Trail of Blood (2 page)

“What do you think?” Frank asked her.

Theresa’s hands probed gently but insistently as she checked the clothing both for identifying objects and for a clue to the body’s condition. Would the papery flesh hold it together in transport? She couldn’t wait for the anthropologist, two and a half hours away at his university—plus, with the current budget crisis the county wouldn’t want to pay his consultant’s fee to assist with the body’s recovery, only to examine its skeleton. She puffed in exasperation as one sleeve disintegrated in her fingers.

“How’s it going?” Frank asked.

“It’s got to be cotton, or wool. Some natural fiber. Synthetics would hold together better. If he’d have been in the ground wearing this there’d be nothing left at all.” The man had carried something in his shirt pocket as well; she worked at it with her fingers but it had been melded into place as the body had decomposed and saturated the clothing and its contents. It felt like a small notebook, malleable, so she did not force it. It could remain in place until they got the whole setup in the lab and could examine it with proper lighting.

“He? You sure it’s a man?”

“The anthropologist will have to say for sure, but he’s got that bump at the back of the skull that men have.”

Frank probed the sandy hair on the back of his head as an apparent fact-checking exercise but said only: “How long has he been here?”

“A long time. That’s all I’m prepared to say for now.” Even when disturbed the body did not smell bad, only a bit musty. The many foul odors from the decomposition process had long ago dissipated along with the flesh. Theresa pulled gently on the leather belt, hoping for a wallet in the back pocket. It held together only slightly better than the pants, though the steel buckle merely needed a little polishing. A triangular object, previously hidden underneath the body, came along with the belt.

“Is that a gun?” Frank asked.

She slid the dusty object from its case, tilted it under the bright light.

“Smith and Wesson thirty-eight.”

“Let me see.”

“Do not break it open and/or unload it,” she ordered him before she handed it over. No matter how versed a cop became in forensic principles, they never quite lost that “making the gun safe” habit.

“I know, I know.” He, too, held the weapon under one of the portable lights for a better look.

Theresa took a moment to retrieve an important piece of her crime scene kit—the emergency hair clip. The red curls kept tickling her cheeks as she looked down at the corpse. The movement kept her warm as the sun rose enough to burn off the fog. Mourning doves sighed and cars buzzed along 490 in the distance. “Where’s your partner today?”

“Sanchez is at city hall, running down the building history.”

Never too busy to tease her cousin, she said, “You’ve been partners for six months. You can’t call her Angela?”

“We’re cops. We don’t do that first-name stuff.”

“Yeah, sure. How about Angie?”

“How about you get this wrapped up so I can get back to murders that happened this week and not this decade?”

“Maybe it’s not a homicide.”

“Besides,” he went on, “she hates
Angie
. Not a homicide? He’s carrying a gun, and do you think his head wound up between his legs by accident?”

“I’m saying that this table, even though it’s made out of wood, reminds me of our autopsy tables. It has a lip installed around the edge, as if to keep the blood in or to keep the patient from sliding off. There’s a hole at the bottom that might have had a drain attached to it, with a hole in the floor underneath it that’s been filled in with some sort of rubber. Was there a funeral home at this address? A medical school?”

“And they just happened to leave a body behind when they cleared out?”

“Stranger things have happened. It could even be some sort of shrine.”

“Removing someone’s head and placing it between his feet is not normally considered a sign of respect.”

“Again, stranger things, and if that’s the case then this is just abuse of a corpse, not murder. That’s why we need a list of tenants. Also, I haven’t found any signs of violence. No gunshots or blunt force trauma to the skull, no visible breaks or nicks in what I can see of the ribs. His bones seem intact.”

“Aside from the head having been removed.”

“Yeah, aside from that.”

Theresa checked the right back pocket of the trousers, reaching in with a cautious and gloved hand. Technically she should have patted them or removed the pants first. Reaching into unknown pockets could result in disastrous encounters with dirty needles or other unpleasant items. But the extremely delicate condition of the clothing made her put aside her own rules. The man had six cents on him, a nickel and a penny. Again, she picked up the halogen lamp for a closer look. “I don’t even know about this decade.”

Frank had been inspecting the one remaining wall. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know if you’re going to want to hear this.
I
don’t even want to hear this.”

“What?”

“It may sound simplistic, but pocket change is generally a reliable indicator of the time a body went missing. You would think we would carry around coins from any year in the past twenty or so, but as a practical matter—”

He came closer, peered over her shoulder at the items in her palm.

“Spit it out, Tess. What year are they?”

“The penny,” she told him, “is from 1931. The nickel says 1935.”

He picked up the copper coin with Lincoln’s head on one side and sheaves of wheat on the reverse, gently, as if it might disintegrate as easily as the man’s shirt. Theresa flipped over the nickel, viewing the standard American Indian and buffalo reliefs.

“You mean this body’s been here for seventy-five years?” Frank demanded.

Several things occurred to Theresa.

First, that—assuming the man had been murdered—at least they did not have a deranged, decapitating killer running around the city. The killer would almost certainly be as deceased as his victim by now, or at least too frail to be hefting bodies onto dissecting tables.

Second, that given the time lapse, this case would be very difficult, if not impossible, to solve.

Third, that the year 1935 put this man’s death in the midst of the infamous Torso Murder spree, in which at least a dozen people were killed, usually dismembered and scattered about the Cleveland area like the seeds for a grisly harvest. The killer had never been caught and all but three of the victims remained unidentified.

Most had been found in or near the desolate valley outside, called Kingsbury Run. Oh, and the press would fall on the story like cats on an open can of tuna.

“Crap,” she said.

“Yeah,” her cousin said, seconding that.

Six cents. Had the killer robbed the victim and not bothered with the coins? Or had six cents been a reasonable amount of pocket change at that time? She found herself glancing at the skull, as if it could tell her. How had he come to be walled up? Hadn’t anyone missed him? “Who owned this patch of floor, that they could brick it in without anyone else noticing? Was this one big room, or apartments, or what?”

“I’m a little fuzzy on that myself,” Frank told her. “Yo! Mr. Lansky!”

The man approached, holding his unlit cigar in front of him like a talisman, stopping at the two-by-fours that marked the edge of the small room. When asked, he explained what he had found when they first began clearing the building, three weeks before. His gaze settled on the bones laid out on the table and stayed there throughout the conversation.

“The south side of the ground floor had serious fire damage, really blackened. The upper floors weren’t bad. The hallway passed through the center of the building, so that the offices had exterior windows.”

“How many separate units were on this floor?” Theresa asked.

“Four or five. I didn’t really pay attention. From the variety of materials I’d guess it’s been divided and subdivided plenty of times over the years. I don’t have any idea what it looked like originally.”

“Did they have plumbing? Drains?”

“Sure. They all had lavatories, sinks, and toilets, I think at least four on each floor. We’ve ripped them all out.”

“Which suite did this little room open to?”

He stopped looking at the corpse just long enough to blink at her, check out her legs in their khaki trousers, and blink again.

She rephrased. “Where was the door?”

“What door?” he finally asked.

“The door into this room.” She spoke with more patience than she felt.

He put the unlit cigar to his lips and, she swore, puffed on it. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There wasn’t any door. Anywhere. If there had been, we’d have emptied the room before we used the sledgehammers. It’s so damn dark in here that my guys took out most of the opposite wall before they saw—that.”

Theresa waved the halogen light at what remained of the other walls. They appeared unbroken, though hardly finished—merely rough wooden strips with plaster oozing through their cracks from the other side.

Frank’s phone rang, and he walked away to answer the call.

“The door had been bricked up?” she asked Lansky.

“No brick. Plaster and furring strips.”

“So the door had been plastered over?” she persisted.

“Or there never was a door, and whoever did—this”—he nodded at the body with revulsion—“added a whole wall to block it up.”

“Or it was in the sections that you already took out.”

“Nah,” he argued. “Guys would have noticed. No door, no molding. They said straight plaster and furring, nothing odd the whole length.

There are some drywalled areas in the southwest corner, but they were at least thirty feet away. I’m telling you, a building this old, the walls have probably been moved and rebuilt a dozen times.”

“But no one ever found this.”

He visibly shivered. “Or they did and didn’t want to tell anybody. Is there anything else you need from me? I’m going to send my guys to another job, unless there’s a chance we’re going to be able to do anything here today….”

“No chance,” she assured him.

“Mr. Greer isn’t going to like that.” This seemed to bother him even more than the corpse.

The hole at the bottom of the table still intrigued her. “Was there a bathroom or kitchen adjacent to this room?”

“Half bath. No tubs or kitchens in the building. I think it was all office space, maybe used as a warehouse later on. We took out plumbing here.” He tapped his foot on the floor where he stood, to the south of the mystery room, near the row of studs.

Perhaps that had been part of the original space—otherwise where did the water come from that then drained out? “Where did all this plumbing dump to?”

He had grown sufficiently accustomed to the corpse to look away from it for up to ten seconds, and did so now to give her an incredulous look. “Sewer.”

“I mean, where did the pipes go?”

“Cellar.”

“This building has a basement?”

“I wouldn’t call it that. Just an access area for pipes and wires.”

“I want to see that.”

“No,” he told her in a solemn tone. “I don’t think you do.”

She pointed out the hole in the table and the apparently corresponding hole in the floor. “I think he had a drain system here that he dismantled when he bricked—closed—this space up. He filled in the hole in the floor with some sort of putty so that it wouldn’t be noticed from the basement. I need to see where a pipe would have gone.”

He sighed. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Frank returned to fall in line with her as she followed the construction manager. “Warn you about what?”

“I hope you didn’t wear a good suit today.” Theresa pulled a diminutive but powerful flashlight from her pocket as they descended from the gloom of the empty building to the outright dark of the basement.
Cellar,
she thought, correcting herself.

“I’ve learned never to wear a good suit. Hey, how is Rachael getting along at OSU?”

“Still bouncing off the walls with excitement. She talks almost too fast to understand when she calls, but apparently her classes are going well. Of course she’s too busy studying to call very often.”

He put his hand on the back of her neck as they reached the bottom of the stairs, pulling her hair slightly, letting her know that he knew she was a little bit miserable and would not admit it. It had been three weeks and two days, not long enough for Theresa to adjust to the emptiness of her nest.

Mr. Lansky had not exaggerated. Theresa didn’t need to duck her five-foot-seven-inch frame to avoid coating her hair with cobwebs but felt like she did. Columns of stone, here and there, supported the structure above. Noises from the city outside faded to a vague hum. The floor consisted of hard dirt and still appeared much cleaner than the surfaces upstairs. Flashlights lost strength by the time the beams found the outer walls, leaving the edges of their new world hovering in gloom. It smelled of coolness and silence.

The construction manager aimed his flashlight upward and silently illuminated the copper piping, green with age, traveling along the underside of the ground-level floor. Next to them ran a much wider, darker tube.

She tapped it with one latex-gloved finger and moved to avoid the shower of dust that action produced. “Is that the drainpipe?”

“Yep. Cast iron.”

Frank said, “Iron? Odd that they hadn’t replaced that by now.”

“If it ain’t broke,” Mr. Lansky intoned, “don’t fix it.”

They continued their cautious shuffle across the open space with only three flashlights for illumination. Theresa wished she could have brought one of the halogens, trailing its electrical cord behind her like a line of bread crumbs.

The construction manager stopped at the approximate center of the building’s foundation and all three of them looked up. Theresa located the hole, neatly drilled through the floor and then filled in. Perhaps twelve inches of space separated it from the drainpipe. “Could there have been a smaller pipe through that hole that emptied into the drainpipe?”