by Lisa Black
The killer had murdered them somewhere else, cleaned and prepped the bodies, then taken them to the hillside for display. Like the original Torso killer, he had carried the bodies of these two grown men down the hill—their skin had not been dragged through the undergrowth. Carried, and Forrest had to weigh close to two hundred pounds.
A shudder of relief ran through her that the man had run from her foolish pursuit last night. He could have taken her apart with his bare hands.
Theresa forced her mind from these gory images back to the forensic evidence. It didn’t seem like much, so she decided to follow James Miller’s example and make a list. Kim: missing part of neck—strangled?; red fiber; brown paint. Richard Dunlop: decapitated; red fiber; black fiber; drug history; adhesive. Levon Forrest: bludgeoned, decapitated; red fiber, adhesive.
“What have you got?” Leo appeared without warning, as he was wont to do, shoving her papers aside to perch on the edge of her desk across the aisle. This disruption to her desktop made her want to slap him upside the head with the polarizing microscope. Unlike him, she refrained. “Not much.”
“Not much is not what I want to hear.”
“Well, we have one thing in our favor. If this guy truly wants to re-create the Torso killer’s murders, then we know where—”
“The next victim will turn up,” Leo interjected.
“And who it will be, at least the gender. The third victim, actually the fourth if you count the Lady of the Lake, was a woman named Flo Polillo. She was found on a freezing January morning behind a manufacturing plant around East Twenty-second. Half of her, I mean. They found the other half about two blocks away.”
“Yeah, he, um—” Leo stopped there and waited for Theresa to fill in the details he clearly couldn’t remember or had never known.
“He cut her body into pieces and left the pieces wrapped in newspaper and burlap bags, placed in bushel baskets. A dog found them. Can you still get bushel baskets?”
“Can you still get burlap bags?”
“Our killer has a problem, though, according to Google Earth.”
Leo raised one eyebrow and sipped his coffee. He would not ask, of course.
“The back of the Hart Manufacturing Plant is now an I-90 interchange. Today’s killer might have to break with tradition.”
“Shouldn’t play in traffic,” Leo agreed, then made a show of checking his watch as Theresa gathered her jacket and purse, in order to clearly illustrate how fifteen minutes remained until quitting time. “Leaving early?”
“Not exactly.”
CHAPTER 24
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
PRESENT DAY
The pleasant hum that trains made when a comfortable distance from one’s ears changed to a heart-rattling, eardrum-shattering, colossal banging when up close. And if they blew their horn, forget it. Five years of your life would be shaved off, at a minimum. Of course she had already learned that the night before; oddly enough the sound was no less shocking in the light of day.
But she loved them anyway.
“I can’t help it,” she told Edward Corliss. “I can’t help but admire something whose design has not essentially changed in, what, two hundred years?”
They sat on a polyurethane bench designed to look like an ancient wooden one, next to the tracks near West Third Street, only a mile from Jackass Hill but on the other side of the river. The day had taken a turn toward winter and the breeze across the river chilled her skin more quickly than the sun could warm it. Theresa snuggled farther into her woolen blazer and added, “But I suppose that’s silly. I don’t really know a thing about trains.”
“No, no, I agree completely,” Edward assured her. “The propulsion systems changed over time, from wood to coal to diesel, and some to electric. But the structure of the cars and the tracks is the same as it was when people tied up their horses in front of the dry goods store.”
The train in front of them, which had been moving slowly, finally came to a halt and then reversed, causing a new series of the deafening clangs to echo up the row as the coupling of each car collided with the next in line. Theresa put her hands over her ears. She swore the vibration plucked at every vein in her body as if they were overtightened guitar strings.
Then she felt Edward’s hand on her raised elbow. “Do you want to walk along the tracks a bit?” he shouted.
She nodded, not at all sure that she meant it.
The tracks near the station had been kept in good order, with fresh gravel filling the gaps between one set and another. The stones crunched underneath her feet as they walked. The rails could have been there for a hundred years, the tops rounded and smooth from the weight of the trains. The air smelled of diesel fuel and fish.
Six sets of tracks passed rather close to each other, with only ten feet of clearance between them. A short train rumbled along the outermost rails, still close enough to rattle the ground. She looked about her constantly, afraid that with all the noise caused by one train, another could sneak up without warning. Hadn’t Irene Schaffer said something about sneaking into the zoo through the elephant cage? It must have felt like this, passing through a pen of tame but still dangerous animals.
Corliss pointed to a section where two sets of rails converged into one, where a train coming into the station would either continue on the original track or veer off on another one. The rails at the point of convergence formed a sloping X shape. “Those point blades—see the rail that yellow warbler is sitting on?—can slide from side to side, so that the train will go to the left-or the right-side track. The flange of the wheel catches the inside of the rail. That’s what keeps a train on its track.”
She expected to see some heavy piece of machinery present to move the rails, but only a squat motor no bigger than a garbage disposal sat on the ground to the side of the rails. An unlabeled red sign in the shape of a hexagon protruded from the top to mark its location. “I’m guessing you no longer have a person stand out here to throw the switch.”
“No, it’s all done by remote now. The switch engine is operated from inside the station. Even when they were hand-operated it was still done from inside the station—they just ran an underground cable from the switch to the operator.”
Another train approached, one track over. Its trail of cars stretched into the distance, and perhaps the engineer saw Edward and Theresa, because he blew the whistle, or horn, or whatever one would call it. All Theresa knew was that she had never heard a louder sound in her life and her skin tingled where she must have jumped out of it temporarily. Her muscles ached as they froze solid in instinctive terror. She would never have believed one simple, loud noise could have such an effect on her. The cars chugged by, both pushing and sucking the air around her so that her body swayed.
Edward Corliss took her upper arm, gently but firmly.
When the noise subsided as the train continued to slow, she asked him, “And people used to hop on and off these things?”
“Like a moving walkway at the airport,” he said. “If you wanted to go to the next town and couldn’t hitch a ride or find the money for bus fare, trains became your only option. And as the Depression wore on, the bums who moved around the country had no money and no friends. My father said one day he had to rout out eleven guys from one set of cars.”
“It’s hard to picture how devastating the Depression was to this country.”
“It is. Although,” he added, as if it might cheer her up, “hopping trains was around long before the Depression. Soldiers did it to get back home after the Civil War ended.”
“The army didn’t give them a ride home?”
“Nope. Once the war ended they were on their own, and trains were the fastest form of travel.”
She thought about this, watching her step over the gravel. “It must have been cold in the winter.”
“They looked for cars that had something in them to use as shelter—bales of hay or livestock, mailbags. They’d use anything they could find, sometimes make sma
ll fires if they got desperate enough. That’s why the railroads worked so hard to rout them out, to keep them from damaging the cargo.”
The cars beside them now moved at a slow crawl.
“That’s what they’d call an easy rider,” Corliss went on. “A slow-moving train, easy to hop. They wouldn’t get on and off here in the rail yards, of course, not within sight of the station. They’d wait a couple thousand feet up the line or even outside of town, at any curve or junction where the train would have to slow down.”
She stared at the cars, painted in different, muted colors, coated with the grime of the valley, scratches and scars and rust evident on every surface. When she glanced at Corliss he smiled at her, a hint of mischief around his lips. “Want to try it?”
“No,” she said. Then, “Yes.”
“What kind of shoes are you wearing?”
She lifted a battered Reebok.
“Those should give you decent footing. Just hang on to the rungs for a few yards and then jump off, okay? You have to land solid and away from the car. Getting off is a lot more dangerous than getting on—you have to fall away from the wheels, not toward them.”
Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. “Okay.”
The train blocked the river breeze, and she began to sweat. She was in the train yard, the Torso killer’s old haunt, and the next victim would be a woman.
“This one.” Corliss pointed to a freight car rolling toward them, a green color with lettering too small to read at that distance. She shook off her mood and watched the train. Ten feet…five feet…she grabbed an upper rung with both hands and half pulled, half jumped up until her feet found a bottom rail, much higher off the ground than she would have expected. The wind tossed her curls into her face and her heart beat wildly, at least until she realized that the train was moving slowly enough for the older Edward Corliss to walk along beside it.
The distance between her and the gravel made her more nervous than the speed. Also, the rungs she used seemed an impossible distance from the sliding door. To swing from the rungs into an open boxcar, you’d have to be both agile and strong. And fearless.
“What do you think?” Corliss called to her.
The vibrations of the heavy cars no longer seemed to be such an assault on her senses, now that she had become part of the train. The air patted her face with fumes of oil and steel. “This is kind of fun.”
“Ready to get off?”
She looked down. The ground seemed to be moving faster now that she had to land on it, and it sloped toward the median’s center. She needed a more level spot.
“The people driving these things still don’t like it when we do this, you know,” he said, prodding further.
She let go and jumped, focusing all of her mind on her two feet and the gravel beneath them, planting them hard and pulling in the arms that one naturally puts out to the side for balance except in cases where to the side rode a large steel machine with huge turning wheels that one should fall away from, not toward—
Corliss grabbed her, two firms hands on her waist, and she grasped his sleeves and tottered in a completely ungraceful motion. “That was cool.”
“There, now.” He kept his hands on her sides until she had steadied, then let go and guided her another few steps back from the train. “You’ve ridden the rails.”
They walked, following the train’s path toward the station. “I imagine actually climbing in and out of cars would be a lot more difficult, especially at higher speeds.”
“Oh, yes. It could be quite dangerous—that was the fun of it, for kids. For the down-and-out it was merely an acceptable risk.”
“Thanks for the opportunity.”
“Any time you want to hop a boxcar, Ms. MacLean, just say the word.”
He led her to a small, recently painted building. “This is the old West Third switch-house—now the headquarters of the American Railroad History Preservation Society.”
The inside had been recently painted as well, with the large, airy space set up like a museum. Photographs and lithographs filled the wall space between each set of windows; the pictures showed Cleveland-area railcars from the late 1800s to the present day, as specified by engraved plaques. Large metal pieces of the engines—a cylinder, a pressure gauge—had been restored and placed on pedestals dotting the floor. Theresa paused before a pen-and-ink drawing of a locomotive, marveling at the intricate detail.
Corliss stood beside her. “That’s my favorite. It’s a Hudson J Class, one of the finest engines ever built. They were developed in the twenties and most were built here in Lima, Ohio. The model city you saw at my house? I have all Hudsons in that array.”
A man emerged from the hallway to their left and Corliss added with a slightly raised voice, “And here’s the man who drew this picture, our resident artist, William Van Horn.”
Theresa offered her hand to the gaunt man with the shaggy mustache. He shook it, the muscles of the hand firm beneath thin skin. “It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you. I feel it is one of my better works. Are you interested in becoming a member of our society?”
“Um, no, actually.”
“I’m sorry?” he asked.
“Ms. MacLean needs a crash course in all things trains,” Corliss explained, again raising his voice.
Van Horn beamed a thin smile in her direction. “Then I would love to help. I have been the president of the Cleveland chapter for eleven years and will continue to be until my retirement, except in the very unlikely event of an upset in the coming election by the VP here.” He waved a dismissive hand in Edward Corliss’s direction. “You will not find anyone in the United States who knows more about railroad history than I do. How can I help you?”
Theresa smiled, the slow, sweet curve that her mother said made her look like the saint she’d been named for. Then she slipped her hand through her guide’s tense arm and enunciated clearly: “Thank you, but Edward is taking quite good care of me.”
The man switched his attention to Corliss, as if wondering how that could be, and Theresa left him to it as she and Corliss wandered toward the back rooms. Her companion seemed to step a little higher and ushered her into a book-filled room with a flourish.
The wooden floors did not give out a single creak. The lead-paned window let in the afternoon sunlight, its beams falling on a small table and three chairs. “This is our reference collection,” Corliss explained. “We should be able to find the answer to any question you have in here. What are your questions, by the way?”
“I’m still working on that. This case has—had—so many details that it’s impossible to make them all fit one scenario. The killer did many things that made no sense.”
“Like what?”
“Like why did he dismember some corpses and only behead others? Why did he throw some in the river and leave others where they were sure to be found? Why kill both men and women?”
“That’s unique?”
“Relatively unusual, yes. Though the Night Stalker in California was all over the board like that, too, with different genders, ages, socioeconomic statuses.” She paused in front of a large, framed map, with lines to illustrate the track system for the northeastern United States. “This is my biggest question, though. New Castle, Pennsylvania.”
Corliss joined her at the map. “What about it?”
“Before, during, and after the Torso killings in Cleveland, bodies showed up in a swamp in New Castle, Pennsylvania. At least eleven were killed between 1923 and 1941.”
Her companion said nothing, and Theresa glanced at him. At times she forgot that not everyone could discuss violent death as casually as she had become accustomed to doing. But he seemed perplexed, not horrified, and asked: “Are you allowed to tell me these things?”
She burst out laughing. “It’s a seventy-six-year-old case, one that’s been extensively studied. I’m not saying anything—hell, I don’t know anything—that you couldn’t find in a library book. It can’t even really be c
onsidered an open investigation…more of an intellectual exercise.” He nodded, a bit reluctantly, and she went on. “I surfed the Internet a bit this week and found that New Castle is a major railroad hub—then and now. Most of the Cleveland victims were assumed to be transients, hobos. Many were found near the tracks. Three of the New Castle dead were actually found in an unused boxcar. Another one had been left by the rails.”
“And you think the Torso killer picked his victims from trains?”
“I think the killer came from the trains.”
CHAPTER 25
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9
PRESENT DAY
Corliss turned to her as if she had uttered a mild blasphemy. “A railroad employee?”
“Specifically, an employee who worked in both Cleveland and New Castle, Pennsylvania. Would there be any way to get a list of such employees?”
His expression changed from consternation to shock. “At this point in time? I doubt any company would still have records. On top of that, there are so many jobs surrounding a railroad. Especially at that time—unskilled labor might be hired for only a day or two, for peak season or a special cleanup job. Sweeping the station or loading, tasks like that would be given out on a piecemeal basis. Then you might have skilled labor called in for some particular electrical or welding job so that you’d have men working here who weren’t officially employed by the railroad.”
“Like a contract employee.”
