by Lisa Black
When the first officer tried the same technique on Councilman Greer, however, the man snapped his arm away. “Get your hands off me. I have an honorary badge, you know.”
“That’s the only reason I’m not putting you in cuffs, sir.”
“Fine, I—” The man turned. Moving away from the officer brought him one step closer to the shore, and suddenly the councilman, too, caught sight of the dead body. The blood left his face and it turned a ghastly sort of orange.
“Better catch him,” Frank said. “I think the good councilman’s going to faint.”
Greer didn’t, though, merely turned away and took a few unsteady steps. The Thunderbirds did a vertical climb over the lake, their engines whining, their sharp outlines silhouetted against the cobalt-blue sky. The cops present watched, of course, as anyone would, but Theresa stopped to swat a late-season mosquito and therefore witnessed the councilman drop to one knee and lose his lunch onto the grass.
Theresa wrinkled her nose, grateful that the planes drowned out the sound of retching. Talk about gross.
The man glanced up, wiping his mouth, noting that the three officers were turned away from him. Then his eye fell on Theresa.
She couldn’t resist. She smiled.
He gave her one malevolent glare before bounding up to be escorted away by the officer with his girlfriend, as if the officers would not be able to conclude how a cup or two of vomit had suddenly appeared on the turf.
Men and their egos.
Theresa went back to the body, lifting the left hand and turning it over. Still no signs of defensive wounds. She had a tattoo of a bleeding rose on the inside of her pale wrist.
Frank leaned over her shoulder. “Finding anything? Other than that she liked roses?”
“No bruises or sticky residue around the wrists—no indication that she was bound.”
“So she must have been unconscious when he took her head off, or already dead. Right?”
“That would be my guess. We should at least be able to get some tox results, see if she’d been drugged.”
Angela crouched near the woman’s shoulder. With the Thunderbirds in the distance a quiet fell over the shoreline, broken only by the lapping waves and the occasional gust of wind. “Kind of weird, isn’t it?”
“Finding a chunk of a dismembered body on the banks of the air show?” Theresa asked. “Yeah, I guess.”
“No, I meant two beheaded corpses in the same week. What are the odds?”
“We only found them in the same week. The murders themselves took place seventy-five years apart. Hardly a pattern.”
“I didn’t think you believed in coincidence.”
“I have to. I’ve seen them. Once I had two women come in within a half hour of each other with the same relatively unusual method of suicide, gassed by a propane tank and a plastic bag.”
“That is kind of odd.”
“No, I found their home addresses odd. They lived around the corner from each other. At first I thought it must be some kind of suicide pact.”
“What changed your mind?”
“Their suicide notes. They both left one—unusual in itself, only about a quarter do—but one was a shopping list of instructions and the other a booklet of poetry, a perfect illustration of right-brain and left-brain orientations. Same action, very different methods and motivations.”
“And you think our two headless corpses are the same thing?”
“Unless we have a ninety-year-old serial killer running around, yes. Miller probably died at the hands of a mobster or Cleveland’s Mad Butcher. This girl either had the bad luck to cross the path of a modern-day serial, or she had a fight with her boyfriend.”
“Remind me not to date.” Angela shrugged. “Oh wait, after the last guy I’ll never need reminding again.”
“Now there’s a story I need to hear,” Theresa said as she checked between the fingers for trace evidence, finding none.
“No, you really don’t.”
Most men were murdered by enemies or business rivals. Most women were murdered by someone who had promised to love them. And now Rachael would be meeting boys, young men, who didn’t have to stand in Theresa’s foyer and introduce themselves when they picked her up. Only a roommate Rachael had described as silly and neurotic to witness in whose company Rachael left the dorm, the campus….
The county’s ambulance crew arrived. Two men, one white, one black, both gently unhurried and neither appearing strong enough to lift the sometimes quite hefty victims who needed a ride to the autopsy room. They stopped at the edge of the seawall and simply absorbed the scene for a moment or two, as every other person present had. The two Port Authority cops conferred in the background, apparently having a good gripe session about the gall of Councilman Greer.
“You’re killing me, missy,” one of the body snatchers said to Theresa.
“Come on, Duane. I don’t get to pick ’em.”
“Twice in one week,” the other, Tom, intoned. “You must not be living right.”
“I don’t see how I could live any more right. I sleep alone, exercise, go to church, and eat tofu, for cryin’ out loud. This isn’t my fault. At least she’s not heavy.”
“You sleep alone?” Tom said. “I know guys who would pay for that information.”
Duane merely handed her the edge of a white sheet to spread over the rocks so they could flip the torso onto its chest. Moving a dead body could often produce noxious odors as fluids in the body shifted and released, but Theresa smelled only the brisk, fishy water. The skin appeared clean except for some dirt adhering from the rocks.
“Well, she wasn’t shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned,” Theresa concluded.
“At least not in this part of her body.” She held up a corner of the sheet and they used it as a hammock, lifting the torso and moving it to an open body bag spread out on the grass. They avoided the remains of the councilman’s last meal.
Theresa pulled off her latex gloves. “I doubt there’s going to be much I can tell you, but we’ll see what Toxicology says about her fluids and what the pathologist says about the injuries. I’m sure you’ve already contacted Missing Pers—”
“Wait.” The first Port Authority officer had returned and interrupted her. “There’s more.”
“More?”
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, indicating the coastline that spread into the east. “Another piece.”
“The other half of her body?”
“Not exactly…just a piece.”
The boom of the Thunderbirds, roaring back into the grandstand area, covered Theresa’s response.
The group moved half a mile along the seawall to view what else the Port Authority staff had found. Theresa once again crouched on wet rocks with water flooding up beneath her shoes, and saw what the cop had meant. One piece. The head.
Theresa had no doubt it belonged to the same victim. Female, under-weight, short blond hair. Eyes glazed over as if she no longer cared to see the world around her.
Theresa examined the ruined flesh at the neck, looked around for trace evidence, and steeled herself to pick it up and place it on a clean sheet for the body removal crew. Think of it as a basketball, she told herself. A ten-or eleven-pound basketball, with eyes. And a mouth, which might have spoken to her killer, asked him to spare her life. A brain that had held feelings and hopes and dreams. A-okay, now. One. Two. Three.
Theresa lifted and deposited and managed to do it with her eyes open. Well, half open.
Two beheaded victims in the same week.
The lake could have been the one area of Cleveland that hadn’t changed since their dead detective’s day. If James Miller could have been transported forward seventy-four years to this spot, he wouldn’t know any time had passed. The water remained the same, knowing, silent, treacherous. The first victim of the Torso killer had washed up in pieces from this same body of water, though not connected to the murderous series for well over a year. The Lady of the Lake, they had called her. S
he had never been identified. Theresa decided this girl would not suffer the same fate. She would have a name to put on her headstone.
She felt Frank’s hand on her shoulder, warm and squeezing gently.
“By the way,” he said, “happy birthday.”
“Not yet,” she reminded him. “I have four days left.”
CHAPTER 10
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
1935
Everyone called it Jackass Hill, the origins of which had been lost in time. A steep slope of Kingsbury Run between the dead ends of East Forty-ninth and Fiftieth, it made for excellent sled riding in the winter but seemed dull and forlorn during fall, that period of time when death stalked the flora. Sparse weeds and other haphazard growth covered the ground from the ridge to the valley and poked up between the train tracks. Weeds and cops. Half the detectives in the city had beaten James and Walter there, as well as a good portion of the uniformed division; no matter, since the case would be assigned to more experienced detectives, not them. They had shown up for the same reason everyone else had—curiosity.
Though once James saw what the knot of officers had gathered around, he reminded himself what had killed the cat.
A dead white male lay on his side in the twigs and brush. One leg stretched out at an angle and the forearms flopped in a relaxed position in front of the chest. The man would have appeared to be asleep were it not for the fact that the body was nude (except for a pair of socks) and headless. James could only assume it was male, since those distinguishing parts had been removed along with the head.
He stopped, looked down, concentrated on his shoes for a moment. The leather had begun to part from the sole on his left one.
Walter reached his side, got his look at it, stared like a moth at the sun. James waited for the cursing, but all his partner could muster was: “Wow.” After a moment, he added, “Did you see stuff like this in the war?”
James had seen every type of injury a soldier could suffer, delivered by everything from a bayonet to heavy artillery, every way men could use machines to kill other men, but that had been different, impersonal, cold. “Not like this,” James said. “Nothing like this.”
“It doesn’t stop there,” a nearby cop told them. Jazzed by the drama, he promptly became their tour guide and led them to a second body that had been treated just as the first. No head. The missing genitalia from both men had been left together in a sad little heap.
James noticed two uniformed guys using trowels to turn over the earth where a dark material mixed in with the weeds. “What are they doing?”
“Digging up the head. The—whatever he is buried both heads but left their hair sticking up through the dirt.” The cop shrugged, one sharp spasm of movement. “Buries them and then leaves it so they’re found. Why do that?”
James nodded at the small pile of severed parts. “Why do that?”
Walter took out a cigarette, lit it, and puffed deeply without once looking away from the decomposing tissue. “I’ve seen a lot of weird things on this job, Jimmy. Bad things. Sick things.”
James nodded again. “But nothing like this.”
“Shit no.”
It should smell like a slaughterhouse, James thought, but it doesn’t. A whiff of death, yes, but not the metallic, turned-meat odor of carnage. He looked again, this time pushing the horror to a far corner of his mind.
“They’re awfully clean, the bodies. I don’t even see any blood soaked into the ground. One guy strafed with a German machine gun would leave a puddle three feet in diameter.”
“Coroner says they were moved,” the uniformed cop told him.
“Haven’t been dead that long, either,” James said. “It hasn’t rained in the past few days, so that wouldn’t have washed all the blood away.”
His reasoning failed to impress the uniform. “You’re about the tenth cop to point that out. They were dumped here, like the coroner said. We’ve searched all the open areas out about two square miles, and there’s no pools of blood anywhere.”
James moved back to the first body, taking in the lack of scratches and the relatively clean socks. “These are two good-size guys, and they weren’t dragged. This guy carried them down here?”
“He must be a moose,” Walter said, trailing behind him. “Or he had a partner. Maybe partners.”
“There’s nothing here—no houses, stores. He must have a car, got them as far as the top of the hill. Why not toss them out and go?”
“Because he wanted to do the little burying-the-heads thing. And leaving the…in a pile,” Walter answered.
“Because he wanted to,” James mused, staring hard at the body now.
“So much so it made the risk worthwhile.”
The uniformed guy shook his head hard enough to loosen a few Bryl-creemed locks. “Pervert. Killing guys like—that. Got to be some kind of queenie.”
“Or he didn’t come down the hill,” James added.
Walter had gotten over the first shock of seeing the bodies and now took refuge in sarcasm. “What, he flew?”
“No, he definitely didn’t fly. I’m just saying maybe he didn’t come from the road.”
“From where, then?”
James did a quick 360 scan. “A train?”
Walter turned to the myriad of rails crossing the valley floor, beginning two hundred feet behind them, glinting in the slanted afternoon rays. “He hopped off a train with a dead body tucked under each arm? Jimmy boy, you’ve got to stop going to bank nights at the Allen. Those movies are giving you a wild imagination.”
“He didn’t need to bring both at once. And it would explain where all our blood is.”
“It rode away in a boxcar? A bull would have found it by now. They inspect those cars every day.”
“Unless it was on its way out, turned up in some other town where the railroad police are puzzling over it right now.”
“I think it would be easier to come down Jackass Hill with one of these guys hefted over your shoulder than jump off a moving train with one. You’d break both legs. Unless he really is some kind of giant.”
“No. Nah, you’re probably right. Or he—”
“McKenna! Miller! Get over here!”
Their captain, short but hefty, his hair a crawling fringe around a widening bald spot, and a uniformed guy had been inventorying a pile of clothing left by the bodies. Very neat, James thought, he stacks the clothes in one spot, the cutoff body parts in another, and reached out to accept the brown paper sack the captain held toward him. “That’s a coat. We think it belongs to the second guy, from the size of him. Find out where it came from and who it belonged to and don’t let me see you again until you do.”
“Sure thing.” The captain didn’t seem to trust James any more than the rest of the cops and didn’t speak to him often. Encouraged, James held the paper bag out for Walter to see as if it were a new nickel.
His partner screwed up his face. “You carry it. I’m not touching anything this murdering pervert had his mitts on.”
James did not relish the idea himself but put the distaste out of his mind. How to proceed? Most of his detective work so far had been questioning witnesses and informants until one coughed up a name. But once he had tracked down a hammer used in a burglary by finding the store that sold it and visiting every one of the customers they sold that brand to until one of those customers bolted at the sight of him. He and Walter would have to do similar work now.
Once in the car, he shuffled the garment around within its bag until he found a label. “B. R. Baker Company. I guess we’ll have to find a store that carries these.”
“They’ll be closed now. We’ll have to start again in the morning.”
“We could find the owners at home, get them to open up.”
“Then they’ll have to call in the department managers, and they’ll have to call up the sales managers and then the floor men—it will take two hours tonight to do what we could do in ten minutes tomorrow when everybody’s there. Apples
auce. It’s been a long enough day as it is.”
James gave up. The most bizarre homicides this city had ever seen, and his partner wanted to go to sleep.
But he hung on to the bag, didn’t leave it at the station. The captain had given it to him and with him it would stay. He hadn’t even wanted to leave the station itself, a situation as unusual as the two bodies on the hill in its way. For one evening he didn’t feel like an outsider with his own coworkers. For one short period the other cops forgot all about who was on the level and who was bent and who was out-and-out crooked, united by a common horror.
He walked home from the precinct house at Wilson and East Fifty-fifth, dead leaves scuffling under his feet, fresh air in his lungs, carrying the paper bag.
CHAPTER 11
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7
PRESENT DAY
Theresa picked up the miniature notebook, which James Miller had left folded open to the most recent page; many of the preceding pages were covered in writing, stuck to each other in some spots, and the sheets after that point were blank. The first section of the notebook had wound up in the center; thus protected, the writing remained relatively clear.
James had begun his notes on April 20, 1936, with the case of a purse snatched from a lady’s arm outside the Playhouse Square movie theater. His handwriting could get murky, but it seemed James had noted the woman’s description of the perpetrator (twenty-five to thirty, torn brown jacket) and the movie she had intended to see (A Quiet Fourth with Betty Grable). He had interviewed a few witnesses, expressing his opinion of their veracity with a system of exclamation points and question marks. Theresa could picture him, in a brown suit coat with a hat pulled low on his brow, the marquee lightbulb glinting off his eyes as he stared down a squirrely customer.
Leo’s voice at her elbow made her jump. “So is it him?”
“Who?”