Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

“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 invisible 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.