He believed the Phantom would have difficulty just loop
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ing the garrote over his head and around his neck, much less slicing through his carotid artery, as he stood six-foot-four, and he had several layers of protective fat that the garroter would likely not figure on. To further complicate any attack on his person, as he paced here, was his cane, his blue steel revolver, and he’d borrowed a pair of specially made horse-hide gloves from a friend working the bovine slaughterhouse at the stockyards. These gloves would slow the cutting power of a garrote if he, like young Purvis, should get his hands between throat and wire. The gloves could slow the expected attack long enough to give him time to wrestle the killer to the ground—if only the bastard would strike!
“Where the devil is the little hellion who obviously has a hard on for me, killing poor Mere in my place?”
Ransom made the return walk from the end of the lagoon, around the water, passing strolling lovers, the occasional homeless who’d be tossed from the park as soon as the first patrolman crossed paths with ragmen, or bums as they were called. How long, he wondered, must he pace in the darkness in this pretense of leisure and calm here in the most poorly lit section of the lagoon, the Ferris wheel high over his shoulder.
In his ears, he heard the faint last death rattle of Miss Mandor out on the water, her boat so near he could leap into it from where he stood. His cop’s imagination, his in-sight, intuition and instinct— all challenged by this so-called Phantom—brought the full picture of how the killer had enticed his victims to help out some “poor chap” in a second boat that was listing. Trelaine, in the throes of infatuation with Miss Mandor, perhaps thought he’d impress her with his show of humanity in the form of a dark figure who knew, somehow, enough about the couple to know that she could not scream out. He’d demonstrated on Trelaine what he intended for her. And it had all come to pass so quickly, and seeing Trelaine’s head fall forward and into 296
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the second boat, his body floating off and away, she most assuredly screamed her silent screams and fulfilled the killer’s sick need to see her eyes bulge with fear and her skin prickle, and her extremities fight for life along with her last gasping breath. He’d leapt agilely from the rocking boat he’d himself scuttled, and into the boat transporting her, even as she attempted to leap out over the side to make the shore where Ransom now stood looking out over the black lagoon.
Silent now, the lagoon reflected back a sliver of moonlight and some nearby gaslight lamps, but this small show of light only made the surface look the more like black oil. Is this Miss Mandor’s last pleasant sight? Had she been mesmerized? Hesitated one second too late to make landfall? Had she got into the water, would she’ve stood a chance of escape? Alerting someone ashore.
Sometimes his uncanny ability to recreate the scene of the crime frightened Alastair. Just good police work, he told himself, nothing special . . . not like the gift of a wonderful stage voice, an ability at acting, a gift of intelligence for science, or a talent for a musical instrument.
He wished to be home playing badly at that piano he kept as a constant challenge to learn. As a child, he’d dreamed once of being a concert pianist. The memory now made him feel foolish. No, he was born to this . . . to the hunt.
He’d had time to rethink the scene when Philo dropped that camera in utter sorrow over Miss Mandor’s unnatural death. He mentally paced to the images of that night, moving on to each murder scene, each impression swelling his mind with a growing hatred of two monsters—one the faceless Phantom, the other himself.
“Where did Griffin get the notion to go after Philo’s studio? To uncover evidence there?” he asked himself aloud.
“Griffin, you disappointment.”
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from the photo that Denton had taken, and it’d been compared to the one Philo had taken at the train station, and according to Christian, the prints had indeed come from the same man. But neither matched Philo’s hand. But what of Griffin’s hand?
Again the evidence pointed to a man small in stature . . . a man hardly larger than Dr. Tewes. Griffin was hardly larger than Jane Francis.
“I thought I’d find you here,” said Griffin Drimmer who seemed to’ve stepped from out of Ransom’s thought!
“Word’s all over the city.”
“Word?”
“That you’ve challenged the Phantom to some sort of duel.”
“Reckless, I know.”
“Foolish . . . to roam about here alone, without me at your back?”
“I assumed your back’s still up over my ranting and my ring.”
Griff held a seething anger just below boiling. “You ought to’ve come to me first with this plan. We ought to’ve coordi-nated on it.”
“By the book, is it, Griff?”
“By the book, hell, by the notion we are a team!”
“As when you put Philo behind bars?”
“At the very least, he knows something.”
“Were we a team on that solo act?”
Over Alastair’s shoulder in the sky, the massive Ferris wheel sent colored lights flitting across Griffin’s features, which took on a separate life—as if another man altogether resided within. Possibly a man who felt a deep-seated hatred not only for his mentor, Alastair, and not only for authority and society and rules and regulations, but all the comforts and familiarity of normalcy. A kind of Beowulf in sheep’s clothing, loose on the world. Even his name, Griffin, spoke of a changeling.
What if Griffin, stymied at every turn, felt that Ransom’s 298
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confusion represented some sort of prize? What if the killer felt weak, ineffectual, and in fact invisible in the company of other men, especially bulls like Ransom?
While not invisible, suppose Griffin felt invisible? Suppose he had pent-up notions, mad goals, secret anger that’d gone unchecked for so long that it’d all suddenly burst in pure venom in a kill spree? Suppose he’d had a sudden loss of faith, of charity, of humanity, of relations . . . a loss of a loved one, a mainstay . . . someone who’d kept him stable and sane all this time? Hadn’t he lost his mother recently?
What did he really know of Griff? He never spoke of his parents, only his wife and children on occasion, and Ransom had never seen them—not in the flesh. So much chicanery went on these days with photographs. Suppose . . . just suppose Griffin Drimmer had created the Phantom in order to make himself visible on two fronts? Visible as the new, young, virile detective who comes on to solve the case, and visible indeed as the Phantom, a killer on page one of the Tribune, the Times, the Herald? And suppose . . . just suppose it was all a way to strike out at Ransom for perceived wrongs?
Ransom wondered how he could live with such a development, that a detective he’d treated as his gopher—snubbed one day, ignored the next, or spoken harshly to—had some larger vendetta to act on? Jekyll and Hyde was now showing at the Lyceum Theater. Could Stevenson’s character be alive in the form of Drimmer? Had the killer stood coldly at his side—in each frame—from the beginning? Watching his every move?