Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

“Damn it, Alastair, I’ve harmed no one, and this is torture and perhaps murder. How do they hope to keep it hushed up?”

“For the same reason men post trunks to Canada under assumed names.”

“Habeas corpus.” She said the Latin legalese for what he meant.

“Last time I looked, if there’s no body…there’s no crime, and therefore, no prosecutor will touch it.” Ransom squeezed her hand. “God only knows what’s gone on out there at the Chapman estate the past few days. Wish you’d told me about Bloody Mary’s being removed before this, Jane.”

“But if you knew that she’d be taken, why’d you send her to Cook County Asylum to begin with?”

“I never would’ve believed it of Christian, that he could do such a thing.” Ransom again pounded with his cane.

“Perhaps not…perhaps it was McKinnette, Shanks and Gwinn surely…”

“Caine would take a payoff sure as that pair of ghouls.”

“Perhaps the Christian is innocent of this?”

“We’ll know for sure if and when a Chapman wing is added to Cook County.”

“It will never happen. Christian could not go through with such nefarious actions, not him, not if he knew.”

“That’s just it. He does not know the level of desperation and the lengths Chapman and Kohler will go to.” Alastair squeezed her to him. “It may be you are correct, and I hope so for all our sakes; there are too few men today with the character to say no to Mammon.”

“Money is not what Christian lives for…nor…nor do I, Alastair. Nor do I.”

“But he does live to gamble and to practice medicine, and while owing a few sharks some hundreds, maybe a thousand in cash, he has also gambled large on Rush College and its connection to Cook County. I have a suspicion that even Christian Fenger would look the other way if he thought it would make his chances of beating out Northwestern Medical School for improvements and medical care.”

“I can’t believe it of him.”

“Fine…don’t. I am the last man on earth who wishes to defame Christian. No finer surgeon has ever graced this city, but as for his motives, they are cloaked in who he is and what he means for Cook County and Rush.”

She grabbed his cane and pounded the cab roof beneath where the driver sat. Outside the window, the city streets had vanished behind them, giving way to a dirt road leading north toward Evanston, just outside Chicago. They skirted the massive Lake Michigan, placid and blue this morning as it winked between the forest trees. The expanse of lakefront property here remained pristine; while sold off by developers, it had not as yet been denuded. Sunlight and shadow played tiddledywinks as their coach careened along Chicago’s northern regions and past the quiet little settlement of Evanston and out onto the other side until they turned into a massive estate created by Senator Harold J. Chapman.

Alastair stuck his head out the coach window, staring about as they approached the buildings here. His face framed in sashes, Ransom trusted that nothing of a criminal nature ending in blood would be permitted in the mansion itself. He shouted to the coachman to make for the outbuildings, the stables in particular.

When he again looked into Jane’s eyes, he said, “I can almost smell it from here.”

“Smell what?” she dared ask.

“The carnage.”

The carriage pulled up to the stables, and the hansom cab horses did literally smell the carnage, it seemed, as they balked and rose as in fear, whinnying discontent. Alastair leapt from the cab, holding out some thread of hope, but doubtful at once. Behind him Jane climbed from the cab. He turned and signaled for her to stay back and wait. The cab driver, curious, his horses ears and noses flaring, jumped down to soothe his animals.

Alastair moved ahead, cautious, pulling his blue-burnished steel firearm, holding it ahead of him in one hand, his cane in the other. The driver, sensing danger, located a safe spot behind the cab, inviting Jane to do likewise. Instead, she shakily moved toward the stables behind Ransom, staring at his massive back while attempting to peek around him.

His complete attention focused on the double doors to the forty-yard long stables, Ransom remained unaware that she was behind him. It felt as silent as it sounded in there. No sounds of horses, that was certain. In a nearby fenced pasture, six or seven horses nibbled at grass below box elder trees, some looking up at the disturbance at the stable.

Ransom put his cane against one of two swinging doors and forced it open; it swung on silent hinges, opening incrementally with its own weight creating momentum that built as it widened. Now Jane, too, could smell the blood odors that wafted out through the doors like a fetid spirit seeking freedom. Jane covered her nostrils but could not get the stench of death out of her brain.

Ransom shook his head at the sight filling his eyes, but Jane could not see around him. When he realized she had followed him, he turned and firmly said, “This is no sight for a lady, Jane. Please, go back to the cab.”

“I am no lady, Alastair. I am a doctor. So stand aside!”

“Please, Jane!” He held her by both shoulders, his cane pressing into her right arm.

“I’ve dealt with death and corpses before, Alastair.”

“Not like this!”

She pulled from his grasp and stepped past him to see what he had already seen and choked on.

In the rafters, hanging from tinder hooks, two upside down animal carcasses hung, dripping decaying fluids and blood into a floor matted with the sweet scent of hay. At first, she believed them to be deer skinned and filleted like fish, gutted, their intestines nowhere to be seen. Organs had been eviscerated but again not in sight. The carcasses now came into focus as not animal but human.

“My worst fear,” muttered Ransom.

“How can men do such a thing?” She made out the one as a hefty woman from her bloodied, skin-stripped breasts, the crotch, and the long gray matted hair like a tangled mop head, the strands touching the ground. From here Bloody Mary looked the part of a cow that had been removed of its hide. The second destroyed body hanging from the rafters was male. Whoever he was, he had not been spared Bloody Mary’s fate.

His privates were also missing.

Arms gone, lobbed off.

Bloody stumps.

Head gone.

Internal organs-all gone.

Eye sockets turned to empty black holes.

“Nice of them to take the horses out to the pasture so they wouldn’t witness this,” Ransom said. “Shows concern for the sensibilities of an animal.”

“What kind of sickness could motivate this? Christian can’t possibly be a part of this anymore than…than you or I, Alastair.”

“You forget, however, that you were negotiating to get in on this…this deal…through Christian.”

“I was never in for this, and neither is Christian, damn you!”

“The senator is obviously gone mad with grief for his granddaughter. No sane man could do this. So what is Nathan Kohler’s excuse or rationalization?” he wondered aloud.

“What do you suppose they’ve done with the organs and the missing parts?”

At the other end of the stables, beyond the opposite doors, the only noise they had heard since arriving rose and fell-the stuttering grunts of pigs.

Ransom could not help but recall Christian’s suggestion when discussing the disappearance of Waldo Denton-to feed him to the hogs at the slaughter yards. Still, like Jane, he could not believe that Christian would have any part in such butchery.

He went toward the sound of hogs and found the pigsty. Leaning in over the rail, finding their stench easier to take than the odor of death inside the stable, Ransom saw the scattered, trampled, half-buried bones. “Obviously human,” he said, pointing them out to Jane.