Trail of Blood (16 page)

“Get Hollywood skank clothes and cars, mostly.” He rubbed long fingers over his shiny face. “And a house for her mama. Some place better to live than here.”

Just then Frank’s phone rang.

“What were you thinking?” Frank asked for the third time.

“I was thinking I’d like to get a look at the guy who was burying two dead bodies.”

“You didn’t know that when you started out to take a stroll among the train tracks and the winos and maybe a few gang wars!”

“Are you looking at this? Besides, I called you, didn’t I?”

“So I’d know where to pick up your body! Thanks a lot.” Frank rubbed the bridge of his nose, not because it hurt but because he and Theresa both had picked it up from a TV detective when they were kids as a way of expressing exasperation. Somehow exasperation came up a lot when they were together. “Look, just promise me that you’ll never wander through a train yard after dark again. First, that you’ll never tell a reporter our family history again, and second, that you won’t wander through train yards.”

It seemed unlikely that she would make a habit of either, so she figured it to be a safe bet. “Okay. But are you
looking
at this?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I see it.”

The first corpse lay on its left side, calves separated, arms loosely bent as if he were sleeping. That victim wore no clothes except for a pair of socks. The second victim, about twenty feet away and a little farther up the hill, lay on his back in a patch of dead goldenrod, with no clothes at all. The heads and male organs had been removed from both victims, the latter parts found together in a pile next to the second body. The killer had been working on the heads when Theresa interrupted him.

“I don’t get it,” Angela Sanchez said, staring down, not at the severed cranium of a youngish man with brown hair, but at the foot-in-diameter hole dug into the ground next to it. “He wasn’t going to bury the bodies?”

Theresa shook her head. “No. Just the heads. With enough of the hair sticking out of the dirt so that we’d be sure to find them.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what the original Torso killer did,” Theresa said.

“Victims one and two,” Frank intoned, “were found here, in exactly these positions.”

“Victim one, anyway.” Theresa pointed at the corpse lying on its side.

“A photograph still exists of that one. We can’t really be sure how he posed the other one. The records don’t specify.”

“And the pile of clothing?” Angela asked. “Is that like the original murders?”

“That, too.” Theresa had made another trip, a more cautious one this time, up the valley to retrieve her camera. She snapped another photo of the material stacked between a worn brick and a crushed McDonald’s cup with at least a month of grime on it. “It should be a coat, a shirt, pants, I think, maybe a hat. When Don gets here with the crime scene equipment I can examine it further.”

“That’s only enough clothes for one guy, though.”

“I know, but that’s what the first Torso killer did. This guy might deviate, though. He’s already got a few details wrong.”

Angela waited until a rapid transit train passed by, though the electric cars made much less noise than the diesel locomotives. “Such as?”

“In the Torso killings, they were both white, and victim two was older than victim one—this one on his side—and had been killed at least a week before victim one. He also had something poured on him, possibly calcium hypochlorite, that made his skin leathery. Now these two guys—victim two appears older than one, yes, but he’s also black; his skin has not been treated; and he certainly hasn’t been dead for a week. I’d be surprised if it were more than a few hours. He either hasn’t studied his history or he’s not as patient as his predecessor. He doesn’t want to wait a week. He certainly didn’t want to wait a year.”

“I’m sure I’ll regret asking this,” Angela said, “but what do you mean by a year?”

“I’m sure I’ll regret answering it. Monday’s victim? The woman cut into pieces and thrown in Lake Erie?”

“Copying another one of the Torso killer’s?”

“His first, so far as anyone knows. They called her the Lady of the Lake. Some of her—not the head—washed up on Euclid Beach, but because a year went by before the two men on the hillside were found, no one connected her murder to the series until much later. That’s why they went back and called her victim zero.”

Frank said, “So—assuming that woman
wasn’t
killed by a boyfriend or a freak boating accident—our new guy decided to collapse the timeline. A year became two days.”

Theresa tried to talk herself out of the theory. “But the first Lady of the Lake had been dead for months when she surfaced, and her skin had been turned to leather as well. That’s not consistent with Kim.”

Angela looked around, frowning in the bright halogens. “Zero, one, and two. How many were there, again?”

“Twelve,” Frank said, “officially.”

“Probably twice that in reality,” Theresa added.

Frank asked, “Tess, can you identify him?”

“I can’t even swear it
was
a him. I assume so, from the size of it—him—whatever I saw. One person, in dark clothes. I didn’t see hair, whether he wore a coat or a hoodie or a mask or just had dark hair.”

“Weight?”

“Big, I guess. You know I’m lousy at that.”

“Well,
think
.”

They stood side by side, backs to the tracks, facing the corpses, waiting for more reinforcements to arrive so that the scene could be documented and collected with all possible accuracy. She knew Frank had to draw every detail he could before the incident faded from her mind,
if
it faded. She just wished he would be a little more gentle about it. Her system had had a shock, even if she did not want to admit it.

“Think,” he said again. “Bigger than me?”

“I think so, yes.” Theresa frowned; it felt like a guess and guessing was the one thing she was not supposed to do.
Verifiable facts only, ma’am.

“Loose clothing?”

“I think so.”

“Glasses?”

“Didn’t see a reflection.”

“A glint from anything? Jewelry? A watch? A logo on his shirt?”

“No. Nothing.”

Frank sighed his exasperation, then pointed out, “He took the shovel.”

“Worried that it could be traced to him. Where did he go? I thought this road ended.”

“No. It’s more or less a dirt road for railroad use only, but it follows the tracks for two miles and over two bridges, then turns into Canal. From there he could get onto Carnegie and disappear.”

“Great. We get to check for tire tracks up two miles of dirt road.”

“That’s what road guys are for. Tess”—Frank’s voice grew harsh—

“did he
see
you?”

Once again she was standing next to the tracks as a train bore down on her, its spotlight illuminating most of the valley but especially her, glinting off her white skin and the highlights in her hair. The explosion of the train’s horn pounded her heart until it ached. The shadow turned. The shadow looked.

Now she shivered from more than the drop in temperature that came with the night. “Yes. He saw me.”

The former army nurse lived in a tall building in Westlake. The sign read “Gracious Community Living” but, as Irene Schaffer Martin told Theresa immediately after introducing herself, “This is one of those places that old folks go to die.”

Theresa had made her way through the lobby, which was elegantly decorated with washable plastic and vinyl furniture designed—well designed—to look old and rich, and now glanced around at the room Irene shared with a bedridden roommate who snored. The bed and the nightstand matched the rest of the facility, but Irene must have brought the other furnishings with her, including an elaborately carved bookcase crammed with knickknacks, reading material, and photos. The room and the building had a particular odor, not of anything unpleasant but of air that had recycled through mechanical systems one too many times without drawing in any new stuff from outside. “It doesn’t look too bad.”

“It’s not,” the old lady said. “You got to go somewhere. Not cheap, though.”

“How did you pay for it? The profit from knocking over the bank?” Irene née Schaffer laughed, not a cackle but a full-throated belly laugh that shook her still-fleshy shoulders. She had a decent head of hair dyed a chestnut brown, worn straight to below her chin and then flipped out like a fifties teen. “Sort of. So you work with stiffs?” She sat in a wheelchair but twitched one leg, stretching out the ankle.

“Yes.”

“I saw plenty of those in the war.” The loose skin on her neck followed where the chin led as she shook her head.

“World War Two?”

“Yes. I almost went back for Korea, but I’d had my first one then, my daughter, and I couldn’t take her along, now, could I?”

So many questions occurred to Theresa that she didn’t know where to begin, but she figured it couldn’t hurt to ease into the topic of the dead man. “When did you join the service?”

“When they bombed our damn harbor, that’s when. Everybody did. Would you like some tea, dear?”

Theresa glanced at the window, where a few drops of rain had decided to fall; they’d caught her shoulders in the twenty steps from her car to the building’s door. On top of that, her heartbeat had not yet returned to normal after stumbling over two dead bodies. “I’d love some.”

The woman filled a Pyrex measuring cup with water and popped it into an undersize microwave. While it hummed, she got out two cups and saucers with a gold-edged floral pattern and went on answering the question as if she hadn’t paused. “Though I can’t say my decision was based on patriotism alone. I was twenty-one, all my friends were married or engaged—did your mother ever tell you that boys may fool around with the bad girls, but they don’t marry them?”

“Yes.”

“She was right. Though I wasn’t bad, not really—hell, I qualified for sainthood compared to kids nowadays.”

The microwave went
bing
, and she wheeled over to retrieve the cup of water. Then she made two cups of tea from the same bag and pushed one over to Theresa, who preferred cream and sugar in hers and also preferred to drink it from a cup she had washed herself. She concentrated on the delicate design of the flowers instead.

“But I could be wild. My father ran out on us, my mother and me and my little brother. So many men did during the Depression. The humiliation was too great, not having a job, not being able to provide for their families. No one had heard of welfare then, and charity was only for the very poor or the infirm.”

Theresa sipped and nodded.

“My mother worked at the feed store, stocking shelves, lifting things that were too heavy for her to lift. We moved in with her sister and lived in their attic, which kept a roof—a leaking roof—over our heads. She charged us, my aunt did, fifty cents a week, which as a kid I thought was a pretty rotten thing to do to your own sister, but my aunt had three of her own kids to feed and she could have rented out the space for three times as much.”

Theresa said, “Ms. Martin—”

“Stick with Schaffer. It’s a good name. And I’m getting to it—I’m not senile, you know, I’m only trying to explain that I ran around the streets all the time just to get out of that house. My aunt’s oldest girl loved babies, so I’d dump my brother on her and I’d…escape.”

Theresa took another sip of tea and decided it wasn’t all that bad without cream and sugar. “Where would you go?”

“Edgewater Park, in the summer. I’d sneak into the Brookside zoo in the winter. Hardly anyone was around and the one old maintenance guy got so used to seeing me that he must have thought I belonged to one of the people who worked there and never asked me anything. I got in through the elephant cage. The elephants never cared. Ever been there in the winter? You should see the polar bears in the winter.”

“I’ll have to do that sometime.”

“But I’d also go down and watch the trains a lot. I had a girlfriend, Doris, in the fifth grade and her father was a conductor on the Erie Railroad, so we’d walk down West Third Street to the yards and wait for him to come back in from Pittsburgh. He lost his job after the crash and they moved out to Illinois for some job, but I’d still go down there to watch the trains, and wonder where they were going, and wish I could go, too. I think that’s what really started it.”

“Started what?”

“Why I wound up in the Navy when they came for recruits. As young as I was, I figured nursing was a job I could take anywhere. I’d never get stuck in one place, like my mother.”

“And that worked?”

“Almost too well—had some hairy times in the Philippines, let me tell you. But I’m getting ahead of my story. So there I was, fifteen years old, hanging around the rail yards, which I hope no self-respecting fifteen-year-old girl would do today, and I made some acquaintances, after a sort. There was a conductor who went back and forth to Chicago every day; he would always give me a peppermint candy. He had kids of his own and I guess he’d look out for me. Then there was the ticket taker for the passenger line; he’d talk to me about horse racing and how he’d lost everything he owned on Ticker Tape. Not the stock market, a horse named Ticker Tape. I still don’t know if he got sort of obsessed with the fact or he just thought it was funny. A woman named Sophie hung out on the platform and she’d give me a cigarette. She would fix my hair once in a while, put it up in a twist that I’ve never been able to duplicate. She was a prostitute, I realize now, though I didn’t then and would have had only a vague idea what that meant if someone told me. Kids were different in those days.”

Theresa glanced past her to a photo on the bookshelf. It showed a young woman in a military uniform, leaning on a brick wall with a cigarette between two fingers. Irene couldn’t have been more than twenty at the time, tall and strong with a tomboyish glint still in her eyes.