City for Ransom

Feels good to say it aloud again.”

“An outstanding warrant out on you from where?” Ransom had seen scores of homeless and hobos, and most had had at least one run-in with the law.

“Boston.”

CITY FOR RANSOM

57

“So you came here to rid yourself of problems in Boston?”

“I did. You have found me out.”

“And how did you arrive here? By mule, pack train, afoot?”

“I come by the rails.”

“Indeed . . . in style.”

“A—a stowaway from the Ohio Reserve on the Baltimore and Ohio.”

“You fled Baltimore after leaving Boston then, Mr. Saville?” Ransom was careful to use his alias, and a half wink told McEachern that he’d come to the right city to start over with a new name. “The truth now I’m asking from you.” Saville-McEachern cleared his throat and scratched himself all over, clearly uncomfortable under Ransom’s and O’Malley’s combined gaze and in need of a bath. “I ahhh . . . ahhh, hell . . . I fled . . . fled Baltimore after robbing a bartender of twenty-four dollars and some change.” “There’s no work in Baltimore, I’ve heard, no more than in Chicago.”

“Then you have some idea how it is with me. No work for an honest man,” he lamented.

“So desperation creates liars and thieves of us all?”

“I was without choice.”

“You speak like an educated man beneath all that grime, sir.”

“I was schooled in Boston.” He said this as if it were a badge of honor.

“You say you’re a tanner?”

“Aye, it’s my father’s gift passed on.”

“Then it is your gift. We must help Saville here, O’Malley! Get ’im fixed up with the right people all properlike.

What do you say, O’Malley?”

“Oh indeed, Inspector Ransom.”

“So’s the man can use those hands for honest work and rob no one in my city, what? O’Malley’ll see you to a hot 58

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meal at the shelter. Get round then to see me, and I’ll introduce you to some friends who can get you solid on your feet.”

Ransom told the wagon driver, “Now Shanks, take Orion here to Cook County! Ask Dr. Fenger to set him right!”

“But, sir, Gwinn and me’re only here to transport the dead.”

“So now you do something for the living!”

Shanks began to protest. “But . . . but . . . this is an official ambulance.”

“Make it one trip, soon as I can get Purvis all put back together again and out the door.”

O’Malley’s nightstick had disappeared into its sheath.

“Doctors at County’ll patch up your hands, old-timer,”

O’Malley agreeably added. “And not to worry. Inspector Ransom’s a man of his word.”

Ransom’s mind still could not wrap around exactly how Dr. Tewes had gotten the information on the victim. He stared at the boy’s ID. Tewes had made some striking hits. It smacked of collusion. To know the name, and so close on the boy’s hometown—too odd. Just too odd. And Ransom was supposed to believe all this factual data had been somehow mysteriously “pulled” from the dead cranial matter—“raised” from the silent brain through touch? Nonsense.

Tewes had to’ve known certain facts beforehand, Ransom reasoned. Prior knowledge of the victim, just as in those bogus spiritualism tents and seances. But how? With whom had he consulted? Had he run into the killer at a local pub?

How close was he to the killer? Or had he run into the victim sometime earlier, perhaps casually.

He felt a heart flutter. Instantly interested to learn what else Cliffton carried in his wallet, Ransom searched the billfold. Nothing but stubs from the fair, an old photo, presum-ably his parents posed before an ivy-covered building, perhaps visiting the campus. It looked like the black stones of Scott Hall. No paper bills—as these the drifter had spent.

Only a cache of nickels and dimes in the zippered pouch.

CITY FOR RANSOM

59

Robbery was no more a motive here than in the previous two deaths. Cliffton had been killed out of some twisted purpose Ransom hoped to determine before the killer might strike again. But just how did Tewes figure in all this?

If the killing motive were personal, he must find answers among Cliffton’s acquaintances. The answer would lie in a handful of small details, perhaps a falling out, perhaps a lover’s quarrel, perhaps a debt, or a building jealousy or misguided revenge, but how could it be personal since the previous victims appeared, on the surface, to have had no contact with Cliffton whatsoever unless young Cliff had partaken of the services of one or both of the previous victims—one a known prostitute, the other perhaps destitute and desperate as she was with child. They were from entirely different worlds, one a Polish girl living alone, and another a seasoned prostitute known by police to ply her trade near the gambling dens of the Harrison Street Levee. Was Cliffton a lost soul who wandered Chicago’s Levee as well, addicted to gambling or whoring or something worse?

Somehow he doubted this.

The three victims must have something or someone in common. Their paths must have crossed at some juncture somewhere. In this he agreed with Tewes, who had likely picked up this tidbit of police science from having hung about enough police houses to know how detectives talk and operate. He likely also read Pinkerton accounts, Conan Doyle, and dime novels.

Certainly, many traditional investigative tools and measures did not apply here. Still, what other choice had he but to look for a tenuous pattern?

These thoughts filtered through his mind as Ransom returned to the station interior. And if no pattern existed? he silently asked himself. Then the bastard remains faceless and free to roam my city.

Three bodies . . . mutilated throats fed to a garrote, each set aflame . . . each left in high-profile areas—one, the prostitute, left on a well-worn path in Jackson Park, used by the 60

ROBERT W. WALKER

fairgoers and police patrolling the area; the Polish girl, barely twenty-three, left on the steps of the world’s fair Natural History Pavilion—her unborn child found during autopsy by Dr.

Christian Fenger. The killer may have honed his garroting skills on the other two, so that stabbing to subdue his latest victim was unnecessary—three times the charm.

From the evidence in the bathroom here, the struggle was quick and the attack overwhelming; over within seconds—certainly no more than fifteen to twenty seconds before Purvis succumbed to blood loss and a deathly euphoria.

Ransom had seen the results of the garrote from time to time—a weapon of choice by the weak and cowardly and usually those without recourse to a direct attack. A cheap weapon, cheaply made, it proved deadly in its simplicity, and frankly speaking, Alastair wondered why it was not used more often. After all, it was an easily concealed weapon, not so noisy as a derringer nor so messy as a blade. Tidy it was.

Despite the blood, little could spill onto the killer, as the victim’s own body shielded him from the pumping major artery—the one Dr. Fenger called the carotid.