Tewes’s curled handlebar mustache twitched anew like a tadpole under the muted train station gaslight.
Ransom saw a uniformed copper and shouted, “O’Malley! Take Dr. Tewes here out of my sight.” Ransom turned his back on Tewes’s raised hand, the note still flourishing birdlike over his head as O’Malley gently guided Tewes off.
“You damned, daft fool!” Tewes shouted to no avail.
Inspector Ransom returned to the still-smoldering body that’d been doused with either petrol or kerosene, and then with water. In two previous such cases, the fire investigator had determined kerosene the accelerant.
Ransom immediately noticed a bloody handprint, left on the marble floor; the trail of blood led him to inspect the men’s room. Drimmer pointed out the sliced off digits in the sink. Ransom went over to the body again, studying the handprint more closely. “The print has all its fingers. It isn’t the boy’s, unless the killer snipped off his fingers here and returned to the men’s room to deposit each digit in the sink, but that feels counterintuitive.” Griffin Drimmer replied, “Then the print belongs to the killer!”
“If so, it needs to be photographically recorded, preserved. For should a suspect come about—distinguishable from the city’s hundreds of likely vermin—then we can match said murderer to something tangible. How is that for scientific progress in police work?”
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“Yeah, I overheard what Dr. Tewes said to you, Inspector.”
Ransom continued to study the bloody handprint as if it recalled some secret memory.
A short, gaunt, angular-and grim-faced Griffin Drimmer, in a three-piece suit, fond of showing pictures of his children, looked more the part of Ransom’s coachman than his partner. Their ages stood a generation apart as did their choice of clothing. His energy and diligence that of a river otter, while Alastair might more appropriately be called a pachyderm. Alastair believed his partner more enthusiastic than clever, more excitable than analytical, but he was young yet. There appeared much to recommend the new man, despite that Nathan Kohler had pushed Drimmer on Ransom.
“When we get the boy to the morgue,” Alastair said to Griffin, “we’ll stamp his palm and place it against Philo’s photo.”
“Easier than ripping up the floor tile and hauling it off.”
“That’d upset people in high places.”
“You mean along with Chief Kohler?”
Drimmer hadn’t once had words with his partner about Kohler, but Ransom knew he was dying to do so—preferably after getting Ransom drunk enough to tell the whole sordid story as to why he and Kohler so intently hated one another from the inside out. Alastair considered Drimmer’s position, its delicateness, working under him but ultimately for Kohler.
“According to our good Dr. Tewes, Griff, we’ve already managed to piss Nathan.” Alastair stared anew at the inexplicable mystery lying at his feet; three times the mystery now. It represented a third body that the coroner, Fenger, would have to separate from itself—like disentangling a melted sculpture created of limbs by the intense heat.
Both detectives staring at the bloody handprint felt a new aura surrounding it. “Could be the bastard’s gone and got sloppy, Griff?”
“It must be his,” Griff sounded hopeful. “You’ll prove it so.”
“Caution. It could as well belong to the night watchman who doused the body with water, or some careless copper got his hand bloody and kneeled here.”
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“But O’Malley’s hands are too large to make a fit.”
“Aye, it’s a man no larger than the victim, from the look of it.”
“Small hands for certain.” Griffin placed his own small hands over the print, creating a shadow fit.
“Keep this between us, Griff. No one else is to know. Do you understand?”
“Absolutely, between us.”
“When Philo gets here with that blasted photographic equipment of his, we’ll have to stay on him, Griff.”
“Stay on him?”
“He’s coming off a drunk, and he can be a slacker when he’s hung over.”
“I’ll stay on him.” Griffin winked.
Ransom imagined Griff thought him on the same drinking binge as Philo, and he wasn’t wrong. “Judging from the size of the handprint—if indeed it belongs to the monster we seek—our killer is hardly larger than the two women he’s killed.” “About the size of that fella waving the note in O’Malley’s face?”
“Tewes? Yes . . . yes . . . in that neighborhood. Doesn’t take much to overpower a man from behind with a garrote.”
Ransom looked from the print to Dr. Tewes, who now waved Kohler’s damnable note at Big Mike O’Malley. O’Malley’s blue uniform looked purple under the haze of light from a lamppost that flooded in from an overhead window in the semidarkened stairwell—a stairwell down which Ransom would like to throw Tewes. He hoped O’Malley would escort Tewes to the door.
Tewes’s silver tongue had gotten him Kohler’s blessing and had gotten him past the police barricade, but Ransom’s attention returned to the bloody handprint. He toyed with the cruel idea of getting a stonemason to lift it from the marble floor. To intentionally provoke Kohler.
Ransom’s thoughts strayed to the so-called new and in-genious art of fingerprint and handprint evidence that was hardly new in other parts of the world. “Everything worth CITY FOR RANSOM
7
knowing comes out of the East,” the taciturn medical examiner for Cook County, Dr. Fenger, once told Ransom. Then the spry old doctor added, “Of course, your chief of detectives thinks it’s all mumbo-jumbo. Been trying for years to get the Chicago Police Department to invest in fingerprint-gathering techniques and devices.” Being the holdout of an old vanguard, Chief Nathan Kohler looked the part of Poe’s most stolid raven: stocky, short, wrapped in a black coat the way a bird wrapped itself in its wings—indicative of how close he played his cards to his chest. A most secretive man, Kohler had been skeptical and resistant to the idea, as his custom dictated, distrusting anything new. Kohler finally put his opinions aside when the scientific evidence became too overwhelming to ignore—in large part due to Ransom’s and Dr. Fenger’s combined persistence and faith in the new science. In another part, due to the coroner’s push for modern techniques and devices, and to wrangling a much larger budget out of the city. Dr.
Fenger, one of the founding members of Cook County Hospital and the city’s preeminent medical examiner, lent credence to Alastair’s war. And what is Kohler’s answer? To hire on a mentalist?
The newsmen, held in check at the stairwell, shouted for comments. Ransom counted on big O’Malley to keep the dogs of the press off his back, and while Alastair liked some reporters, and in fact knew a couple who proved better investigators than cops, today he’d immediately cordoned off the crime scene, and thanks to a Chicago miracle—greased with green—the sensational stories of two earlier garrote victims hadn’t been reported in any major paper. All this, ostensibly to safeguard the “integrity of the ongoing world’s fair.” Ransom cared little for such concerns, but he did want to preserve what Dr. Fenger called the “amalgamate area wherein murderer and victim danced” or “the killer’s parlor.” Fenger wrote poetry in moments of relaxation, good poetry in fact. And his poetical nature came through in his work. But Ransom took his meaning—keep undisturbed the 8
ROBERT W. WALKER
space around the victim in order to do a thorough investigation. A common sense, scientific approach.
So today it was off limits even to his best friends in the press, those he drank with from the Tribune, Herald, and Sun. Reporters had gotten out of control in previous months.