City of Hope: City of Mystery, Book 7 by Wright Kim

Author:Wright, Kim [Wright, Kim ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

May 1, 1891

11:45 AM

New York City

Four days passed. Four agonizing days.

When it became absolutely clear that Tom was not merely out drinking or chasing some madcap scheme but rather well and truly missing, Trevor and Rayley had sprung into action. Or at least as much action as two men can spring into if they are in a land not their own and have no authority beyond the somewhat hollow courtesies one country’s police force is prepared to offer another.

Along with Barton’s six promised men, they set about combing through the endless bars of New York. After years as detectives, both Rayley and Trevor had forgotten how soul-numbing the basic business of a street copper could be. Pub after pub, face after face. Barton was well-organized. He began with the area closest to Minitar’s rooming house and moved slowly away from that center, dragging his net in ever larger concentric circles. Even Trevor, skeptical at best, had to concede that his approach was systematic but after a mere two days he was beset with the feeling that they were revisiting places they had already been. The questions were always the same. Who knew Mary Minitar? Carrie Brown? Or the second victim, Francis Coles? Had anyone seen a man with blond curly hair and a velvet coat?

To make matters worse, Frenchy Number Two had gone the same way as Frenchy Number One. Which is to say, the New York coppers flushed him out and ran him in with great fanfare. Another press conference was called. Rayley took note of the term. Trevor did not. Even at this point the two friends were separating a bit in their focus. What they chose to notice and what they chose to ignore. Trevor’s disdain for what he called “pandering” and Rayley called “progress,” would have been a clear harbinger of what was to come for anyone who knew the men well.

But this was New York, and no one knew the men well. And when reinforcements eventually arrived, they were far more intent on finding Tom than analyzing the growing rift between their superiors.

Davy went straight from the train station to the police station and had made fast friends with the desk clerk before Rayley and Trevor could be summoned from the streets where they had been fruitlessly searching. The man showed Davy to the desk Tom had occupied during his brief tenure at the 34 th Street Precinct and produced a key to the desk’s hidden drawer, a drawer that the higher-ranking officers had not known existed.

Davy had seized upon the drawer’s lone occupant – a small, cheap notebook made of paper. It was not at all the sort of thing he could imagine a member of Scotland Yard, much less a Bainbridge, possessing. But during his fifteen minutes in the world of New York law enforcement he had noticed that almost every man he’d met seemed to have an identical replica of this flimsy journal peeking from the pocket of his vest.

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