in all likelihood prove valueless. Still, that tedious chore of doing something useful in a scientific method with the fingers would be left to the coroner, the now famous, indefati-gable Dr. Christian Fenger.
Just after Haymarket, Chief Nathan Kohler’s intelligent predecessor had made a deal for space at Cook County Hospital for police morgue work. What Dr. Fenger got in return was an endless and steady supply of John and Jane Does—cadavers. Christian’s operating theater, where he taught surgery to a generation of doctors, never lacked for cadavers, not like the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and many other surgeries and medical schools. Before this arrangement between Cook County and the CPD, the earlier police coroner had been a former barber turned pathologist named Louie Fountenay who knew little to nothing about police science and investigation. A man without imagination as well.
“Be sure to point out the situation with the head and fingers to Doc Fenger when you accompany the body to the morgue, O’Malley.”
“Yes, of course, Inspector.” O’Malley jotted a note and mouthed, “Fingers . . . give fingers to Fenger.”
CHAPTER 5
Chicago had almost as many train terminals as police districts, but the Illinois Central Station had just opened this year as the busiest terminus for Columbian Exposition fairgoers. Designed as a through station—as many of the suburban trains used tracks that went through the terminal and on to Randolph and Lake streets—New York architect Bradford L. Gilbert patterned it on a Monet painting of the Paris train station. Opened to serve the tourist traffic to and from the great fair, Illinois Central stood a sight to behold with its towering, gangly turreted clock tower, gaudy Romanesque exterior, and its ponderous Richardsonian office wing extending outward from one side of the tower.
Spindly iron columns that appeared ready to collapse at any moment under the weight of the massive masonry supported this penitent-looking wing. The whole an ugly symbol of the city’s progress, felt awkward, a hodge-podge of random, hastily got-up gore, so far as Ransom could see.
Still, trains of every size and stripe bellowed and roared and whistled in and out, some suburban lines only slowing, going on to their next destination, while the huge engines of the Illinois Central and the Baltimore and Ohio sat at opposite ends like two bulls sizing one another up.
The interior of the building featured an enormous ellipti
38
ROBERT W. WALKER
cally vaulted waiting room straddling the tracks, and a grand staircase leading up to where Ransom stood. The marble steps opened wide, butterfly-fashion on two sides, going up to the second concourse. It was from up here one found stairs going to the top of the clock tower.
Two uniformed officers who Ransom had sent up to the clock tower and roof to investigate returned now with a brown paper bag in which they’d gathered six cigar butts, all the same brand, their bands proclaiming them Cuban Valenzas. Could the killer be so foolish? Had he staked out his victims over a period of days from the clock tower? Looking down over the panorama of the world’s fair from that vaulted position?
“None of the workmen here claim the habit or the brand, sir,” said the officer in charge of the tower hunt.
Ransom’s partner added, “A costly brand—Valenzas—not sold everywhere in the city. I smoke them myself on occasion.”
Ransom nodded, taking this all in, mentally picturing the killer dousing the young man with kerosene and lighting the corpse with his cigar. “Should I put you on my suspect list, Griff?” joked Alastair. He also made a mental note to call Stratemeyer, Chicago’s foremost fire investigator. Get him down to Fenger’s morgue to help determine the exact nature of the accelerant, and if it might’ve been touched off by a cigar. If any man could find residue of cigar in the ashes of the boy’s clothing, it was Harry Stratemeyer. Ransom had already drawn on Harry in connection with the previously torched garrote victims, and Stratemeyer assured him that neither had been torched
Ransom had taken no notice that Drimmer had stiffened, rankling at the suggestion he could be a killer.
Instead Alastair was watching the trains come and go below, like herding elephants in India, recalling his time there CITY FOR RANSOM
39
a few years ago while on holiday. Just outside the huge, marble-columned, marble-floored concourse, just outside the west and south windows, lay the infamous red-light Levee district and beyond, a slum wasteland. Closer to hand, directly below the window where he stood, Ransom studied the warm but limited glow of the gaslights that lined the little “cow paths”—so-called by students coming and going from the University of Chicago campus. The same lanes once led cattle to the slaughter at the Chicago Stock Yards—a standing joke with the students, but now rail lines hauled the cattle to slaughter, and the slaughter paths had been left for the students going to exams.
The paths also led people from the locomotive engines of the Illinois Central to the Alley L—the first elevated train line in the city. The Alley L journeyed folks on toward the South Side and the Hyde Park campus, but not without the stench of the infamous Chicago Stock Yards filling the cars.
The odor of slaughter wafted for six city blocks in every direction. On a bad day with the wind blowing in from the lake, this foul odor blanketed the entire city.
From the second-floor balustrade, Ransom looked out over the solemn main concourse where uniformed officers, with little enthusiasm and smaller hope, questioned people, asking if anyone had seen anything out of the ordinary. The sound of steam-powered trains wafting up to him, Ransom returned to stare out the window at a growing and often troubled metropolis, reflected here in the terminal district where so many different rail lines crisscrossed as to boggle the mind.
He’d been on the scene for an hour and a half now, and his bad leg and back were conspiring with stomach pains from having not eaten. Having had to deal with Tewes atop the gruesome remains had left his nerves in disarray. The sheer cowardice of the killer infuriated him, so evilly Machiavellian down to the instrument of murder: its street name the
40
ROBERT W. WALKER
His skin-crawling need for an opium hit kicking up, his maimed left leg aching, and dry heaves threatening, Ransom—perspiring heavily now—excused himself and walked away from Griff and the others. He bypassed the men’s room when he looked inside at the floor still polished in blood. Swallowing hard, he pushed through the doorway to the stairs leading to the clock tower. He wanted no one to see his fevered restlessness as the opium addiction withdrawal of mere hours now grapple-hooked his insides and crept along the epidermal layers of his skin.
Alone in the clock tower stairwell, Alastair struggled to regain control. He pulled forth a flask and emptied its contents—Bourbon whiskey—swallowing in rhinoceros fashion. Light filtered down from the top of the tower, which looked a thousand steps away. Ransom took the stairs, struggling against his own heft and body to wind his way up the spiraling steps like those in a lighthouse.
At the top, he stood and stared down from the window the killer may’ve gazed from; may even have watched his young victim’s approach from. What kind of internal slings and arrows and horrors beset the madman? How much did the killer hate God, mankind, society, people, Ransom’s city, and in the end himself—his own horrid soul? And how bloody similar were they, this phantom and Ransom’s own shadow self? The one that crawled up out of him during his most private moments?
From below, young Griffin Drimmer banged clumsily up the first few steps, his voice spiraling up to Alastair. “Rance?
You all right?”
