by Lisa Black
Then Walter threw himself into the car with more than his customary enthusiasm. “You are not gonna believe this.”
CHAPTER 5
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
PRESENT DAY
The bizarre circumstances of James Miller’s death did not automatically confer top billing at the Medical Examiner’s Office. He had not been the only citizen found dead during the previous twenty-four hours, so Theresa spent the morning with clothing examinations on two unrelated suicides and then returned to the lab to set up the spectrometer to run the gunshot residue analyses. The lab felt comfortable, for a change, now that the summer heat had faded. Once the snows came the building would always be either too hot or too cold, depending on how the furnace felt like working that day, but for these few weeks they could achieve a happy medium.
The notebook in Miller’s pocket had not been cooperative, its pages fused together with decomposition fluid. She had placed it in the fume hood with a little humidity; if that could unstick the pages, then the alternate light source might be able to see the writing underneath the staining.
Theresa swallowed the dregs from her coffee cup, booted up her computer, swiveled to the other counter, and mounted the crumbling shirt fibers on a glass slide. It took her approximately two seconds to decide the shirt fibers were cotton.
Theresa swiveled back to her microscope to make some notes on the cotton fibers.
“That from your long-lost Torso victim?” The DNA analyst, Don Delgado, hitched one long leg over the corner of her workbench. Dark eyes in an olive-skinned face watched her rotate the lens to a higher magnification.
“I see the word’s out.”
“Faster than a defense attorney’s motion to suppress,” he said in agreement.” You think it’s the guy Ness couldn’t catch?”
“I think you’re too young to even know who Eliot Ness was.”
He unhitched his leg, his foot slapping the floor with a sharp crack.
“Come off it, Theresa. You’re only a few years older than me.”
“Eleven,” she muttered, her head still bent to the microscope.
“You counted?”
“Wait until you hit forty. Numbers take on a new importance.”
“Really.”
“For instance, last week my butt fell. Overnight. I went to bed and everything’s fine, I wake up and my buttocks are resting on the tops of my thighs.”
“Want me to take a look?” he asked.
“If exercise and dieting won’t budge them, there’s nothing you can do.”
“Can I try anyway?”
She glared.
“That hostage negotiator guy still calling you?”
She glared again. The city manager’s daughter had just turned twenty-five. She went on. “Anyway, Frank and his partner learned, from the city building department, that the building on Pullman went up in 1933. A railroad guy named Arthur Corliss owned the place and rented out the offices, eight separate units, four on each floor. Then Frank and Angela went to the Western Reserve Historical Society to look through phone books. Dusty phone books, he whined at me. The city directories listed the tenants at that address.”
“I didn’t know they even had phone books in 1935.”
Theresa made a note of the fibers’ original colors—blue and brown—as well as the dried decomposition fluid coating them. “They came up with a list of unit numbers, but there’s no way to know how the suites were numbered. The owner had unit one, but we don’t know if that was on the upper floor or the lower floor or where on the lower floor. There was also a tutor named Metetsky, a few architects, a medium. Like a talking-to-the-dead medium. Oh, and a nutritionist named Louis Odessa.”
“They had nutritionists in 1935?”
Theresa examined a slide of the dead man’s sock fibers. Wool. “Americans’ obsession with health started in the twenties. Until then no one had heard of a balanced diet or the idea of losing weight instead of gaining it, or that kitchens were supposed to be sanitary. Plus, it was the roaring twenties. Times were good and new ideas were welcomed with open arms as Americans discovered a desire to be sophisticated and cosmopolitan. Until the 1929 crash, of course. Then people went back to eating what they could find.”
“Did you major in history or something?” Don demanded.
“As far as my mother is concerned, the TV set has two channels, the Food Network and the Discovery Channel.”
“So you can’t figure out whose apartment he was in. What did the anthropologist say?”
The doctor had driven up from Kent State University after his morning classes to consult with Theresa. “He says the guy was decapitated, neatly, without nicking a bone. Not an easy thing to do, especially if the victim’s still alive while you do it.”
“Is that the COD?”
She hoped not. The idea of James Miller being conscious while a man cut his head off gave her an uncomfortable twinge in her heart. Being able to do her job meant not picturing the victim’s last moments. “There could be another cause of death, sure, like poison or suffocation, something that wouldn’t leave a mark on bones or clothing. Maybe toxicology can help. They should at least be able to find any heavy metal poisons in the hair, or perhaps the dried-up little prune thing that the stomach has shriveled to.”
“Yuck. You know Leo’s already been on the phone with Court TV.”
Now she looked up from the ocular lenses. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. And Unsolved Mysteries. Just giving them the heads-up. So now I’m giving you the heads-up that where you want to keep your head is down. Leo’s going to want results on this one, like, yesterday, so he can go on camera with all this new information.”
“Better him than me.”
“Don’t worry about that. Leo’s smart enough to know that the camera will love your pretty face a lot better than his. He’ll make sure you’re locked in the cellar if any Hollywood princes call.”
“Me and the rats.”
“I’ll rescue you,” he promised.
Theresa said good night to a smoking deskman on the loading dock and walked through the cool night air to her car. She had grabbed the last space in the farthest corner of the lot, blocked from the streetlights by the building next door, tucked up against the small copse of trees between the M.E.’s and University Hospital’s medical school.
She had always loved September, the month of her birth, the end of humid summer days, the start of a new school year, which a bookworm like her did not consider torture. Now she took a deep breath to clear the dust of 1935 from her sinuses. A different age. What would have been the effect of Cleveland’s first serial killer on its citizenry and its police force? Surely neither group could fully comprehend what they’d come up against.
The populace simply felt beleaguered, under attack by a faceless monster who lurked in the shadows, a specter they could have written off as an urban myth useful for scaring their children into good behavior, were the tale printed in a storybook instead of the newspaper.
Theresa pulled a heavy sweater more tightly around her body. The police, she knew, had approached the crime as they would any other, searching for men who frequented the areas where the bodies turned up, men with criminal records and a documented propensity for violence, men who were “perverted”—a word defined much more broadly then than in the current day. The second victim, and one of the very few identified, Edward Andrassy, had possibly been bisexual, since rumors of homosexuality dogged him. Yet he had also been considered a ladies’ man. This started police on a running hunt for perverts and others who lived outside society’s norm. Much had changed in three-quarters of a century. If the events of the 1930s occurred today, with the experience of too many serial killers to comfortably count, police would hunt for a man with a minor criminal record or none at all, a man with a steady job, unsuspecting neighbors, and an ordinary appearance who remained quite firmly below the radar.
Different, but not easier. It had taken twenty years to catch the Green Riv
er Killer.
Theresa had parked under what turned out to be the only nonfunctioning light in the lot. A few more leaves scuttled by as she reached into her pocket for her keys. A door slammed behind her, most likely the deskman returning to work after his cigarette.
Of course police today might not meet with any more success than in the past. “That description fit so many people.” She found herself talking aloud, a common exercise for those too often alone. “Though forensic science—”
A scraping sound behind her, too big to be caused by a leaf, stopped her midsentence.
“Hello, ma’am—”
She whirled, hand still in her pocket. The man had at least six inches and seventy pounds on her. He stepped closer, his face thrown into shadow by the light behind him. He wore dark pants and a dark jacket, and carried something in his hand.
Her hand came out of her pocket, clutching a small canister of pepper spray. “Stop right there! Don’t come any closer!”
He stopped and put his hands in the air, dropping whatever it was he held. It fell to the asphalt with a harmless splat. A notebook. “Whoa, hold it. Don’t spray, please. Look, Ms. MacLean—”
“How do you know my name?” She glanced across the lot behind him, hoping the deskman would reappear on the dock, and did not lower the spray.
“That’s my job.” He turned slightly, so that the vague light showed her a shock of stylishly tousled brown hair and an angular nose, but his eyes were lost in the shadows of his face. “I’m a stringer—a researcher for the Plain Dealer. My name is Brandon Jablonski. We heard about you finding another Torso killer victim over on Pullman and want to do an in-depth piece on it, the Torso Murders, the history, the effect on Cleveland. Can I ask you a few questions?” He lowered his hands, scooped up his notebook, and got out a pen in one smooth movement.
But he did not move closer, so she did not depress the tiny plunger. “Where did you hear that?”
He gave her a grin, with straight teeth and a chiseled jaw, looking less and less like some psychotic stalker every minute. “I have my sources.
What can you tell me about the victim?”
“Nothing,” she said, “yet. What makes you think he’s a victim of the Torso killer?”
The hands holding his pad and pencil flopped to his sides. “Come on—decapitated on some kind of autopsy table?”
She wondered again where he got this information. The construction workers? Mr. Lansky? The patrol officers?
He went on: “The Torso killer terrorized Cleveland for four years, more really. He was America’s version of Jack the Ripper, unparalleled in savagery and never caught. He cut off heads, limbs, genitals. But he wasn’t some kind of monster.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“I mean, he was a monster, but he wasn’t insane. The entire city was keeping an eye out for this guy in a day when no one had televisions or iPods or the Internet—in other words, people actually paid attention to what occurred outside their own doors. People knew their neighbors. People, well, people read the friggin’ paper. And he still moved around as if invisible.”
“I know,” she said. “But I can’t—”
“He took his victims, he did whatever he felt like to them, and then he dumped them in public areas. And he still wasn’t caught. He was so unique, as serial killers go. I’ve read book after book on criminal profiling and still can’t get a picture of this guy, who he was, what motivated him. Ms. MacLean—” He took a step toward her.
Her arm with the canister had begun to slump, but now it snapped to attention. “Stay right there.”
“I only want to ask a few—”
“I can’t answer them. All inquiries must be directed to Medical Examiner Elliott Stone. I’m sure you know the number. Call in the morning and make an appointment.”
Another step. “But—”
“No buts. I’m getting into my car now. Do not come any closer.”
“We need to work together on this, Ms. MacLean. I know you must be as obsessed with it as I am—”
She slammed the driver’s door shut and cranked the engine until it gave a whining sound. Brandon Jablonski made no attempt to stop her.
She pulled out, careful not to hit him and careful not to get close enough for him to strike one of the windows. In the rearview mirror she saw the man watching her, rooted to his original spot, a contradictory morass of dark colors and perky smile. Whatever else, he had a healthy respect for pepper spray. It made her wonder if he’d been on the receiving end of it before.
She also wondered if he would skip the helpful “Hello, ma’am” warning next time.
It didn’t matter. She could not discuss James Miller’s death or its possible connection to the Torso Murders. She might say too much, turn the cop’s killing into a media event and reveal too much about herself in the process.
Because she was exactly as obsessed with the case as he was.
CHAPTER 6
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6
PRESENT DAY
Theresa yawned her way into the laboratory Monday morning, catching the eye of her boss.
“Hot date?” Leo wanted to know, watching her pour a cup of what smelled like burned caffeine. “Did you finally do the dirty with that hostage negotiator?”
“Fell asleep rereading Badal’s In the Wake of the Butcher.”
“That’s a sad commentary on your social life. You need to get married again, or at least get a dog.”
“I have a dog, and I was never lonelier than when I was married.”
“How about some Visine, then?”
She didn’t tell him that red eyes were a small price to pay for having her mind occupied instead of lying in bed listening to every sound, automatically assuming it to be Rachael and then having to remind herself it wasn’t, that Rachael was away at college, growing up and growing away.
“How about the day off, then? It is a holiday.”
“You had the weekend off. One more day and we’ll be buried.”
“You had the weekend off,” she said, correcting him. “I had a bar brawl in the Flats that produced three dead bodies and a lot of blood spatter. I haven’t even examined James Miller’s clothing yet.”
“Better get to it. I got a phone call about you last night. At home, no less,” Leo said.
Her stomach did that little dipping maneuver, exactly as it did when she’d been called to the principal’s office or her doctor said he needed to discuss some test results. “Why?”
“You have to release that building today. The one on Pullman. Finish up whatever you’ve got to do and get out of there.”
“What? Why?”
“Why? Because the cops can’t spare two patrol officers twenty-four/seven to keep an eye on it. Because it’s practically rubble now, so what is it going to tell you about a seventy-five-year-old crime? Because Councilman Greer talked the city council into condemning the place and they in turn made a sweetheart deal with Ricardo Griffin and company to build a recycling plant there, and there’s a completion clause in the contract.”
“But it could be another Torso killing—Cleveland’s claim to fame, true-crime-wise! I thought you wanted to make some Hollywood magic with it.”
“Turns out Hollywood likes stories that have endings and the local paparazzi are already tired of staring at an empty building.”
“Not all of them,” Theresa muttered, recalling Friday night’s visitor.
“Besides, after their cameras go on to the next warehouse fire or school shooting, I’m still going to be dealing with Greer, and the police chief, and their overtime budget.”
“But what’s the freakin’ hurry? That building has been there for, what, seventy-eight years?”
“Exactly—it’s unsafe, about to fall in on itself. If murder groupies turn the place into a shrine, one of them is eventually going to get hurt. Or killed. Besides, shrines don’t make money. Getting a huge federal grant to increase ‘green’ processes, that makes money.”
“Huh. Well, what else could they do with a location like that, between a freeway and the railroad tracks?”
Leo sipped his coffee, apparently the only nutrient he needed or wanted. “What I’m saying is, get done with what you need to do and release the location, just like you would do for any other crime scene.”
She counter-offered. “Can you get your buddy at the college of engineering to GPR the cellar?”
“Ground-penetrating radar? You think he buried bodies down there?”
“I think if he did, we should find them before the backhoes do.”
He considered this. “Okay. I’ll give him a call. But if he can’t work us in by tomorrow at the latest, we forget it.”
She nodded, yawned again, refilled her cup, and walked down the three flights of steps to the amphitheater.
Theresa examined most clothing and evidence in the old teaching amphitheater, since it minimized contamination to the lab and also had more room. The lab and its wide windows had better lighting, but the amphitheater worked well when one wanted no lighting at all. The small windows had been boarded over years ago to make slide shows more visible, and if she needed pitch dark all she had to do was hit the wall switch.
Never mind that most people would not want to find themselves standing in complete dark while inside a morgue. Theresa had worked there long enough to know that the dead will not bother you.
The living were, of course, another story entirely.
The back of the victim’s shirt, having been soaked in the decomposition fluid that seeped out as the body mummified, held together much better than the front of it. It had hardened into a sort of shield, which Theresa now slid underneath an infrared light.