Similar stories were appearing all over the city. A boy in scruffy clothing made his way across Times Square, dodging the people who were looking up at the electric signs. A few years ago, it was the Heatherbloom petticoats girl who stole everyone’s attention. Every night, crowds gathered and fuddy-duddies snorted as the sign sparked to life and the figure of a young girl skipped across the slashes of electric rain. The twinkling wind began to swirl, whipping up her flashing white skirts. The Heatherbloom girl was thirty feet tall and was hailed as the most realistic depiction of a woman ever seen. The sign was gone now, replaced by one for Omega Oil. People still stared. As the boy weaved in and out, his shoe brushed against a crumpled-up piece of paper. He stopped in the middle of the pulsing crowd to pick it up. The boy looked at it, dumbfounded. In a single line, the writer said they were being detained on Riverside Drive. It was signed Ruth Cruger.
The stunned boy stuffed the note in his pocket and ran to the nearest police station. He rang the bell under the green lamp. Fourth Branch was alerted, and they sent a squad to the address on the note. The cops nearly knocked the door down, but no one lived there. They pronounced it a joker’s fake. The detectives returned back to the Fourth Branch, grumbling. This was only one of hundreds of false leads.
There were now forty full detectives assigned to the Cruger case. They all reported to Captain Alonzo Cooper, the pug-faced head of the Fourth Branch gumshoes. As leads came in, Cooper shoved them off in groups of two in a coordinated hunt across the city. They tracked down every clue, as janitors, neighbors, and passersby saw Ruth Cruger everywhere they looked. She was with foreign men, on steamships, and in movie theaters all across the city. There were young women with clothes and hair like Ruth’s living in apartments across the hall from the nineties to Hackensack—yet none of them were really Ruth; they were just different mirrored images of the same face. In the city, during those weeks, if you were a girl with dark hair or if you carried ice skates, you were given a second look—or a hard glance to the ground.
By now, detectives had counted 699 tips that had come in about Ruth Cruger. They blamed Mr. Cruger’s own public bravado for causing this tidal wave of clues. No one still expected to see Ruth at the doorstep with a sheepish look on her face and an engagement ring on her finger. Her mother knew that Ruth would at least have called by now. That simple thought, if given enough room, was insurmountable.
A few years earlier, Woods had completely revamped the way detectives worked in the city. When Woods agreed to take the job of fourth assistant deputy police commissioner, he insisted that he travel to London to study the inner workings of the famed Scotland Yard. Woods privileged the detective—the thinker, the intelligentsia—more so than the average beat cop, whom he saw as more of a useful brawler. Woods had been head of the detective bureau himself and watched as interdepartmental infighting got case after case dismissed. When Woods returned from touring Scotland Yard, he had civility and organization on his mind.
Once in charge, Woods took his detectives out of the police houses and put them in their own nests, called branches, after the English way. They had single buildings with a head captain in charge of each branch. They looked like everyday New York houses, lacking even the signature green lamps that marked the more obvious police buildings. These places were different on the inside as well. Some of the detective branches had dorms and lounge areas. Third Branch had its own jail in the basement. The Fifth in the Bronx had a garden with arbors and vines. The branches were all interconnected by a sophisticated direct phone system.
Fourth Branch was a three-story house located at 342 West 123rd Street near Manhattan Avenue. Its territory covered Fifty-ninth Street on the south and Fifth Avenue on the east, all bound up by the meandering Hudson on the west. Fourth Branch was especially known for their cooking. When crime hid itself away, detectives would don aprons instead of guns and work the new gas oven. The Washington Times sent a reporter over for a feature piece on this new breed of sophisticated lawman. The reporter was surprised to see a detective on a bench reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.
“This,” the detective said, tapping his finger to the book, “is the only story of a criminal really worth reading. It is the third time I have accompanied Jean Valjean through his amazing sad adventures. I’m reading the story to the men, and we are getting a lot of enjoyment out of the experience.”
New York was impressed by Woods and his crime fighters. The Evening News even called him “an American Sherlock Holmes.” Woods liked that.
By February 28, two weeks after her disappearance, the Times issued an editorial on Ruth Cruger. “It is one of the impenetrable mysteries of recent times,” they wrote. “It is still too early to despair about Miss Cruger. She may be found, and we trust that she will, but it is the simple fact that, in spite of all the confident reports, all the misleading clues, all the neighborhood gossip, which seems to be utterly vapid and without foundation, nobody knows where she is, why she went away. Even in the complex life of crowded modern cities there are a few such mysteries.” There were now fifty detectives on the case, all reporting to Captain Alonzo Cooper of Fourth Branch.
*
The ice of winter finally began to melt and New Yorkers welcomed a world they thought had been lost to them forever. Coats came off, and rain washed the filthy streets. Captain Cooper ordered a launch from Harbor B to troll through the newly splashing waters. Even at night, a police boat pushed through Pelham Bay, flashing its lights over the floating white ice. The temperature was still cold enough that all of the inlets were still frozen into blocks. There were still places that resisted them.
Outside the city, the world was also changing. The leading news item of the day was the Zimmerman telegram, an intercepted, coded page in which Germany seemed to promise parts of the American Southwest to Mexico if it would invade the United States to distract it. Austria was massing troops along the Serbian frontier, and Germany, Italy, Russia, France, and even England were in a turmoil, with panics in their capitals. On March 5, Woodrow Wilson began his second term as president, and the prospects of war seemed less dim. In gray Atlantic waters, fifty more submarines were added to the American fleet to purr under the waters, “to send enemy vessels to the bottom.”
Ruth Cruger, though still lost, was transforming, too. The photograph of her that was being shared across the country had expanded from a portrait to include her full, buxom upper body. In an interview with the Sun, her mother revealed that Ruth had suffered through typhoid fever the previous August. Her illness had left her with a slightly weakened heart, though she otherwise had recovered well.
“We thought, perhaps, the weakened heart had caused her to collapse on the street,” Mrs. Cruger said. “But we’ve searched every hospital without learning anything about her.”