The Unclaimed Victim

by D. M. Pulley

  “And I get to choose where you live. I will not have you holed up in some crack house. Got it?”

  “Well, okay . . . I mean, as long as I can afford it.”

  That was it. She’d pushed him one protest too far. His eyes went cold and drifted away.

  “I mean, I get to have a say in it, right? We’ll look for places together?” The scrambling backpedal in her voice made her cringe inside. She sounded like an anxious little girl—a thing her father had trained out of her since birth.

  “I give it two months.” He stood up from the table and headed to the garage, washing his hands of her. “Once you get a taste of the real world, you’ll come running back with your tail between your legs. You’ll see. You want to play this little game. Fine. Let’s play.”

  He slammed the door to the garage behind him.

  Kris flinched at the memory of it, then blinked up at her flickering computer screen. That was over a year ago, and the chill between them had only grown colder. The week after Christmas was the last straw. He’d hung up on her in the middle of their fight over her getting a roommate behind his back and him demanding that she move home. They hadn’t talked since. She applied to art school without even discussing it with him.

  Guilt gnawed at her empty stomach. Maybe he’d been right, she thought. Maybe if she’d moved back home . . . or never left.

  Kris gazed at her worthless photographs. Maybe they’d both be sitting at Shirlene’s laughing with Mel at that very moment. The photograph she’d taken of the old man behind the lunch counter hung on the wall over her computer. Mel grinned back at her with a haunted sadness in his eyes, or maybe it was just the ache in his hip. She wiped away a flood of tears and forced herself to look away.

  One of her prints was missing.

  With the computer still wheezing and whirring to life, she pulled herself up and walked over to the blank space on the wall where a photo should be. The torn tape still clinging to the plaster proved she wasn’t crazy. She scanned the floor to see where the picture had fallen. She checked behind and under the bed, but it was gone.

  “What the hell?” she muttered to herself. Pete had never shown any interest in her artwork, but she stormed through the house back to his room anyway. His walls were papered with concert posters for bands she’d never heard of. Giant black speakers sat on either side of a collection of plastic milk crates stuffed with vinyl records. His dresser was littered with receipts and sample-size bottles of cologne.

  The picture wasn’t there. A sharp pain squeezed her chest. It was a portrait of her father. She’d caught him smiling. And now it was gone.

  She stopped in the kitchen next to her father’s murder books and tried to remember if she’d taken the photograph down for some reason. Maybe their fight? Things don’t just vanish, she told herself. Then again, fathers don’t just go missing and wash up in pieces down the Auglaize River. The kitchen window rattled behind her as a car blew past along the narrow street outside, and an involuntary shudder ran through her.

  The tiny bungalow was over a hundred years old. All the floors were crooked, and the basement was a nest of cobwebs too terrifying to enter. The landlord used the cellar as storage, filling it to the rafters with dead stoves, moldy cardboard boxes, broken storm windows, and doors that had come off their hinges. Pete liked to joke there was a ghost in the house every time the floor creaked all by itself or the wind blew a door shut, and they both agreed that the ghost must live down there. It was supposed to be funny, but she couldn’t help but check the basement door at night. She glanced over at it as she walked back to her bedroom. It was shut.

  Her father had insisted on renting the house despite the many better listings she presented. I like the owner, he’d said. He’s steady. We understand each other. Says the place has been in his family for generations.

  It was the cheapest of the lot, so she went along with it. Of course, he didn’t mention that the old bastard was also spying on her. What the hell is going on, Kris? The landlord tells me you have a man living there now . . .

  The argument still made her bitter. Who cared how expensive the utilities were or how many hours she had to pull at the bar just to buy food? All that mattered was whether the landlord thought she was a whore.

  Back in her room, her dial-up connection had finally sputtered to life, and the Netscape Navigator home page shouted the day’s biggest headlines. Y2K ONLY 8 MONTHS AWAY! Every week there was another story about the municipal power grids collapsing along with all of Western civilization when the date counter in all the computer programs flipped over to 2000 at midnight, January 1. Shortsighted programmers had coded the years as two digits, and those two digits were about to run out at the end of 99, thereby ending the world.

  The headline below it read, NOSTRADAMUS PREDICTS THE END IS NEAR.

  Kris ignored the news stories and typed in the web address from David Hohman’s card. A huge photograph of a severed head greeted her along with the question, WHO WAS THE TORSO KILLER?

  CHAPTER 8

  Scrolling down the home page, Kris quickly realized the website was really just a series of message boards where strangers argued over which one of their favorite suspects was the true Torso Killer. A whole discussion group devoted themselves to a Dr. Francis Sweeney, another to Frank Dolezal, and still another to the county coroner, Dr. Samuel Gerber. As she scanned the boards, it became clear that the killer was never found.

  One of the tabs along the top read, VICTIMS. She clicked on it.

  A list of names and labels appeared under the heading Official Canon of Victims. The first, Victim 0, was given the name Lady of the Lake. Victim 4 was known as the Tattooed Man. Others were just labeled “Unknown.” There were thirteen in all. Only three had actual names—Edward Andrassy, Flo Polillo, and Rose Wallace, although there was some debate whether Rose was actually Victim 8. All they’d found of Victim 8 was a bag of bones.

  Kris swallowed hard.

  The dates when pieces of each body were discovered sat tabulated next to each victim. They ranged from 1934 to 1938. Another time, another world, a million miles away from where she sat, but her hand trembled as she read. Names and dates set in neat rows like bags of evidence on a table. No family members. No next of kin. No obituaries. Just dates and gory details—whether the head was ever found and what parts had been dissected by the killer.

  Kris clicked on a file link next to Victim 0. A photograph of an armless and legless torso slowly painted itself across her computer screen. She closed it before it could finish.

  “Jesus,” she breathed. She recognized the picture from one of her father’s library books.

  The list of “unofficial victims” was longer, with dates ranging from the 1920s to the 1950s. An entire discussion board devoted itself to an alleged victim called the Black Dahlia. Twenty different people argued back and forth whether a dead Hollywood starlet named Elizabeth Short had been murdered by the Torso Killer in 1947.

  Kris tracked her way back to the beginning. WHO WAS THE TORSO KILLER?

  She clicked the tab labeled “Dr. Francis Sweeney” and opened up an endless screed of debate as to whether this man was indeed the Torso Killer. Many believed he must be and presented detailed forensic analysis of the dissections of all thirteen bodies that indicate the killer must have been a doctor. Accusations flew about primary versus secondary sources and whether the Cleveland Police Museum files were still open to the public. Sweeney’s connections to a certain politician were referenced again and again along with the secret suspect Eliot Ness had apparently kept prisoner in a hotel for several days for an unconstitutional interrogation. Kris’s eyes flitted from one argument to the next until she found what she’d been looking for. Dr. Francis Sweeney died in a veteran’s hospital in 1964.

  Frank Dolezal’s discussion board flooded her screen with heated arguments as to whether he knew the Torso Killer. Skimming through, Kris gathered that Frank had been arrested for the murder of Flo Polillo and coerced into giving a c
onfession. He allegedly hung himself in his jail cell before he could stand trial after changing his story multiple times. When the coroner finally performed the autopsy, he’d found a bunch of broken ribs. Dolezal’s family and nearly all the website commentators agreed Frank had been murdered by a policeman or somebody with access that didn’t want him to talk. Some theorized it was to keep him from ruining the state’s case. Others believed it was because he knew the identity of the real killer.

  Half-baked conspiracy theories bled over onto every page. A congressman protected the identity of the killer. The police flubbed the investigation at the urging of the governor. The press fanned hysteria over Cleveland’s Jack the Ripper to sell papers. Eliot Ness and the rest of the police invented the killer to scare the railroad hobos and prostitutes out of the city. One adamant denier shouted, “Ness just wanted an excuse to burn the hobo jungles to the ground!” The irate man went on to berate Eliot Ness for being a drunk and a notorious union buster.

  After over an hour of reading the threads, Kris blinked her eyes clear. She’d scanned the code names of all the commentators as she went, but the only one that looked remotely familiar was a DHOH. The name appeared over and over.

  DHOH: What if the killings never stopped?

  Kris read the words again. David Hohman?

  The rest seemed like the musings of people with nothing better to do than obsess over a serial killer. Was this the sort of thing her father was into? she wondered, trying to picture him hunched over a computer at the Auglaize County Library, firing off his theories about a maniac from sixty years ago.

  The books she’d found seemed to point to some sort of obsession, but everything she knew about the man begged to differ. Hunting, fishing, cars, guns—these were the things her father cared about. He was never any sort of history buff or crime fanatic. He didn’t moon over Charles Manson. The man hardly even watched the news.

  Then an unsettling thought occurred to her. Maybe I don’t know him at all. She couldn’t deny how far apart they’d drifted over the past several years. All she ever did now was disappoint him. Her once doting father and hero had become a closed book.

  And now he’s gone.

  She shook the thought from her head and filled the empty space it left with facts:

  Fact—her father was missing.

  Fact—this David Hohman knew her father somehow and went looking for him at the diner.

  Fact—her father had books about a serial killer from the 1930s.

  Fact—David wrote the address for a chat room about the same killer on his card.

  Fact—David claims to be a private investigator.

  A series of scenarios flew through her head. Maybe her father had found a pile of old bones out hunting in the woods and figured he’d found another victim of this famed murderer. Maybe he’d hired David as a private investigator to help him prove his own pet theory about the killer. Maybe David Hohman was an old buddy from her dad’s time in the war and they just shared this morbid hobby. Maybe her father had been working undercover with the FBI for years and Hohman was his contact. She shook her head. Maybe her father filled his lonely nights haunting chat rooms and fell in love with this David person. That one felt unlikely, but stranger things had happened. It’s not as though her father would ever confide such a thing in her.

  They probably met right here online, she thought as the cursor blinked in the text box. The little dash of hope flashed on and off as she held her breath. On and off. Maybe David knows what happened. It wasn’t likely. Maybe David knows where he is. He probably didn’t. Maybe David killed him. But no, he wasn’t dead. He can’t be.

  After a moment’s debate over whether she could bear knowing the truth, she exhaled a breath of prayer and created an account on torsokillers.com under the username Kritter. Once her registration processed, she opened the “Victims” page and scrolled down to the bottom. She posted a question under a new thread titled “Hello?”

  KRITTER: David Hohman? Are you there?

  After a few minutes, another user popped up.

  LOWJACK: Who wants to know?

  Kris wasn’t eager to give out her personal information to some conspiracy theory wacko in a chat room, unless that wacko was David Hohman, and even that would be risky. She glanced at the card that some unfriendly man had left for her father. For all she knew, he was the last person to see him.

  KRITTER: David? That you? You gave your card to a friend of mine in Cridersville?

  After a protracted pause, the response came back.

  LOWJACK: Cridersville?

  Kris didn’t respond. She just waited to see if her original question would get answered. A few minutes later, he came back with another one.

  LOWJACK: Did somebody die?

  CHAPTER 9

  Kris recoiled from the question as her cursor blinked impatiently for an answer. She glanced out her window at the street. It wasn’t like the person at the other end of the Internet could see her through the glass. She could be anyone. She could lie about it or confess her worst fears and it wouldn’t matter.

  LOWJACK: You there?

  Kris bit her lip and forced air in and out through her nose. He could be anyone. He could be a killer. But if she didn’t answer, she’d never know.

  KRITTER: They found a body in the woods out there. In pieces.

  LOWJACK: Auglaize County?

  KRITTER: Yes.

  LOWJACK: ID?

  KRITTER: Not yet.

  LOWJACK: Your friend?

  Her hands trembled as she typed the answer.

  KRITTER: They think it’s him. I think/hope they’re wrong. Why were you looking for him? How did you know him?

  She waited a few minutes for a reply.

  KRITTER: David? You there?

  He didn’t answer.

  While she waited, she scrolled up into the acres of text she’d passed over. Missing persons flyers ran down her screen one after another along with dead-end threads.

  Lost.

  Missing.

  Unsolved Death.

  The phone rang next to her computer. She snatched it up. “Hello?”

  “Kris?” It was Glen, her boss down at the Lincoln Tavern.

  A held hope fell out of her lungs. It wasn’t her father. It wasn’t David Hohman.

  “Oh. Hi, Glen.” She scrolled back down to see if Lowjack had written back. The screen went blank. She tapped the space bar and wiggled her mouse. A text box appeared to inform her the dial-up connection had crapped out.

  “I’ve been trying to call you for the past thirty minutes! Are we coming to work today or what? I’ve had you on the schedule for a week. Vin called in sick. I’m pouring drinks by myself down here.”

  She glanced at the clock. It was 7:36 p.m., and she was late for her shift. “Shoot, I’m sorry. It’s just that . . .” There were no words for it. The pleas Lost, Missing, Unsolved Death hung like ghosts on her black monitor.

  “You can tell me all about it when you punch in. Now get your buns down here.” With that he hung up.

  The dead tone hummed in her ear while she stared at the blank computer screen. The chat room went out with her crummy dial-up connection. She set the receiver back down and weighed her options. The thought of calling Glen back with her sob story made her stomach sour. She could just quit her job, she mused. She could stay in her room, chatting with strangers all night until she went crazy. Strangers that might be homicidal maniacs.

  Kris flipped off the computer and headed out the door.

  “Hey, sweetie. Can I get another Jäger?” The mullet-haired man at the end of the bar waved at her.

  “Sure. Just one?” Kris tried to hide her quaking emotions with a smile. Did somebody die? She never should’ve gone in to work. She realized it the second she walked through the door, but now she was stuck. She grabbed the heavy green bottle and began to pour. She glanced at the door, half expecting David Hohman or some other Internet psycho to slip through. Or her father.

  “Why d
on’t you set yourself up with one too? Eh?” He lifted his chin at her in his best attempt at charm.

  “I can’t drink with the customers, sir,” she muttered and handed him his shot. Technically, she wasn’t even supposed to be behind the bar. She wasn’t twenty-one, so Glen hired her as a “waitress” at a deep discount. If the police ever asked, she was just running drinks to the booths in the back.

  A pair of frat boys came in and saddled up to three others at the end of the bar. A couple locked in deep conversation huddled together in one of the booths. Tracy Chapman sang from the jukebox in the corner, painting the air a smoky blue.

  “Oh, come on now. One little shot isn’t going to kill ya. Is it?”

  “My boss might.” Kris busied herself cleaning glasses below the bar.

  She hated the blustering drunks that pestered you, spilled their drinks on the floor, and had to be dumped into a cab at the end of the night. Mullet Head worked construction from the looks of his boots, flannel shirt, and thick hands. Her father had the same hands from repairing railroad lines and engines. They used to pick her up when she was small. The ache in her chest made it hard to breathe.

  Mullet Head didn’t notice or care. He wasn’t going to let up. The ring on his finger said he was married, but the way he looked at her said he liked to mess around. “The boss ain’t here, is he? C’mon. I hate to drink alone.”

  Glen strictly forbid skimming drinks, especially by her, but he’d gone down to the basement storeroom. She was alone behind the counter with nothing but the terrible feeling she’d done everything wrong. It was her fault he’d gone fishing by himself. It was her fault for leaving home. It was her fault for not listening to him and leaving him alone. Selfish. Ungrateful. Rotten.

  The door opened again. Two chatty girls stumbled in drunk.

  “Sure,” she heard herself say. “Why not?” She slapped a second shot glass onto the bar and filled it.

  “Here’s to our future. May our children be as gorgeous as you,” the man slurred and clinked her glass.

  Over my dead body. Kris threw back the shot, and the man whooped in approval. The sickly sweet liquor coated her throat like cough syrup and flushed her cheeks. She glanced up at the clock. It’s going to be a long night.