The Cutthroat (Isaac Bell 10)

He searched her pretty face by the streetlamp. “Scarred?”

“From a fire.”

“Where?”

“Where you can’t see.”

“Can’t see? I saw you dance on the stage.”

“The corset covers it. A lamp exploded when I was a little girl. It looks horrible. I’ll never let anyone see.”

“You poor thing.”

“Well, you’re a poor thing, too.”

“Aren’t we a pair?”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so. And I promised you supper. My housekeeper will be quite put out if we let it get cold.”

“Is she there now?”

“She better be. Who do you think serves supper and washes the dishes?”

Still, she hesitated.

He took a chance and went for broke. “You know, Beatrice, in all my days of booking national tours, I’ve never met a dancer who wasn’t famished after her show.”

That got him a grin that wrinkled her pretty nose, and suddenly they were friends.

“I’m starving!”

He shrugged his cape off one shoulder and offered his arm.

“Step this way.”

Late that night, he propped Beatrice in a kitchen chair while he ate a cold supper. Just before dawn, he tied his cape around her, gathered her in his arms, and climbed down the steep stairs to the dock. The river smelled rank. The fierce current was so loud, he could barely hear her splash.

“Good night. You were lovely.”

How wrong he was about that.

32

Isaac Bell jumped off the extra-fare St. Louis Limited at Cincinnati and headed straight to the morgue in City Hospital. The talkative coroner, who greeted him on the front steps, started apologizing for the condition of the old building. “Dates back to the 1860s. We’re building a fine new hospital across town.”

“May I see the girl?”

A barge hand had spotted her butchered body jammed under an Ohio River wharf. The Van Dorn field office had already reported a dancer missing from the continuous vaudeville house where she worked, the same theater where the singer Rose Bloom had disappeared months earlier.

Beatrice Edmond had told a friend she was trying to land a part in a road company, but she had not said which one. The field office chief had found no one who had seen her at any of the Cincinnati theaters where tours were playing—not Tillie’s Nightmare, the Marie Dressler show at the Bethel, nor Alias Jimmy Valentine at the Lyric, nor Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at the Clark, and surely not Salome at the German.

“Her cape snagged on a wharf,” said the coroner, “or she’d have drifted to New Orleans before anyone noticed.”

“May I see her?” Bell asked again. Twenty-to-one, “her cape” was a standard department store item and twice the size a tiny girl would wear.

“Not much to see. The current banged her around, and the city sewage is as corrosive as you’d ex—”