Shadows in the White City (21 page)

“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 definitely 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.

“Me? A groundhog, a copper penny, a ferret, a rat?”

“You've all the talent for it, and it'll put your considerable mind and experience and knowledge of the streets to good use,” Ransom had encouraged.

Bosch thought about it for several days, then suddenly agreed but only if an advance of twenty dollars was made.

Alastair quickly located a carriage and was soon west of the city. He found Bosch where he knew Bosch would be—at the racetrack—losing whatever money the leprechaun managed to gain from the ill-fated incident that almost got Ransom killed. After all, it was Sunday so the races were in full swing. With the beer garden open and ale mugs filled to spilling over, the crowd was as jovial as if at the World's Fair. The numbers looked to be in the upper hundreds, perhaps a thousand, all in high spirits, save for the recent losers, who could be picked out at a glance. Bosch was not hard to find within this congregation; one need only listen for the familiar dot 'n' carry sound of his peg leg and cane as he pushed along.

“Canya advance me, Inspector?” Bosch immediately asked, astonishing Ransom with his sheer nerve.

Ransom yanked him into the recessed area between two ticket booths not being used. Somewhere through a bullhorn speaker, a minstrel song played, the lyrics wafting over the track:
“Dance boatman dance, dance all night till the broad daylight, go home with a gal in the morning. Dance boatman dance, dance boatman dance.”

“You damn near got me killed, you gimp fool!”

“Oh, that. Now, Rance…it tweren't my fault in the least, you see—”

“Dance boatman dance…”

“It was Kohler set me up, wasn't it?”

“I only shouted that cause…cause I knew you'd jump.”

“Dance boatman dance…”

“Lying little weasel! I know it was Nathan Kohler, and you're going to say so in a court of law.”

He laughed at this. Ransom grabbed him roughly by the throat. A passing pair of friends in frock coats and bowler hats noticed the ruckus, but they quickly glanced away and moved off elsewhere to place their bets.

“You think this is funny, Bosch? You see me laughing?”

“I only laugh,” he choked out, “cause I'm sick with nerves
at the thought. Me in a courta law. Imagine anyone believing me on a stack-a-Bibles!”

“Are you saying Elias Jervis acted on his own? That Jervis himself paid you?”

“Yes, but what would you've done at that instant if I'd've yelled out Jervis's name instead of Kohler, you see? Human nature, see. I am a student of it.”

“Dance boatman dance…”

Ransom had not removed his hand from Bosch's scrawny neck.

“I saved your life, Inspector.”

“And collected from both sides,” added Ransom.

“Well
ahhh
yeah…I did collect both sides on the deal, but that's the mark of a good businessman now, isn't it?”

“Bosch, I ought to crack your head open.”

“H-hey, at first, I didn't know anymore than you did.”

“No?” Ransom had to remember this man weaved with words.

“Elias was wantin' to set up shop again in Chicago.”

“Still buying and selling women?”

“Still dealin' women, like your Polly Pete once.”

“Leave Polly to her grave, old man!”

“But Jervis, he sent a woman to stand in as this young lady with a diary, knowing that I was your,
ahhh
…associate, see? I was fooled for a time, too, so you needn't feel as if you were the only one made a fool of, Inspector.”

“That's a real comfort to me, Bosch.” Ransom released his hold on his “associate.”

“If you've got something for me, you know, like a bonus for saving your hide, young man!” said Bosch as he straightened his clothes, his hand out. “I could use some wagerin' capital.”