Shadows in the White City (27 page)

“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.”

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!”