Trail of Blood (32 page)

So as she watched the valley around her she tried to recall which side of the graph was
x
and which was
y,
and what went over what to get the slope. She did not lean against the concrete column, having more concern for her clothing than Frank had for his.

The female officer in the trees heard voices to her right. Two or maybe three men were having a discussion in the middle of Berwick Road. So far it sounded friendly.

The male officer waiting on the Fifty-fifth Street bridge returned to his car for his raincoat. It said police on the back, but he wasn’t getting soaked to the skin for nobody. It took only wetness to change the cool of the fall evening from brisk to miserable, and cop work didn’t pay enough to cover miserable.

The officer hunched by the building at 4950 Pullman, protected from the rain but still feeling its chill and, he hoped, invisible in the shadow of the stone wall. The wind’s faint moan raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
Give me a matter-of-fact drug bust any day,
he prayed, Heat
instead of
Friday the 13th,
Ed McBain instead of Anne Rice.
He tried to rewrite the evening in his head, turning it into a funny story to tell his wife over breakfast, but nothing amusing came to mind.

Frank saw a woman emerge from the station and make a beeline for the north edge of the parking lot. He hoped it would not be Theresa but felt sure it would be.

She did not run or shout or use the radio. He pushed himself off the column and moved to the next one, took a careful look around it, and continued on to meet her at the edge of the lot. If the killer noticed her at all, perhaps he would see only an RTA employee going to her car.

He met her between a battered pickup truck and a shiny new Cobalt. “What are you doing?”

“Sorry. I got scared.” She explained her fear that the next victim could be a cop. “It would be enormously appealing to him, to thumb his nose at us at the same time he continues his pattern. Not to mention the fact that if he knocks a hole in our perimeter, how much more does that increase his chances of getting away?”

“I see that, but my cops have enough on the ball to keep anyone from coming up behind them. Go back inside.”

“I’d rather stay with you.”

“Don’t be dumb. This is a stakeout. I didn’t bring you along just to have someone to chat with.”

The rain picked up a bit and reached her scalp. “What about Angela? She’s all bundled up with the Kevlar vest and sweatshirts—what if he doesn’t get a good look at her, doesn’t realize she’s a woman?”

“What if he sees you running up to people all night and decides to dump tonight’s body someplace else? Do you have any idea how stupid you and I are going to look?”

“He won’t. He can’t. Besides, is that the most important thing? How you
look
?”

“Yes. Yes, it is, because the next time I try to tell them a killer is on his way, no one is going to listen. Understand?”

“Yeah, yeah. Oh, and Greer is here.”

“What? Why?”

“To make sure we do our jobs and protect the citizens of Cleveland, etc., ad nauseam. Meaning he sensed a photo op but the idea of meeting a killer turned him pale and sweaty. He’s inside with the RTA staff and the coffee machine.”

“Good. All the more reason not to blow this. Go back inside. If you have to contact me again use the cell. I have it on vibrate.”

She thought, chewed the inside of her lip, and finally nodded her assent. But she didn’t move, painfully reluctant to let her cousin out of her sight.

The train coming from the east continued to rumble and the track next to them began to vibrate. The 9:17 rapid appeared from the west. Frank crossed the closest set of tracks, staying within a line of deep shadow provided by a bridge column. Rain accumulated in Theresa MacLean’s hair until it overflowed to the back of her neck, and she said “Frank!” in a fierce stage whisper.

He turned, only eight or ten feet away. “What?”

“About our grandfather—”

“Not
now
, Tess!” he hissed, and walked away, no doubt trying to stalk as unobtrusively as possible.

His cousin watched him. Theresa knew what they had at stake this evening, but all the killers in the world weren’t more important than her family.

“He loved you,” she said. He couldn’t possibly hear her, not with the rapid transit roaring into the station behind her and the other train bearing down on him, the driver blowing his horn, no doubt wondering why RTA couldn’t keep its passengers from wandering all over the valley.

Frank turned anyway, clearly visible in the bright headlamp of the train, and looked back at her just before the train passed between them, cutting him off from her sight. Theresa put one hand on the battered pickup to steady herself in the roiled air as the train rocketed through the night.

“
I
love you,” she said.

Thirteen or so cars passed, revealing an empty valley. Theresa told herself that Frank had gone back to his place of concealment under the bridge, and not to be an idiot, of course the train didn’t hit him and the killer didn’t kill him. Now, how to get back inside the station without being too obvious about it, and before she got soaked to the skin?

The 9:17 departed while yet another train approached from the east, a short thing of only four cars. She let the rain pelt her head for another moment while she watched it flow up the tracks. Its driver, too, let out a short toot on the horn, a habit or perhaps a requirement with the busy rapid station nearby.

He had liked this area, the Torso killer, needing the trains to travel back and forth between Cleveland and New Castle and to troll Kingsbury Run for victims, but not
only
for those reasons. He came there because he felt comfortable there. It was home to him.

She crouched between the cars and opened her cell phone, practically burying her head in her lap in order to muffle her voice and protect her phone from the rain.

A man’s voice answered. “Hello?”

“Mr. Corliss?”

“Ms. MacLean! It’s nice to hear from you again.”

“I’m sorry to bother you.”

“Not at all. I’m just putting the boat away. It’s a bit too windy for an evening sail.”

She could hear the erratic humming of the breeze behind his voice. “I have a quick question that I should have asked you earlier. The two railroads operating in Kingsbury Run—the Nickel Plate and the New York Central—did they go to New Castle?”

“Sure,” he said promptly. “Both of them. As I said, it was a hub. They’d stop for the Northern Ohio food terminal on Orange Avenue. It’s the post office building now.”

She stared at the track in front of her, wondering how that bit of information helped her.

A faint light shone on the tracks in front of her, growing in strength, and she felt the now-familiar rumbling. “I have to go, but thank you.”

The clacking of the wheels grew in volume. “Theresa,” Edward Corliss said, “are you near a
train
?”

“Yes. I’ll tell you about it later.”

“Just be careful,” he said emphatically, and hung up. She had to grin. No doubt he thought letting non–train people in a train yard sharply akin to allowing children to play in traffic. But she had no intention of wandering onto the tracks.

Cleveland to New Castle. Trains. She straightened, cautiously, and watched this new row of cars appear from the west. She knew she should get back inside before her hovering spooked the killer, but she found herself lost in the physics of the sight. Trains were large and heavy, unable to operate without their tracks. Very heavy. The phrase “stopping in its tracks” was not accurate; a train couldn’t just stop. They accumulated too much force behind them.

Momentum. Mass times velocity. Trains had a great deal of mass, and the velocity could get impressive.

A rapid transit car, basically a hollow aluminum tube, had much more stopping power because it had less weight. A shorter train could stop faster than a longer one. That train that had just passed, the one with four cars, would be able to throw on its brakes much more effectively than this longer one now approaching.

So if you wanted to get away, pick a long train. Even if the cops flagged down the engineer or got the dispatch center to call him, even if he threw on every stopping mechanism he had, the train would still be a mile away before it came to a halt, before the police could swarm it. By which time you would have jumped off at any point in the stopping process, preferably by a main road where you could catch a cab or a bus, or, if you appreciate irony, the rapid transit. Though a rapid transit station could have cameras. For real irony, how about another train?

But how to murder the victim there at the scene? Forgo that detail? Or jump off the train from the front, decapitate the (presumably incapacitated) victim, then hop back on one of the rear cars? Difficult, but possible. Assuming the train moves slowly enough. And is really long. Like this one.

Obeying an instinct she did not truly understand, she burst into a run and sprinted across two sets of tracks with at least four seconds to spare. It only
felt
like less. The driver let out an annoyed blast from the horn, not caring to cut it close any more than she did. The earsplitting sound proved so startling that it shoved into her with physical force until she stumbled over the third set of tracks and wound up stretched across them like the hapless heroine of a silent movie.

Scrambling to her feet, she moved to a tiny strip of grass and scanned the other tracks for oncoming cars. Nothing. The rain pelted, let up, and pelted again, its dynamics affected by the push and suctioning of the passing cars and the gaps in between each one as they rushed by her. The large boxes alternately blocked and allowed the bright lighting of the RTA station to pass through, and some cars had lights. This inconsistency ruined any night vision, effectively blinding her. She turned away, looking up and down the ten-foot-wide sliver of dirt and sparse weeds that ran along the tracks under the bridge.

She thought the killer should leave the corpse near the bridge, but that seemed too risky. If the cops were present—and, unless completely insane, he would assume they were present—that’s where they would hide. He would pick a new spot, farther east or west of the bridge, where he could do his grisly work and be gone before they discovered it.

Theresa moved under the bridge, better hidden by its deep shadow. Frank would be poised on the other side of the next pylon. She knew she shouldn’t move around, yet they had too much ground to cover and too much of it became hidden as trains passed by.

Under the bridge, to the west, stood a low structure, probably an abandoned platform. She crept closer to it. The train continued to rumble by.

The original killer had not only murdered this victim at the scene, but he had left the head and the body in two different places—only a thousand feet apart, but far enough that the body had not been discovered until the following day. What would today’s killer do about that? Ignore it? Jump off, decapitate, leave the body, and jump back on the train with the head, then toss that out farther up the line?

That would work, actually. The body had been found near the bridge, with the head found between the bridge and Kinsman Road to the east. Her thighs ached but she moved a few more feet along the platform in a low crouch, keeping her head below its surface. The rain had penetrated her cloth jacket and reached her skin, and this, she told herself, caused her trembling.

Movement.

At the west end of the abandoned platform, a flicker of darker against dark. An animal? A bush blasted with violent air from the passing train? A cop, wondering who the hell she was? Maybe lining up his sights right now?

Another step. Definitely movement.

She crept forward, feeling, curiously, no fear. The killer would not harm her; she was not male and killing her would ruin the authenticity of the scene.

But then, Peggy Hall should have been a heavyset sometime prostitute over forty. Perhaps authenticity was not his top priority.

She moved faster. She thought she could hear the rustling of his movements now, but that could not be possible, not over the roar of the train. It was probably Frank, and they’d scare the bejeebers out of each other like they did as kids playing Spotlight in Uncle Glenn’s basement.

He appeared. A tall bundle of raincoat and hat and nothing where a face should be. He was not Frank, nor any other cop. Some sort of black mesh hid his features and he held a bundle in his arms. She knew exactly what that had to be.

He stood completely still for a moment, watching the train pass. She did not move—she couldn’t—and yet his head snapped to her direction as if she’d jumped up and down.

Now
she felt fear. Paralyzing, gut-twisting fear that squeezed every molecule of air out of her lungs.

He leapt toward the tracks and neatly caught the rungs protruding from one side of a boxcar, pulling his body up with much more feline grace than either she or Edward Corliss would be able to command. He melded with the train car as if he were part of it, mercury joining back into mercury with one hand, the other still clutching the bundle.

Her legs carried her forward before she knew it, as he passed on her left, until she reached the end of the platform. A body lay splayed across the dirt and weeds, with no clothing, and no head.

She turned and launched herself toward the train. He had done it.

She could, too.

Another car rushed by her in a dizzying blur. This next one—see the rungs? The weak streetlights shone down from the bridge and glinted off each metal protrusion.
Grab, pull. Just make sure your feet come up and don’t swing into the wheels, to be chopped off at the ankles and pulverized.

She reached out a hand.

It collided with a rung hard enough to break bone, and she stumbled, landing on the gravel shoulder only inches from the clacking metal wheels.

She looked ahead. The killer watched her from only three cars up, hanging easily off the side and facing back toward her, so the train could not be moving that fast. It was just the momentum. Mass times volume.