Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

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.