ISAAC BELL RAN TO THE RAIL YARD, where Archie had set up a field office in a corner of Josephine’s hangar car. He scanned the reports that were coming in by telegraph, telephone, and Van Dorn messenger. Harry Frost was still on the run despite his wounds.

Or to put it more accurately, Bell had to admit, Harry Frost had vanished.

All hospitals had been alerted to look out for the wounded man. None had responded. Frost could be dying in a ditch or dead already. He could be hiding in the farmland around the racetrack. Or he could have made his way to Brooklyn, where gangsters would take him in, for a price, and provide midwives and crooked pharmacists to treat his wounds. He could have run east into rural Nassau and Suffolk counties. Or north to the vast, thinly populated Long Island hunt country, where the owners of great American fortunes rode to the hounds.

Bell telephoned the New York office. He ordered more agents sent out from Manhattan, and others to double the watch on the railroad and subway stations and the ferries. And he dispatched apprentices to hospitals with stern instructions not to engage but to call for help. When he had done all he could to encourage the manhunt, Bell left a dozen detectives with orders to stick close to Josephine and raced his borrowed Pierce to the Nassau Hospital in Mineola, where they had taken Archie.

Archie’s beautiful wife, Lillian, a young blond-haired woman of nineteen, was standing outside the operating room in a long duster, having driven from New York. Her astonishingly pale blue eyes were dry and alert, but her face was a mask of dread.

Bell took her in his arms. He had introduced her to Archie, sensing that the high-spirited only child of a widowed “shirtsleeve” railroad tycoon would bring particular joy to his friend’s life. He had been more than right. They adored each other. He had persuaded her crusty father to see Archie for the man he was and not a fortune hunter. You changed my life, Archie had thanked him simply at the wedding where Bell was best man. Ironically, years earlier, he had already changed Archie’s life when he proposed that Archie become a Van Dorn detective. If only he hadn’t.

Bell watched over the top of her head as a surgeon came out of the operating room, his expression grave. When he saw Bell holding Lillian, relief flickered in his eyes as if the fact that a friend was comforting her would make it easier to tell her that her husband had died.

“The doctor is here,” Bell whispered.

She turned to the doctor. “Tell me.”