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Polly’d been, he knew he could not keep her. He could not keep any of them.
She persisted, grabbing his crotch. “What? Are you afraid? You’re not one of those who can’t get hard in a woman?”
“Shut up! You don’t know what you’re bleedin’ talking about! Shut up!”
“What are you in real life, heh? A lawyer, a professor, a doctor, perhaps?”
“I’m none. Now, Polly, be a good girl, least till we’re at your place.”
She pouted. “You’re as boorish as Ransom, wantin’ me to be a cultured lady till we’re in bed!”
In the end, the gondola and Polly both settled down, and they sat safe and secure in their seats, and he stared at her, thinking she had a death wish. She needed Stumpf to kill her. She wanted it; begged it. Right, right?
“Yes and I want it again,” her spirit said in his ear.
He regained himself—in the here and now place—and watched the building excitement he’d created below. Stumpf had given him a quota, and he always demanded more blood; always from the back of his head came Stumpf’s voice. Not even lively Polly had been able to drown out that voice.
With their ride over, he and Stumpf and the ghost of Polly stepped from the gondola to an angry operator who failed to appreciate his antics. A tip shut him up, and as the killer joined the maddening crowd on the fairway, he heard the operator also shake down Ransom for a tip.
He soon sat on a bench deep in shadow, nerves raw and exhilarated at once. Polly had been right. He’d never enjoyed normal relations with a woman. Born incapable. Withered testicles and deformed penis. Nothing whatever doctors could do. Despite the efforts of his mother to take him to the best surgeons on two continents, including Christian Fenger.
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miracle any more than God himself might. No one could induce feeling in the lump of flesh he carried between his legs.
That came only with the kill, only in taking life. What defense would he and Sleepeck Stumpf have if ever they were apprehended and tried?
He’d spent countless years in and out of hospitals, as Mother refused to accept his condition as irreversible. How many silent nights he’d spent with Stumpf—as his mother insisted on calling it, a name from his nursery, from his sleep murmurings. Mother was the only one on the planet who’d unconditionally loved him. When she’d died, penniless, he’d had to bury her in that damned Potter’s Field. Although starving, he’d refused to sell her body to the medical men. After that something snapped inside him. He ran. Only months after this, he killed that first prostitute at the fair.
Polly made three, Chesley four. Four Chicago women, and now two young men, as well as one unborn child made the total seven. Chesley had proven a quite humorless thing compared to the vivacious Polly. And as for Purvis and now Trelaine . . . each beautiful in his way and so filled with life and love and happiness as it spilled from them with their blood. “Have all to live for,” Trelaine had once confided to the very man who had, this night, taken his life.
He’d shut Trelaine’s joy down with a delight of his own.
As he’d felt with Polly and the others . . . and again with young Chesley Mandor, who’d so wanted to ride in that boat with Trelaine on her arm here at the fair . . . and ’twas a flaming good time she had. . . .
CHAPTER 19
Guiding Jane Francis by the hand, Ransom rushed from the Ferris wheel the moment the gondola stopped. His cane beating an anthem, Alastair shouted over the noise of the fairway. “We need to find a cab stand, get you home! Something’s amiss at the lagoon, and I fear the worst.” “God, not another murder!”
“I pray I’m wrong. But to be safe, you must be off.”
“But Alastair—”
“I don’t want you seeing anything upsetting.”
“I’m no shrinking violet! I’m a midwife; perhaps I can help.”
They failed to notice a man in shadow across from them watching their every move, reading their lips as best he could.
“I will not allow it, Jane.”
“Did you not hear a word I said?”
He relented. “OK, if you’re quite sure. I must get there as quickly as possible.”
“Then why are we wasting time?”
The boat lay half in, half out of the lagoon, the charred remains of the corpse partially covered in the waterlogged 212
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bottom. As Jane began to see the truth of it, the eerily fired body like a discarded heap of trash along the keel of the rowboat, seared clothing did a danse macabre along the surface. She only half heard Ransom’s order: “Jane, stay back . . . do not move from this spot. Promise me.” She held herself in check, saying nothing, her body trembling at the sight that he tried to shield using his frame. Stop trying to spare me, damn you!
Someone foolishly shouted, “Is’re a doctor here?”
Jane wondered at the emotional cost of being Ransom.
And what of being with Ransom as Polly’d been? Still, she instinctively remained close to Alastair, seeing him take charge, ordering reluctant men into the water to grab the gunwales on each side and guide what remained of the boat onto firmer ground. “Easy! Easy! Don’t lose her!” came Ransom’s encouragement to the younger men.
One last thrust grounded the boat, and the waterlogged, burnt bottom split apart.
“Get her outta the muck! Lift below the arms and at the ankles. Use your gloves if you must, but do it.” The uniformed police obeyed, but they seemed Ransom’s children in need of chastising and scolding. “I’ll take a stick to every last one of ya! Do it, do it now.” Together, the younger men lifted her out.
Jane wondered how many killings he’d seen and overseen, and who this latest victim might be.
“Outta the tunnel aflame all on its own, I tell yous,” the shaken attendant kept shouting.
Alastair grabbed the ride attendant by each shoulder, holding him like a plow. “But going out on the water, man!
Who’d she get in the boat with?”
“Fine-looking gent, but he didn’t come back.”
“What’d he look like?”
His description fit the Phantom, but the attendant ended with, “But they looked so in love.”
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“Allow me to help the man with his memory,” came a feminine voice from behind Ransom. He turned to find Jane beside him.
“I told you to stay put.”
“But I’m trained in hypnosis, and we . . . I mean you . . .
you could greatly enhance someone’s memory if—”
“I hardly believe a parlor trick is going to be of any—”
“Give it a chance. No one’s come forward with any useful information. No witnesses beyond this rum-soaked attendant.” She near whispered, “The killer has declared war on us all, Alastair. That could as well be Gabby or me in that flambéed condition!” Even on quinine and opium gotten from Dr. McKinnette, Alastair feels Jane’s sincerity, her genuine desire to help.
Here stands a woman who understands the complexities and vagaries of a cop’s life and work and is accepting of them.
Not only accepting but supporting.
It was a new and odd thing for Ransom.
He felt unsure what to do with it. With her.
What to do with the feelings she imbued in him.
Just how to behave.
Just what to say.
Should I kiss her?
Thank her?
Hold her?