Trail of Blood

by Lisa Black

  “But you can’t be sure. Perhaps the closets weren’t of equal size. Perhaps Dr. Louis used them both. And even if there had been a door from my father’s office, that doesn’t mean my father used it.”

  She said nothing, having no reason to think the closets weren’t of symmetrical sizes, and though one could say all one liked about proof it was pretty hard to explain away a corpse turning up in your storeroom.

  “It would help if we had the original blueprints.”

  “If I find them, I’ll let you know.”

  She brushed whiteness along the branches of a fir tree, dotted it on the browning leaves of an oak. “I thought you had looked through all your father’s papers already.”

  “I did. But they probably had to have the building inspected when they sold it, and any paperwork would be in the Penn Railroad collection. If I find anything, I’ll keep it out for you.”

  “Thank you.” Most people would not have been so cooperative with someone trying to prove their parent’s guilt. But perhaps Edward needed to know as much as she did.

  The trees at last standing to his specifications, he added, “But you know, I might even be mixed up in my recollections and that wasn’t my father’s office at all. Plus the architects who designed the building worked in it. They could have put in all sorts of secret rooms without anyone else’s knowledge.”

  True, though unlikely. The floor had been too solid to be breached from the cellar, and the construction crew had not found anything to indicate access to the space from the second floor. Too craven to press him, she only asked, “Is that enough?”

  He inspected her work, saying, “A little more.”

  Something tugged at her brain cells, wanting their attention. The mention of their neighbor state had echoed a previous conversation, from her first visit to Edward’s home. “You said your father worked for and then bought a railroad in Pennsylvania?”

  “That’s where it was based. The track system went from Harrisburg to Chicago.”

  He added the loose fake snow on top of her wet coating, creating a snowfall realistic enough to warrant mention on the Weather Channel.

  “Winter has come to your city,” she told him.

  He let more flakes drift to the top of the music auditorium. Apparently Cleveland had had a blizzard. “Snow covers up a multitude of sins. Little imperfections, roof sections that don’t perfectly meld.”

  Theresa’s legs began to feel heavy. The late night and early morning had caught up with her. “My dad used to say that about paint. Covering up a multitude of sins, I mean.”

  Snow. Paint.

  “Where did your father live in Pennsylvania? When he worked for the railroad?” To get his attention away from the model, she added, “The one he later bought.”

  He recapped the container. “Oh, a little town, you’ve probably never heard of it. There’s pretty much nothing there except train tracks.”

  “Where?” she asked again, pursuing some body of thought that would not quite gel.

  “New Castle.”

  And, just like that, the final piece fell into place.

  Arthur Corliss fulfilled every requirement of the Torso killer. He had intimate knowledge of and free access to the railroad system. He worked in the Kingsbury Run area. He had lived in New Castle and had a business there. He owned and occupied not only the building but—apparently—the storage space where James Miller had been slain.

  She felt drunk—but not with success, as she could not summon the slightest happiness for solving the Torso killings. For one thing, the evidence seemed damning but still completely circumstantial. For another, she felt dismay on behalf of Edward Corliss. “And your father never—” What? Gave any sign of a depraved violence? Talked about his victims? Displayed his trophies, if he kept any? She knew she should shut up now, put down the white goop, and search the rail yard on her own, leaving him to sort out his family’s ghosts in private. She needed to talk to Frank. Between the two of them they would figure out what to do.

  “Never talked to me about being the Torso killer?” Edward gave her a weary smile and straightened. “This is a hell of a job you have, Theresa.”

  “I know.”

  “The answer is no, he didn’t. I’m sure he would never have mentioned it to Mother, either.”

  She felt her forehead crease in a frown, trying to make sense of this last part.

  He took the container out of her limp hand. “She didn’t know, you see. She believed him to be a great businessman and philanthropist—which he was—and only that. I would have spent my life believing it, too, if I hadn’t crept into the cellar one day to pinch a beer and found a leg in the stationary tub.”

  She waited, the way one does when another person is talking too fast, hoping that if one gives it a little time one’s brain will sort the words into an order that makes sense. Her problem was, they made too much sense already.

  Edward went on, his light blue eyes dancing with light reflected from the white walls. “They never caught him, you see. He didn’t go to jail, his family didn’t whisk him off to some fancy asylum. He simply got over the need for attention and learned to hide his victims where no one would ever find them.”

  “Where?”

  Edward smiled at this and shook his head. “Always the scientist. I don’t know where. After I found half a man in our basement—this basement, I’ll show you the room—I toasted him with the beer I’d taken and went back to my studies. When my father returned from whatever errand he’d been on—probably disposing of the first half of the body—he didn’t know his sanctum had been breached, and I never said a word.”

  He picked up a stained towel and began to wipe the white stuff from her fingers as he spoke, gently tugging on each one. “All through the years, I never said a word, though I think I should have. The way he looked at me sometimes…he wanted to share it with his only child. That’s natural for a parent, don’t you think? Don’t you share your secrets with your daughter? My father never told me, but I found my own way of coming and going from the basement so that I could watch.”

  “Wahssh—”

  “But I never killed.” He moved closer to her, watching her face for its reactions. “Whatever demons drove my father didn’t drive me. Not even when temptation would strike—when you work on roads, Theresa, the one thing you learn about human beings is that most are sheep. They simply do the same things over and over until someone tells them to do something else, and then they’ll do that over and over until redirected again. Boring things, really. But I never harmed a one of them until that blond whore showed up on my doorstep. I have to admit I’m disappointed in you, Theresa. It’s taken you a week to discover what that little bimbo figured out in two days.”

  Theresa grabbed for the edge of the table and caught up the bottle of fake snow instead. She opened her fingers to let it fall, then thought better of it. If she damaged the model there was no telling what Corliss could do, and besides, the label caught her attention. Polyethylene.

  “Granted, it was only a guess on her part. She found my father’s name in that notebook—”

  “Wha no—”

  “Some little book from her grandfather. He had written about Arthur in it and then she found his name on the blueprints. I happen to be listed in the phone book, so voilà, she showed up on my doorstep.”

  Plastic snow. Polyethylene made to look like tiny snowflakes…circles.

  She couldn’t believe how slow her brain was working. Had worked.

  As liberally as he applied the fake snow, it must have settled on all sorts of things, just as her pets’ fur did.

  “She wasn’t positive my father was the killer, but figured the evidence came close enough. I don’t think she even cared. She only had this wild idea about us taking to the talk-show circuit, making the most of her fifteen minutes, I guess. But I knew, and I had to get that notebook away from her.”

  They had struggled here—Kim brushed her arm against the hot soldering iron as Co
rliss strangled her, damaging the freshly painted swing bridge, infuriating him all the more. The struggle lodged paint and fake snow in her hair.

  Physical evidence could chase all the fog away. And now she had it.

  Afterward Corliss took Kim down to his father’s workroom and removed part of her neck to hide his finger marks, and so that the death would resemble the senior Corliss’s work.

  “Wheresh the notebook?” she managed to ask, more or less coherently.

  “I burned it.”

  One of her knees buckled, and she dropped the bottle to lean heavily on the edge of the platform. So little remained of James Miller and his time on this planet and Corliss had destroyed one more piece.

  “I thought it prudent,” Corliss added, perhaps at the pained look on her face. “Too bad I couldn’t burn her. So I tried to make the most of it. I cleaned her up, just as my father would have done. And he’d never heard the word forensic.”

  And yet Corliss Jr. left trace evidence behind, she thought. The snow and paint from his model were stuck in Kim’s hair. Fibers from his car trunk and living room carpeting stayed with the two men on the hill. Polyethylene snowflakes had been on the handkerchief—probably Edward’s handkerchief—placed in Van Horn’s pocket to make the scene more similar to the Tattooed Man’s.

  Her pets’ fur on the victim’s clothing hadn’t come from Jablonski or been the result of her own clumsy cross-contamination. The fur had gotten on Edward’s white cotton dress shirt when he helped her down from a moving train car and had transferred onto Van Horn when Corliss wrestled his unconscious form into the trunk of his car.

  She saw it all so clearly now and felt strangely unable to do a bloody thing about it. “Whuu’d you do to m—”

  “I’m sorry, my dear. It’s Midazolam. When you turned down the tea I had to add it to the snow gel—with some DMSO, of course, so it could be absorbed.”

  “Dental anesthetic,” she tried to say. Extremely fast-acting, but temporary.

  “Borrowed it from the neighbor. I did tell you I minored in chemistry,” he said, chiding her.

  “You killed them,” she said dumbly, her words so slurred she couldn’t understand them herself.

  “I did. I killed that little bitch and discovered how fun it was. Then you and that reporter showed up here, salivating over my father’s work, and that gave me the idea. If I intended to follow in his footsteps, why not do it right—”

  He caught her as her knees buckled and she fell, not gently, so that he had to tighten both arms around her torso firmly enough to leave bruises. Her foot slid into the bottle, scattering polyethylene flakes across the hardwood floor.

  “You have no idea how much I regret this, Theresa,” he murmured in her ear.

  She felt his lips on hers, and then nothing else.

  CHAPTER 44

  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 11

  PRESENT DAY

  The zoning and planning department’s hallways were silent, the workers all home enjoying their weekend, and Brent made the most of their lack of supervision by tearing up and down the linoleum and listening to his screeches echo off the walls. His mother did not seem inclined to restrain him. Frank suspected she felt she deserved the officers’ indulgence since they had interrupted her Saturday, or she wanted the kid to burn off all the excess energy he could before they returned to their bungalow. Frank could only hope finding this blueprint would help point them to Kim’s killer, that this entire exercise would not be for nothing.

  At least, once her supervisor had arrived to unlock the offices, Sonia Kettle had quickly found what they had come for, since only a week had elapsed since she last retrieved it. She carried the old paper in one hand, as gently as she carried her baby in the other, to a worktable in the center of the storage room. “Here it is.”

  “What is that? Let me see!” her son demanded as she spread it on the wooden surface.

  “No, Brent. It’s very old. Do not touch it,” she added in a tone so stern that the child listened and contented himself with running up and down the aisles of cabinets. While shouting, of course.

  The fragile papers contained an illustration of the outside view of the building at 4950 Pullman, then the upper floor, then the lower floor. Frank immediately honed in on the two offices on the west side of the layout. There, in neat and flowery script, the southwest corner room had been designated Mr. Corliss’s suite. No such notation had been made for Dr. Louis Odessa. A logo reading Metetsky-O’Reilly, Architects appeared at the bottom.

  Corliss’s storage room extended from a doorway in the back of the office; a mirror image had become Odessa’s space. However, Corliss’s closet had an additional feature noted. A small circle had been drawn into the floor, and an arrow pointed to it from the word drain.

  James Miller had been found in Arthur Corliss’s closet.

  But that would not have meant anything to Kim Hammond, would it? Had the newspapers mentioned the hole in the floor? Had Jablonski’s elaborate stories discussed it? He had definitely interviewed the construction crew.

  Frank scoured the rest of the blueprint. What else would have put Kim in the path of her murderer? “What did she say to you, Sonia, when you showed her this?”

  “Brent! Quiet down, buddy. I don’t remember—like I said, by that time I just wanted her to get done and go. But she thought it was cool, et cetera, liked the fancy handwriting.”

  “The architects are on here, too,” Sanchez pointed out. Their office also had their names written on it, claiming that space for the firm of Metetsky and O’Reilly.

  “Did she make any specific comments?” Frank pressed Sonia Kettle.

  “No. She, um, she had a little notebook that she kept looking at.”

  Frank and Angela Sanchez perked up. “Notebook?” they asked in unison.

  “Yeah, a really old-looking little thing. The pages were brown and dusty and crumbling. She’d have to turn them really carefully, and then she’d look back at the blueprint, then turn a page. I didn’t bother asking about it, I knew her well enough for that. Kim kept her little plans to herself more securely than a Hollywood producer with the script to a sequel.”

  Frank and Sanchez met each other’s gazes over the table. James Miller had jotted a note three-quarters of a century before that put Kim in the path of a killer. What had he written? And what did it mean in light of the blueprints?

  “Brent! Be quiet! I wouldn’t put too much stock in it, frankly,” Sonia Kettle added to the officers, sounding more and more put out by such a fuss over an ex-employee. “Kim wasn’t a bad kid, but in terms of brains…she had never been one to think things through, and from what I could see of her, that hadn’t changed.”

  Frank’s phone rang, and he snatched it off his belt with an irritated swipe. Perhaps the woman had it right—Kim Hammond had picked up the wrong john, and the mystery went no deeper than that. “Hello?”

  “Uncle Frank? Do you know where my mom is?” His niece sounded even more annoyed than he and Sonia Kettle put together. “I mean, I caught a ride home to spend her birthday weekend together because I know this whole empty-nest thing has been getting to her, and now she’s not even answering her phone.”

  CHAPTER 45

  SATURDAY, JUNE 6

  1936

  It occurred to James, while making his silent way into the building at 4950 Pullman, that he did not even know where Arthur Corliss lived. This did not concern him much. The man had mentioned a housekeeper, and a woman in the throes of the cleaning process would certainly stumble on some telltale artifact were her employer carving up young men there in the household. If James moved a saucer from one cabinet to another, Helen knew instantly. Women had nothing but their homes and their children to occupy them, all day, every day. Hence the near obsession a set of Fiestaware could cause.

  He could buy it for her if he went with Walter.

  The top step creaked. Not that it mattered, really. The sun had only begun to set and the front door stood slightly ajar. James
entered the hallway. Three of the offices were dark and closed, but light poured from Arthur Corliss’s space.

  He did not plan to take the man by surprise. He did not feel 100 percent sure yet. Nearly everything that applied to Arthur Corliss also applied to Louis Odessa, except their preference for company. Arthur Corliss sought out the down-and-out men, the ones looking for work, the ones without relatives to report them missing. He spoke kindly to them. He fed them.

  They would trust him.

  He needed to follow up on his clues, and then he would turn his information over to the captain and ask for an arrest warrant. James could do nothing by himself. He knew that.

  At the office door he saw Corliss inside, doing nothing more sinister than laying in a fresh supply of Mission Orange soda, his favorite, in their signature black bottles. Had Corliss offered one to the latest young man before killing him? Or had they broken during the fire and a shard lodged in the sole of his shoe, only to come loose when he dumped the body?

  The shelves were clean and freshly painted, books and bottles and drawings returned, all except for the newspapers. Those must have gone up in the blaze. Flo Polillo’s body parts had been wrapped in two different newspapers, dated five months apart. Who else would have a five-month-old newspaper handy but a man who made a habit of collecting them?

  The yellow dog lay under the window, no longer interested in the radiator on this warm evening. He opened one eye, saw James, closed it again.

  He could swear he hadn’t made a sound, but Corliss whirled around all the same. “Oh, Detective. Good afternoon. Evening, really.”

  “I thought you’d be here. Moving your things back in after the renovations?”

  The man chuckled and set the last bottle on his shelf. “They never really left, merely got shuffled around while the painters worked. The fire only damaged my table and the things on it, but the smoke got every where. Nasty stuff, smoke. The smell went through the whole building. Auralina had to throw out two of her robes, and did she get after me about that! I’ll have to pay her three times what they were worth.”