Trail of Blood (31 page)

Angela said: “And don’t forget about the trains, even the rapid transit. He might use them to arrive or escape. It’s unlikely since he needs to bring an abducted male with him. Whether the victim’s conscious or unconscious, it would be difficult.”

Frank added, “We expect a lot of rubberneckers and reporters. Anyone who’s been reading the papers could reach the same conclusions Theresa has and come out to watch the action, so there may be people in the valley tonight who wear dark clothing and don’t stop when you shout at them. Go for your Taser first. Picture the headline ‘Cop Shoots Innocent Teen in Botched Police Operation’ splashed across tomorrow’s
Plain Dealer
.”

Angela muttered, “I bet Brandon Jablonski shows up, rain or shine.”

“Who?” one cop asked.

Frank explained about the Web-news reporter and his interest in the case.

“So if he does come around, just escort him out of the area?”

“No,” Frank said. “Let’s consider him a suspect for now.”

Theresa bit her lip before remembering that Jablonski made an ideal suspect. If anyone knew where to leave all the bodies, he did.

The officers all filtered out to their assigned places to make themselves inconspicuous.

She pointed out a spot on the map to Frank. “We should wait here, between what used to be the Nickel Plate Railroad and is now Norfolk Southern, and the RTA rapid tracks, which used to be the New York Central Railroad.”

“If he’s reading the same books as you, and if he doesn’t decide to call it off because he’s smart enough to know we’re going to be here, or because it’s raining out and he likes the idea of us running around like wet idiots. And when did you become such a railroad historian?”

“Since I met Edward Corliss. Come on, we’d better get out there before it gets completely dark.”

“What do you mean
we
? You’re going to stay right here.”

“Why?”

“Because you have neither a gun nor an
S
on your chest and I’m not going to have you running around a dark valley with a bunch of trigger-happy cops, not that I don’t feel a little itchy-fingered myself.”

“But—”

“Besides,” he continued, “if you find one more body I’m going to have to bring you in for questioning.”

“But—”

“There are no coincidences, isn’t that what you’re always telling me? Cheer up, cuz. At least you’ll stay dry and close to the coffeemaker.”

And then she was left alone on the white linoleum of the RTA conference room. Theresa exhaled sharply enough to fluff up her bangs, got a fresh cup of coffee, and turned out all the lights in the room so that she could watch the activity outside.

The room at the east end of the building gave her a wide view of the tracks on both sides and the station platform. The south side of the tracks turned into a steep hill of dense brush, unlit and apparently empty. To the north of her position, at least ten people milled about on the station platform, waiting for either the 8:41 or the 8:42, depending on whether they wanted to head downtown or toward the eastern suburbs. Overhead lights clearly outlined their body language. A girl stood between two pillars, facing Theresa with either a bag or a pile of books clutched tightly in both arms. She did not turn to look at the three young men twenty feet away no matter how much fun they seemed to be having, no matter how boisterous their horseplay seemed to get. A weary soul leaned forward on the bench, feet splayed. Two other men of similar height and weight shifted around, hands in their pockets. They did not speak to anyone and moved slowly but constantly. Everyone else on the platform shrank from them, ever so slightly, whenever they approached. They would be the cops.

The 8:41 arrived. The three young men boarded. The girl remained, but her shoulders relaxed.

Theresa could not see the area to the west of the building, the patch of grass between the two sets of tracks and just east of the Fifty-fifth Street bridge. This irritated her.

Her shoes squeaked across the floor as she paced from window to window, and she wondered who else remained in the building. The rapids ran more or less all night, pausing only for a short period in the wee hours of the morning. Surely there would be some manager on hand to deal with emergencies, mechanical breakdowns, or a bunch of armed police officers running around his territory.

Theresa had assumed that the killer would hop a train with his victim, kill him, and then throw the body and head out as the train rumbled through the area. But now other scenarios began to present themselves. What if he dropped the two body parts from the Fifty-fifth bridge? Inelegant, yes, and the head might unroll from the pants during the fall, but perhaps he did not value ritual as much as she assumed. Did Frank have men on the bridge?

So much depended upon the killer’s concern for historical accuracy.

Two older ladies and two teenagers joined the people on the platform. None of the four seemed to be traveling together.

The 8:42 arrived. The girl did not board, but the weary person from the bench got up and shuffled into the car.

Otherwise the killer had to carry a body to the patch of grass between two wide sets of train tracks. He could drive to the spot, but only through the RTA building lots and past a handful of waiting police officers. It would take nerves of steel. The head, on the other hand, should be left on the outside of the tracks, at the base of the south slope at the far east end of Kingsbury Run. He could wind through that small forest from Bower and Butler avenues and have at least, she estimated from her window, thirteen hundred feet of lush foliage for cover. Frank and the cops had one or two officers watching that stretch of ground. If the killer was so inclined, he could rewrite history a bit and drop the head from the bridge like a macabre depth charge, wait until the cops found it and clustered around, then putter quietly to the end of Berwick and dump the body in the dark and tree-covered spot, instead of putting the body by the bridge and the head on the slope. Then the killer would drive away and leave the cops to explain this failure to the citizenry, already tempted to riot from fear.

The 8:57 arrived, and when it left it took the girl and three others. The girl had simply not wanted to get on the same train as the three young men, though traveling in the same direction. Theresa could remember being that young and that attractive.

And what about the pool of blood? The Tattooed Man had been one of the few victims killed at the scene. How could he possibly take the time to murder his victim on-site without attracting the attention of one of the officers?

Unless the victim
was
one of the cops.

The victim only had to be a man. There was nothing to say that that man couldn’t be in uniform.

What a challenge it would present. Depositing Peggy Hall’s body had been only a little risky. He had some leeway there when it came to location, since the original manufacturing plant had ceased to exist, and the cops were not yet convinced that he would stick to his one-a-day schedule. But now he had to know the cops would surround the tracks. How much more delicious it would be to come up behind one of the men who were trying to catch him, slip a loop of razor-sharp wire over his head, and pull on both handles with all his might—

Theresa burst from the conference room and through the lobby, out the lobby door, and into the night.

And ran straight into Councilman Greer.

Kingsbury Run had never been a populous place, in any era. So aside from the RTA riders and employees clustered at the station, the surrounding cops didn’t have much activity to keep an eye on.

The officer stationed at the northeast corner of the area had parked his car in the lot behind some kind of old trucking terminal, long fingers of falling-down red brick that could warehouse a host of dead bodies, had he any desire to look through them. He didn’t, content to pace along the patch of grass between Kinsman Road and the railroad tracks and experiment with a pair of night-vision binoculars he’d bought off eBay with his own money. Designed for use in the middle of the woods, they weren’t much use in a city where the dark got interrupted at too many points by a bright streetlight or security light, nearly blinding him and overpowering the dimly lit areas he wanted to see. He crossed the weeds to stow them in his car. If any piece of equipment was going to get broken while he tackled a suspect tonight it wasn’t going to be something for which he’d shelled out his own funds.

An older cop waited by the railing on the north end of the East Fifty-fifth bridge, high above Kingsbury Run, tucked into a small L where the sidewalk widened. Farther up Fifty-fifth a diner that had been closed for hours still managed to waft enough food smells to make him, in turns, both hungry and nauseated. On a typical night he’d have been breaking for “lunch” right about now, parking his unit on the East Ninth pier or maybe near the stadium and discovering whatever healthy thing his wife had decided he should eat that day. She would not let him pack his own meal, since he tended to wrap up stuff like leftover chicken wings, Funyuns, and Pop-Tarts.

At least it’s not raining,
he thought, approximately five seconds before the first drop of water struck the back of his neck.

The female officer had stashed her unit off the dead end of Berwick Road and waited in the copse of trees, south of the tracks, at the east end of the run. She stood mostly hidden under the low-hanging branches of an oak tree, secure in the knowledge that its wide berth had her back. She hoped the killer would not show before midnight, when her shift ended, so that she could remain on duty and get the overtime, important since her husband had lost his job at a GM dealership. She didn’t mind the loss of income—they’d always been pretty sensible with money and should be able to weather this economic storm—so much as the loss of her “me” time. Working a rotating shift gave her days at home, him at work, the kids in school. She could watch TV, exercise, or take herself to lunch or a movie. Now he was home all day, every day. Not ideal.

A fourth officer, assigned to 4950 Pullman, had been with the force for fifteen years. Way too long, he told himself, to let one empty building freak him out. Even a hollowed-out shell with heavy stone walls, isolated on one side by trees and on the other side by a steep hill leading down to the tracks. Even a building where a body—a
cop,
no less—had been walled up with his head between his feet for seventy-odd years. A building with nothing left in it that still managed to make a lot of noise. Rustles. A weird, muffled crackle every so often. When the wind picked up, entering through the southwest holes where windows used to be and blowing out the northeast spaces right at him, it gave a sort of keening wail, so faint he might have imagined it. But he had been a cop for fifteen years, so he was not freaked out. Not at all.

Detective Frank Patrick formed the center pin of the square, leaning up against one of the massive columns of the East Fifty-fifth Street bridge. Only fifty feet separated him from the RTA parking lot, and yet a woman had walked to her car without apparently noticing him in the deep shadows underneath the bridge. But she hadn’t really looked around, either secure with or uninterested in the heavy presence of police on the RTA site. The killer would be more observant. So Frank Patrick stayed still, more or less, and sacrificed the idea of smoking a cigarette. He had sacrificed a lot for this job over the years.

He really, really hoped the killer would show up. Not just so that they could catch the sick son of a bitch, but so that Theresa wouldn’t look like a crackpot for insisting he’d be there and that he, Frank, wouldn’t look like the world’s biggest idiot for believing her. It would take a long time to live down using department resources and making a bunch of cops stand for hours in the rain merely because he loved his pretty, slightly strange cousin who worked in the morgue. His fellow officers had cousins, too, but it didn’t mean they chose to be around them all the time, and given their relative positions in the criminal justice system, if he and Theresa ever wanted to frame someone they could do one hell of a job. But worse, he might be sharing cop confidences with a noncop, and that made other cops nervous. Theresa was one of them and yet not one of them, probably smarter than most of them, and had gotten too old to be fun to flirt with. They thought Frank called her in more often than he needed to and wished he wouldn’t.

At the same time Frank knew that all or most of this could be attributed to the typical human paranoia over the thoughts of others and shouldn’t trouble him. The killer
had
to show up tonight—so far his re-creation of the original Torso Murders could not have been more accurate. He’d done everything but draw them a map. He would come.

Angela Sanchez stood about seventy feet to the north, along an even smaller spit of grass between train tracks. She did not know it but had proved much better at standing still than her partner, watching the terrain with slow, sweeping arcs of her head. The bridge stood too high to serve as an umbrella, even in a vertical rain, and her right sleeve grew damp. At the moment she felt no worry about the killer and his plans for the evening but instead fretted about her daughter’s math scores. Math and science would be the way to make a decent living in the future and she didn’t want the girl to get insecure about her abilities so early. Problem was, she’d always sucked at math herself and her daughter’s homework might as well have been written in Greek. Too bad the girl hadn’t inherited her father’s talent for it. He’d been able to convert ounces to kilos before the dealer could finish counting the bills. Thinking of her ex-husband made her insist to herself, for the four billionth time, that he had no excuse. They had grown up in a perfectly nice neighborhood on the near west side, not some kind of ghetto. His parents were good folks who worked hard. No excuse. At least he’d had the courtesy to be caught and jailed in another county, which slowed the rumor mill just a bit.