The Cutthroat

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.”

“There’s a stage name,” said Archie Abbott.

“Actually, she was born with it, a pretty little Irish girl— There you have it, gents,” Forrer said. “And lady,” he added with a courtly bow to Helen Mills. “Two questions for you to contemplate: What takes our man on this route? Which is to ask, what’s his line? And where is he headed next?”

“Three questions,” said Isaac Bell. “Can the Cutthroat Squad detect where he is headed next before he kills some poor girl when he gets there?”

31

Prospering for a century on a big bend of the Ohio River, Cincinnati was accustomed to spectacular arrivals. Eight thousand steamboats had landed in the single year of 1852, with priceless cargo, and with ambitious passengers eager to share in her boomtown riches. In the dark days of the Civil War, Cincinnatians improvised a pontoon bridge of coal barges for fifty thousand Union troops who had arrived in the nick of time to block a Confederate Army invasion. And when the Kaiser’s brother — the much-loved Prince Henry of Prussia — arrived on his American tour, the police had to shoo adoring mobs off the roofs of his train cars while the United German Singing Societies serenaded him.

But no arrival could prepare Cincinnati for the Jekyll & Hyde Special.

For days in advance, newspaper writers described the show train in awed detail — Jackson Barrett and John Buchanan’s private cars, decorated to the actor-managers’ personal taste; the leading actors’ and actresses’ lavish staterooms; the dormitory cars, stacked with Pullman berths, for players, stagehands, carpenters, electricians, clerks, publicists, accountants, and musicians; the dining car, “the heart of the train that serves mouthwatering repasts all round the clock”; the freight cars that carried the elaborate sets; and the express/baggage car, with its monumental steel safe for the box office receipts, guarded by a heavily armed, ice-eyed agent of Van Dorn Protective Services, the trusted subsidiary of the famous detective agency that furnished house detectives for first class hotels, and as jewelers’ escorts, bodyguards, and for discreet assistance to William Howard Taft’s Secret Service squad when the president ventured from the White House — ten gleaming red cars in all — cannonballed from city to city by a high-wheeled Atlantic 4-4-2 Deaver-built locomotive that was, her engineer confided to the Cincinnati Enquirer, “a good steamer and rides easy.”

Telegraph operators relayed its progress as it thundered south through Detroit. Would the Jekyll & Hyde Special deliver actors, scenery, and musicians in time to stage the show for their first-night curtain?

No one knew that Barrett and Buchanan had deliberately scheduled a close-run arrival to build suspense and encourage the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad to clear tracks for their special rather than risk the wrath of a city that loved its theaters. Betting pools sprang up in saloons, beer gardens, and gentlemen’s clubs, and fortunes changed hands for side bets on the precise moments it would tear past intervening stations.

Suddenly, when it was ten miles out and no greater excitement could be imagined, a blood-red biplane — the spitting image of the airplane everyone had heard was in the play — soared over the city, skimmed the river, and swooped under the Roebling suspension bridge.

* * *

The most unlikely event tripped up the Cutthroat.

This sweet little dancer’s upturned nose was as sensitive as his.

“I smell spirit gum.”