Trail of Blood

by Lisa Black

  “Yeah,” he said. “I see it.”

  The first corpse lay on its left side, calves separated, arms loosely bent as if he were sleeping. That victim wore no clothes except for a pair of socks. The second victim, about twenty feet away and a little farther up the hill, lay on his back in a patch of dead goldenrod, with no clothes at all. The heads and male organs had been removed from both victims, the latter parts found together in a pile next to the second body. The killer had been working on the heads when Theresa interrupted him.

  “I don’t get it,” Angela Sanchez said, staring down, not at the severed cranium of a youngish man with brown hair, but at the foot-in-diameter hole dug into the ground next to it. “He wasn’t going to bury the bodies?”

  Theresa shook her head. “No. Just the heads. With enough of the hair sticking out of the dirt so that we’d be sure to find them.”

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s what the original Torso killer did,” Theresa said.

  “Victims one and two,” Frank intoned, “were found here, in exactly these positions.”

  “Victim one, anyway.” Theresa pointed at the corpse lying on its side.

  “A photograph still exists of that one. We can’t really be sure how he posed the other one. The records don’t specify.”

  “And the pile of clothing?” Angela asked. “Is that like the original murders?”

  “That, too.” Theresa had made another trip, a more cautious one this time, up the valley to retrieve her camera. She snapped another photo of the material stacked between a worn brick and a crushed McDonald’s cup with at least a month of grime on it. “It should be a coat, a shirt, pants, I think, maybe a hat. When Don gets here with the crime scene equipment I can examine it further.”

  “That’s only enough clothes for one guy, though.”

  “I know, but that’s what the first Torso killer did. This guy might deviate, though. He’s already got a few details wrong.”

  Angela waited until a rapid transit train passed by, though the electric cars made much less noise than the diesel locomotives. “Such as?”

  “In the Torso killings, they were both white, and victim two was older than victim one—this one on his side—and had been killed at least a week before victim one. He also had something poured on him, possibly calcium hypochlorite, that made his skin leathery. Now these two guys—victim two appears older than one, yes, but he’s also black; his skin has not been treated; and he certainly hasn’t been dead for a week. I’d be surprised if it were more than a few hours. He either hasn’t studied his history or he’s not as patient as his predecessor. He doesn’t want to wait a week. He certainly didn’t want to wait a year.”

  “I’m sure I’ll regret asking this,” Angela said, “but what do you mean by a year?”

  “I’m sure I’ll regret answering it. Monday’s victim? The woman cut into pieces and thrown in Lake Erie?”

  “Copying another one of the Torso killer’s?”

  “His first, so far as anyone knows. They called her the Lady of the Lake. Some of her—not the head—washed up on Euclid Beach, but because a year went by before the two men on the hillside were found, no one connected her murder to the series until much later. That’s why they went back and called her victim zero.”

  Frank said, “So—assuming that woman wasn’t killed by a boyfriend or a freak boating accident—our new guy decided to collapse the timeline. A year became two days.”

  Theresa tried to talk herself out of the theory. “But the first Lady of the Lake had been dead for months when she surfaced, and her skin had been turned to leather as well. That’s not consistent with Kim.”

  Angela looked around, frowning in the bright halogens. “Zero, one, and two. How many were there, again?”

  “Twelve,” Frank said, “officially.”

  “Probably twice that in reality,” Theresa added.

  Frank asked, “Tess, can you identify him?”

  “I can’t even swear it was a him. I assume so, from the size of it—him—whatever I saw. One person, in dark clothes. I didn’t see hair, whether he wore a coat or a hoodie or a mask or just had dark hair.”

  “Weight?”

  “Big, I guess. You know I’m lousy at that.”

  “Well, think.”

  They stood side by side, backs to the tracks, facing the corpses, waiting for more reinforcements to arrive so that the scene could be documented and collected with all possible accuracy. She knew Frank had to draw every detail he could before the incident faded from her mind, if it faded. She just wished he would be a little more gentle about it. Her system had had a shock, even if she did not want to admit it.

  “Think,” he said again. “Bigger than me?”

  “I think so, yes.” Theresa frowned; it felt like a guess and guessing was the one thing she was not supposed to do. Verifiable facts only, ma’am.

  “Loose clothing?”

  “I think so.”

  “Glasses?”

  “Didn’t see a reflection.”

  “A glint from anything? Jewelry? A watch? A logo on his shirt?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  Frank sighed his exasperation, then pointed out, “He took the shovel.”

  “Worried that it could be traced to him. Where did he go? I thought this road ended.”

  “No. It’s more or less a dirt road for railroad use only, but it follows the tracks for two miles and over two bridges, then turns into Canal. From there he could get onto Carnegie and disappear.”

  “Great. We get to check for tire tracks up two miles of dirt road.”

  “That’s what road guys are for. Tess”—Frank’s voice grew harsh—

  “did he see you?”

  Once again she was standing next to the tracks as a train bore down on her, its spotlight illuminating most of the valley but especially her, glinting off her white skin and the highlights in her hair. The explosion of the train’s horn pounded her heart until it ached. The shadow turned. The shadow looked.

  Now she shivered from more than the drop in temperature that came with the night. “Yes. He saw me.”

  CHAPTER 18

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8

  PRESENT DAY

  The former army nurse lived in a tall building in Westlake. The sign read “Gracious Community Living” but, as Irene Schaffer Martin told Theresa immediately after introducing herself, “This is one of those places that old folks go to die.”

  Theresa had made her way through the lobby, which was elegantly decorated with washable plastic and vinyl furniture designed—well designed—to look old and rich, and now glanced around at the room Irene shared with a bedridden roommate who snored. The bed and the nightstand matched the rest of the facility, but Irene must have brought the other furnishings with her, including an elaborately carved bookcase crammed with knickknacks, reading material, and photos. The room and the building had a particular odor, not of anything unpleasant but of air that had recycled through mechanical systems one too many times without drawing in any new stuff from outside. “It doesn’t look too bad.”

  “It’s not,” the old lady said. “You got to go somewhere. Not cheap, though.”

  “How did you pay for it? The profit from knocking over the bank?” Irene née Schaffer laughed, not a cackle but a full-throated belly laugh that shook her still-fleshy shoulders. She had a decent head of hair dyed a chestnut brown, worn straight to below her chin and then flipped out like a fifties teen. “Sort of. So you work with stiffs?” She sat in a wheelchair but twitched one leg, stretching out the ankle.

  “Yes.”

  “I saw plenty of those in the war.” The loose skin on her neck followed where the chin led as she shook her head.

  “World War Two?”

  “Yes. I almost went back for Korea, but I’d had my first one then, my daughter, and I couldn’t take her along, now, could I?”

  So many questions occurred to Theresa that she didn’t know where to begin, but she figured i
t couldn’t hurt to ease into the topic of the dead man. “When did you join the service?”

  “When they bombed our damn harbor, that’s when. Everybody did. Would you like some tea, dear?”

  Theresa glanced at the window, where a few drops of rain had decided to fall; they’d caught her shoulders in the twenty steps from her car to the building’s door. On top of that, her heartbeat had not yet returned to normal after stumbling over two dead bodies. “I’d love some.”

  The woman filled a Pyrex measuring cup with water and popped it into an undersize microwave. While it hummed, she got out two cups and saucers with a gold-edged floral pattern and went on answering the question as if she hadn’t paused. “Though I can’t say my decision was based on patriotism alone. I was twenty-one, all my friends were married or engaged—did your mother ever tell you that boys may fool around with the bad girls, but they don’t marry them?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was right. Though I wasn’t bad, not really—hell, I qualified for sainthood compared to kids nowadays.”

  The microwave went bing, and she wheeled over to retrieve the cup of water. Then she made two cups of tea from the same bag and pushed one over to Theresa, who preferred cream and sugar in hers and also preferred to drink it from a cup she had washed herself. She concentrated on the delicate design of the flowers instead.

  “But I could be wild. My father ran out on us, my mother and me and my little brother. So many men did during the Depression. The humiliation was too great, not having a job, not being able to provide for their families. No one had heard of welfare then, and charity was only for the very poor or the infirm.”

  Theresa sipped and nodded.

  “My mother worked at the feed store, stocking shelves, lifting things that were too heavy for her to lift. We moved in with her sister and lived in their attic, which kept a roof—a leaking roof—over our heads. She charged us, my aunt did, fifty cents a week, which as a kid I thought was a pretty rotten thing to do to your own sister, but my aunt had three of her own kids to feed and she could have rented out the space for three times as much.”

  Theresa said, “Ms. Martin—”

  “Stick with Schaffer. It’s a good name. And I’m getting to it—I’m not senile, you know, I’m only trying to explain that I ran around the streets all the time just to get out of that house. My aunt’s oldest girl loved babies, so I’d dump my brother on her and I’d…escape.”

  Theresa took another sip of tea and decided it wasn’t all that bad without cream and sugar. “Where would you go?”

  “Edgewater Park, in the summer. I’d sneak into the Brookside zoo in the winter. Hardly anyone was around and the one old maintenance guy got so used to seeing me that he must have thought I belonged to one of the people who worked there and never asked me anything. I got in through the elephant cage. The elephants never cared. Ever been there in the winter? You should see the polar bears in the winter.”

  “I’ll have to do that sometime.”

  “But I’d also go down and watch the trains a lot. I had a girlfriend, Doris, in the fifth grade and her father was a conductor on the Erie Railroad, so we’d walk down West Third Street to the yards and wait for him to come back in from Pittsburgh. He lost his job after the crash and they moved out to Illinois for some job, but I’d still go down there to watch the trains, and wonder where they were going, and wish I could go, too. I think that’s what really started it.”

  “Started what?”

  “Why I wound up in the Navy when they came for recruits. As young as I was, I figured nursing was a job I could take anywhere. I’d never get stuck in one place, like my mother.”

  “And that worked?”

  “Almost too well—had some hairy times in the Philippines, let me tell you. But I’m getting ahead of my story. So there I was, fifteen years old, hanging around the rail yards, which I hope no self-respecting fifteen-year-old girl would do today, and I made some acquaintances, after a sort. There was a conductor who went back and forth to Chicago every day; he would always give me a peppermint candy. He had kids of his own and I guess he’d look out for me. Then there was the ticket taker for the passenger line; he’d talk to me about horse racing and how he’d lost everything he owned on Ticker Tape. Not the stock market, a horse named Ticker Tape. I still don’t know if he got sort of obsessed with the fact or he just thought it was funny. A woman named Sophie hung out on the platform and she’d give me a cigarette. She would fix my hair once in a while, put it up in a twist that I’ve never been able to duplicate. She was a prostitute, I realize now, though I didn’t then and would have had only a vague idea what that meant if someone told me. Kids were different in those days.”

  Theresa glanced past her to a photo on the bookshelf. It showed a young woman in a military uniform, leaning on a brick wall with a cigarette between two fingers. Irene couldn’t have been more than twenty at the time, tall and strong with a tomboyish glint still in her eyes.

  “My point is, I wasn’t afraid of the people I encountered there. I’d never had any reason to be, and that, as it turned out, was a problem. More tea?”

  “Sure.” Obviously Irene Schaffer would tell this story in her own way and her own time, and Theresa stopped trying to rush her. She wondered what had happened to the three children but knew she didn’t have time to hear each one’s history. And Irene might say that they never called or visited, and Theresa did not want to hear that. So was this the way the world ended? You lived all your life and did all these things and wound up with nothing but half a room in a building full of strangers, tethered by your own failing body?

  She told herself that Irene didn’t seem miserable. “Why did you knock over a bank?”

  The woman giggled like a teenager with a delightful secret. “If you want that story, young lady, you’ll have to come back for another visit. You will come back and see me again, won’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right, then. So one day,” Irene said after the microwave bing-ed for the second time and two hard-of-hearing friends holding a conversation in the hallway had moved on, “I began to chat with this man sitting on the bench by the Pennsylvania tracks. It seemed as if he was waiting for the train, though it didn’t occur to me to wonder why he’d be by the freight lines. Anyway, I kind of hoped he’d come across with a cigarette or, better yet, a piece of candy—people often gave children candy in those days; I suppose guys like this is why it became such a no-no—and I finally dropped a hint or two. Then he said I should avoid candy as it would put too much sugar into my bloodstream and from the yellowish tint to my skin he could see that I had a touch of jaundice. Well, I had had jaundice at birth, my mother had told me that often enough. Actually two of my three kids had it as well—now I know how common it is, but then I thought it might be some flaw in my physical makeup, a weakness that could kill me, or at least keep me from seeing the world before I died. He went on talking about my liver function and all these other words I didn’t understand—hell, I was only fifteen and I had avoided school as much as possible. So he said he could tell me what I should and shouldn’t eat and what vitamins to take to stay healthy. But I needed to come to his office. So I popped right up and we went off to his office.” Irene shook her head as if in disbelief. The movement fluffed up the ends of the brown flip.

  “And this was 1936?”

  “April tenth, 1935. I’m ninety-one now.”

  Theresa felt as if she should say congratulations but refrained. “Do you remember the address of this office?”

  “Forty-nine fifty Pullman.” Irene squinted over the top of her cup. “Why do you think I called you?”

  Theresa squirmed, feeling dumb. “And you walked there from West Third?”

  “Sure. I had time and it was a sunny day. We walked everywhere then. Only rich people or businesses had cars. That’s why the whole country wasn’t obese, like nowadays.”

  “Good point.”

  “It never occurred to me to wonder
why he had been at the train station if he didn’t need to meet a train.”

  Recalling the information from the city directory, Theresa chose her questions carefully. “Do you remember this man’s name?”

  “I’ll never forget it. Louis. Dr. Louis, he said.”

  “And his office occupied which unit of the building?”

  “I don’t know if it had a number. When you walked in the front door, from Pullman, you went down a hallway and turned right into the first office.”

  “Do you remember anyone else in the building?”

  “I heard sounds. I think I saw another open door up the hall and I heard people moving upstairs, so I figured the other offices were occupied but I didn’t actually see anyone.”

  “What did his office look like?”

  Irene shrugged. “Kind of bare. He had a desk and a bunch of shelves, with books and jars.”

  “Jars of what?”

  “Things floating in liquid. I didn’t want to look at them. Medicine has changed a lot over the years, let me tell you. People didn’t go to doctors for every little thing like they do now—you didn’t want to. Hospitals were scarier than jails in some places.”

  “So you began to get nervous about this Dr. Louis?” Seventy-five years later, the bony fingers still entwined in her lap, pressing hard against each other.

  “I asked if this would hurt, and he said no—you believe that? The bastard said no, that he only wanted to fill out a questionnaire about what I ate. He sat behind the desk and took out some papers and I sat in a chair. He asked if ate oatmeal, if I ate cherries, if I took aspirin, and he’d make little notes on these papers. It seemed to take forever. I remember I got bored until he gave me a bottle of soda pop out of a little icebox. Ginger ale. A whole bottle, just for me. That perked me up, for a while. Only a while, because that must have been what he put it in.”

  “Put what in?”

  “Whatever it was he gave me to knock me out, because the next thing I remember, I woke up on a cot in another room and Dr. Louis was un-buttoning my blouse.”