by Lisa Black
Theresa swept her thumb over the gold badge. “It looks just like yours.”
“It would,” Frank told her. “The design hasn’t changed since 1906. Unfortunately detective shields don’t have numbers, so we can’t run him down that way.”
“You’d have lists of which cop had what number, three-quarters of a century back?”
“A police department is a bureaucracy. It keeps lists of everything, including the serial numbers of department-issued weapons.” He plucked the gun from the table and pulled out his phone, squinting at both of them—the little numbers on the phone and the little numbers on the gun. He had not yet given in to reading glasses. Neither had Theresa.
Her phone rang. Chris again. She snapped it shut without answering.
“Is that Leo?” Frank asked, referring to her problematic boss. He watched her with the phone to his ear, obviously on hold.
“No.” She brushed the last specks off the badge, avoiding her cousin’s eye. He had many of the characteristics of an older brother—the annoying ones. If he sniffed an uncomfortable subject, he’d run that rabbit to ground every time.
He merely raised an eyebrow, phone still clamped to his ear. “Who, then?”
“Chris.”
“Cavanaugh?”
“Yep.”
“You’re not taking his calls? Why?”
“Because I have more important things to do right now.”
“What’d that showy ass do, stand you up for a date?” Frank had never been a fan of the high-profile hostage negotiator.
“That wouldn’t be possible, since we’re not even really dating.”
“I should think not—what? Yes, I’m here.” He relayed the gun information to the person on the phone, and Theresa turned back to the body.
Besides, if she and Chris were really dating, he would call her more than once a month before texting for a lunch date as if she’d drop everything for the opportunity to see him. And he wouldn’t have taken the city manager’s daughter to the Cleveland Playhouse benefit last week.
Of course it was okay that he did, because they weren’t really dating. Besides, the benefit was more of a political event.
She set the badge next to the left foot. The shoe on that foot had what appeared to be masking tape wrapped around the toe.
The body snatchers, the Medical Examiner’s Office transport ambulance, were on their way with a Sawzall. She would cover the body with paper but still refused the plastic wrap idea.
Frank snapped his phone shut. “James Miller.”
“What?”
“CPD assigned a Smith and Wesson with that serial number to a James Miller.”
“How did you find that out so fast?”
“We got a great guy running our history museum and he’s got all the rolls from back then. Miller joined the force in 1929, was promoted to detective in 1932, was dismissed in 1936 for dereliction of duty.”
“Don’t you have to turn in your gun and badge when you get fired?”
“Usually. The historian has got to check some other records but says it isn’t clear why he was fired—the way the notes he could locate are worded, they could mean that Miller became derelict and was therefore fired. In other words, went AWOL.”
Theresa looked down, automatically directing her gaze to the head of the body when of course the head no longer sat at its usual spot at the top of the spinal cord. “Wouldn’t a cop suddenly going missing cause a stir?”
“Of course it would. I’m sure they investigated, but it will take a while to track down those reports. That’s if this is even him, and not someone who stole James Miller’s badge and gun either to pawn it or use it. Those were desperate times. The Torso killer wasn’t the only one operating in Cleveland.”
“What do you mean? We had another serial killer?”
“I meant the other kind of serial killers—mobsters. Cleveland was a wide-open town then. They’d cracked down in New York and Chicago, but here they stayed under the radar and had most of the cops on the force on their payrolls. That Untouchable guy had to come here and clean it up.”
“Eliot Ness. I know, but I thought hit men dumped their bodies, not constructed little shrines to them.”
“It’s not a shrine. I’ve gone through every pebble on the floor and they left nothing in this room but the body. And they would have wanted to make absolutely sure this body did not turn up—even then, they didn’t kill cops if they could help it. This table could have been here for another reason, gambling, making bathtub gin. Miller finds them, or wants a bigger cut or something, so they slit his throat, wall the place up, and conceal two crimes at once.”
“I don’t know,” she said skeptically. “Why make such a statement with the beheading if you didn’t want to display it as an object lesson for everyone else?”
“We don’t know that they didn’t. There could have been a gap of time between the murder and closing the room.”
She didn’t want to picture a line of delinquent clients traipsing past to gape at the body of James Miller. Spreading the brown paper shroud over the bones, she tucked it in at the edges. Officer Miller would be subjected to only empathetic gazes from now on.
Theresa picked up one of the halogen lights, aimed it at the remaining wall. The light danced off the ancient wood and the plaster welling up through its cracks. The construction appeared steady and strong; the job had not been done in haste. It might be the original structure, but then they had no way to tell what the two and a half missing walls had been like before their destruction. If the walling up of James Miller had been flimsily done it wouldn’t have kept him secret all these years.
The wood had aged over the years with a speckled pattern of discoloration. She took a small bottle of Hemastix test strips out of her crime scene kit and dampened the ends with distilled water. Then she got Frank to hold the light for her while she pressed a wet yellow tip to a large stain, dark against the dark wood. The feltlike yellow material instantly turned a deep blue. “There’s blood on the walls.”
“Wow, what a shock. Wouldn’t cutting someone’s head off produce a lot of blood?”
“That depends on how it’s done. If it takes a number of cuts to the carotids, then there would be blood spraying everywhere for a few seconds. Even if there’s only one quick stroke severing the neck, the heart could keep pumping out the rest of the blood since cardiac tissue can function more or less independently of the brain—assuming the victim is still alive, of course. But this”—she stood back, taking in all the darkened spots as a pattern and not merely a characteristic of the wood—“isn’t one or two arterial spurts. The drops are more discrete, separated.”
“Castoff?” Frank suggested.
“Upon castoff upon castoff, upon castoff.”
“As if someone got really medieval on his ass?”
Theresa couldn’t help but picture the Mad Butcher, dancing around the room covered in his victim’s blood, each thrust of the knife scattering red liquid across the wood and plaster. A fall breeze drifted through the windows behind her, carrying with it a hint of winter, and brushed the back of her neck.
She tested a few more stains. They all reacted positively. “Yes, it’s only four feet from the table, but it seems like an awful lot of drops for a relatively small amount of damage to the body. There’s no evidence of multiple stab wounds and/or bludgeoning, and no fractures.”
“If it’s mob work, it could have been something more subtle, some technique that hurts a lot but doesn’t kill quickly. Maybe they had questions for Officer Miller he didn’t want to answer. Or asked for something he didn’t want to give back. Though I can’t see why they’d leave him armed, in that case.”
Theresa dug a sliver of wood from one stain with a disposable scalpel, dropping it into a small manila envelope. She marked the location on her crime scene sketch before moving on to another stain. “Or this guy isn’t the only person who was killed in this room.”
“You really do think this is
the Torso killer’s workshop?”
“I think I need to sit down.” A joke, with no place to sit—but it really was too much: the bizarre circumstances, the time warp, the victim being a cop, the possible connection to a historic serial killer. “Who’s going to tell Mr. Lansky that we need to hang on to this building for a while?”
“I vote for you.”
“I vote for Leo.” Her boss had a deft hand for dealing with anyone he thought potentially useful to him—i.e., anyone outside the Medical Examiner’s Office—and would have the clout to hold up even a city councilman’s pet project. Whether he would have the fortitude, of course…Leo’s grasp of local politics exceeded even his considerable grasp of forensics.
“Good luck with that,” her cousin told her.
The plastic scalpel, meant to slice soft flesh and perhaps fabric, snapped in two and left the blade stuck in the hard wood. She couldn’t waste supplies and continued to work with it, careful not to let her fingers slide down to the cutting edge. “There isn’t any huge hurry, is there? Jacobs isn’t planning to build a mall here or anything?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Then we need to keep this. Besides, if we really can link it to the Torso killer, it will probably beat out the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to become the city’s number one tourist attraction.”
“You sound almost hopeful.”
She started on a third stain, snapped the scalpel further. “I can’t decide what to hope for. I’d love to know, like everyone else in Cleveland. But I don’t want to jump to conclusions. And how do we go about investigating a seventy-four-year-old crime? We may not be able to get DNA out of such old bones, or this ancient wood. What if all this blood doesn’t belong to him? What if he slaughtered half a dozen victims in this little den—how do we find reference samples after so many years?”
“Cheer up, cuz. You and I have worked cold cases before.”
She sealed another manila envelope with red tape. A metallic rattle from the building’s entrance told her the body snatcher team now approached with a gurney and, she hoped, a big-ass electric saw. “This case isn’t just cold. It’s frozen-solid cold. It’s liquid-nitrogen cold.”
“That’s why I need you.”
CHAPTER 4
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
1935
The lines scared him.
Snaking up the street and around the corner, a single-file assortment of men in worn clothing and beat-up shoes ended at the door to the soup kitchen. Each of them would get what they could, eat the soup and maybe shove the roll into their pocket for later or to take home to their families. It would almost certainly be their only meal today.
Some days James looked away. Other days he forced himself to stare at them, to see each man as an individual and not a piece of society’s offal. To remind himself how lucky he was to still have a job and the semblance of a normal life. They came with a price, yes, but the alternative remained more costly.
The driver’s door opened and his partner, Walter McKenna, dropped into the driver’s seat. Worn-out seat springs protested at his weight. “He didn’t see nothing.”
They’d spent the morning working their way down Prospect, inquiring with the merchants who were either friendly to cops or known for associating with those who weren’t, trying to scare up information about the burglary of a Euclid jewelry store the previous week. So far they had been “treated” by various shop owners to three cups of coffee each as well as a piece of apple pie, two cigarettes, and a cigar (for Walter) but had not learned anything about the burglary.
“Let’s go to lunch.” Walter started the car, and after the engine thought about it for a moment or two, it coughed to life. “You worry too much. Stop looking at them.”
“I know.”
“That’s not going to be you.”
“I know,” he repeated, though he didn’t.
They drove one block over and parked at the curb outside the Arcade—one of the advantages of having a car that said police on the side was the ability to park wherever you wanted, Eliot Ness and his traffic safety program notwithstanding—and went inside. Walter liked what he called “decent” food. No five-bit diner for him, so they often stopped at this collection of offices, eateries, and shops arranged in rings around five stories of open air, topped by a glass ceiling. Throngs of office workers, young clerks with out-of-style ties, and secretaries in modest skirts, swirled around them.
They sat in the diner window to watch the people going by, recognizing a good number of them. James pointed out a wiry guy skulking along with another man. “What about Henry?”
“Only hits groceries. He’d never try a jewelry store, he doesn’t have the contacts to unload the goods.”
“Maybe he’s trying to come up in the world.”
“Ain’t we all.”
The waitress came by. James ordered the cheapest thing on the menu—a ten-cent ham sandwich—instead of the tuna fish he would have preferred, because he knew he wouldn’t have to pay for it. An inefficient sop to his conscience—or his ego.
“How’s Helen?” Walter asked.
Not a non sequitur. Helen definitely planned to move up in the world.
“She wants a refrigerator.”
“Can’t blame her,” Walter said. “They’re great. No more dealing with the iceman, having that damn drip pan overflow and flood the kitchen. I couldn’t stand our iceman. Always showing off his muscles to my wife. You lift blocks of ice for a living, idiot, and she’s supposed to be impressed with you? I mean, you and Helen got electricity, right?”
“I have electricity. I don’t have the five hundred bucks a refrigerator would cost. I could buy a new car for that.”
“You don’t need a car. You do need to eat.”
“We eat fine.” He shouldn’t have said anything, knowing his partner would take his wife’s side. Walter’s spouse got whatever she wanted, because Walter’s police salary came with a healthy supplement from appreciative citizens—people who appreciated not being arrested for gambling, speeding, bootlegging, or beating up a business rival. Walter’s wife had a refrigerator. And a new dress every month. And their kids went to the parish school.
Helen, on the other hand, altered her dresses once in a while for a fresh look, made leftovers last for days, and saved her mascara for social occasions.
The other cop persisted. “Stuff lasts longer, because the temperature don’t go up and down as the ice melts.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I trust you, Jimmy. You know that, right?”
Again, the path his partner’s mind took did not present a mystery. James would have had plenty of money if he were a “normal” cop. Refusing to take it only gave the other “normal” cops a reason to think he might not be a stand-up kind of guy. Cops who weren’t stand-up guys made other cops nervous. “I know. I’m just careful, Walter. Maybe you should be, too.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing from me, you know that. But once Ness takes over—” Walter dropped his sandwich back onto his plate with disgust. “I don’t care about what that pretty-boy newshound did to Capone! Anybody could have gotten Capone, the guy did everything but piss in full view of the entire city! The ones operating here are a lot smarter.”
James waited until Walter went to work on another mouthful and kept his voice low. “Smarts may not have anything to do with it. You know Burton is going to win the mayoral race and his entire platform seems to be police corruption. Even without Ness, people are going to go down and I don’t want to be one of them.”
Walter licked his fingers and winked at the waitress. “I don’t get you, Jimmy. Without even blinking you’ll go up against a drunk with a gun who’s beating his wife, but let some politician shake his fist and you quiver.”
James had no trade to fall back on, no extended family to help him along, and the army didn’t have the budget to take guys back. He pictured himself waiting in a line of hungry men. “I can’t lose my job.�
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Walter’s soft face softened even more, and he shook his head. He understood, really. Walter wasn’t a bad guy. Not cruel, loved his wife despite his big talk about women, a good father. He would be right behind James against any criminal element…if only James felt comfortable enough to turn his back.
Now his partner leaned forward as if he might pat James’s hand. “It’s an election year, Jimmy. Guys say stuff like that every election year. Once the votes are counted it will be a different story. He can’t throw out the whole entire force, so he’ll concentrate on the big shots, fire a few captains to make it look good, and things will go on as before. Guys like you and me will always be here.”
He wiped his mouth with a napkin and got up; no need to wait for a check that wouldn’t come. James examined his pockets—sixty-five cents. He left five of them on the table as a tip for the waitress, or a hedge against completely giving in, the best he could do in the fight for his soul.
Then he followed his partner’s broad back out to the car, thinking: There is no you and me. There is no me and anybody. There’s just me.
Walter used one of the blue call boxes, placed on every other street corner, to check in. As rookie detectives, they didn’t warrant one of the new radio cars. They could have gone back to the station but Walter preferred to stay out and about rather than hang around the smoky, cramped building. So did James.
Fall had come but no scent of dead leaves made it past the gasoline fumes and market stands. A horn blared. James watched a particularly pretty girl step off the curb and cross the street, her skirt brushing the backs of her calves. Funny how hemlines went back down after the flapper dresses of the last decade. He would have preferred they kept going up. Had the crash sobered the country? Did Americans believe that because of their loose ways in the twenties they had somehow brought the Depression on themselves?
One year ago, a woman—or rather, parts of a woman—had washed up on the beach over in Euclid, a different precinct. Now and then Walter would wonder aloud what kind of pervert she must have been keeping company with to wind up like that, and the victim had never been identified, nor the case solved. If the city’s police force didn’t need Eliot Ness, why couldn’t it solve such a brutal crime? No, the modern age had arrived, and James wanted to ride its crest instead of dragging his feet trying to hold it back.
