Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

“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?”

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. The 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.

“Six levels of men atop you!”

“A pecking order?”

“Aye…even in the yards.” He stopped in his tracks long enough to give a shake of the head, then launched into butchering a dead horse at his feet. “The ones doing beef, now they’re at the top, then comes swine-the real money-makers, you see.” He’d already removed the horse’s head. “Then it trickles down to your lamb and chicken and veal, down to goat meat, you see, but horse meat…” He paused, lifting his bloody mallet-sized hatchet and using it to punctuate his words, blood dribbling from it as he did so. “Well, now you see horse meat’s tough as hell, and it’s not so savory nor wanted, and as most of the cutting we do ends in food for other animals-dogs, cats, and then there’s the soap-makers buying a ton of it. You see, then, we knackers, we’re the bottom of the rung ’round here, so I say again, you can’t have no opinion of yourself in this business.”

Ransom asked Jack if he knew anyone around the yards who was strange or eccentric, and he immediately knew it was a ridiculous question to ask under the circumstances.