“He’s not most criminals.”
“I know.” I looked down at the scar on the edge of the desk, the deep cut in the wood I’d first noticed on the day Jack Mortenson was shot by counterfeiters so long ago. I had seen his blood. I knew he was human. “I’m not most operatives either, am I?”
“If anyone can do it, Warne, you can.”
He reached into a drawer and laid my pistol on the desk matter-of-factly, with no fanfare. I retrieved it the same way. We did not say good-bye.
After only hours in Chicago, with the same suitcase never unpacked, I was gone again. I rode the night train to Cincinnati and committed myself to the investigation with a grim enthusiasm.
In the course of a few days, I visited the bank, talked to the manager, discussed the matter with the police, even viewed the body of the poor slain teller, who’d had no family to claim him. In a way, it was like any other case: I could only approach it methodically, one step at a time, and chip away at the lies and confusion and secrets until I reached the core truth.
It was a simple bank job in most ways, similar to countless other crimes of its type. The main differences were the fatality—most robberies of this type were perpetrated by masked men who left the bank employees alive—and the fact that a single man appeared to have taken on the entire job himself. No accomplices had been spotted, let alone named. He just seemed to walk into the bank one day, kill a teller, and make off with over a hundred thousand dollars. But of course, it couldn’t be that simple. The things that looked the simplest were often the most complex. I knew enough to dig deep.
But it was hard. The first week passed, then the second. I returned to my hotel every night dizzy with impatience. There were days when I lay down sobbing with frustration when promising information lost its promise. There were more bad days than good. I only kept on because I knew what this man had taken from me and what I owed him in return.
I began to canvass the neighborhood around the bank in ever-widening circles, not skipping a single door. I spoke with clerks and lawyers, grocers and musicians, bartenders and security guards. At last, my questioning bore fruit: the watchmaker who had recently opened a shop in the storefront neighboring the bank had disappeared the day after the robbery. The timing was suspicious, and I began to search for the watchmaker, looking for signs that he’d been the accomplice no one had suspected.
For a second and third time, I returned to the Cincinnati morgue, hardly as large or as clean as the Cook County one I knew better, and I was again rewarded with more information. There were two unidentified bodies, bearing some resemblance to each other, with sparse brown hair, broad shoulders, and thick waists. It was hard to compare their faces, as both had been dispatched with a single shot to the back of the skull, but the similarity of the wounds was another clue I sorely needed. One was the dead watchmaker, William Hudson. Further inquiries revealed that the other was his brother, Carl Hudson, who had not been reported either dead or missing and whose last known place of residence was a row house near the harbor in Baltimore. It seemed likely that the watchmaker had been in on the robbery, slain so he could tell no tales, and his brother an unlucky casualty.
It was the slimmest of leads, but it was the only one I had, and I would not fail to follow it. I did not tell the authorities. I went in person, and I went armed.
? ? ?
Another train ride, alone, on the way to an uncertain future. The car swayed gently, but I couldn’t rest. I hadn’t been back to Baltimore since the events before Lincoln’s inauguration. Tim had been with me then, but we hadn’t known that we were wasting time not loving each other. There was so much we hadn’t known.
I felt a pang when I rode past the abandoned cabin on my way into the city. I told myself that I would visit, thinking of Tim, once Mortenson was in custody. But I didn’t know if I would survive the next few days, and if I admitted the truth to myself, my plans for Mortenson didn’t involve custody at all.
Carl Hudson’s row house was tidy and empty. I knocked on the door, and hearing no answer, I picked the lock and entered. Each small room was easy to take in at a glance, and when I stood in the last room, the kitchen, it was clear I would not find Mortenson here. I thought about searching the rooms for the money, which would prove his guilt, but it wasn’t the money I wanted.
I knew he was nearby. It sounds odd, but I recognized the smell of him. Even after all the years that had passed, I knew he had been there. I weighed my options—Wait for him to return? Call the local authorities?—and then I realized it was time for the noon meal. There was no food in the house’s kitchen, and it had clearly not been used in months. Therefore, it was likely that he frequented the nearest saloon for his meals.
And indeed, I found him two blocks away, in a good-sized saloon called the Tender Heart, just steps from bustling Commerce Street. He sat alone at a table with a mug of beer and a ham sandwich. I almost laughed. It was as if he were any man, any normal person, and not a killer and a fiend.
The years had changed him. He was less pale, having clearly spent enough time in the sun to tan his skin a darker shade. But he was more wiry, less flesh and more bone, so even more like a skeleton than he had ever been. My body convulsed at the sight of him. Seeing him was the most welcome and most unwelcome sight possible, all at once. I was finally face-to-face with the person responsible for Tim’s death, and the knowledge sang through every muscle, demanding action, demanding justice.
A smart woman would have called the police, but I would not wait. I strode over to his table and sat down across from him. He started—who wouldn’t?—but quickly covered his shock with an ugly, oily grin.
“It’s you,” he said. “The girl.”