The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

P.S. Near as I can tell, she’s the only one in Albuquerque. I looked into the other killings in town. All stemmed plausibly from misunderstandings between tetchy acquaintances.

Horace Bronson, chief of the San Francisco field office, who had just returned home from a stint running the Van Dorn overseas outpost in Paris, was greeted by a Morkrum printed telegram from his old friend Isaac Bell. This called for a three-track investigation. Bronson sent his apprentices to San Francisco’s theaters and his seasoned operators to the Barbary Coast brothels. He himself killed two birds with one stone by visiting his friends among the police to establish that he was back in town while inquiring about missing young women and unsolved strangulations.

After wiring Bell his office’s initial assessment, Bronson, too, wrote a letter.

. . . I am somewhat amazed by how many and how long. Obviously, not every one of these girls’ murders were committed by the same person. But many at least could have been, and they go back ten years or more. And the terrible thing, my friend, is this: one or two a year adds up to relentless slaughter.

Isaac Bell forwarded the Los Angeles, Denver, Albuquerque, and San Francisco reports to the detectives of the Anna Squad with a terse cover letter.

The Anna Squad is now named the Cutthroat Squad.

13

Connections trickled in from the field offices, and Isaac Bell saw hints of patterns.

Some bodies were draped under bloodstained capes. The capes were alike, but not identical, yet all were standard factory-made items that could be purchased in ordinary department stores. The murderer could easily replace them without being traced.

Fair-haired young victims like Anna Waterbury, Lillian Lent, and Mary Beth Winthrop turned out to be mostly actresses in theater and vaudeville and the circus, but some were prostitutes. What these poor souls had in common was what he had told Van Dorn: these were girls on their own, without family or husbands to protect them.

Of the mutilated bodies, many had their necks broken.

Coroners and cops recalled strange marks carved in the girls’ skin.

Bell told Joseph Van Dorn, “I stood in with the Herkimer County coroner. The man barely noticed these cuts. When I remarked on them, he wrote them in his notes as ‘superficial stab wounds.’ It never occurred to him she was already dead before he took out his knife.”

“What do you suppose they mean?”

“I’m racking my brains. I have no idea.”

“I think they’re a calling card,” said Van Dorn.

“Some sort of message,” Bell agreed.

“Lunatic.”

“But no less dangerous for it, and too slick to get caught.”

Another pattern formed, the most disturbing yet. Some bodies had been hidden in old cellars, abandoned buildings, and deep woods.

“How many were never found?” Bell wondered aloud.

Van Dorn said, “You’ve got a monster on your hands, Isaac.”

“A monster who travels. He’s left victims in Kansas City, San Francisco, St. Louis, Chicago—the list keeps growing.”

“A traveling man,” mused Van Dorn. “A salesman? Or a railroad man? How long has this been going on?”

Bell answered bleakly, “T

he Chicago field office just found one of his capes in an abandoned lake boat. Inside was a skeleton.”

“How long” became almost unbelievable when Grady Forrer brought Bell a clipping from the Brooklyn Eagle dated July 24, 1891. The paper made the usual Jack the Ripper comparison, though to be fair to the writer, this killing went so far back that it was not long after the London rampage.

“If this is him, too, he’s been killing girls for twenty years.”

“What do you suppose drives him?” Marion asked late at night. Bell had staggered in at two o’clock and sat with her in bone-weary silence.

“No motive of the sort we understand. He’s not killing for gain, or revenge, or love. He’s just doing what he feels like doing.”