A Knife in the Heart Read online

  “I hope,” Fallon said in a calm, collected voice, “that they paid you handsomely. Because Bowen Hardin is scheduled to hang at noon today.”

  That straightened him. He sat upright, and his face turned white. “You . . . can’t . . .”

  “I imagine the judge upstairs is finalizing your death warrant as we speak.”

  “But . . . but . . . you . . . you can’t.” He swallowed. Then Fallon saw the wetness forming in the crotch of his tan britches—the courtroom suit for prisoners. “You can’t hang me!” he shrieked. “I’m not Bowen Hardin.”

  “Deputy,” Fallon said, and the guard stepped over quickly.

  “You better tell this marshal everything you know, and I mean details and descriptions.” He stepped to the next cell and stared down the four frauds in that room, turning to the nearest guard and taking the shotgun from him. “And you four are going to do the exact same thing. You’ll tell this guard exactly what happened. And if you make one slip, you’ll wish you were hanging in Bowen Hardin’s place before I’m through with you. Because you don’t know what hard labor is, but, by thunder, you’ll find out.”

  Before he got to the door to the stairs, it swung open, and the chief of police rushed into the hallway. “Harry,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “Judge Mitchum isn’t in the courtroom. He hasn’t been seen since yesterday evening.”

  “Andy,” Fallon said. “We’ve got bigger problems. Bowen Hardin. Indianola Anderson. All the others. They’re not here.”

  “What the . . . !”

  “I’ll explain on the way out,” Fallon said and started for the stairs.

  His mind tried to take it all in, figure things out. The six men, likely posing as federal marshals, had arrived at the pen before dawn. Bowen, Holderman, MacGregor, Anderson, and Calloway would have swapped places with the hired imposters. That would have taken some time, not long, but a few minutes. Then what? No train would be running, not that early in the morning, and with the hanging scheduled, Bowen Hardin’s likenesses had been put in newspapers and magazines across the frontier. There was no way Hardin would risk being recognized on a train.

  “Raymond,” Fallon said. “Go to the prison. I told Preston to keep Montgomery Berrien from trying to leave the prison or Leavenworth.”

  “That little pipsqueak,” the guard blurted out. “You mean he was in this conspiracy.”

  “Yes, he was,” Fallon said. “I doubt if Berrien knows much, but just in case.”

  Raymond left. Fallon stopped. “We need to check every livery stable. See if anyone rented five or more horses this morning.”

  “They could have had the horses ready, waiting on the outskirts of town, or even in some vacant lot,” Cameron said.

  “I know,” Fallon said. “But someone might have seen the horses.”

  “A steamboat?” another guard suggested.

  “Doubtful,” Fallon said. “For the same reasons as the train. But we can’t just dismiss the possibility.” He nodded at the guard who had mentioned the steamboat route, and that guard shifted his shotgun under his shoulder and took off at a dead run toward the landing.

  Fallon looked back at the police chief. “There’s no sense in putting this off,” he said. “We need to send telegraphs out to every county sheriff in the state, plus Kansas City and the federal marshal’s office there. Iowa. Nebraska. Arkansas. Colorado. Texas and the Indian Nations. Then telegraph the attorney general’s office in Washington D.C. This is huge. We’ll need all the help we can get.”

  Another city policeman was running toward them, pale and exhausted. He slid to a stop, bent forward, holding his hands against his thighs, and gasped. “Chief . . . it’s . . . the . . . judge . . .”

  “Mitchum?” Andy Cameron asked.

  The officer’s head nodded once. He kept sucking in breath after breath. “Yes.” His eyes lifted. “He’s . . .”

  Fallon knew before the officer finished the sentence or his next breath.

  “Dead.”

  Cut throat. In his own bathtub.

  “Maybe . . .” the officer said. “Sui-cide.”

  “Maybe.” But Fallon doubted that.

  “They can’t get away,” the chief said.

  “They have four hours, maybe more, of a head start,” Fallon said, but then he stopped. He turned to the closest man he saw, a city policeman with a fuzzy mustache. The kid couldn’t have been older than twenty-one. “What would you do? How would you try to escape?”

  “Shoot,” the kid said. “I’d just ride as fast as I could for the Indian Territory.”

  Fallon nodded. “Right.” He turned to Cameron. “We’d send every posse we could outfit in every direction there is.”

  Cameron straightened. “There wouldn’t be a peace officer left in Leavenworth.”

  “You think they’re still in town?” a guard asked.

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Like a fox,” Fallon said. “Or Sean MacGregor.” He grinned. Now he knew why desperate men like Bowen Hardin and MacGregor had let him tag along. Fallon knew all the tricks, how to sneak men out . . . what was the saying . . . hide in plain sight? And detectives knew quite a lot about disguising.

  “Search the hotels,” Andrew Cameron ordered. “Every one. Every room. Every rooming house.”

  “Livery stables, too,” Fallon suggested.

  “They can’t be still here,” whispered another police officer. “That’s just . . .”

  “Yeah,” Fallon said. He nodded at Cameron. “Get those wires sent out as quickly as you can. There’s still a very good chance those boys are halfway to the Indian Nations by now. Telegraph the law in Baxter Springs first. That’s the first place they’d shoot for . . . if they’re going south.”

  He walked away, calling back, “I’ll meet you at your office, Andy, in half an hour.”

  “Where are you going?” the chief asked.

  “To see my wife and daughter. Let them know I’m alive. And put on some shoes and socks that actually fit.” He picked up the pace. “I have a feeling that I’ll be on my feet for quite a long time.”

  * * *

  He let his guard down. Didn’t give Sean MacGregor enough credit. After pushing open the door and calling out Christina’s name, he saw the gun barrel aimed at his head.

  “Hello, Hank.” Aaron Holderman grinned.

  Hiding in plain sight. Fallon felt his stomach turn. Hiding in my own home.

  Then, the blood rushed to his head.

  “Your wife and child are fine.” Sean MacGregor, looking even older, rounded the corner, and grinned. “Let’s keep them that way, all right, Harry?” He turned his head and yelled, “Miss Whitney.” He stopped, laughed, and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I just can’t get used to that. Mrs. Fallon!”

  The door to Rachel Renee’s bedroom opened, and Christina emerged, looking tired but beautiful, carrying Rachel Renee in her arms. Jimmy Calloway, holding a Winchester repeating rifle, followed them but stayed in the doorway.

  “Good to see you,” Christina said softly.

  Fallon answered the same way, but smiled at his daughter. “How you doing, sweetheart?”

  “Papa,” his daughter said, sounding more sleepy than scared. That was good. “Who are these men?”

  “We’re friends of your old man.” Bowen Hardin stepped around, wearing trail duds, looking more like a cowboy than a man who should have been dropping through the trapdoor of a gallows right about now. Hardin looked at MacGregor. “I told you there was no way those two goons could kill Warden Harry Fallon. I told you he’d come right back here.”

  “You told me,” the former private detective said.

  Then the door to the master bedroom opened, and Indianola Anderson threw Janice Jefferson out. Her hair was disheveled, her bottom lip puffy and discolored. She had put up a fight.

  “You all right?” Fallon asked.

  She didn’t answer. But Anderson did. “Of course, she’s all right.”

  Fallon looked back at Har
din, knowing MacGregor might have come up with the plan and paid most of the money to get this all set in motion, but Bowen Hardin was the leader.

  “What’s the plan?”

  “We had two plans.” The killer reached for a cup on a bookshelf, lifted it in a mock toast. “One was we stay here. Till the town cleared out of lawmen. Then ride to Omaha.” He sipped the coffee. “But since that’s not going to happen, we’re going to the landing. All of us. Right now. We’re going to get into a boat. And just take a ride down the river. All of us.”

  Fallon nodded. “Leave the women and child here. I’ll go with you.”

  “Oh, you’re going with us, Hank,” the killer said. “But so are the lovely ladies.”

  Calloway laughed. “If we see dust or anybody on either side of the river, some of our passengers will become supper for the catfish.”

  Fallon looked around his home then back at Hardin. “What did you do with your federal marshals?” he asked. “You know, the ones who were escorting you to the courthouse?”

  The killer finished his coffee, and let the cup fall on the floor, shattering. “I had Calloway pay them off, Hank.”

  “Like you paid off Judge Mitchum?”

  The man grinned evilly. “And how we’ll pay you off when you’ve finished your job for us, Hank. But you know one thing about me. I won’t harm the hair on the head of a woman or a child. So long as you do what I say, exactly what I say. Savvy?”

  Fallon nodded.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Hardin turned to Sean MacGregor. “Now what?” the murderer asked.

  “We get changed,” the old detective said. “Bootsey and I’ll go first.” Both men disappeared into Fallon’s bedroom. Calloway went to the front door, peaking through the curtains.

  “Quiet neighborhood you got here,” he said and chuckled. “That’s one reason we picked this place.”

  After clearing her throat, Christina said, “How about coffee?”

  “Good idea,” Indianola Anderson said, but when Christina stepped toward the kitchen, the murderer stepped in front of her, put his hand on her shoulder, and grinned. “But I like the way I make coffee.” He pushed her back gently. “You, darlin’, I figure might be inclined to poison us all.”

  Hardin swore. “Let her make the coffee, Anderson,” he barked. “They never let you work in the mess hall for good reason. She won’t poison us. But keep the door open, and keep an eye on her.” He nodded at Christina. “Go ahead.”

  She stepped, and Rachel Renee ran to her, grabbing the side of her skirt. “Let me help, Mommy.”

  With his family in the kitchen, Janice Jefferson sitting on the sofa, Fallon tried to think of some way out of this trap. Surely, these men didn’t think they could just walk to the landing, take a boat. They’d be recognized instantly, and there was no way the authorities would let them go—even with hostages. Fallon looked through the open doorway and saw Christina making coffee.

  Then the door to his bedroom opened, and Holderman and MacGregor stepped into the parlor.

  They wore the uniforms of the U.S. Army, Holderman becoming a sergeant in the infantry, and MacGregor a lieutenant colonel.

  “What do you think?” Holderman said with a snort.

  “You should be fighting in Cuba or the Philippines,” Fallon told them.

  “Take over for Calloway,” Hardin ordered Holderman, then Bowen Hardin and Calloway entered Fallon’s bedroom, while MacGregor took Hardin’s revolver and aimed it casually at Fallon’s chest.

  “I planned this pretty good, don’t you think?” MacGregor said with a smile.

  “You’re not out of Leavenworth yet,” Fallon told him, his voice icy.

  “You better hope we are soon,” MacGregor said. “Or nobody gets out of Leavenworth alive.”

  By the time Calloway and Hardin emerged, dressed in Army attire, the coffee was ready, so Indianola Anderson took his mug and stepped into the bedroom for the last of the uniforms.

  The plan might work. Fallon had to concede that argument. With everyone running around, civilians scared out of their wits, lawmen and prison guards trying to get posses together, the sight of the prison warden marching with soldiers to the riverfront would make a certain amount of sense. Why wouldn’t federal soldiers be involved in the effort to round up the escapees from a federal pen? Few would look at the faces of the soldiers. The uniforms would comfort them. This was another reason Bowen Hardin had brought MacGregor into the fold. The crooked old detective had people on the outside, men who could get him Army uniforms that fit, as well as guns.

  But how would they explain two women and a five-year-old girl?

  Indianola Anderson came out of the bedroom. The kepi didn’t fit, for the killer had a small head compared to the rest of his hard, tough body.

  “How’s it look?” Bowen Hardin asked Holderman, still at the door looking through the curtains.

  “Nobody on the street or in the yards,” the big brute said.

  Hardin walked up to Fallon. “The women and kid walk ahead of us. If they run, yell, do anything, they die first,” he whispered. “You get to see that, right before I put a bullet in your spine. I’ll be right behind you. One mistake, and everybody pays the extreme penalty.” He walked to Christina and Rachel Renee and, smiling, whispered the instructions to them, patted Rachel Renee’s head, and came back to Fallon.

  “Let’s go,” Hardin said, and Aaron Holderman opened the door.

  * * *

  The escaped convicts looked like soldiers. They also marched like them. That was another thing prison had taught these scum. And since nobody saw them leave Fallon’s home, by the time they were out of the neighborhood and turning onto the nearest street that ran straight to the Missouri River landing, Fallon guessed that these killers had a good chance to get out of the city.

  People ran this way and that—citizens, preachers, drummers, women with their children, even lawmen. Fallon kept his head straight, but his eyes darted north, south, and east, trying to find some friendly face.

  One old, one-eyed drunk sat up from where he had crumpled in front of a vacant building, brushed himself off, snapped his heels together, and grinned as he saluted sharply, slurring out, “Sergeant Major Christianson, Seventh Ohio Infantry. All present and accounted for, Gen’ral. Welcome to Gettysburg, sir.”

  A woman across the street pointed, and whispered something to another woman standing next to her, but they just gave them a moment’s consideration, and then went back to gossiping.

  He caught glimpses of faces of men he knew, but none was a person he needed, a person willing to put his life on the line. They stopped to let a fire wagon pass, crossed the street. A policeman rounded the corner and, ahead of Fallon, Christina, holding Rachel Renee’s hand, and Janice Jefferson stopped and shuffled closer to the millinery shop’s window.

  “Pardon me,” the officer said. “Pardon me. Emergency. Let me through.” It was the same copper who had hammered Fallon’s head with the nightstick, had arrested him and knocked him out for indecent exposure. He didn’t even notice Fallon, probably could not have told anyone he passed a few soldiers on the boardwalk.

  “Ladies first,” Bowen Hardin said, and doffed his hat at the two women and girl.

  Christina glared, but picked up her daughter and carried her across the street. Janice walked beside her. One more block, and they’d be heading down to the Missouri.

  “Where’s the boat?” Hardin asked MacGregor once they hit the final boardwalk.

  “Tully will be there,” MacGregor said.

  “Who the hell’s Tully?”

  “An informant of mine from years back,” the old detective said. “Worked for us on a lot of cases in Kansas City, Westport, Omaha, Lawrence, Leavenworth. He arranged for those uniforms and weapons. He’s a good man.”

  “I thought he’d just leave us the boat.”

  MacGregor laughed. “Not before he gets paid.”

  “What do we have to pay him with?”

&nbs
p; MacGregor said: “That’s your department, Hardin. But I wouldn’t pay him till he gets us downstream to the horses.”

  “Shut up.”

  Fallon couldn’t see MacGregor or Hardin, since he walked in front of them, but he pictured MacGregor grinning as he said, “But I wouldn’t pay him off here, unless you know how to work a boat on the Missouri River. The Big Muddy can be right treacherous.”

  “I said shut your trap.”

  “Be careful who you’re talking to, Hardin.” MacGregor was feeling like he had returned to power, that he was in command of forty detectives and ruled Chicago with an iron fist. “You wouldn’t be here without me.”

  “And you wouldn’t be here without me,” Hardin whispered. “You didn’t have the guts to do any of this. You just had the money and the connections.”

  A horseman rounded the corner, loped down the street. Fallon saw and smelled the black smoke from a steamboat on the landing, getting ready to sail, but he knew that wasn’t the boat these men wanted.

  His chances were getting slimmer. They had reached the end of the boardwalk. One more street to go. One slight slope to descend, but surely the city police would have plenty of officers wandering the landing, just in case the convicts tried to gain passage on a riverboat.

  “Move,” Hardin barked.

  They crossed the cobblestone street, and Fallon looked left and right but saw just more of the same. Strangers moving. People talking. Peddlers trying to sell their wares. A newspaper boy crying out the headlines of today’s Times. No one paid any attention to Fallon and his party.

  Then, with only the descent to the landing before them, Fallon saw maybe his last chance at keeping his family, Janice Jefferson, and himself alive.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Levi Pigate, chaplain at the federal pen, came up from the landing and grinned as he saw Fallon. He swept his flat-crowned, flat-brimmed straw hat off his head and bowed at the ladies, then stepped toward Fallon and extended his hand.

  “Good day, Warden.” He looked back at Bowen Hardin, then at Sean MacGregor. Fallon watched his wife, Janice, and Rachel Renee descend.

  “Escort the ladies, Sergeant,” MacGregor sang out, startling the preacher, but Holderman stepped forward and raced after the two women and girl.