American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, the Birth of Hollywood, and the Crime of the Century by Howard Blum

Billy assumed that the operatives were on their way; they had left Chicago in too much of a rush to pause to send a telegram. But on the third day a telegram arrived at the Alexandria Hotel. Its message was terse and utterly demoralizing: The Peoria evidence was missing.

PART II
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    MANHUNT

TWELVE
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    B ILLY BURNS LIFTED his water glass high into the air as if to make a toast. But rather than offering up a conventional salute, he leaned across the dining table at the Alexandria Hotel, fixed his district manager with a steady, thoughtful stare, and shared another of his often-recited maxims. “Find the motive,” he lectured Malcolm MacLaren, “and in due course the criminal will be revealed.”
    It was January 1911, just three months after the destruction of the Times Building. The detective, after a quick business trip to New York to work on a murder case and then home to Chicago for the Christmas holidays, had been back in Los Angeles for little over a week. While he was away, there had been another bombing in the city. Early on Christmas morning a series of explosions had rocked the Llewellyn Iron Works. A night watchman had been injured, and the plant had been severely damaged. His men had searched the ruined building but had not been able to find the remnants of a bomb. He did not know if this latest blast was tied to the Times explosion. Perhaps it was the work of someone inspired by that disaster, acting for unknown and very personal reasons. These questions reinforced Billy’s growing sense of urgency. He feared there would be more explosions, more deaths. But he had no answers. All he could do was to sift through a thicket of possible clues and intriguing rumors, trying, as he put it, “to unravel the mystery.”
    It was a frustrating time. Throughout the nation prominent figures were voicing many deeply believed—as well as many self-serving and politically inspired—theories about who was to blame for the blast. But there was little hard evidence. Billy had suspected the Peoria bomb might reveal a promising lead, but until it could be found—and he still had hopes it would be located—he had no choice but to pursue other inquiries.
    For weeks he had been stymied, but now at last he felt that one investigative avenue loomed with a measure of promise. “A possibility,” he said with a careful guardedness. Still, he felt confident enough to try it out on MacLaren; after all, Mac was the L.A. native and would have a first-hand appreciation of the stakes—and whether they could lead a man to commit murder. Or more accurately, the detective realized, twenty-one murders.
    So he had summoned his district manager to dinner in the Alex’s grand dining room. Not even waiting for the meal to begin, Billy rushed into his presentation. He kept his glass high and, always full of theater, let the glow of the dining room’s crystal chandelier reflect on it as though it were a spotlight. “The motive,” he then suggested to MacLaren, “might very well be in this glass—water!”
     
    In arid southern California, water was the elixir of fortunes, Billy began, as if at last delivering his lecture to the bankers. It was a commodity as rare and as precious as gold. And the future—as well as a robber baron’s treasure—belonged to those visionaries who could manipulate Nature and bring the revitalizing flow of water to the vast hot, sandy California wastelands.
    Harrison Gray Otis was driven by such ambitions, the detective told Mac as he settled into his story. And Otis’s and his partners’ attention was focused on a sun-baked strip of land 250 miles northeast of Los Angeles, close to the Nevada line—Owens Valley.
    Nearly ten miles wide and one hundred miles long, the valley would have been simply another scorched stretch of desert if not, Billy explained, for one redeeming and fateful bit of geology. Running through its center was the Owens River, an icy,