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

Offices Alert turned up a slew of his killings. We know he’s still in business. We know what his victims look like. And I’m betting he looks something like this picture.”

“He’s killed girls in twenty cities,” said Harry Warren. “How does he get around?”

“Precisely what we will focus on,” said Bell. “How does he travel? Why does he travel? What line is he in?”

“A drummer,” said Archie Abbott. “Who travels more than a traveling salesman?”

“He’s an executive,” said Helen. “He travels city to city visiting his company’s factories.”

“He’s a bank robber,” said Harry Warren. “The new breed that cross state lines in autos.”

Bell shook his head. “He’s been murdering since 1891. How’d he cross state lines before autos?”

“Covered wagon.”

Isaac Bell did not smile. The detectives exchanged wary glances. The stateroom fell so silent, they could hear stewards hustling luggage in the corridor and the faint piping of pilot whistles as Lusitania crept toward Quarantine.

“Sorry, Isaac.”

“A circus performer,” said Archie Abbott. “They’re always on the move. Or a vaudevillian.”

Now Bell had his people where he wanted them—the best minds in the agency, working full steam at turning speculation into facts. He looked at Abbott. “If he had been a London music hall actor, could he play vaudeville here?”

“Why not? Music is music, and the jokes work the same: Set-up. Premise. Punch line. Was he on the bill?”

“I have no playbills or programs from back then. The music hall isn’t even a theater anymore.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jack Spelvin.”

“Sounds like he had a sense of humor. Spelvin’s a pseudonym.”

“The Ripper liked his games.” If the crescent cuts were the murderer’s idea of a joke, thought Bell, what was the punch line?

“He could be a hobo,” said Harry Warren. “Stealing rides on freight trains.”

“Except,” said Helen Mills, “where does a hobo get cash in hand to show the girl?”

“But what if he isn’t stealing rides? What if he’s a railroad man?” said Warren. “They’re on the move. Brakemen invented the red-light district with their red lanterns.”

Bell said, “I find it difficult to imagine a railroad man dressing in a cape and homburg to convince Anna Waterbury he was a Broadway producer. Though he could be an express agent.” The well-paid operators who guarded the express cars could afford to dress like dandies, and often did.

“Union organizers travel,” said Harry Warren.

“An engineer,” said Helen Mills. “They travel for work. So do specialist doctors and surgeons. So do actors. As we just said.”

“A private detective.”

Everyone stared at Archie Abbott.

Bell nudged them back on track. “There are three or four hundred thousand commercial travelers in the country. If he is a traveling salesman, then he’s probably a commission man. They make their own schedules. Union organizers, engineers, and specialists who travel might number in the low thousands. Archie, how many actors are there?”

“All told? Maybe thirty thousand.”

“All men?”

“Men, maybe twenty thousand.”

“Not exactly what I’d call narrowing down,” said Harry Warren.

That was followed by a deep silence. Helen Mills broke it. “Speaking of a cape and homburg, how did Jack the Ripper dress in London?”

“That was a long time ago, and it depends on who thinks they saw him. The illustrators mostly agreed on a gentleman’s cape and top hat, but that was the image they expected of a man who could afford to pay a prostitute.”

“In other words, we don’t know what he does, and we don’t know how he gets around.”

“We can assume,” said Bell, “that he must be of some means to afford to dress well and travel. Unless he is wealthy and doesn’t have to work, whatever his job, it almost certainly requires him to travel.”

“Right back where we started,” said Harry Warren.

“Not quite,” said Isaac Bell. “We’re miles ahead of where we started.” He looked at Grady Forrer, who remained silent through the speculation.

“We have a pattern,” said the Research chief. “We can match our pattern to the travels.”

“What pattern?”

“His route,” said Isaac Bell. “Tell them, Grady.”

Forrer ticked cities off on his enormous fingers. “New York, Boston, Springfield, in the order petite blond girls were murdered. Albany, Philadelphia, Scranton, Binghamton, Pittsburgh, Columbus, in the order girls disappeared. Ten days ago, a girl was reported missing in Cleveland.”

“He’s back to doing an expert job hiding bodies,” said Bell. “Or luck’s on his side, again.”

Grady Forrer tugged a map from the folds of his tent-size coat and unrolled it on the stateroom bed. The route was marked in red. Looping north from New York to Boston, the red line meandered over the densely populated northeastern section of America, crossing each other occasionally, the size of the cities diminishing as it progressed westward.

“Why did you circle Cincinnati?”

The big manufacturing and trading city on the Ohio River nudged the Indiana and Kentucky borders a hundred miles beyond the westwardmost Columbus.

“Cincinnati breaks the pattern. There’s a girl missing in Cincinnati who resembled his other victims. But she disappeared months before Anna was murdered. A singer at the continuous vaudeville house. Happy in her job, according to the other performers. No hint that she was about to run, nor any reason why she would.”

Bell gestured at the map. “Before all these?”

“An anomaly,” said Grady Forrer. “But anomalies sometimes make a point. So I circled her.”

“What’s her name?”

“Rose Bloom.”

“There’s a stage name,” said Archie Abbott.

“Actually, she was born with it, a pretty little Irish girl— There you have it, gents,” Forrer said. “And lady,” he added with a courtly bow to Helen Mills. “Two questions for you to contemplate: What takes our man on this route? Which is to ask, what’s his line? And where is he headed next?”

“Three questions,” said Isaac Bell. “Can the Cutthroat Squad detect where he is headed next before he kills some poor girl when he gets there?”

31

Prospering for a century on a big bend of the Ohio River, Cincinnati was accustomed to spectacular arrivals. Eight thousand steamboats had landed in the single year of 1852, with priceless cargo, and with ambitious passengers