He found telegrams waiting. One lifted his spirits mightily. Archie was recovered enough to risk traveling west with Lillian on Osgood Hennessy’s special train to see the end of the race. Bell wired back that they should light a fire under the lawyers angling to free Danielle Di Vecchio from the asylum and bring her with them so she could see her father’s machine had flown across the continent while guarding the race—provided, of course, Bell thought, knocking ruefully on wood, that he didn’t smash it to pieces or get shot out of the sky by Harry Frost.

Less happy news was contained in a long telegram from Research:

PLATOV UNMET UNSEEN UNKNOWN,

Grady Forrer had begun, confessing his failure to turn up anything about the Russian inventor Dmitri Platov beyond the reports from Belmont Park. The head of the Van Dorn Research Department added an intriguing slant that deepened the mystery:

THERMO ENGINE DEMONSTRATED AT PARIS INTERNATIONAL AERONAUTICAL SALON BY AUSTRALIAN INVENTOR/SHEEP DROVER ROB CONNOLLY.

NOT PLATOV.

AUSTRALIAN SOLD ENGINE AND WENT HOME.
CURRENTLY INCOMMUNICADO OUTBACK.
THERMO ENGINE BUYER UNKNOWN.
??? POSSIBLY PLATOV ???

Isaac Bell went looking for Dmitri Platov.

He found James Dashwood, whom he had assigned to watch the Russian, staring at the back of Steve Stevens’s support train. A perplexed expression clouded his face, and he ducked his head in embarrassment when he saw the chief investigator striding purposefully straight at him.

“I surmise,” Isaac Bell said sternly, “that you lost Platov.”

“Not only Platov. His entire shop car disappeared.”

It had been the last car on Stevens’s special. Now it was gone.

“It didn’t steam off on its own.”

“No, sir. The boys told me when they woke up this morning, it was uncoupled and gone.”

Bell surveyed the siding on which the Stevens special sat. The rails pitched slightly downhill. Uncoupled, Platov’s car would have rolled away. “Can’t have gotten far.”

But a switch was open at the back end of the yard, connecting the support train siding to a feeder line that disappeared among a cluster of factories and warehouses along the river.

“Go get a handcar, James.”

Dashwood returned, pumping a lightweight track inspector’s handcar. Bell jumped on, and they started down the factory siding. Bell lent this strength to the slim Dashwood’s effort, and they were soon rolling at nearly twenty miles per hour. Rounding a bend, they saw smoke ahead, the source hidden by clapboard-sided warehouses. Around the next twist in the rail, they saw oily smoke rising into the clear blue sky.

“Faster!”

They raced between a leatherworks and an odoriferous slaughterhouse, and saw that the smoke was billowing from Platov’s shop car, which had stopped against the bumper that blocked the end of the rails. Flames were spouting from its windows, doors, and roof hatch. In the seconds it took Bell and Dashwood to reach it, the entire car was completely engulfed.