Shadows in the White City

by Robert W. Walker

  Alastair still had nightmares about when he’d been thrown unconscious into that stench-filled hell-hole they called an ambulance—literally a meat wagon. The whitewash given the old dram had not completely obscured the old Oscar Mayer Meat Company sign along each side.

  Alastair put aside such thoughts and kneeled close in on the dead child, guessing from the size of the girl that she was about the age of young Audra or slightly older. Ransom lifted the broken neck, wondering if it’d been broken before or after death, or during some horrendous torture or struggle. “Didja fight the devil, lass?” he asked the small corpse.

  Ransom then looked at the girl’s features, and despite chunks of flesh slit from her cheeks, the face and eyes shocked him. He let the face drop away, gasping. “It’s Danielle…Queen Danielle…”

  “You know the victim, Alastair?” asked Logan, eyes wide.

  Behan came closer, saying, “Keep it down. We don’t need any more agitation from this crowd.”

  Logan whispered in his ear. “How do you know this Danielle?”

  “I…I interviewed her just two days ago regarding…about what the word on the street was with regards to the case.”

  “Do you think it a coincidence then she’s dead?”

  “She becomes a victim immediately after my interviewing her?

  “And the bastard left the eyes and face so’s to be recognized.” Behan swallowed hard and wiped his brow.

  “I’ve never trusted coincidence, lads.”

  “So why start now?” Logan patted Ransom on the back.

  “It mayn’t be prudent to inform press or public of your connection with the girl, Ransom,” suggested Behan.

  Ransom looked Inspector Ken Behan in the eye. “I merely talked with her about the case, not even the case, really. About how she and other shelter and homeless children view the world, and who they fear, and why. I was looking for any kind of lead.”

  “Like any cop, you put your ear to the street.” The thin-faced Logan swiped at a shock of unruly hair.

  “Yeah…basic information gathering,” agreed Behan, “but people don’t know that. They only know what they wanna know.”

  “On the ground information gathering, Behan,” Alastair said, “exactly.”

  “All the same, people can twist things, so keep it quiet, your connection to the victim,” Behan continued to caution.

  Alastair now glared openly at Behan, and then his glare took in Logan. “I did not say I slept with the child!”

  Behan shushed him. “We…I didn’t mean to imply—”

  But Alastair loudly proclaimed, “Those two ghouls over there with their meat wagon won’t get their hands on Danielle.”

  “Alastair! What’re you doing?”

  Ransom lifted her up into his arms. “No one cared for her in life, not anyone. In death, she’ll be cared for.” With that he carried Danielle’s brutalized and butchered body to the police dram that had brought him here.

  Shanks and Gwinn started to rush in, demanding to know what Ransom was doing. Cook County Morgue paid Shanks and Gwinn only for the numbers of bodies they brought in. Logan and Behan stepped in, running interference for Ransom, backing Shanks and Gwinn off.

  “Sorry, boys, but the CPD has this one,” said Logan.

  “Back off,” added Behan.

  Ransom laid the body in the police carriage and ordered the uniformed driver to take him and Danielle’s remains to the morgue. As the driver pulled away with Ransom and the unusual cargo, Alastair heard Shanks spit out a curse under his breath, while Gwinn toyed with a six-inch blade, cleaning his dirty nails. Both of the reputed resurrection men had sternly eye-balled Inspector Ransom as he’d closed the carriage door on himself and the body.

  “Never seen a grown man cry,” Behan muttered to his partner.

  Logan looked from the retreating carriage to the ambulance men. “Yeah…just look at the vultures.”

  “I meant Rance.”

  “Rance? I saw no tears.”

  “Look a little deeper next time.”

  “They get paid by the number of bodies transported to County, Alastair, and those fellows, no matter what you think of them, have a right to a living as anyone,” Dr. Fenger chastised him on learning that Ransom was in his morgue with the young woman’s body. Fenger had guessed her age at thirteen, perhaps fourteen.

  “Damn Shanks and Gwinn, Christian! I talk to this girl and two days later she’s brutally murdered!”

  “You knew the child?”

  “Not really, no. I was following a lead…a lead that began with Jane and a young girl now in as much danger, a street urchin named Audra, who led us to Danielle.”

  “I have coffee in my office. Come, let’s talk.”

  It was not long before Alastair downed his second cup of Irish coffee and had explained the religion of the street children he had run into. Fenger had listened with awe at the revelations both from the children and from Philo Keane.

  “I had not known Philo was an orphan as a child.”

  “He had it pretty rough in Montreal.”

  “You know, Alastair…not that it has anything to do with Philo, but some people who grow up on the streets like that…as adults or older children, they begin bullying others, and it is not unusual for some to escalate to violence. Some escalating to murder of the very thing that reminds them of their past.”

  “Are you saying—”

  “Just theorizing.”

  “Are you theorizing that the bastard behind these butcherings and vanishings was once a street child?”

  “Was and perhaps still is—even if older!”

  “Gone over to the dark side of that religion they preach, yes,” agreed Ransom with himself. “Of course. Acting on the belief in this war between Heaven and Hell, and doing Satan’s bidding.”

  “A strong possibility, yes.”

  “There’re literally thousands of homeless here.”

  “And more flooding into the city every day.”

  Alastair declined a third cup of the potent, bourbon-spiked coffee. He stared, glassy-eyed, at Fenger’s wall of degrees and awards.

  “So what will you do now, Alastair?”

  “I’m gonna hunt this predator down like the animal he is.”

  “And when you catch him?”

  Inspector and doctor stared at one another for a long moment. Finally, Alastair said, “Nathan has surely informed you by now that I refuse to be a pawn in Senator Chapman’s plan of vengeance.”

  “And nothing will dissuade you?”

  “Even I have my standards, Doctor.”

  “We all must find the line we’re unwilling to cross.”

  “Look, climbing into this pact with Kohler is a sure step toward hell; you can only regret it in the end, Christian.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

  “There has to be another way. With your reputation, you should be capable of naming your loan.”

  “I’m afraid not…not anymore. Have borrowed from all of ’em.”

  “I don’t understand it, Christian. You don’t gamble anymore than Philo or I, so where is all this money going?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Secrets. Everybody’s got secrets.”

  “This could ruin me.”

  Alastair shook his head. “Nothing you could do, old friend, could possibly ruin you in my eyes, unless you turn out to be the madman going about butchering children.”

  “Some in the press are saying he is a medical man.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Saying Leather Apron makes incisions, makes surgical cuts. Damn fools. I made Carmichael sit through the last autopsy, and I showed him the difference between butchery and surgery.”

  “Did it take? Did he get it?”

  “Like the fools in London who called Jack the Ripper’s twenty-nine or thirty insane slashes precision, and why? Because he ripped out a woman’s uterus and other organs?” Fenger had
stood and was now pacing, angry at the thought of it. “Damn fools. Sometimes I feel we are surrounded on all sides by imbeciles.”

  “Any copper can see these cuts have no similarity to surgery,” agreed Ransom. “But it does not rule out that the killer could be a cagey medical fellow who wants it to look like anything but precision.”

  “Oh, please, not you, too.”

  “Doctor, I don’t have the luxury of ruling out whole classes of people; I am in the business of suspecting everyone until they are cleared.”

  “Guilty till proven innocent?”

  “’Fraid so. How else do you expect me to operate?”

  “Alastair…my instincts tell me this man has had no training whatsoever, and this latest of his kills is some sort of message.”

  “Message?”

  “Either to you or to those street children you spoke of.”

  “Hmmm…I’ve said as much to Behan and Logan.”

  “So again, I ask,” began Frenger, “what will your next move be?”

  “It’s back to the streets, and I must find a way to get word to every child in this city, because this maniac doesn’t care if you have a home or not, are monied or poor, black or white, parentless or the child of a senator.”

  “He appears to have only one thing in mind.”

  “He wants your flesh.”

  “Yes,” agreed Fenger, “a flesh vampire, who feeds off the carcass over time, generally, but with your last victim, he did not continue feeding but rather left the body in a well-traveled area, where cops routinely patrol, to be found early…soon—like now.”

  “Sending a message.”

  “Using a child’s body to send a message, yes.”

  “Perhaps due to me.”

  “We don’t know that, Alastair…not for certain.”

  “I should’ve bloody well stayed on Mackinac Island and not come back,” Alastair said on his way out the door. “Fiends and monsters—I attract fiends and monsters.”

  Fenger shouted down the hall after him. “We don’t know that the message is directed at you! Don’t be so self-serving even in this, Ransom! Suppose the message is being sent to the other children?”

  Ransom stopped and wheeled and lifted his cane at Fenger. “And that message is to dare not speak to me!” Ransom then stalked from the hospital morgue, finding the stone stairwell up to the first floor, sorely in need of feeling sunshine on his face, a breeze against his skin, and air enough to swell his lungs with anything other than formaldehyde and death.

  Ransom wondered how he could break the news of Danielle’s murder to Jane and Gabby, but he knew he wanted to get to them before they saw it in the Herald or Tribune. While none of them had actually known Danielle beyond that first meeting, everyone nonetheless had bonded with Audra, and Audra was connected to Danielle and all those little kids they’d met two days before. Some of them so small and young as to look the part of those stuffed animals won by fairgoers.

  Traveling across the city from Cook County Hospital to Jane’s northside home, Alastairs’s cab seemed the only one going away from the great fair. Cab after cab rushed past his, all making for the opposite direction. He had the feel of the only fish going upstream as the throngs flooded toward the lake and the sound of merriment.

  Gabby met him at the door, smiling, happy, telling him she’d had a wonderful day, and that the suffragettes had made a dent. She held up a local neighborhood newspaper called the Polishka Polityka. While the story was in Polish, it supported the right of all women to vote.

  “It’s a coup, Alastair! We’re making headway!”

  “Congratulations, Gabby. You ladies deserve all the press and success you can get. Now, is your mother at home?”

  Gabby immediately felt his cool abruptness. “She’s in the clinic but as Dr. Tewes.”

  He frowned at this.

  “Gabby pulled him into an alcove and conspiratorially whispered, “We must band together to get her to put an end to Tewes, and to these séances and phrenology. It’s too much.”

  “I am your man.”

  “Despite her wrapping it all in a cloak of nobility, Mother’d be so much happier being herself.”

  “I know…yes, who she is, agreed, Gabby, but for the moment, I’m afraid I have some bad news to impart.”

  Her face turned grim in the half-light. “Please not another vanishing?”

  “’Fraid it’s worse than that, and it’s come close to home.”

  “Close to home?” she asked, a little gasp escaping her.

  He absently asked, “Have you seen any more of Audra since we visited her street family?”

  “Oh, God, tell me she’s not gone the way of the Vanished, please!”

  “No, no! Not Audra. I am hoping to speak to her again. To warn her and the others.”

  “Something dreadful has happened, hasn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Mother’s going to want to know. Come.”

  They found Jane in Tewes’s clinic, and while busy, the good doctor left a patient in the chair beneath the brass pipe pyramid. In fact, the patient was snoring, asleep under Tewes’s touch during his phrenological exam. What a perfect scam, Alastair thought, cloaked as it was in the respectability of “science” and medication and this thing Jane called magnetic healing. And how many massage parlors are there in this town, he silently asked himself. Still her “exam” worked on me.

  Jane reacted immediately to the look on Gabby’s face. She followed them into the kitchen where Alastair began to explain, “You’re going to want to sit for this, both of you.”

  Due the tone of his voice, the ladies sat at the table. Alastair said, “Our latest victim is Danielle, the girl we met through Audra. She’s…she is at Fenger’s morgue now.”

  They sat stunned, silence filling the room. After a long pause, Alastair began providing some details as to where Queen Danielle was found, how she had been left in a trash heap, ending with, “It was unlike all the other killings.”

  “H-h-how so?” Jane’s lip quivered with each word.

  “In that she was left recognizable.”

  Gabby openly cried. Jane held her. “What else’ve you come to tell us, Alastair? I know there’s more.”

  “You are intuitive. I give you that.”

  Gabby wiped away tears on a handkerchief he offered her. “Is she…is her body being taken care of?”

  “Yes. I’ve seen to it.”

  “What else, Alastair?”

  “Christian and I discussed the case, and we are of a mind that the killer may have targeted Danielle as a lesson to the other homeless children.”

  “A lesson?” asked Jane.

  “Because she talked to us?” asked Gabby.

  “We surmise because she talked to me,” he countered. “You are blameless in this.”

  “This is awful…terrible,” said Gabby, the tears returning.

  “We need to protect those remaining somehow,” said Jane.

  “That’s a highly unlikely proposition.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This news will spread like wildfire among the street people.”

  “Yes, those kids have lost their leader,” began Gabby. “Chaos in the tribe. They’ll be scattered, and likely impossible to find.”

  “Perhaps Audra will try to contact you again, Gabby, but finding the others? No.”

  “Through Audra,” said Jane, eyes wide, “we could convince them to stay close to the shelters.”

  “I suppose, but you have to first find Audra.”

  “We must try. I’ll call for a carriage.”

  “We can try the area where we last saw her,” suggested Gabby.

  Alastair hadn’t the heart to tell them they would likely waste the evening finding no one, especially in the haunts the children had been frequenting. He was about to excuse himself when the patient from the clinic chair appeared in the doorway, asking, “Dr. Tewes? Is my session over?”

  “Yes, it is definit
ely ended, and I am called away, Mr. Moritz.”

  Alastair took this moment to slip from the kitchen and the house.

  The cool evening air felt good on his brow. He felt a sense of guilt that the ladies had not immediately laid it on his doorstep that Danielle’s death was in fact a direct result of her having dared entertain Alastair Ransom in her court. Still, he worried, for if this were the case, King Robin could easily be next.

  Alastair went in search of his snitch, Bosch, and to see if he could find Samuel, the street boy he’d put on his payroll, in hope of turning up something—anything—on Leather Apron, but he knew that Bosch might well have taken leave of Chicago altogether if he were smart. But then this was Bosch, and Ransom had known few snitches, indeed few criminals as well, who were smart enough, or confident enough, to start over elsewhere. The familiar terrain of his very own city, the criminal mind told itself, gave him an advantage; told itself that it knew every nook and cranny better than either the coppers or natives like Alastair. In fact, it was a foolish but recurrent habit of criminals to haunt the same places over and over; furthermore, Alastair knew it a matter of human nature. People held a map of their small, comfortable, manageable universe in their heads, and the older they became, the more trapped and mired were they within that terrain. For this reason, few men who committed crimes could long stay away from family, friends, old haunts. How many times had he shadowed men released from prison who’d returned to their childhood “maps” only to commit some new outrage, only to be rearrested and again incarcerated.

  Still, Henry Bosch was a cut above the usual criminal turned snitch. Alastair had first made Bosch a snitch out of some pity for his story of how he’d become a cripple and thus a destitute man, and thus a desperate man, and the final thus: a thief. Ransom and other cops saw him routinely arrested and after serving time released, and each go-around, Bosch regaled the cops with his Civil War stories and opinions on General and later President Grant, with whom he claimed to have had personal contact on the battlefield, claiming they shared a bottle of whiskey in a firefight. Ransom only doubted half the story—the half that Bosch was in. However, as with all the police gathered about the peg-leg vet, Ransom found his storytelling amusing as hell. Ransom had urged him to come to work as his snitch.