235
days before Haymarket and the riot and the bomb that exploded in the square, killing Ransom’s fellow officers and doing its best to kill him.
Ransom meant to get information out of the man, and in a warehouse owned by a friend of the police, he’d sweated and beaten the fellow for information. Rumor abounded of a bomb having been planted somewhere in the city. He’d taken extreme measures to get the information he wanted out of Oleander, the man’s code name, and the only name he’d disclosed until he screamed his real name from within the flames.
The matchstick slowly burned toward Ransom’s fingers as he’d held it to the man’s half-opened eyes, blood in his pupils making focusing impossible. No doubt, from the blows to the head. Alastair and the other cops present had pummeled the man’s cranium. His bloodied features might’ve told Ransom that Oleander was, by this time, unable to formulate words much less inform on his comrades.
Then Kohler tossed his lit cigar into the fumes rising off the man. While Alastair’s eyebrows and the hair on his hands curled and blackened, Oleander went up like a rag doll tossed into the hearth. As much as Alastair attempted to kill the flames and stop the death, the flames fought harder than he, claiming what was theirs.
Irony of it, he and not Kohler had earned a reputation that night. No one had seen Kohler’s action. Ransom’s reputation had remained intact since then, and word on the street, spread by the grapevine of lowlifes, toughs, snitches like his own Dot’n’Carry, all had him down as a cold-blooded bastard who’d do anything— anything—to gain what he wanted. As Dot’n’Carry put it: “If a man finds himself in custody of Alastair, then the only ransom worth talking about was payment in full.” Interrogation meant beatings as a matter of course, routine, expected by those arrested. Certain indigents in particular, when taken into custody and not questioned on the latest atrocities in the city, demanded it of their jailers. They demanded a beating regardless, as a beating behind jail walls 236
ROBERT W. WALKER
proved a badge of honor. Further, to leave a Chicago jail without a beating marked a man as a snitch. But in the case of one Inspector Alastair Ransom, the word beating had taken on new meaning in a mix of myth and legend.
“Alastair . . . I think you’re so right about this,” said Dr.
Fenger, bringing him out of his reverie. “The kill . . . the kill being anticlimactic, our boy sets them ablaze for one final rush of excitement. Theoretically, the kill’s not enough.” Kohler loudly pandered to the press. “So, Inspector, you have no clue as to why a man would set a dead body aflame?”
The pointedness of aflame used by the chief made everyone within hearing squirm. It addressed the rumors about Ransom as much as the killer. Alastair’s fists clenched, and he took a threatening step toward Kohler.
Griffin, hand raised, stepped between the two larger men, while hazarding a reply, “Fire has always held significance to people . . .”
Fenger agreed as if on cue, “Full of symbolism and mysticism.”
“Hmmm . . . Tewes said something similar in his report,”
began Kohler. “That fire is or may have some weighty import in his head, in a symbolic sense, say of victory or some such . . .” Nathan stepped back from the threat in Ransom’s eyes.
“More likely he holds us all in contempt,” weighed in Dr. Fenger. “It is the act of a contemptuous man, an angry man. I believe Tewes said it best in a brief discussion I had with him.” “Go on,” said Kohler.
“Dr. Tewes believes the killer has a fire fetish.”
“A fire fetish.”
“A fire bug, yes,” added Griffin.
“Pyromania is how he put it, a deep-seated insatiable need.
Damn, I’m inadequate to the task. Tewes knows the jargon of mental disorder far better than I. I’m, after all, a surgeon.”
“Well, if it is some aberration of the brain, a disorder in here,” Kohler pointed to his wide forehead, “then he cer
CITY FOR RANSOM
237
tainly has given into it, carrying about his own portable vial of kerosene.”
“He takes their lives and utterly disfigures them. He not only wants them dead, but to control what happens to them afterward—”
“Afterward?” Kohler’s features crinkled in confusion.
“After they’re dead. A form of necrophilia, Dr. Tewes calls it, but rather than have his way with the dead body, ahhh, in a sexual sense, like you earlier spoke of, having some sort of perversion there, you see, he may be getting his sexual excitement from the fire as much as from the garroting and holding another’s life in his hands.” “Tewes said all that?” asked Ransom, impressed.
“That way no one, not even the best surgeon—”
“Not even you, Dr. Fenger,” added Griffin.
“—can put them peacefully at rest for all eternity. No amount of cosmetics or preservation can help, you see? A burned, dehydrated body cannot e’en be given a proper wake.”
“I see,” replied Kohler.
Fenger absently added, “Given that every artery, every vein is collapsed by the heat of fire, the body can’t receive formaldehydes, and stuffing rags soaked in formaldehyde into body cavities is not really effective.” “It’s a sick desire to destroy the remains,” suggested Ransom. “By decapitation, then fire. Yet he preserves their features as if they are significant.”
“Like photographs,” Griff added.
Dr. Fenger lit a slim cigar and smoke encircled them.
Kohler coughed, Griff rocked on his heels, and Ransom chewed on his unlit pipe. Fenger said, “You fellows could be on to something. But it’s what besets the man . . . the ghosts of his past—according to Tewes—ones gone unfulfilled, ones ne’er put to rest, that have a way of rising from the grave.” Kohler nodded, his mind racing with Fenger’s reply.
“Then, by God, Ransom, get on to this madman’s trail. Find the ghosts that beset him! But first, I need on my desk tomorrow morning a full report for Mayor Harrison!”
CHAPTER 21
The same night at the Tewes residence
“I’m done with it! No more James Phineas Murdock Tewes, no more hiding behind this disguise!” Jane Francis announced when she stormed in. She’d just returned from the fair, walking out on Kohler’s conspiracy against Alastair and on any hope of helping find a killer. “Who am I kidding? They don’t want my help—either of them!” “Who, Mother?”
“Ransom and Nathan! Alastair at least is honest; he never expected anything of me, Tewes that is. Nathan, on the other hand, lied just to use me. He never believed in the idea of profiling the killer. It was all just part of his ruse.” “Whatever are you talking about, Mother?” Gabby followed her as she stormed about the clinic.
“Only wanted information on Ransom. And to grind Ransom into the ground ’til he can stand no more. Damnable man wants my affections, too!”
“Isn’t Chief Kohler married?”
“Yes, but in a Chicago minute, he’d set me up as his mis-tress.”
“Mother! Really!” Gabby tried keeping up as Jane stormed each room, lifted something, banged it or tossed it CITY FOR RANSOM
239
and continued on. “Slow down, Mother, my God. What has happened?”