Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

“Good luck, Gabby, but do be careful.”

“I have a key to a police phone box now, and should I need you, I can call.”

“Do not hesitate.”

She left with a bounce in her step. He smiled after her, a strange concern coming over him. A fleeting emotion of fear should anything befall Gabby.

Logan leaned forward in his chair and said, “You act the part of father quite well, old chap.”

“What’re you fellows doing here so late?”

Behan laughed and Alastair shrugged it off, his attention going to the reports that Gabby had unearthed. Slowly Behan, followed by Logan, moved in and stood over each of Inspector Ransom’s hefty shoulders.

The report he read in the London Police Gazette dated 1889 put forth yet another theory of the exact identity of Jack the Ripper, an American actor named Richard Mansfield, who’d terrified playgoers as Mr. Hyde, changing from Jekyll without makeup or leaving stage. The man sent ladies into a swoon and men running from the theater. But the story so riveting for these three Chicago cops was a tale of the Vanishings. It read in part:

As near as this detective has ascertained, the Vanishings began in 1881 and continued until this past year of 1891, when they abruptly ended. The case represents for me, personally, the strangest case of my career, and the most frustrating and heart-rending, as I was called into each inquest to view the most horrid sights of my career-the remains of the victims, each barely of age. They began in Ham, and records are scarce, but I have pieced together a clear trail that leads from East and West Ham to London’s East Side.

“Eerie, isn’t it?” asked Behan over Alastair’s right shoulder.

“Damned spooky, if you ask me,” agreed Logan at his left.

Both men were smaller than Alastair. Compactly built like a prize fighter was Ken Behan, whereas the other was rail-thin and gaunt, his eyes sunken, yet Jedidiah Logan had hands as large as griddles. Pale as December snow, Logan looked as if death might claim him at any time. He smoked without end the strongest cigars made. Others joked that one day at the morgue, when Logan dozed against a wall, Dr. Fenger took him for an upright corpse and began shouting orders at his men about maltreatment of the dead.

The three inspectors next skimmed an account of an eleven-year-old girl who went missing after going out to plow a row in a field for her mother. Her name was Eliza Carter, and she simply vanished out of that field. Her yellow dress was found days later on the East Ham football field. No one ever saw her again. The Chicago detectives read on from the account of the London investigator. The next paragraph read:

Charles Wagner, son of a West Ham butcher, vanished next, only a few weeks after the Carter girl. His body had been got at by animals, found seventy-five miles away at the bottom of a ravine at Ramsgate. The animals had got at him bad, tearing away all his face and much of his body. Oddly, neither the fall nor the drowning had caused death, according to the medical men. There was not one murderous abrasion or puncture mark that alone killed the boy but thirty-seven by count of the medical men.

Ransom stopped reading and said, “The work of multiple knifings? And as for cause of death…Fenger’s determined our man uses a cleaver and a number of blades, and it’s theorized there could be more than one madman doing the deed.”

“Really? More than one doing the stabbing?” asked Logan.

“And carving, perhaps. And cannibalizing, perhaps.”

Behan shivered at the idea.

Logan asked, “Rance, do you suspect one of these lunatic religious cults we’ve been seeing more and more of?”

“Maybe one begun in London, but moved to Chicago?” asked Behan.

“We’ve kicked over the thought, yes, of a cult sacrifice, but a London transport? No.”

“Do you for a moment think our killer…or, ahhh , killers…” began Behan, “that he could be one and the same as in England?”

“Long way to come to harvest children,” said Ransom, “especially when London’s got plenty of her own.”

“But then why not, Rance?” countered Logan. “Everyone else is coming to Chicago.”

“Creepy is what it is,” muttered Behan.

Ransom read on:

Next it was three girls in a row disappeared from West Ham all in January 1890. Only one of these dears was ever found, Amelia Jeffs, in West Ham Park. It’s surmised that Amelia made a getaway as there were signs of a struggle, and she had been bruised over the right eye and stabbed through stomach and ribs multiple times.

In every case of the missing where there was anything in the way of eyewitness reports, all the girls involved had been seen talking to and in some cases walking off with a woman. A cautious coroner whispered in me ear that we are fools to think that women are less susceptible to the lowest forms of mania and sexual perversions.

What with the Ripper murders on London’s East side in 1888 and ’89, when new Vanishings began here in the city, they were overshadowed by the mutilations left behind by that fiend Jack. Six prostitutes in all that we know of. Meantime, dozens upon dozens of children going missing, and no one in authority or the press caring as they were focused on when the next Ripper letter might appear. The disappearances ended on the cusp of 1890 becoming ’91. These Vanishings I speak of, and for ten years chased, to my disgrace, have never been solved.

Sincerely,

Inspector Kenan Heise, London, April 14, 1891

“So what do you make of it, lads?” asked Ransom of the other two inspectors.

“Are you asking our opinion of these circumstances?” asked Logan, hands gesturing with a wide swath. “Your eminence?”

“Cut out the foolishness.”

Behan too was doing a bit of a pirouette before him, ending with a bow. “After all, it was our case before we became your dotes and gophers.”

“Which am I,” asked Logan, “dote or gopher?”

“Both!” announced Ransom. “Lads, we’re working on equal footing here. We’re a team.”

“Like you and the kid?” asked Logan, indicating the empty desk across.

“That was different.”

“Really?”

“How so?”

“He was young, green, and-” He stopped short of telling them that Griffin Drimmer had been put on him by Kohler, not wishing to despoil Griff’s memory.

“And…?”

“And you fellows are old farts like myself, well versed in the ways of the detective,” finished Ransom. “I suspect our combined years on the force may do better than this fellow Heise working alone in London.”

“Do you think there is a link between his killer and ours?” asked Behan.

“Dunno. Interesting bit on perverted female suspects, heh?”

“Do you think there’s a woman involved?” asked Logan.

“Dunno, but it’s often true; you hear it in every lament and song-a woman made me do it.”

“You think?”

“It’s what we get paid for, to think.”

Logan pulled at his beard. “Imagine if it’s so…that the Vanishings is done by a woman.”

“Women are more readily accepted by children, less threatening,” Ransom suggested.

“Imagine it,” repeated Logan.

“A lotta shell games are begun by a pretty woman,” said Behan.

Logan laughed. “You well know it, too, don’tcha, lover?”

Alastair laughed at this. “We shouldn’t discard the notion out of hand, Logan.”

“True enough, we’ve all seen tough bitches in our time, but a cannibalizing woman? What’re you thinking, Alastair?

“The Phantom went invisible because we didn’t see him, and who is more invisible in our society than-”

“Than a woman!” It was Dr. James Phineas Tewes standing over his desk now, looking straight in his eye.