Trail of Blood

by Lisa Black

  Momentum. Mass times velocity. Trains had a great deal of mass, and the velocity could get impressive.

  A rapid transit car, basically a hollow aluminum tube, had much more stopping power because it had less weight. A shorter train could stop faster than a longer one. That train that had just passed, the one with four cars, would be able to throw on its brakes much more effectively than this longer one now approaching.

  So if you wanted to get away, pick a long train. Even if the cops flagged down the engineer or got the dispatch center to call him, even if he threw on every stopping mechanism he had, the train would still be a mile away before it came to a halt, before the police could swarm it. By which time you would have jumped off at any point in the stopping process, preferably by a main road where you could catch a cab or a bus, or, if you appreciate irony, the rapid transit. Though a rapid transit station could have cameras. For real irony, how about another train?

  But how to murder the victim there at the scene? Forgo that detail? Or jump off the train from the front, decapitate the (presumably incapacitated) victim, then hop back on one of the rear cars? Difficult, but possible. Assuming the train moves slowly enough. And is really long. Like this one.

  Obeying an instinct she did not truly understand, she burst into a run and sprinted across two sets of tracks with at least four seconds to spare. It only felt like less. The driver let out an annoyed blast from the horn, not caring to cut it close any more than she did. The earsplitting sound proved so startling that it shoved into her with physical force until she stumbled over the third set of tracks and wound up stretched across them like the hapless heroine of a silent movie.

  Scrambling to her feet, she moved to a tiny strip of grass and scanned the other tracks for oncoming cars. Nothing. The rain pelted, let up, and pelted again, its dynamics affected by the push and suctioning of the passing cars and the gaps in between each one as they rushed by her. The large boxes alternately blocked and allowed the bright lighting of the RTA station to pass through, and some cars had lights. This inconsistency ruined any night vision, effectively blinding her. She turned away, looking up and down the ten-foot-wide sliver of dirt and sparse weeds that ran along the tracks under the bridge.

  She thought the killer should leave the corpse near the bridge, but that seemed too risky. If the cops were present—and, unless completely insane, he would assume they were present—that’s where they would hide. He would pick a new spot, farther east or west of the bridge, where he could do his grisly work and be gone before they discovered it.

  Theresa moved under the bridge, better hidden by its deep shadow. Frank would be poised on the other side of the next pylon. She knew she shouldn’t move around, yet they had too much ground to cover and too much of it became hidden as trains passed by.

  Under the bridge, to the west, stood a low structure, probably an abandoned platform. She crept closer to it. The train continued to rumble by.

  The original killer had not only murdered this victim at the scene, but he had left the head and the body in two different places—only a thousand feet apart, but far enough that the body had not been discovered until the following day. What would today’s killer do about that? Ignore it? Jump off, decapitate, leave the body, and jump back on the train with the head, then toss that out farther up the line?

  That would work, actually. The body had been found near the bridge, with the head found between the bridge and Kinsman Road to the east. Her thighs ached but she moved a few more feet along the platform in a low crouch, keeping her head below its surface. The rain had penetrated her cloth jacket and reached her skin, and this, she told herself, caused her trembling.

  Movement.

  At the west end of the abandoned platform, a flicker of darker against dark. An animal? A bush blasted with violent air from the passing train? A cop, wondering who the hell she was? Maybe lining up his sights right now?

  Another step. Definitely movement.

  She crept forward, feeling, curiously, no fear. The killer would not harm her; she was not male and killing her would ruin the authenticity of the scene.

  But then, Peggy Hall should have been a heavyset sometime prostitute over forty. Perhaps authenticity was not his top priority.

  She moved faster. She thought she could hear the rustling of his movements now, but that could not be possible, not over the roar of the train. It was probably Frank, and they’d scare the bejeebers out of each other like they did as kids playing Spotlight in Uncle Glenn’s basement.

  He appeared. A tall bundle of raincoat and hat and nothing where a face should be. He was not Frank, nor any other cop. Some sort of black mesh hid his features and he held a bundle in his arms. She knew exactly what that had to be.

  He stood completely still for a moment, watching the train pass. She did not move—she couldn’t—and yet his head snapped to her direction as if she’d jumped up and down.

  Now she felt fear. Paralyzing, gut-twisting fear that squeezed every molecule of air out of her lungs.

  He leapt toward the tracks and neatly caught the rungs protruding from one side of a boxcar, pulling his body up with much more feline grace than either she or Edward Corliss would be able to command. He melded with the train car as if he were part of it, mercury joining back into mercury with one hand, the other still clutching the bundle.

  Her legs carried her forward before she knew it, as he passed on her left, until she reached the end of the platform. A body lay splayed across the dirt and weeds, with no clothing, and no head.

  She turned and launched herself toward the train. He had done it.

  She could, too.

  Another car rushed by her in a dizzying blur. This next one—see the rungs? The weak streetlights shone down from the bridge and glinted off each metal protrusion. Grab, pull. Just make sure your feet come up and don’t swing into the wheels, to be chopped off at the ankles and pulverized.

  She reached out a hand.

  It collided with a rung hard enough to break bone, and she stumbled, landing on the gravel shoulder only inches from the clacking metal wheels.

  She looked ahead. The killer watched her from only three cars up, hanging easily off the side and facing back toward her, so the train could not be moving that fast. It was just the momentum. Mass times volume.

  “Frank!” she shrieked, in a presumably hopeless attempt to alert the officers, and bounded up and along the side of the cars. That’s how they did it in the movies, lessen the difference between the train’s speed and yours.

  It still outpaced her. She would have to grab the rungs of the next car.

  It did occur to her to wonder what she would do if she caught it. She had no way of moving forward on the train toward the killer—unlike a passenger train, this one would have no pass-throughs between cars—but at least she could see where he jumped off. She could jump as well, pursue him, though once out of the crime scene he need have no qualms about ruining the effect by tacking on an extra murder.

  But she had to catch the damn thing first.

  She vaguely registered a sound that might have been Frank calling her name and hoped it was. The end of this car, the coupling between them, reach out and—

  The killer pitched his bundle, tossing it underhand as one might abandon a basketball once the game ended. It landed in the narrowing strip of grass, directly in her path. If she didn’t stop running she might step on it.

  Her right hand connected with the rung. It hurt slightly less than the other one had. Then her right foot slid in the loose gravel and she went down, instinctively curling into a ball to keep all fingers and toes and arms and extremities off the tracks and out of the blender of moving parts underneath the train cars.

  Her body came to a stop with her face in the gravel and her knees only an inch or so from the rails, but without losing any bits of itself.

  She opened her eyes to find someone else returning her look, but with the unwavering, unseeing gaze of the dead. The killer had thrown the head, wr
apped loosely in a pair of pants, just as she had expected him to do, just as the original Torso killer had prescribed.

  He still watched her from up the tracks, receding farther into the east with every split second, the train picking up speed as it moved out of the more populated downtown area. Could he see her reaction from there, or did he simply enjoy letting his gaze linger on the tableau he’d created?

  Frank caught up with her. “Tess. I saw you fall, are you hurt? What the hell were you doing?”

  “He did it. Surrounded by cops, he still did it.”

  Frank clicked on his flashlight to see the head, though it was clearly visible in the parking lot lights strobing through the passing cars. He opened his mouth but apparently couldn’t think of a profanity bad enough to express his thoughts and pulled out the radio instead. He’d arranged for a link to the downtown train yard dispatch center and now asked them to tell the driver to stop the train, though they both knew that when he did, the killer would be long gone.

  “He did it,” Theresa repeated.

  “Damn,” Frank said.

  CHAPTER 37

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10

  PRESENT DAY

  At least it had stopped raining.

  The body at the far end of the abandoned platform could tell her only this: that it belonged to an older man and that it had suffered no violence other than the loss of its head. The hands appeared clean and neatly manicured. Scraggly gray hair covered the chest, the shape of which would have benefited from a few more pounds. A deep red pool had spread from the shoulders.

  It took a while to recall the train to the area, backing the cars slowly over the tracks—after, of course, examining the tracks closely for any evidence. The Conrail locomotive pulled a chain of fifty-seven cars bound for New Castle—a detail that caused her an extra frisson of dread—with a variety of cargo. Each car had been searched by teams of cops and Don Delgado, who found nothing. No pieces of ripped clothing, no murder weapon, and not a drop of blood.

  Theresa also failed to find a trail of blood from the tracks to the body, so it seemed unlikely that the killer had decapitated the victim on the train. If he had, he could have simply tossed the body from the train without jumping off himself. No, he had wished to re-create the original murder as closely as possible. He had leapt from the train with the apparently unconscious man, cut off the head, then reboarded the train. He would have to be very strong, but then she already knew that. Like the original killer, he had carried two full-grown men down at least part of Jackass Hill—not a task for the feeble.

  Had he at least undressed the victim while on the train, or had he not only decapitated but undressed the victim there at the end of the platform, as she crept ever closer to him? She couldn’t believe that. Every moment of this evening seemed to have happened in slow motion, but surely he had not had time for all that activity. He knew officers would be watching, and he had a train to catch.

  She combed the ten or so feet between the tracks and the body three times before giving up. The killer had not dropped any handy clues to his identity, which she found quite unsporting. Bad enough he made them all look like fools—he could at least throw her a bone for her efforts. Surely the man wanted to be caught, or he wouldn’t stick to a blueprint that told them the whens and wheres of his next murder.

  Which murder came next? Another man, the only one found well out of the downtown area. On the west side, in the Metroparks.

  The killer might be picking him out right now, coming up behind him, putting a tire iron to the skull or some chloroform to the face or simply asking for help getting his car started. She had no idea how he gained control over his victims. She had no idea how he chose them. She had no idea how to save this unlucky male who would die before the first golden glints of tomorrow’s sun warmed the sky.

  She needed to catch this killer. Then she wanted to squeeze the life out of him with her bare hands. This no longer had to do with a fascination for history or making the ghost of her grandfather proud. She wanted this guy stopped, brought down, trussed up like a calf, and forced to look her in the eye.

  The night-shift body snatchers, too brightly alert for her, lifted the limp form into a white plastic body bag, and she hiked up the track to the group of cops around the head. Frank had frozen all the heavy train traffic through the area so that they could work without fear of disruption. Theresa shuddered at the thought of encountering another train any time soon. Every time she thought of falling along the tracks, so close to those whirling, slicing wheels, her mind turned away and closed off the picture until it could fade to black.

  Portable halogen lights again turned the area into a live display of harsh beams and deep shadows, where the cops’ faces were made even more pale and the browns and greens of the woods washed into a million shades of gray. At the center of it all lay a splash of bright color that only seemed more surreal given the neutral palette around it.

  A light blue shirt, almost turquoise, glowed under the lights to near fluorescence. It had been ripped at one shoulder and the blood splashed across the front seemed oddly bright even though it had dried. A pair of khaki pants, similarly torn and bloody, wound its legs around and under the shirt and along the leaf-strewn earth. A belt and a pair of worn leather loafers stuffed with what should have been the man’s white socks had landed next to the pants. Among all these items lay the head. The third disunited head she’d encountered in less than a week.

  That wouldn’t have been so bad, in and of itself. The only shocking part was how familiar the head looked.

  The gray hair, the thin cheeks, and shaggy mustache…“I know him.”

  “What?” Frank said at her elbow. How long had he been there?

  “I know him. I mean, I met him. His name is William Van Horn. He’s the president of the American Railroad History Preservation Society. Was. He was the president. For the past eleven years, possibly only because of the Pennsylvania Railroad.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” It was only the humming of the electricity along the rapid transit tracks and the brightness of the lights that made her dizzy. “I’m just very confused.”

  Frank shifted his weight, snapping a twig under one shoe. “Join the club.”

  “Aren’t you going to ask how I know he was president of the preservation society?”

  “Because you met him the other day, you told me that. And because that’s what his wallet says.”

  “He had ID?”

  “Driver’s license, a membership card from the train society, credit cards, and fifty-two dollars in cash.”

  Theresa shook her head as she attached the heavy flash to the top of the Nikon, and Frank asked what was wrong. “He’s got everything right in this series except the victimology and the ID. None of the Torso victims had any identifying item found with them and he didn’t kill young girls like Kim.”

  “She was a prostitute, now and then, like Flo Polillo,” Frank pointed out.

  “Yes, but with very different looks. And this victim is a wealthy local man. Hardly a bum who wouldn’t be missed.”

  “The killer might not have known that,” Frank said. “He sees some guy wandering around the train tracks and either doesn’t notice the designer clothing or doesn’t care. Please don’t tell me you’re annoyed with the killer over his lack of historical accuracy.”

  “If he’s going to do this”—she crouched next to the head—“he should do it right.”

  Van Horn wore, improbably, the same sneery look she had seen on him earlier, albeit with a slight cast of surprise. His right cheek had a light scratch with a trace of blood in it; otherwise the head seemed un-molested except for having been cut from the body. The slices there were not as tidy as on Kim, and the neck was the appropriate length.

  From what she could see with a Maglite, the mouth had nothing in it but blood. Small flecks spotted the gray hair and appeared to be tiny leaves blown there from the surrounding weeds. Blood had been patted onto
his right temple, probably from coming into contact with the wet pants. But the head seemed otherwise clean. The clothing, too, was only stained in spots and not soaked, the shoulders only spotted with blood. Definitely removed before decapitation.

  Theresa let the heavy camera dangle from her shoulder while she sketched, still muttering to herself over the consistencies, and inconsistencies, of the murders. The ID bothered her. The original Torso killer had taken pains to keep his victims from being identified, with great success. Names had been found for only three of the twelve, and only two of those with complete certainty. Kim might still have been Jane Doe if it hadn’t been for her criminal history. But a lot had changed since 1935. They had identified all his victims so far, without too much trouble, so perhaps he decided not to worry about it.

  “Has this guy’s family been notified?” she asked Frank as she worked.

  “Sanchez is at his address now, but apparently he lives alone. She woke up his landlady, who reports that Mr. Van Horn had no kin and not many friends. His life revolved around his job and the railroad preservation society.”

  “What job?”

  “Draftsman at an architectural firm on Fifty-fifth.”

  “That makes sense. He was quite an artist.”

  “But he never got ahead.”

  She peered at him.

  “At the firm. Never got a-head?”

  “Haven’t you heard a pun is the lowest form of humor?” she asked, thrilled to have Frank joking with her again. He didn’t hold their grandfather against her, not really.

  “I’ve heard it. I just don’t believe it.”

  “When was the last time seen?”

  “His landlady talked to him yesterday evening. When the firm opens up tomorrow morning we’ll find out if he went to work. What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know. I just didn’t want to be the last person to see him alive.” She couldn’t have said why, only that she did not want to get in the habit of meeting victims before they died. She preferred to have a completely impersonal relationship with the people on the gurneys. “I’m deeply unhappy about something.”