frightened or beaten into complying with having his measurements taken.
But he’d also performed it on a few with whom he’d struggled and knocked senseless, and he found measuring the unconscious a great deal faster and easier. Thirty seconds alone with Tewes now was all he required.
“Get him some water, and I’ll get him into bed,” Ransom now barked orders at Gabby.
“I won’t leave you alone with him under any circumstances.”
“I mean your father no harm, child! Now go! Get water or better yet, black coffee!”
Gabrielle waved the gun before his eyes. “All right, but you just lay him out on the bed, and don’t touch him in any other way!”
“I’ve no desire to touch him in any way, child. Now, please as I say!”
She acquiesced, backing out the door, gun weighing down her hand like a pipe.
As soon as she disappeared, Ransom whipped out his measuring tape and gave Tewes the Bertillon once over, memorizing each figure in his head as he measured forehead, distance between eyes, nose to chin, eyes to chin. Cir-cumference of neck; shoulder to shoulder. Chest. Again the sponginess of Tewes’s body struck him. He then measured the waistline. The man had none! He noticed how the man’s belt looped one and a half times around the waist. He hadn’t time to contemplate this more, as he now measured length of leg from crotch to knee, then knee to ankle, finally tearing off his shoes to measuring foot size.
But he failed to finish as Gabrielle was returning; he pock
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eted the unraveled tailor’s tape. What’d alerted him to her quick return, he realized only when seeing her enter, was her gun clinking against the glass on the crowded tray she carried. She had a pot of coffee on the tray alongside the water.
“I’d made coffee earlier,” she explained. “Father never stays out so late, ever.”
“And you were worried.”
“And rightly so, it appears.”
“He tells me that you knew the victim at the train station.”
Fenger had told him this.
“I had only known him for a few days at Northwestern when we met quite by accident at the fair, you see. I was playing hooky from my studies. Gabby’s eyes had filled with tears. “We were to meet at the fair again next eve . . .” “He was quite taken with you, then?”
“He was sweet . . . smitten, I’m afraid.” She teared up and he offered her a handkerchief that she accepted.
“I had no idea your father couldn’t, you know, hold his liquor. I do apologize.”
“I’ve never seen him this way, ever.”
“You take good care of your father. Admirable.”
“I do my best.”
“He is not always making wise decisions, I would hazard a guess.”
“Certainly not tonight! Going off with you! No . . . I mean, yes. He is not always showing the best judgment, but he is my father, and I . . . I love him dearly.”
“That much is obvious.” Ransom poured himself a cup of coffee and sipped at it before asking, “What about your aunt, his sister?”
“His sister?”
“Your aunt . . . who I met earlier?”
“Ahhh . . . Mrs. Ayers . . . Jane Francis.”
“You do not call her Auntie?”
“I’ve not known her long.”
“Ahhh . . . I see.”
“She’s only recently joined us.”
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“From France?”
“Ahhh . . . I believe by way of New York.”
All facts he could check later, he told himself. The young one seemed absolutely befuddled. She’d not gone near the gun in all this time. Perhaps she was getting used to Alastair.
He could only hope. “It’s a fine gun you carry about.”
“It is mother’s,” she blurted out. “I mean . . . was my mother’s. The . . . the only thing she bequeathed me.”
“Interesting heirloom then. But I was given to understand she died in labor, giving birth to you, so how was it she bequeathed you a gun? Or is that mere street talk, rumor I’m repeating?”
“She set it out in a letter in the event anything should happen to her during her pregnancy.”
“Ahhh . . . foresight she had, perhaps a premonition?”
“I am told she was sickly . . . always.”
“Difficult pregnancy?”
“Hard labor came as no surprise.”
“I see. Your father here, being a doctor . . . he must’ve known the risks . . .”
“Aye . . . I mean, I should think so, as he’s a medical man.”
“But they had not consummated their wedding? He then had to legally adopt you, his own child is how I heard it.”
“No . . . common street talk is that, sir!”
Was Gabby embarrassed by this? Her clenched hands spoke of discomfort, perhaps a lie. He lifted the gun, and her allowing this felt like a new, fresh start between them. They smiled across at one another, the gun held up between them while Tewes mildly snored.
Ransom examined the gun for the missing cap that Tewes had mentioned. The firing pin was in place, and the cap in the caplock. Either Tewes failed to tell the truth about the gun, in an attempt to ease Ransom’s fears at having it pointed at the back of his head, or Gabby knew as much about guns as her father’d intimated. Likely the latter.
“Whataya think of my gun?”
“It belongs in a museum.”
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She looked indignant. “That gun is in fine working order.
I keep it clean.”
“It’s a cannon, not a gun. Blow a hole the size of a medicine ball in a man.”
She threw her hands up to cover her laughter. “Now you exaggerate.”
“Not by much.”
“My . . . my family wants me to pursue a medical degree, but I’m so fascinated with what men like you do, Inspector Ransom.”
“Really?”
“I’ve read Alan Pinkerton’s accounts of heroic deeds during the late war, about his army of spies—
“Oh, but it is . . . what you and other Chicago detectives must see daily! I bet no two of your days are alike! Can I tell you that medical school is a bore down to my . . . well, to my core!”
“But isn’t medicine in your makeup?”
“I hate it. Hate that it’s in my blood, too!”
“It should come easily to you, following in your father’s—”
