Robert Walker - Shadows in the White City

“Then Leather Apron ought rather be called Leather Aprons?” asked Carmichael who’d stopped in his note-taking long enough to gasp.

“Philo, get this covered,” said Ransom. “Take shots from-”

“Every angle, I know…I know if I can take the stench. Thanks for your concern.” Keane lifted his camera and began firing off shots with his Night Hawk, a camera built for just such work.

Ransom gave a quick thought to how photography preserved the crime scene forever, or until the photos were destroyed or doctored. “Get us some paper bags, you fellows, and gather all this into the bags, and…” he took a moment to keep from getting ill. “A-and get those bags to Dr. Fenger at the morgue. If anyone can do anything with this mess, it’ll be the coroner.”

“You mean we gotta handle this shit?” asked one cop, pointing to the buckets.

“I’m speaking of the leftovers-the meat!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Use gloves but get it done.”

Ransom had no clue whatsoever whether Fenger could or could not learn anything from the meager human remains and bone, but he knew the teeth in a single skull would reveal approximate age as a child’s teeth spoke volumes. It was one of the few truisms in nature.

Another shout, another discovery. Ransom followed the crowd and had to fight his way past others to see what the hullabaloo was over. When others parted for him, he saw that they had cornered an aged old rat, too slow-moving to get off in time. The sight brought back what Alastair had witnessed in the darkness below hours earlier. “Why is he hanging about this location, alone?” Ransom wondered aloud.

Logan pulled out his .38 and fired, killing the rat. The explosion of the gunshot in the empty warehouse resounded over the entire wharf just as the owners of the place arrived. Stopping Overton and Hamptead at the door, uniformed officers asked their business. The gunshot had caused every cop to drop and pull his weapon. Meanwhile, Alastair poked about where the rat had chosen to hover, and in a moment, he found a small chest amid the boxes.

He opened the small cedar chest and peered inside, others over his shoulder doing likewise. Doilies, knitted items, caps, mostly small, mostly children’s items. As Alastair picked through the chest, Kohler said, “My God, the cretin has kept items from his victims, kept them as…as souvenirs of the murders.”

The others gasped at this conclusion.

“It’s worse than that, I fear,” said Alastair, now lifting out baby booties, infant hats, and infant clothing. A set of old tintypes, old tins-pictures created from a process predating photography.

Philo, always the interested artist and historian of photography, automatically grabbed for the tins, as he wanted simply to handle the old metal depictions and to closely examine the features as well as the quality of the work. As an artist, he found the tintypes of boundless interest. But Ransom withheld one of the tins and held it up to the weak light, a depiction of a comely if hefty young woman with features burned into Alastair’s brain. “It’s her…it’s her when she was Grace.”

“What?” asked Philo.

Logan inched closer.

Behan swallowed hard.

Philo Keane stepped back and snapped a photo of what Ransom held in his hands.

Kohler erupted. “What in God’s name does this mean, Ransom? Who the hell is Grace?”

Alastair dropped everything back into the cedar box and painfully got back to his feet, using his cane to steady himself. How long since I’ve had sleep? How much of an attack on my sensibilities can I absorb?

“Well, man! Spit it out!” ordered Kohler.

Ransom casually went toward a window and opened it, allowing in more air, and in the light, he produced the photo that Philo Keane had given him, the photo of an entire homeless family of five-mother, father, and three children. He held it up to the waiting, anxious group of detectives, cops, newsmen, and Philo.

“What’re you saying, Ransom?” demanded Kohler.

“This is what Leather Apron looks like. Take a good look.”

Every eye was focused on the desperate faces of the homeless family.

“Are you saying…” began Logan.

“…that Leather Apron?” continued Behan.

“…is not just two killers but a mother and a father?” asked Thom Carmichael.

“The knives…the many cuts that Dr. Fenger speaks of,” said Philo, a realization coming over him. “There could be as many as five separate attackers?”

“It’s a family affair, yes. And this is no chest of souvenirs of their victims, but souvenirs from the killer’s childhood, maybe the old homestead.”

“Family heirlooms,” croaked Philo.

“Father, mother, and children?” asked Logan, eyes wide.

“All murderous, all cannibals?”

“This is a helluva story,” muttered Carmichael.

“Some story, and one of our own making.” Ransom turned to the window and breathed in fresh air off the river. Morning sun had burned off all fog but a dampness remained in the air.

“Whataya mean one of our own making?” asked Kohler, pursuing him.

“Same as Stead means in his book?” asked Carmichael.

This alerted Ransom, and he faced Thom. “You’ve read William Stead’s book?”

“I am perhaps the first to do so.”

“Has it found a publisher?”

“It has.”

“Good…good.”

“What in blazes does a book have to do with all this?” shouted Kohler. “And who the devil is this woman in the tintype?”

The irony was lost on Kohler, that they stood in a graveyard of dead books amid a city full of illiterates, amid the remains of this horror, only now learning that William Stead’s exhaustive exposé of the treatment of indigent and homeless in Chicago, entitled If Christ Came to Chicago , had been published. The question remained who would read it, and who might care? Further irony lost on Nathan was the subject of the ancient picture.

“I don’t see that a book has anything to do with any of this butchery,” added Kohler in his ear. “And who the bloody hell is this?” he demanded, pushing the old picture into Ransom’s face.

Ransom glared at Nathan. “We oft create our own monsters, Nathan-you among them!” He grabbed the tintype and held it overhead, shouting, “It’s Bloody Mary when she was young! Now step off.”

Nathan smiled. “Then that old witch indeed had something to do with the Vanishings after all.”

Philo weighed in, asking, “Do you think this cannibalistic family was pushed to it by our ignoring them, Alastair, until desperation and hunger drove them to…to cannibalizing children?”

“Throwaway children, yes. Nameless, faceless ones even in death. Then came Anne Chapman and Alice Cadin, two not homeless, two with names and faces.”

“No one asked for this,” countered Behan.

“Disposable children,” added Ransom. “Until Chapman.”

Philo snapped a photo of Ransom. He’d secretly begun to compile a kind of photographic history of Alastair Ransom. Some were photos of Alastair in various undercover disguises, but this time Philo had caught in a moment of time the rage on Ransom’s face as he muttered through clenched teeth, “Now we’ve got to hunt down and kill the monsters we’ve spawned.”

Philo Keane did exactly as his good friend and police detective boss told him to do, and so he now stood over the remains of the unknown child being autopsied by Dr. Christian Fenger. Philo took pictures of the carved up body as Fenger and his most senior assistants worked to create an autopsy report. The coroner for the City of Chicago worked in what appeared weary fatigue, his findings corroborating all that Alastair had concluded regarding the number of suspects being perhaps as many as five, all with separate knives, a view that Fenger had early on suspected from the few clues left them. Once again, Christian proved a remarkable medical genius.