“Where is he?” Bell demanded.
“It’s not him,” said Fulton wearily. He seemed exhausted, Bell thought, and for the first time he wondered if Mack should be considering retirement. Always lean, his face was shrunken as a cadaver’s.
“Not who blew the train?”
“Oh, he blew the train all right,” said Kisley, whose trademark three-piece checkerboard suit was caked with dust. Wally looked as tired as Mack but not ill. “Only he’s not the Wrecker. Go ahead, you take a crack at him.”
“You’ll have a better chance of getting him to talk. He sure as hell won’t admit a word to us.”
“Why would he talk to me?”
“Old friend of yours,” Fulton explained cryptically. He and Kisley were both twenty years older than Bell, celebrated veterans and friends, who were free to say whatever popped in their heads even though Bell was boss of the Wrecker investigation.
“I’d knock it out of him,” said the sheriff. “But your boys said to wait for you, and the railroad company tells me Van Dorn calls the tune. Damned foolishness, in my opinion. But no one’s asking my opinion.”
Bell strode into the room where they had the prisoner manacled to a table affixed solidly to the stone floor. An “old friend,” to be sure, the prisoner was Jake Dunn, a safecracker. On the end of the table was a neat, banded stack of crisp five-dollar bills, five hundred dollars’ worth, according to the sheriff, clearly payment for services rendered. Bell’s first grim thought was that now the Wrecker was hiring accomplices to do his murderous work for him. Which means he could strike anywhere and be long gone before the strike happened.
“Jake, what in blazes have you gotten mixed up in this time?”
“Hello, Mr. Bell. Haven’t seen you since you sent me to San Quentin.”
Bell sat quietly and looked him over. San Quentin had not been kind to the safecracker. He looked twenty years older, a hollow shell of the hard case he had been. His hands were shaking so hard it was difficult to imagine him setting a charge without detonating it accidentally. Relieved at first to see a familiar face, Dunn shriveled now under Bell’s gaze.
“Blowing Wells Fargo safes is robbery, Jake. Wrecking passenger trains is murder. The man who paid you that money has killed innocent people by the dozen.”
“I didn’t know we were wrecking the train.”
“You didn’t know that blowing the rails out from under a speeding train would cause a wreck?” Bell said in disbelief, his face dark with disgust. “What did you think would happen?”
The prisoner hung his head.
“Jake! What did you think would happen?”
“You gotta believe me, Mr. Bell. He told me to blow the rail so the train would stop so they could hit the express car. I didn’t know he was gonna put her on the ground.”
“What do you mean? You’re the one who lit the fuse.”
“He switched fuses on me. I thought I was lighting a fast fuse that would detonate the charge in time for the train to stop. Instead, it burned slow. I couldn’t believe my eyes, Mr. Bell. It was burning so slow the train was going to run right over the charge. I tried to stop it.”
Bell stared at him coldly.
“That’s how they caught me, Mr. Bell. I ran after it, trying to stomp it out. Too late. They saw me, and after she hit the ground they lit out after me like I was the guy who shot McKinley.”
“Jake, you’ve got the hangman’s rope around your neck and one way to get it loose. Take me to the man who paid you this money.”
Jake Dunn shook his head violently. He looked, Bell thought, frantic as a wolf with a leg caught in a trap. But no, not a wolf. There was no raw power in him, no nobility. Truth be told, Dunn looked like a mongrel dog that had fallen for bait left for bigger game.
“Where is he, Jake?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why are you lying to me, Jake?”
“I didn’t kill nobody.”
“You wrecked a train, Jake. You’re damned lucky you didn’t kill anybody. If they don’t hang you, they’ll put you in the penitentiary for the rest of your life.”
“I didn’t kill nobody.”
Bell changed tactics abruptly.
“How’d you happen to get out of prison so soon, Jake? What did you serve, three years? Why’d they let you go?”
Jake regarded Bell with eyes that were suddenly wide open and guileless. “I got the cancer.”
Bell was taken aback. He had no truck with lawbreakers, but a killing disease reduced a criminal to just an ordinary man. Jake Dunn was no innocent, but he was quite suddenly a victim who would suffer pain and fear and despair. “I’m sorry, Jake. I didn’t realize.”
“I guess they figured to set me loose to die on my own. I needed the money. That’s how I took this job.”
“Jake, you were always a craftsman, never a killer. Why are you covering for a killer?” Bell pressed.
Jake answered in a hoarse whisper. “He’s in the livery stable on Twenty-fourth, across the tracks.”
Bell snapped his fingers. Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton rushed to his side. “Twenty-fourth Street,” said Bell. “Livery stable. Cover it, station the sheriff’s deputies on the outer perimeter, and wait for me.”
Jake looked up. “He’s not going anywhere, Mr. Bell.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I went back to get my second half of the money, I found him upstairs, in one of the rooms they rent out.”
“Found him? What do you mean, dead?”
“Slit his throat. I was afraid to tell-they’d pin that on me, too.”
“Slit his throat?”Bell demanded. “Or stabbed?”
Jake ran a hand through his thinning hair. “Stabbed, I guess.”
“Did you see a knife?”
“No.”
“Was he run through? Did the wound exit the back of his neck?”
“I didn’t stick around to examine him close, Mr. Bell. Like I said, I knew they’d blame me.”
“Get over there,” Bell told Kisley and Fulton. “Sheriff, would you send a doctor? See if he can reckon what killed him and how long he’s been dead.”
“Where will you be, Isaac?”
Another dead end, thought Bell. The Wrecker wasn’t just lucky, he made his own luck. “Railroad station,” he answered without a lot of hope. “See if any ticket clerks recall selling him a ticket out of here.”
He took copies of the lumberjack’s drawing to Union Depot, a multigabled, two-story building with a tall clock tower, and queried the clerks. Then, driven in a Ford by a railway police official through tree-lined neighborhoods of cottages with jigsaw woodwork, he visited the homes of clerks and supervisors who were off work that day. Bell showed the drawing to each man, and when the man did not recognize the face, Bell showed him an altered version with a beard. No one recognized either face.
How did the Wrecker get out of Ogden? Bell wondered.
The answer was easy. The city was served by nine different railroads. Hundreds, if not thousands, of passengers passed through it every day. By now, the Wrecker had to know that the Van Dorn Agency was hunting him. Which meant he would choose his targets more carefully when it came to preparing his escapes.
Bell enlisted Van Dorn agents from the Ogden office to canvass hotels, on the odd chance that the Wrecker had stayed in the junction city. No front-desk clerk recognized either drawing. At the Broom, an expensive, three-story brick hotel, the proprietor of the cigar store thought he might have served a customer who looked like the picture with the beard. A waitress in the ice-cream parlor remembered a man who looked like the clean-shaven version. He had stuck in her mind because he was so handsome. But she had seen him only once, and that was three days ago.
Kisley and Fulton caught up with Bell in the spartan Van Dorn office, one large room on the wrong side of Twenty-fifth Street, which was a wide boulevard divided by electric-streetcar tracks. The side of the street that served the legitimate needs of railroad passengers using the station was lined with restaurants, tailors, barbers, soda fountains, ice-cream parlors, and a Chinese laundry, each shaded by a colorful awning. Van Dorn’s side housed saloons, rooming houses, gambling casinos, and hotels fronting for brothels.