Trail of Blood (23 page)

“Yes, thank you,” she said.

Edward Corliss removed his hand.

When Van Horn dematerialized from the doorway, she leaned across the table and whispered, “What is up with that guy, anyway? Will this become an election scandal, you caught canoodling with a nonmember?”

He laughed, the air exploding out of his nose before he could stop it. “And in the library, no less. No, no particular reason for William to look so superior. He just always does. It doesn’t win him any friends, but he enjoys his own company so much he doesn’t mind.”

Now she snickered. “Then why is he president?”

“Because his great-uncle was the last CEO of the Pennsylvania Railroad and left all the artifacts of its one-hundred-and-twenty-four-year reign to William. He parcels these out to the society a few at a time, and only as a loan. The pressure gauge in the lobby and the photograph of the Congressional Express are examples.”

“Oh.”

She must have worn a blank expression, because he went on. “The Pennsylvania Railroad was a behemoth. It absorbed eight hundred smaller companies during its reign.”

“It’s not operating now?”

“The lines were eventually divided between Conrail and Amtrak. Twenty years later, Conrail’s lines were divided between CSX and Norfolk Southern. It’s a heartbreaking business, now that you mention it.”

“You said your father worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad?”

“Yes, but as a lowly brakeman, not CEO. I have no claim to William’s collection, so he will continue to ransom them for social acceptance. Ah well, one does what one must, I suppose.”

Theresa shook her head, couldn’t think of anything else to ask, and thanked him for a most interesting afternoon. “Thank you for teaching me how to hop trains. Not that I intend to make a habit of it.”

“You’re very welcome. And I will continue to poke around my house to see if anything has survived from my father’s business concerns. I doubt I’ll find any items of interest, but I’ll let you know if I do.” He patted her arm as they left the building, but she had the distinct impression that he would carefully weigh the significance of any such item beforehand. If it could possibly implicate his father she might never hear of it.

But she couldn’t do anything about that, and couldn’t blame him. Who would want the world to know they were the progeny of a serial killer?

She thanked him for his time and got into her car. As she pulled out of the parking lot she caught his image in the rearview mirror, watching her leave, suddenly looking his age as his shoulders drooped and he frowned. The vitality he’d shown earlier seemed to fade as if his mind now followed tracks it did not care to travel.

James had not forgotten the two headless men on Jackass Hill, but he no longer carried the blue coat or its pills around with him. After he and Walter exhausted all possibilities for identification, they had turned it over to the identification unit for scientific analysis. Then they personally drove fifteen possible relatives of the unidentified man to the morgue to view the decapitated victim. The staff there would drape a sheet over the ragged bottom of the neck to spare the men, but to James the sharp falling-off of the cloth where a body should have been seemed worse, the situation made even more bizarre by trying to make the gore presentable. And they brought only men there, even if there were mothers or wives who might more easily have recognized the missing person. The morgue was no place for a lady.

Some of those men had fainted straightaway, and all insisted that the dead…
thing
did not resemble their missing relative or friend or neighbor. It did not help that the body’s lack of not only clothing but genitalia convinced every adult in the city that the murderer had to be extremely perverted, and what would their friend or relative or neighbor have been doing in the company of any such man? James worried that someone might recognize the man and simply refuse to admit it.

Officers probed the background of the first victim—identified as petty criminal Edward Andrassy—and his family, friends, and habits, but every lead petered out without revealing the killer.

James kept up with the investigation, pestering the main detectives with questions and carefully absorbing any drop of office scuttlebutt, but he knew that the odds of finding a solution grew smaller with every passing day. He and Walter had plenty of burglaries, assaults, and domestic complaints to keep them occupied; at home Helen did not abandon her quest for new dishes and baby John caught a cold. James consoled himself that the killer had been a hobo who had sensibly hopped a boxcar and left town even as the bodies cooled on the hillside. That way it did not keep him up at night, despite the savagery of the murders. Every cop knew there were ones you weren’t going to solve, and you either made your peace with that or you got into another line of work. James wasn’t even the lead investigator, anyway, just a rookie gold shield who didn’t take bribes and therefore wasn’t trusted.

So he left the two victims to the angels and continued to plod through his daily life. He never expected there would be more.

James had that Sunday off, which had dawned crisp and very cold. Frost covered the windows and Helen didn’t even consider going to church services and exposing baby John to the winter air. James had been awake most of the night, lying on his side, facing the bassinet, listening to each breath moving in and out of his son’s tiny chest. The cold—little more than a case of the sniffles—did not truly threaten the baby but still he worried, and besides, concentrating on John gave both James and Helen a break from thinking about each other.

Twelve noon found him at the kitchen table eating a portion of soup, thin but hot, when someone pounded on the door. James opened it to a gust of unheated air and his partner, who began speaking immediately. “We got another one, Jimmy me boy, and I’m told it makes those two bums on the hill look like a school picnic. It’s the most disgusting—good afternoon, Helen. How is little John coming along?”

James felt the soup turn to ice in his stomach. “You mean—another body like—”

“But it’s Sunday, and you’re not even scheduled,” Helen protested. “You can’t have to work on a Sunday.”

Walter grimaced along with her. “I guess we never sleep, just like those Pinkertons. But we ain’t got a choice—every cop in the city will be working this one.”

James got his coat and muffler as his wife repeated, “But it’s Sunday. I thought we could go out this evening, leave John with Mrs. Tsolt downstairs and see a show—”

The winter months were hard on her, confined to these four walls with only a coughing baby for company. “I’m sorry, honey. But there’s nothing I can do.”

Her scowl indicated that she found him less than credible.

“You’ll have to come over for dinner real soon, Helen,” Walter put in. “The missus has been asking about you.”

Walter was a nice guy in a lot of ways, or maybe he found Helen his biggest ally in the attempt to get James around to the right way of thinking. In either case, her scowl lessened, and after one more check on the sleeping baby, James went with his partner into the icy streets.

The temperature had been arrested well below freezing; he could tell from the way his nostrils stuck together when he inhaled. Between that and its being Sunday, the roadways were largely empty. Their department-assigned car spluttered a bit before it would start.

“Only one this time?” James asked.

“Yep. And in more pieces than the first two. He didn’t only remove the head, he separated the body at the waist and cut off the arms and legs.”

Bile rose at the back of James’s throat and he swallowed hard, then told himself it was only the exhaust fumes seeping into the closed vehicle. “Where?”

“In an alley at East Twentieth and Central.”

“Who found him?”

“Her,” Walter said, correcting him. “This one’s a woman.”

This surprised James more than the body being found on a city street instead of an isolated hillside. He had been assuming the killer was some kind of sodomite, but perhaps his tastes were more omnivorous. Or he had tried to be clever and mutilated the first two bodies to make it look like a sexual thing so that the cops would waste their time chasing perverts.

Or whoever murdered this woman was a different person entirely and they had two killers running around out there, outdoing each other in savagery.

James didn’t know which option would be better.

They passed East Thirtieth, tires sliding over the occasional patches of ice. Walter filled him in. “Officially, the reporting party is a dog. Barked for hours until some Negro woman got tired of it and goes to shoo him, and finds two half-bushel baskets with burlap sacks on top of them. She peeks under the burlap and sees what looks like meat wrapped in newspapers. Now this woman figures it belongs to a meat market around the corner so she goes over there and tells the owner there’s some hams sitting out in the alley. He thinks he’s been robbed, goes rushing out to investigate, and gets the surprise of his life.”

“It’s not hams,” James muttered.

“It’s not hams,” Walter confirmed. “At least the guy’s market didn’t get robbed. You gotta look on the bright side.”

They left the car on Twenty-second since cop cars already lined both sides of the streets ahead. Well-bundled officers milled about, coming and going or just talking.

There should be a better way to do this,
James thought.
What about a house-to-house search? Are there footprints? He had to leave a footprint in all this snow—but twenty cops would have trampled it by now.

The alley in question ran alongside the Hart manufacturing plant, which didn’t operate on Sunday, and was choked with police officers. Their hurried conversations rose into the air in puffs of white condensation. The words came faster the closer James and Walter got to the haphazard pile half buried in snow against the brick wall of the factory.

They stared. Even knowing what it was, James couldn’t sort out the image in his head. He saw a basket, the rectangular kind with a handle used to carry fruit, with a piece of newspaper and a flesh-colored cylindrical object inside. Nearby lay two more bundles of…something. James couldn’t blame the Negro woman for not recognizing it as a human body. He knew and still couldn’t make it familiar.

Then he noticed the white ball protruding from the red mass in the basket—the rounded part at the top of a femur where it fits into the hip socket. He’d seen one before, sticking out of a broken soldier.

He moved closer, noting a right arm with the hand still attached. The nails were short and gnawed. She couldn’t even have scratched her attacker with those.

Something nudged his knee. James looked down at a large brown dog.

As at Jackass Hill, a uniformed cop stood watch by the body; unlike at Jackass Hill, the cop’s feet were cold and proximity to the limelight did not make up for it. The young man’s teeth chattered as he told James, “That’s your witness. Her name’s Lady. Belongs to some kid around the corner.”

James patted the dog’s head. Her eyes pleaded with him, to either solve the murder or perhaps get her out of the cold. He patted the animal again to apologize for doing neither.

He and Walter turned away and found their captain, giving orders to his officers with the halfhearted air of a man who knows he’s been overwhelmed. To James and Walter, he said, “You two help check the whorehouses, see if they’re missing anyone. I’ve got guys on Twentieth going west, so you start at Sixteenth and come east. Don’t rile the girls. This city’s already hysterical and this will make it worse.” He nodded toward a group of people at the end of the alley. “Reporters and neighbors and nosey parkers. They’re risking frostbite to stand there, but they won’t budge.”

“Any footprints, Captain?” James asked.

The sardonic tone of their chief’s response let James know he had sounded like a kid at Christmas and also confirmed his fears. “Look around you, Miller. This place has been wall-to-wall people for the last hour and a half. Any footprints this schlepper left have been trampled by the dog, the Negress, the butcher, forty cops, and half the neighborhood.”

“What happened to her?” Walter asked.

“The…
madman
sawed the body in half, chopped the legs at the hips and the knees, sliced the right arm at the shoulder.”

“Did he cut her head off?” James asked.

“Cut it and kept it.”

“What?”

“It’s not here.” The captain lit a cigarette, striking the match nearly hard enough to ignite the whole book. “Neither are the feet.”

“Did he”—James tried to find the words—“cut her in a perverted way? Like the men on the hill? Her—you know—”

The captain smiled, without any sort of humor in the expression. “I think you’re blushing. Look, McKenna, your partner’s blushing.”

“He’s a genteel sort, Cap.” Walter didn’t even try to smile.

“The answer is no, so far as anyone can see here. Maybe cutting her legs off sufficed for him. We’re guessing she’s a hooker because no one has come into the station yet to say their wife or mother or sister is missing. She’s someone no one would bother to report, like a whore.”

“Or someone from Hooverville,” James said, referring to the shanties along the lakefront where the hobos lived, though the male residents vastly outnumbered females.

Suddenly Walter sucked in air, excited by a theory. “Maybe the husband killed her, and that’s why he hasn’t reported her missing. He read about the bums on Jackass Hill and figured we’d figure it’s the same guy.”

“Then what, he kept her head for a souvenir? Get out of here and check those whorehouses. And don’t tell me you don’t know where they are, McKenna. I know you better than that.”

Teddy Morgan had been a cop for six years and had spent every day of them wondering if he might be better off in some other line of work. Every time a punk kid put on their sassy hat, or a drunk puked in the back of his cruiser, Teddy wondered if being an accountant would be as boring as it sounded. Since his utter lack of knowledge of resolution and f-stops kept him from applying as a photographer of Victoria’s Secret models, maybe counting up numbers wouldn’t be so bad. The hours would be regular.