by Brian Hodge
As it turned out, though, I left the bus much sooner.
What the heavy metal shit said next was the last straw. He started mimicking the guy who slurred, asking his friend to the right if he would ever date someone who "tawked d' way." Mother fuckers. My hand was on my tool belt before I was even thinking about it.
I had the screwdriver in my hand as I moved to the back of the bus. Only the people standing were aware of my movements. In my head I was thinking matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, because of the last thing heavy metal was saying.
Two movements. The screwdriver in my hand came down into heavy metal's mouth; I tore downward, giving him half an Emmett Kelly grin. I think I said it aloud, but I was asking him to go ask the guy out himself, now that he'd be slurring himself, even with corrective surgery.
I looked at the guy next to him, the one he was telling about the older woman in the sunglasses. I asked him if he thought the lady might like to go out on a blind date, and then I put the screwdriver in his right eye, then the left, leaving it wiggling there, not caring about my fingerprints. Pardon me, that makes it three movements.
Before anybody could react, I was off the bus at Belmont and down an alley. I stayed at a friend's place on Southport until the next day.
Now I'm on a Greyhound, going to still another city, at least this time a free man. I wonder how I'll like Memphis. While I was at my friend's place, I dyed my hair. He's coming down here next week, after he gets the security deposit back on his apartment on Southport. I should have a job lined up by then.
I shaved my mustache off, as well. Ask the three assholes back in Chicago, I'm sure they'll tell you appearances are everything.
Chicago:
17 May 1994
Family Fiction
People kill over two things, Szostak was taught at the academy. Love and money. The cop with the fiery red hair and beard, who often worked undercover because of his boyish looks and Kentucky drawl, stood near the corpse thinking about the days when he was a potential candidate for the Chicago Police Department. Back when police artists drew in charcoal on cave walls; it seemed that long ago. Even in 1993, in this time of gangs and drive-by shootings, crack and moxie dealers overrunning the parks, and even the plain old standby, barroom brawls that ended up with one guy in the Augusta Boulevard drunk tank and the other at Cook County Morgue, this was still the two top hits on the untimely death's hit parade.
Love and money.
Szostak locked down at the teenage girl who had been burned alive, this he could surmise from the way her hands were in a rictus of raggedy flesh, and thought about the only exception. When it was the work of a psycho, you could throw away the book.
Chicago was a city of exceptions.
The girl had been discovered by the weekend watchman doing his rounds of the yard. The cops stood in a cluster around a set of railroad tracks at Huron and Washtenaw. It was the day before Valentine's Day. The wind was mild, and when a gust blew in from the north, you could smell the lagoon from Humboldt Park. The cops were waiting for the Crime Scene Unit and the Medical Examiner, and the reason they were bunched together, almost shamefaced, although there was no crowd, was because of the age of the girl who had most certainly been burned alive.
The corpse.
Everyone there had their own private thoughts. The older cops thought about their own daughters, how they wished they'd call home more than they cared if they were having safe sex. The younger cops, like Szostak and his partner, a blond woman named Felice, thought about sisters and nieces.
"Think it was a boyfriend?" Felice spoke in a whisper, almost reverently, to Szostak. "Valentine's Day, and all. You know."
"I've never known a teenager to do this." Szostak was mesmerized by the dead body. By avoiding the corpse, you avoided the answers. It was times like this that the western Kentucky twang, for it was real, not imagined for the sake of going undercover in Billyland up north, was as gone as last week's paycheck. "It's got to be a psycho, a stalker, something."
Felice listened to him speak as emotionless as a man saying that he was wrongfully sentenced to death. From where she stood, the small legs and hairless crotch reminded her of nothing more than a gnarled tree branch.
She looked up at the sound of tires on the gravel. Incredulously, the approaching car was an olive Ford Matador ragtop with Municipal plates. The once-white convertible cover was a nicotine-gray. With city plates, Felice doubted it was secondary smoke that caused the stains.
A well-built woman dressed in black climbed out of the car. Each cop watched her approach. She was carrying a black medical bag with the seal of the City of Chicago, two horizontal blue stripes connoting the branches of the river, sandwiching four red stars, for the
Fort Dearborn Massacre, the Chicago Fire, and the two Worlds' Fairs, forty years apart. There was talk of a fifth star to be added, immortalizing the flooding of the Loop the previous April when lazy and overzealous cable workers punched a hole through bedrock into the Chicago River, flooding the old coal tunnels and causing downtown to be evacuated for several days.
Felice guessed she thought about such trivial things that she might forget the travesty at her feet. The approaching woman had her black hair cut in a wedge and wore black jeans tucked into black boots. Her heels clocked across the small stones of the rail yard. The traffic along Grand Avenue behind her was mild. Jacketless, she wore a black silk shirt that billowed in the wind. The instruments in the bag clanked against each other as she came towards them, already reading their faces. Felice had a shirt at home, a gift from Szostak on her thirtieth birthday, that had the police logo and star. The legend was amended to CHICAGO POLICE: TO SERVE AND PROTECT WHENEVER WE FUCKING FEEL LIKE IT.
I'm Denise Cline," she said tersely when she was close enough to brush elbows with the cop standing at the back of the crime scene. "Assistant M.E."
"Where's Bervid?" one of the older cops asked.
"We're used to seeing his ugly mug around," another said. Hard, seasoned veterans. Been at a million crime scenes, no doubt.
"Out in the Quad Cities," she said, her mouth a thin line. "Riverboat gambling for the weekend." The older cops imagined Bervidi's car parked in the lot where the boat docked near Rock Island. His vanity plates read AWTOP C.
"Where's the damaged goods?" Cline said. It was the last thing spoken for the next twelve minutes. The photographers had yet to arrive from Eleventh and State, so the only sounds were the wind and the mournful wail of a Milwaukee-bound C&NW freight. The train was seventeen cars long. Perhaps conductors from each route and station should be questioned.
The sound that also existed, but was shut out by the cops the way the sounds of the elevated trains were in the Loop, was that of the rustling of the latex glove the M.E. used to prod the sex organs of the deceased.
The Crimes Scene Unit arrived at the site after Cline had pronounced the girl dead. Five uniforms and two detectives from Area 4 Homicide, milling listlessly. This was not a day for gallows humor. The air was so fresh, the sky so blue, the corpse so blackened and dry that more than one of the cops prayed for rain.
One of the techs was talking to Cline.
"You worked the Dolenz killing, I remember." The tech, a bald man who dressed like Phil Donahue, spoke while he dusted the body for fingerprints. Another tech was snapping pictures from every angle, like he was on a domestic surveillance. "Patty something, right?"
"Close. Denise Patsy Cline," the Assistant M.E. said without smiling, lighting up a Carlton menthol. "Like people named their kids, Elvis. I can bet that the next generation will have a lot of boys named Garth. Garth Brooks, the singer."
"I know," the tech said. "My name's no great shakes either. Emmett Nix. Did you know what song—"
"Yes, I've been asked that a billion times," Cline rolled her eyes. "When her plane rammed into that mountain in Tennessee, her top ten hit was `I Fall to Pieces.'”
"Yea, I guess you would hear that."
"Uh-huh."
> "Like that new thing, 'Wayne's World.’"
"Mmm."
"No one's original anymore," Nix dusting for fingerprints all the while.
"Whoever killed this girl was", Cline said as the tech turned the body over. The teenager's vagina was shredded.
"Hey, look what I found." Everyone turned toward a rookie named Sparrow, a woman with a slight build who often worked the Equestrian Squad.
Working the perimeter of the scene. One of the techs picked it up after the photos had been snapped. The white gloves were stained brown from blood immediately.
It was an automobile jack. The ratchet end had tissue hanging from it. Two of the older cops let go of their lunches simultaneously.
It was common knowledge to most of the cops on Augusta Boulevard that Szostak and Felice were lovers. They were able to remain intimate and not take their work home with them. Even after finding the girl, there were plenty of other layers on the monster cake to push the teen's mutilated remains from their minds. A floater in the turning basin north of Goose Island. The usual drive-by shootings, ten-year-olds shot dead without ever knowing anything more about the San Jose Sharks other than the colors were cool and it got their blood running all over the intersections from Kedzie to Pulaski. A gas explosion tore apart a photo studio on Racine; the owner's remains that were identifiable consisted of his lower jaw and teeth found on the median of the Kennedy Expressway three blocks north. That was one for the record books.
Szostak was sleeping like the dead, the girl on the train tracks a distant memory in Morpheus' arms, to be prodded front and center only when the mayor was questioned on the Open Files at the police district. It was two days later, and Felice sat in the living room of the apartment at Wellington and Kimball, watching a deserted street, one with absolutely no tales to tell.
In her hands she held the autopsy report. The medical jargon about histamine and serotonin levels she skipped over. She was glad that the body had been found in the winter, not mid-July, but she did not thank God. Outside the windows, beyond the frosted glare of the streetlamps, the exterior lights of an Exxon station went out one by one. The clock near the bed ticked. Szostak's chest heaved, and a single snore hitched from his mouth.
The girl was estimated to be between twelve and fourteen, the tagging all the more difficult because her pubic hair had been burned off. The age was assumed ballpark, though, because there was no immediate evidence that the corpse's legs had ever been shaved.
There was little progress on Jane Doe 93-07 over the next few days; there were the usual gang drive-bys, and the male cops at the Wood Street station house spent their free time speculating about if Felice would ever rope Szostak into marrying her and about how much Meiko Sparrow resembled the actress Nastassja Kinski.
Each shift had been briefed on the case, particularly the calm brutality of the autopsy protocol. In this city, sirens and sobbing relatives doing a positive ID were a daily thing. In very few cases did Watch Commander Pasdar allow his squad to hear that a once-breathing human being was better off dead.
The girl had been violated — ah, these sterile textbook law enforcement terms — both vaginally and anally. This was suggested by circumference for both and verified by several tissue samples from the labia and the transverse slit below the sigmoid flexure. In females, the recto-vaginal pouch is about two and a quarter inches from the anal orifice.
M.E. Cline was as thorough as Frank Bervid, not that there was ever any doubt. Back at the Harrison Street brownstone that was the Cook County Morgue, she scraped several rust and metal flecks from an area an inch above the aforementioned slit.
Jackson Lentz of the Trace-Microscopy Unit at the Crime Lab was able to give an identification of the metal fillings, though the fact that unburned, bloodied Type-O blood and flesh clung to the bumper jack Meiko Sparrow had found next to the railroad tie as much proved Lentz's efforts. But he did narrow down where to look, which haystack to find the needle.
The instrument was a hired-hand jack, sold through the Sears catalog. Most of the Sears stores plus all of the catalog and auto maintenance outlets in the tri-state area had closed the previous month; Pasdar cautioned that the jack might have come from a car sold elsewhere, like Wisconsin, or Indiana.
Interstates were a wonderful thing for serial killers. Or just for people passing through who had an urge.
Lentz was a meticulous man. Sparrow had met him once, and was impressed by his dexterity with even the most minute particle. His report also mentioned that the jack was made from Call A-1 castings. The horizontal climb pins from the base to positive contact measured twenty-eight inches. In Illinois, most car dealers automatically provided a buyer with a bumper jack, and different brands were available through different dealerships. This is one of those things you don't find out listening to Joe Rizza Ford's jingle during commercial breaks for Rawhide on Sunday mornings
"What kind of cars are we looking for?" one of the cops in back said over a cruller.
"Not that it's much help," Pasdar admitted. "Our buddy Lentz called a Sears catalogue outlet in Roca, Nebraska. Near Lincoln, I think. Got most of the above description from them. The cars range from Ford Escorts and GEO Storms to Chevy Novas,"
"Too bad the jack wasn't used only on, say, Volares," the cop said, munching away.
This isn't Magnum, P.I., Sparrow thought with disgust, knowing the cop was only joking around. To give him his due, he did elicit a few chuckles. But they were all making notations in their notebooks.
Cline's report was so thorough it was horrendous. Each description stood alone like a cracked domino. Every cop thought, how come so young, but none thought on why. Not even the rookies or the khakis.
There was some discussion between Cline and Bervid, two hundred dollars richer from his Mississippi Queen excursion—on exactly what killed the girl. The only thing they did agree on was the age. Both felt that she had been between ten and twelve; her legs, when scrubbed best as possible, showed no evidence that they had ever been shaved.
The rape had torn apart the internal organs. Pieces of rust and chrome from the jack had been found in both lower orifices of the body. In the vagina, there were also flecks of metal with a gold finish, marked unidentifiable. Possibly something cheap, whatever it was, because of the size and weight of the flecks in comparison with those from the jack. The victim, had she lived, would have needed a hysterectomy and a kidney transplant.
She would also have worn a colostomy bag for the rest of her life.
Had she lived. In her death, this was where the two coroners argued.
Cline felt that the trauma and the intensity of the attack was what killed her. Bervid thought it was a blow to the head which fractured her skull. Szostak had thought on the scene that the corpse had been burned alive because of the fingernail marks in the palms. It was explained in the coroner's report that she was dead or unconscious when burned: no carbon monoxide in the lung tissue, and other things more technical regarding trace elements. Szostak recalled that the mouth of the girl had been closed, and told this to Felice and Sparrow after watch ended.
"So, the reason for the claw marks," Felice said, her mouth in a minimalist sketch, "was because she was aware of her torture."
"So what have we got?" Sparrow was going to head the field investigations, Szostak and Felice let her run the brainstorming session, as well. They were sitting in a back booth at The Huddle House on Armitage and Ashland. Manila folders spilled their contents in parallel lines on the Formica countertop. There was a jukebox on the table; "Crazy On You," by Heart, was audible above the sounds of sizzling, greasy chicken.
"We've sent out copies of the dental records to all dentists in Wicker Park, Bucktown and East Village, for starts," Szostak cracked his knuckles. "If there isn't a positive response, we'll hit Ravenswood and points north." He scratched his beard.
"The newspapers and television coverage, well, we've been lucky. No leaks. The severity of this hasn't gotten out." The Channel Five news team
had made the Burned Body in the Trainyard their lead story, the other networks following suit when the nightly ratings became available. "Even if the dentists recognize the connection, the teeth are burned as well, then at least they won't know the age."
"Unless they make a positive match from their files," Felice nodded with her chin towards her partner.
"All the better," Sparrow said. "I've been following up on the phone leads we caught." She flipped through her soft leather notepad. "Some were the usual phone psychos, one even saying he saw Elvis setting the body on fire. One that looked promising was from a, let's see, Alex, no last name. Called in on the fifteenth, the afternoon. Gave a home address of 2219 West Division when the officer catching asked. It goes to St. Mary of Naz hospital."
"A boyfriend?" Felice asked. "We could check with Human Resources..."
"Already done. Nothing."
"Maybe the girl had some connection to the hospital, could have been taken there by this Alex guy for an abortion, to cover a bruise." Szostak, still scratching his beard. "None of our known prostitutes or moxie snitches have shown up missing..."
"It's a thought," said Sparrow.
"We could check at the Naz," Felice said. "The guy catching, did he get it on tape?"
"No, too sudden. I talked to him. He said that the voice sounded muffled. Like a handkerchief was over the phone."
"Shit, that's slim to nil. But it's still a shot there might be something in the records at Admitting."
"Follow up," Sparrow said, catching air in her straw when she sipped at the ice water remains of her Coke. "What else?"
"We could go over the photos taken at the scene, something like that." Szostak moved a few folders around as if it were a Three-card Monte game. Interspersed were the daily police bulletins, hot sheets, and interoffice correspondence regarding an upcoming raid by the Bureau of ATF on a cult complex in Waco.
