by Lisa Black
Theresa checked the right back pocket of the trousers, reaching in with a cautious and gloved hand. Technically she should have patted them or removed the pants first. Reaching into unknown pockets could result in disastrous encounters with dirty needles or other unpleasant items. But the extremely delicate condition of the clothing made her put aside her own rules. The man had six cents on him, a nickel and a penny. Again, she picked up the halogen lamp for a closer look. “I don’t even know about this decade.”
Frank had been inspecting the one remaining wall. “What do you mean?”
“I don’t know if you’re going to want to hear this. I don’t even want to hear this.”
“What?”
“It may sound simplistic, but pocket change is generally a reliable indicator of the time a body went missing. You would think we would carry around coins from any year in the past twenty or so, but as a practical matter—”
He came closer, peered over her shoulder at the items in her palm.
“Spit it out, Tess. What year are they?”
“The penny,” she told him, “is from 1931. The nickel says 1935.”
He picked up the copper coin with Lincoln’s head on one side and sheaves of wheat on the reverse, gently, as if it might disintegrate as easily as the man’s shirt. Theresa flipped over the nickel, viewing the standard American Indian and buffalo reliefs.
“You mean this body’s been here for seventy-five years?” Frank demanded.
Several things occurred to Theresa.
First, that—assuming the man had been murdered—at least they did not have a deranged, decapitating killer running around the city. The killer would almost certainly be as deceased as his victim by now, or at least too frail to be hefting bodies onto dissecting tables.
Second, that given the time lapse, this case would be very difficult, if not impossible, to solve.
Third, that the year 1935 put this man’s death in the midst of the infamous Torso Murder spree, in which at least a dozen people were killed, usually dismembered and scattered about the Cleveland area like the seeds for a grisly harvest. The killer had never been caught and all but three of the victims remained unidentified.
Most had been found in or near the desolate valley outside, called Kingsbury Run. Oh, and the press would fall on the story like cats on an open can of tuna.
“Crap,” she said.
“Yeah,” her cousin said, seconding that.
Six cents. Had the killer robbed the victim and not bothered with the coins? Or had six cents been a reasonable amount of pocket change at that time? She found herself glancing at the skull, as if it could tell her. How had he come to be walled up? Hadn’t anyone missed him? “Who owned this patch of floor, that they could brick it in without anyone else noticing? Was this one big room, or apartments, or what?”
“I’m a little fuzzy on that myself,” Frank told her. “Yo! Mr. Lansky!”
The man approached, holding his unlit cigar in front of him like a talisman, stopping at the two-by-fours that marked the edge of the small room. When asked, he explained what he had found when they first began clearing the building, three weeks before. His gaze settled on the bones laid out on the table and stayed there throughout the conversation.
“The south side of the ground floor had serious fire damage, really blackened. The upper floors weren’t bad. The hallway passed through the center of the building, so that the offices had exterior windows.”
“How many separate units were on this floor?” Theresa asked.
“Four or five. I didn’t really pay attention. From the variety of materials I’d guess it’s been divided and subdivided plenty of times over the years. I don’t have any idea what it looked like originally.”
“Did they have plumbing? Drains?”
“Sure. They all had lavatories, sinks, and toilets, I think at least four on each floor. We’ve ripped them all out.”
“Which suite did this little room open to?”
He stopped looking at the corpse just long enough to blink at her, check out her legs in their khaki trousers, and blink again.
She rephrased. “Where was the door?”
“What door?” he finally asked.
“The door into this room.” She spoke with more patience than she felt.
He put the unlit cigar to his lips and, she swore, puffed on it. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There wasn’t any door. Anywhere. If there had been, we’d have emptied the room before we used the sledgehammers. It’s so damn dark in here that my guys took out most of the opposite wall before they saw—that.”
Theresa waved the halogen light at what remained of the other walls. They appeared unbroken, though hardly finished—merely rough wooden strips with plaster oozing through their cracks from the other side.
Frank’s phone rang, and he walked away to answer the call.
“The door had been bricked up?” she asked Lansky.
“No brick. Plaster and furring strips.”
“So the door had been plastered over?” she persisted.
“Or there never was a door, and whoever did—this”—he nodded at the body with revulsion—“added a whole wall to block it up.”
“Or it was in the sections that you already took out.”
“Nah,” he argued. “Guys would have noticed. No door, no molding. They said straight plaster and furring, nothing odd the whole length.
There are some drywalled areas in the southwest corner, but they were at least thirty feet away. I’m telling you, a building this old, the walls have probably been moved and rebuilt a dozen times.”
“But no one ever found this.”
He visibly shivered. “Or they did and didn’t want to tell anybody. Is there anything else you need from me? I’m going to send my guys to another job, unless there’s a chance we’re going to be able to do anything here today….”
“No chance,” she assured him.
“Mr. Greer isn’t going to like that.” This seemed to bother him even more than the corpse.
The hole at the bottom of the table still intrigued her. “Was there a bathroom or kitchen adjacent to this room?”
“Half bath. No tubs or kitchens in the building. I think it was all office space, maybe used as a warehouse later on. We took out plumbing here.” He tapped his foot on the floor where he stood, to the south of the mystery room, near the row of studs.
Perhaps that had been part of the original space—otherwise where did the water come from that then drained out? “Where did all this plumbing dump to?”
He had grown sufficiently accustomed to the corpse to look away from it for up to ten seconds, and did so now to give her an incredulous look. “Sewer.”
“I mean, where did the pipes go?”
“Cellar.”
“This building has a basement?”
“I wouldn’t call it that. Just an access area for pipes and wires.”
“I want to see that.”
“No,” he told her in a solemn tone. “I don’t think you do.”
She pointed out the hole in the table and the apparently corresponding hole in the floor. “I think he had a drain system here that he dismantled when he bricked—closed—this space up. He filled in the hole in the floor with some sort of putty so that it wouldn’t be noticed from the basement. I need to see where a pipe would have gone.”
He sighed. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Frank returned to fall in line with her as she followed the construction manager. “Warn you about what?”
“I hope you didn’t wear a good suit today.” Theresa pulled a diminutive but powerful flashlight from her pocket as they descended from the gloom of the empty building to the outright dark of the basement. Cellar, she thought, correcting herself.
“I’ve learned never to wear a good suit. Hey, how is Rachael getting along at OSU?”
“Still bouncing off the walls with excitement. She talks almost too fast to understand when she calls, but apparently her classes are
going well. Of course she’s too busy studying to call very often.”
He put his hand on the back of her neck as they reached the bottom of the stairs, pulling her hair slightly, letting her know that he knew she was a little bit miserable and would not admit it. It had been three weeks and two days, not long enough for Theresa to adjust to the emptiness of her nest.
Mr. Lansky had not exaggerated. Theresa didn’t need to duck her five-foot-seven-inch frame to avoid coating her hair with cobwebs but felt like she did. Columns of stone, here and there, supported the structure above. Noises from the city outside faded to a vague hum. The floor consisted of hard dirt and still appeared much cleaner than the surfaces upstairs. Flashlights lost strength by the time the beams found the outer walls, leaving the edges of their new world hovering in gloom. It smelled of coolness and silence.
The construction manager aimed his flashlight upward and silently illuminated the copper piping, green with age, traveling along the underside of the ground-level floor. Next to them ran a much wider, darker tube.
She tapped it with one latex-gloved finger and moved to avoid the shower of dust that action produced. “Is that the drainpipe?”
“Yep. Cast iron.”
Frank said, “Iron? Odd that they hadn’t replaced that by now.”
“If it ain’t broke,” Mr. Lansky intoned, “don’t fix it.”
They continued their cautious shuffle across the open space with only three flashlights for illumination. Theresa wished she could have brought one of the halogens, trailing its electrical cord behind her like a line of bread crumbs.
The construction manager stopped at the approximate center of the building’s foundation and all three of them looked up. Theresa located the hole, neatly drilled through the floor and then filled in. Perhaps twelve inches of space separated it from the drainpipe. “Could there have been a smaller pipe through that hole that emptied into the drainpipe?”
“Sure,” the man said at once. “There’s a clean-out right here; he could have hooked up to that. Of course then it’s not available to you as a clean-out if you need one, though it’s probably got one or two more along the length—yeah, there’s another one. This is a quality pipe. They built things to last in those days, gotta hand them that.”
“Can you tell if there had been a pipe attached to it?”
“No, lady, I can’t.” Then he added more patiently, “That little bit of space, they wouldn’t have had to install brackets or anything even. Just a pipe that hasn’t been there for a long, long time. If it ever was. You don’t need me, you need a psychic. One of them ghost hunters.”
He found this amusing and began to laugh, only to cut the chuckle off into a strangled sound when a footstep creaked overhead.
“Our patrol officer,” Theresa assured him, but no color returned to the man’s face and he hunched into himself.
Frank had lost interest in the piping and now directed his light into the dimness around them. “Dirt floor,” he said to Theresa.
“I know. Visions of John Wayne Gacy. But the ground is so steady—I don’t see any depressions.” If bodies had been buried in the basement—always a popular location for one’s victims—they would see irregularities in the surface where the bodies decomposed and created a hollow deep in the ground. The dirt on top would settle inward, making a dip. They could probe, piercing the ground with a metal rod to see if they hit a soft area, but she was not certain that would even work for ancient graves. Ground-penetrating radar would be better, if they could talk one of the universities or maybe an engineering firm into doing it for them. The county would never pay for the equipment.
Besides, they had no reason to believe other victims existed, even if the man upstairs turned out to be a victim of homicide. He had been not buried but walled up in a hidden shrine, as if the killer felt guilt.
She didn’t believe that, though. The type of people who decapitated other people didn’t usually stop at one. He could have brought in more dirt to fill in the depressions and then smoothed the floor of the cellar flat again.
Their patrol officer paced, finding another loose floorboard to give off a deep creeeeeak. The construction manager decided it was time to leave and headed for the stairway.
“You see anything of note?” Frank asked her.
“A lot of dust.”
“Me neither.”
She followed him up the steps. “We need to hang on to this building for another day or two, you know. There’re no signs of other victims, but I’d hate to think of bodies lying down here and then we pile the building on top of them and bury them deeper.”
“Depends on what they’re going to do with this property. They’ll probably dig it out for a new building, put in a better foundation and more subground levels.”
“In which case I’d still rather find them before a backhoe does.”
“Don’t talk about them. There is no them. There’s just this one guy.”
“Right. There is no them,” she repeated like a mantra as they emerged onto the ground floor.
Unless they had, at long last, uncovered the lair of the Torso killer. Then there could be half of Depression-era Cleveland buried under the rock-hard dirt beneath them. The thought made her ill, and yet a little frisson of excitement ruffled the tiny hairs on the back of her neck.
It would be horrible.
It would also be the case of a lifetime.
Grandpa would be so proud.
She asked Mr. Lansky: “Was the stairway to the second floor here? It couldn’t have been convenient for all the second-floor tenants to have to go past one of the offices to get there.”
“Naw, there was an outside stairway to the second floor. We took that down last week.”
The construction manager didn’t pause as he spoke, just continued through the cleared area and kept on going until he had left the structure entirely. Their patrol officer, by contrast, stood entirely too close to the body for her comfort. “You didn’t touch anything, did you?”
“No,” he said insistently with a convincing shudder.
“What are you going to do with this body, Tess?” Frank asked, most likely impatient for his midmorning cigarette break.
“I don’t know. If I scoop him into a bag, the anthropologist is going to have to sort out every tiny bone all over again. I’m thinking of taking the entire tabletop. We can saw through the two-by-four legs and carry it like a tray.” It wouldn’t be the biggest thing she’d ever hauled back to the lab. That honor went to a three-bedroom recreational vehicle with four flat tires. “I wish I could Saran Wrap him to it first.”
“Why can’t you?”
“I hate plastic wrap. Too much static electricity. It would take half of our trace evidence away with it. I suppose I could cover him with brown paper, though….” She pondered various ideas while prodding gently at the left back pocket, which contained a firm, rectangular object. The trousers held together better than the shirt had but still ripped at the slightest stress. “I need an archaeologist. Someone trained in handling ancient things.”
“Seventy-five years isn’t exactly ancient.” Frank crouched, examining the rubble of plaster and wood covering the floor. He began to pick up pieces, give them a glance, and toss them outside the area of the room, searching for anything that had been inside the room before the walls tumbled down.
“The pocket change could be misleading us. He might have been a coin collector and kept them aside to take home. He could have died in 1940, or 1950, or 1960, for all we know.” Concentrating mightily, she managed to slip the object out of the pocket with minimal tearing. A wallet? No.
He scattered more plaster stones. “And this still could be some kind of natural death. Like the guy who leaves Mom’s corpse in her bedroom for twenty years, that sort of thing.”
“Then again”—she stared at the object in her hand as her heart began to beat a few pulses faster—“maybe not.”
Frank looked up. “What is it?”
Sh
e tilted it toward him, the hard leather case with its gold-colored shield nestled inside. “He was a cop.”
CHAPTER 3
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2
The Torso Murders of Kingsbury Run began in 1935, unless one counted the pieces of a woman washed up by Lake Erie the year before, in which case they would have begun in 1934. The murders stopped in 1938, or perhaps 1950, if one could accept a twelve-year gap in the killer’s activities or supposed that he became more circumspect in hiding his victims—while aware that circumspection had never been part of his style. When victims weren’t cut into pieces and dropped into either the lake or the river, they were wrapped in paper and left like parcels for unsuspecting passersby to find. Some particularly unlucky male victims were divested of not only their heads but their genitalia. Sometimes the heads remained missing, sometimes only the heads were found, and sometimes the heads were placed near the body, in one case buried close by with the hair quite noticeably visible above the earth. He killed both men and women; only three of the victims were ever identified, and one of those tentatively.
His reign produced either twelve or fourteen victims, depending on which individuals were included or excluded. Unless one considered the rash of skeletons and other bodies found around New Castle, Pennsylvania, and one found in Youngstown, in which case the list of murders added up to twenty-six occurring between 1923 and 1950.
He was never caught.
The Torso murderer, also known as the Mad Butcher or the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run if you really wanted to get dramatic, was Cleveland’s very own serial killer, more prolific, equally as bent, but slightly tidier than Jack the Ripper.
Standing over the body, Theresa asked herself if she could really solve this, finish the case that her cop grandfather had told her about, repeated over and over at her request like a macabre bedtime story. He would have been thrilled at this development. He would have—
She stopped herself. Time to get real. If the case couldn’t be solved in its own time, what could she hope to do so many years later? All the city would get out of this latest chapter would be more frustration. Not to mention the maelstrom of media attention any whiff of it would inevitably produce. And this dead cop would give off more than a whiff…more like a sirocco.
