Shadows in the White City

CHAPTER 17

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.

Alastair tried to imagine what had gone on here. They’d obviously conspired to get Bloody Mary here. Chapman had long before prepared the stable as his inquisition chamber. He had the old crone stripped and hauled up by her ankles, likely with the help of brawny hands who worked for the senator. Some of whom appeared on their way down the hill from the main house now, having spotted the commotion at the murder scene, for this was murder, pure and simple.

“These fellows coming toward us could prove dangerous given the situation,” he told Jane, who was staring at the bones being tamped into the pigsty mud.

“Should we make a run for the coach?” she asked.

“We’d never make it.”

“What, then?”

“I start making arrests, I suppose.”

“But this is a U.S. senator, and given what’s occurred here and that we’re potential witnesses…perhaps we’d better find cover.”

“Yes, a man who’s killed two people in his stable won’t balk at dispatching us unless-”

“How will we manage it, Alastair?”

“Listen carefully, if you don’t want to wind up fodder for Chapman’s hogs.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Just follow my lead, then.”

“Talk? You’re going to talk your way out of this?”

“I suspect it is our only way. I see two armed men with long-barreled rifles coming up from the river. We’re cut off.”

“But can you do it? Talk your way and mine out of this?” When Alastair did not readily reply, she said, “I know. I’ve got it.”

“Got what?”

“Tell them we’ve bloody well come for our share of the loot.”

“Cute.” He stared at her.

“But it could work if they thought we had a hand in getting Bloody Mary turned over, and you did arrange to put her into a place where they waltzed her out and to her death. You are entitled to compensation, by the rules of fair play.”

He laughed in her face. “Let me do the talking.”

“Just do it,” she said, getting the last word in, when voices from behind them broke out.

Wheeling for a look, Alastair cursed, “Damn! It’s Kohler and Chapman with the rifles coming up the rise from the river. A fitting end to my career…” Ransom’s lament had her turn about to see the men with guns. Ransom added, “We’re surrounded by killers.”

“But no sign of Christian.”

“Keep still and play the dutiful girl without a brain, Doctor, as my woman, do you understand? As for how I will manage these fellows, just watch me. Stand clear and watch me.”

“Have you an extra gun at least?” she asked.

“My ankle…in a holster under my pants-leg, but it has a hair trigger. Do not go for it.”

“Then why tell me about it?”

“You’ve my permission if they kill me.”

“Ahhh…thank you.”

Ransom stood like a wall between three approaching farmhands, who’d obviously had a hand in the killings in the stable-their overalls painted in the brown burnished color of dried blood. Varnish stains they’d tell a judge and jury, and no way to refute it.

Jane’s only thoughts went to Gabrielle and what her daughter’s life would be like without her mother; wondered how Gabby would cope on her own; wondered if she’d have to drop out of Rush Medical College; wondered if Dr. Christian Fenger would take her under wing, to see that she stretch to her full potential; finally, Jane wondered if dying here and now would be painful or quick.

Alastair had but one thought: save Jane.

The carriage driver had seen the approaching men as well, and he leapt to his seat, turned the cab round and attempted to make a dash for it when one of the farmers threw a heavy harness into his face, sending him over the side. He lay in the dust, unconscious, his carriage and horses startled but caught by a second brawny fellow.

Then, as if the two men had come up from a nearby turkey shoot down at the river, Senator Chapman and Chief Nathan Kohler, guns in hand, materialized at Jane’s and Ransom’s back.

“Wonderful time of year, don’t you agree, Inspector Ransom?” asked Chapman, all smiles. “Love to go out on a hunt just after finishing a prickly job.”

“Nathan,” said Alastair, his hand white-knuckled around his blue gun, which he’d rested along his leg.

“Fancy seeing you here, Alastair,” replied Kohler, “and with Miss Francis is it?”

“I came for my share.”

Nathan laughed. “I’m sure you did. Smart move getting the old witch committed. With Christian being uncooperative, it was up to us, Alastair.”

“I have a hefty check made out to you, Inspector Ransom,” began the senator, a grim smile on his face as he narrowed the distance between them. “One you will be pleased with.”

“Check?” asked Jane, her eyes going from Chapman and Kohler to Ransom who glared at her to be silent.

“Yes, Jane, a check,” said Alastair, “one that will keep me from the poor house in my old age. Thank you, Senator Chapman.”

“You knew about this? Then you were part of it all along?” Jane asked.

“I know how this must look to you, Jane,” said Kohler, his hands extended in a gesture that swept her eyes back to the business in the barn. “But it does save the lives of countless children in our city, now doesn’t it? You can’t argue with that, and with your recent interest in helping homeless street kids, well…”

Senator Chapman pumped Alastair’s hand. “Getting that rabid foul old bitch out of the court system and into McKinnette’s control on a medical adjournment, that was brilliant, Inspector.”

Alastair smiled woodenly and jokingly asked if Kohler and Chapman had had poor luck hunting along the river. He imagined they had escorted someone into the woods but had come back alone. He prayed it’d not been Christian.

Chapman talked as if among friends, a calm about him. “Too much rain this season out this way, everything swollen.”

“Washes away the grime,” commented Kohler, hefting the scoped rifle. Had Chapman wanted them dead, Nathan could have killed them from a hundred yards off.

Grime or crime, Alastair wondered. He also wondered at the shovels being carried by the three farmhands. Likely, they had come to bury all those identifying parts from hands to heads and teeth along with the personal effects of the second victim, as Mary Grace didn’t have any. However, asking about this would not endear him to Chapman, and he really wanted Chapman to like him and Jane at the moment when he saw Jane’s eyes and realized she was going to say more.

“How could you keep me outta the deal? You knew I wanted to be a part of this?” she persisted.

He took her aside and whispered, “If you want to get out of here alive, I suggest you follow my lead.”

“I am I thought.”

“If I negotiate a deal for you, and Chapman writes you a check, you will take it, too.”

“Never. There I draw the line.”

“To accomplish getting us both killed. We are both dead otherwise, Jane.” He then returned to Chapman and Kohler, saying, “It was Christian’s idea, the whole thing-getting the old crone committed.”

“But you executed it, and here Nathan called you a hard-nosed bastard who would not go along,” countered Chapman. “I told Nathan, I said, ‘He’ll come round; time and money have a way of greasing the rustiest of skids.’”

Kohler nodded. “You did predict it, sir.”

Chapman said in a near whisper to Alastair, “How about this chief of yours, Inspector? Never seen a man work so hard at kissing ass.” He ended with a laugh.

“So who is the dead man that Mary fingered?” asked Ransom, pointing to the small man’s corpse.

Kohler replied, “Your man…snitch of yours, Bosch.”

“What? Are you insane?” he asked Kohler and then he moaned to the corpse in the barn. “Ahhh…Bosch…”

Jane felt the depth of his pained response.

“The old bitty was quite clear on who was butchering and eating the children,” said Chapman, “and she named your man.”

“It makes sense, Ransom,” said Kohler. “Think of it. He knows not only the ins and outs and ups and downs of the homeless children, but he knows the workings of our department. In a sense, you yourself furnished him with information and-”

“But Bosch?” Ransom still could not believe it, and he imagined that the old wild woman, Mary, simply drew on the first notorious name leaping to mind, perhaps the only one she had known for any length of time in Chicago, Henry “Dot ’n’ Carry” Bosch.

“A cripple like Bosch…you really think he was behind your granddaughter’s death, Senator Chapman?” asked Ransom.

“Whataya mean, a cripple?”

“Bosch had a wooden leg.”

“W-wooden leg?” The senator glared at Chief Kohler. “What’s he talking about?”

Jane realized one of the missing parts of what hung beside Bloody Mary from the barn rafters had no peg leg.

Nathan said, “I-I was told your men picked up Bosch.”

“At the address you provided, yes.”

Kohler raised his gun and hand in a gesture of innocence. “By time I got here, he was unrecognizable. I assumed it Bosch.”

Chapman looked Kohler hard in the eye, “Shut up, Kohler! You bloody well sent us to the wrong address, and you said nothing about a goddamn wooden leg!”

“I had no idea it wasn’t the gimp! It was handled by your men! If you’d allowed me to call in my fellows, they surely would’ve known to get the right man!”

“All right! All right!” countered Chapman. “We have Inspector Ransom now, and he obviously knows how to find this Bosch creature.” Chapman turned to Alastair. “Come along, Inspector, up to the house. We’ll have a cognac and consider the circumstances, and you may have an advance on your turning this Henry Bosch over to me.”

“But who is it, then, you’ve skinned alive?” asked Jane.

“A street person; no one of consequence,” replied the senator.

“Certainly no one who will be missed,” agreed the chief.

“Come with me, Jane,” Ransom told her.

Jane now did precisely as Alastair asked.

As they straggled behind, Jane asked Ransom who besides Bloody Mary had been butchered back at the stables. Behind them, they heard Senator Chapman’s men bring to life a huge, steam-engine operated saw, and the piercing sounds it was making in the stables could mean only one thing. They were doing the finer work of feeding the rest of the body parts to the hogs. “Purchased that remarkable saw at the agricultural pavilion at the fair,” Chapman proudly announced, keeping pace ahead of Alastair and Jane.

“You know as much as I do,” whispered Alastair in Jane’s ear. “I’ve no idea who stood in for Bosch.”

“And do you believe for a moment Bosch is Leather Apron?”

“Not for a moment.”

“Then you are a champion at charades?”

“I wish it were all a charade.”

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” she cautioned.

“It’s not the woods I fear. It’s those two.” He indicated Kohler and Chapman ahead of them.

“You were left with your weapons. It would appear they believed you back there. And frankly, you were quite convincing.”

“I swear to you, Jane, I never seriously considered Mary a part of the Vanishings, and I still don’t. The kids’ stories were built around her because she scared hell out of them.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all, until I can prove otherwise, yes.” He felt a judicious lie at this point might just keep her alive. Ransom feared telling her of Bloody Mary’s last admission to him, and he wondered if the old loon had died thinking that he’d used that information to turn her over to Chapman and Kohler. For now, he felt keeping old Mary’s secret a kind of justice, the fact of her son, the man in the picture with the grim brood. Besides, if he were to share this information with Jane just now, she’d surely believe him a liar and a part of this carnage.

Better to let her believe as she did, that Mary was an innocent victim here, too, caught up for no better reason than the stories children told on the street.

Ransom and Jane got free of Chapman and Kohler as quickly as possible, Ransom given a timetable in which to return with Bosch, bound, gagged, and prepared for the slaughter. The coachman was well paid to keep silent, and Alastair imagined he had also been threatened that if any word of what he’d seen at the farmstead should get out, that he would be the next man flayed and filleted and fed to Chapman’s prize-winning hogs. In fact, the bulk of their cognac visit was taken up by his showing them photos of each prize winner and rattling off the vital statistics of each hog and sow.

“What will you do now, Alastair?” she asked. “You’ve managed to implicate yourself in two murders back there by taking that check, and checks leave money trails.”

“Not if I tear it up.”

“Will you?” she asked, staring into his eyes, awaiting an answer.

“Will I?”

“Rip up a check for a fortune?”

“Imagine having that much to play with at the racetrack.”

“Are you going to destroy the check or become a part of this bloody conspiracy?”

“I’m walking a sensitive tightrope here, Jane.”

“What sensitive rope?”

“Suppose Christian is, like they say, part of this? Suppose he turned Mary over to them for a sum like this?”

She signed heavily and leaned back into the cushions. “Damn you, you’re wrong. It wasn’t Christian who did it. It had to’ve been McKinnette.”

“We don’t know how deep either of them’re in, but from the outset, the senator has been throwing his money around.”

“He’s blinded by his hatred and desire for vengeance.”

“He’s fixed on one path, most certainly.”

“An obsession. Suppose he does not get what he wants? Will he come after you, me, Gabby, anyone he can hurt?”

“There is little telling.”

“And as you’ve pointed out, without a body in the possession of authorities, there is no crime.”

“Hogs don’t eat bones,” he replied.

“You’re not thinking of going back out there, are you?”

“Not right away, but when I do, it will be with a gunnysack. At which time, this untendered check becomes evidence.”

Overhead, they heard the shaken coachman talking to himself, something about jumping the next ship or train out of the city.

“Perhaps we should take a clue from this fellow,” Ransom suggested.

“Nonsense. It’s not in your blood to run from a fight or a case.”

“Jane, you know me too well.”

“Well enough to know that if I’d gone out there to Chapman’s funhouse with any other man, I’d be as dead as Bloody Mary right now, and no one would ever have known,” she said, shivering a bit. “And I haven’t even sufficiently thanked you.”

“I’ll take out thanks in this manner,” he said and pressed his lips to hers, and they embraced to the lulling motion of the hansom cab, returning to Chicago by gaslight.

Ransom returned Jane to her home, angry with himself that he’d allowed her to go anywhere near Chapman’s estate. It had taken all his powers of persuasion to convince Chapman and Kohler that she was harmless and would do as told, using such phrases as “a man who can’t control his woman ain’t no kinda man” and “she knows her place if she wants to eat and wear nice jewelry.” Of course, Jane rankled at each such remark, but by then, she realized she must play her part to make it off the death farm alive.

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.

So he felt about the windowsill with his bare hands in the pitch dark. The sill itself was old and worn and loose from years of rainwater and weather. Ransom grabbed hold of the loose frame in each hand. He then tore away the entire framework until nothing but stone and cement remained, along with a gaping hole large enough to accommodate Ransom’s size. If anyone were inside and if Ransom had hoped to have surprise on his side, he could forget about it now.

Alastair eased himself down into the basement of the warehouse, this side of the building facing a paved road over which wagons traversed, and where men loaded and unloaded goods. His eyes came to street level as he dropped into the pit. It felt good to plant his feet firmly on the ground below, as it made him less susceptible to attack.

Ransom now used his flint lighter, and it was immediately refracted by the damp stone walls that seemed to bleed in the weak illumination. Ransom moved along, and as he did so, the light moved with him. Darkness filled the spaces behind Alastair just as light filled the spaces ahead. He was painfully aware that his own features and body stood outlined by the light like a man standing before a campfire. All that lay beyond him was a potential fright, a potential attack.

However, with the stillness so complete as it felt both outside him and deep within, Alastair guessed himself alone here…alone save for the source of the blood odor. He turned a corner and filled it with his light and all at once got the full shock of what he’d so fatefully come to find.

Rats.

A horde of them.

Feeding on something dead.

The industrious little beasts having created a kind of vertical bridge of one another’s bodies so as to climb several feet up to their prize, the discarded remains of yet another child that had been carved on like a Thanksgiving turkey.

Ransom’s boot sent rats flying, and he stomped and shouted and sent the rats skittering in every direction, leaving what appeared to be a bloody ham hock dangling from an overhead pipe. Little wonder he’d seen so many river rats gnawing and clawing their way in from the other side of the building.

“Nobody here but the dead,” Ransom announced to himself just to hear the sound of his own voice, and just to break the spell of horror.

Alastair didn’t know what to do; if he left to call for help, he must leave the body to the rats again, and he was not prepared to do that. He instead took off his coat and wrapped it about the body, and working with shaking hands, he unhooked the small body from a stevedore’s tenterhook. He next wrapped his arms around what was left of the carcass. He refused to leave it alone again.

He went out through the front doors, unlatching them and kicking them open. He made his way out into the night air and for the first time since he could recall, he allowed himself a deep breath of oxygen. He made his way out toward the gaslit street, shouted down a cab. He then laid the precious cargo onto the cushion over the coachman’s protests, and climbed in. “Cook County Morgue!” he shouted to the driver. “Now.”

“With haste, yes sir!” the man replied.

“No…no rush. She’s long dead.”

“My God! It’s the work of Leather Apron, isn’t it, sir?”

“Aye…aye, it is that.”

“Then he’s still afoot, despite what the papers’ve said about it being that madwoman, Bloody Mary?”

“Afraid so.”

The driver climbed back onto his seat and Ransom rode with the body, quietly speaking to the unknown victim. “This is probably the only time you’ve ever ridden in a hansom cab, and it’s your hearse.”

Ransom banged his cane on the top of the hansom cab, shouting for the driver to stop. He alighted from the cab at a police phone booth and made a call into the regional district headquarters, pressing the key designating murder. After a brief explanation, he was assured of twenty-four police officers in uniform, a paddy wagon, and all the equipment he might need to collect evidence on the scene.

“I’m to await the wagon here,” he told the cabbie.

“But what am I to do with what’s in me cab?” asked the driver.

“Continue on to Cook County and deliver it to Dr. Christian Fenger or his stand-in.”

“Are you sure they won’t take me for the killer? I hear rumors you killed a hackman once you believed to be a killer.”

“That hackman was killed because he failed to follow orders!”

“Yes, sir…yes, indeed.”

With that the cabman and the decaying body continued on for the morgue.

Out of the silent darkness and fog, a noisy police wagon arrived at the call booth. Ransom clambered aboard with his cane. Soon after, the police had cordoned off the book warehouse, Ransom giving them jobs to do-most canvassing the wharf as Chicago awoke and workers began filtering into the area and boats and wagons and people began their duties-Chicago stretching and awakening to dawn.

Difficult as it was, after hot coffee, Ransom returned to where he’d discovered the body. He asked the uniformed men remaining to fan out and search for anything whatsoever that looked out of order or out of place. The search for clues was on as light from outside began filtering through the dingy book repository. The row upon row of books collecting dust here gave silent testimony to the popularly held belief that the Threepenny Opera, the Lyceum stage, and sports events had made the bound book dead as diversions go.

Behan and Logan showed up, getting word of the discovery, and they were followed by Philo Keane who had come to take photographs. Soon after, Chief Kohler arrived to “take charge” and to “oversee” the investigation.

“Where is the body I’m to photograph?” asked Philo.

“You’ll find her at the morgue.”

“Sent off?”

“I sent her to the morgue, yes. You can photograph her there.”

“Sure…sure, Alastair.”

“You have any idea how long ago…that is when this butchery happened, Inspector?” asked Chief Kohler.

“About the same time as you and Chapman murdered that homeless fellow along with Bloody Mary is my guess.”

“Hold your voice down!”

“My source heard her screams only last night. Sometime after that, the rats got to her, and I refused to allow them a single ’nother nibble. They’d got to the bone as it was. So I sent her off to Christian’s care.”

“So the work of Leather Apron continues,” said Thom Carmichael, standing now behind them. “I’d like to hear your take on all this, Alastair, and about the mysterious disappearance of Bloody Mary and Dot ’n’ Carry-Bosch.”

Alastair took the reporter aside. “In time, Thom…in time.”

A uniformed copper cried out from the second floor of the warehouse, “Up here! Up here!”

Everyone rushed the stairs and made their way to where the officer stood staring down at an obvious “living and sleeping area” for a number of homeless. Amid the usual debris of bedding and filth, there lay a horrid knife with a protective hilt and a curved blade like a pirate’s dagger. Scattered pieces of flesh-small but noticeable-were also found about the dirty bedding, a ratty tick mattress, bits and pieces of a destroyed teddy bear, a top, marbles, ball ’n’ jacks, a yo-yo, and a broken wooden doll, alongside scattered cigar and cigarette butts, ripped out pages of the Herald and the Tribune-stories about Leather Apron. A large part of the horrid odor proved to be filthy cans used for toilets.

“My God,” cried out Ken Behan from a dark corner, his lantern light revealing a discarded leather apron, beside a small human skull denuded of all but a few stringy swatches of flesh.

“More than one person was using this area,” said Ransom, his cane picking about the debris, “and that’s not fish pieces we’re looking at but cannibalized human flesh. This is the lair of the beast…or rather beasts.”

“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.”