Trail of Blood (18 page)

“Honey, I don’t think you’re a ghoul. I just hate to see you dealing with all those terrible people.”

Murderers, she meant. “They’re long gone by the time I get there.” Tonight had been an exception.

Her mother merely raised an eyebrow. Several incidents in Theresa’s past had disproven that statement.

Theresa ignored those memories and said nothing about Kim Hammond or the two men on the hillside. Luckily, her mother never watched the news and, if the angels of peace were on Theresa’s side, might be too busy at the restaurant to pick up a paper.

The horror of the Torso Murders, however, had faded with time and could be safely brought up. “What did Grandpa say?”

Agnes gave the question some thought. “He said your great-grandfather Gabriel always thought Ness looked in the wrong places. He said that gangsters were easy because you always knew where to find them. Ness couldn’t figure out a guy who was insane, but then, neither could anyone else.”

Theresa let her mother sort recipes for a while as she pondered this point. In the 1930s, no one would have ever heard of a serial killer. They would have approached the investigation like any other—rounding up the usual suspects, criminals, what they used to call sexual deviants. Of course that encompassed a lot more than now, since it used to be a crime to be homosexual or have an interracial relationship. “In that day they’d be looking for a man who stood out. Knowing what we know about most serial killers, nowadays we’d look for a man with a steady job, who doesn’t bother his neighbors and has no or a very minor criminal record. Someone who
doesn’t
stand out.”

“Then how do you catch him?” her mother asked.

This stumped Theresa. “Evidence, I suppose. That’s where I come in.”

“Your great-grandfather Gabriel told your grandpa one other thing, too. He said it had to have something to do with the railroads.”

“Because the victims were found around the train tracks?”

“I have no idea
why
he said it, he just did. You should go to bed, honey. You look tired.”

“Were you going to make turnovers?”

Her mother smiled. “Not tonight. This weekend, at the restaurant. Come for dinner and for two forty-nine you can buy one.”

“Highway robbery.” Theresa stood up and said good night.

“And don’t forget about Friday.”

“Aw,
Mom
!”

“We always have birthday parties with the family. Especially a big one like this.”

A small house crowded with aunts upon aunts and cousins upon cousins. Theresa loved them all, but not when they were trying to convince her that the irretrievable loss of her youth was something to be happy about. “Why should I
celebrate
turning forty?”

“Every birthday is one to celebrate,” her mother said in a way that made Theresa feel ungrateful, which, of course, had been the idea. Mothers were good at that.

Theresa said good night and trooped through the rain, now faded to a heavy mist, to her home. The trees whispered above her and tossed a few cold drops down her neck while she ordered herself to get into the habit of leaving lights on, now that Rachael would not be there before her with every bulb blazing, the TV going, and the stereo bulging the walls. But Harry, her dead fiancé’s dog, stood guard with tail wagging to let her know the perimeter had been secured, so lights did not seem that important.

A truck drove by, the name of a roofing company emblazoned on the side. No other cars, with or without missing headlights.

She tucked herself into bed with James Miller’s notes and a business card. She dialed the phone before glancing at the clock and then debated whether she should hang up. She was still debating when he answered. “Mr. Corliss? It’s Theresa MacLean. I’m sorry to call so late.”

“Not at all, young lady. I’m something of a night owl. What can I do for you?”

Helpful hint for women of a certain age, Theresa thought: Hang out with people at least twenty years your senior and they will make you feel youthful. “I need to learn about trains.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place,” he said, chuckling. “So to speak.”

James Miller dallied with his partner only long enough to drink a cup of coffee before he left Walter to the tender ministrations of a middle-aged waitress and moved out into the bustle of the Terminal Tower. His stomach growled, but he told himself he was too interested in the investigation to eat. It didn’t work.

He carried the coat, in its paper bag, after Walter refused responsibility for that particular piece of evidence. “I’m not eating my lunch with something that pervert touched on my lap. Now either sit down with me or scram.”

James scrammed. There were no less than three drugstores scattered throughout the two floors of shops. All three were popular, but at two P.M. he did not have to deal with the lunchtime or after-work throngs. He headed for one on the lower level, marveling at whoever had come up with the idea of planting retail shops squarely in the path of travelers. People waiting for trains with time to kill and commuters who rushed from tracks to office and needed convenience were provided with the perfect outlet for their hard-earned funds. From inside this bubble of commerce, one could barely tell the Depression existed. Strolling along the gleaming marble walkways, a man felt prosperous even on an empty stomach.

The drugstore counters thronged with kids on their way home from school. James wondered where these children got the dimes for an ice cream soda when there were grown men outside on the streets begging for those same dimes. He didn’t begrudge them; indeed, it seemed a hopeful sign that at least some of the nation’s offspring were having a happy childhood.

He had to wait to speak to the druggist while a portly lady with a small dog described her nightly tossing and turning. James thought of telling her to spend some time in a trench in Europe and she’d learn to sleep through mortar attacks, but thought better of it. It wasn’t her fault that he’d probably never sleep through the night again.

The man in the white coat listened with great sympathy, gave her a packet of powder, and sent her on her way before turning to James. “If I had a nickel for every whiny dame who comes in here I would own the place. What can I do for you? Anemia?”

“Uh, no.”

“You sure? You look a little pasty. Just a cold, then?”

James identified himself and pulled out the blue coat, which the druggist, unsurprisingly, did not recognize. The pills from the pocket were another story. He picked up a magnifying glass and examined each pill, holding them one at a time in the palm of his hand. “Nothing bad. No kind of mass-produced barbiturate or narcotic—that’s why you’re asking, right? You think this is something that can dope somebody up?”

“I need to know what it is, even if it’s harmless.”

“Well, that would be my guess. Harmless. This one is probably a vitamin—vitamin A, see the
A
stamped on it? People are nuts about vitamins these days, think that all the alphabet minerals can cure everything that ails. Not that there’s anything wrong with vitamins, of course, they’re important, but they’re not the bee’s knees. But the customers don’t listen. I guess any sense of security is better than none.”

“Is the other one a vitamin, too?”

“I don’t know. It might be a custom job, one that some guy like me brewed up special. I can’t tell without sending it for chemical testing. You want me to do that?”

“No.” James took the pill back before the man could think about it. “No, I need to hang on to that.”

“Besides, don’t you guys have your own lab that can do all that fancy stuff? I read about it in the paper. You’ve got Ness in charge now, after all. The reporters seem to think he’s going to turn the police force into a bunch of angels.”

James ignored this last sentence, thanked the man, and walked out past the kids. He found another drugstore and received the same information, this time from a dour old man who left out the speculation regarding the future of the Cleveland police force. Then James put the pills in his pocket and trotted down the steps to the train platforms.

Forty-five minutes later he found Walter window-shopping outside a tobacconist’s shop. The older cop now carried a parcel wrapped in brown paper and an unlit cigar—both, no doubt, “gifts” from a grateful citizen. “I found a baseball suit for Walter Junior’s birthday,” he told James, eyeing his partner with a piercing glance. “Where have you been?”

“Haunting the platforms. Why, did you think I was informing on you to the Untouchables?” James joked, nodding at the parcel.

He realized his mistake a split second later when Walter’s face darkened and he stepped closer to hiss, “Don’t razz me about that, Jimmy! It ain’t funny!”

James flushed, more from the stares of the shoppers within earshot than from having the same argument one more time. “Nothing’s funny about being a cop these days. Look around. The people we’re supposed to work for expect nothing but a shakedown. They don’t look to us for help. Nobody thinks we’re heroes.”

“Is that what you need, Jimmy? To be a hero? Then go find a war somewhere and leave us mere mortals to the business of making a living.”

This was pointless. “Look, Walter—I checked out the pills and asked around to see if anyone recognized the blue coat. That’s all.”

Walter’s shoulders relaxed a bit. He tucked the parcel under his arm and the unlit cigar between his lips, though his face retained its tense lines. “And did they?”

“Maybe. I got a bunch of maybes. The strongest one is almost positive they saw a man wearing a similar coat loitering by the loading platform about two and a half weeks ago. They couldn’t pin it down to a day.”

Walter nodded. They fell into step, doing a slow circuit of the shop windows as they headed toward Public Square.

James outlined what he had learned from the druggists. “They both said at least one is a vitamin. I know everyone’s vitamin crazy these days—”

“Quackery is all that is. My granddad lived to ninety-five and never took a pill in his life.”

“—but it started me thinking. Remember the tomboy?”

Walter pushed open the thin glass door to the bustle of Euclid Avenue, his face smoothing into a thoughtful plane. “Yeah.”

“Remember where she took us?”

Walter tucked the cigar into his breast pocket. “Yeah.”

“I think we should pay the good doctor another visit,” James proposed. “Now that you’ve had lunch and all.”

The autopsy room in the sixty-year-old Medical Examiner’s Office had been built for easy cleaning. With stainless steel sinks and counters, a drain in the floor, and ceramic tile over the floor and halfway up the walls, it could be scrubbed down night after night, year after year, without evidence of any real wear and tear. Each evening it appeared to be the cleanest room in the building, though the result was tidy rather than sterile. The victims could no longer be infected and the staff did not worry much about germs. For years they had worked with formalin and X-rays, been exposed to the insides of victims with tuberculosis, HIV, hepatitis (A, B, and C), and occasionally meningitis, and remained healthy. Surrounded by death they, like the rest of humanity, smoked, rode motorcycles, ate fatty foods, and drove too fast. Familiarity breeds contempt.

The two headless males were not, by a long shot, the most disturbing or most bizarre deaths the doctors and dieners had ever seen, and so had to compete with the baseball scores for attention. The Indians were third in the division, with wins and losses about even. One pathologist and two dieners thought that the team had made some good trades in the past year and were sure of a place in the series, maybe couldn’t win it, but could at least participate. Another pathologist, another two dieners, and a deskman put these odds at slim to none. They had been through this heartbreak too many times. One pathologist, Christine Johnson, abstained, sharpshooting being the only sport to which she paid any attention.

Before her lay the body of the older victim, the head by itself at the top of the table. She had noted all the external information she could—injuries (a scrape to the right wrist, a healed cut on the left index, and of course the wounds to the neck and groin), old scars (appendix), moles (two large ones, as well as a host of smaller ones she didn’t bother to note) and tattoos (none). She saw no puncture marks or abscesses on the arms that would indicate drug use, no swelling of the chest or stomach that would indicate trauma, tumors, or hernia. The body did not yet show too many signs of decomposition. She guessed the time of death to be twenty-four hours previously but collected a syringe of fluid from one eyeball to help her narrow that down. The potassium level of vitreous fluid increases after death.

Christine’s assistant for this autopsy happened to be a young man by the name of Damon, and as she made the last notation necessary before beginning the internal autopsy, he took a scalpel and made the Y incision from the man’s shoulders to his belly button, without waiting for her instruction to do so. At the medical examiner’s, as just about anywhere else in society, doctors occupied the top rungs of status, influence, and power. Damon felt it his duty to bring these demigods down to earth and had a myriad of small ways in which to do so. Christine let it go. She understood the desire to keep humans on an equal footing. Besides, civil service made people nearly impossible to fire and she had to work with Damon almost daily, and besides
that,
he did excellent work.

The victim’s skin parted like the Red Sea, and yellow globules of subcutaneous fat welled up from inside. Not much, relatively speaking, as the victim had not been significantly overweight. With quick slices of the scalpel, Damon stripped the flesh back from the ribs and got out the long-handled pruning shears. The bones made soft cracking sounds as he snapped through them.