Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

Alastair pushed ahead of Sam and Robin’s band, telling them to hang back. As he moved from the fire, the darkness ahead of Alastair was near complete, only a small slither of light filtering from somewhere above at street level.

“Blood Mary’s coming for us!” shouted one of the kids in blackness.

“You gotta hide me, copper! Else I’m dead like Danielle!” shouted Noel in tears. King Robin was also now blubbering, terrified and hanging back near the fire. He’d seen what they’d done to Danielle, so Ransom could hardly blame him for blubbering, but arranging for Sam to go in as his goat, this was indefensible. “Zoroaster is gonna do me next!” Robin shouted.

The youngest of them, his face streaked with tears, shouted out now. “Don’t let Bloody Mary get us!”

The lanky, older boy named Hector added, “She’s killing us one by one until there are no more children left in the world, so all humankind will die off! That’s her plan.”

Alastair rushed toward the end of the tunnel where the so-called Apron gang were supposedly this moment assembled, awaiting the sacrificial lamb-Samuel. They would get Ransom instead.

Alastair half expected to be set upon by this gang awaiting him, and he pictured the poor abducted ones who’d vanished as having been attacked by a knife-wielding gang of murderous cultists. This made sense and fit with what Dr. Christian Fenger’s autopsy had supported. This could well be the end of the investigation. He knew these killers, whatever age, to be dangerous and well trained in wielding cleavers and knives. He recalled the “animals” he’d seen in the park after talking to Sara.

“Hang back, Sam,” he told the boy, but Samuel now displayed a bowie knife all his own, almost the size of his leg. The thing shone like ice in the darkness here, and in a moment of fright, Alastair wondered if the boy might not be one of them -one of the killing gang.

“I’ll not go down without a fight,” Sam whispered, “and I’ll not let you go it alone, Inspector.”

Ransom looked anew at the boy, studying Sam’s eyes and finding truth there; a feeling of pride for the boy welled up. “If ever had I a son, Sam…I’d have wanted him to be as brave as you.”

Sam choked out, “Thank you, sir.”

They moved on, inching forward.

Knives could come flying at them at any moment from any number of directions. Ransom extended his blue burnished .38 and was about to fire on seeing a large figure of a man in a group ahead bathed in weak light. Alastair’s night vision had cleared, and he recognized faces. The faces of Danielle’s followers, the one’s who’d gone into hiding on learning of her murder. None of them were holding knives so far as Alastair could see.

Some eleven children had followed the paths to here in their effort to locate a safe place in the city. Learning it’d been their leader-their queen-who’d been brutally murdered, they hadn’t time to grieve when fear had gripped them.

He put his gun away, making a show of it, realizing the large shadow he’d seen earlier had merely been a projection of the huddled group. “I’ve come to find you all,” he lied. “Come to take you to a safe house.”

One of the children grabbed hold of his huge leg and held on, and Alastair could feel the shivering little body against him. Like a modern retelling of the Pied Piper, all the others, like so many mice, scampered to the Bear and hung on. Sam stood back, put his knife away, and shook his head.

Alastair began guiding them from the underworld with a mantra: “I gotcha…you’re going to be all right…all right…all right.”

Alastair felt like Moses at having led the children and frightened young adults who wished to follow from the underground area around Wacker and Michigan. It had taken him another twenty-four hours to find places for them all. Most every shelter in the city was full to capacity. No one wanted to be on the streets with this madman on the loose, including homeless adults. So the Salvation Army and what few shelters existed bulged and were turning people away. Ransom had learned that Robin had led his followers out of Hull House, but these kids before him now had been Danielle’s followers. Without a leader, they’d stay put.

Ransom wound up accommodating his more adult charges like Robin at the Des Plaines lockup, called the Bridewell, an old English term meaning that the man locked up here was well shackled to this bride. The jails were, as usual, jam-packed as well, every inch of stone floor covered in a sea of bodies where they slept, but there were the stairwells and hallways. Even City Hall was full with the indigent, the homeless, and the runaways.

Once he had settled all his charges, he realized that Samuel had simply disappeared again and no telling where. No one had seen him go.

Later, arriving home, Alastair found Sam on his doorstep, tearful and pleading to be taken in.

Alastair could not turn the boy away, and so he found a pillow and blanket and put him on his settee for the night. Sam’s information had been wrong, and it had almost cost lives, had almost ended horribly in fact, had Alastair used his weapon down in that dungeon. Such an accident, involving the death of children, would most assuredly have given Chief Nathan Kohler all the ammunition he needed to end Alastair’s career in Chicago. Sure it was an error, a serious one for a paid informant to make, but Sam was, after all, just a boy. Alastair had forgiven him, but the boy fell asleep blubbering apologies.

Asleep, he looked the angel indeed, Alastair thought, and his cherubic features made Alastair wonder anew over the various interpretations of the “Angels’ War” and the whereabouts of little Audra about now.

The following morning, Sam had gone before Alastair rose from bed. “Vanished of his own accord,” Alastair mumbled when someone banged loudly at his door.

He stumbled to the source and opened it wide, shading his eyes from a bright sunlit morning. Philo stormed past and into the room.

“Alastair, they’ve made an arrest in the Leather Apron killings.”

“When will people stop calling it that? And who have they arrested?”

“That old crone, Bloody Mary!”

“Indeed…does not surprise me. In fact, it follows…as inevitable as the sun coming up and the moon going down.”

“But in either case, the sun does not actually come up and the moon does not actually go down; science has us going up and down, or rather around, spinning through the cosmos, so it only looks to our limited perspective-”

“All right, I get it.” Ransom covered his ears in a mocking gesture.

“Still, your point is well taken. Bloody Mary may well be a scapegoat in all this.”

“To be sure, she may know something, but she’s batty, and besides that, she has been here since the first brick was laid so-”

“So why now does she suddenly become a menace? Good question, one I’m sure that Chief Kohler is not asking.”

“Kohler is behind the arrest?” Alastair was instantly alert.

“Well…actually it was your friends, Logan and Behan, who dragged her in kicking and screaming, I’m told.”

“I don’t envy them their duty, and I know those men well…well enough to realize it was not their idea.”

“A smokescreen? A bone to throw press and public?”

“To make it appear we are hot on the trail of Leather Apron, would be my guess.”

“What will you do, Alastair? How can you stop this maniac with so many obstacles thrown in your path, and…and with your hands continually tied behind your back by bureaucratic fools like-”

“Please, Philo!” he stopped him with an upraised hand. “Allow me to dress. Sit, listen to music, be patient.”