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

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.

Howdy, Isaac Old Son,

Rode the train to Albuquerque, New Mexico, yesterday. I had caught wind of a poor little dance hall gal cut up real bad last October. Then I caught wind of your All Field Offices Alert and it struck me she might be up your alley. Turned out, she probably is. Not only carved-up but decorated with them little half-moons you was asking about. Hope it helps.

Happy Trails.

Your good friend, Texas Walt Hatfield, former ranch hand, former Texas Ranger, former Van Dorn detective

P.S. Near as I can tell, she’s the only one in Albuquerque. I looked into the other killings in town. All stemmed plausibly from misunderstandings between tetchy acquaintances.

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.

. . . I am somewhat amazed by how many and how long. Obviously, not every one of these girls’ murders were committed by the same person. But many at least could have been, and they go back ten years or more. And the terrible thing, my friend, is this: one or two a year adds up to relentless slaughter.

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

The Anna Squad is now named the Cutthroat Squad.

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