Fenger gulped his whiskey and slammed the glass down. He abruptly left.
Kohler and Alastair stared across at one another. “Are you trying to figure out a way to gain this treasure that’s fallen in our laps all for yourself, Alastair?”
“Don’t be a fool, Nathan. A thing like this gets out; people talk.”
“People are already talking about you, Inspector, and some are speculating you had my blessing in murdering Waldo Denton.”
“That’s a bald-faced lie.”
“That you had my blessing or that you did it? And how else to explain his sudden disappearance?”
“I don’t know. I was in Michigan. I heard about it when I got back, like I am hearing about this mess with the grieving senator for the first time.”
“The press is calling this madman Leather Apron.”
“Why Leather Apron?”
“Who knows. Someone put forth the theory he is a knacker.”
“A horse butcher?”
“Someone says they saw a knacker fellow in a leather apron in the area right before the Chapman girl’s body was found.”
“So we are going on hearsay now?”
“The press is.”
“Is the body still at Fenger’s morgue?”
“Unrecognizable if it were not for a birthmark. Did you know that some birthmarks go all the way down to the bone? I hadn’t known that until Fenger educated me.”
“The senator had to identify his granddaughter by a birthmark?”
“A bell-shaped mark, yes. I tell you, Alastair, the body was scavenged in the manner of…well of a deer carcass hanging from a tree is how Fenger put it.”
Alastair took the drink now and downed it.
“Then you are with us?” asked Kohler, his long-time nemesis.
Alastair tried on the notion, looking at it from all angles, trying to see how Kohler could twist it to get at him. How might it backfire? In how many ways?
“I didn’t say that,” he announced.
“You drink my whiskey-a peace offering-and yet you stand against me?”
“I’ll need that drink,” he replied, “if I’m to have a look at this little girl’s butchered carcass.” Ransom left with his badge in hand as abruptly as had Fenger, hoping to catch Christian on the street, to talk privately about this matter. He wanted to know how Christian could have gotten in so deep in so short a time.
But Alastair was stopped by Logan and Behan, who had assembled all their notes and files on the case, dumping them onto his desk. “Chief’s idea,” said Logan.
Behan added, “Told us we’re taking our lead from you now, even before you arrived, Inspector Ransom.”
“Here’s a brief on the whole bloody matter.” Logan slapped a file into his hands.
“Shit, boys! This is your case, not mine.” He pushed the file back into Logan’s hands. “I’m outta here.”
Dr. Fenger moved far too fast for Alastair to catch him outside the Des Plaines house. He must see the body in the morgue anyway, so he would see Christian in private there to ferret out how he came to be in such a fix. Why did he need money? It couldn’t just be that he wanted it for the hospital.
At Cook County, he followed the usual route into the bowels of this place where the morgue had been relegated, and as always the stench of death and chemicals proved only the first obstacle here in the basement facilities.
“They should tear down this place and start over,” he muttered to himself. “Now that would require quite the sum.”
The lift door opened on a long corridor that took Alastair to its terminus, Dr. Fenger’s second domain here. There were several reasons they placed morgues below ground. The ease of transportation to and from the hospital, the general public’s sensibilities, yes, even the coolness, although with crude ice box refrigeration units now in use, the primary concern remained odors. Although it must be fifty degrees down here, the odors cut into the nostrils and brain sharper than Fenger’s scalpel.
Prevailing overall, the odor of decay. Hard to maintain any sort of religious fervency here as all seemed lost in this undeniable odor of putrefaction. Cook County Morgue was the largest in all the Midwest. Its shelves and cold unit were filled with the indigent and unclaimed John and Jane Does, suicides, homicides, twisted corpses of those who died freak deaths. He half expected to see the bloated, water-logged corpse of one Waldo Denton here someday, washed ashore. But for now the odor was the predominant matter. No amount of cleansing fluids or fans could overpower this stench.
Ransom moved onward toward the source.
Aboveground and in his operating theater, Dr. Christian Fenger reigned as the surgeon of the century, well regarded and respected, even canonized by everyone in the hospital-a hero in his own “home.” But not belowground in his morgue. Here there was no heroic life-saving measures; here there was no life to save, and his surgical skills did not repair so much as they deconstructed the “patient” if he could be called a patient; certainly he was “patient” to a fault, the corpse.
Down in the depths of the morgue, then, Christian put on another hat, and he performed something closer to the butcher, meatball surgery it was called in some circles-the work of the pathologist who spent all his time “reading” the corpse of anyone who may have met with foul play, committed suicide, or was victim of a freak accident. Here Christian determined cause of death, an act at opposite poles from being the savior upstairs.
Acting as city coroner had to take its toll on a man, reasoned Alastair as he pushed through the double doors, his cane against the stone floor along the corridor having announced him before his barging in. Ransom was so often in and out of here that few paid any special attention to him. He’d come on the occasion of every victim of the Phantom. Dr. Fenger’s medical assistants paid him no heed now, save a nod before going back to their various tasks.
“I thought I’d find Dr. Fenger here,” he said to the room.
“He’s had to see to Dr. Tewes,” replied one of the men, his once white apron a rainbow of florid and dull colors.
“Tewes? Tewes was here?”
“They carried him out on a gurney,” explained the man.
“Fell out like a girl when he looked at the Chapman child’s corpse; the mutilation was that horrid.”
“The child…her body.”
“Have you come for a look yourself?” came the obvious question.
“I have, but what bloody business has Tewes in all this? Damn him!”
“I suspect he’s just out to make a name for himself,” came the reply as the attendant wheeled a death gurney before Alastair.
“Oh, he’ll be talked about in the pubs tonight, he will,” chimed in the other man from behind his mask. “How he fell out.”
“Morgan, it’s a normal reaction for most people!” shouted the first attendant. “Not everyone’s got the constitution of a knacker.” He then casually pulled away the sheet that had covered a misshapen lump of flesh beneath.
Alastair audibly gasped. Only the long flowing curling red tresses of her hair looked human. He had now laid eyes on every conceivable horror done a human being. Beheadings of the Phantom did not compare; fire victims did not compare. Nothing in all his career had prepared him for this. “It’s…are you sure it’s human?” he asked.
“Dr. Fenger and a team of us have determined not only is it human but that it is Senator Chapman’s missing grandchild.”
“There’s no face left. No nose…ears…not even eyes.”
“Nor cheek, nor forehead.”
The birthmark alone they had said in Kohler’s office. Ransom saw that whole chunks of flesh had been carved away. It brought to mind an evening at Berghoff’s where the chef stood behind his roast or ham and carved off slices for your plate.
“Cover it…cover it now!” Alastair raced from the room.
Behind him, he heard the man called Morgan snicker and say, “And him the man of the hour.”
“Shut up, Morgan,” said the other.
Alastair went searching the building for Fenger and Jane Francis, who had said she would end Dr. Tewes’s career in Chicago, and now this. She had come as Tewes to view the remains of the Chapman girl. Whatever possessed her to do so?