Trail of Blood (13 page)

“All right.” Perhaps that would be best, anyway. The woman had been firm about not wanting the police, and given Frank’s mood, Theresa didn’t want him either.

“Did you hear about—”

“Speaking of James Miller,” she said at the same time, “did you get the ballistics back?”

“They’ve got to work the rust out before they can do a test-fire. Say, you might want to check out that nursing home while you’re there. Now that you’ve passed over the hill.”

“You’re farther down the other side than I am. And it’s a retirement community.” She placed the receiver in its cradle and enjoyed approximately ten seconds undisturbed by any male animal before Leo stood in front of her desk with a mass spec report and a cell phone, as if ready to dial up
U.S. News & World Report
at any moment. “What’s up?”

“Um…nothing.”

Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, and better to check out Irene Schaffer before unleashing the hounds of gonzo journalism on her. Or Leo.

Theresa went looking for Christine Johnson. She found the doctor in the autopsy room reserved for decomposed bodies—an odor-soaked room that could make grown men ill—snipping the fingers off James Miller’s desiccated body. Theresa averted her eyes. “I
hate
it when you do that.”

“Cleveland PD wants ’em.” The doctor brought the handles of the pruning shears together, the
snap
sound identical to the sound of a small branch breaking. “They think if they work with the skin enough they can tease out a positive ID with prints. Apparently all cops were fingerprinted, even back then. Good luck to them, I say—these suckers are dry.”

Of course merely finding James Miller’s gun and badge on the corpse would not be sufficient identification. But the man being made to suffer this final indignity overwhelmed her. She tried to focus on an empty latex glove box on the counter. No one ever stocked the decomp room. “I wanted to know if you’d reached any conclusions about Kim Hammond and her missing section of neck.”

“Nope.”
Snap
.

“No?”

“I can’t really be sure what killed her, much less what happened to her neck.”

“Having her head cut off didn’t do it?”

“She had too much blood left in her heart to have died of exsanguination. But so far tox is negative, no drugs, certainly no OD. She had edema in the lungs, no edema in the heart, and petechiae in the eyes.”
Snap
. “That might mean asphyxiation, but pulmonary edema can result from a dozen different things, probably three dozen.”

Theresa turned to ask, “Could she have been—augh. How many times are you going to have to do that?”

“Ten. I should think that would be obvious. Ten fingers, five on each hand. Humans are remarkably consistent that way.”

“Could Kim have been smothered?”

“Doubt it. There were no impressions of her teeth against the inside of her mouth.”

“Strangled?”

“Possibly.”

Theresa watched her drop a severed, shriveled digit into a small jar of 70 percent alcohol and tried not to picture James Miller’s hands as he took his careful notes. “You think someone could have cut out part of her neck to disguise the fact that she’d been strangled and not decapitated?”

“Or he saw a TV show where the cops got a fingerprint or the precise and unique size of the killer’s hand from a bruise on the victim’s skin or some such nonsense. Or he doesn’t care what we think the cause of death is but does care what we think of his handiwork, and”—
snap
—“he did such a hack job taking the head off that he kept trying to neaten up the edges, which would be no easy task once the head had been disarticulated. Then he wound up shaving a lot more off than intended.”

Theresa helped her zip up James Miller’s body bag. “It just seems weird.”

“Really? You mean the part where he killed her or the part where he cut her body into pieces and threw them in the lake?”

“I mean assuming Kim is a strangulation that looks like a decapitation. James Miller is a gunshot that looked like a decapitation.”

Christine screwed lids onto the jars, tightening each one. “Oh, sure. The two have a lot in common, except that one occurred seventy-five years before the other. That kind of sets them apart.”

“Seventy-four. I don’t think they were committed by the same person. I just think it’s weird.”

“Maybe your respective killers don’t care about official cause of death. They just like removing people’s heads.”

Theresa nodded.

“Or the pathologists who worked here in the 1930s got so distracted by the headlessness of the bodies that they missed other CODs. They wouldn’t have had any women in the autopsy room then, you know,” Christine added, as if this would explain any errors. “All men. Too many egos getting in the way of accuracy.”

“I doubt it—chauvinistic or not, scores of people observed every last bit of flesh and evidence in the Torso killings. I wonder sometimes if they were more thorough than we are today—they didn’t have technology to fall back on, no DNA or infrared spectroscopy or databases. Every piece of trace evidence had to be run down by old-fashioned legwork. And I don’t think
headlessness
is a word.”

“If it’s not,” Christine said as she stacked the jars into a small box, “it should be.”

“What are you going to put on the death certificate?”

“I don’t know yet. Why do you think I’m down here dodging the phones? Members of the media are calling me every five minutes wanting to know if she was dismembered alive. What is
wrong
with people?”

“I don’t know, but if I did it would certainly explain the appeal of certain Hollywood offerings.”

“I keep telling them that I’m waiting for the medical records and that will buy me some time. At least I can fill in one box with absolute certainty.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s definitely a homicide.”

Theresa left the fusty decomposed autopsy room and climbed the two flights of steps to the third floor to knock for admittance to the toxicology department. Unfortunately the team of pleasant, younger women who largely staffed the place had gone to lunch, and that left Oliver.

Theresa tiptoed into his lair, a corner bordered by a window, a workbench, a barrier of tall gas tanks, and the mass spectrometer. Oliver sat with his body mass spilling over the edges of the task chair, reading a gas chromatograph spectrum as if it were a racing form. And ignored her.

She watched the mass spec twirl its samples for a while and then said, “Kim Hammond.”

Oliver turned a page. “The inside of that girl’s body must have borne some resemblance to a nuclear plant after meltdown.”

“Actually it wasn’t bad. But that’s youth.”

Oliver grunted.

“I take it you found drugs in her hair?”

The dead cells of the hair shaft had long been used to detect drugs and poisons and their metabolites. Since hair generally grew at the rate of half an inch per month, it could provide a timeline for that activity as well.

“It would be simpler to tell you what I
didn’t
find. To put it in layman’s terms, cocaine, heroin, Xanax, THC—that’s marijuana—”

“Thanks.” She gritted her teeth. Putting up with Oliver’s rampant self-esteem was the price one paid for prompt and thorough information.

“I know.”

“—oxycodone, and some little gobbledygook I think might be airplane glue. Plus amounts of caffeine and nicotine that should have been fatal in a little thing like her. This girl was an omnivore.”

“What’s in the last half inch or so?” The hair that grew during the past month would tell them of her most recent activity.

“Nothing. Sad, I suppose. She got off the stuff and died anyway.” He did not sound sad. He sounded as if he were observing an unusual but not particularly interesting peak on a mass spec graph, which, to him, was all Kim Hammond represented.

“Poisons?”

“If you mean toxic compounds, no, not that they would have had time to grow into her hair anyway. But of course I checked the blood, urine, and gastric as well, since that’s what I live to do here, one might call it my raison d’être, to put disgusting things into little tubes so it can tell us disgusting secrets.”

“No obvious poisons.”

“I refuse to repeat myself.”

“Not even alcohol.”

“I’m not sure I would call alcohol a poison, but that’s for the do-gooders to debate. No alcohol.”

“She was clean.”

“And still dead,” Oliver pointed out. “Rather turns the whole concept of karma on its ear, don’t you think?”

Returning to the lab, Theresa walked right into an ambush. Leo waited at the laboratory door for her, his body between her and the coffee machine. Never a good sign.

“We have a visitor.”

In a rare absence, the Medical Examiner was away presenting a seminar in Columbus, so city councilman Greer had been shown into the conference room, where the battered 1950s décor had done nothing to improve his mood.

He invaded her personal space immediately, towering over her in a suit too heavy for the weather. She hadn’t noticed the watery eyes or the weak chin upon their first acquaintance, but then they’d been separated by some distance and a dead body. “Are you the one holding up my building?”

“Um.” She puzzled over this choice of words for a moment, then said, “No. I—we’re—investigating a homicide that occurred there.”

“Yeah, seventy-four years ago, and you’ve already removed the body and all your clues or whatever. Yet you need to turn my building into your own little stage. This isn’t about you, Ms. MacLean, get that?”

“Of course it isn’t—I don’t know what would make you think—”

He held up that morning’s edition of the
Plain Dealer
. “This, maybe?” Metro Section, first page:
New Torso Victim Discovered in Downtown Building
. A subheading went on:
Third generation of Cleveland law tackle the case dads couldn’t solve
.

He slapped the paper down onto the conference table. “Next you’ll be declaring the place a historic landmark, I suppose, just to draw out your fifteen minutes of fame.”

“Absolutely not.” She glanced at Leo, who stood away from them, off in neutral territory between the file boxes of old records and a broken X-ray machine. In true Leo fashion, he would wait to see who won before choosing his side.

“You have no idea what you’re interfering with, Ms. MacLean.” He managed to make her name sound like an obscenity, standing close enough for her to feel the heat from his chest and smell the garlic from his lunch.

“I know a man was murdered—”

“The economy of this city is being murdered every day! Every minute we delay a recovery project, more Clevelanders have to declare bankruptcy and face foreclosure. I want that building released immediately.”

“You were right in the first place, Councilman. This has nothing to do with me personally. We investigate every homicide thoroughly and we will do so in this case. After we examine the cellar with ground-penetrating radar, we will promptly release the building.”

“I’ll bill the county for lost ti—what?”

“I have someone lined up to do it this afternoon. If no new information turns up, then we are done with the building.” She hated to do it, but she would have to let the site of James Miller’s murder go. “Provided my supervisor concurs.”

Her supervisor nodded feverishly.

The councilman backed off a few inches, allowing her a half-fresh breath of air. “That’s what we’re waiting on? For some egghead to look for buried bodies?”

She would not have expected the councilman to be aware of the uses of ground-penetrating radar. “Yes. The time elapsed since the murder occurred doesn’t mean we investigate with any less diligence—”

“It’s that bastard from the Twenty-second Ward, isn’t it? He put you up to this.”

“Councilman,” she said with a sigh, preparing to tell him that she wouldn’t know the Twenty-second Ward if her car broke down in the middle of it, but he stepped up to her again until his blue pinstriped shirt blotted the rest of the room from her vision.

“Don’t bother, I don’t care who it is. But understand this: This is a very important project.
Very
important. So if I get one more problem from this office, if you affect this project in any way again, you’ll never get another job in this county. Got it?”

Too surprised to be afraid or even angry, she said, “Yes. And I’m sure Officer Miller sends his posthumous apologies for getting himself murdered in a building you want to sell.”

His eyebrows knitted themselves together as he tried to work out those words into a statement relevant to him, apparently failed, and turned to go. Leo hurried after him, echoing cries of “So glad we could be of assistance, Councilman,” down the hall.

Theresa waited for her heartbeat to return to normal. “I hope you don’t mind me speaking for you, James,” she muttered. “But I thought it appropriate.”

Somewhere in the next world, she felt sure, James Miller chuckled.

In the empty room, she sat down at the conference table to read the article. Brandon Jablonski had not written it, though his name appeared as a contributor. But the wording and the enthusiasm for the Torso Murders sounded like him.

It began with a brief recap of the Torso killings and their impact on a depressed Cleveland. By the sixth murder, twenty-five detectives were working the case full-time, the most assigned in Cleveland history. They investigated every missing or suspicious person report; traced every piece of clothing found with the bodies; ran down even trivial, back-stabbing complaints citizens made against their husbands, coworkers, or neighbors. The city counted on the great Eliot Ness to solve the case, but he never personally took the reins of the effort, instead working on a widespread police corruption case that resulted in thirteen convictions, two hundred suspensions, and a host of reassignments and resignations. A different kind of authority figure began to spearhead the mass of information being accumulated about the killer—the slight, scholarly county coroner Dr. Samuel Gerber. The case had fascinated him.