Another theory had it that a now dead-killed-horse butcher by the name of Timothy Crutcheon was the man behind the Vanishings. Crutcheon sold rags and bottles when he could not find a dead horse in need of butchering. Most knackers were independent, and if they did not work at the yards, then they must drum up their own business by finding someone wanting to rid the farm of a useless aged animal. A lot of locals suspected Crutcheon of many a local crime, especially when a horse came up lame or too suddenly off his feet. People suspected this particular Leather Apron of poisoning a horse in order to generate revenue. A knacker normally purchased a sick or aged animal for a scant price and butchered it for parts, hide, and flesh, which he then turned around and sold at a handy profit. It was grueling, cruel work indeed; not the sort of career path people wanted for their children.
Aside from his unfortunate profession, Crutcheon traded on his unfortunate looks, having boils all over his body and face. It was rumored he’d once been a sideshow attraction. People called him a cunning man, a male witch of the black arts, and to make a living, he traded on his notoriety. Possibly another offshoot victim of the real killer, Crutcheon had turned up dead. Logan and Behan had investigated and declared that old Crutcheon had died of multiple stab wounds with a pitchfork where he lay sleeping in a barn well within the city limits, a barn owning to a family with ten children afoot. The pitchfork also belonged to the farmer, and it’d somehow become buried in Crutcheon’s chest, discovered when the eldest son had come out to feed stock and milk the family cow.
No one knew why Crutcheon chose this place to sleep; he’d come in the night, uninvited. Most likely, if pursued, the case of Crutcheon would unravel quickly and surround the fears a mother and father had for their children on seeing the boil-infested wizard waddle into their barn. Alastair imagined the man waking with a scream due to a sharp three-pronged pain in his aged chest.
Other such outbreaks of fear would continue citywide until the killer was caught and the Vanishings ended.
His phone rang. He’d finally taken the step to have one installed since the fiasco of being unable to contact Jane and Gabby at the moment they were in the most danger from the Phantom, the night he and Griff had had to navigate the city in a hansom cab going full tilt during a thunderstorm as the only means of getting to Jane’s in time. He now lifted the phone to learn it was Nathan Kohler calling.
“You have had time to think it over. What do you say? Think of it as an opportunity for the two of us to work toward a common goal and to bury old hatchets, Alastair.”
Alastair said nothing.
“Alastair?”
Since when has Nathan my best interest at heart?”
“Alastair?”
And when did I become Alastair instead of Inspector or simply Ransom to this man?
“Are you there?”
“I said I wanted to sleep on it.”
“Make the right decision, man.” Kohler hung up.
“Now that’s the Nathan I know,” he said to the silent phone.
“You can ’ave no kinna self-worth in such a business, even though it keeps bread on ye table,” the horse knacker named Houston told Alastair as he kept moving about the Chicago Stock Yards, pulling on his leather gloves and apron, snatching for his tools. “Bloody truth of it is, even round here there’s a hexarchy.”
“What do you mean, Jack, a hexarchy?” Alastair, while not a friend knew Jack Houston from the pubs.
“Six levels of men atop you!”
“A pecking order?”
“Aye…even in the yards.” He stopped in his tracks long enough to give a shake of the head, then launched into butchering a dead horse at his feet. “The ones doing beef, now they’re at the top, then comes swine-the real money-makers, you see.” He’d already removed the horse’s head. “Then it trickles down to your lamb and chicken and veal, down to goat meat, you see, but horse meat…” He paused, lifting his bloody mallet-sized hatchet and using it to punctuate his words, blood dribbling from it as he did so. “Well, now you see horse meat’s tough as hell, and it’s not so savory nor wanted, and as most of the cutting we do ends in food for other animals-dogs, cats, and then there’s the soap-makers buying a ton of it. You see, then, we knackers, we’re the bottom of the rung ’round here, so I say again, you can’t have no opinion of yourself in this business.”
Ransom asked Jack if he knew anyone around the yards who was strange or eccentric, and he immediately knew it was a ridiculous question to ask under the circumstances.
“You mean someone capable of taking one of these”-he held up the cleaver this time-“to a human being?”
“Yes, I believe it’s what I’m asking.”
Jack thought long and hard about this as he continued to butcher the dead horse, working off the limbs one joint at a time. “There’s old Hatch, maybe Quinn…even Sharkey, but I gotta tell you, even those fellows, bloody crazy as they are…even they’d have to be pushed to considerable limit to chop up a senator’s lass.”
Jack never stopped talking, even as Alastair started away, unable to take the stench of the yards any longer. Alastair understood Jack’s excitement. It was most assuredly the first time anyone had ever come asking questions of his profession or the men in it.
Ransom could still hear Jack talking as he closed the last gate on the last stall he must pass through to get clear of this place. It would take a carriage ride of several blocks to get clear of the odors that daily hovered over the entire area of the Southside Stock Yards. Even so, the stench in his nostrils and throat remained.
He had the cabbie pull over at a neighborhood grocery and got out. He went inside and purchased a sarsaparilla to wash down the clinging odors in his throat. The label on the drink made amazing claims, that it could settle the mind and provide a mental state for making enormous sums of money among other things. The label had three paragraphs of text touting the wonderful properties of cocaine, which made up two thirds of the drink’s marvelous ingredients, and the rest was sugar. But the label made no claim of effectiveness against horrid odors, and it did nothing for odors clinging to his clothes.
He stepped from the store, having drained half the bottle, when he saw a homeless street urchin, dirty and hungry-looking, staring up at him. The boy was missing his front teeth, and Ransom hoped this was due to natural causes. The boy appeared perhaps eight or nine-same age as some of the Vanished.
“Say, Mister, you got a penny?”
Alastair saw such children about the streets of Chicago every day; the number of homeless families and the growing population of children on the street like this boy represented a staggering problem that seemed without answer. The city fathers had begun talking about it, but no one had done anything about it.
“Mind drinking after me, son?” Alastair asked, handing him the remainder of his soft drink.
“No, sir! Thank you, sir!” The boy took hold of the bottle as if it were a lifeline, and before Ransom could ask his name, he’d scurried off with the drink as if to find a secret place to relax and enjoy its contents.
Alastair had intentionally gone to work on the Vanishings case by hitting the streets, in an effort to avoid going into the station house, to avoid another confrontation with Chief Kohler and to buy time. He’d earlier arranged to meet with his street snitch, and he did not have a long wait before Bosch-otherwise known as Dot ’n’ Carry-showed up. They got into the cab, and the driver was told to drift about the area.
“It’s the Vanishings, isn’t it?” Bosch asked. “They put you onto the case, didn’t they? I’m not surprised. Told me mates the other night they gotta put Ransom onto the case.”