Clive Cussler - The Assassin

“It’s been buried two weeks.”

“Dig it up!”

The coroner rose to his feet. He was nearly as tall as Isaac Bell and forty pounds heavier. “I’ll give you fair warning, mister, get lost while you still can. I paid my way through medical school with money I won in the prize ring.”

Isaac shrugged out of his coat and removed his hat. “As we have no gloves, I presume you’ll accommodate me with bare knuckles?”

“What did you do to your hand?” asked Archie Abbott.

“Cut it shaving,” said Bell. “What do you think of that water tank?”

They were pacing Fort Scott’s St. Louis — San Francisco Railway station platform where refiner Reed Riggs had fallen to his death. “Possible,” said Archie, imagining a rifle shot from the top of a tank in the Frisco train yard to where they stood on the platform. “I also like that signal tower. In fact, I like it better. Good angle from the roof.”

“Except how did he climb up there without the dispatchers noticing?”

“Climbed up in the dark while a train rumbled by.”

“How’d he get down?”

“Waited for night.”

“But what if he missed his shot and someone noticed him? He would be trapped with no escape.”

“You’re sure that Riggs was shot?”

“No,” said Bell, “not positive. There’s definitely a hole in his skull. In a piece of the temporal bone, which wasn’t shattered. But it could have been pierced by something other than a bullet. Banged against a railroad spike or a chunk of gravel.”

“What did the coroner think?”

“He was inclined to agree with my assessment.”

Bell and Archie took the train down to Coffeyville, a booming refinery town just above the Kansas — Indian Territory border. They located Albert Hill’s refinery and the tank in which Hill had died while repairing the agitator.

They looked for sight lines. They climbed to the roof of the boiler house, four hundred yards’ distance, then to the roof of the barrel house. Both offered uninterrupted shots at the tank. The barrel house had its own freight siding to receive the lumber trains that delivered wood for the staves.

“Rides in and out,” said Archie.

“I’d go for the boiler house,” said Bell. “They’d never hear a shot over the roar of the furnaces.”

“If there was a shot.”

“I told you,” said Bell. “Albert Hill’s number two cervical vertebra appeared to have been nicked.”

Archie said, “Based on how he killed Spike Hopewell, the assassin is capable of hitting both Hill and Riggs. But he’s one lucky assassin that no one saw him. Or coolly deliberate in choosing his moment.”

Isaac Bell disagreed. “That may be true of Albert Hill. But when Riggs was shot, the timing was dictated by the approach of the locomotive. In both cases, the shots were fired by a marksman as calculating and accurate as the killer who shot Spike Hopewell.”

“If there were shots fired at all,” said Archie, and Wally Kisley agreed, saying, “There could have been shots, and shots would explain how the victims happened to fall, but they could have just as easily fallen as Spike Hopewell suggested to Isaac: one drunk, one overcome by fumes.”

Bell said, “I have Grady Forrer looking into their backgrounds.” Forrer was head of Van Dorn Research.

Isaac Bell went looking for Edna Matters Hock and found her loading her tent onto her buckboard. He gave her a hand. “Where you headed?”

“Pittsburgh.”

“In a wagon?”

“Pittsburgh, Kansas.”

“I was going to ask could you print me that aerial photograph your sister snapped, but you’ve packed your Kodak machine…”

“Actually, I made an extra. I thought you’d ask to see it.”

She had it in an envelope. She handed it to Bell. “Oh, there’s a second photograph that Nellie took before the fire. So you have a before the fire and an after.”

“She flew over before?”

“By coincidence. She was hoping to address a convention in Fort Scott, but the wind changed and the balloon drifted over here. I hope the pictures help.”

Bell thanked her warmly. “Speaking of coincidence,” he told her, “my father served as an intelligence officer in the Civil War and he tried to take balloon daguerreotypes of Confederate fortifications.”

“I’ve never seen an aerial of the Civil War.”

“He said that the swaying motion blurred the pictures. When the wind settled down, a rebel shot the camera out of his hands.”

“Quite a different war story.”

“Actually,” Bell smiled, “he rarely talked about the war. The very few times he did, he told a humorous tale, like the balloon.”

“I really must go.”

He helped her onto the wagon. “It was a pleasure meeting you. I hope to see you again.”

Edna Matters Hock gave him a long look with her gray-green eyes. “I would like that, Mr. Bell. Let us hope it happens.”

“Where are you going next?”

“After Pittsburgh, I’m not sure.”

“If I were to wire the paper sometime, perhaps they could put us in touch.”

“I’ll tell them to,” she said.

They shook hands. “Oh, please say good-bye to Mr. Abbott.”

Bell promised he would. Edna spoke to the mule and it trotted off.

Bell took the photographs to Wally Kisley. Wally gave a low whistle.

“Fascinating. I’ve never had a look like this before.”

The photograph Nellie Matters had snapped after the fire looked like raindrops on a mud puddle. All that was left of the storage tanks were circular pockmarks in the ground. The brick furnaces of the refinery stood like ruined castles. The steel pots were warped, staved in, or completely flattened. The remains of the derricks looked like bones scattered by wild animals.

The picture she had taken before the fire was shrouded in smoke, but Spike’s refinery still looked almost as orderly as an architect’s blueprint. What stood out was the logic of Hopewell’s design to efficiently move the crude oil through the process of brewing gasoline.

“Now you see, Isaac, they couldn’t have picked a better tank to blow. Look at this.”

“But their target was the gasoline tank. Why didn’t they blow it first off?”

“Couldn’t get to it. Out in the open like it was, in plain sight, there’s no way to lay the explosives and set up the target duck. But look here. They could not have chosen a tank better positioned for the first explosion to start things rolling. Someone knows his business.”

Ice-eyed Mack Fulton, an expert on safecrackers, arrived from New York dressed in funereal black. He had news for Archie Abbott. “Jewel thief the New York cops are calling the Fifth Avenue Flier sounds a lot to me like your Laurence Rosania, in that he’s got an eye for top quality and beauty.”

That caught Archie’s interest because Rosania was known to leave ugly pieces behind regardless of value. They compared notes. Like the discriminating Rosania, Mack’s Fifth Avenue Flier robbed safes on mansions’ upper floors.

“New York cops think he’s scaling walls, but I’m wondering if he’s talking his way upstairs, romancing the ladies and charming the gents, like your guy.”

“How’d he get there so fast?” asked Archie. A recent robbery in New York had taken place less than a day after a Rosania-sounding job in Chicago.

“20th Century Limited?”

“If he’s pulled off half the jobs we think, he can afford it.”

“He gets to play the New York and Chicago fences off each other, too. Bargain up the price. That reminds me, Isaac. I brought you a note from Grady Forrer.”

Bell tore open the envelope from Research.