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“What do they have to do with Private Jones?”
“That’s what I’m asking you, sir. Neither Lieutenant Casey, Private Gensch, nor Sergeant Orr are Private Billy Jones. Give your soldiers their due and help me hang a killer.”
“How?” Mills growled.
“Have you ever heard of a Standard Oil executive named Bill Matters?”
Mills put down his glass. “I wondered if you would ask.”
“You know of him?”
“Oh, yes.”
Isaac Bell leaned closer, which put the veteran officer in mind of a cougar about to land on him with all four feet. “Tell me how.”
“When we investigated Billy Jones’ desertion,” Mills said, “we discovered certain items the boy had left behind that we were able to trace—or so we thought. I went, personally, to the man that our investigation revealed was very likely Billy Jones’ father. That his son had disappeared around the time that Private Jones joined the Army seemed to cinch it.”
“What ‘item’ did he leave behind?”
“Ticket stubs from an opera house. Shakespeare shows. We traced them to Oil City, Pennsylvania.”
“Bill Matters lived in Oil City. He raised his daughters there before he moved to New York.”
“He still maintained a home in ’02. For all I know, still does. Anyway, I found him in Oil City.”
“Why did you go personally?”
“I would not put the officers under me in the position of offending a powerful man who might well have had no connection with the deserter other than the fact he was grieving for a missing son who had run off back in ’98 to enlist for the war.”
“Was the marksman Bill Matters’ son?”
Brigadier Mills looked Isaac Bell in the eye and Bell found it easy to imagine him as a young officer leading his men into a storm of lead. “I’m not proud of this,” he said, “but it was my job to cover things up. I went to Matters’ house. I spoke with him in private. He was alone there. I found him sitting in the dark. Mourning the boy.”
“In ’02? But that was years after he disappeared.”
“He still mourned him. I promised that nothing we discussed would leave the room. I made my case. The cross-grained SOB refused to believe me. He was certain—dead certain—that the marksman was not his missing son.”
Bell said, “Detectives run into similar denials by the parents of criminals.”
The general’s answer was uncharacteristically roundabout. “I’ve led men my whole life, Bell. Gettysburg. The west. Cuba. The Philippines. I can read men. I know what they’re thinking before they do. Bill Matters was telling the truth! The marksman Billy Jones was not his boy.”
“And yet?” Bell asked.
“And yet what?” Mills fired back.
“And yet I sense your, shall we say, disquiet? If not doubt?”
Angered, Mills looked away. He stared at his collection of weapons. He hesitated, face working, as if he was debating the merits of shooting Bell versus running him through. Finally, he spoke.
“Maybe you read men, too. You’re right. Something was off there. I don’t know what, but something was way off, out-of-kilter.”
“What?”
“Bill Matters knew that his boy was not the marksman. But he was not surprised that I had come calling.”
“What do you mean?”
“He was not surprised that I had connected him to the marksman who won the President’s Medal of 1902. Even as he sat there in the dark denying the theater stubs were his.”
