by Lisa Black
The 8:41 arrived. The three young men boarded. The girl remained, but her shoulders relaxed.
Theresa could not see the area to the west of the building, the patch of grass between the two sets of tracks and just east of the Fifty-fifth Street bridge. This irritated her.
Her shoes squeaked across the floor as she paced from window to window, and she wondered who else remained in the building. The rapids ran more or less all night, pausing only for a short period in the wee hours of the morning. Surely there would be some manager on hand to deal with emergencies, mechanical breakdowns, or a bunch of armed police officers running around his territory.
Theresa had assumed that the killer would hop a train with his victim, kill him, and then throw the body and head out as the train rumbled through the area. But now other scenarios began to present themselves. What if he dropped the two body parts from the Fifty-fifth bridge? Inelegant, yes, and the head might unroll from the pants during the fall, but perhaps he did not value ritual as much as she assumed. Did Frank have men on the bridge?
So much depended upon the killer’s concern for historical accuracy.
Two older ladies and two teenagers joined the people on the platform. None of the four seemed to be traveling together.
The 8:42 arrived. The girl did not board, but the weary person from the bench got up and shuffled into the car.
Otherwise the killer had to carry a body to the patch of grass between two wide sets of train tracks. He could drive to the spot, but only through the RTA building lots and past a handful of waiting police officers. It would take nerves of steel. The head, on the other hand, should be left on the outside of the tracks, at the base of the south slope at the far east end of Kingsbury Run. He could wind through that small forest from Bower and Butler avenues and have at least, she estimated from her window, thirteen hundred feet of lush foliage for cover. Frank and the cops had one or two officers watching that stretch of ground. If the killer was so inclined, he could rewrite history a bit and drop the head from the bridge like a macabre depth charge, wait until the cops found it and clustered around, then putter quietly to the end of Berwick and dump the body in the dark and tree-covered spot, instead of putting the body by the bridge and the head on the slope. Then the killer would drive away and leave the cops to explain this failure to the citizenry, already tempted to riot from fear.
The 8:57 arrived, and when it left it took the girl and three others. The girl had simply not wanted to get on the same train as the three young men, though traveling in the same direction. Theresa could remember being that young and that attractive.
And what about the pool of blood? The Tattooed Man had been one of the few victims killed at the scene. How could he possibly take the time to murder his victim on-site without attracting the attention of one of the officers?
Unless the victim was one of the cops.
The victim only had to be a man. There was nothing to say that that man couldn’t be in uniform.
What a challenge it would present. Depositing Peggy Hall’s body had been only a little risky. He had some leeway there when it came to location, since the original manufacturing plant had ceased to exist, and the cops were not yet convinced that he would stick to his one-a-day schedule. But now he had to know the cops would surround the tracks. How much more delicious it would be to come up behind one of the men who were trying to catch him, slip a loop of razor-sharp wire over his head, and pull on both handles with all his might—
Theresa burst from the conference room and through the lobby, out the lobby door, and into the night.
And ran straight into Councilman Greer.
CHAPTER 36
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10
PRESENT DAY
Kingsbury Run had never been a populous place, in any era. So aside from the RTA riders and employees clustered at the station, the surrounding cops didn’t have much activity to keep an eye on.
The officer stationed at the northeast corner of the area had parked his car in the lot behind some kind of old trucking terminal, long fingers of falling-down red brick that could warehouse a host of dead bodies, had he any desire to look through them. He didn’t, content to pace along the patch of grass between Kinsman Road and the railroad tracks and experiment with a pair of night-vision binoculars he’d bought off eBay with his own money. Designed for use in the middle of the woods, they weren’t much use in a city where the dark got interrupted at too many points by a bright streetlight or security light, nearly blinding him and overpowering the dimly lit areas he wanted to see. He crossed the weeds to stow them in his car. If any piece of equipment was going to get broken while he tackled a suspect tonight it wasn’t going to be something for which he’d shelled out his own funds.
An older cop waited by the railing on the north end of the East Fifty-fifth bridge, high above Kingsbury Run, tucked into a small L where the sidewalk widened. Farther up Fifty-fifth a diner that had been closed for hours still managed to waft enough food smells to make him, in turns, both hungry and nauseated. On a typical night he’d have been breaking for “lunch” right about now, parking his unit on the East Ninth pier or maybe near the stadium and discovering whatever healthy thing his wife had decided he should eat that day. She would not let him pack his own meal, since he tended to wrap up stuff like leftover chicken wings, Funyuns, and Pop-Tarts.
At least it’s not raining, he thought, approximately five seconds before the first drop of water struck the back of his neck.
The female officer had stashed her unit off the dead end of Berwick Road and waited in the copse of trees, south of the tracks, at the east end of the run. She stood mostly hidden under the low-hanging branches of an oak tree, secure in the knowledge that its wide berth had her back. She hoped the killer would not show before midnight, when her shift ended, so that she could remain on duty and get the overtime, important since her husband had lost his job at a GM dealership. She didn’t mind the loss of income—they’d always been pretty sensible with money and should be able to weather this economic storm—so much as the loss of her “me” time. Working a rotating shift gave her days at home, him at work, the kids in school. She could watch TV, exercise, or take herself to lunch or a movie. Now he was home all day, every day. Not ideal.
A fourth officer, assigned to 4950 Pullman, had been with the force for fifteen years. Way too long, he told himself, to let one empty building freak him out. Even a hollowed-out shell with heavy stone walls, isolated on one side by trees and on the other side by a steep hill leading down to the tracks. Even a building where a body—a cop, no less—had been walled up with his head between his feet for seventy-odd years. A building with nothing left in it that still managed to make a lot of noise. Rustles. A weird, muffled crackle every so often. When the wind picked up, entering through the southwest holes where windows used to be and blowing out the northeast spaces right at him, it gave a sort of keening wail, so faint he might have imagined it. But he had been a cop for fifteen years, so he was not freaked out. Not at all.
Detective Frank Patrick formed the center pin of the square, leaning up against one of the massive columns of the East Fifty-fifth Street bridge. Only fifty feet separated him from the RTA parking lot, and yet a woman had walked to her car without apparently noticing him in the deep shadows underneath the bridge. But she hadn’t really looked around, either secure with or uninterested in the heavy presence of police on the RTA site. The killer would be more observant. So Frank Patrick stayed still, more or less, and sacrificed the idea of smoking a cigarette. He had sacrificed a lot for this job over the years.
He really, really hoped the killer would show up. Not just so that they could catch the sick son of a bitch, but so that Theresa wouldn’t look like a crackpot for insisting he’d be there and that he, Frank, wouldn’t look like the world’s biggest idiot for believing her. It would take a long time to live down using department resources and making a bunch of cops stand for hours in the rain merely because he loved his pretty, sligh
tly strange cousin who worked in the morgue. His fellow officers had cousins, too, but it didn’t mean they chose to be around them all the time, and given their relative positions in the criminal justice system, if he and Theresa ever wanted to frame someone they could do one hell of a job. But worse, he might be sharing cop confidences with a noncop, and that made other cops nervous. Theresa was one of them and yet not one of them, probably smarter than most of them, and had gotten too old to be fun to flirt with. They thought Frank called her in more often than he needed to and wished he wouldn’t.
At the same time Frank knew that all or most of this could be attributed to the typical human paranoia over the thoughts of others and shouldn’t trouble him. The killer had to show up tonight—so far his re-creation of the original Torso Murders could not have been more accurate. He’d done everything but draw them a map. He would come.
Angela Sanchez stood about seventy feet to the north, along an even smaller spit of grass between train tracks. She did not know it but had proved much better at standing still than her partner, watching the terrain with slow, sweeping arcs of her head. The bridge stood too high to serve as an umbrella, even in a vertical rain, and her right sleeve grew damp. At the moment she felt no worry about the killer and his plans for the evening but instead fretted about her daughter’s math scores. Math and science would be the way to make a decent living in the future and she didn’t want the girl to get insecure about her abilities so early. Problem was, she’d always sucked at math herself and her daughter’s homework might as well have been written in Greek. Too bad the girl hadn’t inherited her father’s talent for it. He’d been able to convert ounces to kilos before the dealer could finish counting the bills. Thinking of her ex-husband made her insist to herself, for the four billionth time, that he had no excuse. They had grown up in a perfectly nice neighborhood on the near west side, not some kind of ghetto. His parents were good folks who worked hard. No excuse. At least he’d had the courtesy to be caught and jailed in another county, which slowed the rumor mill just a bit.
So as she watched the valley around her she tried to recall which side of the graph was x and which was y, and what went over what to get the slope. She did not lean against the concrete column, having more concern for her clothing than Frank had for his.
The female officer in the trees heard voices to her right. Two or maybe three men were having a discussion in the middle of Berwick Road. So far it sounded friendly.
The male officer waiting on the Fifty-fifth Street bridge returned to his car for his raincoat. It said police on the back, but he wasn’t getting soaked to the skin for nobody. It took only wetness to change the cool of the fall evening from brisk to miserable, and cop work didn’t pay enough to cover miserable.
The officer hunched by the building at 4950 Pullman, protected from the rain but still feeling its chill and, he hoped, invisible in the shadow of the stone wall. The wind’s faint moan raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Give me a matter-of-fact drug bust any day, he prayed, Heat instead of Friday the 13th, Ed McBain instead of Anne Rice. He tried to rewrite the evening in his head, turning it into a funny story to tell his wife over breakfast, but nothing amusing came to mind.
Frank saw a woman emerge from the station and make a beeline for the north edge of the parking lot. He hoped it would not be Theresa but felt sure it would be.
She did not run or shout or use the radio. He pushed himself off the column and moved to the next one, took a careful look around it, and continued on to meet her at the edge of the lot. If the killer noticed her at all, perhaps he would see only an RTA employee going to her car.
He met her between a battered pickup truck and a shiny new Cobalt. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry. I got scared.” She explained her fear that the next victim could be a cop. “It would be enormously appealing to him, to thumb his nose at us at the same time he continues his pattern. Not to mention the fact that if he knocks a hole in our perimeter, how much more does that increase his chances of getting away?”
“I see that, but my cops have enough on the ball to keep anyone from coming up behind them. Go back inside.”
“I’d rather stay with you.”
“Don’t be dumb. This is a stakeout. I didn’t bring you along just to have someone to chat with.”
The rain picked up a bit and reached her scalp. “What about Angela? She’s all bundled up with the Kevlar vest and sweatshirts—what if he doesn’t get a good look at her, doesn’t realize she’s a woman?”
“What if he sees you running up to people all night and decides to dump tonight’s body someplace else? Do you have any idea how stupid you and I are going to look?”
“He won’t. He can’t. Besides, is that the most important thing? How you look?”
“Yes. Yes, it is, because the next time I try to tell them a killer is on his way, no one is going to listen. Understand?”
“Yeah, yeah. Oh, and Greer is here.”
“What? Why?”
“To make sure we do our jobs and protect the citizens of Cleveland, etc., ad nauseam. Meaning he sensed a photo op but the idea of meeting a killer turned him pale and sweaty. He’s inside with the RTA staff and the coffee machine.”
“Good. All the more reason not to blow this. Go back inside. If you have to contact me again use the cell. I have it on vibrate.”
She thought, chewed the inside of her lip, and finally nodded her assent. But she didn’t move, painfully reluctant to let her cousin out of her sight.
The train coming from the east continued to rumble and the track next to them began to vibrate. The 9:17 rapid appeared from the west. Frank crossed the closest set of tracks, staying within a line of deep shadow provided by a bridge column. Rain accumulated in Theresa MacLean’s hair until it overflowed to the back of her neck, and she said “Frank!” in a fierce stage whisper.
He turned, only eight or ten feet away. “What?”
“About our grandfather—”
“Not now, Tess!” he hissed, and walked away, no doubt trying to stalk as unobtrusively as possible.
His cousin watched him. Theresa knew what they had at stake this evening, but all the killers in the world weren’t more important than her family.
“He loved you,” she said. He couldn’t possibly hear her, not with the rapid transit roaring into the station behind her and the other train bearing down on him, the driver blowing his horn, no doubt wondering why RTA couldn’t keep its passengers from wandering all over the valley.
Frank turned anyway, clearly visible in the bright headlamp of the train, and looked back at her just before the train passed between them, cutting him off from her sight. Theresa put one hand on the battered pickup to steady herself in the roiled air as the train rocketed through the night.
“I love you,” she said.
Thirteen or so cars passed, revealing an empty valley. Theresa told herself that Frank had gone back to his place of concealment under the bridge, and not to be an idiot, of course the train didn’t hit him and the killer didn’t kill him. Now, how to get back inside the station without being too obvious about it, and before she got soaked to the skin?
The 9:17 departed while yet another train approached from the east, a short thing of only four cars. She let the rain pelt her head for another moment while she watched it flow up the tracks. Its driver, too, let out a short toot on the horn, a habit or perhaps a requirement with the busy rapid station nearby.
He had liked this area, the Torso killer, needing the trains to travel back and forth between Cleveland and New Castle and to troll Kingsbury Run for victims, but not only for those reasons. He came there because he felt comfortable there. It was home to him.
She crouched between the cars and opened her cell phone, practically burying her head in her lap in order to muffle her voice and protect her phone from the rain.
A man’s voice answered. “Hello?”
“Mr. Corliss?”
“Ms. MacLean! It’s n
ice to hear from you again.”
“I’m sorry to bother you.”
“Not at all. I’m just putting the boat away. It’s a bit too windy for an evening sail.”
She could hear the erratic humming of the breeze behind his voice. “I have a quick question that I should have asked you earlier. The two railroads operating in Kingsbury Run—the Nickel Plate and the New York Central—did they go to New Castle?”
“Sure,” he said promptly. “Both of them. As I said, it was a hub. They’d stop for the Northern Ohio food terminal on Orange Avenue. It’s the post office building now.”
She stared at the track in front of her, wondering how that bit of information helped her.
A faint light shone on the tracks in front of her, growing in strength, and she felt the now-familiar rumbling. “I have to go, but thank you.”
The clacking of the wheels grew in volume. “Theresa,” Edward Corliss said, “are you near a train?”
“Yes. I’ll tell you about it later.”
“Just be careful,” he said emphatically, and hung up. She had to grin. No doubt he thought letting non–train people in a train yard sharply akin to allowing children to play in traffic. But she had no intention of wandering onto the tracks.
Cleveland to New Castle. Trains. She straightened, cautiously, and watched this new row of cars appear from the west. She knew she should get back inside before her hovering spooked the killer, but she found herself lost in the physics of the sight. Trains were large and heavy, unable to operate without their tracks. Very heavy. The phrase “stopping in its tracks” was not accurate; a train couldn’t just stop. They accumulated too much force behind them.
