City of the Absent by Robert W. Walker Page A

would refuse it.”
    â€œSuch a gift, such an opportunity to use your skills, your father’s surgical tools on human flesh?”
    â€œDamn you, Alastair, I am no part of this movement afoot in your city to have involuntary organ donation going on amid…amid murder and intrigue.”
    â€œIt has been going on for years, curtailed only during wartime when there are always enough unidentifiable bodies and parts to fill every medical school in the land, so why should it be any different here in Chicago?”
    â€œScience must progress at all costs,” she said, climbing from the cab. “We all accept that. There is always a cost, butharvesting a living person of her organs? It’s an abhorrent notion on so many levels; no, Alastair, I know of no medical people who would stoop that low.”
    â€œOr admit to it?”
    She gritted her teeth at this and glared at him. “You can be so exasperating! Read my heart. I am not one of your bloody suspects.”
    â€œWho, then, in the medical community?”
    â€œOnly the most ambitious.”
    â€œNo one is more ambitious in the field than is Christian Fenger.”
    â€œDon’t be ridiculous. He has scruples. He’s above such behavior.”
    â€œOnly because he has the city to supply him with cadavers.”
    â€œWhich rules him out! God, and he calls you a friend?”
    â€œWho, then, in the city has Christian’s obsession but not his access to cadavers?”
    â€œWhom, Alastair, do you wish me to speak ill of? All those who worked so hard to keep Jane Francis out of the medical field? All those who refuse to stop killing babies and pregnant women because they fail to grasp the simplest medical wisdom? Stupidly rationalizing such practices as going from an autopsy to a birthing without use of soap and water? Or those still bleeding people because they hold firm to an idea of all disease residing in ‘bad’ blood rather than treating the organ?”
    â€œCan you provide me with a list of names?”
    â€œDon’t you get it, Alastair? I suspect none of these idiots of wanton murder.”
    â€œPerhaps Christian will be more forthcoming when I interrogate him on the subject, after I get some sleep.”
    â€œOhhh! Just how infuriating can you be!” She stomped over the boards of her porch and disappeared into the semi-darkness of her home.
    â€œWhat’d I say?” he asked himself, the coachman, and the horse.
    None had an answer.

CHAPTER 12
    The cool morning passed reluctantly but finally gave way to a warm sun and clear skies with scattered clouds, and anyone passing the corner of Van Buren and Dearborn would never have known anything untoward had happened there, so complete had Shanks and Gwinn’s replacements cleaned up after the murder.
    As the cityscape changed from gloominess to brightness, the city of big shoulders shook itself awake and began to tremble with the noise of rumor, gossip, innuendo, and half-truth as the story of Nell Hartigan’s unnatural death circulated. Chicago cast its jaundiced eye over the streets and over the rumor that a Pinkerton agent, and a female at that, had not only been raped and murdered, but had her unborn child ripped from her insides by some maniac who had likely sacrificed the fetus to Satan himself.
    Chicagoans cast a furtive eye down every alleyway and bystreet, feeling a growing sense of unease, as if a living Devil had climbed from the sewers and walked among the population, interested in feeding on babies. Chicago looked over its big shoulders, down roads that yesterday were mud, today paved over proper thoroughfares. The meandering, amber-tinted snake called the Chicago River invited furtherrumor as the highway by which Satan made stealth possible with a barge from Hades that wended its way through the earthbound community, evil coming ashore, doing the deed, and returning to the safety and invisibility of the barge on the crowded