“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.
ALL PETITE WOMEN MISSING THIS WEEK
NEW ENGLAND
NEW YORK
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.
“The killings of the Broadway stage actress Anna Waterbury and Springfield church choir singer Mary Beth Winthrop, whose mutilated body was found in the Mohawk River train wreck, appear to be the brutal work of a madman as methodical and cunning as Jack the Ripper.”
Van Dorn crumpled it in his fist and picked up another.
“The case looks like Jack the Ripper all over again, the murderer seemingly affected with an insane mania to mutilate bodies as had the notorious Whitechapel Fiend.”
He threw it down and read from a third.
“The detectives seek a woman hater of the Jack the Ripper type.”
“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 telegraphe
d 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.