the fact that Helen Mills had discovered nothing about any boyfriend in Anna’s diary; that Anna, Mary Beth, and Lillian shared a similar petite build and hair coloring; and the mysterious crescent-shaped symbols carved on Anna’s and Mary Beth Winthrop’s bodies.

Later, when his wife had changed into a silk peignoir that matched her green eyes, and Bell was watching with growing interest as she let loose her hair, Marion suddenly said, “But…”

“What?”

“But what if the murderer was interrupted just after he strangled Lillian? What if someone came along before he could… do what he wanted with his knife?”

“Then we would have three murders in a row,” Bell answered soberly. “And be one closer to counting how many.”

“How many victims he has already killed?”

“Exactly.”

“How will you do that?”

“I’ve got to figure out how to get Mr. Van Dorn to gather our forces.”

“What will it take to convince him?”

“More evidence.”

11

Isaac Bell banged a perfunctory knock on Joseph Van Dorn’s door and shouldered through it. The Boss glanced up from his desk, took one look at his Chief Investigator’s expression, and spoke into his candlestick telephone. “I will call you back later.” He hooked the earpiece, and asked testily, “What’s on your mind, Isaac?”

“I’m ready to broadcast an All Field Offices Alert.”

Van Dorn shook his head. “Field Offices Alerts are as urgent as ‘All hands on deck’ in a hurricane. But ordering every operator in the agency to drop everything to act on orders from the top is disruptive — even excusing those engaged in gunplay. That is why we seldom issue them, and then only for the most pressing matter.”

“We have evidence of three similar murders of young girls in three separate cities,” said Bell. “I’m not waiting for a fourth.”

“Two possibly similar murders,” Van Dorn shot back. “And one unlikely link in Boston. I said last week, Isaac, and I’ll say it again, it’s a police case. Let the police handle it.”

“It’s gone beyond the cops.”

“Why?”

“Three murders in three cities,” Bell repeated. “Local cops rarely talk to local cops in the next precinct, much less neighboring cities. And never across state lines.”

“What are you driving at?”

Bell replied to Van Dorn’s question with a question of his own: “How do you get us federal government contracts?”

“By spending ridiculous amounts of time buttering up government officials in Washington while the rest of you have a fine time being private detectives.”

“Those officials are buying something priceless from you. Priceless and unique.”

“What is that, may I ask?”

“The Van Dorn Detective Agency’s broad overview from our field offices all across the country. Cops don’t have that overview. Without it, they can’t see patterns. They can’t connect related crimes. They can’t fit pieces of a puzzle together. They don’t have the pieces.”

“The Justice Department’s—”

“No, sir,” Bell interrupted. “At this moment, there are only two types of national forces that can put the pieces together — newspapers linked by national wire services and private detective agencies with a continental reach like ours.”

“Newspapers?” Van Dorn leveled a meaty finger at the heap of cuttings that Bell had ordered sent to him from Research. “Have you seen this drivel?” He snatched up one and read aloud in a voice steeped in scorn.

Van Dorn crumpled it in his fist and picked up another.

He threw it down and read from a third.

“Natives tom-tomming in the jungle make more sense than journalists.”

“That is precisely why I wanted you to read them,” said Isaac. “The newspapermen are often on the scene. But they report little more than what the cops tell them. While the cops don’t know what’s going on next door. That leaves only the Van Dorn Detective Agency to collect and share evidence that can stop a murderer preying on young girls who are alone. Defenseless orphans.”

“Anna Pape and Mary Beth Winthrop weren’t orphans. Lillian Lent, in Boston, probably wasn’t, either.”

“Any hopeful young woman who leaves the bosom of her family to try to be an actress — or any poor farmer’s daughter who falls to prostitution like Lillian Lent — is, in effect, an orphan. Alone with no protector.”

Joseph Van Dorn said nothing.

“And no one knows that better than you,” said Bell.

The Boss glowered dangerously.

The Chief Investigator and his old mentor knew each other as well as any men who had stood shoulder to shoulder in battle. Van Dorn knew that Bell had not finished arguing his case. Not only not finished but was about to play his “hole” card.

“Orphans,” Bell repeated. “No father, no husband, no big brother to look out for them,” adding with a sudden quirk of his lips, “No Captain Novicki.”

Joseph Van Dorn shook his head, helpless to stifle the smile that softened his flint-hard eye. “Low blow, Isaac.”

Back when Captain David Novicki was a junior officer on a sea-battered steamer jam-packed with immigrants, he had taken the orphan boy Joseph Van Dorn under his wing. When the ship finally landed in Boston, Novicki had found Van Dorn a family to live with outside the slums. He had looked in on him on subsequent voyages back, steering him into school and away from trouble. Nearly four decades after that fateful crossing, they were still fast friends. Joseph Van Dorn credited his immense success in the detective business to David Novicki, as Isaac Bell credited Van Dorn for his.

“Here’s another low blow,” said Bell. “We both know they’re not paying clients.”

“I never thought they would be.”

Bell returned his smile. Then his handsome features hardened and his eyes grew cold, and he said firmly, with no reservation, “We’re the only ones who can stop him, Joe. Van Dorns can hunt everywhere in the country. And we never give up.”

“O.K.! Send the blooming thing.”

Isaac Bell telegraphed the All Field Offices Alert on the private wire, ordering detectives across the continent to scour their cities and surrounding regions for similar unsolved murders in recent years. He instructed them, as he had Research, to pay particular attention to disappearances of petite blond women. And he called for a fresh look at past discoveries of skeletons and body parts.

Bell followed up with personal telephone calls to offices within the limits of the long-distance system. It had been extended just this year as far west as Denver.

Field offices that Bell could not reach by long-distance received long letters sent by Morkrum Printing Telegraph.

Bell went to Grady Forrer’s rabbit warren of back rooms to assign the Research Department the task of tracing news reports of unsolved killings. “I have a question: When did this start?”

“What do you mean, Isaac?” asked Forrer.

“Was Anna Waterbury his first victim?”

“Good question.” Grady Forrer looked around at his army of unkempt bleary-eyed researchers. “You heard Mr. Bell. Do you have any questions for him?”

“I do, Mr. Bell,” said a scholarly-looking, middle-aged researcher. “The victim’s name was Anna Genevieve Pape. Why do you always call her Anna Waterbury instead of Anna Pape?”

“Because she wanted to be Anna Waterbury,” said Isaac Bell.

12

“There isn’t a body buried in L.A. that Tim Holian can’t jab with a spade.”

The subject of the oft-spoken compliment — Timothy J. Holian, the formidable chief of the Los Angeles, California, Van Dorn field office — shambled in and out of city agencies, perspiring freely, on a hot, dry spring day. He wore a battered panama hat that most private detectives would have long since handed down to a gardener, a greasy necktie, and an ill-cut sack suit hung heavy with pistols. He limped, having taken four bullets from the German spy Christian Semmler’s gunmen, two of whom he’d shot dead, in the blazing Thief case shoot-out that had all but annihilated the Los Angeles field office the year before.

The compliment referred to metaphorical bodies — the secrets behind scandals. There wasn’t a government clerk in the city’s morgue, hospitals, and police stations who wouldn’t do the Van Dorn a favor for cash or valuable information that could be used against enemies. If flesh-and-blood bodies were what Tim Holian wanted, flesh-and-blood bodies Tim Holian would have.

He soon shambled back to the office with lists of young women who had disappeared, lists of petite blond murder victims, lists of nameless bodies, and lists of mutilations. These he coordinated with lists his detectives had compiled from interviews with homicide cops and newspaper police reporters. Even after culling the unlikely from the likely, they still had a chilling number of strangled victims — six in the past three years, four of them hopeful actresses, one prostitute, and one librarian walking home alone.

Tim Holian telegraphed the results to New York, care of Chief Investigator Isaac Bell. He followed up by composing a personal letter for Bell. He was still writing it when the company wire rattled out a query from Bell himself:

Holian wired a shortened version of his letter, wherein he speculated that the extraordinary number of possible victims might testify to the lure of the filming of movies, a fast-growing business that drew so many young people to Los Angeles. This drew a second query from Bell.

Tim Holian wired back that 1908 marked the beginning of a flood of movie makers from the East Coast. Then he speculated:

Bell did not reply.

Charlie Post, chief of the one-man Denver field office, took a fresh look at an awful murder that occurred only last year. The eviscerated body of a doctor’s wife had been found in a gold smelter. She was from a prominent Colorado family, and her husband had been swiftly tried, convicted, and hung for the crime. The entire incident would have been a comedy of errors if it hadn’t been tragic.

Whoever had killed her — and Isaac Bell’s All Field Offices Alert had raised new doubts in a case that Post had never liked — had thrown her body into the smelter’s charge hopper. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have boiled to oblivion. But labor and owner hatreds being ferocious as they were in Denver, saboteurs had drawn the furnace fires to ruin the smelter. The molten ore had cooled, and when the killer dumped her body, it bounced on a hardened mass of ore and slag, where it was found the next morning by scab laborers imported to break the strike.

“Clearly,” the prosecutor had told the jury, “this doctor knew less about the smelting business than he did about surgery. Having butchered the poor woman like he was taught back east in medical school, he was tripped up by his ignorance of Colorado’s most important industry.”

Convinced more than ever that the case stunk, and emboldened by Bell’s alert, Post raided his emergency expense fund to bribe a coroner’s assistant to let him see photographs of the body.

“Son of a gun.”

Her arms and legs were stippled with the shallow crescent-shaped slices that Isaac Bell had ordered him to look for. He wired New York. Then he found a saloon. The murderer was Bell’s man. The doctor was innocent. And the best Charlie Post could hope for, as he raised a glass to toast—“Right and wrong”—loudly enough to catch the attention of the floor manager, was that husband and wife were reunited in Heaven.

“Telegram from Texas Walt Hatfield on the Western Union line, Mr. Bell.”

“Texas Walt Hatfield is a movie star. He doesn’t work for us anymore.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. Bell. But he still knows the Van Dorn cipher.”

Bell looked over the typewritten lines of code and deciphered them in his head. Texas Walt — who had been masquerading as a stunt performer on the Thief case when movie makers hired him away to play cowboy parts — had not bothered to save money by reducing a telegram to a few words. The once famously terse Texan was no longer laconic, having gotten used to booming his movies in Photoplay and Motion Picture Story Magazine. As Bell read his wire, he could hear his old friend’s Texas drawl, which had grown more pronounced when he became a Western star.

Horace Bronson, chief of the San Francisco field office, who had just returned home from a stint running the Van Dorn overseas outpost in Paris, was greeted by a Morkrum printed telegram from his old friend Isaac Bell. This called for a three-track investigation. Bronson sent his apprentices to San Francisco’s theaters and his seasoned operators to the Barbary Coast brothels. He himself killed two birds with one stone by visiting his friends among the police to establish that he was back in town while inquiring about missing young women and unsolved strangulations.

After wiring Bell his office’s initial assessment, Bronson, too, wrote a letter.

Isaac Bell forwarded the Los Angeles, Denver, Albuquerque, and San Francisco reports to the detectives of the Anna Squad with a terse cover letter.

13

Connections trickled in from the field offices, and Isaac Bell saw hints of patterns.

Some bodies were draped under bloodstained capes. The capes were alike, but not identical, yet all were standard factory-made items that could be purchased in ordinary department stores. The murderer could easily replace them without being traced.

Fair-haired young victims like Anna Waterbury, Lillian Lent, and Mary Beth Winthrop turned out to be mostly actresses in theater and vaudeville and the circus, but some were prostitutes. What these poor souls had in common was what he had told Van Dorn: these were girls on their own, without family or husbands to protect them.

Of the mutilated bodies, many had their necks broken.

Coroners and cops recalled strange marks carved in the girls’ skin.

Bell told Joseph Van Dorn, “I stood in with the Herkimer County coroner. The man barely noticed these cuts. When I remarked on them, he wrote them in his notes as ‘superficial stab wounds.’ It never occurred to him she was already dead before he took out his knife.”

“What do you suppose they mean?”

“I’m racking my brains. I have no idea.”

“I think they’re a calling card,” said Van Dorn.

“Some sort of message,” Bell agreed.

“Lunatic.”

“But no less dangerous for it, and too slick to get caught.”

Another pattern formed, the most disturbing yet. Some bodies had been hidden in old cellars, abandoned buildings, and deep woods.

“How many were never found?” Bell wondered aloud.

Van Dorn said, “You’ve got a monster on your hands, Isaac.”

“A monster who travels. He’s left victims in Kansas City, San Francisco, St. Louis, Chicago — the list keeps growing.”

“A traveling man,” mused Van Dorn. “A salesman? Or a railroad man? How long has this been going on?”

Bell answered bleakly, “The Chicago field office just found one of his capes in an abandoned lake boat. Inside was a skeleton.”

“How long” became almost unbelievable when Grady Forrer brought Bell a clipping from the Brooklyn Eagle dated July 24, 1891. The paper made the usual Jack the Ripper comparison, though to be fair to the writer, this killing went so far back that it was not long after the London rampage.

“If this is him, too, he’s been killing girls for twenty years.”

“What do you suppose drives him?” Marion asked late at night. Bell had staggered in at two o’clock and sat with her in bone-weary silence.

“No motive of the sort we understand. He’s not killing for gain, or revenge, or love. He’s just doing what he feels like doing.”

“A wild animal.”

“I’ve been calling him a monster. The trouble is, believing he’s a monster doesn’t get me any closer to stopping him.”

“That would be the same as calling him evil, wouldn’t it?” Marion asked.

Bell agreed. “It’s not enough to think he is evil. In fact, it’s not even helpful.”

Marion said, “I’m beginning to understand why the newspapers keep referring to Jack the Ripper. He’s like an explanation for the unexplainable.”

“Even though we don’t know a thing about Jack the Ripper.”

“What do we know about him?” asked Marion.

Bell had already observed that the further back Research delved into newspapers, the more recent the memory of Jack the Ripper, the more their reporters invoked the connection. Now he asked Grady Forrer for information on the actual Jack the Ripper. Forrer had anticipated the request. Waiting for him was a thick packet of yellowed clippings from the Sun, the World, the Herald, and the Times. The top sheet’s headline read

“What do they boil down to?” Bell asked.

“Theories,” Grady told him, “all unfounded. Speculation, all imaginative. Conjecture, all fanciful. Guesses, all hopeless. Jack the Ripper is said to have been a nobleman or a surgeon or a Freemason, or a Polish radical, or a merchant seaman, or a leather worker, or a butcher. All that is known for sure about him is that eventually he stopped killing women in London. Although exactly when he stopped — whether 1888, or 1889, or 1891—is hotly debated. Also debated is why he stopped. Did he kill himself? Did he die of natural causes? Did he get bored? Did he immigrate to Australia? Did he flee to Brazil? Did he settle down to a quiet life in the country?”

“Do they debate whether he ever stopped at all?”

Grady shrugged. “The consensus seems to be that if he didn’t die, at some point he must have run out of steam.”

Bell slung the clippings under his arm and found an empty desk in the bull pen.

“Where is the Boss?”

“Went downstairs for supper.”

Downstairs was the palatial dining room of the Knickerbocker Hotel. An orchestra played. Every table was taken and conversation was animated. Bell waved to Enrico Caruso, who was dining with coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini, but continued on a beeline toward Joseph Van Dorn, who was reading the menu at a corner table with his back to the wall. Bell eased onto the banquette, catty-corner to him, with his back to the other wall.

“Welcome,” said Van Dorn. “We haven’t broken bread in a long time. How are you?”

“Intrigued,” said Bell.

“Good Lord. We better order first.” Van Dorn looked up, and the table captain came running.

“Cocktail?” asked the Boss.

“Not yet,” said Bell.

Van Dorn ordered a Manhattan.

“With Bushmills Irish Whiskey, Mr. Van Dorn?”

“Always— You’re sure nothing for you, Isaac?”

“I am sure.”

Van Dorn ordered oysters and roast beef.

“And for you, Mr. Bell?”

“Pollo Tetrazzini.”

He waited for Van Dorn’s drink to arrive and toasted him back with water when the Boss said, “Mud in your eye.”

“O.K.,” Van Dorn said. “Spit it out. What intrigues you?”

“There are a hundred theories about Jack the Ripper.”

“At least.”

“The one I find most intriguing is that he stopped killing prostitutes in London twenty-three years ago when he escaped to America.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“What do you think? Did he come here?”

Van Dorn shook his head. “One version had him killing an old woman on the Bowery, if I recall. Didn’t make much sense. She wasn’t young and she wasn’t a prostitute.”

“I read about it,” said Bell. “It didn’t seem at all like his other crimes.”

“And yet you’re ‘intrigued.’”

“Not by that murder. No, what intrigues me is a question: Is it possible that the reason Jack the Ripper was never caught was he fled London in 1888 or 1889 and landed in America? Maybe in New York. Maybe Boston. And laid low for a while.”

“Far-fetched,” said Van Dorn. “How long do you think he laid low?”

“The first killing I’ve found that could be him was in Brooklyn in 1891. But the question is, is he killing again?”

“Now? 1911? That is far-fetched.”

Bell agreed it was far-fetched.

Van Dorn’s oysters were served on a bed of ice. He heaped a few of them on Bell’s bread and butter plate. “That’s exactly the kind of speculation we get in the newspapers.”

“Agreed,” said Isaac Bell, and challenged his own question: “Besides, wouldn’t the Ripper be too old by now?”

Joseph Van Dorn raised a bushy red eyebrow. “Too old?” he asked silkily.

“We’re talking about a murderer who committed his crimes twenty-three years ago.”

Van Dorn said, “I suppose that from your perspective, a man past forty looks ancient.”

Bell said, “You and I both know that past age forty, criminals who haven’t been jailed tend to slow down.”

Van Dorn signaled the waiter. “You see that soup ladle on the sideboard?”

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Van Dorn?”

“That big long one.”

“Yes, sir. I see it.”

“Bring it here.”

The mystified waiter delivered the ladle.

Van Dorn asked Bell, “Tell me, young fellow, how would you characterize the poor devils who will soon not see the sunny side of fifty again? Decrepit? Flea-bitten? Feeble?”

With a cold smile for his Chief Investigator, the Boss hefted the heavy silver serving tool in his powerful hands and tied the handle in a knot.

“Too old?”

Bell swept to his feet in a fluid motion as swift as it was graceful.

“Thank you for your oysters,” he said, and glided from the dining room.

“Isaac!” Van Dorn called after him. “Where the devil are you going?”

“England.”