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

been rumors of a play. An American actor was said to have bought dramatic rights from Stevenson. Then came word it had opened in New York to magnificent notices. London was next, and opening night from even the cheapest seat in the house was everything the Cutthroat had hoped for.

And more. In Mansfield’s adaptation, Hyde attacked women as well as men. For the Cutthroat, everything he wanted fell into place. It took only a few short hours after the curtain fell for him to murder a woman who denied him. By a miracle and some good luck, he didn’t get caught. A cask of spoiled wine in the St. Katharine Docks storehouse, where he paid for his bed as the night watchman, preserved the body while he got rid of it in pieces.

He would be more careful next time. He would plan. Savor. Anticipate. Returning to the theater repeatedly, he had prepared for that next time. Prostitutes were safest, he decided, the nature of their bargain being privacy. It was safer to kill them in their places, leave their bodies, and sleep safely in his own place. Three weeks later, he killed his first prostitute. Set off by the play, he let the demon in him come and go. In between, he led a blameless life. He was in every aspect Jekyll and Hyde. But unlike Jekyll, he needed no secret potion to become Hyde. The play was his potion.

But suddenly he was punished. Returning to the Lyceum one evening, he found the theater dark and shuttered. The Mansfield play had failed, driven out of business by his own Jack the Ripper murders. The audience had dried up. Who wanted to watch a play about horror when the horror of real-life killings gripped London? He would wait three long years before he saw Jekyll and Hyde performed in New York.

He tested the mustache with another smile, took one of the capes hidden under a false bottom in his trunk, and swirled it over his shoulders. He snatched up a walking stick and strode into the dark streets at a jaunty pace. When he saw her, fair-haired in the glow of a streetlamp, he slowed his pace and transformed the walking stick into an old man’s cane by the simple act of leaning on it.

She looked him over, saw he was old and rich, and gave him a hopeful smile.

“Would you tell me your name, miss?”

30

Isaac Bell had fired off two final cables to New York before he boarded his ship at Southampton. To his Cutthroat Squad:

LUSITANIA

PILOT BOAT

To Grady Forrer in Research:

MURDERED GIRLS

MISSING GIRLS

TRAVEL PATTERN

Lusitania flashed past sail-driven pilot boats as she raced along the Fire Island coast at her twenty-five-knot service speed. Slowing at last for the first time since she put to sea at the Needles, the four-stack Cunard liner stopped beside the lightship Ambrose at the entrance to the channel. The steam-powered Sandy Hook pilot boat New York launched a heavily laden yawl in the lee of Lusitania’s cliff-like black hull. The yawl’s oarsman rowed to the ship. The harbor pilot climbed her rope and wood Jacob’s ladder.

An agile quartet of Van Dorn detectives clambered after him. Lusitania’s assistant purser, as lavishly tipped as the pilot-boat crew, took them directly to Isaac Bell’s stateroom.

“Grab a seat. The Cutthroat Squad has four uninterrupted hours, until the tugboats land us at 13th Street, to think out loud. I expect bright ideas to spark others.”

Archie Abbott, Harry Warren, James Dashwood, and Helen Mills crowded onto chairs and the edge of the bed. Grady Forrer leaned quietly against the bureau. Bell paced.

“The question is no longer whether Anna Waterbury’s murderer is Jack the Ripper. The question is how has he managed not to get caught for the twenty years he’s been murdering women in our country?”

“But is he Jack the Ripper?” asked Harry Warren.

“Here’s what he might look like if he is.”

The ship’s photographer had made copies of Wayne Barlowe’s aged drawing. Bell passed them around.

“This could be any gent in his forties,” said Archie Abbott.

“A rather handsome ‘any gent,’” said Helen Mills. “Outstanding.”

“But not unique.”

“Looks like a grown-up altar boy,” said Harry Warren.

“This eliminates men who look older and younger,” said Dashwood. “He’s not thirty. He’s not fifty.”

“Why don’t we print these up like wanted posters?” asked Mills. “Warn street girls about a man who looks like this.”

Isaac Bell thought of Wayne Barlowe, caught in a similar bind, refusing to draw the angelic and possibly innocent youth for the police posters, and second-guessing himself ever since. “No,” he said. “Archie’s right. This drawing could be many gents in their forties. If we print these up, we’ll get bullies forming lynch mobs and a bunch of innocents dancing from their necks.”

“That’s a valid point,” said Helen. “But the girls he’s killing are innocent, too.”

Bell said, “I’ll consider it after we isolate the city he’s operating in. Meantime, a better angle is to decipher the crescent shapes he carves in the bodies.”

“Did the London Ripper do this to his girls?”

“He cut symbols. But they were different. We need to know what his crescents mean.”

“How come no one’s seen him attack?” asked Helen. “No one’s even heard a scream?”

“Three reasons,” said Bell. “One, he’s a predator. That means he’s extraordinarily alert and aware of his surroundings. Probably the last time he had to run was the night when a con man named Davy Collins caught a glimpse of him in ’eighty-eight. Two, he never frightens his victim before he has complete control of her. He’s made an art of putting her at ease. Three, America is a big continent. When he arrived, he reckoned he’d never get caught if he kept moving around. If the Van Dorn Agency hadn’t been working up the Anna case, no one would have noticed the connection between her and Lillian Lent in Boston and Mary Beth Winthrop in Springfield. Fortunately, we are working the case, so the All Field