Trail of Blood (3 page)

“Sure,” the man said at once. “There’s a clean-out right here; he could have hooked up to that. Of course then it’s not available to you as a clean-out if you need one, though it’s probably got one or two more along the length—yeah, there’s another one. This is a quality pipe. They built things to last in those days, gotta hand them that.”

“Can you tell if there had been a pipe attached to it?”

“No, lady, I can’t.” Then he added more patiently, “That little bit of space, they wouldn’t have had to install brackets or anything even. Just a pipe that hasn’t been there for a long, long time. If it ever was. You don’t need me, you need a psychic. One of them ghost hunters.”

He found this amusing and began to laugh, only to cut the chuckle off into a strangled sound when a footstep creaked overhead.

“Our patrol officer,” Theresa assured him, but no color returned to the man’s face and he hunched into himself.

Frank had lost interest in the piping and now directed his light into the dimness around them. “Dirt floor,” he said to Theresa.

“I know. Visions of John Wayne Gacy. But the ground is so steady—I don’t see any depressions.” If bodies had been buried in the basement—always a popular location for one’s victims—they would see irregularities in the surface where the bodies decomposed and created a hollow deep in the ground. The dirt on top would settle inward, making a dip. They could probe, piercing the ground with a metal rod to see if they hit a soft area, but she was not certain that would even work for ancient graves. Ground-penetrating radar would be better, if they could talk one of the universities or maybe an engineering firm into doing it for them. The county would never pay for the equipment.

Besides, they had no reason to believe other victims existed, even if the man upstairs turned out to be a victim of homicide. He had been not buried but walled up in a hidden shrine, as if the killer felt guilt.

She didn’t believe that, though. The type of people who decapitated other people didn’t usually stop at one. He could have brought in more dirt to fill in the depressions and then smoothed the floor of the cellar flat again.

Their patrol officer paced, finding another loose floorboard to give off a deep
creeeeeak
. The construction manager decided it was time to leave and headed for the stairway.

“You see anything of note?” Frank asked her.

“A lot of dust.”

“Me neither.”

She followed him up the steps. “We need to hang on to this building for another day or two, you know. There’re no signs of other victims, but I’d hate to think of bodies lying down here and then we pile the building on top of them and bury them deeper.”

“Depends on what they’re going to do with this property. They’ll probably dig it out for a new building, put in a better foundation and more subground levels.”

“In which case I’d still rather find them before a backhoe does.”

“Don’t talk about
them
. There is no them. There’s just this one guy.”

“Right. There is no them,” she repeated like a mantra as they emerged onto the ground floor.

Unless they had, at long last, uncovered the lair of the Torso killer. Then there could be half of Depression-era Cleveland buried under the rock-hard dirt beneath them. The thought made her ill, and yet a little frisson of excitement ruffled the tiny hairs on the back of her neck.

It would be horrible.

It would also be the case of a lifetime.

Grandpa would be so proud.

She asked Mr. Lansky: “Was the stairway to the second floor here? It couldn’t have been convenient for all the second-floor tenants to have to go past one of the offices to get there.”

“Naw, there was an outside stairway to the second floor. We took that down last week.”

The construction manager didn’t pause as he spoke, just continued through the cleared area and kept on going until he had left the structure entirely. Their patrol officer, by contrast, stood entirely too close to the body for her comfort. “You didn’t touch anything, did you?”

“No,” he said insistently with a convincing shudder.

“What are you going to do with this body, Tess?” Frank asked, most likely impatient for his midmorning cigarette break.

“I don’t know. If I scoop him into a bag, the anthropologist is going to have to sort out every tiny bone all over again. I’m thinking of taking the entire tabletop. We can saw through the two-by-four legs and carry it like a tray.” It wouldn’t be the biggest thing she’d ever hauled back to the lab. That honor went to a three-bedroom recreational vehicle with four flat tires. “I wish I could Saran Wrap him to it first.”

“Why can’t you?”

“I hate plastic wrap. Too much static electricity. It would take half of our trace evidence away with it. I suppose I could cover him with brown paper, though….” She pondered various ideas while prodding gently at the left back pocket, which contained a firm, rectangular object. The trousers held together better than the shirt had but still ripped at the slightest stress. “I need an archaeologist. Someone trained in handling ancient things.”

“Seventy-five years isn’t exactly ancient.” Frank crouched, examining the rubble of plaster and wood covering the floor. He began to pick up pieces, give them a glance, and toss them outside the area of the room, searching for anything that had been inside the room before the walls tumbled down.

“The pocket change could be misleading us. He might have been a coin collector and kept them aside to take home. He could have died in 1940, or 1950, or 1960, for all we know.” Concentrating mightily, she managed to slip the object out of the pocket with minimal tearing. A wallet? No.

He scattered more plaster stones. “And this still could be some kind of natural death. Like the guy who leaves Mom’s corpse in her bedroom for twenty years, that sort of thing.”

“Then again”—she stared at the object in her hand as her heart began to beat a few pulses faster—“maybe not.”

Frank looked up. “What is it?”

She tilted it toward him, the hard leather case with its gold-colored shield nestled inside. “He was a cop.”

The Torso Murders of Kingsbury Run began in 1935, unless one counted the pieces of a woman washed up by Lake Erie the year before, in which case they would have begun in 1934. The murders stopped in 1938, or perhaps 1950, if one could accept a twelve-year gap in the killer’s activities or supposed that he became more circumspect in hiding his victims—while aware that circumspection had never been part of his style. When victims weren’t cut into pieces and dropped into either the lake or the river, they were wrapped in paper and left like parcels for unsuspecting passersby to find. Some particularly unlucky male victims were divested of not only their heads but their genitalia. Sometimes the heads remained missing, sometimes only the heads were found, and sometimes the heads were placed near the body, in one case buried close by with the hair quite noticeably visible above the earth. He killed both men and women; only three of the victims were ever identified, and one of those tentatively.

His reign produced either twelve or fourteen victims, depending on which individuals were included or excluded. Unless one considered the rash of skeletons and other bodies found around New Castle, Pennsylvania, and one found in Youngstown, in which case the list of murders added up to twenty-six occurring between 1923 and 1950.

He was never caught.

The Torso murderer, also known as the Mad Butcher or the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run if you really wanted to get dramatic, was Cleveland’s very own serial killer, more prolific, equally as bent, but slightly tidier than Jack the Ripper.

Standing over the body, Theresa asked herself if she could really solve this, finish the case that her cop grandfather had told her about, repeated over and over at her request like a macabre bedtime story. He would have been thrilled at this development. He would have—

She stopped herself. Time to get real. If the case couldn’t be solved in its own time, what could she hope to do so many years later? All the city would get out of this latest chapter would be more frustration. Not to mention the maelstrom of media attention any whiff of it would inevitably produce. And this dead cop would give off more than a whiff…more like a sirocco.

Theresa swept her thumb over the gold badge. “It looks just like yours.”

“It would,” Frank told her. “The design hasn’t changed since 1906. Unfortunately detective shields don’t have numbers, so we can’t run him down that way.”

“You’d have lists of which cop had what number, three-quarters of a century back?”

“A police department is a bureaucracy. It keeps lists of everything, including the serial numbers of department-issued weapons.” He plucked the gun from the table and pulled out his phone, squinting at both of them—the little numbers on the phone and the little numbers on the gun. He had not yet given in to reading glasses. Neither had Theresa.

Her phone rang. Chris again. She snapped it shut without answering.

“Is that Leo?” Frank asked, referring to her problematic boss. He watched her with the phone to his ear, obviously on hold.

“No.” She brushed the last specks off the badge, avoiding her cousin’s eye. He had many of the characteristics of an older brother—the annoying ones. If he sniffed an uncomfortable subject, he’d run that rabbit to ground every time.

He merely raised an eyebrow, phone still clamped to his ear. “Who, then?”

“Chris.”

“Cavanaugh?”

“Yep.”

“You’re not taking his calls? Why?”

“Because I have more important things to do right now.”

“What’d that showy ass do, stand you up for a date?” Frank had never been a fan of the high-profile hostage negotiator.

“That wouldn’t be possible, since we’re not even really dating.”

“I should think not—what? Yes, I’m here.” He relayed the gun information to the person on the phone, and Theresa turned back to the body.

Besides, if she and Chris were really dating, he would call her more than once a month before texting for a lunch date as if she’d drop everything for the opportunity to see him. And he wouldn’t have taken the city manager’s daughter to the Cleveland Playhouse benefit last week.

Of course it was okay that he did, because they weren’t really dating. Besides, the benefit was more of a political event.

She set the badge next to the left foot. The shoe on that foot had what appeared to be masking tape wrapped around the toe.

The body snatchers, the Medical Examiner’s Office transport ambulance, were on their way with a Sawzall. She would cover the body with paper but still refused the plastic wrap idea.

Frank snapped his phone shut. “James Miller.”

“What?”

“CPD assigned a Smith and Wesson with that serial number to a James Miller.”

“How did you find that out so fast?”

“We got a great guy running our history museum and he’s got all the rolls from back then. Miller joined the force in 1929, was promoted to detective in 1932, was dismissed in 1936 for dereliction of duty.”

“Don’t you have to turn in your gun and badge when you get fired?”

“Usually. The historian has got to check some other records but says it isn’t clear why he was fired—the way the notes he could locate are worded, they could mean that Miller
became
derelict and was therefore fired. In other words, went AWOL.”

Theresa looked down, automatically directing her gaze to the head of the body when of course the head no longer sat at its usual spot at the top of the spinal cord. “Wouldn’t a cop suddenly going missing cause a stir?”

“Of course it would. I’m sure they investigated, but it will take a while to track down those reports. That’s
if
this is even him, and not someone who stole James Miller’s badge and gun either to pawn it or use it. Those were desperate times. The Torso killer wasn’t the only one operating in Cleveland.”

“What do you mean? We had another serial killer?”

“I meant the other kind of serial killers—mobsters. Cleveland was a wide-open town then. They’d cracked down in New York and Chicago, but here they stayed under the radar and had most of the cops on the force on their payrolls. That Untouchable guy had to come here and clean it up.”

“Eliot Ness. I know, but I thought hit men dumped their bodies, not constructed little shrines to them.”

“It’s not a shrine. I’ve gone through every pebble on the floor and they left nothing in this room but the body. And they would have wanted to make absolutely sure this body did not turn up—even then, they didn’t kill cops if they could help it. This table could have been here for another reason, gambling, making bathtub gin. Miller finds them, or wants a bigger cut or something, so they slit his throat, wall the place up, and conceal two crimes at once.”

“I don’t know,” she said skeptically. “Why make such a statement with the beheading if you didn’t want to display it as an object lesson for everyone else?”

“We don’t know that they didn’t. There could have been a gap of time between the murder and closing the room.”

She didn’t want to picture a line of delinquent clients traipsing past to gape at the body of James Miller. Spreading the brown paper shroud over the bones, she tucked it in at the edges. Officer Miller would be subjected to only empathetic gazes from now on.

Theresa picked up one of the halogen lights, aimed it at the remaining wall. The light danced off the ancient wood and the plaster welling up through its cracks. The construction appeared steady and strong; the job had not been done in haste. It might be the original structure, but then they had no way to tell what the two and a half missing walls had been like before their destruction. If the walling up of James Miller had been flimsily done it wouldn’t have kept him secret all these years.

The wood had aged over the years with a speckled pattern of discoloration. She took a small bottle of Hemastix test strips out of her crime scene kit and dampened the ends with distilled water. Then she got Frank to hold the light for her while she pressed a wet yellow tip to a large stain, dark against the dark wood. The feltlike yellow material instantly turned a deep blue. “There’s blood on the walls.”