Trail Of Blood Part 16

"Because the victims were found around the train tracks?"

"I have no idea why he said it, he just did. You should go to bed, honey. You look tired."

"Were you going to make turnovers?"

Her mother smiled. "Not tonight. This weekend, at the restaurant. Come for dinner and for two forty-nine you can buy one."

"Highway robbery." Theresa stood up and said good night.

"And don't forget about Friday."

"Aw, Mom!"

"We always have birthday parties with the family. Especially a big one like this."

A small house crowded with aunts upon aunts and cousins upon cousins. Theresa loved them all, but not when they were trying to convince her that the irretrievable loss of her youth was something to be happy about. "Why should I celebrate turning forty?"

"Every birthday is one to celebrate," her mother said in a way that made Theresa feel ungrateful, which, of course, had been the idea. Mothers were good at that.

Theresa said good night and trooped through the rain, now faded to a heavy mist, to her home. The trees whispered above her and tossed a few cold drops down her neck while she ordered herself to get into the habit of leaving lights on, now that Rachael would not be there before her with every bulb blazing, the TV going, and the stereo bulging the walls. But Harry, her dead fiance's dog, stood guard with tail wagging to let her know the perimeter had been secured, so lights did not seem that important.

A truck drove by, the name of a roofing company emblazoned on the side. No other cars, with or without missing headlights.

She tucked herself into bed with James Miller's notes and a business card. She dialed the phone before glancing at the clock and then debated whether she should hang up. She was still debating when he answered. "Mr. Corliss? It's Theresa MacLean. I'm sorry to call so late."

"Not at all, young lady. I'm something of a night owl. What can I do for you?"

Helpful hint for women of a certain age, Theresa thought: Hang out with people at least twenty years your senior and they will make you feel youthful. "I need to learn about trains."

"Then you've come to the right place," he said, chuckling. "So to speak."

CHAPTER 20.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24.

1935.

James Miller dallied with his partner only long enough to drink a cup of coffee before he left Walter to the tender ministrations of a middle-aged waitress and moved out into the bustle of the Terminal Tower. His stomach growled, but he told himself he was too interested in the investigation to eat. It didn't work.

He carried the coat, in its paper bag, after Walter refused responsibility for that particular piece of evidence. "I'm not eating my lunch with something that pervert touched on my lap. Now either sit down with me or scram."

James scrammed. There were no less than three drugstores scattered throughout the two floors of shops. All three were popular, but at two P.M. he did not have to deal with the lunchtime or after-work throngs. He headed for one on the lower level, marveling at whoever had come up with the idea of planting retail shops squarely in the path of travelers. People waiting for trains with time to kill and commuters who rushed from tracks to office and needed convenience were provided with the perfect outlet for their hard-earned funds. From inside this bubble of commerce, one could barely tell the Depression existed. Strolling along the gleaming marble walkways, a man felt prosperous even on an empty stomach.

The drugstore counters thronged with kids on their way home from school. James wondered where these children got the dimes for an ice cream soda when there were grown men outside on the streets begging for those same dimes. He didn't begrudge them; indeed, it seemed a hopeful sign that at least some of the nation's offspring were having a happy childhood.

He had to wait to speak to the druggist while a portly lady with a small dog described her nightly tossing and turning. James thought of telling her to spend some time in a trench in Europe and she'd learn to sleep through mortar attacks, but thought better of it. It wasn't her fault that he'd probably never sleep through the night again.

The man in the white coat listened with great sympathy, gave her a packet of powder, and sent her on her way before turning to James. "If I had a nickel for every whiny dame who comes in here I would own the place. What can I do for you? Anemia?"

"Uh, no."

"You sure? You look a little pasty. Just a cold, then?"

James identified himself and pulled out the blue coat, which the druggist, unsurprisingly, did not recognize. The pills from the pocket were another story. He picked up a magnifying gla.s.s and examined each pill, holding them one at a time in the palm of his hand. "Nothing bad. No kind of ma.s.s-produced barbiturate or narcotic-that's why you're asking, right? You think this is something that can dope somebody up?"

"I need to know what it is, even if it's harmless."

"Well, that would be my guess. Harmless. This one is probably a vitamin-vitamin A, see the A stamped on it? People are nuts about vitamins these days, think that all the alphabet minerals can cure everything that ails. Not that there's anything wrong with vitamins, of course, they're important, but they're not the bee's knees. But the customers don't listen. I guess any sense of security is better than none."

"Is the other one a vitamin, too?"

"I don't know. It might be a custom job, one that some guy like me brewed up special. I can't tell without sending it for chemical testing. You want me to do that?"

"No." James took the pill back before the man could think about it. "No, I need to hang on to that."

"Besides, don't you guys have your own lab that can do all that fancy stuff? I read about it in the paper. You've got Ness in charge now, after all. The reporters seem to think he's going to turn the police force into a bunch of angels."

James ignored this last sentence, thanked the man, and walked out past the kids. He found another drugstore and received the same information, this time from a dour old man who left out the speculation regarding the future of the Cleveland police force. Then James put the pills in his pocket and trotted down the steps to the train platforms.

Forty-five minutes later he found Walter window-shopping outside a tobacconist's shop. The older cop now carried a parcel wrapped in brown paper and an unlit cigar-both, no doubt, "gifts" from a grateful citizen. "I found a baseball suit for Walter Junior's birthday," he told James, eyeing his partner with a piercing glance. "Where have you been?"

"Haunting the platforms. Why, did you think I was informing on you to the Untouchables?" James joked, nodding at the parcel.

He realized his mistake a split second later when Walter's face darkened and he stepped closer to hiss, "Don't razz me about that, Jimmy! It ain't funny!"

James flushed, more from the stares of the shoppers within earshot than from having the same argument one more time. "Nothing's funny about being a cop these days. Look around. The people we're supposed to work for expect nothing but a shakedown. They don't look to us for help. n.o.body thinks we're heroes."

"Is that what you need, Jimmy? To be a hero? Then go find a war somewhere and leave us mere mortals to the business of making a living."

This was pointless. "Look, Walter-I checked out the pills and asked around to see if anyone recognized the blue coat. That's all."

Walter's shoulders relaxed a bit. He tucked the parcel under his arm and the unlit cigar between his lips, though his face retained its tense lines. "And did they?"

"Maybe. I got a bunch of maybes. The strongest one is almost positive they saw a man wearing a similar coat loitering by the loading platform about two and a half weeks ago. They couldn't pin it down to a day."

Walter nodded. They fell into step, doing a slow circuit of the shop windows as they headed toward Public Square.

James outlined what he had learned from the druggists. "They both said at least one is a vitamin. I know everyone's vitamin crazy these days-"

"Quackery is all that is. My granddad lived to ninety-five and never took a pill in his life."

"-but it started me thinking. Remember the tomboy?"

Walter pushed open the thin gla.s.s door to the bustle of Euclid Avenue, his face smoothing into a thoughtful plane. "Yeah."

"Remember where she took us?"

Walter tucked the cigar into his breast pocket. "Yeah."

"I think we should pay the good doctor another visit," James proposed. "Now that you've had lunch and all."

CHAPTER 21.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9.

PRESENT DAY.

The autopsy room in the sixty-year-old Medical Examiner's Office had been built for easy cleaning. With stainless steel sinks and counters, a drain in the floor, and ceramic tile over the floor and halfway up the walls, it could be scrubbed down night after night, year after year, without evidence of any real wear and tear. Each evening it appeared to be the cleanest room in the building, though the result was tidy rather than sterile. The victims could no longer be infected and the staff did not worry much about germs. For years they had worked with formalin and X-rays, been exposed to the insides of victims with tuberculosis, HIV, hepat.i.tis (A, B, and C), and occasionally meningitis, and remained healthy. Surrounded by death they, like the rest of humanity, smoked, rode motorcycles, ate fatty foods, and drove too fast. Familiarity breeds contempt.

The two headless males were not, by a long shot, the most disturbing or most bizarre deaths the doctors and dieners had ever seen, and so had to compete with the baseball scores for attention. The Indians were third in the division, with wins and losses about even. One pathologist and two dieners thought that the team had made some good trades in the past year and were sure of a place in the series, maybe couldn't win it, but could at least partic.i.p.ate. Another pathologist, another two dieners, and a deskman put these odds at slim to none. They had been through this heartbreak too many times. One pathologist, Christine Johnson, abstained, sharpshooting being the only sport to which she paid any attention.

Before her lay the body of the older victim, the head by itself at the top of the table. She had noted all the external information she could-injuries (a sc.r.a.pe to the right wrist, a healed cut on the left index, and of course the wounds to the neck and groin), old scars (appendix), moles (two large ones, as well as a host of smaller ones she didn't bother to note) and tattoos (none). She saw no puncture marks or abscesses on the arms that would indicate drug use, no swelling of the chest or stomach that would indicate trauma, tumors, or hernia. The body did not yet show too many signs of decomposition. She guessed the time of death to be twenty-four hours previously but collected a syringe of fluid from one eyeball to help her narrow that down. The pota.s.sium level of vitreous fluid increases after death.

Christine's a.s.sistant for this autopsy happened to be a young man by the name of Damon, and as she made the last notation necessary before beginning the internal autopsy, he took a scalpel and made the Y incision from the man's shoulders to his belly b.u.t.ton, without waiting for her instruction to do so. At the medical examiner's, as just about anywhere else in society, doctors occupied the top rungs of status, influence, and power. Damon felt it his duty to bring these demiG.o.ds down to earth and had a myriad of small ways in which to do so. Christine let it go. She understood the desire to keep humans on an equal footing. Besides, civil service made people nearly impossible to fire and she had to work with Damon almost daily, and besides that, he did excellent work.

The victim's skin parted like the Red Sea, and yellow globules of subcutaneous fat welled up from inside. Not much, relatively speaking, as the victim had not been significantly overweight. With quick slices of the scalpel, Damon stripped the flesh back from the ribs and got out the long-handled pruning shears. The bones made soft cracking sounds as he snapped through them.

Theresa MacLean entered the autopsy room. She did not express an opinion on the Indians' chances other than to wish them well, any more than she would have gotten involved in a discussion of politics. In Cleveland, the former could be a more volatile subject than the latter. She did ask Christine how it was going, a less nagging way of asking for information.

"Nothing interesting so far. What did you find?"

Theresa said, "A few fibers and adhesive residue on the wrists and ankles, of both men. But I don't see any bruising like they struggled against it, do you?"

"Nothing visible. I'll check under the skin."

"I sc.r.a.ped their nails but haven't had a chance to look at the material yet. No defensive wounds. Makes me think the tape merely made their bodies easy to transport, but then something must have knocked them out. I hope you can tell me what."

"We'll see." Christine never made promises.

Damon made the small incision into the pericardium, the membrane surrounding the heart, again without waiting for her instruction. A normal amount of fluid oozed out. An excess amount would have put the heart under too much pressure to function. Christine made a note and Damon removed the rest of the pericardium.

"You really think this is a copy of some 1930s murders?" Damon asked.

"Yes. These two were left in the same place and the same circ.u.mstances as victims one and two in 1935, circ.u.mstances too bizarre to have occurred by accident."

"Well, why not?" the young diener said in agreement. "People do those Civil War reenactments, with uniforms and horses and muskets and all that s.h.i.+t." He reached for the heart with an evilly sharp scalpel.

"Damon," Christine said, a note of warning in her voice. She hadn't finished her notes on the pericardium.

The young man shrugged and waited. He had made his point for the day, and the rest of the autopsy would proceed smoothly. Tomorrow he would start all over again. The battle to establish equality among all never ended. "What about that chick they found at the air show? Where does she fit in?"

"I think she's supposed to be victim zero," Theresa said. "It's too much of a coincidence that she turned up in the same week. But I can't be sure. There's nothing unique about men dismembering their girlfriends."

"I'll take the heart now," Christine said.

"And I didn't find any adhesive on her wrists-but then I a.s.sumed she had already been cut in pieces when transported. Not as difficult to move around as the nearly complete body of a full-grown male, and he moved them. Just like in the original cases, both men were clean and drained of blood with no signs of insect activity. We found no blood or a way to wash the bodies at the scene, so it had to be done somewhere else."

"What does that mean?" Damon asked, slicing through the top of the aorta. "Or do I want to know?"

"He has a workshop," Theresa said.

"I didn't want to know."

"Do you have everything you need this time?" Theresa asked them. "No missing sections of neck or anything like that?"

"Nothing missing," Christine a.s.sured her. "Even their genitalia is accounted for. Your guy removed stuff but didn't keep it. Any idea who these two unfortunate gentlemen are?"

"Yes, actually." Theresa followed the doctor over to the cutting board next to the sink to watch her dissect the heart. She didn't expect any clues to result from this, but she found cardiology interesting. "They've both been identified. Your guy is Levon Forrest, fifty-two, married with two grown children. Lives on East 119th, takes the Red Line from the Euclid station to the Brookpark station, and walks to his job at the Ford plant. Despite a nasty cold he left his house at six. But he missed his seven o'clock start time this morning, which was so unlike him that his supervisor called his wife, who called the cops, who, unsurprisingly, were not too interested in the case of a grown man missing only four hours. That ID isn't written in stone yet, but he matches the description exactly and the wife identified a photo of the head. His head."

The pathologist opened up Levon Forrest's heart with quick, sure strokes, then measured the thickness of the chamber walls. They were normal, with the left ventricle, of course, being much thicker than the other three as it had to push the blood throughout the length of the body. The valves had no abnormalities. The tiny coronary arteries covering the outside surface of the fist-sized organ showed some stiffening and blockage from atherosclerosis, but no more than average for a man his age. "I hope they didn't get the neck in the photo."

"No, of course not. Frank planned to ease into the decapitation part of the story, figuring she didn't really need to know the gory details in the same breath with 'You're now a widow.' Poor woman. At least the time of his abduction is narrowed down to an hour. The officers are questioning everyone they can find along the route."

Christine kept some sections of the heart, dipping the scalpel into a small jar of formalin and swis.h.i.+ng it until the tissue washed off, then returned to the body. "Has he got any history?"

"None. Some minor sc.r.a.pes as a juvenile, but nothing as an adult. Apparently a law-abiding, loving husband and father and you-can-set-your-watch-by-him employee."