Trail of Blood

by Lisa Black

  “No obvious poisons.”

  “I refuse to repeat myself.”

  “Not even alcohol.”

  “I’m not sure I would call alcohol a poison, but that’s for the do-gooders to debate. No alcohol.”

  “She was clean.”

  “And still dead,” Oliver pointed out. “Rather turns the whole concept of karma on its ear, don’t you think?”

  CHAPTER 14

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8

  PRESENT DAY

  Returning to the lab, Theresa walked right into an ambush. Leo waited at the laboratory door for her, his body between her and the coffee machine. Never a good sign.

  “We have a visitor.”

  In a rare absence, the Medical Examiner was away presenting a seminar in Columbus, so city councilman Greer had been shown into the conference room, where the battered 1950s décor had done nothing to improve his mood.

  He invaded her personal space immediately, towering over her in a suit too heavy for the weather. She hadn’t noticed the watery eyes or the weak chin upon their first acquaintance, but then they’d been separated by some distance and a dead body. “Are you the one holding up my building?”

  “Um.” She puzzled over this choice of words for a moment, then said, “No. I—we’re—investigating a homicide that occurred there.”

  “Yeah, seventy-four years ago, and you’ve already removed the body and all your clues or whatever. Yet you need to turn my building into your own little stage. This isn’t about you, Ms. MacLean, get that?”

  “Of course it isn’t—I don’t know what would make you think—”

  He held up that morning’s edition of the Plain Dealer. “This, maybe?” Metro Section, first page: New Torso Victim Discovered in Downtown Building. A subheading went on: Third generation of Cleveland law tackle the case dads couldn’t solve.

  He slapped the paper down onto the conference table. “Next you’ll be declaring the place a historic landmark, I suppose, just to draw out your fifteen minutes of fame.”

  “Absolutely not.” She glanced at Leo, who stood away from them, off in neutral territory between the file boxes of old records and a broken X-ray machine. In true Leo fashion, he would wait to see who won before choosing his side.

  “You have no idea what you’re interfering with, Ms. MacLean.” He managed to make her name sound like an obscenity, standing close enough for her to feel the heat from his chest and smell the garlic from his lunch.

  “I know a man was murdered—”

  “The economy of this city is being murdered every day! Every minute we delay a recovery project, more Clevelanders have to declare bankruptcy and face foreclosure. I want that building released immediately.”

  “You were right in the first place, Councilman. This has nothing to do with me personally. We investigate every homicide thoroughly and we will do so in this case. After we examine the cellar with ground-penetrating radar, we will promptly release the building.”

  “I’ll bill the county for lost ti—what?”

  “I have someone lined up to do it this afternoon. If no new information turns up, then we are done with the building.” She hated to do it, but she would have to let the site of James Miller’s murder go. “Provided my supervisor concurs.”

  Her supervisor nodded feverishly.

  The councilman backed off a few inches, allowing her a half-fresh breath of air. “That’s what we’re waiting on? For some egghead to look for buried bodies?”

  She would not have expected the councilman to be aware of the uses of ground-penetrating radar. “Yes. The time elapsed since the murder occurred doesn’t mean we investigate with any less diligence—”

  “It’s that bastard from the Twenty-second Ward, isn’t it? He put you up to this.”

  “Councilman,” she said with a sigh, preparing to tell him that she wouldn’t know the Twenty-second Ward if her car broke down in the middle of it, but he stepped up to her again until his blue pinstriped shirt blotted the rest of the room from her vision.

  “Don’t bother, I don’t care who it is. But understand this: This is a very important project. Very important. So if I get one more problem from this office, if you affect this project in any way again, you’ll never get another job in this county. Got it?”

  Too surprised to be afraid or even angry, she said, “Yes. And I’m sure Officer Miller sends his posthumous apologies for getting himself murdered in a building you want to sell.”

  His eyebrows knitted themselves together as he tried to work out those words into a statement relevant to him, apparently failed, and turned to go. Leo hurried after him, echoing cries of “So glad we could be of assistance, Councilman,” down the hall.

  Theresa waited for her heartbeat to return to normal. “I hope you don’t mind me speaking for you, James,” she muttered. “But I thought it appropriate.”

  Somewhere in the next world, she felt sure, James Miller chuckled.

  In the empty room, she sat down at the conference table to read the article. Brandon Jablonski had not written it, though his name appeared as a contributor. But the wording and the enthusiasm for the Torso Murders sounded like him.

  It began with a brief recap of the Torso killings and their impact on a depressed Cleveland. By the sixth murder, twenty-five detectives were working the case full-time, the most assigned in Cleveland history. They investigated every missing or suspicious person report; traced every piece of clothing found with the bodies; ran down even trivial, back-stabbing complaints citizens made against their husbands, coworkers, or neighbors. The city counted on the great Eliot Ness to solve the case, but he never personally took the reins of the effort, instead working on a widespread police corruption case that resulted in thirteen convictions, two hundred suspensions, and a host of reassignments and resignations. A different kind of authority figure began to spearhead the mass of information being accumulated about the killer—the slight, scholarly county coroner Dr. Samuel Gerber. The case had fascinated him.

  As always, Theresa had to smile at the mention of his name. Her first supervisor in the trace evidence section, Mary Cowan, had worked with Dr. Gerber during the infamous Sam Sheppard trial.

  Neither famous man nor the battalion of law enforcement officers working for them could find the Torso killer, but that is not a reflection of their abilities or determination. The Torso killer defied efforts at capture because he did not behave like a serial killer on TV. He did not adhere to a rigid process for selecting each victim or disposing of each corpse. He did nothing to make his behavior predictable so that some well-dressed team of agents could swoop in before the last commercial break. No one could have caught him unless by the sheerest luck.

  The Depression had hit this industrial city hard and nearly one-quarter of the population depended on some form of government aid to survive. It fell to juvenile probation officer Gabriel Beck to help the smallest victims of this crisis, kids we would call “at risk” today.

  His son, Joseph Beck, became a police officer as well, patrolling the streets of Cleveland as it moved into postwar prosperity and saw the birth of rock and roll.

  His grandchildren diversified the family effort. One a cop and one a forensic scientist, the better to surround and choke off today’s criminals. Citizens hope these two have inherited more than just their crystal-blue eyes from their ancestors, because they’re going to need it to solve their latest case: a newly discovered victim of the same Torso killer that prowled Cleveland all those years ago.

  History has come full circle.

  Jablonski had included two photos, a famous grainy black-and-white photo of a decapitated body from the original case, and a snap of her and Frank on the dock behind Edward Corliss’s house. They were both identified by name in the caption. A profile, she decided, was not her best angle—

  Her phone rang.

  “Did you see the paper?” her cousin demanded as soon as she flipped it open.

  CHAPTER 15

  WEDNESDAY, SEP
TEMBER 8

  PRESENT DAY

  Theresa began to wind the extension cord, looping it around one elbow. “Thanks for coming out at such short notice.”

  “No problem.” The balding geology professor patted the square, squat machine—Cleveland State had the only ground-penetrating radar within the city limits, so far as Theresa knew. “You know I’m always happy to get out of the office. I’m only sorry we couldn’t find a body for you.”

  Theresa sneezed the dust out of her nose. They had crossed the hard dirt floor of the cellar at 4950 Pullman enough times to assure Theresa that no victims of the Torso murderer, or anyone else, had been interred there. Just as well. She had frustrated Councilman Greer for as long as she dared. Now his demolition could proceed.

  “You find out who killed that girl? The one in the lake?” The professor stood backward on the steps, yanked until the machine was perched on the edge of the riser, risking back injury. Theresa lifted at the same time, the metal bars cool against her palms.

  “Not yet.”

  “I hope you do soon. It’s all my giggling mass of America’s future leaders can talk about when they should be reviewing for the quiz.”

  Theresa lifted in unison, passing another step.

  “I try to tell them it will be the boyfriend. It always is.”

  “They disagree, I’m sure.”

  “To a man—woman, I mean. ‘Oh no,’ they’ll say, ‘he loves me.’ Sweet things. Makes me glad I have sons.”

  Theresa didn’t distress him with tales of men killed by their girlfriends, only helped him heft the machine’s bulk out to his car, thanked him again, and said good-bye. It had been daylight when she and the professor had arrived, but now the haze of dusk had settled over the city. Time to go. Yet she drifted away from her car, over to the brush-covered slope.

  The Kingsbury Run valley—named for the first white settler in this western reserve, who purchased land that would later become the city of Cleveland—traveled in a meandering slash across northeast Ohio. It began two miles away at the West Third Street train switch-house on the Cuyahoga River, on the southern edge of downtown Cleveland. Theresa now stood at, roughly, the opposite end of it. The run officially continued for another four miles into the eastern suburbs, but past Fifty-fifth the tracks diverged and the valley grew less defined.

  Cleveland was safer than a lot of large cities, but no one hung around East Fifty-fifth and Kingsbury Run after dark. Not unless they were very tough, which she wasn’t, and not if they valued their personal safety, which she did.

  Still.

  She swung her head to the right and left. Tall dried weeds persisted between the rails. A Red Line car of the rapid transit system took off from the East Fifty-fifth station and moved slowly west toward Tower City, its windows sparsely populated with commuters who hadn’t gotten the day off or kids and young adults going downtown to enjoy the long weekend to its last drop. As the clatter of the train car died away, it left only the hum of vehicles on 490 behind her and the breeze whispering through the undergrowth.

  The Torso killer had also been known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, though only three of his twelve or so known victims were found there. But those three were arguably the most dramatic; one, under the huge East Fifty-fifth bridge to her right, and two on this same bank, about—she looked to her left—forty feet from where she stood.

  Men used to sleep on this hillside while “riding the rails” during the Depression. A current of warm air kissed her cheek; maybe the impromptu camping wasn’t as bad as it sounded. Until the Torso killer came by, looking for his next victim. Some aspects of serial killing had not changed much. The destitute and disassociated—like Kim Hammond—were still vulnerable to an offer of money, drugs, food, or friendship.

  A distant twig snapped, too large a sound for a raccoon or an overgrown rat. Was someone actually sleeping outside here, one of the current era’s homeless? She moved to the edge of the slope, tried to see around the lush Ohio growth. Ghosts of the Torso killer’s victims didn’t scare her, but modern-day, very real predators were another story.

  One step down the hill, then two. The car sat not twenty feet behind her—she could make it there if someone gave chase. The lights of the Fifty-fifth rapid transit station glowed off to her right, but still a thousand feet away and over numerous sets of train tracks. Another step.

  She set her feet carefully—not to be silent, she told herself, but because the uneven ground presented too many weeds and small bushes and discarded trash to move quickly. Before she knew it she had reached the bottom, where a path ran next to the tracks. Now she could see around the trees spotting the slope. In the west, the sun had fallen completely behind the city in the distance, abandoning her. A train approaching from the east rumbled and projected a glow forward along the tracks. It lightened the valley from dark back to dusk.

  A form, large enough to be a man, moved on the hillside approximately sixty feet away to her left, to the west, toward downtown. She could scarcely see him, dark against darker, and wondered if her eyes were imagining things. But the movement seemed familiar, sensible. The up and down, pushing with one foot—yes, someone digging a hole.

  Hardly a thrilling thing to witness. Time to go, Theresa, instead of standing around an inner-city rail yard after dark.

  Yet she kept watching, growing more positive of her assessment with each second. Worse, she now noticed other shadings in the night around this activity. Another form, near the digger, this one also large enough to be a man, but stretched along the ground and unmoving. Maybe a friend waiting to take his turn with the shovel, but even a barely discernible shadow couldn’t stay that still.

  And with that, Theresa knew exactly what she was looking at.

  She did not move. She unclipped her cell phone from her belt and spoke Frank’s name into it, not wanting to take the time to dial his number. The digging man wouldn’t hear her, not with the distance between them and the intense rumbling that grew to a crescendo as the train from the east arrived. Its track sat closer to her than she had expected, not dangerous but able to jar her bones with its earsplitting whistle and shake the ground beneath her. She pressed the phone to her ear.

  “Hello?” Frank said. “Who the hell is this?”

  She screamed his name, hoping he would hear her over the train.

  “Hang on, I’m next to a railroad.”

  “Then call me back,” he screamed in return. “We’re doing the notification.”

  “The building at 4950 Pullman,” she shouted. “The hillside west of it. Send a car.”

  An army could have come up behind her under the cover of all that noise. Or a gang. She did a frantic 360 but saw nothing but weeds and heard nothing but Frank saying, “What? Tess, you’re not making any sense.”

  “I think I see someone burying a body.”

  Frank expressed more disbelief at the fact that she would be walking around in the dark at that location than at the idea that she was currently witnessing a killer. “Are you nuts? Get back in your car.”

  “I’m not going to walk in front of a train.”

  “It’s not the trains I’m worried about, idiot!”

  The figure on the hill kept working, at a point halfway up Jackass Hill, about thirty feet from her path next to the tracks. Another train approached from the west on the outermost track, or second-outermost track, moving toward her. This new noise would cover her phone conversation—hell, it would cover a small explosion. But to be sure, she cupped her hand over her mouth and the receiver.

  “Send someone.”

  “I will. But get out of there!”

  “Just a welfare check. You don’t have to tell them I actually see a dead body.”

  “Don’t worry, I wasn’t going to. Hang on.”

  He put her on hold as she moved closer to the man and the train moved closer to her. She hadn’t intended either to occur, but her feet wandered forward of their own accord and the train did not pause. It had a light at
its peak, bright and piercing.

  BBBLLLAAATTT!!!

  The figure on the hill—sharper now, with the edge of the approaching light behind it—stopped moving.

  It straightened up.

  It turned.

  Theresa, trapped in the train’s floodlight as if she were on a stage, stopped as well.

  It—he or she—looked at her. She could feel that gaze even though she could discern no other details, not if it was a male or female, height, weight, or clothing, only the outline of a shape and how that shape went from still to deathly still as its invisible face lighted on her.

  For a moment, neither of them moved.

  The train from the east kept coming. Its driver gave her a second, irritated blast to tell her to get away from the tracks.

  She left the path next to the track and charged the hill, forcing extra energy into her legs, pulling her feet from the brambles before they could trip her, nearly blind from the train light and wondering what the hell she would do if she caught up with this person. She had no flashlight, no weapon, and no illusions about her skills at hand-to-hand combat.

  Not to worry. By squinting hard she could sort of see the hillside and the man, running away from her, shovel in hand.

  She landed at the gravesite, her right foot sliding into the unfinished hole. The lights from the passing train, its driver still expressing his annoyance at her at an earsplitting decibel level, erased some of the shadows from the hillside and let her see the unmoving form.

  A man’s body lay on its side. It had no clothes. It also had no head.

  The digging man couldn’t have gotten far. She could probably still have heard him moving through the bushes that lined the top of the ridge, if not for the cacophony of that damn train in the valley.