Shadows in the White City

CHAPTER 16

Alastair made all due haste to the Des Plaines station house where he assumed Bloody Mary was being held, but once there, he learned that she was already being arraigned before Judge Grimes. He spoke to the desk sergeant, discovering that Logan and Behan were at the arraignment. He rushed to join them.

A large crowd had gathered outside the courthouse downtown, and feelings were running high. Most assuredly, the old crone was being thrown to the proverbial dogs, Alastair reasoned, as Chief Kohler most assuredly would’ve secreted her off to Senator Chapman’s farmstead outside the city for the reward if he really thought her in any way guilty or implicated in the death of Anne Chapman.

Hooting and cheers and “atta-boy”s trailed Alastair all the way up the steps through the crowd. On the inside, he went for Judge Grimes’s courtroom. He quietly pushed through a door on hearing Bloody Mary cursing at the beefy, morose Judge Grimes.

Ransom immediately recognized the tall, stoop-shouldered, scraggly-haired, wild-eyed, feral looking woman who could easily pass for a stevedore down at the wharves. Bloody Mary was being gaveled down by the judge, and she suddenly fell silent, her curses on judge and court at an abrupt end; and so fascinated had she become with the judge’s pounding gavel, which sounded like a series of angry gunshots. Grunting and cursing under her breath in animal fashion, her gaze taking in everything while in a pretense of blindness, drool came over her lips in globs that fell to the floor or splatted onto her curled, aged shoes.

Alastair noticed Behan and Logan sitting up front. The two looked as if they’d had a rough night’s sleep, their clothes filthy, hair wild, but Alastair knew the cause: transporting Mary.

Alastair found a wall and leaned against it, watching, listening, and realizing here was a woman who represented everything that the city leaders and merchants most loathed and feared. She was a walking billboard for the underbelly of the city, and she lived by instinct alone.

Bloody Mary, under the harsh courtroom lights, was as out of place as any fish tossed ashore or any bird with a hole in its wing.

Ransom felt a wave of empathy and sadness wash over him for the ugly old woman-the penultimate outcast-the social excommunicant.

The judge held a handkerchief over his nose, so rancid was the odor rising off Mary. Keeping a safe distance from the accused, Grimes asked his bailiff to escort her to Room 148.

Her hands were cuffed to chains attached to ankle bracelets, all of it rattling like ship’s rigging as she stomped, heavy footed, from the room, head slumped forward like some new species of captive animal with a strange curve to its spine, a species yet to be given a name. As she filed past, Alastair’s eyes met hers, but there was no light and no recognition there. Only an emptiness.

Her chains rattled along the floor all the way through the door, the sound like sandpaper over the spine.

“It may well be a dead end,” said Behan who, on seeing Alastair enter, had joined him at the rear.

Logan came next, adding, “But we won’t know that till we get’er talking and to trust us-now will we?”

“I got an instinct about her,” Ransom replied.

“We all know she’s addled in the head.”

“Exactly, so…”

“So what, Rance?”

“Damn it, man, so how can we trust a word she tells us?”

Behan raised his hands. “We’ll never know unless she opens up.”

“So I say we ‘open’ her head for her,” joked Logan, deadpan.

Behan put in, “You can wait outside if you wish.”

“I’m in the room for as long as I can stand it,” Ransom said.

They located 148.

“We hadda wrestle her in cuffs and chains, and I can tell you,” said Behan, “it was no fun.”

“The woman needs a good delousing and bathing,” said Logan.

“You two can draws straws, but I’m outta that one,” said Ransom.

A light laugh accompanied the three of them into 148. Once inside, and with the bailiff stepping out, Behan sat across the table from Bloody Mary. He introduced himself with his title, and added, “And you know Inspector Logan and everyone knows Inspector Ransom.”

Ransom remained standing and imposing nearby, nodding perfunctorily when introduced.

“Aye, the Big Bear they call ’im these days.”

“Mary and me,” began Ransom, “we go way back, don’t we, my lovely girl?”

“I need my medicines,” the woman replied. “Did yous two bring me my mendications? I got a magic blanket, you know, one I can spread out on command and ask it to fly. A flying carpet. Give it to you for some medicines. You want my magic blanket?”

“Mary, we’re not interested in magic or bloody flying carpets.” Alastair held a handkerchief over his nose. “We’ve come to ask you questions.” The odor exuding off the woman was preternaturally powerful. Something akin to a fetid over-ripe melon. If there was such a thing, Bloody Mary seemed a walking candidate for spontaneous human combustion.

“Finally, somebody wants me for something,” she pathetically replied.

Behan stalwartly held his own against the assault on his senses from this homeless wretch. The judge had been right. Even cleaned up, her skin appeared dusky and covered with a gray patina. She appeared Spanish or Black or a mix of both, but it was impossible to say with any certainty. Her accent sounded Mexican.

“Let’s make a deal.” A mantra for her. “Let’s make a deal. Anything you want,” she toothlessly muttered and spread her legs as far as her ankle chains allowed. “Let’s deal. I’ll take care-a-all three of yous!”

Obviously, she’d fallen back on her usual method of relating to men. “Look at her teeth,” said Ransom.

“God save us,” muttered Behan.

Logan joked, “You want some time alone with her, Ken?”

“Let’s make a deal,” she repeated.

“Mary…we do not want a magic carpet ride,” Ransom assured her.

“What teeth are you talking about, Rance?” asked Behan, talking over him. “She’s got none.”

“That’s just the point. If she did barter with this Leather Apron devil in these vanishings, what did he pay her? She have any cash on her?”

“Not a nickel.”

“And boys, I tell ya, she wasn’t tearing at human flesh, not with her gums, so what motive has she?”

Twenty minutes and they learned nothing from Mary. She kept wanting to talk about an amusement park and a ride she had once taken, presumably as a child, deep in the bowels of a haunted castle. Then she slipped back into barter mode, her eyes lighting up with a cackling laugh. All her words came out of her toothless, cryptlike mouth along with spittle and froth that both sickened and amazed the three Chicago inspectors.

Finally, unable to take her voice-like a nail through the head, or her stench-like a spike of sewage through each nostril, or her frothy mouth-like a rabid dog-Behan pleaded that Alastair take over.

“There’s nothing but mayhem inside your head, right, Mary? You don’t know why you’re here, do you, Mary?” asked Alastair, replacing Behan at the “front.” “If she knows anything at all,” he said to Logan and Behan, “about the Vanishings, she’s likely forgotten it. Or it’s locked away in her sponge.” Alastair indicated his head.

But Mary exploded at the word Vanishings. “It’s the work of the Anti-Christ himself! Nothing I had a hand in; nothing I could do anything about.”

“Where do I find this Anti-Christ, Mary? Where?”

“Under the water…under the lake, under the fair.”

“Under the fire?”

“Fair…I said fair! Under the bleedin’ fair!”

“Now we know for sure she’s batty,” said Logan.

“I already knew that before you two nabbed her.” Alastair turned his attention back to Mary. “Is there anything else you wish to tell us, Mary?”

“No.”

“Nothing you wish to say in your defense?”

“No.”

“What’s your real name, Mary?”

She stared at him but said nothing.

“Your secret name?”

“I’ll not tell.”

“Is it full of Grace, as in Hail Mary, full of Grace?”

“I am full of Grace. My name…my real name is Grace. Grace Sheffield, originally from Shrewsbury, England.”

Ransom jotted this down. He’d recalled it from arrests ten years prior.

“Whatya doing with that?” she asked, fixated on the moving pen over the notepad.

“Just going to check to see if it’s true.”

“Ohhh…’tis true enough.”

Alastair stood and slipped from the room, the other two inspectors doing likewise. Outside, they began a group coughing-sneezing-hacking-snorting jag, filling their white handkerchiefs with the result of their combined interrogation.

Alastair said, “I believe she’s a dead end, and that we’re railroading a mindless old crone.”

Behan shrugged, his mustache bobbing with his tie. “We’re just following orders.”

Frustrated, Logan blurted out, “We oughta take a g’damn club to the old witch and beat it outta her.”

“That kinda talk in the face of what you just saw in there? Now, I can just imagine where the orders came from, but fellas, this old girl…she’s got nothing but loose marbles and bird fodder for brains.”

From where they stood out in the hallway, they heard Mary being Bloody Mary, shouting lunacies at some invisible demons in her head and inside Room 148. “My goddamn real name is Grace! You know ’cause I have a friend who digs earthworms in the cemetery! She ties ’em tail to head, head to tail and makes jewelry outta worms-living worms! Living jewelry! Says it’s eatable jewels and the idea will sell in the thousands! Won’t make her any less mad, but it will make her rich and mad! But she damn well ate ’em all! Now that’s sick! Her name is Grace, but she’s got none! Same as me. I had an accident with her, an accident with Grace…just like she had an accident with me. Her accident with Grace was with me!”

“The woman is battling the DTs,” declared Ransom. “She’s sick in too many ways to count-not unlike the charge brought against her.”

Even as he said this, Alastair thought, How fitting that she, like the Mother of God-according to the street children-had fallen so far from “Grace”…Perhaps there was some small truth in the street beliefs after all. But it all seemed so tenuous.

Behan and Logan reluctantly followed Alastair back into 148, returning to the scolding Bloody Mary in her chains. Alastair asked, “When you were Grace, Mary, did you ever have a child?”

“Yes…yes, several.”

“Whatever happened to your children?”

“Dead, all dead.”

“All dead?”

“Cruel world.”

“Not one survived?”

“Well…all that I knew of.”

“Meaning?”

She began crying. “’Cept one I left with the sisters.”

“The sisters? What sisters?”

“The Sisters of the Holy Cross Convent.”

“On South Michigan Avenue?”

“Yes, but Grace was just a child then.”

“And how old would your son be today if alive?”

“I dunno. How should I know? Can’t keep my head round numbers.”

“Take a wild guess then.”

“’B-bout your age, I suspect.”

“Ahhh…and have you seen him, Mary Grace, recently?”

She thought long and hard on this. “No…not ’im…that could not be him. Not that evil thing!”

“The street children say that you’re the mother of Zoroaster’s child. Any truth to it, Mary Grace?”

She smiled wide at this. “If I spawned a demon from me womb…I’m penitent sorry.” A smirk on her face said otherwise. “And I’ve asked God’s blessin’ and forgiveness at the church’s back door, ’cause the likes of you won’t have me come through the front! And as I’ve God’s forgiveness, I don’t need none from murderers like you!”

“Well now, Mary, now we know where you stand,” Logan said and chuckled.

“Don’t hold back,” added Behan.

But Alastair was intrigued by this and the image of her at the back door of a church, perhaps the same as Samuel had said where holy water was being sold; he imagined the same fellow could sell forgiveness to a fallen angel such as Mary Grace for the right price as well. He’d filed this away for a time when he could visit St. Alexis. Have a chat with the priests there. But for now, he wondered what connection Bloody Mary had with this man the children called Zoroaster-or the son of Zoroaster-and whether he was her son or not, and then she’d have motive…if she believed Leather Apron was indeed her son.

Alastair needed a clear idea who this mystery man and his mystery family might be, and what proof he’d used to convince Mary that he was in fact her evil spawn. Or was it all a fiction from her addled mind, a cunning one to create and build her own dangerous reputation, to ward off evil befalling her? Who in his right mind, man, woman or child would attack Satan’s mother?

Alastair now manipulated the other two inspectors from the room without the least difficulty before he showed Mary the photo that he’d been given by Philo Keane that morning. He must assume either Behan or Logan or both were working in consort with Nathan Kohler.

When he laid the photo before Bloody Mary, she gasped and said, “How? How did you get the demon and his demon brood and his damned wife in a picture?”

“Have you seen your grandchildren, Mary Grace?”

“I…he said he was my son…that he’d been born of Satan, and that his offspring were the grandsons of Satan, and that I laid with Satan to begin the bloodline between human and Devil.”

“And you’ve told children this?”

“They need to know. It’s the truth. Only the strongest survive.”

“And this man in the photograph, is he familiar to you?”

She near gasped and her eyes widened, but she immediately controlled herself. “Who is he?”

“Mary Grace, if he is Leather Apron, he is the one behind the Vanishings?”

“What do I get if I tell you?”

He promised her a warm, dry place with daily meals and a bed. He made it sound heavenly.

Finally, she said, “He is my lost son, yes, but he’s not the only Leather Apron.”

“Who then is his accomplice?”

She pointed at the woman in the photo and said, “She-his wifey.”

“Really?”

“And them others.”

“Others?”

“In the picture. The children. They’re all Aprons, all meat eaters, trained to it. The Devil’s own child and grandchildren’re this brood, and I pleaded with Danielle to stay away from ’em.”

“Where are they now, Mary Grace?”

“Like I told you, under the parks and under the water! They come up through the ground and sometimes through the bloody lake and the river.”

He gave up, calling in Behan and Logan to take her to Cook County and turn her over to Christian Fenger.

“But what’ll Chief Kohler say?” asked Logan.

“Put it on me, boys. The woman is too far gone to organize a single planned abduction and murder, much less a series of disappearances and butcherings.”

Logan and Behan looked from Alastair to one another again. Finally, Ransom said, “Concentrate on it, boys. Mull it over as you make your way to Cook County, where this woman’s to be committed.”

“You know what a pain in the ass it was to get her here?”

Behan added, “What about Judge Grimes?”

“He will bless you. Now find a phone and call for Shanks and Gwinn to come get her. Those boys know how to deal with troublesome types.” Alastair laughed. “Hell, they transported me once in that meat wagon of theirs.”

“Yeah, when you were half dead.” The three laughed together.

“Fools rush in where wise men…well the truly wise would not go near that old bat,” said Behan.

“For a price, Shanks and Gwinn will get her to the asylum.”

“You think she’ll be better off in that snake pit?”

“No, but she will be off the streets, and there are far more people living on the streets in needless fear of her than you can count, among them children. And if returned to the street, she’ll wind up another Timothy Crutcheon or worse.”

“Do you think her in any way complicit in the murders, Rance?” asked Logan.

“Something strange connects her to all this, to the children, to the killings, to the killer, I suspect, but exactly what…who can say?” lied Ransom.

“Yeah, just can’t put a finger on it, right?” Logan winked as if a conspirator.

“But it’s inside her, right?” added Behan.

Alastair thought about this long. “Yes, but so deeply locked away inside that lunatic brain, inside one of her personalities, that it’s useless, lads.”

“I got no sense of that whatsoever,” Logan sarcastically replied. “Guess that’s what makes you Alastair Ransom, heh?”

Behan agreed, “Yeah, all I got was a morass of meaningless gibberish going on at all times.”

“Yeah…kinda sad, really,” agreed Logan. “Hell, at some time she might’ve been someone’s mum and maybe human.”

Ransom nodded. “Some sort of odd continuous parade of lost memories and a head full of confusing voices, lads. She definitely marches to a different drum.”

“Surprise is she’s not marched off into Lake Michigan to end it all,” said Behan.

“’Nough bodies out that way already, heh, Alastair?” Logan’s remark was meant to say that he knew where at least one body was buried.

Alastair ignored the remark, however, saying, “Let’s do the right thing by Grace, gentlemen.”

“And that would be to shoot her?” asked Logan, causing Behan to erupt in laughter.

“No, that being treat her as you might your own mum if she were out of her head.”

Behan frowned and nodded, while Logan said, “That’ll never come to pass. My mother’s as sharp as tacks.”

Ransom gave them a cold stare. It was enough to send them off in search of a government phone to call in Shanks and Gwinn.

The following day

Jane Francis had come to Cook County in search of Dr. Fenger, and she had not come as Dr. Tewes but herself. She had come to learn his feeling about something she’d discovered only this morning, that the woman arrested as Leather Apron-Bloody Mary-had been sent to Cook County Asylum, where she supposedly had been admitted against her will. From what Jane could piece together, the lunatic fought her “captors” the entire way and that she had bitten one of the ambulance men, Shanks, in his shank, and that she’d somehow, while yet shackled, bloodied Gwinn’s nose. She’d screamed that they had attempted to rape and kill her. Shanks and Gwinn denied they did anything whatsoever untoward, but rather had to restrain her, and in that attempt, she became even more violent.

Jane believed that Alastair, from his account of having faced down Bloody Mary at the courthouse, had been premature in shipping her off to a cell at the asylum. She believed that with careful probing-after winning the confidence of the woman-the aged woman might lead them to some clues to the Vanishings.

For this reason she’d not come as a man, as Dr. Tewes, but rather as Dr. Jane Francis, to ask her good friend and confidant, Dr. Fenger, if she could interview the so-called madwoman. All of the children spoke of Bloody Mary’s being an accomplice, somehow connected to these horrendous crimes, that she perhaps procured for the killer, and yet Alastair had shrugged off any part she might play in this horrific opera, having made a medieval diagnosis about her sanity. “Insane people can be as immoral and as wicked as sane people, Alastair!” she had shouted at him when he made the ridiculous statement that the woman was too mad to be of any real danger. “And since when did you become a medical expert?”

Alastair had telephoned her from his home the night before, telling her of his day, and she’d informed him of how she and Gabby had gone again among the shelter children to gather more information. He’d then pleaded with her to not place herself and Gabby in danger, and next he mentioned the arrest and release of Bloody Mary as an afterthought. His cavalier remarks about having made the decision to institutionalize the suspect had set her off.

So now here she was, hoping that Christian Fenger would allow her an audience with the woman. Perhaps she could speak to this Bloody Mary woman-to-woman, to appeal to whatever motherly and natural impulses and instincts might be buried below her outward appearance and behavior.

Jane now rushed down the corridor, going for the stairwell and Christian-no doubt in his morgue below-when she heard the irritating voice of Dr. Caine McKinnette, whose reputation, so far as Jane believed, was unfounded. McKinnette represented the old guard who still believed in bleeding his patients, and still believed that all disease rested in the bloodstream. She heard McKinnette tell a nurse to call him when his patient died so that he could fill out the death certificate and in essence be done with the woman in the bed before him.

Unlike Christian Fenger, Dr. McKinnette did not know Jane; he only knew Dr. James Phineas Tewes, with whom McKinnette had shared ale and spoke on occasion. They had both been involved to some degree in saving Alastair Ransom’s life from a bullet wound. McKinnette seemed to have somehow weaseled his way into Cook County as something other than an anesthesiologist and pill pusher, so that he was now overseeing the last breath of a dying patient. How unfortunate for the patient, Jane thought.

Jane knew she should leave it alone and go on her way. After all, she had her hands full as it were. But on seeing McKinnette disappear down the hall, something made her turn and walk into the patient’s room. She entered quietly and nodded to the nurse, who hand-cranked the dying woman’s bed to flatten it. The nurse assumed Jane to be a relative, so she ducked out to give Jane a moment with her loved one. No words passed between them.

Jane immediately checked the woman’s medical chart, and she took a pulse at the throat. Yes, the patient was dying. But Jane felt a hand grasp hers as she took the pulse. The woman on the bed, a gray wire-haired lady with a face ashen as stone and etched with wrinkles named Eloise Howe, was desperate to communicate. Jane saw it in her weak eyes, and she felt it in Eloise’s weak but persistent grip.

The strength in her touch told Jane that while she was weak, Eloise wanted a fight; she was not ready to give up, and Jane believed with proper treatment, Eloise could be turned around.

Jane pulled forth one of Dr. Tewes’s cigars from her bag, lit it, and used it to burn off the leeches that Dr. McKinnette had placed on Eloise at incisions he had made in the woman. She began to administer other means to help the woman. She did so quietly and as nurses changed bed sheets and replaced water, she engaged them and found that the nurses disagreed in whispering voices with Dr. McKinnette and his care of this woman from the beginning. In fact, one went so far as to say that she felt the old doctor had caused more harm than good, saying that the woman had declined rapidly once he’d taken over her case.

“She was found on the street, passed out, brought in a week ago. She had fainted from lack of nourishment. Dr. McKinnette began treating her immediately as a dying cause.”

Two days later and Jane had still not gotten around to Bloody Mary, but as the woman was in the asylum ward, she was going nowhere, and Jane had come to believe she could save a life here at Cook County.

Still, the nurses, assumed Jane a family member or dear friend, and she did not dissuade the notion. Two days and no more response but rather a comatose state had come over the elderly patient.

McKinnette did not once check his own steps, even down to a look at his damnable leeches. He claimed that his patient’s mind was gone, that she was brain dead and would never recover herself again. He spoke of it as a matter of time, and he remarked that had he a race horse or a pet in the same condition, that he would put it out of its misery. It was an undisguised invitation to any nurse who wanted to do both patient and doctor a favor to “take action” on behalf of mercy.

Meanwhile, Dr. McKinnette was told that Jane had sat with the supposed brain dead, had talked nonstop to the patient, holding her hand. Jane’s instinct told her this woman was not ready to go, that she had unfinished business, and Jane always went with her first instinct. After much frustration even with Christian Fenger, who Jane had brought to Eloise to show him that she was not only out of coma, but lucid-talking and touching Jane-and that Eloise had started to open her eyes and was trying to focus on Jane when Dr. Fenger had entered in the room. Christian, who’d been monitoring the situation and who’d had a shouting match with McKinnette in his office over his arcane practices, his esoteric handwriting, and his ill-treatment of this patient, was amazed at what Jane had accomplished. After a lot of aggressive therapies and ideas, Jane had talked them into pulling McKinnette off the case and allowing Dr. Tewes to come in and work with Eloise, calling Tewes a homeopathic healer as well as a phrenologist and magnetic healer.

Jane as Tewes combated dangerous infection created by McKinnette’s sloppiness. Tewes was soon credited with what Jane had accomplished, getting Eloise’s breathing to slow with thirty-minute hourly suctioning. When Jane as Tewes left Eloise, the elderly woman insisted on a hug, and she squeezed her with some strength in her arms, and she could keep her eyes open for a long period, and her gag reflex was good, and she responded well to Tewes’s voice. She also exhibited a normal pain response. She wanted to know where that sweet woman-a nurse, she believed-had disappeared to. Dr. Fenger was amazed at the stark difference between McKinnette’s patient and Jane’s patient at this point. He walked with her outside and in the hallway, he shook her hand and praised her skills, drawing stares.

“So fire the quack and hire Dr. Jane Francis, then, Christian.”

“I am going to work on it.”

“And how long will that take?”

“There are bridges yet to build, but I am going to build them.”

They stood staring at one another, she in men’s clothing, he in his smeared white frock. Around them Cook County hospital was alive with activity.

“You saved that woman from a certain death.”

“I’ve seen this before-too often-but I had a feeling from the first touch between us that I could help Eloise far, far better than Caine McKinnette.”

“But how did you know you could bring the woman back?”

“Initially, I didn’t, but I knew that I wouldn’t turn over my dog to McKinnette and his leeches.” She thought a moment. “But honestly, I had hope and she knew that, and so together she and I guided Eloise back.”

“You should go home. Get some rest.”

“No…not just yet, Christian. I want to talk to that woman they call Bloody Mary who’s here in your asylum, but I want to do it as a woman, not as Tewes. Can I change in your office?”

“Jane, Bloody Mary is no longer here.”

“No longer here?”

“She was discharged.”

“I don’t understand. How?”

“She has been in before, Jane, and no one…no one here can deal with her.”

“Meaning?”

“She literally bites, kicks, and fistfights the staff and other patients. Furthermore, she refuses help and thinks we’re trying to poison her.”

“Isn’t that what an asylum is for? People with delusions?”

“There is no cure for her madness, and I refuse to operate on the insane. It’s against my principles.”

“Agreed. Enough experimental surgery on the insane.” She paced. “So you simply release a so-called lunatic and murder suspect to the streets?”

“She was not charged with any crime. Besides, according to her primary physician, she refused help, she attacked other inmates, and she made a habit of biting everyone.”

“Let me guess-McKinnette!”

“Yes, you have me there.”

“Damn, damn, damn, Christian, what hold does that man have on you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, hold. He works for the hospital.”

“Only so long as you suffer him! When is Cook County going to get it right?”

“Easy now, Jane!”

“I’d bite that man, myself! It’s ridiculous to put such a man in the care of the mentally diseased. Why not hire some good people in pathological conditions of the mind.”

“Like you?”

“Yes, like me!” Jane let out a gasp. “I cannot believe you released that woman back onto the streets.”

“She was put on a train bound for family we found in Iowa.”

“Really?” Jane watched his eyes and body for any sign of chicanery, unhappy that they had arrived at this juncture. “Please tell me you didn’t turn her over to Kohler and Chapman, Christian.”

“I did nothing of the kind. I opted out of the whole entire business days ago. Afraid I still have a conscience.”

She saw no reason to doubt him. “You’re the better man for it, dear Christian.”

“Yes, really very little call for that sort of thing nowadays, however…”

Jane decided there was no help for it. She went home with a splitting headache to be with Gabby and to find some corner of peace. Once home, Gabby found her agitated, and she became worried in turn, making her mother undress and go to bed to fend off any worse headache.

The following morning

“Hold on! Are you telling me that Christian just let her go?” asked Alastair at the kitchen table where this morning he’d joined Jane and Gabby for breakfast. “I tell you, the woman is absolutely daft and belongs in a place where she can do no harm either to herself or others.”

“Apparently, she does only that-harm others,” countered Jane. “Besides, you didn’t charge her with any crime,” countered Jane. As Christian wasn’t here to defend himself, Jane took his side.

“She sounds perfectly dreadful,” added Gabby, pouring more coffee into each cup.

Alastair’s expression changed from one of surprise at Christian’s letting the woman walk to one of shock, horror even. “My God, he’s turned her over to Kohler, who has in turn-”

“Whatever do you mean?” asked Jane, confused. “No, no, you see Christian assured me that he’d have no part in this business between Nathan Kohler and Chapman, Alastair.”

“So he’s told you, and you believe him?”

“I do.”

“She’s been put on a train according to records. Bound for Iowa.”

“Not simply turned back out on the streets, as I was told by Shanks and Gwinn when I went asking?”

“No, nor given over to Chief Kohler, Alastair.”

“Is that what you fear?” asked Gabby.

Alastair rushed from the room as best he could with his stiff leg and cane, fighting to exit the door, the ladies on his heels. He was stopped when Jane shouted for him to explain.

“I must go and go now!” he replied, tearing the door from her hand and clamoring out onto the porch in the morning sunlight. He immediately shouted for a passing cab with a frightened couple inside as this bear of a man descended on their carriage. The man inside shouted for the driver to pull off and do it immediately even as Alastair waved down the driver. “Halt in the name of the law!”

The hansom coach stopped, the two horses lifting on hindlegs, fearful. As Ransom ordered everyone out, saying the cab was commandeered in the name of the Chicago Police Department, Jane shouted, “I am going with you, Alastair!”

“This will not be pleasant, Jane,” he firmly said, shaking his head.

“Since when did you begin treating me as if I am some shrinking violet?”

“I haven’t time to argue with her, Gabby! You do it!” he was half in the cab, half out on the running board when he shouted to the driver, “The Chapman estate north of the city, my good man, and make haste!”

“Haste, sir?”

“All due haste, yes! Time is of the essence!”

The smile on the face of the horseman presaged his pleasure at opening up his team of horses from here to Evanston, Illinois.

Jane leapt in after Ransom and from the window, she shouted to Gabby, “Don’t forget the roast I put in the oven, dear!”

Gabby stared after the dust cloud crafted of debris as the hansom lifted a whirlwind in its wake, the pair of horses pulling it thundering down the dust-laden street for the northern farms region where the wealthy Chapman family lived.

Inside the cab, Jane clung to Alastair where he sat braced with his cane as the coach squealed, its shocks bouncing, wheels revolving below them at an alarming rate, whip snapping, horses crying out in hysteria and bolting along, controlled only by the skill of the hackman.

Alastair pulled Jane Francis close to him and held her firmly against the mad rocking carriage interior.

“You could have at least warned me!” she shouted over the roar, deafening inside the cab, of frenetic hooves over stone. “My God, Alastair! Even on the Ferris wheel at the fair they’re smart enough to give you a bar to hold on to.”

“There wasn’t time and is no time now, Jane! Christ, I should’ve seen this coming! Fool! But I know where they’ve taken Mary Grace, and it is not to a good end!”

“What’re you saying?”

“Chapman will kill her if she does not talk.”

“Chapman? Kill? Talk?”

“Chapman will gouge it out of her one way or another who Leather Apron “could be,” and she will confess after a little pain, and for all I know, they’ve cornered a suspect and have drawn and quartered him by now.”

“Who are they?”

“Chapman, Kohler, Fenger.”

“Fenger? No! He would not be party to such-”

“Barbarity?”

“Yes, barbarity.”

“Perhaps he has no idea the extent to which men like Kohler and Chapman will go to get what they want out of a suspect or a material witness.”

“I’ve heard that you’ve interrogated suspects into the grave.”

This momentarily silenced him. “Not you, too, and not now.”

“Will you then please tell me what you know of this conspiracy between Christian and the other two. The details?” She wanted to hear it from him.

“If you’ve the stomach for it.”

“I have.”

He told her the whole sordid tale of how Kohler and Christian had cornered him in Nathan’s office with Chapman, and how much money was involved, and how Christian saw it as his last chance to end his debts and his talk of a new wing on the hospital. The story fit with what Christian had relayed earlier.

“When he asked for my help, Christian didn’t tell me the entire truth, and together, we led them to Bloody Mary, didn’t we?”

“None of this is your fault, Jane. Truth be told, Christian is, while shrewd in his field, naive about men.”

“Naive like me? Naive in what way?”

“In how men of power operate. Jane, I once witnessed Nathan Kohler burn a man alive while the poor devil was strapped to a chair.”

“I’ve heard the same story told of you, Alastair.”

“Which story is the more comfortable fit? I was there. I couldn’t stop it, but I didn’t throw the match. Nathan did.”

“Jane shivered at these revelations. All well and true, I’m sure of the other two, but I can’t believe it of Christian.”

“He rammed his shiny new wolf’s-head cane into the top of the cab, beating out a code to the driver that said, “Faster, faster, faster!” He then looked into her eyes.

She returned his gaze as much as possible for one who was so bounced about. “What?” she asked.

“I fear we may be too late.”

The carriage now jostled and quaked over a rough, yet-to-be unpaved road. “Why? Why risk their reputations, their careers?”

“Money is a great motivator, Jane, and who knows that better than Dr. Tewes?”

She glared at him but said, “It’s hardly the same.”

“Do you think for a moment Christian and Nathan haven’t rationalized their crimes down to misdemeanors as well?”

“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.”