Clive Cussler - The Chase

Murphy was furiously wielding a hammer and didn’t hear Bell approach. A great torrent of dark brown hair flowed around his neck and shoulders. Most of the lawmen in the West were not fat but lean and angular. Murphy had the body of a blacksmith rather than a sheriff. The muscles in his arms looked like tree trunks, and he had the neck of an ox.

“Sheriff Murphy!” Bell shouted over the pounding of the hammer against nails.

Murphy stopped with his hammer in midair and turned. He stared at Bell as he might stare at a coyote. “Yes, I’m Murphy. But, as you can see, I’m busy.”

“You can keep working,” said Bell. “I’m with the Van Dorn Detective Agency and would like to ask you a few questions about the bank robbery and murders a few months ago.”

The name Van Dorn was respected among law enforcement circles, and Murphy laid down the hammer and pointed inside the little house. “Come inside. The place is a bit of a mess, but I have coffee on the stove.”

“After that climb up the hill, a cup of water would be nice.”

“Sorry, the well got befouled by the flood and isn’t fit to drink, but I carried a gallon up from a horse trough in town.”

“Coffee it is,” said Bell with a measure of trepidation.

Murphy led Bell into the house and offered him a chair at the kitchen table. There was no sign of the presence of a woman, so Bell assumed that Murphy was a bachelor. The sheriff poured two coffees in tin cups from an enamel pot that sat on the wood-burning stove.

“I don’t know how I can help you, Mr. Bell. I sent a copy of my findings to your agency in Chicago.”

“You neglected to mention Jack Carson’s sighting.”

Murphy laughed. “The guy on a motorcycle? I don’t believe what Jack said he saw. The description didn’t fit anyone I knew in town.”

“The bandit could have changed his disguise,” Bell suggested.

“There was no time for him to completely alter his appearance, retrieve his motorcycle, and ride off into the blue.”

“The rider and his machine were never seen again?”

Murphy shrugged. “Strikes me odd that nobody else saw him except Jack. A man on the only motorcycle in town is bound to be noticed. And how could he ride out of town without leaving a trail?”

“I admit it sounds a bit far-fetched,” said Bell, not wanting to discard the sighting.

“Jack Carson was an upstanding citizen not noted for being a hard drinker or a teller of tall tales. But I believe he was hallucinating.”

“Was there any other evidence discovered that wasn’t in your report?”

“There was something found after I sent the report to Chicago. Murphy rose from the kitchen table and pulled open a drawer of a rolltop desk. He passed Bell a brass shell casing. “This was found two weeks later, by a young boy playing on the floor of the bank while his father made a deposit. It was under a carpet. The bandit must have missed it.”

Bell studied the cartridge. “Thirty-eight caliber. If it was ejected, it must have come from an automatic weapon, probably a Colt.”

“That was my guess, too.”

“May I keep it?” asked Bell.

“Sure. But I doubt you’ll learn anything from it, except knowing it came from the bandit’s gun. And even that is not cold, hard evidence.”

“If not the bandit, then where did it come from?”

Murphy held up his hands in a helpless gesture. “I can’t begin to guess.”

Bell carefully held the cartridge in the palm of his hand. “Hopefully, we can obtain the bandit’s fingerprints.”

Murphy grinned. “You’ll find mine as well as the young boy’s and two of my deputies’.”

“Still,” said Bell optimistically, “our experts may be able to pull a print. We won’t need a sample of the boy who found it. His print would be small. But I would like sample prints of you and your deputies. You can send them to my Chicago office.”

“I’ve never taken a fingerprint,” said Murphy. “I’m not at all sure how it’s done.”

“The science has been around for centuries, but only in the past few years is it catching on with law enforcement. The impressions on an object—in this case, the cartridge—are created by the ridges on the skin. When the object is handled, the perspiration and oils are transferred to it, leaving an impression of the fingertip-ridge pattern. To record the prints, a fine powder like ground-up graphite from a pencil is dusted on the surface. Then a piece of tape is used to lift the print for study.”

Murphy sipped at his coffee. “I’ll give it a try.”

Bell thanked the sheriff and walked down the stairway. Three hours later, he was on a train back to Denver.

CROMWELL’S CHAUFFEUR DROVE THE 1906 ROLLS Royce Brougham, made by the London coach maker Barker, with its six-cylinder, thirty-horsepower engine, from the garage to the front of the palatial Nob Hill mansion Cromwell had designed himself and constructed from white marble blocks cut and hauled by railroad from a quarry in Colorado. The front end had the appearance of a Greek temple, with high fluted columns, while the rest of the house was more simply designed, with arched windows, and a cornice that crowned the walls.

While the chauffeur, Abner Weed, a stony-faced Irishman whom Cromwell hired more for his experience as a wrestler than his expertise behind the wheel of an automobile, stood patiently by the Rolls out front, Cromwell waited for his sister in his study, sprawled comfortably on a leather sofa, listening to Strauss waltzes on an Edison cylinder phonograph. He was conservatively dressed in a dark wool suit. After listening to “Voices of Spring,” he changed cylinders and played Tales from the Vienna Wood. The cylinders played two minutes of music each.

Cromwell glanced up from the machine as his sister came into the room wearing a doeskin dress that fell around her nicely curved calves.

“A bit risqué, aren’t we?” he said, eyeing her exposed flesh.

She spun around, swirling the skirt and showing off her legs up to midthigh. “Since we’re going slumming on the Barbary Coast, I thought I’d dress like a soiled dove.”

“Just be sure you don’t act like one.”

He rose from the sofa, turned off the phonograph, and held up her coat so she could slip into it. Even with his shoe lifts, he stood the same height as his sister. Then he followed her through the large, intricately carved front doors to the drive and the waiting Rolls-Royce. Abner, attired in his liveried uniform with shiny black boots, stood at attention, holding open the rear door. The Rolls was a town car, with an enclosed passenger compartment, the chauffeur in the open air with nothing but the windshield to protect him. As soon as Cromwell’s sister was settled, he instructed the driver where to go. Abner shifted gears and the big car rolled silently over the granite stones laid in the street.

“This is the first opportunity we’ve had to talk since I came home,” said Cromwell, secure in the knowledge that the driver could not hear their conversation through the divider window separating the front and rear seats.

“I know that your trip to Salt Lake City was successful. And our bank is another seven hundred thousand dollars richer.”

“You haven’t told me how you made out in Denver.”

“Your spies in the Van Dorn Agency were quite accurate in their assessment of the investigation. The Denver office has taken on the job of lead investigator in the hunt for the Butcher Bandit.”

“I hate being called that. I would have preferred something with more swank.”

“Like what, pray tell?” she asked, laughing.

“The Stylish Spirit.”

She rolled her eyes. “I doubt that newspaper editors would be enthused with that one.”