Shadows in the White City

by Robert W. Walker

  “Christian, when it comes time for us to deliver up this obvious lunatic to Senator Chapman, are you sure you’ll have the stomach for it?”

  “I’ll happily light the fire that’ll boil him alive, yes.”

  “And Jane—acting as Tewes again? Was that her idea or yours, coming down here to see this atrocity? Have you cut her in on the deal?”

  “She has street contacts I don’t have, contacts you should be cultivating right now instead of harassing me.”

  “Damn…then you did call her here.”

  “I told her the circumstances of the case, and I am asking her to do a…a psychological mock-up of what kind of mind could concoct such a fate for a child. Don’t for a moment think this is the last of the Vanishings.”

  “I see…so you are just playing ‘Catcher in the Rye’ to save the future children from harm’s way.”

  “Don’t try to get all moral with me, Alastair. Not you!”

  “Next you’ll be marching out the bagpipes and singing verses from Robbie Burns, heh?”

  “Bull! I know you too well for this, Rance.”

  “Or perhaps Kipling. Do a bit of flag-waving, trumpets, drums, all that?”

  “You forget, I did the autopsy on what was left of Anne Chapman.”

  This stopped Ransom’s joking, and he nodded to his old friend. “I know that must’ve been…must’ve been hell.” Then he repeated, “I saw her remains just now.”

  “Butcher is too kind a word for this madman, but, Alastair, there is something else…something I have to share with you.”

  “What is it?”

  “At the nape of the neck, right here,” he indicated on himself, his hand going to the base of his neck at the back. “Where the vertebra meet the skull.”

  “Spit it out, man.”

  “She was kept for some time on a hook, dangling like…like a carcass, and there is some justification in believing…God…hard to even voice it.”

  “Say it, Doctor.”

  “The missing portions of her—cheeks, torso, appendages.”

  “Yes, yes?”

  “They were taken from her over time.”

  “Over time?”

  “This was not a single sit down.”

  “Whataya saying that—”

  “Not a single one-time carving.”

  “Jesus—”

  “Mary—”

  “—and Joseph. These victims were carved on multiple times at different sittings?”

  “Proven by each wound carefully examined. Each carving displays a different time frame.”

  “My God. You’re saying she was spiked on a nail or a hook in some godforsaken place and carved on like a leg of lamb.”

  “Multiple blades used on her as well. Some well after death set in, obviously. Merciful shock will have killed her before the fiend or fiends could make that many stabs and slashes.”

  “Does Kohler know all this?”

  “He does.”

  “And he informed Chapman of this?”

  “He did, against my better judgment. I had to tell someone, and you weren’t here. I could not keep absolutely silent on the matter.”

  “So you share with Kohler? And then Kohler rushes off to inform Chapman of these awful details better kept in-house to begin with? That’s not standard procedure, Christian, and you know it.”

  “I agree but there’s no fetching it back now.”

  Alastair shook his head in disdain. “This is what sent the senator over the edge, correct?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “And now we’re having to deal with—or deal in—an insane wealthy senator…and there’s a fortune to be had. We could likely name our price, heh?”

  “Alastair, will you please stop preaching to me? Christ!”

  “I tell you, Christian, the whole thing smacks of evil wrapped in evil.”

  “I did not for a moment suspect Nathan Kohler would impart the details to Senator Chapman.”

  “But he did, and now we have this situation on our hands.”

  “And what can we do but make the best of a bad bargain, Alastair. That is all I am hoping for now.”

  “It’s a bargain that will haunt you to your grave.”

  “Come now! What are we proposing? To see this bastard who did this desecration of a child get precisely what he gave out? At one time that was called justice.”

  “Rationalizing it does not change what it is, Christian, and if it got out, you can kiss your career and connection with Cook County and Rush Medical College good-bye.”

  “Northwestern could send us all packing, given their growth. Rush needs a major influx of funds.”

  “Get off it, man. I believe Christian Fenger needs funds far more than does Cook County or Rush.”

  He dropped his gaze. “All right, I need the money as well. Hell, Alastair, you need the money more than any of us.”

  “How much of it have you confided to Jane?”

  “Not much…the sketchy details.”

  “Tell me she knows nothing of this devil’s bargain you’ve struck with Nathan Kohler and Chapman.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Keep it that way if you wish to keep her respect. Where is she, by the way?”

  “She’s two doors down, resting…lying down. Look, Alastair—”

  But he was gone, banging down the hallway with his cane, going in search of Jane, his anger at boiling point.

  Alastair found Dr. Tewes—Jane incognito—in the room down the hall, recovering from a bruise to the head from when she’d fainted in the morgue. Given the circumstances, the usual odors of that place conspiring with the brutality done to young Anne Chapman, he little wondered that even a surgeon such as Jane could fall faint.

  “Are you all right?” was his first question. She was sitting on the edge of the bed they’d placed Tewes in to regain himself. Jane looked out through those unmistakable eyes and from behind her mustache and makeup at Alastair.

  “It’s horrible what he did to her.”

  “And somehow Fenger thinks you should be involved in all this? Jane, I forbid it.”

  “What?”

  “You are not to get involved. Not one whit.”

  “Hold on. Who do you think you’re addressing?”

  “I know who I am addressing.”

  “Apparently, you do not.”

  “Whatever he’s paying you to do this psychology on this madman, Jane, I will double it if you drop it now.”

  “Look here, Alastair. We do not have the sort of relationship in which you order me around.”

  “I’m asking you, then.”

  “It’s already too late. I’ve made promises to Christian, promises I intend to keep.”

  “Damn you for a stubborn woman!”

  A nurse entered asking Dr. Tewes if he were feeling better. Jane replied in male voice, “I am fit. Shouldn’t’ve accompanied Dr. Fenger into his morgue on a full stomach.”

  The nurse had Tewes sign a release form, and with this formality complete and the nurse gone, Jane got to her feet, readying to leave.

  “Wait…you do not know the whole picture here, Jane. You must trust me.”

  “I see a man trying to protect me from unsavory business. It’s the same sort of attitude that kept me out of medical school here…sent me overseas to finish my training.” She was at the door now. “And frankly, Alastair, I had come to expect more from you.”

  “More what from me?”

  “More…just that I expected better coming from you.”

  “But I tell you—”

  “No more. You’ve disappointed me enough for one day.”

  She left him standing alone in the empty room.

  Every time he got into a covered carriage now to get around Chicago, Alastair was reminded of how Waldo Denton had been in every frame of his existence during the entire hunt for the Phantom of the Fair—ever present yet invisible at once. How effective a tool it was to be cloaked in such mundane existence as to go about invisibl
e even while in plain sight. Alastair vowed never to let this kind of blindness stand in his way again, and he began to ponder the invisibility of the so-called horse butcher in leather apron who might have abducted a number of young people from the fitful streets of Ransom’s city, to jam them onto meat hooks, and to begin a steady filleting of their features and work over them until the entrails were gone. The papers had hinted at missing intestines, but according to the autopsy report that Alastair had perused as he stood over the latest victim’s remains, all major organs had gone missing.

  “Where’re the parts…the evidence of his crimes? Where does he hide them if not in a refrigeration unit of some sort?”

  Alastair heard the cry of a newsboy on the street, waving the latest Tribune and shouting, “The Vanishings! Read all about it! No arrest made!”

  Alastair banged with his cane for the cabbie to stop and fetch a paper. The paper was deposited through the window and Alastair scanned it for the reasons he always scanned news accounts: to take the pulse of the people, to gauge the mood. He did not expect to find any evidence floating about the story. Nor did the Tribune disappoint him in this any more than the Herald had.

  Rumors mostly. Eyewitness accounts to nothing. A source quoted as saying, “I saw ol’ Leather Apron nab the lil’ nicker, but I could see no face on the man.”

  Another “eyewitness” added, “It was pitch that night, but I heard a noise as I come out of O’Dhule’s and of a sudden, I heard a scream like a little kid, but it was silenced soon as it sounded. I followed a shadow into the alleyway there, but he disappeared like smoke. Some others, a little family of homeless, stood there staring at me and swore they saw no one come that way.”

  Alastair cast the paper aside, its pages covering the floor-board. “Another invisible killer who turns into the very darkness surrounding him.”

  He wondered if in the future, if in the twentieth century, if there’d ever come a time when men like him would be an anachronism, a thing of the past, unnecessary, as science will have found a way to end the lives of men born into evil, born with the mark of Caine permanently on their foreheads.

  For now, he wanted to go home. In the cab that he’d ordered to wait for him, his bag brought back from Mackinac remained. He wanted a shower, a shave, a moment’s respite, and some time alone to sort things.

  “As to the victim, a well-known, proper lady is her mother,” Jed Logan had said back at the station.

  “Lives at the Chapman family home, north shore, with her husband, a banker.”

  “How did they lose sight of the little girl?”

  “Fourteen-year-old. You ever try keeping up with a kid that age, Ransom?” asked Behan. “I didn’t think so.”

  “The mother and Anne were out for a day in the park when Anne went missing,” added Logan, who took a moment to burp out a gas bubble. “Hell man, read the report.”

  Alastair did not know the details of how the girl had gone missing that day. It had gone to Logan and Behan as a missing-persons case for a week and a half before Dr. Fenger was called to the river at Wabash to identify remains there. Called to the scene by Logan and Behan, who’d been notified by uniformed police, who’d been aware that the detectives had been chasing down the missing grandchild of an important man.

  How the first police on scene discerned that what they had was human at all, Alastair could not say. The mutilated body had been in the water for days, ropes clinging to the small bloated package of flesh. The ropes and its discovery clearly indicated that Anne’s remains had been poorly weighted down.

  “Whoever did it, dropped her into the river, we are guessing around the Michigan Avenue Bridge, given the current,” Logan had added.

  “We think likely in a weed patch just west of the bridge,” Behan had said.

  “Even so, we could not identify her as Anne. The mother refused to believe it and could not be made to really look at the remains.”

  “So the senator showed up to do the job,” Alastair had said.

  “Dr. Fenger was preparing to have the body buried in the Potter’s Field as a little Jane Doe, as there was nothing identifying her, until he asked Chapman about the mark he’d found on the buttocks—which had also been carved into.”

  “The birthmark, I see.”

  “That and her lovely red curls.”

  Yes…red curls, he said to himself here in the back of the cab, curls which curiously enough, appeared the only feature on her body that did not meet the knife.

  “You can’t eat hair,” Behan had commented.

  “If you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat anything,” countered Logan.

  Ransom had replied, “But when you have flesh, why eat hair?”

  CHAPTER 8

  Ransom felt privileged to own one of the first indoor plumbing facilities in the city, where he could shower and shave in peace, as well as relieve himself without having to go down a flight of stairs to an outdoor privy.

  After cleaning up, he listened to a Bach symphony on his phonograph while perusing the paperwork that he’d had a messenger bring to him from the station house.

  He learned little from the information save that Logan and Behan had padded their murder book with a great deal of useless anecdotal testimony and a lot of pointing fingers, most of them pointing in the direction of the slaughterhouses along Market Street and farther south at the Chicago Stock Yards. There was no lack of suspicious characters in the bovine and hog-slaughtering business or among the horse knackers—all of whom wore the obligatory leather apron. Once a hue and cry had gone up that the killer was a leather-apron man, there was no stopping the flood of informers and invectives.

  There also came the typical outcry against foreigners. At once fear the “other tribe,” particularly the Jews among them. Arm in arm with accusation came the usual bigotry and outlandish charges that even seeped into the newspapers. It was well known that Jews routinely sacrificed children to their god, so why not abduct gentile children with red and blond curls and blue eyes and cut them to ribbons to appease a Jewish custom and to feed their sadistic cannibalistic needs? Yes, a Jewish knacker would do nicely…wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. Alastair had heard it in many permutations and in every venue at every level of society since his return.

  Actually anyone unable to succinctly speak English had become suspect to his neighbors. There had already been mob attacks on individuals who were thought to be the one and only Leather Apron. One hefty Austrian fellow had bloodied the noses and bruised the eyes of twenty men when he was attacked, but he was himself hospitalized with multiple contusions at Cook County before police could end the violence.

  Another theory had it that a now dead—killed—horse butcher by the name of Timothy Crutcheon was the man behind the Vanishings. Crutcheon sold rags and bottles when he could not find a dead horse in need of butchering. Most knackers were independent, and if they did not work at the yards, then they must drum up their own business by finding someone wanting to rid the farm of a useless aged animal. A lot of locals suspected Crutcheon of many a local crime, especially when a horse came up lame or too suddenly off his feet. People suspected this particular Leather Apron of poisoning a horse in order to generate revenue. A knacker normally purchased a sick or aged animal for a scant price and butchered it for parts, hide, and flesh, which he then turned around and sold at a handy profit. It was grueling, cruel work indeed; not the sort of career path people wanted for their children.

  Aside from his unfortunate profession, Crutcheon traded on his unfortunate looks, having boils all over his body and face. It was rumored he’d once been a sideshow attraction. People called him a cunning man, a male witch of the black arts, and to make a living, he traded on his notoriety. Possibly another offshoot victim of the real killer, Crutcheon had turned up dead. Logan and Behan had investigated and declared that old Crutcheon had died of multiple stab wounds with a pitchfork where he lay sleeping in a barn well within the city limits, a barn owning to a family with ten children afoot. Th
e pitchfork also belonged to the farmer, and it’d somehow become buried in Crutcheon’s chest, discovered when the eldest son had come out to feed stock and milk the family cow.

  No one knew why Crutcheon chose this place to sleep; he’d come in the night, uninvited. Most likely, if pursued, the case of Crutcheon would unravel quickly and surround the fears a mother and father had for their children on seeing the boil-infested wizard waddle into their barn. Alastair imagined the man waking with a scream due to a sharp three-pronged pain in his aged chest.

  Other such outbreaks of fear would continue citywide until the killer was caught and the Vanishings ended.

  His phone rang. He’d finally taken the step to have one installed since the fiasco of being unable to contact Jane and Gabby at the moment they were in the most danger from the Phantom, the night he and Griff had had to navigate the city in a hansom cab going full tilt during a thunderstorm as the only means of getting to Jane’s in time. He now lifted the phone to learn it was Nathan Kohler calling.

  “You have had time to think it over. What do you say? Think of it as an opportunity for the two of us to work toward a common goal and to bury old hatchets, Alastair.”

  Alastair said nothing.

  “Alastair?”

  Since when has Nathan my best interest at heart?”

  “Alastair?”

  And when did I become Alastair instead of Inspector or simply Ransom to this man?

  “Are you there?”

  “I said I wanted to sleep on it.”

  “Make the right decision, man.” Kohler hung up.

  “Now that’s the Nathan I know,” he said to the silent phone.

  “You can ’ave no kinna self-worth in such a business, even though it keeps bread on ye table,” the horse knacker named Houston told Alastair as he kept moving about the Chicago Stock Yards, pulling on his leather gloves and apron, snatching for his tools. “Bloody truth of it is, even round here there’s a hexarchy.”

  “What do you mean, Jack, a hexarchy?” Alastair, while not a friend knew Jack Houston from the pubs.