Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

They had gleaned that Chapman had to place his wife in a sanitarium, that she had collapsed under the strain of learning of her granddaughter’s death, and that he had gotten his son and daughter-in-law out of the country, on a cruise to Europe for their health…all to plot and carry out his plan of vengeance.

Jane was glad to be home, met on the porch by Gabby; she held her daughter close. Ransom continued on, staring over his shoulder out the coach window at Jane and Gabby still locked in embrace.

After this ugly business, Ransom must, by every means at his disposal, turn up Leather Apron, the culprit behind the Vanishings-whether one man or many as Bloody Mary had indicated.

Alastair began searching his city, going to every location he thought plausible and mining every street snitch he knew in search of any news regarding Bosch and/or the lunatic the press called Leather Apron. As he did so, he garnered information that told him Bosch was already in hiding, that he somehow knew of the man who’d taken his place as the supposed guilty Leather Apron. It made Alastair wonder if Bosch himself had not set up the anonymous fellow now fed to Senator Harold Chapman’s voracious hogs, sows, and piglets.

As luck would have it, Alastair turned up Samuel instead of Bosch, and they found a small, isolated area in a neighborhood park and talked. The boy was shaking the entire time, terrified. He had seen something.

“What is it, Sam?” asked Alastair. “You must tell me if it can save one life, you must.”

“S-s-sir, yes…it’s to do with Leather Apron. I’ve done like you said, kept my eyes and ears open.”

“And you’ve seen something?”

“Heard something.”

“What is it you heard?”

“Heard a homeless child tell another one where they could be fed.”

“I don’t follow you, son.”

“No homeless who has been on the street invites another homeless for food. Homeless find food, they ain’t sharing it with no one but their family.”

“What about friends? They may’ve been friends.”

“That’s just it. She didn’t know the other one.”

“How can you be sure?”

“She introduced herself. Said her name was Alice…Alice Cadin, but it was really Audra pretendin’, you see.”

“That’s impossible, Sam. Alice Cadin is the name of one of the dead girls.”

“It’s what Audra said, and Audra gave the other girl a piece of bread like…like a lure.”

“Audra? The same as in Robin’s band?” Alastair recalled that it’d been Audra who wanted to sacrifice young Sam to the Leather Aprons, the little manipulator.

“I followed ’em as far as I could, and it ended with screams, but I dared go no farther. Didn’t see nothing, but I heard.”

“Can you take me to this place?”

“You got your blue gun?”

“Always.”

“All right. Then let’s go.”

“Brave lad. Lead on.”

Samuel guided Alastair through several back alleyways, some so narrow his shoulders touched the clapboard houses on each side of him. They followed a winding, wending path below the raised platform of the electric train until finally it was clear that Sam was leading him toward the river where black, silent warehouses sat idle this time of night.

Sam stopped abruptly, saying, “This is as far as I went the other night.”

“Why didn’t you find me then? Why did you keep this to yourself?”

“I was afraid for one. Second, I tried but I couldn’t find you. Third, I couldn’t tell no one else.”

“You’re sure now it was the same Audra?”

“Yes.”

“Wait here, Sam, and I’ll go ahead…investigate, see if there’s anything in the way of evidence.”

Ransom inched forward in the deep shadow of the warehouse district. The smell of dead fish heads, the creeping skittering sound of wharf rats, and the glowing eyes of the occasional slinking cat added to the mix of whirring wind and tinkling ropes against mastheads. The river by day was alive with boat and ship traffic of all manner, delivering cargo of every sort to an insatiable, gluttonous city, but by night, the river and the wharf seemed a haunted world with ships whispering to one another, their rigging determining the strength of each voice. It was enough to make even a large man with both a gun and experience on his side quake deep within to think that Leather Apron could be awaiting him at every recessed doorway, every crevice and cranny that made up this black center of commerce.

The deeper he moved into the shadows of this place, the more he worried over Sam’s safety behind him. The farther from the boy he got, the more he feared Sam’s sudden disappearance, not of his own accord but as Leather Apron’s next victim. If Leather Apron somehow knew of Danielle, then why not Samuel?

Given this fear for Sam, Ransom felt an overwhelming urge to shout a challenge to the killer. Show yourself and stand and face a man, and fight face-to-face, and to the death like a man. But given this fiend’s usual target-size, age, innocence-it was highly unlikely he’d stand and show himself.

Ransom wanted his hands on this fiend, and he wanted it tonight, now; Sam would have to fend for himself just as he had been doing long before Alastair had met him that day outside the grocery.

Alastair sniffed the air around a locked warehouse door and came away with an odor dissimilar to any he’d already swallowed here on the wharf, a smell branded in his mind since Senator Chapman’s stables-blood, human blood.

Inspector Alastair Ransom stepped slowly back and read the warehouse sign almost invisible in the purple darkness here. An overcast sky, no stars, no moon conspired to hide the letters. When he made them out, they read Overton amp; Hampstead Bookbindery and Storage. The sign had fallen in disrepair, the lettering long since peeled away. It was one of a number of empty hulking, dead businesses that had come and gone, leaving its carcass-like some bone-picked pachyderm. This place proved large and sprawling along the city wharf.

While locked against entry by the unhappy owners, there must be several entry points. If homeless people could find a way in, so could Alastair. He motioned for Samuel somewhere in the gloom of a thick fog that’d swept in to engulf wharf and river. Somehow Sam saw his signal and joined him at the book warehouse. “Is this where the screams were coming from?”

“I-I-I think so, yes.”

“OK, look, I suggest you get going.” He paid the boy handsomely.

“Get going, sir?”

“Yeah, go back the same way we came and get outta here.”

“I like police work, sir. I think I may be suited to it.”

“That’s well and good, but for now you’re to go to a safe place.”

“What’s a safe place?”

Ransom gritted his teeth at the bit of wisdom. “Go to the shelter called Hull House, and tell no one about this.”

“What’re you going to do?” Sam asked.

“I’m going to find a way inside.”

Sam breathed deeply and said, “I don’t wanna seem no chicken around you, Inspector, and going off, leaving you alone is-”

“Is the wisest move at this point, so go!” He shooed Sam off this final time, and the boy disappeared into the gloom of night.

Alone, Ransom began searching for loose boards, broken windows, back doors, torn siding-anything that a killer might use to gain entry into the depths of the warehouse. With Sam gone, he could concentrate on burglarizing the place.

Ransom located a window at street level back of the warehouse, a window that had been broken. He instantly realized that whoever came and went at this portal must be slight of build, and he also knew he’d never fit, not without some renovation to the window. He’d brought a flint lighter of the sort used for lighting cigars and pipes, one he’d purchased at Sears Roebuck downtown, but he hesitated using it for light until certain he was alone and no one was inside.