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“My first apprentice,” said Van Dorn.
Bell glanced around the demolished office. “Turned out to be a disappointment?”
“In spades.”
“How did he know you were coming?”
“Henry Clay is about the most intelligent man I have ever met. I am not surprised he knew I was coming. He has an uncanny ability to see the future.”
“A psychic?”
“Not in any mystical way. But he is so alert — sees much more clearly than ordinary men in the present — that it gives him a leg up on the future. Darned-near clairvoyant.”
Van Dorn looked over the wreckage of what had been a first-class office and shook his head in what seemed to Isaac Bell to be sadness. “So gifted,” he mused. “So intelligent. Henry Clay could have been the best detective in America.”
“I’m not sure how intelligent,” said Bell. “He disguised nothing about his past. He practically handed it to me on a silver platter.”
Van Dorn nodded. “Almost like he wanted to be caught.”
“Or noticed.”
“Yes, that was always his flaw. He was so hungry for applause— But Isaac?” Van Dorn gripped Bell’s arm for emphasis. “Never, ever underestimate him.”
Bell wove through an obstacle course of broken furniture and tried a door marked Private. It was locked. He knelt in front of the knob and applied his picks, then stepped aside abruptly.
“What’s the matter?”
“Too easy.”
Van Dorn handed him a broken table leg. They stood on either side of the door, and Bell shoved it with the leg. The door flew inward. A twelve-gauge shotgun thundered, and buckshot screeched where he would have been standing as he pushed it open.
Bell glanced inside. Blue smoke swirled around a wood-paneled office. The shotgun was clamped to a desk, aimed at the doorway. Rope, pulleys, and a deadweight had triggered the weapon.
“Heck of a parting shot.”
“Told you not to underestimate him.”
“That was on my mind.”
They went through Clay’s desk and inspected his files carefully.
Not a word or a piece of paper applied to current cases.
“I’ve never seen so many telephone and telegraph lines in one office,” said Bell. “It’s a virtual central exchange station.”
Closer inspection showed every wire had been cut.
“He did not run in haste.”
“No, sir. He took his own sweet time. I doubt he’s out of commission.”
Van Dorn said, “I cannot imagine Clay out of commission until he wants to be. He’ll regard having to flee as a minor setback.”
Bell put his eye to a handsome brass telescope that was mounted on a tripod in the window. It angled upward and focused on a penthouse office atop the tallest building on the block. A storklike figure was pacing back and forth, dictating, apparently to a secretary seated below the sight line. As the man turned, his face filled the glass, and Isaac Bell recognized the financier Judge James Congdon from scores of newspaper sketches.
“Clay spied on his neighbors.”
Van Dorn took a look. “Who’s that?”
