Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

“Do you mean to say each stab wound is symbolic?”

“No, not the stabbing, no. The carving up afterward. They are not all stab wounds.”

“I got that. Hell, I can see that.”

“In fact, none of the killings are what we traditionally call murder by stab wound,” added Dr. Fenger, coming nearer, overhearing.

“What then are they, these killings?”

“We suspect a couple of things: a kind of barbaric ritual from the old world for one.”

“Human sacrifice?”

“Something of that nature, yes.”

“Each killing leads to something in the nature of a carving, and the areas carved from the bodies are…well…edible.”

“Including the entrails?”

“Including the entrails.”

All of them fell silent at the thoughts and images raised by this.

“So, Dr. Fenger, are you telling me now that these children were carved up for their meat, like a knacker does a horse, like a butcher slaughters a sow? Are you definitely confirming this?”

“That is what we are leaning toward, yes.”

“Then you’re saying none of the wounds on the Chapman girl were deadly in and of itself, that she died of multiple stab wounds and was then later, after death, carved up?”

“Evidence tells us that some of the carving up went on before the Chapman girl was completely dead.”

“Like the taking of her nose, ears?”

“Correct.”

“How can you know that?”

“It’s a theory but it has to do with the coloration around the wounds,” explained the medical genius, Fenger. “Blood in the living rises to meet the knife, but not in a corpse where we’d see no color. In most of the knife wounds found on Anne Chapman, the color isn’t there.”

“As a result,” said Jane, “we theorize death ensued due to a blow to the head-before any of the major cuts.”

“Earlier, I proved to myself that he dispatched them before he cleaved off their flesh,” added Dr. Fenger.

“How then was the last victim killed? A blow to the head, strangulation? What?”

“Alice Cadin over there was stabbed to death.”

“How was she lured into this?”

“Sorry…we haven’t a clue as to that.” Fenger tugged at his beard.

“No intoxication, no poison?”

“Poison is hard to determine without testing her fluids, and that takes time, but I have a fine man on it. Dr. Joseph Konrath.”

Ransom and Jane both knew that Konrath was a rarity, a man who’d pursued the alliance of the study of poisons-toxicology-and crime fighting, a new direction begun in the 1840s with the breakthrough in the infamous Marie Lafarge case, breakthroughs shared by two men working independently of one another-Frenchman Dr. Mathieu Orfila and Englishman Dr. James Marsh, who invented the process that could detect gas arsine, produced when arsenic is heated to the correct temperature. Konrath carried on a fifty-year-old tradition nowadays of seeking out gases in any number of bodily tissues and fluids to determine if poisoning were present in the deceased.

“But such things as belladonna are easily accessed nowadays.”

“There’ve been no sign of any narcotic or poison in earlier victims, Alastair.”

“Whoever this so-called Leather Apron is, we suspect rampant cannibalism,” said Jane. “I suspect most cannibals don’t stop to use poison. Wouldn’t want to spoil the…the meal.”

“Why’d he take her eyes?”

“Usually the first to go…soft tissues, a delicacy for a cannibal,” said Fenger.

Alastair began tamping his unlit pipe. “Christian, what do you know of cases of cannibalism?”

Fenger took in a deep breath and exhaled. “All right, you’ve found me out, Rance. I’ve not ever handled a case like this, but I am reading up on it, you can bet.”

“Rampant cannibalism of children. God…what has the world come to?” asked Ransom, not expecting an answer.

“Actually, it was not so very long ago that Jonathan Swift wrote his answer to the problem of the homeless children of London,” began Jane, “that the government should round them up and feed them to the populace.”

“Swift was satirizing,” said Christian, “to bring the problem to the attention of Parliament and the Crown.”

“Well, the Vanishings is not satire,” replied Alastair. “This is real.”

Alastair asked again, “OK, so what do you think you know about this madman?”

She ticked off a number of beliefs. “He is ingratiating, charming, luring the victim; he lives in the city and knows every avenue and byway.”

“He likely uses candy or a drink possibly laced with some narcotic we can’t detect,” added Fenger.

“That’s any soft drink on the market,” Ransom said, recalling the boy, Sam, who so easily gulped down the soft drink that he’d been offered.

Jane continued, stating the obvious. “As he uses multiple blades, he is either in a profession relying on blades or is a collector.”

“That narrows it down for us,” he chided. “Look, Jane, have you given thought to the notion that since there’re multiple blades used, that there just might be a violent gang or nutty religious cult using cannibalism as a kind of badge of honor or an initiation, or both? Each gang or cultist with his own blade, racking up points with their leaders.”

“I confess,” began Fenger, “it has crossed our collective minds, yes. Haven’t ruled anything out at this point.”

“Then we are no closer to knowing the truth about Leather Apron or his possible followers, are we?”

Fenger looked tired, his emotion on his face. “What I earlier suggested, some sort of religious cult sacrificing these lambs; perhaps it’s a collective mind at work here?”

“Like a very, very dark mob or lynching party?” asked Alastair, helping secure Tewes’s mustache back into place. “Only this mob likes the blades and cleavers.”

“It is as old as mankind, ritual sacrifice,” said Jane, shivering, “and if it is symbolism you’re out for…well, there you have it. Trust me, the phrase Blood of the Lamb predates Christ.”

“These lambs-our Chicago lambs-are silent witnesses, if that is the case,” replied Ransom. “But do you really think there’s some ancient cult operating here in Chicago, drinking the blood and eating the flesh of these disappearing children?”

Jane fielded the question. “Some pagan cult, something out of Romania or Eastern Europe, Druids perhaps?”

Alastair breathed deeply of the night air. Lights had gone on all across the city and they stood beneath a gaslight at the bridge. The fire boat that’d taken Denton out to the depths tugged by beneath them. He stared back at the little weed patch far below at river’s edge where Dr. Fenger’s attendants finished up, readying to cart the pitiful remains to County Morgue. “I have people in the city working to find out and find out quickly. If there is a sick religious cult at work here, I’ll soon know it, and we’ll hang them all in a public square.”

Even as he said it, he wondered how Kohler, Fenger, and he would deliver an entire religious sect to the senator’s farm to be boiled in oil and skinned alive in the manner of butchering swine. The senator certainly had the equipment out there on that big farm of his, the cauldron, the oil, the tools, and the know-how.

But it had been Alastair’s experience with religious cults that there were more than just men and women involved but whole families, children. He tried to imagine a cultist ritual involving drinking human blood and feeding human organs and chunks of flesh to children-items torn from other children.

He prayed they were all wrong.

He imagined Christian and Jane must also have problems wrapping their minds around the notion, but apparently, they had discussed it at length sometime earlier.