“Do you face a deadline?” asked Bell.

Hennessy looked sharply at Joseph Van Dorn. “Joe, can I assume that confidences are as safe with your detectives as they are with my attorneys?”

“Safer,” said Van Dorn.

“There is a deadline,” Hennessy admitted to Bell.

“Imposed by your bankers?”

“Not those devils. Mother Nature. Old Man Winter is coming, and when he gets to the Cascades that’s it for railroad construction ‘til Spring. I’ve got the best credit in the railroad business, but if I don’t connect the Cascades Cutoff to the Cascade Canyon Bridge before winter shuts me down even my credit will dry up. Between us, Mr. Bell, if this expansion stalls, I will lose any chance of completing the Cascades Cutoff the day after the first snowstorm.”

Joseph Van Dorn said, “Rest easy, Osgood. We’ll stop him.”

Hennessy was not soothed. He shook the blueprint as if to throttle it. “If these saboteurs stop me, it’ll take twenty years before anyone can tackle the Cascades Cutoff again. It’s the last hurdle impeding progress in the West, and I’m the last man alive with the guts to clear it.”

Isaac Bell did not doubt that the old man loved his railroad. Nor did he forget the outrage in his own heart at the prospect of more innocent people killed and injured by the Wrecker. The innocent were sacred. But foremost in Bell’s mind at this moment was his memory of Wish Clarke stepping in his casual, offhanded way in front of a knife intended for Bell. He said, “I promise I will stop him.”

Hennessy stared at him for a long time, taking his measure. Slowly, he settled into an armchair. “I’m relieved, Mr. Bell, having a top hand of your caliber.”

When Hennessy looked to his daughter for agreement, he noticed that she was appraising the wealthy and well-connected detective like a new race car she would ask him to buy for her next birthday. “Son?” he asked. “Is there a Mrs. Bell?”

Bell had already noticed that the lovely young woman was appraising him. Flattering, tempting too, but he did not take it personally. It was an easy guess why. He was surely the first man she had seen whom her father could not bully. But between her fascination and her father’s sudden interest in seeing her suitably married off, the moment was overdue for this particular gentleman to make his intentions clear.

“I am engaged to be married,” he answered.

“Engaged, eh? Where is she?”

“She lives in San Francisco.”

“How did she make out in the earthquake?”

“She lost her home,” Bell replied cryptically, the memory still fresh of their first night together ending abruptly when the shock hurled their bed across the room and Marion’s piano had fallen through the front wall into the street.

“Marion stayed on, caring for orphans. Now that most are settled, she has taken a position at a newspaper.”

“Have you set a wedding date?” Hennessy asked.

“Soon,” said Bell.

Lillian Hennessy seemed to take “Soon” as a challenge. “We’re so far from San Francisco.”

“One thousand miles.” said Bell “Much of it slow going on steep grades and endless switchbacks through the Siskiyou Mountains-the reason for your Cascades Cutoff, which will reduce the run by a full day,” he added, deftly changing the subject from marriageable daughters to sabotage. “Which reminds me, it would be helpful to have a railway pass.”

“I’ll do better than that!” said Hennessy, springing to his feet. “You’ll have your railway pass-immediate free passage on any train in the country. You will also have a letter written in my own hand authorizing you to charter a special train anywhere you need one. You’re working for the railroad now.”

“No, sir. I work for Mr. Van Dorn. But I promise to put your specials to good use.”

“Mr. Hennessy has equipped you with wings,” said Mrs. Comden.

“If only you knew where to fly …” The beautiful Lillian smiled. “Or to whom.”

When the telegraph key started clattering again, Bell nodded to Van Dorn, and they stepped quietly off the car onto the platform. A cold north wind whipped through the rail yard, swirling smoke and cinders. “I’ll need a lot of our men.”

“They’re yours for the asking. Who do you want?”

Isaac Bell spoke a long list of names. Van Dorn listened, nodding approval. When he had finished, Bell said, “I’d like to base out of Sacramento.”

“I would have thought you’d recommend San Francisco.”

“For personal reasons, yes. I would prefer the opportunity to be in the same city with my fiancee. But Sacramento has the faster rail connections up the Pacific Coast and inland. Could we assemble at Miss Anne’s?”

Van Dorn did not conceal his surprise. “Why do you want to meet in a brothel?”

“If this so-called Wrecker is taking on an entire continental railroad, he is a criminal with a broad reach. I don’t want our force seen meeting in a public place until I know what he knows and how he knows it.”

“I’m sure Anne Pound will make room for us in her back parlor,” Van Dorn said stiffly. “If you think that’s the best course. But tell me, have you discovered something else beyond what you just reported to Hennessy?”

“No, sir. But I do have a feeling that the Wrecker is exceptionally alert.”

Van Dorn replied with a silent nod. In his experience, when a detective as insightful as Isaac Bell had a “feeling” the feeling took shape from small but telling details that most people wouldn’t notice. Then he said, “I’m awfully sorry about Aloysius.”

“Came as something of a shock. The man saved my life in Chicago.”

“You saved his in New Orleans,” Van Dorn retorted. “And again in Cuba.”

“He was a crackerjack detective.”

“Sober. But he was drinking himself to death. And you couldn’t save him from that. Not that you didn’t try.”

“He was the best,” Bell said, stubbornly.

“How was he killed?”

“His body was crushed under the rocks. Clearly, Wish was right there at the precise spot where the dynamite detonated.”

Van Dorn shook his head, sadly. “That man’s instincts were golden. Even drunk. I hated having to let him go.”

Bell kept his voice neutral. “His sidearm was several feet from his body, indicating he had drawn it from his holster before the explosion.”

“Could have been blown there by the explosion.”

“It was that old single-action Army he loved. In the flap holster. It didn’t fall out. He must have had it in his hand.”

Van Dorn countered with a cold question to confirm Bell’s conjecture that Aloysius Clarke had tried to prevent the attack. “Where was his flask?”

“Still tucked in his clothing.”

Van Dorn nodded and started to change the subject, but Isaac Bell was not finished.

“I had to know how he got there in the tunnel. Had he died before or in the explosion? So I put his body on a train and brought it to a doctor in Klamath Falls. Stood by while he examined it. The doctor showed me that before Wish was crushed, he had taken a knife in the throat.”

Van Dorn winced. “They slashed his throat?”

“Not slashed. Pierced. The knife went in his throat, slid between two cervical vertebrae, severed his spinal cord, and emerged out the back of his neck. The doctor said it was done clean as a surgeon or a butcher.”

“Or just lucky.”

“If it was, then the killer got lucky twice.”

“How do you mean?”

“Getting the drop on Wish Clarke would require considerable luck in the first place, wouldn’t you say?”

Van Dorn looked away. “Anything left in the flask?”

Bell gave his boss a thin, sad smile. “Don’t worry, Joe, I would have fired him, too. It was dry as a bone.”

“Attacked from the front?”

“It looks that way,” said Bell.

“But you say Wish had already drawn his gun.”

“That’s right. So how did the Wrecker get him with a knife?”

“Threw it?” Van Dorn asked dubiously.

Bell’s hand flickered toward his boot and came up with his throwing knife. He juggled the sliver of steel in his fingers, weighing it. “He’d need a catapult to drive a throwing knife completely through a big man’s neck.”