The Unclaimed Victim

by D. M. Pulley

  Kris turned to him, his earlier words buzzing in her ear. The Torso Killer isn’t like Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Dahmer.

  He pointed to the pictures on the far wall. “See Victims 1 and 2? They were decapitated, emasculated, and left out in the middle of Kingsbury Run, right on the edge of a shantytown for those poor folks to find. That’s a totally different MO than Victims 7 through 12, who were hacked up into pieces and hidden or thrown in the river.”

  Her frowning eyes darted from one set of photographs to the next.

  “There are inconsistencies all over the place. The cut marks on Victim 10 are totally different than most of the others. The knife work on Victim 6 points to two different styles of cutting, and detectives initially suspected an apprentice was involved. Why were some burnt? Why were some preserved?”

  The way he talked made it seem like a game. Kris tilted her head, sickened. Mimi’s head rested on the wall next to the photograph of Rose Wallace. Eyes closed. The fever dream kept going.

  “Why was Victim 11 embalmed? Did the city’s best suspect, the deranged Dr. Francis Sweeney, exact a revenge on Eliot Ness for kidnapping him and holding him prisoner in a hotel for questioning? Ness kept him for days, trying to extract a confession. Victims 11 and 12 were left under Ness’s office window a few months after they let Sweeney go and might’ve been stolen from a funeral home just to mess with the guy . . . How could all these belong to just one killer? These are the questions that have been buggin’ investigators for years . . .”

  The words blurred together as Kris scanned the photographs again, trying to see what he saw, trying to find a way out. Coroners’ reports were plastered below some of the photographs. She focused on one to keep the room from spinning. “How did you get these? I thought the reports were lost.”

  Jimmy turned to her with a frown. “What?”

  “I went down to the county archives, and most of the coroner’s files are missing. The Cleveland Press archives have been scattered too. Someone even walked off with the microfilm.”

  “It must’ve been fairly recent.” Jimmy’s eyes circled his macabre collection. “I got copies of some of those files just last year.”

  “But why would someone take them?” It was just one of the questions that had been plaguing her ever since she left the library, and the suspicion it had something to do with her father twisted in her stomach.

  “I dunno. It could be some asshole with no respect for public records. Some collector or tourist.” Jimmy turned back to Rose Wallace and looked at her with heavy-lidded eyes. “Or maybe it’s deliberate. Maybe somebody’s trying to destroy what little evidence of the killer we have left.”

  “But that makes no sense. There are books and books on the subject,” Kris protested.

  “Books aren’t the same as police reports and the coroner’s files. Details are selected and edited by the writers. Important details that might make a difference if the case is reopened are now missing.”

  “But I thought the case was closed years ago.”

  “There’s no statute of limitations on murder. Maybe someone is trying to make sure they never open it back up again. Maybe someone got too close to the truth.”

  Dad. Her voice drifted as she pictured her father hunched over the records in the archives. “But it was so many years ago. Why would someone go to all that trouble to hide evidence?”

  Madame Mimi lifted her heavy eyes from the photograph of Rose and leveled them at Kris. “Because the killings never stopped.”

  “What?” Kris shook her head, but the photographs of severed body parts Ben had tried so hard to hide from her eyes back in Cridersville would’ve fit in perfectly with the ones lining Jimmy’s walls. The red dotted lines cut through ankles, knees, hips, elbows, and wrists. “No. It has to be a copycat. Right? There’s no way . . .”

  “No. She’s right.” Jimmy pointed to his collection. “Thirteen official victims were attributed to the Torso Killer, but this all happened before the national crime database. Cities didn’t share information on homicides. Dismembered bodies turned up all over—in Pennsylvania, in New York, shit, in other parts of Ohio—and nobody put them together. Detective Peter Merylo was assigned to the case in the 1930s and he tried. From what I’ve read, his death count went up to over fifty.”

  Kris shook her head. “But don’t serial killers travel around? This isn’t the first time a killer has struck in other places, right?” She forced herself to do the math. The Torso Killer would have to be at least eighty years old by now. That’s assuming there’s just one of them.

  Mimi went back to studying the photos of poor Rose, oblivious to them both.

  Jimmy kept going. “But the victims keep turning up. There were three bodies found in the ’40s in Pennsylvania. All naked. All decapitated and dismembered. One of them had the word Nazi carved into his chest.” Jimmy pointed to a photograph on the far wall. “In 1950 a headless body was found in a steelyard in town. There were several more in the ’60s and ’70s . . . and that’s just the bodies that were found.”

  “But.” Kris waved a hand at the photos. “If the serial killer’s still around, wouldn’t they have found him by now? He’d be an old man!”

  “Exactly.” Jimmy announced like he’d just won his case. “It isn’t a ‘him,’ it’s a ‘them.’ Did you know there are over ten thousand murders in this country every year and over a third go unsolved? Police just don’t have the manpower or the budgets to solve them, especially when the killing is random.”

  Kris’s head began to reel as she struggled to figure out whether Jimmy was crazy or right.

  “See, the most common way to solve a murder is by identifying the victim. Once the victim is known, they look for suspects among their family and associates. We’re usually lucky enough to get killed by people we know. That’s why the Torso Killers were so successful. Shit, that’s why Jack the Ripper was so successful. These guys didn’t know their victims, and better yet, they chose victims that nobody would miss.”

  Jimmy looked up again at the picture of Rose Wallace with inexplicable remorse. Kris puzzled at him a moment. “Did you know her or something?”

  “No. But she doesn’t fit. She was the only black victim, you know.”

  Mimi woke from her trance and looked over at him. “It wasn’t her fault, Jimmy. You have to forgive her.”

  “Forgive her for what?” Kris demanded sharply. She felt herself coming unhinged.

  “For getting killed, of course.” Mimi admonished Kris with her eyes. “Rose would’ve been a better mother to Jimmy’s grandmother if she’d lived.”

  “So you’re related to her?” Kris stared at Rose’s smiling face, searching for a family resemblance. They both had the same light brown skin and similar African features, but her eyes weren’t as pretty. Below her smile, a photograph of two police detectives in hats pointed to a spot under a bridge.

  Jimmy just shrugged. “Can’t really prove it. Birth records were real sketchy back then, especially for the homeless.”

  Mimi patted Jimmy’s shoulder like he was her own son and went back to mooning over the cut-off body parts of Victim 9. Suddenly, it all made sense. Jimmy’s obsession with both the murders and the crazy fortune-teller must’ve started the minute Madame Mimi convinced him he was the great-grandson of one of the victims. Jesus, this is sick. Her suspicions that Mimi was the one who’d painted a star on her door deepened.

  “So who do you think they—these killers—are?” Kris demanded, refusing to get sucked into the fortune-teller’s lies. “And what the hell does any of this have to do with the graffiti on my door?”

  Mimi sat down in the middle of the floor and pulled a large scrapbook out of her crocheted handbag. It was a collection of tattoo designs, both hand drawn and photographed. She glanced up at the confusion on Kris’s face and simply said, “Understanding tattoos is critical in my line of work. When someone walks in for a reading covered in marks, you’ll find the answers to their questions are written all
over them. Now . . . do you recognize any of these?”

  She flipped through page after page of images. Crosses, Celtic symbols, ankhs.

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  “What about these?” Mimi flipped the page to a collection of swastikas.

  “Of course. Nazis.”

  “After what Hitler did, we all came to hate the bent cross. It’s a shame really. Do you know what it meant for centuries before he stole it?”

  Kris shook her head, wanting to storm out of the room but sitting down anyway.

  “To the ancient Hindus, it meant good fortune and well-being. These days, our Nazis have to be clever to hide their hate from the rest of the world. They use numbers and secret symbols. Like here.” She flipped another page. “‘88’ stands for ‘HH’ or ‘Heil Hitler.’”

  “Do people really wear these?” Kris frowned at the black numbers tattooed across a skinhead’s neck. “You know, outside of prison?”

  “The Aryan Brotherhood and the KKK have more associates and supporters than you might think.”

  Kris glanced up at Jimmy standing over them. His face registered no emotion. Tattooed evidence of racial hatred didn’t seem to shock him at all.

  Mimi turned another page to show an eight-pointed star with a swastika ghosted over the top. “They’ve hidden their mark in all sorts of other symbols.”

  Kris drew in a breath. “Wait. I thought you said the star on my door stood for baptisms or beheadings or something.”

  “It does. The Nazis were praying for a rebirth or baptism of their nation. Religion and Hitler go hand in hand.”

  Kris was losing patience fast, but Mimi didn’t seem to give a damn.

  “Hitler removed all the parts of the German Bible that included the Jews, except how they killed Jesus of course, and he aligned the faith to his cause. He told his followers they were on a mission from God to defeat the devil. Hell and the devil were real things to these people, and the Jews were the devil’s minions here on earth. It would be Christian to help the heathens find Jesus, even if that meant killing them. And more importantly, ethnic cleansing was imperative to saving the souls of their countrymen.”

  Kris just gaped at her.

  “Don’t be so surprised. Horrible things have been carried out in the name of the church.”

  “So what are you saying? That some Nazi left that star on my door?”

  “Maybe.” Mimi sighed and gathered her thoughts. “The octogram has been used by Nazi groups in the past. They loved mixing religion with old-world superstition and fear, and they twisted people’s faith to justify a genocide. It’s easier to cut someone up or kill them in a gas chamber if you convince yourself that you’re doing God’s work. People like to believe they’re fighting a noble battle against evil.”

  Mimi turned to another collection of drawings, and a tattoo design jumped off the page. Kris recoiled in surprise. It was a red letter L.

  “You recognize this one.” Mimi decided, gauging her reaction. “Your father had one of these.”

  Kris didn’t answer. She grabbed the book off Mimi’s lap and flipped to another page. More red Ls appeared, some surrounded by wreaths, some flanked by wings. “What the hell is this?” she breathed.

  “The Silver Shirt Legion was an American Nazi movement in the 1930s. They were quite active in Cleveland around the time of the Torso Killings.” Mimi flipped another page covered in photographs of raised branding scars all showing the letter L. “They considered themselves the cultural and social elite. Titans of industry and science. They had nothing but contempt for the poor uneducated masses huddled together in the shanties across the country. They were convinced the Jews would lead the destitute in a Communist uprising. They were also convinced President Roosevelt was a puppet for Communists.”

  “What?” Kris tore her eyes off the pictures. The history lesson just careened off the rails into crazy town.

  “Try to remember, after the stock market crashed in 1929, the country was in shambles. Labor unions were going on strike every other week and gaining strength. The Russians had just suffered through their own Communist revolution where the rich were either driven from their homes or killed. Many feared that the world as they knew it was coming to an end. Many in the Russian aristocracy and military fled to America. Several even landed here in Cleveland and joined the Legion.”

  A black-and-white photograph of a naked, headless corpse with the word Nazi carved into the chest hovered on the far wall. The Z was backward. Kris stared at it a minute, then turned to Jimmy. “So you think they were the Torso Killers? That they started killing poor people and dumping their bodies?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Maybe.”

  “But why? For what?” Kris protested, her eyes circling the collection of severed arms and legs pasted up all around her.

  “To scare people to death. To stop the poor from organizing. To drive the homeless hordes out of Cleveland. Eliot Ness burned the hobo jungles to the ground in the name of catching the killer.” Jimmy paused a moment, then shrugged. “And who knows? Maybe they just liked killing them.”

  “I need a minute,” Kris whispered and shoved Madame Mimi’s tattoo book off her lap. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Out the door and down the hall.” Jimmy pointed her in the right direction and then fell into a hushed discussion with Madame Mimi.

  Kris’s head felt like it was floating somewhere above her body as she wandered out of Jimmy’s room, down the steps, and out into the hallway. The sun streamed in through the high windows overhead, leaving long streaks of light and shadow on the opposite wall.

  The air force tattoo on her father’s shoulder had been etched on top of a raised scar. The skin was bumpy and at the same time smooth. She used to trace the raised skin under the ink when she’d sit on his lap. What happened, Daddy? He’d kiss the top of her head and pull the sleeve of his shirt back down. Oh, Daddy had an accident when he was young. She frowned at this. She was only five or six years old at the time but was smart enough to know he was hiding something. Did it hurt? He shook his head. It was a long time ago. It doesn’t hurt anymore.

  It didn’t look like an accident.

  She could tell he didn’t like talking about it but couldn’t stop herself from asking, Why does it look like a letter L? He’d smiled at her, but it was a sad sort of smile. He tussled her hair and said, L is for love, sweetie. It reminds me how much I love you. She pulled up his shirt and looked at it again and frowned. He had drawn an army tattoo on top of his love. Like he was trying to hide it.

  Now she knew what it stood for. Legion.

  Kris splashed cold water on her face and looked at herself in the clouded mirror. Her skin had always been a shade darker than her father’s. Her hazel eyes were a far cry from his light blue. Mimi was right. Her mother wasn’t German or Austrian or particularly Aryan at all. She sifted through all the family photographs in her head. Her mother’s parents had died in a house fire before Kris was born. Their wedding picture had sat on her mother’s dresser. They both had thick black hair. Her grandmother’s hair was curly.

  There were no pictures of her father’s parents. Kris had only seen them once or twice in her entire life. They moved to Florida when she was a baby and never came to visit. Whenever she asked about them, her father would explain how expensive it was to travel, and change the subject. When her grandfather died of a heart attack, her father went alone to the funeral while Kris stayed home with a neighbor. She’d been too young to think anything of it. Her grandmother had died of cancer her senior year of high school. This time her father offered to take her down with him to her burial, but she could tell he didn’t want her to come. There weren’t any aunts or uncles or cousins to meet, and her grandmother was a stranger. The woman never even sent her birthday cards. The quilt on her bed had been her father’s only memento of his childhood.

  All the suspicions she’d harbored in the back of her mind about her grandparents no longer seemed ridiculous. They didn’t like
her. They didn’t like her mother. Her father always managed to explain away their permanent absence, making her feel silly and childish for wondering, but maybe she’d been right all along.

  The last time she’d seen her father’s parents was at her mother’s funeral. They didn’t speak to anyone, not that she could remember. They sat together in the corner with thin-lipped frowns and rigid backs. There was no purse candy or hugs or smiles for their granddaughter. As Kris pictured them in her mind’s eye, she could imagine angry, red Ls cut into both of their shoulders.

  Kris took off running down the hall. She rounded the corner into Jimmy’s bedroom and grabbed her bags off the floor.

  “Hey.” He sauntered out of his murder room as she ran back down the steps. “You okay?”

  Kris shook her head. “I have to go.”

  “Go where?”

  “I have to go home. I have to see him, his arm. I have to see it . . .” She couldn’t put the rest into words.

  “That’s not a good idea.” Jimmy climbed down the steps after her. “If we’re right, there’s somebody out there looking for you. Somebody that wanted to silence your dad. It’s not safe, Kris.”

  Kris kept walking. “And it’s safe here? What am I supposed to do? Just hide and wait for them to come for me? I have to see the body. I have to see if it’s him. I have to see for myself.”

  “Okay. Okay.” Jimmy grabbed her by the shoulder out in the hall. “Just let me go with you.”

  Her mouth dropped open in protest. “Why? Why would you want to do that? We hardly know each other. And . . .” His murder room still fresh in her mind, she wasn’t sure he was sane.

  His eyes seemed sane. Kind even. “I got nothin’ better to do. I’m not gonna just sit around here and smoke dope and wonder if they got you too. I’m sick of looking at photographs of dead people. Let me help you.”

  Mimi climbed down the steps in agreement. “He’s right, Kris. They like their victims alone and vulnerable, drunk or asleep. All of the poor souls were alone when they found them. They prey on the weak. They believe they are culling the herd by cutting out the inferior and diseased. Don’t let them find you alone.”