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It was only then, when O’Connor went to retrieve the money, that he made an astounding discovery. The ransom was gone! A frantic search ensued but as this story went to press, there was no word as to where the ransom had gone or how it had been taken from beneath the very noses of the police.

As no fewer than eight policemen had the area in view and yet not one reported seeing or hearing anything of a suspicious nature, there appears to be but one possible explanation for the disappearance of the ransom. The chief, however, refused to entertain the possibility that one of his own officers might have absconded with the money, saying they are “to a man of the highest moral character and would never resort to thievery of any kind.”

In the meantime, young Kirchmeyer is still missing, and fear grows by the hour that he will meet with some terrible fate, as it is now obvious that the police of this city are far better at losing things than finding them. Indeed, it is to be wondered now whether there is anyone in St. Paul who can prevent a most awful tragedy from playing itself out before long.

What the author of this melancholy prediction didn’t know was that Shadwell Rafferty—saloonkeeper, bon vivant, private detective, and a man with an uncanny understanding of the human animal—was already on the case.

Although best remembered for the remarkable series of investigations he undertook with Sherlock Holmes, beginning with the ice palace murders of 1896, Shadwell Rafferty had even before then made a name for himself in St. Paul as a private detective. Saloonkeeping was, of course, his chief occupation, but by the early 1890s his legendary watering hole at the Ryan Hotel had proved so successful that he found himself able to devote more time to the “detectin’ game,” as called it. It was therefore hardly surprising that he found himself in the midst of the Kirchmeyer affair almost from the very start.

The facts of the case were simple enough, or so it seemed at first. On the morning of June 9, Kirchmeyer, aged twenty-four, left his family’s towering brick mansion on Stewart Avenue in the city’s West End to walk to his job as an accountant at his father’s brewery. Located in a complex of stout limestone buildings along the Mississippi River just three blocks from the mansion, the brewery was famed as the home of “Kirchmeyer’s Cavern Lager” or “Kirchy’s,” as it was commonly called, and so named because it was aged in a system of caves dug into the sandstone cliffs nearby. Local malt connoisseurs, Rafferty among them, regarded the dark foamy libation as St. Paul’s finest beer, no small achievement in city that took its drinking seriously.

Young Kirchmeyer’s walk was normally accomplished in a matter of minutes, but on this morning he did not arrive at the brewery as scheduled. Although not considered by his parents to be a perfectly reliable young man, he was seldom late for work and, if so, his tardiness was never extreme. When he became a full hour late, his father telephoned home to see what had happened. It was only then, after a brief search of the household, that Augusta Kirchmeyer, Michael’s mother, made a frightful discovery. Lodged beneath the screen door on the front porch was a note, written in the large block letters a child might use. It said: