Trail of Blood

by Lisa Black

  “It’s not hams,” James muttered.

  “It’s not hams,” Walter confirmed. “At least the guy’s market didn’t get robbed. You gotta look on the bright side.”

  They left the car on Twenty-second since cop cars already lined both sides of the streets ahead. Well-bundled officers milled about, coming and going or just talking.

  There should be a better way to do this, James thought. What about a house-to-house search? Are there footprints? He had to leave a footprint in all this snow—but twenty cops would have trampled it by now.

  The alley in question ran alongside the Hart manufacturing plant, which didn’t operate on Sunday, and was choked with police officers. Their hurried conversations rose into the air in puffs of white condensation. The words came faster the closer James and Walter got to the haphazard pile half buried in snow against the brick wall of the factory.

  They stared. Even knowing what it was, James couldn’t sort out the image in his head. He saw a basket, the rectangular kind with a handle used to carry fruit, with a piece of newspaper and a flesh-colored cylindrical object inside. Nearby lay two more bundles of…something. James couldn’t blame the Negro woman for not recognizing it as a human body. He knew and still couldn’t make it familiar.

  Then he noticed the white ball protruding from the red mass in the basket—the rounded part at the top of a femur where it fits into the hip socket. He’d seen one before, sticking out of a broken soldier.

  He moved closer, noting a right arm with the hand still attached. The nails were short and gnawed. She couldn’t even have scratched her attacker with those.

  Something nudged his knee. James looked down at a large brown dog.

  As at Jackass Hill, a uniformed cop stood watch by the body; unlike at Jackass Hill, the cop’s feet were cold and proximity to the limelight did not make up for it. The young man’s teeth chattered as he told James, “That’s your witness. Her name’s Lady. Belongs to some kid around the corner.”

  James patted the dog’s head. Her eyes pleaded with him, to either solve the murder or perhaps get her out of the cold. He patted the animal again to apologize for doing neither.

  He and Walter turned away and found their captain, giving orders to his officers with the halfhearted air of a man who knows he’s been overwhelmed. To James and Walter, he said, “You two help check the whorehouses, see if they’re missing anyone. I’ve got guys on Twentieth going west, so you start at Sixteenth and come east. Don’t rile the girls. This city’s already hysterical and this will make it worse.” He nodded toward a group of people at the end of the alley. “Reporters and neighbors and nosey parkers. They’re risking frostbite to stand there, but they won’t budge.”

  “Any footprints, Captain?” James asked.

  The sardonic tone of their chief’s response let James know he had sounded like a kid at Christmas and also confirmed his fears. “Look around you, Miller. This place has been wall-to-wall people for the last hour and a half. Any footprints this schlepper left have been trampled by the dog, the Negress, the butcher, forty cops, and half the neighborhood.”

  “What happened to her?” Walter asked.

  “The…madman sawed the body in half, chopped the legs at the hips and the knees, sliced the right arm at the shoulder.”

  “Did he cut her head off?” James asked.

  “Cut it and kept it.”

  “What?”

  “It’s not here.” The captain lit a cigarette, striking the match nearly hard enough to ignite the whole book. “Neither are the feet.”

  “Did he”—James tried to find the words—“cut her in a perverted way? Like the men on the hill? Her—you know—”

  The captain smiled, without any sort of humor in the expression. “I think you’re blushing. Look, McKenna, your partner’s blushing.”

  “He’s a genteel sort, Cap.” Walter didn’t even try to smile.

  “The answer is no, so far as anyone can see here. Maybe cutting her legs off sufficed for him. We’re guessing she’s a hooker because no one has come into the station yet to say their wife or mother or sister is missing. She’s someone no one would bother to report, like a whore.”

  “Or someone from Hooverville,” James said, referring to the shanties along the lakefront where the hobos lived, though the male residents vastly outnumbered females.

  Suddenly Walter sucked in air, excited by a theory. “Maybe the husband killed her, and that’s why he hasn’t reported her missing. He read about the bums on Jackass Hill and figured we’d figure it’s the same guy.”

  “Then what, he kept her head for a souvenir? Get out of here and check those whorehouses. And don’t tell me you don’t know where they are, McKenna. I know you better than that.”

  CHAPTER 27

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9

  PRESENT DAY

  Teddy Morgan had been a cop for six years and had spent every day of them wondering if he might be better off in some other line of work. Every time a punk kid put on their sassy hat, or a drunk puked in the back of his cruiser, Teddy wondered if being an accountant would be as boring as it sounded. Since his utter lack of knowledge of resolution and f-stops kept him from applying as a photographer of Victoria’s Secret models, maybe counting up numbers wouldn’t be so bad. The hours would be regular.

  He felt this way only when some part of cop work proved tedious, as it did tonight. Teddy Morgan was driving in circles. Down East Twenty-second to Orange, toward downtown to get on 90, immediately getting off 90 again at Central, then making a smaller circle around to Eighteenth past the Tri-C College district offices, on to Carnegie, then back down East Twenty-second to start the circuit all over again. Keeping his eye out for, get this, an unknown guy dumping pieces of an unknown woman wrapped in some unknown fashion. Pieces.

  Teddy had received these instructions from the shift sergeant at roll call that evening. Six years and he was still on nights, he would grumble to anyone who would listen, but the truth was he liked being on nights. The less he and his wife saw of each other, the better they got along. “Who got murdered?” Teddy asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “She hasn’t been identified?”

  “She hasn’t been found or even reported missing. For all we know she hasn’t been murdered yet.” The same nut who beheaded those two guys by the Fifty-fifth rapid station and was almost caught by that girl from the M.E.’s office (and what the hell was up with that story? Teddy wondered) was apparently reproducing murders that happened in the 1930s. The next murder back then had been a woman cut into pieces and wrapped in burlap and newspaper and left at the two locations assigned to Teddy. Problem was, neither I-90 nor 77 had existed at the time. The geography of the situation had changed and there was no way to know how that would affect the killer’s plans.

  “And he’s going to dump this woman, who we don’t even know is dead, tonight?” Teddy asked.

  “Maybe tonight,” the sergeant said. “Maybe tomorrow night, or next week or next month. The real murder, I mean the original murder, occurred four months later in January, so who knows. That’s why we can’t spare the manpower for a full-scale stakeout. We’re short already, what with the buyouts and the hiring freeze.”

  Teddy didn’t care about the financial state of the city. He cared about a twelve-hour shift of nothing but tedium. “But if this guy wants to dump a body, won’t a marked car make him think, Wow, maybe this ain’t such a great idea?”

  “Good. Then he can go dump it in one of the ’burbs. We can’t spare an unmarked right now. One’s in the shop and the others are working that drug cartel out on 110th. And the chief won’t approve overtime for a detective to do it.”

  Teddy shot his last arrow. “Why me?”

  “’Cause you got those eagle eyes,” another cop said with a smirk. “You might as well,” said another. “Then you’ll have an excuse for not making any arrests.”

  “Why not you?” the sergeant asked.

  No answer to that, so Ted
dy had listened through the rest of roll call, tested the charge level of his Taser like everyone else until the room filled with a buzzing, snapping sound, and headed out to his vehicle. Cut into pieces and wrapped in newspaper and burlap bags. What the hell was burlap, anyway?

  At least the areas he needed to patrol were open, slivers of grassy lawn boxed in by a maze of major roadways. Any idiot carting around body parts would stand out like a missile silo in a cornfield.

  So he drove, and drove, and drove, past the post office, the hospital, and the Tri-C building, getting practically freakin’ dizzy going in circles like that, and wondered how long it would take to get a degree in accounting.

  Night fell as the last of the commuters hummed down I-90 and the office buildings downtown stretched their glittering diamond windows into the black sky. He slowed down to take a hard look at someone waiting at the bus stop across from the post office facility, but as he watched a 76X picked the guy up and no bloody parcels remained at the stop.

  This made him think: Being a cop really sucked at times, but at least he could afford a car.

  Back on 90, it occurred to him that the number of sport utility vehicles had surpassed that of regular cars. Except for his police cruiser and a Ford sedan, every other vehicle in sight was a friggin’ SUV. Officer Morgan sighed and continued to drive the half mile between the two points of interest. Around and around.

  He stopped for a drunk who staggered along East Twenty-second and shouted dire predictions at the post office facility, and waited until the responding backup transported the guy to St. Vincent Charity’s ER. He got out again at the edge of Broadway after noticing movement on the slope to the tracks down in Kingsbury Run. A brick wall separated the road from the valley, but it petered out near East Ninth. The activity turned out to be three kids and, without getting too close—since he really was supposed to be patrolling for this one guy instead of getting distracted with minor trespassing, even though the stupid kids would probably get hit by a train, and then who would be in trouble—he told them to get out of the rail yard. They shouted at him with language he wouldn’t even have used himself but were still little enough that they actually listened and ran off toward East Ninth.

  He climbed the few feet back to the crest of the hill. A Ford sedan had paused along this deserted stretch of Broadway but pulled slowly away as he got back in his car. Without thinking he noted the make and license number. Maybe the driver was lost and stopped to ask him for directions, then figured it out or was too embarrassed to ask. Or maybe the driver wanted him to leave or get tied up so he could dump a body in peace. Teddy Morgan pursued the Ford from a discreet distance.

  It merged on to I-90 and got off at the next exit, making the same circuit Teddy had been instructed to drive. He continued to follow but didn’t call it in, not yet. There were two disturbances downtown, a fatal traffic crash on the inner belt and a smash-and-grab on Prospect, and the dispatchers were going nuts. Some could handle stress better than others, and some scheduler with a vicious sense of humor had put all the high-strung ones on the same shift—his, of course. So he’d wait to ask them to run a plate.

  The Ford turned off Carnegie, heading down Twenty-second. Passed Cedar. Passed Central. Keep looking around, Teddy reminded himself. Don’t want to miss the bad guy because you were stalking some kid from the suburbs who expected drugs to be available on every street corner in the big bad city.

  The Ford turned into the parking lot of the St. Vincent Charity medical building, across the street from the main hospital. The driver stopped to take a ticket from the machine at the entrance.

  Okay, Teddy thought. A nurse or doctor who drove around wasting gas instead of going in to work a minute early. Someone who hated their job more than Teddy sometimes disliked his.

  The Ford drove to the north edge of the parking lot and stopped. The driver got out but did not walk toward the hospital. He simply stood at the front of his car, facing the grassy area between the lot and Central Avenue.

  Morgan took his little ticket from the machine and drove in, moving among the sparsely parked cars. He pulled the cruiser into a space between, what else, an SUV and another friggin’ SUV, as quietly and calmly as if he were there to visit poor Uncle Moe in the cardiac ICU. The cars would hide at least part of the lettering on his vehicle, but nothing could be done about the rack of lights on the roof. Idiot detectives. He might as well have a neon billboard on top with the words I’m watching you, so if you were going to do anything incriminating you might want to wait until after my shift.

  But the figure by the other car got the hint anyway, because he had disappeared.

  Damn.

  Teddy Morgan turned down the volume on the portable radio clipped to his shoulder and exited the cruiser. The night had gotten chilly, the temperature dropping at least ten degrees since roll call. One hand on his gun—if this guy did those two bodies on the hill, then he had to be a complete psycho—and the other on his radio, he moved closer to the Ford. He made his feet light over the asphalt grit crunching beneath his boots and knew the noise from I-90 would drown that out. He did not see the driver inside the vehicle.

  He reached the Ford. Vacant, as far as he could see, and he didn’t want to use his flashlight. Between the lot and the freeway lamps he had a fair amount of ambient light. No figure.

  Morgan whirled suddenly, worried that the killer might materialize behind him like in some B movie, but the pavement remained empty. He turned back. Grass and trees extended to the 90 off-ramp. Nothing moved.

  A flash of darkness near the trees and Teddy saw the figure separate from one tree and move toward another. It didn’t seem to be carting any bodies, only looking for something. With a flashlight.

  Teddy considered his options, since no crime appeared to be in progress. The man could be a really eccentric doctor or a drug dealer picking up a stash. Maybe Teddy should run the plate first—

  The figure let out a small sound, like a muffled shout.

  The hell with this. He charged across the grass, unsnapping but not drawing his gun. “Police! Stop right there!”

  It turned. Dark coat, dark pants, face covered, or maybe the head was turned down.

  Teddy pulled the gun out of its holster at the same time it occurred to him that the guy might not be able to hear him over the noise of a tractor-trailer now roaring by on 90. So he flicked on his flashlight with the other hand and aimed the beam square in the guy’s face. “Police. What is your business here?”

  The head snapped up and a woman stared at him in amazement and not a little fear, her mouth gaping in a red oval.

  “Cleveland Police,” Teddy said during a lull in the freeway noise. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

  “We’re too late,” she said.

  She turned one wrist until the beam of her flashlight caught an object placed on the grass between two maple trees, and what Teddy Morgan saw in that light would give him nightmares for the rest of his life.

  He really needed to get into another line of work.

  CHAPTER 28

  THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9

  PRESENT DAY

  Officer Morgan seemed distinctly unimpressed with Theresa’s medical examiner’s credentials, her relation to a Homicide detective, and her explanation for stalking the Torso killer’s old haunts. Perhaps he thought she might be one of those unbalanced investigators who committed the crimes themselves, like the arson investigator who set fires so that he could swoop in and be the hero. She couldn’t blame him. Stumbling upon three bodies in two days did seem a bit much.

  He alerted the Homicide unit as Theresa explained, trying to sound scientific and sane and still speak as quickly as she could because they needed to go! Now! “As near as I can tell from texts on the subject, Flo Polillo’s remains were found between Twenty-first and Twenty-second and Central, behind a manufacturing plant that isn’t here anymore. I suspect I-90 would run smack through the middle of that plant if it were. So if the killer wanted t
o repeat the original murders as closely as possible, he needed to come here.”

  “Who is Flopalillo?” the young officer asked. He kept looking at the milk crate and its contents with quick glances, as if the image might be less horrible if taken in measured doses. Theresa doubted this would help him. The lower half of a female torso, both thighs, and the right arm and hand had been stacked on their ends in the crate, the raw, gory edges peeking from the top of the newspaper they had been wrapped in, the fingers protruding as if they might wiggle in a friendly wave at any moment. Nothing could make it less horrible.

  She explained about the Torso killer’s fourth victim.

  “So you came here tonight because you thought this guy might kill again and he might do it tonight and he might dump the body here,” he asked with some skepticism. Never mind that he was there for the same reason—he had been assigned. It was different.

  “It seemed a distinct possibility.” The double murder on Jackass Hill had come immediately after the Lady of the Lake, if Kim Hammond was supposed to be the Lady of the Lake, so why not telescope the rest of the series as well? “And that means that at this moment he’s dropping off the rest of this woman’s body somewhere around 1419 Orange Avenue. We have to go there. Now.”

  “There’s no we here, um, ma’am,” the cop said, trying for a combination of stern and courteous and missing both. “A car has been sent and they don’t need help. This is our job, not yours.”

  He was correct, of course, in that she was not armed, not trained, did not get increased pay for hazardous conditions, and had no authority to apprehend or arrest anyone. But he made it sound like none of that mattered. All that mattered was that she was not a cop—not one of them.