She nodded, her mouth full, and they joined the mass of people heading toward the Hippodrome.

Chapter 44

Chapter 44

THE ROBEY STREET station house was filled with reporters when Francis arrived. After leaving Cue’s, he’d walked around the neighborhood, mulling over what he’d learned. Could it possibly be true?

The barman had no reason to lie. Dr. Holmes had committed atrocities right here in Chicago during the 1893 exposition, and elsewhere for some years before that, and gotten away with them until his capture. Francis had been a thirteen-year-old boy at the time, utterly captivated by the exposition; one of the few things that made his ignominious transfer to the Riverview force palatable. Riverview was much smaller and, despite Baumgarten’s insistence that it reflect his own clean Lutheran values, quite a bit seedier than the exposition, yet it stirred an echo of the wonder and delight that Francis had partaken of at the White City.

Now he felt the same sick terror he’d felt reading about Holmes’s crimes as a boy: men and women interred alive, then incinerated in the furnace Holmes had installed in his mansion, or their skeletons flensed and sold to medical colleges.

And this was not the first child murder in Chicago in recent years. In 1911, when little Elsie Paroubek disappeared, Francis had joined sergeants and volunteers in one of the biggest manhunts in the city’s history. After a month, her body was discovered in a sewage canal thirty-five miles from the city. The coroner’s report attested that she had been “mistreated,” then smothered, and tossed into the canal in or near Chicago, probably the same day she’d been abducted. No water was found in her lungs, and the official cause of death read Unknown.

Various suspects were questioned. Two committed suicide afterward. Another, a lunatic, fled into the woods. The real killer had never been found.

And two years ago, an Italian child had disappeared from Little Sicily, and after that a Gypsy girl. Both were a bit older than Elsie, but could they possibly be connected to the Riverview murder, and the one Cue had just told him about? Boston was a thousand miles from Chicago, but what were the odds of the same bizarre crime occurring twice within a few years, at such a great distance? He pushed open the station door and stepped inside, trying to make himself as inconspicuous as possible.

Most of Robey Street’s force had been sent to Riverview, so the crowd was chiefly made up of reporters who swarmed around the duty sergeant manning the front desk. Francis found a space by an open window to get some fresh air.

“Is that Francis Bacon? How are you, man?”

Francis turned to see a gangly young man in a snappy, if rumpled, checked suit and brown fedora, pencil tucked behind one ear and notebook in hand, a dog-eared magazine poking out of his jacket pocket. “Bennie. You’re looking well.”