Night Probe! (Dirk Pitt 6)

Pitt looked again. "Okay, I see them."

"You'll note that there are no fracture lines on the sample from the bridge to your right. The deformation is too extreme to have come from natural causes. We put specimens of it under a scanning electron microscope, which shows us the characteristic electrons in each element present. The results revealed residue from iron sulfide."

"What does it all mean?"

"What it all means, Mr. Pitt, is that the DeauvilleHudson bridge was cleverly. and systematically blown up."

"A grisly business," Preston Beatty exclaimed with an odd sort of pleasure. "One thing to butcher a human body, but quite another to serve it for dinner."

"Would you care for another beer?" asked Pitt.

"Please." Beatty downed the final swallow in his glass. "Fascinating people, Hattie and Nathan Pilcher.

You might say they came up with the perfect solution for disposing of the corpus delicti." He motioned around the bar, which was busy with the early evening two-for-one drinks crowd. "This tavern

we're sitting in rests on the very foundations of Pilcher's inn. The townspeople of Poughkeepsie burned down the original in 1823 when they learned of the ghastly deeds that had gone on behind its walls."

Pitt gestured for a barmaid. "What you're saying is that the Pilchers murdered overnight guests for their money and then put them on the menu."

"Yes, exactly." It was clear that Beatty was in his element. He recited the events with relish. "No way to take a body count, of course. A few scattered bones were dug up. But the best guess is that the Pilchers cooked between fifteen and twenty innocent travelers in the five years they were in business."

Professor Beatty was considered the leading authority on unsolved crimes. His books sold widely in Canada and the United States and had on occasion touched the nonfiction best-seller lists. He slouched comfortably in the booth and peered at Pitt through blue-green eyes over a salt-and-pepper beard. His age, Pitt guessed from the stern, craggy features and the silver-edged hair, was late forties. He looked more like a hardened pirate than a writer.

"The truly incredible part," Beatty continued, "is how the killers were exposed."

"A restaurant critic gave them a bad review," Pitt suggested.

"You're closer than you know." Beatty laughed. "One evening a retired sea captain stopped overnight.

He was accompanied by a manservant, a Melanesian he'd brought on board his ship many years before in the Solomon Islands. Unfortunately for the Pilchers, the Melanesian had once been a cannibal and his educated taste buds correctly identified the meat in the stew."

"Not very appetizing," said Pitt. "So what happened to the Pilchers? Were they executed?"

"No, while awaiting trial they escaped and were never seen again."

The beers arrived and Beatty paused while Pitt signed the tab.

"I've pored through old crime reports here and in Canada trying to connect their modus operandi with later unsolved murders, but they passed into oblivion along with Jack the Ripper.

"And Clement Massey," said Pitt, broaching the subject on his mind.

"Ah, yes, Clement Massey, alias Dapper Doyle." Beatty spoke as if fondly recalling a favorite relative.

"A robber years ahead of his time. He could have given lessons to the best of them."

"He was that good?"

"Massey had style and was incredibly shrewd. He planned all his jobs so they looked like the work of rival gangs. As near as I can figure, he pulled off six bank holdups and three train robberies that were blamed on someone else."

"What was his background?"

"Came from a wealthy Boston family. Graduated Harvard summa cum laude. Established a thriving law practice that catered to the social elite of Providence. Married a prominent socialite who bore him five children. Elected twice to the Massachusetts senate."

"Why would he rob banks?" Pitt asked incredulously.

"For the hell of it," Beatty replied. "As it turns out, he handed over every penny of his ill-gotten gains to charity."

"How come he was never glamorized by the newspapers or old pulp magazines?"