Trail of Blood

by Lisa Black

  “The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.”

  “Leo, aren’t we’re going to look a bit foolish if we suggest to the population of Cleveland that we have a nonagenarian serial killer in our midst?”

  “They’d love it. If we can link this guy to the Torso killer the national outlets will pick it up. Then these local TV wimps will have to run the story, councilman or no councilman. What’s that? Is that from the girl?”

  “No, our 1935 victim.” She began to separate the pages, gently, using a plastic set of tweezers. “The girl didn’t have anything on her but a tiny blob of brown paint in her hair. It’s got a fiber in it, though, probably carpeting, red polyester in a trilobal shape. Oh, and also two little flecks of white stuff.”

  “Stuff is not a forensic conclusion.”

  “I’ll run it through the FTIR. Otherwise the lake scrubbed her poor little body ’til it gleamed. There was no one in Latent Prints on the holiday, but I suspect they’ll turn up her ID today—she looks unnaturally skinny to me, with that junkie pallor.” The tips of the notebook pages crumbled as she pulled on them to open the book flat.

  “You going to put that under the ALS? I’ll go with you.”

  She protested. “You really don’t have to do that….”

  “Don’t be silly. I’m always ready to help one of my staff with a thorny problem. Besides, U.S. News and World Report will be calling this afternoon and I’d like to have something to tell them.”

  “But I thought we never released information on an open ca—”

  “I’d like,” he repeated, holding the door open for her, “to have something to tell them.”

  She kept her sigh to herself and carried the notebook in its tray down the two flights of steps. The ultraviolet light apparatus stayed in the amphitheater, since she normally used it for clothing examinations.

  They were in luck. The decomp fluid hadn’t caused the ink to run, and the ultraviolet light moved past the decades-old blood and decomposition fluid as if they weren’t there, then sank into the writing as if filling up its indentations with blackness.

  “It seems to be a list.” She stared at the page, sorting out the words in her head.

  “One would assume he took notes on his investigation, just like any detective,” Leo mused, breathing into the cubic foot of air surrounding their work. He had lunched on something with curry in it. “I wonder if he was working on the Torso Murders. Hey—maybe he is the Torso killer. Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “No,” Theresa snapped. “That wouldn’t be great at all.”

  “Well, interesting, anyway. Famous serial killer turns out to be cop. It’s usually the number three theory anyway, after ‘doctor’ and ‘spoiled son of a wealthy family.’ The same ideas they had about Jack the Ripper.”

  Theresa wrote her translations onto her worksheet, squinting in the near dark. “Any theories about why the Torso guy took their heads off?”

  “He thought they were vampires and wanted to make sure they stayed dead?”

  “I’ve been reviewing the literature. Decapitation as a method of murder is very rare, so rare I can’t find anything written on the subject. Bodies are often dismembered to make them easier to dispose of, but the Torso killer must have had other reasons. Sometimes he divided his victims into pieces but then left them where they were sure to be found, so it wasn’t done to hide the body. Sometimes he scattered them about town.”

  “Proving that no man is an island, that sort of thing?” Leo guessed.

  “Then some he hung on to for a while. And yet he had such an eclectic mix of victims—all genders and ages, like the Zodiac killer or the Night Stalker. So maybe it’s not a sexual thing.”

  “Are you kidding? He emasculated a couple of them. Besides, is serial murder ever not a sexual thing?”

  “Good point,” Theresa said. “Then with a number of his victims, he removed only the head. Why the head?”

  “They do it in the Middle East.”

  “But that’s more of a political statement. I suppose it’s always been popular for political murders, from the samurai to Vlad the Impaler to the French Revolution. But for your average psychopath, not so much.”

  “Maybe both our killers wanted to be different.”

  “But why decapitation?”

  “I don’t know, okay? Can you figure out what that says?”

  James Miller had written:

  pills

  dog hair

  newspaper

  food in stomach

  RR tar?

  bull?

  “How are you making that out?” Leo demanded.

  “If I can read my own handwriting, I can read anyone’s.”

  “His lists are just like yours. A bunch of words that don’t mean anything.”

  “My lists mean something to me.” She turned a page, moving backward into the notebook. “These must have meant something to him.”

  Kingsbury—June 5, 1936

  decapitated WM, about 20s

  slim, many tattoos

  naked

  no blood!

  right in front of RR police—why?

  clothes piled—J.D.

  “So he was definitely still alive in 1936,” she said. “And he was investigating the Torso Murders.”

  “And solved them. He caught up with the guy.”

  Theresa stared at her boss, his face a ghostly echo in the weak UV light.

  “What?” Leo said. “That didn’t occur to you?”

  “Yes, but—” The idea had been there since they had found the body, of course, but putting it into words forced her to picture it: A dedicated cop tracked down the monster the entire city had been looking for. He solved the crime of the century but never had a chance to tell anyone. His only legacy came to be that of a deserter, a bum who walked off the job.

  In a split second James Miller went from being an intellectual exercise to a tragedy.

  “What?” Leo said again. “What are you looking all sniffly about?”

  They were jumping to conclusions, of course, not just jumping but leaping with reckless abandon, both feet off the ground. Yet she had never been more certain of anything in her life.

  A beam of light split the room, cleaving her and Leo to opposite sides.

  Christine appeared in a white coat, backlit like an angel. “Here you are again. What is it about you forensic types and the dark?”

  Theresa cleared her throat. “We’re used to it. Years of working for the county have taught us to burrow.”

  “Well, dig yourself out and come see this.”

  Theresa sidled over to where she knew the light switch would be and flicked the lights. Leo blinked.

  “You’re not going to tell U.S. News about this, are you?” she said to him.

  He shook his head, chin in hand. “No. No, I think we’re going to keep this to ourselves for a while, until we can flesh out every detail possible.”

  “Good.”

  “Then it’s straight to TruTV.”

  Theresa followed Christine to the autopsy suite, where her eyes reacted badly to the brilliant light and therefore she viewed the girl’s corpse from under lowered lids until her pupils adjusted. The torso had been opened and the organs removed through the Y incision. The head lay on the steel table, nearly touching the shoulder. The killer had left the top of the neck nearly level with the shoulders, with the raw circle in the center making a crater in the body rather than anything resembling a neck. The head had a short stem at its base.

  “What?” Theresa asked.

  “The head has been removed from the shoulders,” Christine stated.

  Leo let out a puff of impatient air.

  Theresa said, “I had noticed that. You might say it jumped right out at me. Looks like he did a rather tidy job of it, all things considered.”

  “Actually, it’s fairly messy. He stopped and started again, downright hacked in places.”

  “So not as neat as the Torso killer.”

  “You
mean the Torso killer who would be about ninety or a hundred years old now? Okaaay. Well, from the condition of the wounds I think it’s safe to say it’s not the same guy. My point is, when I tried to piece the two together”—she slid the head toward its rightful place, stopping with no more than a quarter inch to go.

  “You do that?” It had never occurred to Theresa to reassemble a body like a macabre jigsaw puzzle.

  Apparently it had never occurred to Christine not to. “Of course. Now, see how it looks?”

  “Gross?”

  “Missing. If we took a needle and thread and did a Dr. Frankenstein, this girl would look like an NFL quarterback. No neck. She’s lost about two inches of neck, including two vertebrae.”

  Theresa and Leo exchanged a look. “He wanted to hide something,” Leo said.

  “A tattoo?”

  “He left the roses.”

  “She might have had something more distinctive on her neck. Her name, or his.”

  “A bite mark,” he suggested. Christine and the diener waited, the doctor patiently, the diener a little less so, their heads swinging back and forth with each new theory.

  “We can’t know about sexual activity,” Theresa said. “Not without the rest of her. What about tool marks from a particular weapon, a unique knife?”

  “Nothing unique about the knife,” Christine told them. “A single edge, serrated, could be part of any kitchen set. Also, she still had a good amount of blood in her heart.”

  Theresa considered this. “So her heart had stopped beating before the decapitation, otherwise it would have pumped itself dry with the carotids opened like that?”

  “Even with no head?” Leo asked.

  “The heart is fairly autonomous,” Christine replied. “It would keep going at least long enough to empty most of the five or six quarts. A girl this skinny, perhaps only four.”

  Theresa said, “So she was already dead when he cut her head off. Given the choice, I’m sure she preferred it that way.”

  “Maybe she had a heart attack when she saw that knife coming at her,” Leo said. “I know I would.”

  Christine nixed that theory. “No, her coronary arteries weren’t bad, considering the tar in her lungs and the old needle tracks in her arms. She could have been poisoned, somehow OD’d…though I didn’t see any obvious foaming in the lungs…. I don’t know. We’ll have to wait for the tox results, and for me to get a closer look at the organs. We might find a tumor or aneurysm in the brain, too, but I wanted to show you the missing section before I started on the head.”

  Theresa’s phone rang and she unclipped it from her belt.

  “Our lady of the lake is Kim Hammond,” her cousin reported. “Arrested three times for drug possession, once for solicitation, over the past six years.”

  “Interesting. I’m standing next to her now.” She summarized Christine’s findings. Frank listened, then said he and Sanchez were going to try to track down Kim’s mother.

  “See if she’s got a soldering iron,” Theresa said before hanging up, her gaze on the small burn on the dead girl’s arm. “If the killer knew this girl at all, he had to know we would ID her instantly through her prints.”

  “Therefore he didn’t remove any part to hide her identity,” Leo said, continuing her reasoning.

  “Therefore he removed it to hide his own.”

  “Or he didn’t know her at all,” Christine put in. “And he didn’t guess she’d have prints on file. He removed parts because he wanted to, because it made sense to him. Though usually they take something more—melodramatic. A breast, or the heart.”

  Theresa sighed. They could stand there and throw out theories all day, for all the good it would do them. “True. Okay, let me know if there’s anything else you find, or that I can find out for you.”

  “How about who killed her?”

  “Give me time.”

  “Oh, and before I forget,” Christine said, “happy birthday.”

  So much for time.

  CHAPTER 12

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23

  1935

  Helen had already eaten. James didn’t care, didn’t feel hungry anyway. He washed the table free of every speck of toast and jam and then spread out the coat, faceup. It smelled a bit musty but not offensive, with an almost chemical scent. The second victim, the one who most likely owned the coat, had had leathery-looking, almost tanned skin. No one at the scene knew what could have caused that. James had never seen anything quite like it, not even during the Battle of Belleau Wood. Twenty-six days with no place to put the dead had given him a close look at the stages of decomposition. It had also given him a reason to become a cop, figuring that if he could withstand that experience without losing his mind, he could withstand anything.

  Except the lines.

  “What’s that?”

  Helen leaned against the doorjamb, soft brown hair back in a braid, flannel nightgown reaching her ankles. He didn’t dare tell her the origin of the coat. Helen didn’t like to hear about his job at all; his exploits as a Marine on a heroic field of battle made good dinnertime conversation for their few friends, but not breaking up a brawl or wrestling with a teenage house thief. Especially if the story involved blood, immoral behavior, or dirt.

  Besides, he wouldn’t know where to begin describing what he’d seen on that hill. “I worked on a burglary case this evening.”

  “Wash that table good when you’re done. And there’s coffee in the pot, if you want to warm it up.”

  “Thanks. Is Johnny sleeping?”

  “Like the baby he is,” she joked. Helen was a decade his junior, and it had taken seven years of marriage to conceive John; no matter what else occurred she and James remained united in their adoration of the towheaded infant—even if Helen had expected more amenities in a marriage to a man with a steady job. She winced as someone thumped a chair on the floor in the apartment upstairs. “Even through the Taylors’ nightly argument.”

  “Good.” He bent over the coat once more. Walking home from the station he had formed more theories about how the bodies came to rest where they did. Perhaps the killer had thrown them from the trains and then jumped himself, or perhaps he had dragged them down the hill fully dressed, removed the clothing at the scene, and took most of it away with him. That way the skin would not have been scratched or poked.

  Helen said, “Have you heard of Fiestaware?”

  “Hmm? No.”

  She pulled out a chair, sat down, then must have caught the faint funk of the dead man’s coat and pushed herself backward a foot. “It’s a new line of dishes. They’re heavy pottery and they come in all these bright colors.”

  “Honey? Do you have a magnifying glass?”

  She left the room, returning with the round glass and a magazine, already opened to a dog-eared page. “See? This is Fiestaware. It should be available around Christmas.”

  He glanced at the ad featuring a tomato-red plate, glossy, concentric circles the only design element. Tacky, he thought, but knew better than to say so. “Looks kind of—garish.”

  “Bright,” Helen corrected him. “It would give the kitchen some color.”

  He glanced around. “You wanted everything white. You said it was sanitary.”

  The magnifying glass confirmed his observations. No slivers of weeds or broken leaves. This coat had not been dragged down the hill or thrown from a train. The guys at the scene were right. This monster had carried both men, both nearly as tall and a little heavier than James, a considerable distance.

  “It is sanitary. But it will also make the dishes stand out.”

  “What’s wrong with china?” He should just shut up, he knew, but failing to keep up-to-date with Helen’s budget could have consequences, and besides, he needed to get this conversation over with so he could concentrate.

  “China’s old-fashioned. You can’t have a spaghetti party on china.”

  “Now we’re having people over for spaghetti?”

  Back in her chair, s
he flipped another page in her magazine but declined to show it to him. He knew it would feature a photo of a group of well-dressed, laughing people eating the Italian import, another new craze that didn’t appeal to him.

  He turned the left front pocket out, slowly pushing the fabric out from the inside, with the glass held above it. Lint, a dried and crumbled sprig of clover, and some brown shards. He moved the glass up and down to bring them into clearer focus, decided they were most likely tobacco. He had rolled enough cigarettes to know. “Do we have an envelope?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “I need to put this in something. To keep it.”

  She looked up from the magazine. “Pocket lint? You’ve been reading Sherlock Holmes stories again, haven’t you?”

  “Helen!”

  “I have two envelopes left and I need one to pay the electric bill.”

  He couldn’t argue with that. “All right. How about a piece of paper?”

  “I keep some scraps in the knife drawer.”

  When James had folded the motley collection into the center of a department store advertisement, he turned his attention to the right pocket. A hole had worn through the thin cotton, and nothing save some fuzz remained. Items in the pocket would have fallen into the lining. He flipped the coat open.

  Helen sighed audibly. “It would be nice to have a spaghetti party,” she said now. “It would be even nicer to have some friends to invite to it.”

  “Sure.” He patted the lining with his fingers, detecting a coin, a stick-like object, and two small, hard nubs. Now, how to get them out?

  “We could invite Walter and his wife.”

  His fingers barely fit through the hole. He couldn’t rip the lining out; that might get him in trouble with the very captain who had entrusted him with the item. Besides, the Bertillon guys would examine the coat for pieces of evidence; he and Walter were merely supposed to trace it. But he didn’t want to wait. “Where’s your sewing scissors?”