Trail Of Blood Part 1

Trail of Blood.

Lisa Black.

for my dad who would have loved all this.

CHAPTER 1.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2.

Fall had come early this year, and Theresa could see why people considered it the season of death. With the sun behind clouds the trees appeared as a palette of dull browns. Weeds had overtaken the train tracks below, though she knew a rapid transit car would rattle by at any moment. The only spots of color belonged to graffiti on the pylons supporting the bridge. It was Labor Day weekend according to the calendar, but it might as well have been the middle of winter on this edge of the city.

"Why am I here?" she asked the cop. He stood next to her, further crumbling the edge of the asphalt street with one toe.

"Metaphorically speaking?" The brown autumn tableau did not seem to bother him and he drew in the crisp air with relish; but then he was young, and in uniform, and would not get a chance to deal with homicides very often. "That I couldn't say. But probably because I called the sergeant and the sergeant called Homicide and Homicide called Dispatch and Dispatch called the Medical Examiner's Office. 'Sounds weird,' the sergeant told me. 'I'll call Forensics.' And here you are."

"What's weird about it?"

He waved at the valley and its train tracks. "Know what that is?"

She declined to answer, tired of playing Q & A with a boy half her age, and gave him a mild glare instead.

"Kingsbury Run," he said.

She knew the term, of course. Everyone in Cleveland did. "So?"

"Come with me." He turned away from the valley he'd just pointed out without waiting to see if she would follow or offering to carry her crime scene kit. And she was an old woman now. Forty, as of next Friday.

She left her car parked along Pullman. Traffic did not present a hazard-no one ventured up this deserted road on the edge of the downtown area except for employees at the electrical station on the corner. A white car labeled security sat at the entrance; its lone occupant watched her progress with great suspicion, as if he could see no reason why terrorists would not arrive in a Medical Examiner's Office station wagon or appear as a mild-mannered forensic scientist.

The two-story structure had been constructed with stone instead of brick and had probably been an attractive building a century ago, before the property hedged on one side by train tracks became trapped by the tail end of I-490 on the other. Square, about a hundred feet by a hundred feet. The lawn around it had long since descended into weeds and garbage. The building had no gla.s.s in its window s.p.a.ces, no door at its threshold. Obviously empty, obviously a victim of fire at some point. Obviously dead.

Her phone trilled with a text message from Chris. She did not send a reply.

The cop strolled up to another young officer guarding the entrance-that was when you knew you had aged, when they all started looking not old enough to drive-and exchanged some sort of wisecrack. The one guarding the door, however, did not find the fall air or the weird homicide as invigorating as his compatriot. He broke off a yawn to shout something to the interior of the building, and the detective appeared just as she reached the front stoop.

"I might have known this would be your doing," she said to him.

"What, like it's my fault?" Frank Patrick had been a Homicide detective for ten of his years and her first cousin for all of them. Pinp.r.i.c.ks of sweat appeared around his mustache and a swipe of dust marred his dark slacks. "Watch your step."

She moved into the dank interior. Chunks of plaster and concrete lay on top of ancient pop cans and other garbage, and gaping holes appeared in the ceiling, but the floor felt plenty solid enough to support her one hundred and thirty pounds. A film of white dust still hung in the air. Some of the walls had been removed from the area to her left and gray light from the far windows provided a hazy illumination. On her right a dim maze of rooms still existed. It smelled of urine, decomposed fast food, and old smoke, which explained the blackened surfaces on the south wall of the building.

"Arson," Frank said without being asked. "That keeps happening to the collection of old warehouses that cl.u.s.ter this dying city. I quote a particularly depressing columnist. It's either kids with nothing better to do or some homeless guy trying to get cozy."

"You got me out here for an arson?" Theresa had been trained in many avenues of forensic investigation. Arson was not one of them.

"You got something better to do?"

"Just my job." This overstated the case a bit. Leo and Don were at the lab, surely keeping things under control.

"Your job includes getting away from the microscopes now and then," he reminded her. "Forget the arson, that happened weeks ago. The fire guys came with their s.h.i.+ny trucks and took out what little structural integrity this building had left."

She glanced up at the ceiling. "It's not going to cave in on us right this minute, is it?"

"No guarantees. Think anyone would miss us?"

Good question. Her fiance had been dead for over a year and her ex-husband was probably out with the latest in a line of pole dancers. But her mother certainly would, and her daughter would notice when the tuition check didn't clear. Chris-who knew? She stumbled over a collection of crushed c.o.ke cans and decided to concentrate on her cousin's gray blazer as it advanced into the gloom.

He went on. "This prompted the city council to once again address the issue of empty buildings and their absentee landlords and file a claim to seize the property for destruction. Councilman Greer, as you know, has made it clear that cleaning up the city of Cleveland is his personal mission in life and only he can save us from ourselves. No protests ensued to save this little blight on the landscape, so they hired Mr. Lansky's construction company"-he gestured toward a man up ahead, who was standing off to the side with a paunch and an unlit cigar-"to demolish the place lest it just up and collapse one day on a homeless squatter or some innocent but high-spirited youth."

Another glance at the ceiling. It did not appear to have moved. "Or us."

"So far, so good. The construction guys, or rather the deconstruction guys, started from the top down and tossed the walls through those holes in the ceiling. Upstairs is just empty s.p.a.ce. But when they started taking out the sections on the ground floor, well"-he stopped at the edge of an incomplete wall, his tall frame outlined by light from the other side of it-"they found this."

She reached the area, blinking in the brilliance provided by portable halogen lights. Bordered by two walls and a collection of two-by-four studs stood a table. It had been roughly but st.u.r.dily constructed of unfinished wood and bolted to the floor.

On that table stretched the body of a man. And that man had been dead for a very long time. His flesh had sunk to only a papery, peeling cover over the bones and left no odor in the air. The body's arms and legs lay straight, the back flat against the surface of the table. It would have seemed a fairly peaceful repose, were it not for the white vertebrae protruding from the collar of the s.h.i.+rt without a skull to cap them off.

Theresa approached the table, thrown into erratic shadow by the lights crouching along the floor. She only a.s.sumed the body to be male-the shapeless pants and leather belt did not suggest femininity, and neither did the dark, long-sleeved s.h.i.+rt. She touched a fold at the elbow and the material became dust under her finger. "It's desiccated, like a mummy."

She picked up one of the halogen lights, careful to use the handle and not the hot casing. Its electrical cord snaked off through the structure to where a generator hummed in the distance.

The head had been removed from its rightful place, but not from the area. It rested between the flopped-open feet in their brown leather shoes. The hollow eye sockets stared up at her. It had retained some flesh and even some hair, yes, but not enough to resemble a face, not something human, just a badly done Halloween decoration.

"See what I mean?" The young cop had followed them. "Weird."

The damp of the surrounding gloom finally reached her bones, and she shuddered. Now she knew what he had meant about Kingsbury Run and its very special history.

"What do you think?" Frank asked her.

"I think I'm going to need coffee," she told him.

CHAPTER 2.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 2.

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 a.s.sist 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 b.u.mp 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 polis.h.i.+ng. 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 s.h.i.+rt. 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-a.s.suming 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.

"c.r.a.p," 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 pa.s.sed through the center of the building, so that the offices had exterior windows."