Trail of Blood (26 page)

The captain gave him a considering look, the kind that usually preceded the comment that perhaps James would be happier in another precinct, but he said only, “Newspapers—yesterday’s
News
and the
Plain Dealer
from a day last August. Dog hairs. Fur, I mean, but then that’s who made the initial report, so to speak. Found by a dog. Hell of an epitaph. Besides that there was coal dust and cinders, like maybe she’d been laying on lump coal at some point and it left dents in the skin.”

“A coal car,” James said promptly. “He killed her down by the tracks, like the other two, and carted her back up here in pieces. He hid the pieces in a coal car until he could go back for them. The coal would absorb the blood and the stains wouldn’t show against the black lumps.”

“Great, Miller. By the way, what’s your house heated with?”

James’s flow of words hit a bottleneck. “Coal.”

“And it’s kept where?”

“In the coal cellar.”

“Great place to hide a body, wouldn’t it be?”

“Yeah. But, Cap—”

“And the other guys weren’t killed by the tracks, were they? Just dumped.”

“We think that because there weren’t any pools of blood by the rails. But that could explain what happened to it—he killed them in the coal car, which then rode out of town.”

“Except he didn’t only get rid of their blood, he washed it off the bodies as well. And we didn’t find any coal or cinders on those two dead guys. Aside from the heads coming off, I see more things different than the same here. The first time, the guy obviously had a sex problem with men, he only took the head off and didn’t cover or wrap the bodies in anything. No newspaper, no coal. This time the doc says the cuts were neat—like a doctor or a butcher—but he wrenched the bones apart like he was in some kind of fit.”

Walter made a face and clutched his stomach. “Don’t think about upchucking here, McKenna,” the captain warned him. “It’s got to be some kind of crazy doctor. Who else would know how to do something like that
neatly
?”

“Someone who’s practiced it,” James said, thinking aloud. “Helen’s squeamish about most everything, but she can debone a chicken in minutes with a few quick slices.”

“You think your wife’s killing people, Miller?” the captain asked without a smile.

“She grew up on a farm and got good at certain things. Maybe this guy did, too.”

“Nah,” Walter said. “A chicken’s a lot different than a person, and a doctor would have the equipment, the workroom, a car to dump the bodies—”

“Maybe,” the captain said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “But this lady wasn’t no society Jane, if you catch my drift. She couldn’t have afforded no doctor with a car. No, I’m guessing this bitch got on the wrong side of a boyfriend who’ll have a line of arrests going back to when he wore short pants. How he learned to cut up bodies, we can ask him when we arrest him. So get out there and find out who she’s been making whoopee with. You two ever find the source of that blue coat from the two guys on the hill?”

“Yeah—” James began.

“Bailey’s department store had three of them,” Walter cut in, his technique smooth from practice. “Sold one, and the guy still has it. The other two didn’t sell and some do-gooder in the bargain basement donated them to St. Peter’s soup kitchen.”

“Not bad. After you report everything there is to learn about Flo Polillo’s waitressing career, get to that church and find out where those two other coats went. And, Miller—”

James had half turned and now stepped back. “Yeah?”

“When you’re done with that, you can check out the rail yards. But do the restaurants first.”

Walter brightened more than he had when told to visit the whorehouses. “Restaurants?”

James sighed.

The temperature had begun to dip in the mornings, creating a fog that hung over the old steel mill and the river and Kingsbury Run like an unreliable shield, shifting and dissipating and then, unexpectedly, revealing. Now it lay wet and chilled against the back of Theresa’s neck as she gazed out over the weeds poking up between the railroad ties. On her last visit, there had been two dead bodies on this hillside with her. If there were more today, the fog hid them.

Behind her sat the hollowed-out building at 4950 Pullman. On her left, the ravine stretched another mile and a half to the west to end at the Cuyahoga River. To her right, the East Fifty-fifth bridge spanned the gorge, concrete legs picking their way among the train and RTA tracks. Almost nothing had changed in this valley for seventy-five years, except the graffiti.

This place had never given up a clue to the Mad Butcher’s identity and wouldn’t now.

Theresa turned away from the slope and crossed the grass to the abandoned building. Another fifteen minutes and she would miss the M.E.’s morning viewing conference, ensuring Leo’s ire, but her crime scene would be demolished by sunset. Councilman Greer’s construction would remain on schedule.

The teardown crew had already returned to work and now only four central pillars and the wall studs remained. The floor had been cleared and the ceiling removed until she could see straight up to the inside of the roof. The place seemed bigger without the walls, and brighter now that they no longer blocked the light from the broken-out windows. The fog-coated sunlight softened the stones and turned the shadows to gray.

Armed with only a Maglite, Theresa scanned the area for signs of life. The smell of urine told her that the city’s homeless had been making use of the place, but no one seemed to be around now.

From Edward Corliss’s description and the photograph he gave them, she could assume the original layout. Half of the ground floor, the half on her left, had belonged to the architects and the medium. The area on the right had made up Louis Odessa’s and Arthur Corliss’s offices. She wandered to the space where they had found the table, where the two offices would have backed up against each other.

Outside, a stray cat or dog moved through the uncut brush around the building. The faint rustling began, then faded near the northwest corner.

The construction crew had done too good a job. Nothing remained on the studs to indicate where a wall had gone straight or turned, what might have been a doorway opening to the front office or the rear. She crouched, brushing the remaining plaster dust and a few stray leaves off the floorboards. If one of these areas had been James Miller’s murder chamber or Louis Odessa’s closet—or if the two cubicles were one and the same—there should be a wear pattern in the floor leading into and out of it.

A train clattered in the distance. Twenty feet above, the roof creaked as if the fog pressed on it.

The floor had been polished at some point and no doubt carpeted at another. The solid tongue-in-groove planks showed scratches and nicks and nail holes from tenants past. She followed the line of studs along the floor, trying to keep her pants off the dust but eventually giving up. Normally she waited until she got to work to get dirty, but not today. “Sometimes,” her grandfather had often told her, “you have to get down on your hands and knees.” She always thought it had been his way of warning her against pride, but perhaps he’d meant it literally.

Wait, she had gone at this wrong. The building had been nearly new when James Miller became entombed there—the closet entrance became a solid wall for all subsequent tenants. She should look at the gaps between the studs that did
not
show evidence of traffic in and out.

More time spent on the knees, without any real findings. Not even seventy-five years of feet had worn down the hefty planks in any discernible pattern. Arthur Corliss or Louis Odessa? Which one had walled up James Miller’s body? Or did she have the floor plan backward, somehow, and the architects had occupied this space, surely more skilled at creating new walls than a medium would be?

The tiniest sound, almost a vibration more than an audible noise, reached her. It could have been the cat outside leaping to a windowsill, or the tiniest shift of a ceiling beam in the fall breeze. But she didn’t think so.

She stood, flicked off her flashlight, and moved across the building to the cellar staircase. Her footsteps made only a whisper over the wooden planks, a series of small creaks.

At the top, she stopped and listened. It would be stupid to go down there, of course. If the sound came from anything other than a stray cat or a raccoon, it would probably be one of the vagrants who had used the upper floor as a toilet recently and retreated to the basement when she approached. Perhaps a camp had been set up—the earthen cellar would have been warmer during the night than anyplace on the surface. Homeless men—or women—were most likely timid and nonviolent…but she shouldn’t take the chance.

She lowered her foot to the first step, heavy and solid.

But what if she were to find some descendant of the Mad Butcher, an apprentice who carried on his work? Someone who had not been surprised by the discovery of James Miller’s body. Someone who knew how and why he had been laid to rest on a crude table in a secret chamber.

Someone who
knew
.

She took two more downward steps, waited. No sound, save for her own breathing.

This was stupid.

But wasn’t it just as stupid to be afraid of the dark? It was only a cellar, after all. So what if a murder had happened here years and years ago?

Another step. She didn’t believe in ghosts, anyway. If they existed, they didn’t hang around crime scenes or even their old bodies. She’d spent enough hours with both to know.

Pity, really. She would have enjoyed meeting James Miller’s ghost.

Her toes found the next board.

Though it wasn’t ghosts one needed to fear here, not in an abandoned building in a large city with no one close enough to hear you scream.

Almost there.

He waited until she had one step to go to blind her.

The ray of light that struck her eyes seemed too bright for a handheld lamp, but rather like the startling beam of an approaching train. The toe of her Reebok slid off the edge of the last step and she fell even as her fingers clutched the Maglite. Her legs buckled and she would have wound up in a heap on the hard-packed earth if the man hadn’t been in the way.

His flashlight fell away; it pointed toward the steps and provided a backlight with which to silhouette the man. He rose to his feet, unfolding a dense form that kept rising and rising, and the only thought in her mind became
They were right. He really is a monster
.

And now he stood between her and the only means of escape.

She had managed to hold on to her Maglite, but he was on her before she could either swing it or turn it on, yanking her up by her shoulders hard enough to leave bruises on both arms. She opened her mouth to scream.

“What the hell are you trying to do, kill me?” said this demon of the depths with a puff of onion-bagel-scented breath.

“Jablonski!”

“What are you doing here? Are you finding evidence? Are you
planting
evidence?” He gave her a little shake,
little
meaning it didn’t completely loosen her fillings. “You have to tell me!”

Initial relief—at least she knew her attacker—turned to renewed fear. “Let go of me!”

He didn’t. “Who is he? Who is this new killer? You know, don’t you?”

Enough of this. At the risk of kicking a sleeping psychotic, she used the flashlight as a battering ram into his solar plexus. “Let go of me!”

“Ow,” he said with a surprised and offended tone. “What did you do that for?”

Don’t back down. Show strength.
“Why did you blind me, trip me, and then try to rattle my brains?”

“I didn’t mean to put the beam in your face like that,” the researcher told her, using wiry arms to set her back on her feet. “You scared me.”

“
I
scared
you
!”

He retrieved his flashlight but kept it pointed at the floor so that she could see him, the lean face, brown hair gone awry, a fresh set of fashionably casual clothes. Two camera bags and a large, square Kodak dangled from one shoulder. “I didn’t know you were here. This building is so solid…. I don’t know why Greer keeps saying it’s unsafe.”

“What were you doing down here?” Her voice still rang an octave higher than normal and her breath came in short gasps.

“Taking pictures.” He hefted the Kodak an inch for illustration. “Damn, I’m going to have to solder this strap mount again.”

She sucked in some air, held it, and let it out slowly.
Calm down. You have nothing to fear from this guy.
“Is that a digital?”

“Yeah, an ancient model that I got for ten cents on the dollar. Unfortunately, given how fast the technology advanced, I still overpaid. But I got to thinking about this cellar and figured he had to bury more bodies here. No one knows how many people he killed, you know. With all the transients moving through this town at that time, it could have gotten up in the triple digits. We still can’t be sure how many Bundy killed, right?”

“No.” She shifted a few inches to her left, the first step in a cautious circle back to the stairway, not wanting him to see how much he had spooked her.

“
Yes
. He probably only walled up that guy because he ran out of room down here. I figured I’d better get in here before Greer sends the wreckers. I have a shovel in the car.”

“I mean no, there aren’t any bodies buried here. A geology team from CSU came out here yesterday with ground-penetrating radar. There’s nothing beneath us but dirt.”

He seemed disappointed. “Yesterday’s killer still won’t leave us any clues, and today’s killer drives right by us all and gets away.”

Theresa moved to the stairs. “‘Us all’?”

“I patrolled that area, too. I saw you, and that cop. You couldn’t miss the cop, they sent a friggin’ marked unit. All three of us driving that circuit, and we still missed him.”

She started up the steps, nearly tripping in her haste to see daylight again. “You were there last night? I mean—”