“Just catch this bastard before his insanity touches us all in ways unimaginable.”
“He seems bent on…on destroying me…”
“Question is,” said Nathan Kohler, standing over them now, “who’s next?”
“He’s going for larger game,” said Ransom. “His pattern has been to go up the social scale.”
“We should build a record, Alastair,” said Tewes. “Should we ever have this monster in custody…well, it could act in our favor.”
“Act as a kind of Bertillon measurement of the killer’s mind, you think?” he asked Tewes. “And I ’spose you’d like to run hands over this maniac’s head?”
“Doing so with enough such madmen, who knows, perhaps over time, if diligent records are kept, similarities in the bone structure, or areas of abnormality in the brain—areas of weak magnetism, for instance—” Jane realized that both men only stared. “But who can say without long-term study?”
“This is why we at top asked Dr. Tewes’s assistance, Alastair,” Nathan said. “To give our investigation a rigorous scientific, ahhh…appearance.”
“I see…how blind I’ve been.” Ransom grimaced.
“It could have a bearing on the Lombroso controversy, my study,” she added.
“Really? And another reputation made!”
“Look, Detective, every brain is as different as the fingerprint.”
“It’s a proven fact,” added Kohler.
She went on. “In cases such as this, with no usable print or a match, today you only have Bertillon and Lombroso, but perhaps one day men like you—hunters—will routinely turn to men like me—scientists—for answers.”
“Glad you’re concerned with the future, Dr. Tewes,” said Kohler.
“Yeah,” added Ransom, “but as for me, I have to deal with the here and now, and while I find the doctor’s unusual criminal recording interesting, for now I’d best get back to my duties.”
He left Kohler and Tewes to again plot their separate moves in all this. As he turned his back on the odd couple, he felt a definite knife twisting about his spine. Kohler was ever up to no good, and he’d love nothing better than to embarrass Ransom, bring him down, and ultimately put him out to pasture. In fact, he’d been headhunting Ransom for six years now. And to this end, he’d enlisted Tewes’s questionable help. Ransom also feared that Griffin’d been recruited as well.
It’s a minefield, he thought when he saw that Dr. Christian Fenger had not only arrived but was looking over the murders. It’d become rare—Fenger out of his labs, on scene. The man had such complete empathy with murdered souls that scenes like this literally hurt him to the quick.
“What of my ring?” Ransom asked him.
“I can assure you, Ransom, my men’re innocent. I skewered them, and threatened them.”
“And you’re convinced?”
“They haven’t the ring.”
“And their feelings hurt, I’m sure.” If this were true, then the monster has Merielle’s ring. “I’d hoped to bury her with it.”
“At heart the romantic, heh?” Fenger sadly returned to the corpses and severed heads. “The man was not torched, only the woman. Should we read any significance into that?”
“Trelaine’s body fell straightway into the water, his head into the second boat.”
“Heard you did a reenactment. Good a theory as any.”
“The killer would’ve been busy with the woman,” Ransom added, “no doubt shrieking, but strangely, no one heard screams.”
“She might shriek inside her head, but I have it on reliable authority that Chelsey Mandor is—was a mute.”
“A mute? Damn that Philo. Said they’d talked all night.”
“You’ve never spoken all night without a word?” asked Tewes, joining them. “There’re many ways to ‘talk.’”
“Damn that Philo. A mute…another handicapped woman,” complained Ransom.
“Says as much about Philo as it does about the women who’re attracted to him,” added Fenger.
“Or to his camera,” agreed Ransom. “I asked Philo once if he got involved with handicapped and disabled women because he thought it less an investment on his part.”
“What’d he say?” asked Tewes, curious.
“Reminded me of his wheelchair love. Said she couldn’t catch him once it was over. Scoundrel that he is!”
The three of them laughed and Ransom added, “The story does say a lot about our friend Philo.”
Fenger’s tone went serious. “This Miss Mandor…mute from a childhood disease, according to her father—a perfect delicacy for Philo.”
“Her father is here? My God.”
Ransom feared he’d get no new or useful information out of the distraught father. Another wail escaped the man, who beat the earth with fists from a kneeling position on the grass.
Alastair noticed that Tewes’d returned to Kohler, and they were in a controlled but heated discussion. “Look there, Christian,” Ransom said. “I should call on Dr. Tewes tonight, to break the weaker of the two obvious conspirators.”
Then of a sudden, Tewes stormed off.
“What’s Nathan’s game?” asked Fenger.
“The game of Get Ransom.”
“Wants an end to talk of an incident that you alone want dredged up.”
Griffin came back to him. “You were right about the lady victim, Ransom. Nothing on her in the manner of jewelry. Do you think he takes his victim’s jewelry?”
“Until now, I thought Shanks and Gwinn were getting rich off these deaths, but Dr. Fenger assures me otherwise.”
Griff and Fenger acknowledged one another.
“Ransom, so far as the chief goes, I only let him know what I want him to know when I want him to know. Tell ’im, Dr. Fenger.”
Fenger cast his eyes in another direction, but Ransom saw the guilt. “Not you, too, Christian?”
“Kohler runs the man’s budget, Rance,” said Griff. “Whataya expect?”
Fenger said nothing.
“Let’s just work this case, the three of us, and when it’s concluded, we can reassess where we stand with one another, gentlemen!”
“Sure, a chance is all I ask…a chance to prove myself,” said Griff but Fenger remained silent.
“Although I’ve none left, Griff, I do understand ambition. But mark me, young friend, the prize won can leave a man alone with ambition.”
“As may be said of your blind ambition to open the books on Haymarket!” Fenger fired back as if struck.
“Aye…touché. You have me there, but who does one trust, Christian, who?”
A deep, painful silence rose among them like an evil child at play. Griffin blasted him. “Alastair, you never put trust in me. Not once’ve you confided a single dirty secret you’ve learned about Haymarket. Just a few drunk stories at the bar, yet you expect sympathy and—”
“You’re right, Griff. So much I’ve not confided in anyone for fear it’d get back to Kohler. Nathan has a way of getting at people, controlling ’em.”
“I want to understand your side of things, Alastair. I do.”
“Perhaps one day soon…after we apprehend this fiend.”
“I’ll hold you to it.”
Dr. Fenger said, “As to the case at hand…I can tell you fellows it’s definitely the work of the same garroter. Down to the diamond shape at the neck here”—he paused to point at his own Adam’s apple—“about here, on both male and female victims. What utter nerve and swiftness in killing he’s perfected…practicing his technique over and over to get this efficient.”
“What do you suppose he practices on, Doctor?” asked Griffin.
“Melons, fence posts, small animals, who can say, perhaps all and more.”
“Or cadavers in a morgue?” asked Nathan Kohler, who joined them. “Gentlemen, whoever this perverted, twisted bastard is, he destroys the peace and happiness of the fair. This kind of thing, four deaths now on fairgrounds, two similar deaths within a cab’s ride! It
has to stop and stop immediately.”
“Not to be contrary,” began Ransom, “but it’s seven deaths all toll, sir, and I’ve seen no evidence these killings’ve made any dent in the number of hotdogs, hamburgers, or trinkets sold, or a decrease in fair attendance.”
“In fact, the numbers have increased!” added Fenger.
“Where the deuce’re your Resurrection Men, Fenger?” Kohler barked. “Get these unseemly bodies and heads out of here now, now!”
Fenger took great exception to Shanks and Gwinn being called his Resurrection Men, and he stood face-to-face with Kohler on the issue. “Look here, we do not rob cadavers from their sanctified graves!”
“You chest cutters’re never satisfied.”
“Whatever you’re talking about—”
“Potter’s Field! A recent disturbance,” countered Kohler.
“I was sent to investigate,” Griff added. “A woman’s body…taken without a trace.”
“How sick is that?” asked Kohler.
“I recall the incident,” said Ransom.
“Who was she, and what end came of it?” Fenger asked.
“No end, open case still, Drimmer!” complained Nathan.
“Remains a mystery, even her identity,” said Griff. “She was a numbered grave—an elderly Jane Doe.”
“And the body in question never turned up?”
“Afraid not.”
“Someone likely made a stew of her,” suggested Ransom.
Fenger nodded. “Not farfetched, given how swollen our streets are with the homeless, and the city doing nothing to relieve the problem.”
“Now they’re calling him the Phantom of the Fair over at the Tribune,” said Kohler in disgust. “Flood gates’ve opened! Imagine all the ink devoted to this deviant! From what Christian tells me, he doesn’t rape his victims—alive or dead! How deviant is that?”
“My God, Nathan, do you think raping his victims might make him a better chap?” asked Fenger. “Somehow more like us and less a monster, somehow less sadistic?”
“Somehow, yes, in my mind.”
“Somehow? In your mind.” Ransom, his cane beating the pavement here, controlled the urge to reach out and strangle Kohler. Throw in rape with your murderous act and it somehow made murder more palatable? Normal? Ransom had to walk off in a circle to not explode.
“At least if he raped them first, we might understand his motive is my point. It’d point to a clear purpose in these senseless attacks.” Nathan straightened and stood taller. “At the moment, what possible motive have we for his bloodletting?”
“He likes blood…likes the smell of it, the consistency of it, likes to wash his hands in it,” suggested Fenger.
“Likes the garrote,” added Griff, “likes the heft of it, the cunning of it, the handiness of it, the genius behind it. Maybe the history of it.”
Ransom shouted, “Come on, he likes the feel of the kill, same as you and I when we hunt deer with a Winchester. He likes the process of the hunt itself…the hooking of the bait, the lure, all of it.”
“To gain the moment in which his prey is under absolute control,” added Fenger.
“Yes, you would understand him, wouldn’t you,” Kohler coldly replied to Alastair’s summing up. “Takes a killer to catch one, or at least to know how one will behave.”
“Prove me a murderer, Nathan, and I’ll willingly sit for shackles. Until such time, I’d appreciate your not characterizing me as this evil bastard’s counterpart.”
“But you just did so yourself!”
“Aye…I did, but I’ve not given you carte blanche to do so.” Ransom knew Kohler guilty of at least as much evil as himself, but in a time of war, men did evil for a greater good, or at least what they perceive a greater good. During the “war” with labor, Alastair had interrogated an arsonist and anarchist, a known killer of men who set bombs off to make a political point, a refugee of such activities in France. He’d transplanted to America and had drifted to Chicago when news got out about the labor dissidents at Pullman. All this, days before Haymarket and the riot and the bomb that exploded in the square, killing Ransom’s fellow officers and doing its best to kill him.
Ransom meant to get information out of the man, and in a warehouse owned by a friend of the police, he’d sweated and beaten the fellow for information. Rumor abounded of a bomb having been planted somewhere in the city. He’d taken extreme measures to get the information he wanted out of Oleander, the man’s code name, and the only name he’d disclosed until he screamed his real name from within the flames.
The matchstick slowly burned toward Ransom’s fingers as he’d held it to the man’s half-opened eyes, blood in his pupils making focusing impossible. No doubt, from the blows to the head. Alastair and the other cops present had pummeled the man’s cranium. His bloodied features might’ve told Ransom that Oleander was, by this time, unable to formulate words much less inform on his comrades.
Then Kohler tossed his lit cigar into the fumes rising off the man. While Alastair’s eyebrows and the hair on his hands curled and blackened, Oleander went up like a rag doll tossed into the hearth. As much as Alastair attempted to kill the flames and stop the death, the flames fought harder than he, claiming what was theirs.
Irony of it, he and not Kohler had earned a reputation that night. No one had seen Kohler’s action. Ransom’s reputation had remained intact since then, and word on the street, spread by the grapevine of lowlifes, toughs, snitches like his own Dot’n’Carry, all had him down as a cold-blooded bastard who’d do anything—anything—to gain what he wanted. As Dot’n’Carry put it: “If a man finds himself in custody of Alastair, then the only ransom worth talking about was payment in full.”
Interrogation meant beatings as a matter of course, routine, expected by those arrested. Certain indigents in particular, when taken into custody and not questioned on the latest atrocities in the city, demanded it of their jailers. They demanded a beating regardless, as a beating behind jail walls proved a badge of honor. Further, to leave a Chicago jail without a beating marked a man as a snitch. But in the case of one Inspector Alastair Ransom, the word beating had taken on new meaning in a mix of myth and legend.
“Alastair…I think you’re so right about this,” said Dr. Fenger, bringing him out of his reverie. “The kill…the kill being anticlimactic, our boy sets them ablaze for one final rush of excitement. Theoretically, the kill’s not enough.”
Kohler loudly pandered to the press. “So, Inspector, you have no clue as to why a man would set a dead body aflame?”
The pointedness of aflame used by the chief made everyone within hearing squirm. It addressed the rumors about Ransom as much as the killer. Alastair’s fists clenched, and he took a threatening step toward Kohler.
Griffin, hand raised, stepped between the two larger men, while hazarding a reply, “Fire has always held significance to people…”
Fenger agreed as if on cue, “Full of symbolism and mysticism.”
“Hmmm…Tewes said something similar in his report,” began Kohler. “That fire is or may have some weighty import in his head, in a symbolic sense, say of victory or some such…” Nathan stepped back from the threat in Ransom’s eyes.
“More likely he holds us all in contempt,” weighed in Dr. Fenger. “It is the act of a contemptuous man, an angry man. I believe Tewes said it best in a brief discussion I had with him.”
“Go on,” said Kohler.
“Dr. Tewes believes the killer has a fire fetish.”
“A fire fetish.”
“A fire bug, yes,” added Griffin.
“Pyromania is how he put it, a deep-seated insatiable need. Damn, I’m inadequate to the task. Tewes knows the jargon of mental disorder far better than I. I’m, after all, a surgeon.”
“Well, if it is some aberration of the brain, a disorder in here,” Kohler pointed to his wide forehead, “then he certainly has given into it, carrying about his own portable vial of kerosene.”
“H
e takes their lives and utterly disfigures them. He not only wants them dead, but to control what happens to them afterward—”
“Afterward?” Kohler’s features crinkled in confusion.
“After they’re dead. A form of necrophilia, Dr. Tewes calls it, but rather than have his way with the dead body, ahhh, in a sexual sense, like you earlier spoke of, having some sort of perversion there, you see, he may be getting his sexual excitement from the fire as much as from the garroting and holding another’s life in his hands.”
“Tewes said all that?” asked Ransom, impressed.
“That way no one, not even the best surgeon—”
“Not even you, Dr. Fenger,” added Griffin.
“—can put them peacefully at rest for all eternity. No amount of cosmetics or preservation can help, you see? A burned, dehydrated body cannot e’en be given a proper wake.”
“I see,” replied Kohler.
Fenger absently added, “Given that every artery, every vein is collapsed by the heat of fire, the body can’t receive formaldehydes, and stuffing rags soaked in formaldehyde into body cavities is not really effective.”
“It’s a sick desire to destroy the remains,” suggested Ransom. “By decapitation, then fire. Yet he preserves their features as if they are significant.”
“Like photographs,” Griff added.
Dr. Fenger lit a slim cigar and smoke encircled them. Kohler coughed, Griff rocked on his heels, and Ransom chewed on his unlit pipe. Fenger said, “You fellows could be on to something. But it’s what besets the man…the ghosts of his past—according to Tewes—ones gone unfulfilled, ones ne’er put to rest, that have a way of rising from the grave.”
Kohler nodded, his mind racing with Fenger’s reply. “Then, by God, Ransom, get on to this madman’s trail. Find the ghosts that beset him! But first, I need on my desk tomorrow morning a full report for Mayor Harrison!”
CHAPTER 21
The same night at the Tewes residence
“I’m done with it! No more James Phineas Murdock Tewes, no more hiding behind this disguise!” Jane Francis announced when she stormed in. She’d just returned from the fair, walking out on Kohler’s conspiracy against Alastair and on any hope of helping find a killer. “Who am I kidding? They don’t want my help—either of them!”
City for Ransom Page 23
