“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.”