“fiend.” This was most unfair. A man wanted credit for his work.
He had intended never to write again. The business had become altogether too risky. Innovations were in the wind. People spoke of detecting a man’s finger marks on items he’d touched and matching them to the man himself; it was claimed no two men’s digits bore the same pattern of loops and whorls. And to think he had intentionally stamped his bloody thumb print on the postcard sent in 1888… The card must still be on file in the police office, and if he were ever apprehended, some enterprising detective might think of making a comparison.
In spite of his misgivings, he did send another message. Honor required it. In September of ’89 a woman’s torso turned up on Pinchin Street, and some fool suggested that Jack the Ripper did the deed. Of course it was not his work at all. Most likely the bitch fell prey to the criminal gangs that sought to control the prostitution trade. Determined to escape blame for such an inartistic piece of work, he scribbled a quick note in pencil on a postcard and dropped it in the nearest pillar-box, addressed to the
His last victim in London was nearly his undoing. By sheer bad luck a constable came plodding by while the blood was fresh. Then there was the business with Vole and the police, and he made his desperate flight to New York City.
He had expected never to see London again. But his prospering business enterprises had widened his circle of friends and opened up many new opportunities. It was in the pursuit of one such venture that he had made a brief return to England within the past two months.
Naturally he used his “American” name, as he thought of it. And just as naturally, he meant to combine business with pleasure. He meant to see Kitty again.
And he brought his knife.
Tracking her down was more difficult than he anticipated. She was long gone from her lodgings, and now married. But he sniffed out her hiding place, a cottage in a respectable neighborhood, with a fenced-in garden blooming with roses.
Through the decorative loopholes in the garden gate he spied on her. She wore a bonnet and a pale blue dress, and she was singing songs to a child, a girl of two or three who giggled riotously on any pretext.
None of this was what he had expected. He felt the passion die in him. She was not the girl he remembered. She meant nothing to him now, either for good or ill.
He did not enter the garden, nor did he return at night.
But before leaving for the States, he did post two quick notes. The first was addressed to Kitty's husband.
The second was posted directly to the police. Good old Abberline had retired years ago, sad to say, and Sir Charles Warren, the hapless commissioner, was long gone, but Swanson perhaps remained in the game, and a few others.
And so on in similar fashion. It was signed with a flourish:
That was three weeks ago. By now the letter would have been received and read and studied and worried over. It would have made the rounds, he thought, passing from hand to hand, circulating among all the inspectors still on the force who remembered the autumn of ’88.
Finishing his meal, Hare reclined in his chair with a glass of cognac. A guileless smile rode his lips. He believed, quite sincerely, that the police had been glad to get his note.
It was always pleasant to hear from an old friend.
Gazing out the window as the street lights winked on, he wondered how much longer he would remain in Chicago. In recent months he had felt something stir in him, a restlessness. The West called out, with its deserts and mountains and, at the end of it all, the serene Pacific. Soon, he thought, he would move on.
Though he would leave Chicago, he would not forget his debt to the city that gave him a fresh start. And Chicago had been good for him in another way. It opened his eyes to a new and better approach to his secret trade. He had Herman Mudgett to thank for that.
Mudgett, more widely known as H. H. Holmes, came to Chicago in the ’80s, procuring a chemist’s shop by the expedient method of murdering its owner. In 1892 he completed construction of the World’s Fair Hotel, a building later known as the Murder Castle. To all appearances an ordinary hostelry, it was in fact a “chamber of horrors” and a “charnel house,” as the excited press would observe. The hotel contained soundproofed rooms in which Holmes’s victims could be gassed to death, and torture racks, and greased chutes for the conveyance of bodies, and a copious cellar with furnaces and lime pits for their disposal.
The facility was open for business during the Great Exposition of ’93. Two dozen tourists, mostly females, perished in Mr. Holmes’s hotel.
Owing to plain bad luck, Holmes was arrested on other charges in ’94, while traveling on the East Coast. Investigation into his background widened the scope of his crimes. Convicted after a five-day trial in Philadelphia, he was hanged last May.
The publicity afforded Holmes rankled Hare just a bit. He was particularly vexed by the prosecutor’s long- winded closing argument, in which he dubbed Holmes “the most dangerous man in the world.” Hare resented that title. It was one he meant to reserve for himself.
Nevertheless, he was grateful to Mr. Mudgett, a.k.a. Dr. Holmes, for having stimulated a most rewarding train of thought.
It was the cellar, of course. The cellar, which Holmes had equipped with a dissecting table and surgical instruments. The bothersome human remains had been eliminated with masterful efficiency. Had Holmes left his victims on the street, the city would have been in an uproar. As it was, he operated unsuspected.
In Chicago and surrounding towns, Hare indulged his habits occasionally, though with less feverish
