CHAPTER 16
Griffin Drimmer stumbled amid still smoldering ashes of the fire that’d killed Alastair Ransom’s only dream.
Alastair had confided in a word here and there that he had found someone special, someone he’d spoken about in connection with the word
Now this.
And it was worse than first he’d heard—that Ransom’s woman had died in a terrible fire. Worse by far, as she’d been garroted—beheaded—and set aflame. He could hardly imagine Alastair’s grief and suffering. Surely the work of the fiend they’d been tracking. Had the madman turned on the hunters? And if so, how safe was Griffin’s own family?
He must think of his own loved ones now.
He made his way from the sight of Polly Pete’s severed head and the blackness of the fire-charred building and went in search of a messenger to send a hastily scratched note reading: “Pack children—go to mother’s in Portage. Stay till you hear from me!”
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ROBERT W. WALKER
Everyone in Chicago, it seemed, had come out to see the fire, a mob held back by uniformed coppers. People in mass who needn’t be here. People who could contribute nothing.
Still, the CPD and CFD had learned something since the days of Haymarket, to circulate plainclothes undercover cops and snitches in among the crowds to feel out the word on the street.
Nathan Kohler had come down to the site to oversee the investigation, barking orders for Griffin to get to the bottom of things. Philo Keane, hearing of the matter, had rushed down to gather what photos he might, not knowing of Polly’s murder by garrote and by blaze. He’d arrived just in time to get shots of the body being courageously eased down by a fireman Philo knew only as McKeon.
Despite a hangover, Philo rushed into the midst of the rubble for shot after shot, made to pause only by the surreal sights—the mirror, the bedposts and bedsprings atop the charred bar, and then he saw the head being lifted from a bag to display to Drimmer and Kohler, and Philo’s camera caught this, too.
Some of the firemen thought Philo a complete ghoul, but he knew that Alastair Ransom, had he been here and of sound mind, would be barking at him to get all these cuts.
He told himself he was doing it for Ransom, although a whispered voice from the deepest reaches of his psyche said otherwise, said he liked it, the stark beauty that fire and charred remains carried into the frame. An artistic-minded man must understand the stark painful reality inherent in the scene—like storm devastation.
“How I would’ve loved to’ve been on hand during the Great Fire . . . to’ve photographed its majesty, its finality, the uncompromising wasteland,” he said to arson investigator Stratemeyer.
“Yes . . . I suppose a fine artistic soul such as yourself, Mr. Keane, can find beauty e’en in death. But trust me, you would’ve wept to see Chicago so crippled as she was then.”
“You must have been—”
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“I was a bloody eighteen-year-old at the time. This”—he pointed to the devastation lying before them—“this is something like it only if you multiply the loss of life by hundreds and the property damage by millions.” “Still, the stark beauty of it. I’ve seen early photos, but a frame always limits the perspective of reality.”
“Not sure, sir, but would you move just to your left a foot or two, Mr. Keane?”
Philo did so, and the wall and fixture pipe that’d snatched Polly’s body while her head had fallen, now came crashing down, sending up a plume of smoke and ash to choke Philo and paint him ashen. He stepped out of the billowing cloud caused when the firemen had intentionally brought down the unsafe wall.
Small fires still flared up around Philo as he moved off.
Stratemeyer and his men stayed inside the mushroom cloud of debris, while Philo caught glimpses of these
