THE ROAD that wound up to the street toward the sheriff’s house was long, and muddy after a rainstorm that struck Bisbee in the middle of the night. Coming to a dead end, Bell mounted the steep stairway that seemed to go on forever. Despite being in excellent physical shape, he was panting when he reached the top.
Bell was in a happy mood. He had yet to learn what Irvine and Curtis turned up, if anything. But he was dead certain the man seen on the motorcycle was the Butcher Bandit after he removed his disguise as the old intoxicated miner. A missing finger and a hint of red hair was hardly a triumph. Even the hair color glimpsed by Jack Carson was a long shot. It was the motorcycle that intrigued Bell, not because the bandit owned one but because it fit that a shrewd and calculating mind would use the latest technology in transportation.
The primary question was, how did the bandit ride it out of town without being seen again?
Sheriff Murphy’s house was only a few steps from the top of the stairway. It was small, and looked more like a shed than a house. The flood had pushed it off its foundation, and Bell saw that Murphy was busily engaged in propping it up in its new location, ten feet from where it had sat before. True to O’Leery’s description, it was painted green, but the flood had devastated the orange grove.
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
