The Chase Read online

  He had watched the people who came and went from the bank for nearly two weeks until he could identify them by sight. He had also noted the time when they came and went. Satisfied now there was no one in the bank except one teller and the owner/manager, he looked at his watch and nodded to himself.

  Leisurely, the old derelict rose, stretched, and ambled across the brick street and trolley tracks to the bank, carrying the large, empty gunnysack over one shoulder. Just as he was about to enter, a woman unexpectedly walked past. She gave him a look of loathing, stepped around him, and went inside. She was not in his plan, but he decided to deal with the matter rather than wait. He checked the street and followed her into the bank.

  He closed the door. The teller was in the vault and the woman waited until he reappeared. The derelict removed a model 1902 Colt .38 caliber automatic from his boot, struck the woman on the nape of the neck with the barrel, watching with detachment as she slowly folded to the wooden floor. It happened so suddenly and silently that the owner of the bank did not see or hear anything from his office.

  Then the drunken miner suddenly turned bank robber leaped sprightfully over the counter, entered the owner’s office, and put the gun barrel to his head. “Resist and you’ll be shot dead,” he said in a low but forbidding tone. “Now, call the teller into your office.”

  The bald, fat, shocked bank owner looked at him with brown eyes widened with fright. Without argument, he called out, “Roy, come in here.”

  “Be right there, Mr. Castle,” Roy called out from inside the vault.

  “Tell him to leave the vault open,” said the bank robber quietly, with a sharp edge to his voice.

  “Roy, don’t close the vault door,” Castle complied as ordered, his eyes crossing as they focused on the gun pressing against his forehead.

  Roy stepped from the vault, a ledger under one arm. He couldn’t see the unconscious woman lying under the counter. Suspecting nothing, he entered Castle’s office and abruptly stiffened when he saw the robber holding a gun to his boss’s head. The robber pulled the gun barrel away from Castle’s head and motioned with the muzzle toward the vault.

  “Both of you,” he said calmly, “into the vault.”

  There was no thought of resistance. Castle rose from his desk and led the way into the vault while the robber stepped quickly to the window to check the street for anyone heading for the bank. Except for a few women shopping and a passing beer wagon, the street was quiet.

  The interior of the vault was well lit, with an Edison brass lamp hanging from the steel ceiling. Except for the chest containing the gold, stacks of bills, mostly the payroll for the mining companies, covered the shelves. The robber threw the gunnysack at the teller.

  “Okay, Roy, fill it with all the greenbacks you have.”

  Roy did as he was told. With trembling hands, he began sweeping the piles of bills of various denominations into the sack. By the time he was finished, the sack was stretched to the limit of its burlap fibers and seemed to be the size of a well-filled laundry bag.

  “Now, lay down on the floor,” ordered the robber.

  Castle and Roy, believing the robber was now about to make his getaway, stretched out flat on the floor, with their hands stretched over their heads. The robber pulled a heavy woolen scarf from one of his pockets and wrapped it around the muzzle of his automatic. Then he systematically shot both men in the head. It sounded more like two loud thumps than the sharp crack of gunfire. Without another second’s hesitation, he heaved the sack over one shoulder and walked from the vault without looking back.

  Unfortunately, he wasn’t finished. The woman under the counter moaned and tried to rise to her elbows. With utter indifference, he leaned down, lowered the gun, and shot her in the head like he had the bank owner and teller. There was no remorse, not the slightest hint of emotion. He didn’t care whether any of them left families behind. He had murdered three defenseless people in cold blood with as little interest as he might have shown stepping on a column of ants.

  He paused to search for one of the shell casings he thought he’d heard fall to the floor from inside the scarf wrapped around the gun but could not find it. He gave up and walked casually from the bank, noting with satisfaction that no one had heard the muted gunshots.

  With the gunnysack bulging with cash slung over his shoulder, the man walked through the alley running behind the bank. Stepping into a small alcove under a stairway where he would not be seen, he took off the grimy clothes, removed the gray wig and beard, and threw everything in a small valise. Now revealed in an expensively tailored suit, he perched a bowler hat at a jaunty angle on his head and its neatly brushed carpet of red hair. He slipped on a necktie and knotted it before also tossing the scuffed boots in the valise. He was a short man, and the soles and heels of the boot had been raised nearly two inches. Next, he pulled on a pair of English-made leather shoes, with lifts in the heel to make him appear taller, before turning his attention to a large leather suitcase he had hidden under a canvas tarp along with a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. Glancing up and down the alley every few seconds, he transferred the huge pile of cash from the gunnysack to the suitcase, which he strapped on a rack over the rear wheel of the motorcycle. The valise containing his disguise he tied on a front rack.

  At that moment, the man heard shouting coming down the alley from Tombstone Canyon Road. Someone had discovered the bodies in the Bisbee National Bank. Unconcerned, he pushed the motorcycle forward and started the three-horsepower, twenty-five-cubic-inch one-cylinder engine. He threw one leg over the seat and rode deserted back alleys to the railroad yard. He moved unseen along a siding where a freight train had stopped to take on water.

  His timing was perfect.

  Another five minutes and the freight train would have moved back onto the main line and headed toward Tucson. Without being noticed by the engineer and the brakeman, as they pulled a big pipe down from the wooden tank into the tender for water to make steam, the man took a key from his vest pocket and opened the padlock to the door to a boxcar that was marked with a painted sign that read O’BRIAN FURNITURE COMPANY, DENVER. He slid the door open on its rollers. The presence of the boxcar in this time and place was no coincidence. Acting as a fictitious representative of the equally fictitious O’Brian Furniture Company, he had paid cash for it to be included in the freight train passing through Bisbee, en route from El Paso, Texas, to Tucson, Arizona.

  He took a wide plank, attached by brackets to the side of the boxcar, and used it as a ramp to ride the Harley-Davidson aboard. Then he quickly closed the rolling door and reached through a small hinged opening to replace the lock as the whistle on the engine tooted and the train began moving forward from the siding onto the main track.

  From the outside, the boxcar looked like any other that had been in use for several years. The paint was faded, and the wooden sides were dented and chipped. But its appearance was deceptive. Even the lock on the door was fake, making it look like the car was buttoned up tight. It was the inside that was the most deceptive, however. Instead of an empty interior or one packed with furniture, it was luxurious, ornately constructed, and furnished as ostentatiously as any private railcar belonging to the president of a railroad. Mahogany paneling spread over the walls and ceiling. The floor was covered by a thick carpet. The décor and furniture were extravagantly magnificent. There was an opulent sitting room, a palatial bedroom, and an efficient kitchen with the latest innovations for preparing gourmet meals.

  There were no servants, porters, or cooks.

  The man worked alone, without accomplices who might reveal his true name and occupation. No one knew of his clandestine operations as a bank robber and mass murderer. Even the railroad car had been built and decorated in Canada before being secretly transported across the border into the United States.

  The robber relaxed in a plush leather settee, uncorked a bottle of 1884 Château La Houringue Bordeaux, chilled in buckets, and poured himself a glass.

  He
knew the town sheriff would quickly form a posse. But they would be looking for an old mangy miner who murdered while in a drunken fit. The posse would fan out, searching the town, almost certain he was too poor to own a horse. None of the townspeople had ever seen him come and go on horseback or driving a buggy.

  Immensely pleased with himself, he sipped the wine from a crystal glass and studied the leather suitcase. Was this his fifteenth, or was it his sixteenth, successful robbery? he mused. The thirty-eight men and women and two children he had killed never entered his mind. He estimated the take of the mining payroll at $325,000 to $330,000. Most robbers wouldn’t have come close to guessing the amount inside the case.

  But it was easy for him, since he was a banker himself.

  The sheriff, his deputies, and the posse would never find the murdering robber. It was as if he had disappeared into thin air. No one ever thought to connect him with the dapper man riding through town on a motorcycle.

  The hideous crime would become one of Bisbee’s most enduring mysteries.

  2

  SEPTEMBER 15, 1906 THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER BELOW HANNIBAL, MISSOURI

  SOON AFTER THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WAS BORN, steamboating on the Mississippi began to fade. Few passenger steamboats still reigned in style. The Saint Peter was one of the last grand passenger boats to have survived the onslaught of the railroads. Two hundred fifty feet long and seventy-five feet wide, she was a splendid example of palatial elegance, with side-curving stairways, plush passenger cabins, and a magnificent main dining room with the finest food to be found anywhere. Ostentatious salons were provided for the ladies while the men smoked their cigars and played cards in handsome rooms adorned with mirrors and paintings.

  Card games on steamboats plying the river were notorious for their cardsharp gamblers. Many passengers left steamboats poorer than when they boarded. At one table in the gambling room of the Saint Peter, in a quiet corner away from the main action, two men were enjoying a game of five-card stud.

  At first glance, the scene looked like any other in the room, but a closer look revealed that no chips sat on the green felt table.

  Joseph Van Dorn calmly studied his hand before laying down two cards. “A good thing we’re not in this for the money,” he said, smiling, “or I would owe you eight thousand dollars.”

  Colonel Henry Danzler, director of the United States government’s Criminal Investigation Department, smiled in return. “If you cheated like I do, we’d be even.”

  Van Dorn was a congenial man in his early forties. His cheeks and chin were buried under a magnificent red burnsides beard that matched what remained of the hair that circled his bald dome. His face was dominated by a Roman nose, and his brown eyes looked sad and melancholy, but his looks and manner were deceiving.

  Irish-born, he bore a name known and respected throughout the country for tenacity in tracking down murderers, robbers, and other desperados. The criminal underworld of the time knew he would chase them to the ends of the earth. Founder and chief of the renowned Van Dorn Detective Agency, he and his agents had prevented political assassinations, hunted down many of the West’s most feared outlaws, and helped organize the country’s first secret service agency.

  “You’d still deal yourself more aces than me,” he said affably.

  Danzler was an enormous man, tall and mammoth in girth, weighing slightly over three hundred pounds, yet he could move as effortlessly as a tiger. His salt-and-pepper hair was immaculately trimmed and brushed, shining under the light that streamed in through the boat’s big windows. His blue-green eyes had a soft glow to them, yet they seemed to analyze and record everything going on about him.

  A veteran and hero of the Spanish American War, he had charged up San Juan Hill with Captain John Pershing and his black “Buffalo Soldiers” of the Tenth Cavalry and had served with distinction in the Philippines against the Moros. When the government’s Criminal Investigation Department was authorized by Congress, President Roosevelt asked him to become its first director.

  Danzler opened the lid of a large pocket watch and stared at the hands. “Your man is five minutes late.”

  “Isaac Bell is my best agent. He always gets his man—and occasionally a woman, too. If he’s late, there’s a good reason.”

  “You say he’s the one who apprehended the assassin Ramos Kelly before he could shoot President Roosevelt?”

  Van Dorn nodded. “And he rounded up the Barton gang in Missouri. He shot and killed three of them before the other two surrendered to him.”

  Danzler stared at the famous detective. “And you think he’s the man to stop our mass murderer and bank robber?”

  “If anyone can stop the killer, Isaac can.”

  “What is his family background?”

  “Very wealthy,” answered Van Dorn. “His father and grandfather were bankers. You’ve heard of the American States Bank of Boston?”

  Danzler nodded. “Indeed. I have an account there myself.”

  “Isaac is very affluent. His grandfather left him five million dollars in his will, thinking Isaac would take his place as head of the bank one day. It never happened. Isaac preferred detective work to banking. I’m lucky to have him.”

  Danzler caught a shadow on his arm. He looked up and found himself looking into soft blue eyes with a slight violet cast, eyes that had looked over horizons to see what was beyond. The effect was almost mesmerizing, as though they were searching deep into Danzler’s inner thoughts.

  Danzler could size up a man as precisely as he could a horse. The intruder was tall and lean, stood well over six feet, and weighed no more than one hundred seventy-five pounds. A large flaxen mustache that covered his entire upper lip conformed with the thick mass of neatly barbered blond hair. His hands and fingers were long and nimble and hung loosely, almost casually, at his sides. There was a no-nonsense look about him. The colonel judged that this was a man who dealt with substance and did not endure fools or insignificant and phony candor. He had a determined set to the chin and lips that were spread in a friendly smile. Danzler guessed his age at about thirty.

  He was dressed immaculately in a white linen suit without a wrinkle. A heavy gold chain dipped from a left vest pocket that was attached to a large gold watch inside the right pocket. A low-crowned hat with a wide brim sat squarely on his head. Danzler might have pegged him as a dandy, but the look of elegance was betrayed by a pair of worn leather boots that had seen many hours in stirrups. Bell carried a thin valise and set it down beside the table.

  “Colonel Danzler,” said Van Dorn, “this is the man I told you about, Isaac Bell.”

  Danzler offered his hand but did not rise from his chair. “Joe here tells me that you always get your man.”

  Bell grinned slightly. “I’m afraid Mr. Van Dorn has exaggerated. I was ten minutes too late when Butch Cassidy and Harry Longabaugh sailed for Argentina three years ago from New York. Their boat pulled away from the dock before I could apprehend them.”

  “How many agents or law enforcement officers were with you?”

  Bell shrugged. “I intended to handle the matter on my own.”

  “Wasn’t Longabaugh the Sundance Kid?” asked Danzler.

  Bell nodded. “He got the nickname when he tried to steal a horse in Sundance, Wyoming. He was caught and spent eighteen months in jail.”

  “Surely you didn’t expect to subdue them without a fight.”

  “I think it is safe to say that they would have resisted,” said Bell, without explaining how he would have single-handedly captured the former members of the infamous Wild Bunch.

  Van Dorn sat back in his chair, made no comment, and gave the colonel a smug look.

  “Why don’t you sit down, Mr. Bell, and join our little game?”

  Bell looked at the empty table quizzically and then at Danzler. “You appear to have no chips.”

  “Just a friendly little game,” said Van Dorn, shuffling the deck of cards and dealing out three hands. “So far, I owe the colonel eight
thousand dollars.”

  Bell sat down, the quizzical look altered to one of understanding. The game was a pretense. His chief and the colonel were sitting in the corner away from the other gamblers and playing as if they were in a serious game. He laid his hat in his lap, picked up his cards, and acted as if he were deep in thought.

  “Are you familiar with the swarm of bank robberies and murders that have occurred around the western states in the past two years?” Danzler inquired.

  “Only in conversation,” replied Bell. “Mr. Van Dorn has kept me busy on other cases.”

  “What do you actually know about the crimes?”

  “Only that the robber murders anyone in the bank during the act, escapes like a spirit, and leaves no evidence behind that might incriminate him.”

  “Anything else?” Danzler probed.

  “Whoever he is,” answered Bell, “he is very, very good. There have been no leads and no breaks in the investigation.” He paused and stared at Van Dorn. “Is that why I’ve been called here?”

  Van Dorn nodded. “I want you to take over the case as chief investigator.”

  Bell threw down a card, picked up the card that Danzler dealt, and slipped it in the fan, which he held in his left hand.

  “Are you a lefty, Mr. Bell?” asked Danzler out of curiosity.

  “No. Actually, I’m right-handed.”

  Van Dorn laughed softly. “Isaac can draw the derringer he hides in his hat, cock it, and pull the trigger faster than you can blink.”

  Danzler’s respect for Bell grew during the conversation. He drew back his coat and revealed a 1903 Colt .38 caliber hammerless automatic. “I’ll take Joe’s word for it, but it would be interesting to put it to the test—” Danzler had not finished the sentence when he found himself staring into the twin muzzles of a derringer.

  “Age has slowed you, Henry,” said Van Dorn. “Either that or your mind wandered.”

  “I have to admit, he is very fast,” Danzler said, visibly impressed.