City for Ransom

This kind of thing, four deaths now on fairgrounds, two similar deaths within a cab’s ride! It has to stop and stop immediately.”

CITY FOR RANSOM

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“Not to be contrary,” began Ransom, “but it’s seven deaths all toll, sir, and I’ve seen no evidence these killings’ve made any dent in the number of hotdogs, ham-burgers, or trinkets sold, or a decrease in fair attendance.” “In fact, the numbers have increased!” added Fenger.

“Where the deuce’re your Resurrection Men, Fenger?”

Kohler barked. “Get these unseemly bodies and heads out of here now, now!”

Fenger took great exception to Shanks and Gwinn being called his Resurrection Men, and he stood face-to- face with Kohler on the issue. “Look here, we do not rob cadavers from their sanctified graves!” “You chest cutters’re never satisfied.”

“Whatever you’re talking about—”

“Potter’s Field! A recent disturbance,” countered Kohler.

“I was sent to investigate,” Griff added. “A woman’s body . . . taken without a trace.”

“How sick is that?” asked Kohler.

“I recall the incident,” said Ransom.

“Who was she, and what end came of it?” Fenger asked.

“No end, open case still, Drimmer!” complained Nathan.

“Remains a mystery, even her identity,” said Griff. “She was a numbered grave—an elderly Jane Doe.”

“And the body in question never turned up?”

“Afraid not.”

“Someone likely made a stew of her,” suggested Ransom.

Fenger nodded. “Not farfetched, given how swollen our streets are with the homeless, and the city doing nothing to relieve the problem.”

“Now they’re calling him the Phantom of the Fair over at the Tribune, ” said Kohler in disgust. “Flood gates’ve opened! Imagine all the ink devoted to this deviant! From what Christian tells me, he doesn’t rape his victims—alive or dead! How deviant is that?” “My God, Nathan, do you think raping his victims might make him a better chap?” asked Fenger. “Somehow more like us and less a monster, somehow less sadistic?”

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ROBERT W. WALKER

“Somehow, yes, in my mind.”

“Somehow? In your mind.” Ransom, his cane beating the pavement here, controlled the urge to reach out and strangle Kohler. Throw in rape with your murderous act and it somehow made murder more palatable? Normal? Ransom had to walk off in a circle to not explode.

“At least if he raped them first, we might understand his motive is my point. It’d point to a clear purpose in these senseless attacks.” Nathan straightened and stood taller. “At the moment, what possible motive have we for his bloodletting?” “He likes blood . . . likes the smell of it, the consistency of it, likes to wash his hands in it,” suggested Fenger.

“Likes the garrote,” added Griff, “likes the heft of it, the cunning of it, the handiness of it, the genius behind it.

Maybe the history of it.”

Ransom shouted, “Come on, he likes the feel of the kill, same as you and I when we hunt deer with a Winchester. He likes the process of the hunt itself . . . the hooking of the bait, the lure, all of it.” “To gain the moment in which his prey is under absolute control,” added Fenger.

“Yes, you would understand him, wouldn’t you,” Kohler coldly replied to Alastair’s summing up. “Takes a killer to catch one, or at least to know how one will behave.”

“Prove me a murderer, Nathan, and I’ll willingly sit for shackles. Until such time, I’d appreciate your not characterizing me as this evil bastard’s counterpart.”

“But you just did so yourself!”

“Aye . . . I did, but I’ve not given you carte blanche to do so.” Ransom knew Kohler guilty of at least as much evil as himself, but in a time of war, men did evil for a greater good, or at least what they perceive a greater good. During the “war” with labor, Alastair had interrogated an arsonist and anarchist, a known killer of men who set bombs off to make a political point, a refugee of such activities in France. He’d transplanted to America and had drifted to Chicago when news got out about the labor dissidents at Pullman. All this, CITY FOR RANSOM

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days before Haymarket and the riot and the bomb that exploded in the square, killing Ransom’s fellow officers and doing its best to kill him.

Ransom meant to get information out of the man, and in a warehouse owned by a friend of the police, he’d sweated and beaten the fellow for information. Rumor abounded of a bomb having been planted somewhere in the city. He’d taken extreme measures to get the information he wanted out of Oleander, the man’s code name, and the only name he’d disclosed until he screamed his real name from within the flames.

The matchstick slowly burned toward Ransom’s fingers as he’d held it to the man’s half-opened eyes, blood in his pupils making focusing impossible. No doubt, from the blows to the head. Alastair and the other cops present had pummeled the man’s cranium. His bloodied features might’ve told Ransom that Oleander was, by this time, unable to formulate words much less inform on his comrades.

Then Kohler tossed his lit cigar into the fumes rising off the man. While Alastair’s eyebrows and the hair on his hands curled and blackened, Oleander went up like a rag doll tossed into the hearth. As much as Alastair attempted to kill the flames and stop the death, the flames fought harder than he, claiming what was theirs.

Irony of it, he and not Kohler had earned a reputation that night. No one had seen Kohler’s action. Ransom’s reputation had remained intact since then, and word on the street, spread by the grapevine of lowlifes, toughs, snitches like his own Dot’n’Carry, all had him down as a cold-blooded bastard who’d do anything— anything—to gain what he wanted. As Dot’n’Carry put it: “If a man finds himself in custody of Alastair, then the only ransom worth talking about was payment in full.” Interrogation meant beatings as a matter of course, routine, expected by those arrested. Certain indigents in particular, when taken into custody and not questioned on the latest atrocities in the city, demanded it of their jailers. They demanded a beating regardless, as a beating behind jail walls 236

ROBERT W. WALKER

proved a badge of honor. Further, to leave a Chicago jail without a beating marked a man as a snitch. But in the case of one Inspector Alastair Ransom, the word beating had taken on new meaning in a mix of myth and legend.

“Alastair . . . I think you’re so right about this,” said Dr.

Fenger, bringing him out of his reverie. “The kill . . . the kill being anticlimactic, our boy sets them ablaze for one final rush of excitement. Theoretically, the kill’s not enough.” Kohler loudly pandered to the press. “So, Inspector, you have no clue as to why a man would set a dead body aflame?”

The pointedness of aflame used by the chief made everyone within hearing squirm. It addressed the rumors about Ransom as much as the killer. Alastair’s fists clenched, and he took a threatening step toward Kohler.

Griffin, hand raised, stepped between the two larger men, while hazarding a reply, “Fire has always held significance to people . . .”

Fenger agreed as if on cue, “Full of symbolism and mysticism.”

“Hmmm . . . Tewes said something similar in his report,”

began Kohler. “That fire is or may have some weighty import in his head, in a symbolic sense, say of victory or some such . . .” Nathan stepped back from the threat in Ransom’s eyes.

“More likely he holds us all in contempt,” weighed in Dr. Fenger. “It is the act of a contemptuous man, an angry man. I believe Tewes said it best in a brief discussion I had with him.” “Go on,” said