All trains, all carriages, all foot traffic-or very nearly all-made for the fair. All save a killer and the man who pursued him.
It had been two weeks since the operation, and Ransom felt and looked exhausted from his vigil to be on hand when Waldo Denton slipped up. Ransom’s presence wherever Denton showed up had led the young killer to change his routes, to change his times, and now to change his main location with his hack and horse from the fair to here. No more deaths had occurred since the double murder at the lagoon inside the World’s Fair grounds, and this had led some to speculate that the real Phantom of the Fair had left the area altogether, while it only led Ransom to a sense of vindication; instinct told him that he was correct about Denton. And he had the deaths of seven victims-one an unborn child-to avenge.
Alastair’s driving new obsession, then, was Denton, and no one could dissuade him from his crusade. In fact, all attempts had failed. He’d tried without success to order Denton to come in to again test his hand against the two bloody handprints. This time with a print expert, Theopolis Harris.
Ransom’s harassing of Denton now had continued daily. It might cost him his job, and it had already cost him friends and colleagues like Griffin Drimmer and even Dr. Fenger-the only family he had ever known. The chase had in fact eclipsed Ransom’s previous obsession, his years-long search for the truth surrounding the mystery of who bombed Haymarket Square in 1886.
Philo Keane, police photographer, artist, and friend had come along with Ransom tonight, and now the two stood in a juniper thicket mid-park, shadowing a man Ransom believed to be a repeat killer. Philo had come for fear of leaving his friend Alastair alone, a strange feeling having gripped Philo. This faith and cocksureness Ransom felt in his own cunning in the matter of the Phantom overtook all else. They had argued about it only an hour earlier at Philo’s studio, and Keane kept up his steady barrage of concern even now.
“Give this madness up, at least long enough to take some sleep, man, and remind yourself what is good in life! Look at you!”
“I won’t rest until I have my hands around that punk’s throat and can justifiably choke a confession out of him.”
“Some people would call you cunning, a master detective, but not anymore. Here you are…on the verge of hallucination from fatigue. Come back to my place. Just lie down on my sofa to catch some rest. I’ll wake you in an hour or two.”
“Cunning…yes, I can be cunning, but this boy killer now he is cunning.”
“To think him so near me all those weeks he apprenticed with me,” began the pencil-thin Philo, his knitted brow twitching. “And he still has my Night Hawk, you know. Weird thing is…I never once considered him a threat of any sort, much less a camera thief and a murderer. Still, he did leave me with an uneasy feeling the time I caught him with his hands where they oughtn’t’ve been.”
“As when he dropped a victim’s ring in your pocket just to frame you?”
“Ironic, I was in jail when Griffin drags him in. And Griff so damned sure at the time you two had your man. He even had the damn garrote in his hand; held it up to me as proof positive.”
“Griff is like a reed in the wind. Whatever the prevailing winds.”
“At least Chief Kohler didn’t come back after me for the killings.”
“Don’t be so sure he won’t.”
“What’ve you heard?” Philo gasped.
“He’s working closely with the city prosecutor to charge you again, while everyone else-including the mayor-is content to leave it alone.”
“Leave it alone?”
“Glad simply that the killings’ve ended, and that their precious White City boondoggle continues without further stain.”
“Then I say the mayor is a rational man.”
“Quite.”
“Afraid I can’t say the same for you. Have you considered all that you’ve forfeited for this business with Denton? How others’ve distanced themselves from you? That woman I ran into at the hospital who sat at your bedside night and day, and her niece, is it?-whom you claim as your friend despite the fact it was she who shot you? And your partner, Griffin, to whom you refuse to speak. Not to mention Dr. Fenger? Who next will abandon you?”
“You. I am sure of it. So good-bye. Make haste!”
“I’ll not leave you here in the darkness contemplating murder.”
“You’ll miss your booze.”
Philo held up a flask of whiskey. “Portable. Have some! You need it more’n I.”
Ransom’s limp and need for the cane was now even more pronounced. His fatigue only added to his leaning on the new one, which Philo had gifted him at his hospital bed when he was still in a coma-and the steady thumping of that cane now felt like some sort of Chinese water torture to Philo.
“Why’re we standing in the drizzle, Ransom?”
“Bosch got word on where Denton has relocated his carriage.”
“How much did that bit cost you?”
“Denton’s picked out a new killing ground, Lincoln Park. I’m sure of it.”
“And you’re going to catch him in the act?”
“I have my own flask to keep me company. You needn’t’ve come, Philo.”
“You’ve a strange sense of duty, Alastair. Duty to yourself.”
“Duty to Polly, to Purvis, Trelaine, Chesley, all the victims, even that unborn child that Denton killed.”
They had earlier climbed from a hansom cab a block away from the park’s cabstand, and now cautiously approached, in a roundabout fashion, through the dense woods of Lincoln Park, named for the fallen president.
The park, Ransom said at one point, reminded him of a place he’d dreamed about while in the hospital fighting for his life. A place ever reminiscent of a somewhereland in Michigan where his parents had taken him as a child. “You’re not going to get all maudlin on me, are you, Rance?”
“Just something about the two shores of the lagoon here…just like in the dream. Only in the dream, I was with a beautiful woman.”
“Well, don’t look for me to help you out there, old friend.”
Again Philo Keane thought of the terrible price a man like Ransom paid to the public at large. This determination to catch the Phantom for the safety of all Chicagoans had become a personal affair, a single-minded obsession to be sure, and yet if he were to succeed, it benefited all of the city. Benefited the lowliest street person to the Potter Palmers and the Marshal Fields. But at what price to Ransom? To his peace of mind? To his sleep? It had already cost Ransom dearly in so many ways. Worst of all, it could eventually cost him Jane Francis and any opportunity along those lines. It had cost Alastair friends as well, but Philo understood obsessions, and he understood his friend’s need for vengeance.
In fact, Philo guessed it’d been vengeance that kept him alive.
Philo wondered now if he and Alastair would be arrested at any moment for loitering and lurking, or worse if a copper came along and saw them amid the trees, two grown men playing hide-and-seek. Philo could ill-afford being arrested again. “If we’re arrested for pandering,” he complained, “it’s on you, Alastair.”
But Alastair’s full concentration remained on the row of horse-drawn buggies and covered cabs at the cabstand, where Waldo Denton casually awaited the Lincoln Park strollers who weaved about the pathways, amid the greenery, locked in embrace, their eyes interested only in one another. Watching the strolling couples, Ransom realized how easily the Phantom of the Fair operated, using his hansom cab as central headquarters. He’d move about the paths of the park in his black uniform, strike like a shadow, murder with that garrote of his, set the body aflame, and be sitting atop his hack, an invisible man, all in a matter of minutes. Orchestrated murder.
The lakefront Lincoln Park was a killer’s dream, a place where people allowed their common sense and justifiable fears and natural defenses to drop like stones one after another. A place to distract one from the horrors at one’s shoulder. Unlike the fair, this place kissed the senses with solitude and privacy and peace, whereas the fair rang loud with the sound of multiple calliopes, the barkers, and the hawkers, amid which worked the street prostitutes. Here the noises were of nature, squirrels, and chipmunks chasing one another, birds chirping in the trees, leaves rustling a languid whisper.