Ransom instead led them to the rear of the courthouse instead. “You know the streets well,” said Declan.
“I make it my business to know the lay of the land.”
They quickly closed in on the impressive red-brick hospital which had the aspect of a cathedral among the densely packed, terraced residential houses surrounding the medical facility.
Once again the young interns had walked ahead of Ransom to guide him to the separate facilities turned over to the university for dissection and surgery, this separate morgue for university use only. Ransom strained to hear what the boys were whispering about.
“He’s going to make a wonderful witness, Declan—a wanted man, Declan. Are you listening to me, Declan?” complained Thomas in his friend’s ear. The boys walked quickly now, slowing occasionally to look back over their shoulders to check on Alastair’s progress.
Ransom habitually looked over his shoulder as well but he did so for possible attacks on him. An old habit cultivated as a cop in Chicago, a habit that he’d thought himself ready to give up, but apparently not. He’d been fooling himself to think he had finally run far enough. Now all he could think of was hanging for a crime he hadn’t committed, and how much that would please all his enemies in Chicago—like his boss at the time, Kohler, the Chief of Police—and the man who’d set him up for a hanging.
As they found the hospital grounds, the street lamps became fewer and farther between, and soon they were approaching the darkened, locked up basement that the boys pointed to, guiding Ransom to the lock. “How will you get us in?” asked Declan.
“Watch me.”
Ransom worked a sliver of metal he always kept on him into the lock, and in an instant, he had the lock turning but the door would not budge. He fumbled about, a blush of embarrassment coloring his jowls and making him thankful for the deep shadow here so the boys could not see his shame as he knew he didn’t have the necessary torsion wrench to get past this door. “There’s good security here, boys. No way I can get through this door. Sorry. Best we all go home.”
“But there must be a way in.” Declan held up one of Ransom’s picks.
“There’s no way to work this lock with the tools I have, son. Sorry.”
“Surely you have other means of breaking and entering—a man of experience?”
“All right and yes, Declan, I do have other means.”
“Then what’re we waiting for?” asked Thomas. “Someone’s going to spot us here.”
Ransom stared momentarily at Thomas. “Come along. Follow me closely, fellas.”
The interns shadowed the detective to the grassy area beside the door and stone steps leading to this back entryway. “What’re you doing?” asked Thomas at the same time that Ransom, using an elbow with his coat wrapped about it, suddenly broke a window, making the boys leap.
“You’ve broken the window,” said Declan.
Ransom snorted and said, “You are a bright one. All right, one of you climb through and open the door.”
“That’s it? This is your clever way to get us inside?”
“Declan is elected,” said Thomas.
“Me? Why me?”
“You’re smaller, more compact. Careful climbing over those test tubes, by the way. Try not to break anything.”
Ransom looked at Declan, the boy’s face having dropped. “You do want to learn what the victims can tell us, right?”
“Thomas encouraged his friend. “If we don’t go in and have a hard look, Declan, we are merely flailing around in the dark.”
Ransom added, “May’s well be back inside that detestable mine shaft without a lantern—and Thomas, I wish to apologize to you, young man.”
“For what?”
“Well… what with so much going on, I’ve been remiss in failing to offer my condolences on the loss of your uncle.”
Thomas stood stunned for a moment, unsure how to respond. “Thank you, Mr. Wyland, but at the moment, I just want to know precisely what killed him. I want to know what to tell my aunt.”
“Understood.” Ransom and Thomas watched Declan climb though the window and into the darkness where the three bodies lay in waiting.
“No sign of the missing Pinkerton man, Tuttle eh, Thomas?”
“None whatsoever, but it’s a big ship.”
“And it leaves for sea trials tomorrow, and following that, it’s off to Southampton, and from there to America.” They had walked back to the door, and it swung open under Declan’s power. He held up a lit oil lamp and waved them inside.
They rushed in and closed the door behind themselves. Declan led Ransom and Thomas through this closet- sized back anteroom and into an interior where they felt safe to turn on the electric lights, filling the room with brightness. In fact, the electricity lit up a huge operating theater. Along a large back wall refrigerator units stared back at them.
“I’ll never get over electric light, fellows,” Ransom said as he gazed about the well-lit room.
“Bodies are in there,” said Declan, pointing at the wall of doors.
Ransom covered his nose with a handkerchief. “From the smell of things here, I’d say your coolers need a good repairman.”
“The refrigerator units are fine; it’s these particular bodies, Mr. Wyland. They smell of sulfur if you ask me.”
Each of the unusual bodies discovered tonight was pulled from its unit, and using leather gloves going up to their elbows, the boys placed each of the oddly light bodies onto a steel slab designed specifically for dissection. Directly over the table hung lights on swivel arms, magnifying glasses on another swivel arm, a hose to keep a constant flow of water to run off excess fluids and blood to a drainage pipe that took such unwanted matter to the floor and the sewer pipe at their feet. Meanwhile, Thomas switched on a huge machine in one corner of the room, and a lulling whoosh answered—air conditioning. Belfast’ Sirocco Works factory had pioneered air-conditioning for hospitals and such rooms as this to create Plenum ventilation, which nowadays was being applied to all such interiors dealing with medicine. Nearby Victoria Hospital had been the first building of such size to enjoy air- conditioning some six years before. Humdity control and choice of temperature. How wonderful, Ransom thought, trying to imagine a time when any hotel or home might enjoy this advanced industrial technology.
The night’s work stared at the excited young interns, who seemed—as Ransom took in their long, doubtful gaze into one another’s eyes—to be thinking of their efforts as having the potential of becoming a monumental and complicated failure. At the very least, the secretive night work would surely prove difficult and time consuming. Ransom had certainly thought so as Thomas pulled open the cold storage unit where his uncle’s body lay in repose. Both Declan and Ransom held back, allowing Thomas a moment alone with his Uncle Anton’s corpse.
The light illuminated three bodies now lying beneath sheets on three slabs in the wide open space of the operating theater. Looking around and up, Ransom studied the impressive operating theater and the large gallery where students like Thomas and Declan would be perched on a normal day to observe an autopsy conducted by Bellingham or another faculty member. He could just imagine the boys intent on watching every cut, every organ lifted during an autopsy from on high, safely behind the glass, but here they were on the front lines, dealing with God knows what, putting fear aside to determine cause of death, while disappointed in Bellingham for not guiding them this night.
The room brought back bad memories for Ransom. Being a police detective in Chicago with his reputation, he’d on more than one occasion gone under the knife, his life saved twice by the famous Dr. Christian Fenger during emergency surgery. The same doctor who failed to save that contemptible priest, Father Franklin Jurgen.
Ransom cautiously went to each body in turn and slipped the sheet from each distorted face. McAffey, looking like the dead beast from the mine with his horrid grimace and barred teeth. O’Toole, looking nearly the same, and Fiore, who had somehow retained the look of a pleasant little fellow despite the rigid grimace distorting his features. Ransom recognized the grimace as a natural phenomena of traumatic death.
“That’s Uncle Anton,” said Thomas who’d remained rigidly frozen in place at Ransom’s side. “What’s left of him. I could tell you so many wonderful stories about my uncle.”
