The Cutthroat by Clive Cussler (popular books to read txt) 📗

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.

ANNA NEVER READ JEKYLL

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,