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

“Only from the supper table,” said Heather.

“Do you recall the last time you saw her?”

“Yesterday. She never came home last night.”

“Did she leave with anyone?”

“She left alone.”

Bustling up behind the dancers came their landlady, Mrs. Shine, a round woman with suspicious eyes and a work-worn face. She looked appalled when Bell asked whether she had known Anna, and she protested that she ran an orderly house and she could not be held responsible for what her boarders did away from the house.

“Did she have a boyfriend?”

The landlady crossed her arms. “Not on this premises.”

“Would any of your other boarders know whether she had a boyfriend?”

“Only Lucy Balant. They shared a room.”

“May I speak with Lucy?”

“If you take yourself to Philadelphia,” said the landlady, and one of the hovering dancers explained, “Lucy is an understudy in Jimmy Valentine—”

“Oh my Lord,” groaned the landlady. “Look at them!”

From one direction pounded a phalanx of police, from the other a mob of reporters. Uniformed cops were trailing plainclothesmen. The reporters were shouting questions.

Isaac Bell hurried uptown to the Knickerbocker. He wired instructions to the Philadelphia field office and several other offices around the continent, issued orders to every detective in the bull pen, then raced across town to Grand Central Terminal, where he caught a train to Waterbury, Connecticut.

He was in the Brass City in less than two and a half hours, but the newspapers had beat him to it. No one answered the telephone when he called from the Waterbury Station, and when he got to the Pape home, a three-story brick mansion flanked by stone turrets, he found reporters milling outside the spiked fence.

A thug in a black coat and fedora guarded the gate, and two flanked the front door—Pape Brass company cops, Bell assumed. He palmed his Van Dorn badge to shield the flash of gold from the reporters. “Mr. Pape is a client. If he wants to see me, tell him let me in the back door.”

He received the polite “Wait here, please” that he expected. Private cops treated Van Dorns with kid gloves, hoping to be remembered next time the agency’s Protective Services branch was hiring. The guard hurried back. “Walk around the corner. One of the boys will take you through the side gate.”

Bell was ushered down a service alley and in the servants’ entrance. A liveried butler led him through the house and across an immense drawing room dominated by a pipe organ. He knocked on the door to a library that doubled as Pape’s home office and left Bell face-to-face with the grieving father.

“I can only say how sorry I am, sir. I promise you that we will never give up until we bring her killer to justice.”

“She’d be alive if you had found her.”

6

Isaac Bell bought the New York papers from a Bridgeport newsboy who ran onto the train when it paused in the station. All hewed the same line—guided, Bell was certain, by Captain Coligney—that an innocent young woman of a good family had been lured or forced to the room where she was murdered. None raised the possibility that Anna might have known her murderer.

Deprived of the salacious, the papers fell back on a tried and true comparison to the ultimate evil. Back in 1888, nearly twenty-five years ago, a string of murders in London were a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. To Bell’s day, in 1911, reporters routinely likened them to any unsolved knife attack against a woman.

Police at work on the Anna Pape case suspect a moral pervert similar to Jack the Ripper whose gruesome murders in the Whitechapel district of London startled the world.

“The cops reckon a boyfriend,” Bell told a hastily organized squad of his best available detectives. He had wired others who were out of town to report to New York, but he would manage with these for a start.

“A boyfriend is my instinct, too. Or at least someone she knew and trusted. There’s no evidence, so far, that she didn’t go to the flat voluntarily. And the way he cut her up strongly suggests jealous rage. That said, we have no one who witnessed her arrival at the flat, no one who saw her being carried, dragged, or marched into the building. Would they have? Probably, but no guarantee, particularly late at night.”

“Any sign of knockout drops?” asked redheaded Archie Abbott.

“The assistant coroner conducted the autopsy, which means it was scientifically sound. Chloral hydrate is swiftly metabolized, but he found no alcohol in the contents of her stomach, either.”

The detectives nodded their understanding. The taste and odor of chloral hydrate were masked by alcohol, so it was a reasonable bet the killer had not slipped the victim knockout drops in a drink.

“Chloroform?” asked Harry Warren. The grizzled Gang Squad chief was one of Bell’s closest confidants.

“The assistant coroner told me that the odor would have dissipated by the time her body was discovered. I certainly didn’t smell it. But the autopsy revealed something unusual. Her neck was broken. Which takes a mighty strong hand. Anna was petite, but it does suggest we are looking for a big bruiser who doesn’t know his own strength. Nonetheless, the main point is this, gents: it is imperative that we establish whether she went there voluntarily, vital that we confirm whether she was acquainted with her killer or was attacked by a stranger. If it was personal, we will discover his name. If it wasn’t personal, then a vicious cutthroat is prowling the city and may kill again. Either way, I want him in the electric chair.”

“Why would she go with the man if he wasn’t a boyfriend?” asked a young detective still on probation.

“Hope,” answered Bell.

“Hope for what? That he’ll become a boyfriend?”

That drew some smiles, which faded when Isaac Bell said in an icy voice, “Anna wanted to be an actress. She hoped for a role in