Longarm 245: Longarm and the Vanishing Virgin by Tabor Evans Read Free Book Online

a couple of folks, but nobody had any proof.”
    â€œWell, it sounds like whoever ventilated the bastard did the world a favor. No need for him to be wasting perfectly good air by breathing it.”
    Vail inclined his head. “You could look at it that way.”
    â€œThen why don’t we?” suggested Longarm.
    Vail sighed in defeat. “All right, if that’s the way you want it. Anyway, the real problem is McGurk. He’s liable to be after you, Custis.”
    Longarm shook his head and said, “I’m not afraid of ol’ Badger Bob.”
    â€œWell, you should be,” snapped Vail. “You ought to be worried a little anyway. The man’s murdered at least a dozen people, and he’s about as vicious a killer as I’ve ever seen.”
    â€œHe is all of that,” agreed Longarm.
    â€œI’ve put the word out to all of our men to keep an eye open for McGurk, and I’ve warned the Denver police too.” The chief marshal shrugged. “I don’t know what else I can do.”
    â€œThere isn’t anything else.” Longarm stood up, stretching his rangy frame. “If McGurk comes after me, I’ll deal with him then.”
    â€œJust be careful.” Longarm started to turn away, and Vail added hurriedly, “Hey, what about that Canady girl? I figured that was why you came in this morning, to report on that investigation.”
    Longarm nodded. “I went to Canady’s house last night, had a look around the place. It doesn’t seem likely to me that somebody could have gotten in there and snatched the gal, Billy. I have to agree with Canady and Senator Palmer that she probably left on her own. Seems to me that even that would have been hard, though, with the guards Canady has around the place.”
    â€œThen you haven’t located any sign of her?”
    â€œNary a one. I checked some of the hotels last night, figured I’d hit the rest of them and the boardinghouses this morning. If that doesn’t turn up anything, I’ll start looking into the possibility that she left Denver altogether.”
    â€œHell, if she did, she could have gone anywhere,” Vail grumbled.
    Longarm nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right, Billy. That’s what makes this one bitch of a job.”
    And now he had to worry about a lunatic like Badger Bob McGurk on top of it.
    Â 
    The morning was as unproductive as the night before had been. He checked the rest of the hotels, including some dives that Nora Canady likely wouldn’t have been caught dead in, and moved on to the boardinghouses. No one had seen a young woman matching Nora’s description.
    But at least nobody tried to kill him, and Longarm was thankful for that.
    After eating lunch in a hash house, Longarm headed for the railroad depot. He was friends with several of the ticket agents, and by talking with them, he discovered that, again, no one answering Nora Canady’s description had purchased a ticket during the past few days. “But that doesn’t mean she couldn’t have boarded a train and bought a ticket from the conductor after it pulled out,” one of the agents advised Longarm, which nearly brought a groan of despair from the big lawman. Without a good starting place, Denver—and the whole sweep of the frontier beyond it—made for a mighty big area in which to be searching for one young woman. Longarm had heard the old saying about the needle and the haystack, and he was starting to understand just what it meant.
    Faced with a dwindling supply of options, Longarm began making the rounds of the stagecoach companies. Several of them maintained offices in Denver, and he checked with each in turn. With so many railroads criss-crossing the country these days, the stage lines didn’t do as much business as they once had, but they still carried quite a few passengers to the places the railroads didn’t reach.
    It was late afternoon