The Cutthroat

Bell returned his smile. Then his handsome features hardened and his eyes grew cold, and he said firmly, with no reservation, “We’re the only ones who can stop him, Joe. Van Dorns can hunt everywhere in the country. And we never give up.”

“O.K.! Send the blooming thing.”

* * *

Isaac Bell telegraphed the All Field Offices Alert on the private wire, ordering detectives across the continent to scour their cities and surrounding regions for similar unsolved murders in recent years. He instructed them, as he had Research, to pay particular attention to disappearances of petite blond women. And he called for a fresh look at past discoveries of skeletons and body parts.

Bell followed up with personal telephone calls to offices within the limits of the long-distance system. It had been extended just this year as far west as Denver.

Field offices that Bell could not reach by long-distance received long letters sent by Morkrum Printing Telegraph.

Bell went to Grady Forrer’s rabbit warren of back rooms to assign the Research Department the task of tracing news reports of unsolved killings. “I have a question: When did this start?”

“What do you mean, Isaac?” asked Forrer.

“Was Anna Waterbury his first victim?”

“Good question.” Grady Forrer looked around at his army of unkempt bleary-eyed researchers. “You heard Mr. Bell. Do you have any questions for him?”

“I do, Mr. Bell,” said a scholarly-looking, middle-aged researcher. “The victim’s name was Anna Genevieve Pape. Why do you always call her Anna Waterbury instead of Anna Pape?”

“Because she wanted to be Anna Waterbury,” said Isaac Bell.

12

“There isn’t a body buried in L.A. that Tim Holian can’t jab with a spade.”

The subject of the oft-spoken compliment — Timothy J. Holian, the formidable chief of the Los Angeles, California, Van Dorn field office — shambled in and out of city agencies, perspiring freely, on a hot, dry spring day. He wore a battered panama hat that most private detectives would have long since handed down to a gardener, a greasy necktie, and an ill-cut sack suit hung heavy with pistols. He limped, having taken four bullets from the German spy Christian Semmler’s gunmen, two of whom he’d shot dead, in the blazing Thief case shoot-out that had all but annihilated the Los Angeles field office the year before.

The compliment referred to metaphorical bodies — the secrets behind scandals. There wasn’t a government clerk in the city’s morgue, hospitals, and police stations who wouldn’t do the Van Dorn a favor for cash or valuable information that could be used against enemies. If flesh-and-blood bodies were what Tim Holian wanted, flesh-and-blood bodies Tim Holian would have.

He soon shambled back to the office with lists of young women who had disappeared, lists of petite blond murder victims, lists of nameless bodies, and lists of mutilations. These he coordinated with lists his detectives had compiled from interviews with homicide cops and newspaper police reporters. Even after culling the unlikely from the likely, they still had a chilling number of strangled victims — six in the past three years, four of them hopeful actresses, one prostitute, and one librarian walking home alone.

Tim Holian telegraphed the results to New York, care of Chief Investigator Isaac Bell. He followed up by composing a personal letter for Bell. He was still writing it when the company wire rattled out a query from Bell himself:

EXPLANATION

Holian wired a shortened version of his letter, wherein he speculated that the extraordinary number of possible victims might testify to the lure of the filming of movies, a fast-growing business that drew so many young people to Los Angeles. This drew a second query from Bell.

WHY NONE BEFORE 1908?

Tim Holian wired back that 1908 marked the beginning of a flood of movie makers from the East Coast. Then he speculated:

MAYBE KILLER MOVIE MAN

Bell did not reply.

* * *

Charlie Post, chief of the one-man Denver field office, took a fresh look at an awful murder that occurred only last year. The eviscerated body of a doctor’s wife had been found in a gold smelter. She was from a prominent Colorado family, and her husband had been swiftly tried, convicted, and hung for the crime. The entire incident would have been a comedy of errors if it hadn’t been tragic.

Whoever had killed her — and Isaac Bell’s All Field Offices Alert had raised new doubts in a case that Post had never liked — had thrown her body into the smelter’s charge hopper. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have boiled to oblivion. But labor and owner hatreds being ferocious as they were in Denver, saboteurs had drawn the furnace fires to ruin the smelter. The molten ore had cooled, and when the killer dumped her body, it bounced on a hardened mass of ore and slag, where it was found the next morning by scab laborers imported to break the strike.