Ruins of War (2 page)

“Overrun and surrounded. I was out on a patrol and wound up behind enemy lines. They roughed me up pretty bad.”

“You were a POW?”

Mason tended to avoid discussing it with anyone who hadn’t been in combat, but Wolski was growing on him. “Buchenwald for two weeks then transferred to a couple of POW stalags.”

Wolski sat back in his seat. “Buchenwald? Damn. No wonder . . .”

“No wonder what?” Mason said and turned to Wolski.

“No offense, sir. You got the right, is all I was going to say.”

Corporal Manganella pulled up the jeep in front of a four-square-block, seven-story factory. The structure still stood, but it had been clearly gutted by fire, its brick scorched black by intense heat and smoke. Thick wooden beams propped diagonally against the wall kept it from collapsing. A handful of jeeps and army green sedans were parked in front of the building. Four MPs held back a small crowd of curious civilians.

Mason instructed Corporal Manganella to stay with the jeep. As he and Wolski made their way through the crowd of German onlookers, Mason said, “All I ask is you don’t stumble over your own two feet. Watch, listen, and do what I say.”

Wolski gave him an exaggerated salute. “Yes, sir.”

At the factory entrance, Mason showed his CID badge to one of the MPs. The guard told them to go straight through and across the courtyard to the loading docks. A sergeant would direct them from there.

Mason and Wolski entered an enclosed driveway just wide enough for small trucks. On their left, they passed a former shipping office with its windows crisscrossed by slats of wood. Somewhere inside the dark room a baby cried. Through the gaps Mason could see crumpled blankets and a tiny field stove like the German soldiers used to carry. People now lived in these ruins, having no other place to go. With estimates of up to 70 percent of the city damaged or destroyed, virtually any hovel that sheltered against the cold and the rain and snow had been occupied by the homeless.

Thirty feet of driveway opened up to a courtyard. High stacks of debris were piled everywhere. Tents and lean-tos dotted the grounds, all empty for the moment, since the “residents” had been herded outside during the investigation.

“What misery,” Wolski said.

Mason grunted an acknowledgment. He’d seen enough misery in the last two years that words no longer seemed sufficient.

They crossed the courtyard, where an MP sergeant waited below a loading platform.

“This way, sir,” the sergeant said.

Mason and Wolski clambered after him up a pile of rubble and into the building’s shipping department, where rolling platforms and conveyor belts sat in twisted heaps or crushed under the debris of the collapsed floor above. Guiding with his flashlight, the sergeant led them through the dark maze. The sound from drops of melted snow echoed in the open space. Snowflakes somehow found an opening that the fading afternoon light could not.

“What have we got, Sergeant?” Mason said.

“A couple of women found the body. They’d been searching for firewood and came out screaming. Nearly started a panic with the rest of the people using this place as a shelter.”

“Most of these people have seen plenty of dead bodies,” Mason said. “What made them panic?”

“You’ll have to see for yourself, sir. I’ve seen a lot of corpses, but nothing like this.”

They entered a short hallway then a stairwell. Metal stairs led upward. Snowflakes and streams of water tumbled down from a large hole in the roof, seven stories above. Wolski hesitated at the bottom step. The sergeant said, “It’ll hold a big fella like you. We only got two flights.”

The weakened stairs groaned as they climbed. Even ten months after the bombing raid that had devastated this area, the building still reeked of the acrid smell of spent explosives, smoke, and now decay.

On the third floor they entered another open space. Burned army
blankets, uniforms, and canvas tents were fused together in long blackened rows. The stench grew pungent, like that of burned hair.

“You should see about getting a team with a genny and work lights,” Mason said. “We’re going to be here awhile.”

“Already ordered, sir,” the sergeant said. “Should be here any minute. The photographer just got here, and the scene techs are on their way.”

At the far end of the room, Mason saw flashlight beams beyond a set of collapsed doors. He quickened his pace, with Wolski and the sergeant close behind. Mason’s foot inadvertently kicked a piece of metal, sending it across the floor. The clanging brought someone from the room to investigate. Mason was hit in the face by a blinding flashlight beam.

“Who’s there?” the man holding the light said with an underlying tone of fear in his voice.

Mason shielded his eyes from the light but could see the man only in silhouette. “Get that light out of my face.”

The beam swept away, and Mason recognized the egg-shaped frame of Havers, another CID investigator. It hadn’t taken more than an hour on the first day for Mason to figure out Havers: a reasonably competent investigator who did as little as possible to accomplish a task, and as much as possible to lick his superiors’ boots.

“As if we didn’t have enough people around here already.” Havers half blocked the door and glared at Mason. “This is my investigation. I was first on the scene.”

“Talk to the colonel if you have a problem,” Mason said as he pushed past Havers.

Almost pitch-black beyond the group’s pool of flashlights, only the echoes of shuffling feet and low murmurs hinted at the immensity of the room. Mason lit his flashlight, as did Wolski. A wall of men stood in front of them, six MPs Mason didn’t immediately recognize and Havers’s CID partner, who always looked pained to be associated with Havers. They all wore grim expressions, and a few looked as though they might run to a dark corner at any moment to empty the contents of their stomachs.

“Someone want to fill me in?” Mason asked.

Havers stepped in the middle of the group as if to claim his territory. In the harsh light from the flashlights Mason could see by Havers’s taut, blanched face that he was profoundly shaken by whatever waited in the darkness behind him. Without looking, he pointed to the dark center of the room. “Up there on the column.”

None of the others seemed anxious to look again. Mason and Wolski moved forward and trained their flashlights toward the center of the vast room. A huge portion of the upper two floors above them had collapsed, taking their floor with it and crashing to a stop thirty feet below. Mason and Wolski now stood at the edge of a gap twenty feet across. With their flashlight beams, they found the thick support column of concrete and steel. Their eyes followed the beams up the column then stopped.

Wolski gasped and took a quick step back. “Tell me that wasn’t a man.”

M
ason remembered to breathe after his stomach finished doing a Saint Vitus dance. Lashed to the column, halfway up from their level, hung an armless and legless corpse. Only the head remained attached to the eviscerated torso, which had been split down the middle. A Y-shaped cut started at each shoulder and met at the sternum, then a single slash descended to just above the man’s groin. His ribs had been pulled back, exposing his organs, his face frozen in agony and terror. In Mason’s two years in combat zones, he’d seen torn and mangled corpses; he’d seen the atrocities at Buchenwald. But this man had been ritualistically butchered.

A flashbulb went off, startling Mason. More flashes went off, making the bloodless torso appear stark white against the black space.

“Jesus almighty,” Wolski said.

Mason let out a sigh to ease his outrage. “Welcome to homicide.” He waved the beam around the torso. “Whoever killed this person put some kind of mesh across the body to keep the organs from falling out.” He looked at Wolski, who’d turned pale. “You notice what’s missing, though?” Mason asked Wolski the question to help Wolski concentrate and not lose himself in the gruesome scene.

“You mean, other than his arms and legs?”

Mason trained his beam on the spot. “He’s missing his small intestines.” Then, without looking at the group, he spoke loud enough for the rest to hear. “I hope this area was searched for clues before any of you tromped on it.”

Havers charged up to Mason, while averting his eyes from the corpse. “Look, Collins, I know what I’m doing. So far we haven’t found anything except the footprints of the two women who discovered the body. What we haven’t been able to figure out is how anyone could get that body up there.”

“The right question is why,” Mason said. He searched the rubble around the base of the column with his flashlight beam then the area above the torso. “Get up on the fourth floor and look around,” Mason said to Wolski. He turned to the MPs. “I want four of you downstairs now. Start interviewing the people who live in this building and the surrounding neighborhood. The other two of you go down to the base of the column and search for clues. And don’t wipe out any footprints.”

Havers got in Mason’s face. “We’ve all heard about your snitching on fellow police officers in Chicago. No one wants to work with you. You can’t give these men orders. I’m in charge here.”

“Then why haven’t you searched above and below? Or figured out a way to get that body down?”

“I don’t answer to you. The victim’s probably a kraut who ripped off someone on the black market and this is a revenge killing. Dead krauts are on every street corner. They don’t interest me, and this won’t interest the colonel. So get off my case.”

“How can you tell? The victim’s naked. For all we know he’s an American or Brit.”

Havers could only puff out his cheeks in response.

“It shouldn’t matter. No one should have to suffer that kind of cruelty.” Mason took a breath, then tried a more conciliatory tone. “Look, Frank, Colonel Walton told me to come over here and take charge, and I could use your expertise. How about if you help Mr. Wolski look around on the next floor?”

“Fuck you,” Havers said and stormed off.

Someone came up behind Mason and muttered, “Jesus H. Christ.” Mason turned to see Major John Treborn, the chief medical examiner. Mason had met him briefly, but introduced himself again.

“You’re the criminal investigator who came in about two weeks ago.”

Mason nodded.

“Well, welcome to the zoo,” Treborn said and stepped up to the edge of the gap. Mason joined him. Treborn examined the corpse with the beam of his flashlight. “I can tell you one thing from here,” Treborn said. “He was killed, dismembered, and bled dry somewhere else before being hung up there like a slaughtered animal. And look at the shoulder joints and the hips. Clean, surgical cuts.” He looked at Mason. “What do you think? Revenge killing, sending others a message?”

“If this were a revenge killing they wouldn’t have been so meticulous with the butchering then strung him up like a trophy.”

“I can see this case getting really ugly,” Treborn said. “Maybe you should have let Havers take it.”

Wolski called down from the edge of the fourth floor. “Sir, you need to see what’s up here.”

As Mason headed for the stairwell, he met four men bringing in the generator and lights. He told them to set up the lights in the next room and see about getting the body down without contaminating the scene. “Major Treborn will supervise.”

Once Mason was alone climbing the stairs, images of the corpse projected themselves onto the dark surroundings as if burned onto his eyes. On the fourth floor he entered a room full of scorched sewing machines and looms. Up ahead, Wolski stood near the edge of the collapsed flooring with his flashlight trained on something hidden from Mason’s view.

“Seems our friend left us some kind of crazy message,” said Wolski. “No blood on the floor. Looks like he drained them like the torso.”

The sight was one of the strangest Mason had ever seen. On the
floor, five feet from the broken edge, lay the victim’s arms and legs. The killer had arranged the limbs in the shape of an X, the stumps joining in the middle. Four additional stakes formed a crude wooden cross between them.

“I’ll be damned if I know what it’s supposed to mean,” Wolski said.

“I don’t think he left this message for us.”

They both walked to the edge of the drop-off and looked down at the column, then up to the floor above.

“One thing’s for sure,” said Wolski, “he either had help or he’s a hell of an engineer.”

“That, or maybe a mountain climber.”

“Mountain climbers know how to hang dead bodies, do they?”

“You’re going to have a wiseass remark for everything, aren’t you?”

Wolski smiled and shrugged.

“How’s your German?” Mason asked.

“I was born in Pomerania, but the family moved to Wisconsin when I was five—”

“That’s really fascinating, but I just want to know how your German is.”

“Now he pulls out the sarcasm.”

Mason started to say something, but Wolski beat him to the punch. “Fluent. My German’s fluent. Sorry, I just used to get a lot of flak because I could speak it.”

“Go tell the photographer and the doc to get up here. Then I want you to go help with the interviews. Planting that body on that column and making an art show out of the body parts took time and had to make noise. Somebody’s got to have heard or seen something.”

Wolski left, and Mason searched for any signs the killer had been there. A broad survey of the area turned up nothing, no shoe prints, no evidence of any activity that might explain how the killer managed to suspend the body or attach it to the column. Everything seemed to be as it had been since a fire caused by incendiary bombs had ravaged the building. He scanned the exposed edge of the concrete around the
collapsed portion of the floor with his flashlight, slowly and carefully. A quarter of the way, light glinted off the hammered surface of what he’d thought was exposed rebar embedded in the concrete floor. He got on his knees and studied it closely. It was a spike. A sweep of his flashlight revealed three more. The killer had driven spikes at intervals of ninety degrees, like the four points of a compass, around the hole. The man must have engineered some kind of pulley system to lower himself and mount the body.

Why go to that much trouble?

Mason noticed something else: From his kneeling position, he could see the faint relief of imprints in the ash. They weren’t from shoes or bare feet. But what? Cloth? Like ghostly disturbances, they didn’t follow a definite form from one print to the next. Now that he knew what to look for, he saw they continued around the hole’s edge. He followed them with his flashlight, and on the opposite side the trail led to and from the hole, extending outward into the darkness. As he followed the prints, he noticed another set of markings. The killer had been dragging something heavy, like a sack . . . or dismembered torso.
Odd
, Mason thought,
the killer had been so meticulous covering up his tracks, and now this?
Maybe he’s fallible after all
.

Mason passed a series of partitioned office spaces filled with charcoal replicas of what had once been office furniture. The trail wove around piles of debris and fallen light fixtures. Finally, at the far end of the room, the trail stopped at a steel-reinforced door. On the floor, ash and scattered fragments had been scraped away in an arc, proof that the door had been opened recently. The soot on the door handle had been rubbed off as well. He reached for a handkerchief in his back pocket and, in doing so, turned the flashlight away from the door. That was when he noticed a very faint light leaking from under the door.

He froze and listened. He pulled out his M1911 .45 automatic and slowly pushed the door lever to make as little noise as possible.

The rusted lever screeched. Mason shoved the lever and jerked open the door.

Though daylight had turned to the gray gloom of dusk, the light was still a shock to his eyes. At the same moment he heard a creak and clank of metal. A black shadow flew at his face. He dived sideways. Something sliced through the arm of his coat as he fell. He shot up to an elbow and aimed the pistol, ready to fire. But it wasn’t a man charging him with a knife. The moving object was a thick metal pipe with a scalpel strapped on the end. It had been rigged above the door frame to swing in when the door was opened.

Mason got to his feet, stopped the pipe from swinging, and stepped out the door onto the fire escape. Metal stairs descended to an alley. He examined the rig—a clever bit of engineering. The killer had knowingly left the footprints to lead someone into the trap. It wasn’t designed to kill, unless by chance the short blade entered the neck or the heart. In all likelihood, he was sending a message: Whoever follows does so at his peril.

And Mason had willingly walked right into it.

He turned to go back inside and stopped. On the exterior face of the door crude letters in red paint spelled out a message in German:

THOSE WHO I HAVE MADE SUFFER WILL BECOME SAINTS AND THEY SHALL LIFT ME UP FROM HELL.