Shadows in the White City (10 page)

Ransom moved onward toward the source.

Aboveground and in his operating theater, Dr. Christian Fenger reigned as the surgeon of the century, well regarded and respected, even canonized by everyone in the hospital—a hero in his own “home.” But not belowground in his morgue. Here there was no heroic life-saving measures; here there was no life to save, and his surgical skills did not repair so much as they deconstructed the “patient” if he could be called a patient; certainly he was “patient” to a fault, the corpse.

Down in the depths of the morgue, then, Christian put on another hat, and he performed something closer to the butcher, meatball surgery it was called in some circles—the work of the pathologist who spent all his time “reading” the corpse of anyone who may have met with foul play, committed suicide, or was victim of a freak accident. Here Christian determined cause of death, an act at opposite poles from being the savior upstairs.

Acting as city coroner had to take its toll on a man, reasoned Alastair as he pushed through the double doors, his cane against the stone floor along the corridor having announced him before his barging in. Ransom was so often in and out of here that few paid any special attention to him. He'd come on the occasion of every victim of the Phantom. Dr. Fenger's medical assistants paid him no heed now, save a nod before going back to their various tasks.

“I thought I'd find Dr. Fenger here,” he said to the room.

“He's had to see to Dr. Tewes,” replied one of the men, his once white apron a rainbow of florid and dull colors.

“Tewes? Tewes was here?”

“They carried him out on a gurney,” explained the man.

“Fell out like a girl when he looked at the Chapman child's corpse; the mutilation was that horrid.”

“The child…her body.”

“Have you come for a look yourself?” came the obvious question.

“I have, but what bloody business has Tewes in all this? Damn him!”

“I suspect he's just out to make a name for himself,” came the reply as the attendant wheeled a death gurney before Alastair.

“Oh, he'll be talked about in the pubs tonight, he will,” chimed in the other man from behind his mask. “How he fell out.”

“Morgan, it's a normal reaction for most people!” shouted the first attendant. “Not everyone's got the constitution of a knacker.” He then casually pulled away the sheet that had covered a misshapen lump of flesh beneath.

Alastair audibly gasped. Only the long flowing curling red tresses of her hair looked human. He had now laid eyes on every conceivable horror done a human being. Beheadings of the Phantom did not compare; fire victims did not compare. Nothing in all his career had prepared him for this. “It's…are you sure it's human?” he asked.

“Dr. Fenger and a team of us have determined not only is it human but that it is Senator Chapman's missing grandchild.”

“There's no face left. No nose…ears…not even eyes.”

“Nor cheek, nor forehead.”

The birthmark alone they had said in Kohler's office. Ransom saw that whole chunks of flesh had been carved away. It brought to mind an evening at Berghoff's where the chef stood behind his roast or ham and carved off slices for your plate.

“Cover it…cover it now!” Alastair raced from the room.

Behind him, he heard the man called Morgan snicker and say, “And him the man of the hour.”

“Shut up, Morgan,” said the other.

Alastair went searching the building for Fenger and Jane Francis, who had said she would end Dr. Tewes's career in Chicago, and now this. She had come as Tewes to view the remains of the Chapman girl. Whatever possessed her to do so?

He went for Christian's surgery. From there he went to the surgeon's office, and here he cornered him. “I understand you allowed Jane in to see that awful mess your men are trying to put back together again.”

The senator's already held a wake without a body; they—he—wants the funeral to come off tonight and the coffin into hallowed ground at the family's church tomorrow.”

“Look, it's awful, the whole thing, but Christian, how did you get sucked into this business of accepting money from Chapman for your services? Think what might happen if it got out?”

“I have gambling debts about to eat me alive, Alastair, and…besides, we need a lot of things here at the hospital, and he mentioned a wing in her name.”

“The Anne Chapman wing, heh?”

“Why not?”

“And a trust or a charitable fund set up?”

“Precisely.”

“One that you alone will control?”

“Someone must administer the—” he paused, seeing Ransom's smirk. “Look, here! Someone's going to do it, so why shouldn't those funds come to Rush Medical and Cook County?”

“
Ahhh
…it comes down to your age-old rivalry with Northwestern, does it?”

“Regardless, Rance, why shouldn't something good come of this horror? Why shouldn't decent people benefit in some manner if we do our jobs right?”

“You have no qualms about it in the least?”

“None! Did you see that child's body?” Christian's eyes
and jaw were firmly set. “What I'd give for a retirement home and a volume of Kipling right now.”

“Christian, when it comes time for us to deliver up this obvious lunatic to Senator Chapman, are you sure you'll have the stomach for it?”

“I'll happily light the fire that'll boil him alive, yes.”

“And Jane—acting as Tewes again? Was that her idea or yours, coming down here to see this atrocity? Have you cut her in on the deal?”

“She has street contacts I don't have, contacts you should be cultivating right now instead of harassing me.”

“Damn…then you did call her here.”

“I told her the circumstances of the case, and I am asking her to do a…a psychological mock-up of what kind of mind could concoct such a fate for a child. Don't for a moment think this is the last of the Vanishings.”

“I see…so you are just playing ‘Catcher in the Rye' to save the future children from harm's way.”

“Don't try to get all moral with me, Alastair. Not you!”

“Next you'll be marching out the bagpipes and singing verses from Robbie Burns, heh?”

“Bull! I know you too well for this, Rance.”

“Or perhaps Kipling. Do a bit of flag-waving, trumpets, drums, all that?”

“You forget, I did the autopsy on what was left of Anne Chapman.”

This stopped Ransom's joking, and he nodded to his old friend. “I know that must've been…must've been hell.” Then he repeated, “I saw her remains just now.”

“Butcher is too kind a word for this madman, but, Alastair, there is something else…something I have to share with you.”

“What is it?”

“At the nape of the neck, right here,” he indicated on himself, his hand going to the base of his neck at the back. “Where the vertebra meet the skull.”

“Spit it out, man.”

“She was kept for some time on a hook, dangling like…like a carcass, and there is some justification in believing…God…hard to even voice it.”

“Say it, Doctor.”

“The missing portions of her—cheeks, torso, appendages.”

“Yes, yes?”

“They were taken from her over time.”

“Over time?”

“This was not a single sit down.”

“Whataya saying that—”

“Not a single one-time carving.”

“Jesus—”

“Mary—”

“—and Joseph. These victims were carved on multiple times at different sittings?”

“Proven by each wound carefully examined. Each carving displays a different time frame.”

“My God. You're saying she was spiked on a nail or a hook in some godforsaken place and carved on like a leg of lamb.”

“Multiple blades used on her as well. Some well after death set in, obviously. Merciful shock will have killed her before the fiend or fiends could make that many stabs and slashes.”

“Does Kohler know all this?”

“He does.”

“And he informed Chapman of this?”

“He did, against my better judgment. I had to tell someone, and you weren't here. I could not keep absolutely silent on the matter.”

“So you share with Kohler? And then Kohler rushes off to inform Chapman of these awful details better kept in-house to begin with? That's not standard procedure, Christian, and you know it.”

“I agree but there's no fetching it back now.”

Alastair shook his head in disdain. “This is what sent the senator over the edge, correct?”

“Afraid so.”

“And now we're having to deal with—or
deal in
—an insane wealthy senator…and there's a fortune to be had. We could likely name our price, heh?”

“Alastair, will you please stop preaching to me? Christ!”

“I tell you, Christian, the whole thing smacks of evil wrapped in evil.”

“I did not for a moment suspect Nathan Kohler would impart the details to Senator Chapman.”

“But he did, and now we have this situation on our hands.”

“And what can we do but make the best of a bad bargain, Alastair. That is all I am hoping for now.”

“It's a bargain that will haunt you to your grave.”

“Come now! What are we proposing? To see this bastard who did this desecration of a child get precisely what he gave out? At one time that was called
justice
.”

“Rationalizing it does not change what it is, Christian, and if it got out, you can kiss your career and connection with Cook County and Rush Medical College good-bye.”

“Northwestern could send us all packing, given their growth. Rush needs a major influx of funds.”

“Get off it, man. I believe Christian Fenger needs funds far more than does Cook County or Rush.”

He dropped his gaze. “All right, I need the money as well. Hell, Alastair, you need the money more than any of us.”

“How much of it have you confided to Jane?”

“Not much…the sketchy details.”

“Tell me she knows nothing of this devil's bargain you've struck with Nathan Kohler and Chapman.”

“Nothing.”

“Keep it that way if you wish to keep her respect. Where is she, by the way?”

“She's two doors down, resting…lying down. Look, Alastair—”

But he was gone, banging down the hallway with his cane, going in search of Jane, his anger at boiling point.

 

Alastair found Dr. Tewes—Jane incognito—in the room down the hall, recovering from a bruise to the head from when she'd fainted in the morgue. Given the circumstances, the usual odors of that place conspiring with the brutality done to young Anne Chapman, he little wondered that even a surgeon such as Jane could fall faint.

“Are you all right?” was his first question. She was sitting on the edge of the bed they'd placed Tewes in to regain himself. Jane looked out through those unmistakable eyes and from behind her mustache and makeup at Alastair.

“It's horrible what he did to her.”

“And somehow Fenger thinks you should be involved in all this? Jane, I forbid it.”

“What?”

“You are not to get involved. Not one whit.”

“Hold on. Who do you think you're addressing?”

“I know who I am addressing.”

“Apparently, you do not.”

“Whatever he's paying you to do this psychology on this madman, Jane, I will double it if you drop it now.”

“Look here, Alastair. We do not have the sort of relationship in which you order me around.”

“I'm
asking
you, then.”

“It's already too late. I've made promises to Christian, promises I intend to keep.”

“Damn you for a stubborn woman!”

A nurse entered asking Dr. Tewes if he were feeling better. Jane replied in male voice, “I am fit. Shouldn't've accompanied Dr. Fenger into his morgue on a full stomach.”

The nurse had Tewes sign a release form, and with this formality complete and the nurse gone, Jane got to her feet, readying to leave.

“Wait…you do not know the whole picture here, Jane. You must trust me.”

“I see a man trying to protect me from unsavory business. It's the same sort of attitude that kept me out of medical
school here…sent me overseas to finish my training.” She was at the door now. “And frankly, Alastair, I had come to expect more from you.”

“More
what
from me?”

“More…just that I expected better coming from you.”

“But I tell you—”

“No more. You've disappointed me enough for one day.”

She left him standing alone in the empty room.

 

Every time he got into a covered carriage now to get around Chicago, Alastair was reminded of how Waldo Denton had been in every frame of his existence during the entire hunt for the Phantom of the Fair—ever present yet invisible at once. How effective a tool it was to be cloaked in such mundane existence as to go about invisible even while in plain sight. Alastair vowed never to let this kind of blindness stand in his way again, and he began to ponder the invisibility of the so-called horse butcher in leather apron who might have abducted a number of young people from the fitful streets of Ransom's city, to jam them onto meat hooks, and to begin a steady filleting of their features and work over them until the entrails were gone. The papers had hinted at missing intestines, but according to the autopsy report that Alastair had perused as he stood over the latest victim's remains,
all
major organs had gone missing.

“Where're the parts…the evidence of his crimes? Where does he hide them if not in a refrigeration unit of some sort?”

Alastair heard the cry of a newsboy on the street, waving the latest
Tribune
and shouting, “The Vanishings! Read all about it! No arrest made!”