Trail of Blood (28 page)

“Mechanic.” Apparently another wisp of memory had surfaced, and she massaged her chin with strong fingers as she thought. “That was it. Mechanical zupervisor—heavy machinery, steam engines, that’s what he zaid. He called them turbines.”

James digested this. Walter tore his gaze from the younger woman long enough to question the woman further, but she could not add anything more.

James and Walter thanked the quartet and went out into the freezing day once more.

After the car warmed up and thawed out their jaws, Walter said, “This doesn’t quite fit. Unless this guy gave the hawk-nosed lady in there a line, he’s a reasonably pleasant, formerly hardworking joe. Why would he hang around with a punk like Edward Andrassy?”

“Maybe he didn’t. We found them together, but they weren’t
killed
together. The coroner said the guy with the coat was dead a week or two before Andrassy.”

“And he went looking for a job. Great. That narrows it down to half the guys in this city. Probably more.”

“But he’d have been looking for a mechanic job. Who’d be hiring for that?”

Walter waited for a bundled-up family of four to cross the street in front of them, which allowed him to look like a nice guy while using the time to light a cigarette. He offered James one of the Luckies and for once James didn’t have the inclination, or willpower, to refuse. They puffed companionably before Walter said, “Garages. Factories, the few that still operate.”

“Trains.”

“You and your trains again! Ain’t it that guy you’re always quoting who says never theorize ahead of the facts?”

“Sherlock Holmes.”

“Yeah, the limey. You’re stuck on this railroad thing and now you see trains every way we turn. I thought you liked that masher doctor for it.”

“Odessa. Who picks up his marks at the train station,” James said.

“The dead whore don’t have nothing to do with trains,” Walter argued. “She had a place to stay and wasn’t leaving town.”

“Same with Andrassy. And the woman had coal on her.”

“The city runs on coal!”

“I know, I know. But what else do we have to go on? Two guys found by the train tracks and four months later we still don’t even know who one of them is.”

“And probably never will, by now. That’s why we should concentrate on Andrassy and this woman. It’s easier to trace their movements since people knew them.”

“The whole city’s been working on Andrassy for four months, and every cop will be working on Flo Polillo now. Why duplicate efforts? I say we stick with the man in the blue coat.”

“The captain said to track down the doctor the Polillo hag made payments to. Remember?”

James finished the cigarette and cracked the window only enough to toss the butt out. Then he put his hands in his armpits to keep them warm. “Okay, you’re right. Let’s compromise.”

“I hate it when you say that.”

“We’ll go see Odessa. The mook claims to be a doctor, maybe he knows this Manzella. And we can also ask if he saw our guy in the blue coat while trolling the train station last summer.”

“He won’t say even if he did,” Walter predicted. “That chizz has every angle figured.”

The body pieces found in the crates apparently belonged to a thirty-eight-year-old mother of two who worked the early-morning hours at the West Side Market, unloading, cleaning, and stacking fruit for display. Two other merchants remembered her being there about 5:00 A.M., but when her boss arrived at six he found the job only half done and no sign of Peggy Hall. The scattered personnel at the market probably would have seen her abductor if he had entered the pavilions, police concluded, but Peggy made several trips to the Dumpster to throw out empty boxes. She always flattened them properly and took them to the one marked for recyclables. Peggy Hall believed in being green. She must have encountered the killer in this dark corner of the lot, as the Cuyahoga quietly streamed by.

“Interesting, that Dumpster,” Theresa said to Don as the DNA analyst prepared microtubes in order to confirm Peggy’s identity. “The milk crates he used didn’t come from it. I found—aside from another strand of that black nylon that keeps turning up—dried spaghetti with sauce, a healthy little clump of it.”

“You can’t get spaghetti at the West Side Market?” Don asked. “Isn’t that against the order of nature or something? I thought you could get everything there.”

“Oh, you can. But we didn’t see any in that Dumpster, or in any of the Dumpsters. I think he picked up the milk crates somewhere else. That makes more sense—he would have had all his props in place before choosing a victim. He would already have the crates.”

“And this spaghetti?”

“If he’s smart—and he is—he picked them out of the garbage somewhere, so they couldn’t be traced to him or his place of business.”

“Aha. So you think he stole them from a Dumpster behind a restaurant that serves spaghetti?”

“Yep.”

“Wow. That narrows it down. In a city the size of Cleveland. Tess, everyone from Bob Evans to Hornblower’s serves spaghetti.”

“I know.”

“Of course you can take a sample and run it through our spaghetti sauce database.”

“Not funny.” She rubbed her eyebrows. The few hours of sleep she had managed to catch at home had not helped.

“If this were a TV show, we’d have one.”

“If this were a TV show, I’d be twenty pounds lighter and twenty years younger. And Leo would be chosen
People
’s Sexiest Man Alive.”

They spent the next thirty seconds giggling. Theresa’s laugh held a tinge of hysteria.

“Seriously,” she said, wiping her eyes. “We ID’d Peggy Hall off a missing person report filed by her sister, who was sleeping over to watch the kids while Peggy worked. The husband has been in the hospital for two months after an accident at work—something to do with a forklift—and he called the sister to see why Peggy hadn’t come by for her daily visit on her way home from the market. She has no record. She was a perfectly nice woman, working her butt off to keep her family going.”

“Wow,” Don said. “Sister’s going to be watching those kids for a very long time.”

“We’ve got to catch this guy, and we’ve got to do it tonight.” Since the killer seemed to be an early riser, tonight’s victim had most likely already been abducted. Every police department in Cuyahoga County had been alerted to contact the Homicide unit with any missing person report filed today, particularly those of grown men, as well as reports filed in the prior forty-eight hours. The media had been pressed into service and fed warnings about possible abductions. County residents were warned to take extra precautions for their safety and to watch for any suspicious behavior occurring around them, especially during the hours from dusk to dawn. This could make their killer change his habits or go to ground, and catching him would be that much more difficult. But they couldn’t neglect the chance that for his next target, forewarned might prove to be forearmed. “Frank will put cops at each of the four corners of a square mile at Fifty-fifth and Kingsbury, plus one at the rapid station. And he should have a more difficult task tonight. The fifth victim of the real Torso killer was a young man—never identified, despite a boatload of tattoos—and they found a large pool of blood next to his body.”

She got lost for a moment, picturing this, until Don prompted her. “Uh-huh?”

“So he was one of the few victims actually killed at the scene. Most were killed somewhere else, cleaned, and then deposited. Our killer can’t just dump the victim. He has to bring him, murder him, decapitate him, wrap the head up in the pants, and carry it a thousand feet away. That’s going to be tough to do in an open valley surrounded by cops.” Impossible, she hoped, for the city’s sake as well as any future victims’. Councilman Greer, with his construction project cleared, had now guided the city’s fear into a hot wave of righteous indignation at police incompetence, mentioning her and Frank by name. Bad enough that he let his bruised ego come after her, but to criticize Frank because he couldn’t wave a magic mirror and spot the killer aroused Theresa’s own virulent indignation. Only catching the killer would stop Greer’s assault.

Don said, “I see. This guy will show up with tonight’s sacrifice, and your cousin and half the Cleveland police force will be waiting for him.”

“So will I.”

Irene Schaffer sat in a wheelchair and stared out at the setting sun with a face so vacant that Theresa worried—perhaps Irene had good days and bad days, and this could be one of the latter. But when the old woman turned and saw her, the wrinkles in her face curved into smiles along with her lips. “You came back.”

“Yes. I have some more questions, I hope that’s okay.”

“Let me check my busy social schedule. Sure, it’s okay.”

Theresa waited patiently for the tea routine, trying not to tap her foot. Her mother would kill her if she was late to her own birthday party, and she’d even hear it from Frank, since
his
mother was to host the shindig. They would both have to make a showing before cutting out to wait at the valley. But she couldn’t rush Irene. Theresa might find herself in a place like this someday, with a visit from a stranger the only entertaining thing to happen that year.

She began, “We talked about your encounter with Dr. Louis.”

“I’ve been trying to remember more about him.” The old lady stirred her tea as delicately as any queen. “I came up with a white shirt with gold buttons. The buttons had an anchor on them.”

“Really,” Theresa said, just to say something.

“I got rather a close look at them. Does that help?”

“They thought one of the victims might be a sailor, the one they called the Tattooed Man. But I’m here to focus on the room, the little storeroom he put you in. The building is going to be destroyed tomorrow, and it’s driving me crazy that we still can’t figure out which office the room with the body belonged to.”

Irene tapped her spoon on the cup. “Dr. Louis had a door behind his desk, and that opened into the closet.”

“I understand that, but the other offices probably had such built-in closets as well. The door behind his desk—was it next to the outer wall, or the inner wall, by the hallway?”

For the first time Irene seemed unsure. “Neither…somewhere in the middle.”

“Tell me again about the arrangement of the room. When you first walked in from the hallway—”

“His desk was on the left,” Irene said immediately, “but not touching the wall. He had a chair behind it for him and two in front of it—”

“Closer to the hallway door.”

“Yeah. On the right were two windows and shelves going almost to the ceiling, with books and bottles and things. He had a coat rack in the far corner, way behind his desk. That was about it. Kind of sparse, really. That also struck me as odd—most doctors’ offices that I’ve ever seen, even today, are crammed to the gills with stuff.”

“So the desk sat about midcenter along the south wall?”

Her face scrunched up in concentration. “Yeah, I think that’s about right.”

“And the door to the storage room, in the south wall behind it—would you say that was closer to the outer wall, or the hallway wall?”

Irene thought so long that Theresa had to gasp out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

“The outer one, I guess. Otherwise his desk would have been in the way of the door.”

“Okay. When you entered the room, the little storage room, did the space open up to the right or the left?”

“I see what you mean. God, I tried not to think about this for so many years—”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Okay. I woke up on the cot…. I pushed him and ran past the shelves…. I think the storage area would have stretched between the middle of the room and the outer wall. When you looked into it, it opened to the right. The cot lay in the back corner. I had to get past him, out the door, around the desk, and out the door to the hallway.”

Theresa pondered this with a mix of exhilaration and disappointment. The area in which they found James Miller lay farther into the building. If that section of floor had not belonged to Dr. Louis’s office, it moved Arthur Corliss up to number one suspect. Corliss, the adored father of her new friend Edward. Maybe—Odessa could have installed the table after Irene’s attack and before James’s murder. “And this was a cot, not a table?”

“A cot, canvas thing about two feet off the floor. Standard military issue, I learned a few years later.”

“Did you see any plumbing in there? A sink, a toilet?”

“I didn’t really stick around to inventory the place, dear. I only remember shelves, bare wooden things made out of two-by-fours. I grabbed on to one to haul myself up. It gave me a splinter.”

“What did he have on the shelves?”

“Not much, as I recall. Bottles and jars, like his outer office. A stack of paper and a typewriter, I remember that.”

“Any medical instruments? Like a stethoscope, or…knives?”

Irene grinned to show that the delicacy had been wasted on her. “To chop up his victims with? I don’t remember any, but again, I didn’t take the time to look around.”

“And then you ran out.”

“As fast as my chubby little legs could carry me.”

“And you saw no one else? All the other tenants had gone home?”

“Yes. Yes….” Irene sipped tea.

“You seem unsure about that,” Theresa said, pressing her.

“I didn’t
see
anyone. But—oh, that was it. The dog.”

“Dog?”

“The man in the next office must have had a dog. I heard him whining and scratching at the wall next to me, as if he heard us in there and knew I was in trouble. Animals can always tell, you know. They sense it. Or maybe he just wanted us to come and let him out.” She shook her head, the badly dyed locks going every which way. “Funny, I forgot all about that until now. Probably because when you asked I thought you meant
humans
.”

James Miller had made a notation about dog hair in his notes. “And you’re sure this dog was in the other office? Not in the hallway or outside the building?”