by Lisa Black
James flushed, more from the stares of the shoppers within earshot than from having the same argument one more time. “Nothing’s funny about being a cop these days. Look around. The people we’re supposed to work for expect nothing but a shakedown. They don’t look to us for help. Nobody thinks we’re heroes.”
“Is that what you need, Jimmy? To be a hero? Then go find a war somewhere and leave us mere mortals to the business of making a living.”
This was pointless. “Look, Walter—I checked out the pills and asked around to see if anyone recognized the blue coat. That’s all.”
Walter’s shoulders relaxed a bit. He tucked the parcel under his arm and the unlit cigar between his lips, though his face retained its tense lines. “And did they?”
“Maybe. I got a bunch of maybes. The strongest one is almost positive they saw a man wearing a similar coat loitering by the loading platform about two and a half weeks ago. They couldn’t pin it down to a day.”
Walter nodded. They fell into step, doing a slow circuit of the shop windows as they headed toward Public Square.
James outlined what he had learned from the druggists. “They both said at least one is a vitamin. I know everyone’s vitamin crazy these days—”
“Quackery is all that is. My granddad lived to ninety-five and never took a pill in his life.”
“—but it started me thinking. Remember the tomboy?”
Walter pushed open the thin glass door to the bustle of Euclid Avenue, his face smoothing into a thoughtful plane. “Yeah.”
“Remember where she took us?”
Walter tucked the cigar into his breast pocket. “Yeah.”
“I think we should pay the good doctor another visit,” James proposed. “Now that you’ve had lunch and all.”
CHAPTER 21
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
PRESENT DAY
The autopsy room in the sixty-year-old Medical Examiner’s Office had been built for easy cleaning. With stainless steel sinks and counters, a drain in the floor, and ceramic tile over the floor and halfway up the walls, it could be scrubbed down night after night, year after year, without evidence of any real wear and tear. Each evening it appeared to be the cleanest room in the building, though the result was tidy rather than sterile. The victims could no longer be infected and the staff did not worry much about germs. For years they had worked with formalin and X-rays, been exposed to the insides of victims with tuberculosis, HIV, hepatitis (A, B, and C), and occasionally meningitis, and remained healthy. Surrounded by death they, like the rest of humanity, smoked, rode motorcycles, ate fatty foods, and drove too fast. Familiarity breeds contempt.
The two headless males were not, by a long shot, the most disturbing or most bizarre deaths the doctors and dieners had ever seen, and so had to compete with the baseball scores for attention. The Indians were third in the division, with wins and losses about even. One pathologist and two dieners thought that the team had made some good trades in the past year and were sure of a place in the series, maybe couldn’t win it, but could at least participate. Another pathologist, another two dieners, and a deskman put these odds at slim to none. They had been through this heartbreak too many times. One pathologist, Christine Johnson, abstained, sharpshooting being the only sport to which she paid any attention.
Before her lay the body of the older victim, the head by itself at the top of the table. She had noted all the external information she could—injuries (a scrape to the right wrist, a healed cut on the left index, and of course the wounds to the neck and groin), old scars (appendix), moles (two large ones, as well as a host of smaller ones she didn’t bother to note) and tattoos (none). She saw no puncture marks or abscesses on the arms that would indicate drug use, no swelling of the chest or stomach that would indicate trauma, tumors, or hernia. The body did not yet show too many signs of decomposition. She guessed the time of death to be twenty-four hours previously but collected a syringe of fluid from one eyeball to help her narrow that down. The potassium level of vitreous fluid increases after death.
Christine’s assistant for this autopsy happened to be a young man by the name of Damon, and as she made the last notation necessary before beginning the internal autopsy, he took a scalpel and made the Y incision from the man’s shoulders to his belly button, without waiting for her instruction to do so. At the medical examiner’s, as just about anywhere else in society, doctors occupied the top rungs of status, influence, and power. Damon felt it his duty to bring these demigods down to earth and had a myriad of small ways in which to do so. Christine let it go. She understood the desire to keep humans on an equal footing. Besides, civil service made people nearly impossible to fire and she had to work with Damon almost daily, and besides that, he did excellent work.
The victim’s skin parted like the Red Sea, and yellow globules of subcutaneous fat welled up from inside. Not much, relatively speaking, as the victim had not been significantly overweight. With quick slices of the scalpel, Damon stripped the flesh back from the ribs and got out the long-handled pruning shears. The bones made soft cracking sounds as he snapped through them.
Theresa MacLean entered the autopsy room. She did not express an opinion on the Indians’ chances other than to wish them well, any more than she would have gotten involved in a discussion of politics. In Cleveland, the former could be a more volatile subject than the latter. She did ask Christine how it was going, a less nagging way of asking for information.
“Nothing interesting so far. What did you find?”
Theresa said, “A few fibers and adhesive residue on the wrists and ankles, of both men. But I don’t see any bruising like they struggled against it, do you?”
“Nothing visible. I’ll check under the skin.”
“I scraped their nails but haven’t had a chance to look at the material yet. No defensive wounds. Makes me think the tape merely made their bodies easy to transport, but then something must have knocked them out. I hope you can tell me what.”
“We’ll see.” Christine never made promises.
Damon made the small incision into the pericardium, the membrane surrounding the heart, again without waiting for her instruction. A normal amount of fluid oozed out. An excess amount would have put the heart under too much pressure to function. Christine made a note and Damon removed the rest of the pericardium.
“You really think this is a copy of some 1930s murders?” Damon asked.
“Yes. These two were left in the same place and the same circumstances as victims one and two in 1935, circumstances too bizarre to have occurred by accident.”
“Well, why not?” the young diener said in agreement. “People do those Civil War reenactments, with uniforms and horses and muskets and all that shit.” He reached for the heart with an evilly sharp scalpel.
“Damon,” Christine said, a note of warning in her voice. She hadn’t finished her notes on the pericardium.
The young man shrugged and waited. He had made his point for the day, and the rest of the autopsy would proceed smoothly. Tomorrow he would start all over again. The battle to establish equality among all never ended. “What about that chick they found at the air show? Where does she fit in?”
“I think she’s supposed to be victim zero,” Theresa said. “It’s too much of a coincidence that she turned up in the same week. But I can’t be sure. There’s nothing unique about men dismembering their girlfriends.”
“I’ll take the heart now,” Christine said.
“And I didn’t find any adhesive on her wrists—but then I assumed she had already been cut in pieces when transported. Not as difficult to move around as the nearly complete body of a full-grown male, and he moved them. Just like in the original cases, both men were clean and drained of blood with no signs of insect activity. We found no blood or a way to wash the bodies at the scene, so it had to be done somewhere else.”
“What does that mean?” Damon asked, slicing through the top of the aorta. “Or do I want to know?”
“He has a workshop,” Theresa said.
“I didn’t want to know.”
“Do you have everything you need this time?” Theresa asked them. “No missing sections of neck or anything like that?”
“Nothing missing,” Christine assured her. “Even their genitalia is accounted for. Your guy removed stuff but didn’t keep it. Any idea who these two unfortunate gentlemen are?”
“Yes, actually.” Theresa followed the doctor over to the cutting board next to the sink to watch her dissect the heart. She didn’t expect any clues to result from this, but she found cardiology interesting. “They’ve both been identified. Your guy is Levon Forrest, fifty-two, married with two grown children. Lives on East 119th, takes the Red Line from the Euclid station to the Brookpark station, and walks to his job at the Ford plant. Despite a nasty cold he left his house at six. But he missed his seven o’clock start time this morning, which was so unlike him that his supervisor called his wife, who called the cops, who, unsurprisingly, were not too interested in the case of a grown man missing only four hours. That ID isn’t written in stone yet, but he matches the description exactly and the wife identified a photo of the head. His head.”
The pathologist opened up Levon Forrest’s heart with quick, sure strokes, then measured the thickness of the chamber walls. They were normal, with the left ventricle, of course, being much thicker than the other three as it had to push the blood throughout the length of the body. The valves had no abnormalities. The tiny coronary arteries covering the outside surface of the fist-sized organ showed some stiffening and blockage from atherosclerosis, but no more than average for a man his age. “I hope they didn’t get the neck in the photo.”
“No, of course not. Frank planned to ease into the decapitation part of the story, figuring she didn’t really need to know the gory details in the same breath with ‘You’re now a widow.’ Poor woman. At least the time of his abduction is narrowed down to an hour. The officers are questioning everyone they can find along the route.”
Christine kept some sections of the heart, dipping the scalpel into a small jar of formalin and swishing it until the tissue washed off, then returned to the body. “Has he got any history?”
“None. Some minor scrapes as a juvenile, but nothing as an adult. Apparently a law-abiding, loving husband and father and you-can-set-your-watch-by-him employee.”
The doctor moved on to the lungs. “What about the other one?” Theresa paused to stretch a crick out of her back, completely unaware that this action garnered a surreptitious glance from every male in the room. Had she been aware, she’d have lived with the crick. “We have an ID on him as well, for utterly different reasons. No one reported him missing, but he had a record as long as one’s proverbial arm.”
Christine Johnson ran her hands over the lungs of the dead man, feeling for any spots where they might have fused to the inside of the chest cavity. Prior surgery or tumors could cause this, but Levon Forrest’s lungs were smooth and free, so she cut through the primary bronchial attachments and weighed them. The lobes weren’t exactly the healthy pink of youth, but they weren’t bad. She sliced off three thin sections of tissue and added them to the formalin soup in the plastic quart container. “So who is he?”
Theresa stood between the two autopsy tables, her back to the sink, so that she could talk to Christine and also the doctor preparing to autopsy the man of whom she spoke, the other victim of their modern-day Torso killer. “His name is Richard Dunlop, and he couldn’t be more Levon Forrest’s opposite. Different color, much younger—twenty-three—and if he ever held a job it must have been under another name. He lived on the west side, more or less. His last known address was a friend’s house on Wade Avenue off Twenty-fifth. No one knows who he’s been flopping with recently, or they’re not saying, according to Frank and Angela.”
“So little Richard has no visible means of support.” The doctor opened Forrest’s half-full stomach, pouring the contents into a fresh quart container. They would have to be tested for drugs as a matter of routine, and Theresa might want to examine the solid matter to corroborate details of his last meal.
Theresa’s nose wrinkled at the thought. She hated gastric exams. “Visible, yes. Legal, no. He’s been arrested every year or so since his teens for loitering, prostitution, possession, solicitation, more loitering.”
Christine Johnson finished dissecting Levon Forrest’s unremarkable organs as Damon sliced his scalp open with a scalpel. Then the doctor took over with the small instrument, like a flat chisel, used to separate the flesh from the white bone of the skull. With no other apparent cause of death, she wanted to examine every inch of it for trauma. “So he’s a hustler,” she said of the other victim.
Theresa nodded. “Looks that way. Not a difficult person for our killer to find and abduct.”
“Yeah.” Damon waited, bone saw in hand. “Just open the door and wave a twenty.”
“Also without a firm timeline, like Mr. Forrest here. The last time anyone will admit to seeing Dunlop was three days ago.”
“Maybe it was a doctor,” Damon said.
“Why?” Theresa asked.
“The chick was an addict, the first guy had a cold, and the second guy is another malnourished lowlife.”
“You have a point,” Theresa said.
“Who else would know how to do this?” Damon gestured toward the severed neck. “And don’t say me.”
Christine said, “Here we go. I thought that felt a little too cushy.”
A flat, wide blood clot had formed under Levon Forrest’s skin, directly above the top of the neck, where the head had suffered a trauma and broken blood vessels leaked between the flesh and the skull. The doctor sent Damon to get Zoe, the photographer. This injury would have to be documented.
Theresa inspected the glossy red mass. “Someone socked him in the back of the head. Would that be enough to make him unconscious?”
“Why do you always ask me that?”
“Why will you never tell me?”
“Because it varies from person to person. This was hard enough to crack the skull but not hard enough to break the skin. Very blunt impact. It might have knocked him out, it might not have. That’s all I can say.”
“No other blows?”
Christine finished flaying the flesh from the bone of the skull. “I don’t see any.”
“Okay. How about a time of death, then?”
“Five hours and twelve minutes,” the doctor said immediately. Christine rarely joked, but this was one of her favorites. No one else found it as amusing. Zoe even rolled her eyes.
“Seriously,” Theresa demanded.
“I’m happy with twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Rigor has come and gone and he’s been refrigerated since you found him last night, which should have slowed the process. He was cold when you found him, right?”
“Not Popsicle cold, but definitely cool.”
“Right. So all the signs could easily fit into that window between when he left for work and when his shift began without him.”
Theresa said, “In only one hour he ran into Richard Dunlop, or our killer, or both at the same time. But he spent most of that hour riding the Red Line.”
Christine gestured to Damon, who started in with the bone saw to take the top off the cranium. As always, Theresa retreated to the man’s feet and leaned up against the stainless steel sinks, as from the bone dust wafting into the air. She raised her voice over the whining saw to say to the doctor: “How does someone strike and drag off a fully grown man from a moving car packed with dozens of commuters?”
“He doesn’t. He must have attacked him before he got on the rapid or after he got off.”
“Frank found a few people who say he was on yesterday morning’s 6:08, but he’s taking that with a grain of salt. You know commuting—you get your regulars and they get into their habits. The whole process becomes a blur, so these witnesses aren’t completely sure if it was yesterday or the day before, or the day be
fore that. They’ve all seen the news last night or the paper this morning and now they’re so freaked they can swear they saw Elvis.”
“But if they’re right, then the killer grabbed Mr. Forrest here after he disembarked.”
“That gives us a window of fourteen minutes between the time he’d get off the rapid and the start of his shift, during which he should have been walking to the Ford plant. The cops are hitting the Brookpark parking lot hard.”
Damon finished with the bone saw and pried the section from the top of the head. This took some muscle, and he quickly found it a different sort of proposition when the body didn’t weigh down the neck—without it, he had no anchor to pull against. Christine put her hands around the torn neck and the hair at its nape and hung on as best she could, and they wrestled the bone apart. Zoe waited, camera in hand. As they did this, the doctor suggested to Theresa, “Maybe the killer attacked Dunlop and this guy”—meaning her victim—“tried to help and wound up in the cross fire.”
“I thought of that—Forrest sounds like the kind of person who would come to someone’s rescue. But the killer meant to kill two. He needed them to re-create the 1935 murders. Two fully grown, unhelpless men. This guy knows how to approach people.”
Levon Forrest’s brain came into view, pink and convoluted and looking so exactly like what one expected a brain to look like that it seemed unreal. But its neatness had been marred by the small clot on the occipital lobe. Christine ran her fingers over it and muttered to herself, “Coincides with the skull fracture.”
Theresa leaned in, peering as well. “Would that have made him unconscious?”
“Why do you—I don’t know. Possibly. I doubt it killed him—my guess is it’s not big enough to really interfere with the brain’s functioning.”
“What did kill him, then?”
“Cutting his head off,” Christine said. “Yeah, I think that did it.”
She cut the brain free, the spinal cord sliding out easily since it had already been severed from the backbone, and dropped it onto the scale. Damon began to dry out the inside of the skull with a rag to get ready for more photographs while Zoe, as always, waited with what patience she could muster. The other pathologist in the room did not have Christine’s brisk style and had not yet finished the external examination of Richard Dunlop, dutifully noting each blemish on Dunlop’s young skin, bruises, abrasions, needle tracks. Theresa decided not to wait and left the autopsy room, to the disappointment of the male pathologist and his diener, whose conversation wandered back to the Indians and the deservedness, or lack of same, of their division ranking.
