The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

“So you are quite sure you didn’t see this actress?”

“I am positive. All character bits for actresses and actors were filled long before we left New York.”

“There was no reading in New York?”

“None! Excuse me, young man, I have an opening night in five and a half hours.”

“Thank you, sir. I appreciate the time you gave me.” Dashwood extended his hand, and when he had the stage manager’s clamped firmly in his, he said, “You know, sir. You look so familiar.”

Henry Young preened, and admitted, “I trod the boards years ago. Perhaps you saw me in a play.”

Insulting a subject was no way to get him to talk freely, so James Dashwood did not confess that he spent his small amounts of free time and money at the movies.

“I’m afraid I haven’t been to a play since high school.”

“I toured high schools— Now, young man, as I said, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde opens in Boston tonight—provided a hundred disasters are set straight in the next five hours. Good-bye.”

Dashwood wired New York.

ANNA NEVER READ JEKYLL

Then the detective burrowed into the file drawers that contained the Boston field office’s collection of wanted posters. Apprenticing for Isaac Bell, James Dashwood had learned the power that came from memorizing criminals’ faces. He was sure he recognized the Jekyll and Hyde stage manager, and he wondered whether he had seen Henry Booker Young pictured with a price on his head.

8

An old woman walking a dog found Lillian Lent’s body the second morning after she died.

The Cutthroat, who had murdered her, slipped among the morbid, who were watching the police detectives, cops, and reporters, and edged close. They had kicked aside his cape, with which he had so lovingly covered her, and had thrown over her instead a soup-stained tablecloth. That said all that had to be said about so-called human decency.

He moved away and edged toward the bench on which her life had become his before he suddenly had to drag her corpse deep into the bushes. A trysting couple had interrupted him before he could continue with his blade. This morning he had been unable to resist the impulse to attempt to recover the moment by inhaling the atmosphere.

The wind stirred the leaves under the bench. Suddenly he saw the white blur of a handkerchief. He patted his pocket, but even twenty paces away he knew it was his by the gleam of pure silk. White as snow, except for the red splash of his embroidered initials.

He searched his coat, found a half-empty packet of cigarettes, rubbed the wrapper against the inside of his pocket, then strode to the bench and knelt to retrieve his handkerchief.

“What have you got there?”

A sharp-eyed cop had followed him.

“What is that you’re holding?”

“I noticed something that could have been dropped by the man who killed the poor girl,” the Cutthroat answered.

“Hand that over!”

“I presume officers of the Boston Police Department read Mark Twain.”

“What?”

“Pudd’nhead Wilson? Twain’s plot turns on the science of fingerprint identification.”

He rose with the cigarette packet clasped in his handkerchief and held it before the cop. “Don’t touch it! Here, give me your helmet. I’ll drop this inside, and your detectives can retrieve it at the station house without smudging the fingerprints.”

The cop whipped off his helmet and turned it over like a bowl. The Cutthroat dropped the cigarettes inside.

“Thank you, sir.”

“The least a citizen can do,” said the Cutthroat. “Remember