Shadows in the White City

CHAPTER 7

From the outside, the old stone structure called the Des Plaines Police Headquarters looked as cool and peaceful as any mausoleum, bathed as it were in a blue halo of gaslight, its yellow brick exterior reflecting back like gold. Despite the horrors of untold crimes filling the files and murder books inside, the edifice could be taken for a church if only a steeple were added, Alastair thought, pushing through the door, making his way into the mayhem. Clutter and noise hit him. Two uniforms had a wild man on the floor, attempting to cuff the rowdy drunk. The desk sergeant pleaded, at wit’s end with some woman, saying “I kin do naught-a-thing to solve yer outhouse plumbing problem, my dear lady-”

“Then what bloody good’re you coppers and the taxes I pay?”

“-and had you any sense, you’d know that no one kin turn rock to running water, so without a description down to the length of his nose, or a bloody name’n’address, would you kindly be leavin’ now?” Alastair instantly realized how much he’d missed his sour, old second home. Then he realized how little thought he’d actually given it other than the unusual weightlessness over his heart, where his badge used to be.

Other cops whisked from desk to desk, but everyone froze when Jed Logan shouted Alastair’s name over the din. A sudden silence descended over the station house as word went around that Alastair had come home. Even the complaining woman at the front desk and the man in cuffs silenced.

Sergeant of the watch came down from his high seat and around his desk, braving any blow that might come his way, and as if seeing the pope, stepped up to Ransom to shake his hand.

“What’s this?” asked Ransom. “What’re ya all gone daft?”

“Hail, the conquering hero!” Ken Behan was one of two inspectors working on the rash of killings now making headlines.

“Welcome home, Rance!” Jedidiah Logan, Behan’s partner, slapped Alastair on the back.

“What’s it all for, boys?” Ransom did a clumsy pirouette, hands extended.

“You’re a hero, Alastair.”

“For what in the name of God?”

“Indeed.”

Laughter erupted. “Does everyone in the city know?” he whispered to Behan.

“Know what? I know nothing. Logan, whataya know?”

“Nothing.”

“We’re as good as the old Know-Nothing party, aren’t we boys?” shouted Behan and a roar went up, ending in laughter and a chorus of “naught nothings.”

“See?” asked Behan amid the uproar over the mention of the anti-immigrant movement and party.

Suddenly Chief Nathan Kohler, standing on the second-floor landing, shouted over all, silencing the room with, “What goes on here?”

“Knock it off, all of you!” shouted Ransom. “Some hero. I’ve lost both my badge and my partner.” He pointed to Drimmer’s empty desk facing his own and a feeling of enormous, sick emptiness filled Alastair.

“He were a good man!” declared Sergeant Dolan, shaking his head.

“We raised more’n a pint to Griff’s memory.” Ken Behan lowered his head.

“And raised three hundred dollars for his family,” added Logan.

Alastair continued cleaning out his desk. “He was a fine assistant inspector although he had some training yet, getting himself knicked like that.”

“Remember the time we set his report on fire, Behan?” asked Jedidiah Logan.

“And that day someone stole his lunch from the icebox, and he couldn’t detect who was behind it?”

They all broke out in good-natured laughter.

The laughs ended abruptly when Chief Nathan Kohler, again shouted, “Ransom! My office, now!”

“Shitty man,” complained Logan under his breath.

“Go get ’im, Alastair,” added Behan. “Now you no longer have to eat his shit.”

“And remember,” said Sergeant Dolan, a skeletal man who stood a head taller than Ransom, “we none of us know a thing, and it’s an oath we’ve taken to your health, Inspector.”

“Ahhh…well thanks, Dolan. I didn’t know I had so many friends among ye.”

“Aye, you do now.”

Alastair imagined the story must have circulated throughout the force about his having quietly “taken out the garbage,” but he wondered with whom the leak had begun and precisely when and maybe where and perhaps who was on hand. Harry or one of his men perhaps, during a drinking bout? He pondered the notion while making the stairs taking him up to Kohler’s closed office.

He hesitated a moment at the turning of the knob, not wishing to get into turmoil with Nathan so soon back, but as he could hardly stand Kohler in the same room, he imagined there was no dodging it. He opened the door and pushed through.

Inside the semi-darkened office, he found Kohler was not alone. In one corner stood Dr. Christian Fenger, a man to whom Alastair owed deference, as Christian had saved his life now twice-once after Haymarket exploded and more recently when Gabby’s gun had exploded.

Alastair did not recognize the seated figure who appeared doubled over, so far into himself did he lean. The stranger was white haired and white bearded, a Santa Claus figure, dumpy, doughy, and looking as if he’d slept in his suit. A gold watch fob and a diamond ring marked him as a wealthy man. When he looked up to see Ransom enter, Alastair saw that it was Senator Harold J. Chapman, the grandfather of the deceased girl. Chapman looked a shadow of himself, on the verge of death’s endgame. The terrible tragedy had left him a tattered soul.

“Senator Chapman,” began Kohler, “here is our best man for such an assignment. Along with Logan and Behan-introduced to you yesterday-Inspector Ransom here will hunt down this madman who’s brought this horror on your family. I assure you that-”

“Shut up, Kohler!” ordered the old man, getting to his feet. He lifted his cane and placed it in Alastair’s face. “You find this monster, Ransom, and you turn him over to me.”

“What’s this?” Alastair asked Kohler, confused.

“Talk to me,” the senator said sternly. “Understand, this is what I want. You do this thing and the three of you, gentlemen, you will have my fortune. The paperwork is already complete at my lawyer’s, all quite in order. All you need is to bring him to me out at my farm in Evanston alive for me to flay. I’ll strip him of every inch of his bloody skin while he’s yet alive. I want to hear him beg and scream and cry the entire-”

Unfortunately and all too often, Ransom had seen this kind of unrestrained, unconditional hatred born of unmitigated hurt, pain, and a sense of entitlement to justice and order in an unjust and disordered world. For men like Chapman, it amounted to an extreme insult. A shock to the comfortable existence of an otherwise honorable soul now twisted and confused and filled with a sense of outrage that reached back to an ancestral past: the old eye-for-eye vengeance legitimized by the man’s bible. Still, Ransom felt sorry for the man’s terrifying loss; he empathized, and being in his position earlier, he, too, had resorted to the same ancient code. But something felt different here, somehow. Most men of Chapman’s stature would never know a simple truth: no execution, no amount of punishment, no amount of justice could end the pain or quail the loss of an innocent life.

“Have you agreed to this, Dr. Fenger?” asked Alastair, amazed, lifting his own cane now.

“I have.”

“How so. You, a man of high moral ethics? A surgeon?”

“I know you, of all people,” interrupted the senator, “can and will put a capper on this maniac, and so why not make a bargain of it?” asked the senator, his gold tooth and gold ring and gold watch all lighting him up like a Christmas tree.

“I see my reputation precedes me.”

“Alastair,” said Dr. Fenger, “it means a new wing at Cook County. You’ve no idea how much it’s needed.”

“And you, Chief Kohler?” asked Ransom. “The defender of law in Chicago?”

“No one need know outside this room, Alastair.”

“I see…given it much thought have you?”

“Look, man, we-you and I-civil servants…what becomes of us, Alastair?” Kohler asked. “When retirement comes round? And hell, face it, we don’t know from year to year if we even have jobs! Do you stand on principle? We are talking a fortune here.” Nathan Kohler extended Ransom’s badge to him.

But Alastair turned from Kohler to Senator Chapman. “I…I have to tell you, sir, that even without your bribe and your hatred, I would do all in my power to bring this fiend to justice.”

Chapman leapt even closer at him. “Justice? I want nothing of justice I haven’t a hand in. Do you understand?”

“That much is clear, yes.”

The old senator snatched the badge out of Kohler’s hand and pushed it on Alastair. “Get it done. See to this, Kohler, or it will be your job!” The senator pushed past Alastair and was out the door, his cane beating a sad rhythm in his wake down the stairs and out the door.

“The old man believes the rumors, Alastair.” Kohler actually grimaced.

“The rumors?”

“That you single-handedly caught and dispatched the Phantom,” added Christian Fenger, who then turned to Kohler and said, “How ’bout we have a drink, the three of us, Nathan. Snatch out that bottle you keep in your desk.”

Kohler did so, placing three small tumblers of whiskey between the others and himself. Fenger lifted and toasted, “To the end of the Phantom, and to a quick end to this new fiend making children vanish.”

Kohler lifted his glass, about to accept the toast, when both men saw that Ransom had not taken hold of his drink. “Come now, Alastair,” began Fenger. “You of all men, reservations? It wasn’t so long ago you and I were plotting violence against Dr. Tewes.”

“I’d like to sleep on it…give it some thought. A thing like this…well, it could ruin the three of us sooner than make us rich.”

Fenger gulped his whiskey and slammed the glass down. He abruptly left.

Kohler and Alastair stared across at one another. “Are you trying to figure out a way to gain this treasure that’s fallen in our laps all for yourself, Alastair?”

“Don’t be a fool, Nathan. A thing like this gets out; people talk.”

“People are already talking about you, Inspector, and some are speculating you had my blessing in murdering Waldo Denton.”

“That’s a bald-faced lie.”

“That you had my blessing or that you did it? And how else to explain his sudden disappearance?”

“I don’t know. I was in Michigan. I heard about it when I got back, like I am hearing about this mess with the grieving senator for the first time.”

“The press is calling this madman Leather Apron.”

“Why Leather Apron?”

“Who knows. Someone put forth the theory he is a knacker.”

“A horse butcher?”

“Someone says they saw a knacker fellow in a leather apron in the area right before the Chapman girl’s body was found.”

“So we are going on hearsay now?”

“The press is.”

“Is the body still at Fenger’s morgue?”

“Unrecognizable if it were not for a birthmark. Did you know that some birthmarks go all the way down to the bone? I hadn’t known that until Fenger educated me.”

“The senator had to identify his granddaughter by a birthmark?”

“A bell-shaped mark, yes. I tell you, Alastair, the body was scavenged in the manner of…well of a deer carcass hanging from a tree is how Fenger put it.”

Alastair took the drink now and downed it.

“Then you are with us?” asked Kohler, his long-time nemesis.

Alastair tried on the notion, looking at it from all angles, trying to see how Kohler could twist it to get at him. How might it backfire? In how many ways?

“I didn’t say that,” he announced.

“You drink my whiskey-a peace offering-and yet you stand against me?”

“I’ll need that drink,” he replied, “if I’m to have a look at this little girl’s butchered carcass.” Ransom left with his badge in hand as abruptly as had Fenger, hoping to catch Christian on the street, to talk privately about this matter. He wanted to know how Christian could have gotten in so deep in so short a time.

But Alastair was stopped by Logan and Behan, who had assembled all their notes and files on the case, dumping them onto his desk. “Chief’s idea,” said Logan.

Behan added, “Told us we’re taking our lead from you now, even before you arrived, Inspector Ransom.”

“Here’s a brief on the whole bloody matter.” Logan slapped a file into his hands.

“Shit, boys! This is your case, not mine.” He pushed the file back into Logan’s hands. “I’m outta here.”

Dr. Fenger moved far too fast for Alastair to catch him outside the Des Plaines house. He must see the body in the morgue anyway, so he would see Christian in private there to ferret out how he came to be in such a fix. Why did he need money? It couldn’t just be that he wanted it for the hospital.

At Cook County, he followed the usual route into the bowels of this place where the morgue had been relegated, and as always the stench of death and chemicals proved only the first obstacle here in the basement facilities.

“They should tear down this place and start over,” he muttered to himself. “Now that would require quite the sum.”

The lift door opened on a long corridor that took Alastair to its terminus, Dr. Fenger’s second domain here. There were several reasons they placed morgues below ground. The ease of transportation to and from the hospital, the general public’s sensibilities, yes, even the coolness, although with crude ice box refrigeration units now in use, the primary concern remained odors. Although it must be fifty degrees down here, the odors cut into the nostrils and brain sharper than Fenger’s scalpel.

Prevailing overall, the odor of decay. Hard to maintain any sort of religious fervency here as all seemed lost in this undeniable odor of putrefaction. Cook County Morgue was the largest in all the Midwest. Its shelves and cold unit were filled with the indigent and unclaimed John and Jane Does, suicides, homicides, twisted corpses of those who died freak deaths. He half expected to see the bloated, water-logged corpse of one Waldo Denton here someday, washed ashore. But for now the odor was the predominant matter. No amount of cleansing fluids or fans could overpower this stench.

Ransom moved onward toward the source.

Aboveground and in his operating theater, Dr. Christian Fenger reigned as the surgeon of the century, well regarded and respected, even canonized by everyone in the hospital-a hero in his own “home.” But not belowground in his morgue. Here there was no heroic life-saving measures; here there was no life to save, and his surgical skills did not repair so much as they deconstructed the “patient” if he could be called a patient; certainly he was “patient” to a fault, the corpse.

Down in the depths of the morgue, then, Christian put on another hat, and he performed something closer to the butcher, meatball surgery it was called in some circles-the work of the pathologist who spent all his time “reading” the corpse of anyone who may have met with foul play, committed suicide, or was victim of a freak accident. Here Christian determined cause of death, an act at opposite poles from being the savior upstairs.

Acting as city coroner had to take its toll on a man, reasoned Alastair as he pushed through the double doors, his cane against the stone floor along the corridor having announced him before his barging in. Ransom was so often in and out of here that few paid any special attention to him. He’d come on the occasion of every victim of the Phantom. Dr. Fenger’s medical assistants paid him no heed now, save a nod before going back to their various tasks.

“I thought I’d find Dr. Fenger here,” he said to the room.

“He’s had to see to Dr. Tewes,” replied one of the men, his once white apron a rainbow of florid and dull colors.

“Tewes? Tewes was here?”

“They carried him out on a gurney,” explained the man.

“Fell out like a girl when he looked at the Chapman child’s corpse; the mutilation was that horrid.”

“The child…her body.”

“Have you come for a look yourself?” came the obvious question.

“I have, but what bloody business has Tewes in all this? Damn him!”

“I suspect he’s just out to make a name for himself,” came the reply as the attendant wheeled a death gurney before Alastair.

“Oh, he’ll be talked about in the pubs tonight, he will,” chimed in the other man from behind his mask. “How he fell out.”

“Morgan, it’s a normal reaction for most people!” shouted the first attendant. “Not everyone’s got the constitution of a knacker.” He then casually pulled away the sheet that had covered a misshapen lump of flesh beneath.

Alastair audibly gasped. Only the long flowing curling red tresses of her hair looked human. He had now laid eyes on every conceivable horror done a human being. Beheadings of the Phantom did not compare; fire victims did not compare. Nothing in all his career had prepared him for this. “It’s…are you sure it’s human?” he asked.

“Dr. Fenger and a team of us have determined not only is it human but that it is Senator Chapman’s missing grandchild.”

“There’s no face left. No nose…ears…not even eyes.”

“Nor cheek, nor forehead.”

The birthmark alone they had said in Kohler’s office. Ransom saw that whole chunks of flesh had been carved away. It brought to mind an evening at Berghoff’s where the chef stood behind his roast or ham and carved off slices for your plate.

“Cover it…cover it now!” Alastair raced from the room.

Behind him, he heard the man called Morgan snicker and say, “And him the man of the hour.”

“Shut up, Morgan,” said the other.

Alastair went searching the building for Fenger and Jane Francis, who had said she would end Dr. Tewes’s career in Chicago, and now this. She had come as Tewes to view the remains of the Chapman girl. Whatever possessed her to do so?

He went for Christian’s surgery. From there he went to the surgeon’s office, and here he cornered him. “I understand you allowed Jane in to see that awful mess your men are trying to put back together again.”

The senator’s already held a wake without a body; they-he-wants the funeral to come off tonight and the coffin into hallowed ground at the family’s church tomorrow.”

“Look, it’s awful, the whole thing, but Christian, how did you get sucked into this business of accepting money from Chapman for your services? Think what might happen if it got out?”

“I have gambling debts about to eat me alive, Alastair, and…besides, we need a lot of things here at the hospital, and he mentioned a wing in her name.”

“The Anne Chapman wing, heh?”

“Why not?”

“And a trust or a charitable fund set up?”

“Precisely.”

“One that you alone will control?”

“Someone must administer the-” he paused, seeing Ransom’s smirk. “Look, here! Someone’s going to do it, so why shouldn’t those funds come to Rush Medical and Cook County?”

“Ahhh…it comes down to your age-old rivalry with Northwestern, does it?”

“Regardless, Rance, why shouldn’t something good come of this horror? Why shouldn’t decent people benefit in some manner if we do our jobs right?”

“You have no qualms about it in the least?”

“None! Did you see that child’s body?” Christian’s eyes and jaw were firmly set. “What I’d give for a retirement home and a volume of Kipling right now.”

“Christian, when it comes time for us to deliver up this obvious lunatic to Senator Chapman, are you sure you’ll have the stomach for it?”

“I’ll happily light the fire that’ll boil him alive, yes.”

“And Jane-acting as Tewes again? Was that her idea or yours, coming down here to see this atrocity? Have you cut her in on the deal?”

“She has street contacts I don’t have, contacts you should be cultivating right now instead of harassing me.”

“Damn…then you did call her here.”

“I told her the circumstances of the case, and I am asking her to do a…a psychological mock-up of what kind of mind could concoct such a fate for a child. Don’t for a moment think this is the last of the Vanishings.”

“I see…so you are just playing ‘Catcher in the Rye’ to save the future children from harm’s way.”

“Don’t try to get all moral with me, Alastair. Not you!”

“Next you’ll be marching out the bagpipes and singing verses from Robbie Burns, heh?”

“Bull! I know you too well for this, Rance.”

“Or perhaps Kipling. Do a bit of flag-waving, trumpets, drums, all that?”

“You forget, I did the autopsy on what was left of Anne Chapman.”

This stopped Ransom’s joking, and he nodded to his old friend. “I know that must’ve been…must’ve been hell.” Then he repeated, “I saw her remains just now.”

“Butcher is too kind a word for this madman, but, Alastair, there is something else…something I have to share with you.”

“What is it?”

“At the nape of the neck, right here,” he indicated on himself, his hand going to the base of his neck at the back. “Where the vertebra meet the skull.”

“Spit it out, man.”

“She was kept for some time on a hook, dangling like…like a carcass, and there is some justification in believing…God…hard to even voice it.”

“Say it, Doctor.”

“The missing portions of her-cheeks, torso, appendages.”

“Yes, yes?”

“They were taken from her over time.”

“Over time?”

“This was not a single sit down.”

“Whataya saying that-”

“Not a single one-time carving.”

“Jesus-”

“Mary-”

“-and Joseph. These victims were carved on multiple times at different sittings?”

“Proven by each wound carefully examined. Each carving displays a different time frame.”

“My God. You’re saying she was spiked on a nail or a hook in some godforsaken place and carved on like a leg of lamb.”

“Multiple blades used on her as well. Some well after death set in, obviously. Merciful shock will have killed her before the fiend or fiends could make that many stabs and slashes.”

“Does Kohler know all this?”

“He does.”

“And he informed Chapman of this?”

“He did, against my better judgment. I had to tell someone, and you weren’t here. I could not keep absolutely silent on the matter.”

“So you share with Kohler? And then Kohler rushes off to inform Chapman of these awful details better kept in-house to begin with? That’s not standard procedure, Christian, and you know it.”

“I agree but there’s no fetching it back now.”

Alastair shook his head in disdain. “This is what sent the senator over the edge, correct?”

“Afraid so.”

“And now we’re having to deal with-or deal in-an insane wealthy senator…and there’s a fortune to be had. We could likely name our price, heh?”

“Alastair, will you please stop preaching to me? Christ!”

“I tell you, Christian, the whole thing smacks of evil wrapped in evil.”

“I did not for a moment suspect Nathan Kohler would impart the details to Senator Chapman.”

“But he did, and now we have this situation on our hands.”

“And what can we do but make the best of a bad bargain, Alastair. That is all I am hoping for now.”

“It’s a bargain that will haunt you to your grave.”

“Come now! What are we proposing? To see this bastard who did this desecration of a child get precisely what he gave out? At one time that was called justice.”

“Rationalizing it does not change what it is, Christian, and if it got out, you can kiss your career and connection with Cook County and Rush Medical College good-bye.”

“Northwestern could send us all packing, given their growth. Rush needs a major influx of funds.”

“Get off it, man. I believe Christian Fenger needs funds far more than does Cook County or Rush.”

He dropped his gaze. “All right, I need the money as well. Hell, Alastair, you need the money more than any of us.”

“How much of it have you confided to Jane?”

“Not much…the sketchy details.”

“Tell me she knows nothing of this devil’s bargain you’ve struck with Nathan Kohler and Chapman.”

“Nothing.”

“Keep it that way if you wish to keep her respect. Where is she, by the way?”

“She’s two doors down, resting…lying down. Look, Alastair-”

But he was gone, banging down the hallway with his cane, going in search of Jane, his anger at boiling point.

Alastair found Dr. Tewes-Jane incognito-in the room down the hall, recovering from a bruise to the head from when she’d fainted in the morgue. Given the circumstances, the usual odors of that place conspiring with the brutality done to young Anne Chapman, he little wondered that even a surgeon such as Jane could fall faint.

“Are you all right?” was his first question. She was sitting on the edge of the bed they’d placed Tewes in to regain himself. Jane looked out through those unmistakable eyes and from behind her mustache and makeup at Alastair.

“It’s horrible what he did to her.”

“And somehow Fenger thinks you should be involved in all this? Jane, I forbid it.”

“What?”

“You are not to get involved. Not one whit.”

“Hold on. Who do you think you’re addressing?”

“I know who I am addressing.”

“Apparently, you do not.”

“Whatever he’s paying you to do this psychology on this madman, Jane, I will double it if you drop it now.”

“Look here, Alastair. We do not have the sort of relationship in which you order me around.”

“I’m asking you, then.”

“It’s already too late. I’ve made promises to Christian, promises I intend to keep.”

“Damn you for a stubborn woman!”

A nurse entered asking Dr. Tewes if he were feeling better. Jane replied in male voice, “I am fit. Shouldn’t’ve accompanied Dr. Fenger into his morgue on a full stomach.”

The nurse had Tewes sign a release form, and with this formality complete and the nurse gone, Jane got to her feet, readying to leave.

“Wait…you do not know the whole picture here, Jane. You must trust me.”

“I see a man trying to protect me from unsavory business. It’s the same sort of attitude that kept me out of medical school here…sent me overseas to finish my training.” She was at the door now. “And frankly, Alastair, I had come to expect more from you.”

“More what from me?”

“More…just that I expected better coming from you.”

“But I tell you-”

“No more. You’ve disappointed me enough for one day.”

She left him standing alone in the empty room.

Every time he got into a covered carriage now to get around Chicago, Alastair was reminded of how Waldo Denton had been in every frame of his existence during the entire hunt for the Phantom of the Fair-ever present yet invisible at once. How effective a tool it was to be cloaked in such mundane existence as to go about invisible even while in plain sight. Alastair vowed never to let this kind of blindness stand in his way again, and he began to ponder the invisibility of the so-called horse butcher in leather apron who might have abducted a number of young people from the fitful streets of Ransom’s city, to jam them onto meat hooks, and to begin a steady filleting of their features and work over them until the entrails were gone. The papers had hinted at missing intestines, but according to the autopsy report that Alastair had perused as he stood over the latest victim’s remains, all major organs had gone missing.

“Where’re the parts…the evidence of his crimes? Where does he hide them if not in a refrigeration unit of some sort?”

Alastair heard the cry of a newsboy on the street, waving the latest Tribune and shouting, “The Vanishings! Read all about it! No arrest made!”

Alastair banged with his cane for the cabbie to stop and fetch a paper. The paper was deposited through the window and Alastair scanned it for the reasons he always scanned news accounts: to take the pulse of the people, to gauge the mood. He did not expect to find any evidence floating about the story. Nor did the Tribune disappoint him in this any more than the Herald had.

Rumors mostly. Eyewitness accounts to nothing. A source quoted as saying, “I saw ol’ Leather Apron nab the lil’ nicker, but I could see no face on the man.”

Another “eyewitness” added, “It was pitch that night, but I heard a noise as I come out of O’Dhule’s and of a sudden, I heard a scream like a little kid, but it was silenced soon as it sounded. I followed a shadow into the alleyway there, but he disappeared like smoke. Some others, a little family of homeless, stood there staring at me and swore they saw no one come that way.”

Alastair cast the paper aside, its pages covering the floor-board. “Another invisible killer who turns into the very darkness surrounding him.”

He wondered if in the future, if in the twentieth century, if there’d ever come a time when men like him would be an anachronism, a thing of the past, unnecessary, as science will have found a way to end the lives of men born into evil, born with the mark of Caine permanently on their foreheads.

For now, he wanted to go home. In the cab that he’d ordered to wait for him, his bag brought back from Mackinac remained. He wanted a shower, a shave, a moment’s respite, and some time alone to sort things.

“As to the victim, a well-known, proper lady is her mother,” Jed Logan had said back at the station.

“Lives at the Chapman family home, north shore, with her husband, a banker.”

“How did they lose sight of the little girl?”

“Fourteen-year-old. You ever try keeping up with a kid that age, Ransom?” asked Behan. “I didn’t think so.”

“The mother and Anne were out for a day in the park when Anne went missing,” added Logan, who took a moment to burp out a gas bubble. “Hell man, read the report.”

Alastair did not know the details of how the girl had gone missing that day. It had gone to Logan and Behan as a missing-persons case for a week and a half before Dr. Fenger was called to the river at Wabash to identify remains there. Called to the scene by Logan and Behan, who’d been notified by uniformed police, who’d been aware that the detectives had been chasing down the missing grandchild of an important man.

How the first police on scene discerned that what they had was human at all, Alastair could not say. The mutilated body had been in the water for days, ropes clinging to the small bloated package of flesh. The ropes and its discovery clearly indicated that Anne’s remains had been poorly weighted down.

“Whoever did it, dropped her into the river, we are guessing around the Michigan Avenue Bridge, given the current,” Logan had added.

“We think likely in a weed patch just west of the bridge,” Behan had said.

“Even so, we could not identify her as Anne. The mother refused to believe it and could not be made to really look at the remains.”

“So the senator showed up to do the job,” Alastair had said.

“Dr. Fenger was preparing to have the body buried in the Potter’s Field as a little Jane Doe, as there was nothing identifying her, until he asked Chapman about the mark he’d found on the buttocks-which had also been carved into.”

“The birthmark, I see.”

“That and her lovely red curls.”

Yes…red curls, he said to himself here in the back of the cab, curls which curiously enough, appeared the only feature on her body that did not meet the knife.

“You can’t eat hair,” Behan had commented.

“If you’re hungry enough, you’ll eat anything,” countered Logan.

Ransom had replied, “But when you have flesh, why eat hair?”