Trail of Blood

by Lisa Black

  Her brow smoothed out as she remembered a more hopeful time. “She was only seventeen, and they made quite a pet of her at first. Then she said the older ladies got snooty, which probably meant she had gotten on their nerves. But there was one girl she liked—just out of college and young, so they had more in common. But I don’t know her name, if that’s going to be your next question.”

  Frank smiled. “It was, yes. Please try to remember.”

  The woman tried, pressing her back into the sofa with her arms crossed. Sanchez raised an eyebrow at Frank but would wait until they left to ask why he asked.

  “Sorry, I’m a total blank.”

  “That’s all right. It was just a hunch.”

  “I remember she got pregnant just before the summer ended. I had hoped they might hire Kim to fill in during her maternity leave, but they didn’t.”

  “That’s helpful. Thank you.” He stood up and gave her his card for the second time, asking her to call if she thought of anything else and telling her that they would be in the building for a while longer, reinterviewing her neighbors.

  She pressed it into her palm and then crossed her arms again, balled fists underneath her armpits. “You really think Johnny’s father’s body turning up is the reason Kim got killed?”

  “Mrs. Hammond,” he confessed, “I don’t know what else to think.”

  Theresa prodded a flattened McDonald’s cup with her toe and decided it had been on the scene for years and was unlikely to have been on his body when it had been dumped. Besides, she couldn’t see Van Horn eating in a McDonald’s. John Q’s, maybe.

  Occasional bursts of sun made the buildings in the distance glitter as if studded by diamonds. The cries of birds and insects, one class of animal thinking about migration and the other about death, filled the air. A perfect day for a stroll by the railroad tracks, except she wouldn’t have considered strolling here without some sort of escort—in this case one of the patrol officers guarding the scene—and she’d rather have been strolling through her kitchen, deciding what to cook to entice her teenager out of bed. Eleven o’clock. Rachael would still be asleep, unless Harry decided to wake her.

  The patrol officers had already walked a grid through the area, so she really didn’t need to do this. Surely they would have found anything of significance. She knew she should just tell them to release the scene and go home. Frank would let her know if any significant facts developed from the interviews, and she could use the time to figure out a way to tell Leo about contaminating the victim’s clothing with her pets’ hairs.

  Yet she continued to walk from the pool of dried blood to the train track and back, widening the swath with each step. Perhaps the killer had dropped something. How she would know that something when she saw it became the question, so any item that had not yet become encrusted by rain-soaked dirt bore closer scrutiny. So far she had not found an object to match that description.

  The patrol officer watched her from the concrete platform, bored in his little cage of yellow tape. She’d have to release the scene after she finished—she couldn’t justify tying up a road officer because she wanted to go home to her daughter. And the railroad wanted their train back.

  A dirty matchbook, a bundle of filthy yarn. She walked on. The sun flowed through her hair to her scalp and she took off her sweater, tying it around her waist. The valley smelled of diesel fuel and dead leaves.

  A broken plastic fork. A penny. A rumble sounded, and she looked up. The Red Line 11:08 chugged off to the west.

  A used condom. A piece of surprisingly clean white paper.

  She stepped carefully over a stand of dead goldenrod to pluck up a piece of torn paper. The piece had been torn from the upper left corner of an unlined spiral notebook but the black pencil used on the paper formed not words but a series of lines and dots, some very straight, some wavy, some forming another corner, the deep slashes against the white somehow reminiscent of—

  She turned her face up to the train in front of her. The rear edge of the boxcar, with its small rung at the bottom and the coupling sticking out, matched the piece of drawing. Someone had been sketching a train.

  She couldn’t prove it without finding his sketch pad but would bet that Van Horn had been drawing one of his favorite items—a train—at some time in the previous day. Standing near the tracks, where a train rattling by would deaden the sound of someone approaching from behind, ready to bludgeon, catch, bundle into a waiting car. Perhaps the victim’s hand clenched on his drawing, ripping the paper. Perhaps the notebook had been left behind at the site…by a train track. There were too many miles for herself or the officers to scour. She should start with the preservation headquarters, the most logical place for Van Horn to do his sketching.

  CHAPTER 41

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11

  PRESENT DAY

  Frank knocked on the door. The Brookpark bungalow was neatly kept, with the grass trimmed and the leaves raked and only a few scattered toys to make it look homey. At least on the outside.

  With Sanchez at his side, he knocked again, hoping the husband would not be at home. When he interviewed married women, in Frank’s experience, husbands always took up too much time. They wanted to know everything. He would be the first to admit that men were, in general, paranoid. Maybe they’d learned to be while evading saber-toothed tigers or something.

  The inner door swung inward, pulled by a short, slender woman with light brown hair and a chubby baby perched on one hip. She left the screen door in place. Behind her, a little boy as round with baby fat as his sibling peered at them with dark eyes, his hands reflexively clenching a Tonka truck. He must have been the pregnancy that engorged the woman while she worked with Kim Hammond at the zoning and planning office.

  “Sonia Kettle?” Frank asked.

  “Yes?”

  They showed her their badges, told her their names, and said they were there to ask about Kim. That this did not seem to surprise her at all convinced Frank they were on the right track. She pushed the screen door open with her free hand and told them to come in.

  There were more than a few scattered toys on the inside of the house. In fact, the living room seemed more like a well-scrubbed toy box than a place for adults. No husband emerged, though a motorcycle magazine and a pair of men’s sunglasses implied that he did exist. Good thing, Frank thought, since Sonia Kettle appeared to have her hands full. As soon as they sat at the kitchen table, the baby started to squirm and the little boy plunked the Tonka on Frank’s knee.

  “I have a truck,” he declared, as if daring Frank to deny it.

  “That’s great.” Now go away.

  “I read about it in the paper,” Sonia said. “First about the body in the lake, and then the next day I caught a little paragraph somewhere about it being Kim. I couldn’t believe it.”

  “You worked with her in the zoning and planning office?” Sanchez began.

  “Yes. That was…geez, four, five years ago, I think, right before I had Brent. Kim was just a kid. So was I.”

  “The back goes up,” Brent continued, demonstrating how the dumping part of his dump truck worked by unloading a Super Ball onto the oak table.

  “I see,” Frank said.

  “I can put a motorcycle in it.” The kid zipped off, and Frank wasted a moment hoping that the quest for a motorcycle suitable for demonstration would keep the tot busy for a while, but he returned before Sanchez could finish asking, “Had you seen her lately?”

  “Yes. Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  The baby screeched until Sonia relented and set her—her? the diaper had pink flowers on it, so probably—on the living room floor. The baby immediately made a beeline back to the linoleum and her mother.

  “Yes,” the woman began. “She came to see me at work, last week. I’d wonder from time to time what happened to her, because she seemed a little wild to me back then.”

  “It’s a spider motorcycle,” Brent said.

  Frank didn’t recognize
the term, until he glanced at the toy to see the Spider-Man logo on it. “That’s nice.”

  The kid squinted at him. That’s nice was not something men said, not even to a five-year-old. “Do you have any motorcycles?”

  “Brent,” his mother said, “Mommy is talking. Don’t interrupt.”

  The boy shared a murderous look with his truck, then flounced off, nearly stepping on his baby sister on the way out. The sister reached Sonia, who plucked her up for deposit in a playpen in the living room. Brent beat her back to the table, however, with a plastic SpongeBob doll.

  “He talks,” the boy announced.

  Great, Frank thought. Another country heard from. “Wild how, Sonia?”

  “The drugs. The things she did with boys. The things she did with boys to pay for the drugs. I chalked some of it up to bravado, but most of it—most of it she didn’t seem to be proud of. She wasn’t bragging, just shooting the breeze, which struck me as sadder than any sob story she could have given me.”

  Brent pushed a button, and the toy uttered a comment Frank couldn’t quite catch, not that he tried very hard. “Why did Kim come to see you last week?”

  The baby began to protest.

  “Just a visit, she said at first. She had been kicking around downtown, thought she’d come in and say hi.”

  The cops waited. SpongeBob made another pronouncement as Brent walked his bendy little feet across the table, nudging Frank’s elbow.

  “She seemed good. Relatively healthy; her eyes were clear. But she had that old look.”

  “Look?” Sanchez said, pressing.

  “You can talk to him,” Brent reminded Frank.

  The baby wailed.

  “Brent. Show SpongeBob to Bethie. Try to make her laugh. Now,” she added in one of those iron tones that all mothers eventually learn. It worked on Brent. It would have worked on Frank if he’d thought she meant him.

  With toys and babies momentarily quieted, Sonia Kettle made the most of her break. “Like she was up to something. When we worked together, I could always tell when she’d be about to hit me up for cigarettes or money or to help her cover up a long lunch hour. She’d get this glinting look in her eyes, suddenly be real interested in everything about you. And when she showed up last week, I wanted to think she’d grown up, got her life together, and that maybe I’d helped with that process in some small way. But she hadn’t.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Same thing, different day. She chatted, made a fuss over pictures of the kids, then asked for a favor. She wanted to see blueprints from a building. That’s not a big deal, really—I mean they’re not exactly state secrets and she did used to work there….”

  Frank nodded encouragingly. He didn’t know if Sonia had violated some code, but knew he didn’t care if she did.

  “The problem was, they were from 1935.”

  “Forty-nine fifty Pullman?”

  For the first time Sonia Kettle looked surprised. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “Long story. Did she say why?”

  “She said her grandfather used to own it, and they were going to tear it down, and she wanted to see what it had looked like. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but Kim would go off on tangents like that. She’d get obsessed about a movie or a car or a breed of dog and talk about nothing else for a few days, then lose interest.”

  “So you didn’t get them out for her?”

  “No, I did. I figured she’d nag me until she got what she wanted—same old Kim. She’d gotten off the drugs, but nothing else had changed.” She gave an abrupt shrug. “Maybe I’m being mean. Anyway, we went down to basement storage and dug through the drawers until I found what she wanted. Got dust all over a new blouse, too.”

  “The blueprints?” Frank asked as the baby started up in the other room. “We requested those and were told it would take a week because they had to come from remote storage, or something along those lines.”

  The young woman nodded. “Requests are processed in the order they’re received. Unless you get, like, the mayor to call us and say it’s an emergency. Otherwise it goes into the queue with the others.”

  Frank wished he’d known that. But the fresh bodies turning up had taken priority over James Miller’s murder for everyone except Theresa. “So you—”

  “I did her a favor, yeah. Isn’t every job like that?” she asked with a hint of defensiveness. “Don’t you fix people’s parking tickets?”

  “I try,” Frank said to soothe her. “Sometimes. Did anything in particular interest Kim about the blueprints? Did she just want the general layout?”

  “I don’t know. She seemed real interested in them, that’s for sure, but I couldn’t tell you why.”

  “Did you make her a copy of it?”

  “No! You need the oversize copy machine to do that, and that sort of thing the boss will get mad about. Kim didn’t even ask. She just wrote down some of the information, like the date and the name of the architect.” The baby wailed again, not loudly.

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t pay attention. By that point I wanted to get her out of there and back to work before the boss came looking for me.”

  “Mommy! Bethie threw up!”

  “Excuse me.” Sonia left the table and went into the living room. Sanchez leaned over the oak surface. “What do you think? Kim knows it’s her grandfather’s body in that building—”

  “And she’s got his notebook.”

  “—and she sees something on the blueprints that leads her to the killer? What?”

  “Maybe it’s Corliss. She confronted him and he killed her.”

  “Corliss is the only tenant we know about, but that doesn’t mean he was Miller’s suspect. Who knows what Miller wrote in that notebook?”

  Sonia came back into the kitchen area and took the baby to the kitchen sink to rinse off the spit-up. Brent made a triumphant return to the table, legitimately freed from his exile, both the motorcycle and SpongeBob in hand.

  “Mrs. Kettle?” Frank asked. “Can you show us those blueprints?”

  “Sure. It will only take a minute now that I know where they are. Come by Monday morning and—”

  “I meant now.”

  She looked up from drying her daughter’s face with a paper towel. “Now? No, I can’t—I mean, I don’t have a key to our offices, they don’t give keys to peons—and I think the building itself is locked—”

  “If we get your supervisor to unlock the offices?”

  She perched the baby on her hip with an expression of profound unhappiness. Brent, sensing a significant decision, swung his body from person to person as the exchange went on.

  Sanchez asked, “Are you worried that your boss will be mad you showed Kim the blueprints?”

  “No, he won’t really care about that. It’s just that my husband is at work and I don’t have a babysitter I can call at short notice. We’d have to take the kids with us.” She finished on a determined note. “And you’d have to give us a ride there and back.”

  Frank bit the figurative bullet. “Brent, how would you like to ride in a real police car?”

  CHAPTER 42

  SATURDAY, JUNE 6

  1936

  The dead man’s head had turned up the day before, wrapped in (presumably) his own clothing and left under a willow tree just southwest of the East Fifty-fifth Street bridge, where any passerby would spot it. The passersby happened to be two Negro boys playing hooky that pleasant Friday.

  The killer had not had to wait long for the rest of his handiwork to be discovered. A railroad detective regularly checked the area, looking for items stolen from the cars, and knew the macabre bundle had not been there the day before. “Right across from the railroad police station,” Walter pointed out from their vantage point atop the edge of the Kingsbury Run valley. This detail seemed to disturb him more than any other. “Why do that? He gets off on the risk? Or he wants to rub our noses in it?”

  James r
ecalled Corliss’s words. “Maybe he likes nothing so much as getting away with something.”

  “I’d like nothing so much as rubbing his nose in this dead guy’s ass, that’s for sure. ’Course he’s probably already done that. Pervert.” Walter spat out the last word but lacked the wind for any more as they picked their way down the slope, only half a mile to the east of where they’d found the first two bodies.

  Then Walter puffed, “They are not going to be happy with us.”

  “It’s not our fault.”

  “Has that ever helped, with a wife?”

  “It used to.” James couldn’t blame his wife for being disappointed. She had been looking forward to spending this Saturday on a drive in the country with Walter and his wife after being cooped up all winter long. Summer had arrived, with at least as much certainty as one could get in Cleveland, where warm weather could never be counted on no matter the month. The women wanted to see the rolling green hills of Cuyahoga Falls. But once the body turned up, the detectives no longer had the day off. No cop in the city had the day off.

  Helen’s mood had already been foul enough after Friday, her personal wash day, despite the fact that she could now hang the clothes outside and away from the soot of the woodstove. Washing took the entire day and left her back aching and her hands blistered from the boiling water. James’s interest in finding the building at 4950 Pullman mentioned in the newspaper—now reopened after renovations made necessary when a tenant cooked food on a hobo stove and set his office alight—had been met with a tight-lipped scowl from his wearied wife. James hadn’t dared to speak to her until well after lunchtime. Even his having splurged on the newspaper did not thaw her; only the proposed outing had brightened the horizon. When Walter arrived to collect him, they had thrown the news at Helen like a curveball and ran out before she could catch it and bean them.

  “Who found it?” James asked his partner as they picked their way through the spring weeds, careful not to slip down the sharp incline.