Trail Of Blood Part 17

The doctor moved on to the lungs. "What about the other one?" Theresa paused to stretch a crick out of her back, completely unaware that this action garnered a surrept.i.tious glance from every male in the room. Had she been aware, she'd have lived with the crick. "We have an ID on him as well, for utterly different reasons. No one reported him missing, but he had a record as long as one's proverbial arm."

Christine Johnson ran her hands over the lungs of the dead man, feeling for any spots where they might have fused to the inside of the chest cavity. Prior surgery or tumors could cause this, but Levon Forrest's lungs were smooth and free, so she cut through the primary bronchial attachments and weighed them. The lobes weren't exactly the healthy pink of youth, but they weren't bad. She sliced off three thin sections of tissue and added them to the formalin soup in the plastic quart container. "So who is he?"

Theresa stood between the two autopsy tables, her back to the sink, so that she could talk to Christine and also the doctor preparing to autopsy the man of whom she spoke, the other victim of their modern-day Torso killer. "His name is Richard Dunlop, and he couldn't be more Levon Forrest's opposite. Different color, much younger-twenty-three-and if he ever held a job it must have been under another name. He lived on the west side, more or less. His last known address was a friend's house on Wade Avenue off Twenty-fifth. No one knows who he's been flopping with recently, or they're not saying, according to Frank and Angela."

"So little Richard has no visible means of support." The doctor opened Forrest's half-full stomach, pouring the contents into a fresh quart container. They would have to be tested for drugs as a matter of routine, and Theresa might want to examine the solid matter to corroborate details of his last meal.

Theresa's nose wrinkled at the thought. She hated gastric exams. "Visible, yes. Legal, no. He's been arrested every year or so since his teens for loitering, prost.i.tution, possession, solicitation, more loitering."

Christine Johnson finished dissecting Levon Forrest's unremarkable organs as Damon sliced his scalp open with a scalpel. Then the doctor took over with the small instrument, like a flat chisel, used to separate the flesh from the white bone of the skull. With no other apparent cause of death, she wanted to examine every inch of it for trauma. "So he's a hustler," she said of the other victim.

Theresa nodded. "Looks that way. Not a difficult person for our killer to find and abduct."

"Yeah." Damon waited, bone saw in hand. "Just open the door and wave a twenty."

"Also without a firm timeline, like Mr. Forrest here. The last time anyone will admit to seeing Dunlop was three days ago."

"Maybe it was a doctor," Damon said.

"Why?" Theresa asked.

"The chick was an addict, the first guy had a cold, and the second guy is another malnourished lowlife."

"You have a point," Theresa said.

"Who else would know how to do this?" Damon gestured toward the severed neck. "And don't say me."

Christine said, "Here we go. I thought that felt a little too cushy."

A flat, wide blood clot had formed under Levon Forrest's skin, directly above the top of the neck, where the head had suffered a trauma and broken blood vessels leaked between the flesh and the skull. The doctor sent Damon to get Zoe, the photographer. This injury would have to be doc.u.mented.

Theresa inspected the glossy red ma.s.s. "Someone socked him in the back of the head. Would that be enough to make him unconscious?"

"Why do you always ask me that?"

"Why will you never tell me?"

"Because it varies from person to person. This was hard enough to crack the skull but not hard enough to break the skin. Very blunt impact. It might have knocked him out, it might not have. That's all I can say."

"No other blows?"

Christine finished flaying the flesh from the bone of the skull. "I don't see any."

"Okay. How about a time of death, then?"

"Five hours and twelve minutes," the doctor said immediately. Christine rarely joked, but this was one of her favorites. No one else found it as amusing. Zoe even rolled her eyes.

"Seriously," Theresa demanded.

"I'm happy with twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Rigor has come and gone and he's been refrigerated since you found him last night, which should have slowed the process. He was cold when you found him, right?"

"Not Popsicle cold, but definitely cool."

"Right. So all the signs could easily fit into that window between when he left for work and when his s.h.i.+ft began without him."

Theresa said, "In only one hour he ran into Richard Dunlop, or our killer, or both at the same time. But he spent most of that hour riding the Red Line."

Christine gestured to Damon, who started in with the bone saw to take the top off the cranium. As always, Theresa retreated to the man's feet and leaned up against the stainless steel sinks, as from the bone dust wafting into the air. She raised her voice over the whining saw to say to the doctor: "How does someone strike and drag off a fully grown man from a moving car packed with dozens of commuters?"

"He doesn't. He must have attacked him before he got on the rapid or after he got off."

"Frank found a few people who say he was on yesterday morning's 6:08, but he's taking that with a grain of salt. You know commuting-you get your regulars and they get into their habits. The whole process becomes a blur, so these witnesses aren't completely sure if it was yesterday or the day before, or the day before that. They've all seen the news last night or the paper this morning and now they're so freaked they can swear they saw Elvis."

"But if they're right, then the killer grabbed Mr. Forrest here after he disembarked."

"That gives us a window of fourteen minutes between the time he'd get off the rapid and the start of his s.h.i.+ft, during which he should have been walking to the Ford plant. The cops are hitting the Brookpark parking lot hard."

Damon finished with the bone saw and pried the section from the top of the head. This took some muscle, and he quickly found it a different sort of proposition when the body didn't weigh down the neck-without it, he had no anchor to pull against. Christine put her hands around the torn neck and the hair at its nape and hung on as best she could, and they wrestled the bone apart. Zoe waited, camera in hand. As they did this, the doctor suggested to Theresa, "Maybe the killer attacked Dunlop and this guy"-meaning her victim-"tried to help and wound up in the cross fire."

"I thought of that-Forrest sounds like the kind of person who would come to someone's rescue. But the killer meant to kill two. He needed them to re-create the 1935 murders. Two fully grown, unhelpless men. This guy knows how to approach people."

Levon Forrest's brain came into view, pink and convoluted and looking so exactly like what one expected a brain to look like that it seemed unreal. But its neatness had been marred by the small clot on the occipital lobe. Christine ran her fingers over it and muttered to herself, "Coincides with the skull fracture."

Theresa leaned in, peering as well. "Would that have made him unconscious?"

"Why do you-I don't know. Possibly. I doubt it killed him-my guess is it's not big enough to really interfere with the brain's functioning."

"What did kill him, then?"

"Cutting his head off," Christine said. "Yeah, I think that did it."

She cut the brain free, the spinal cord sliding out easily since it had already been severed from the backbone, and dropped it onto the scale. Damon began to dry out the inside of the skull with a rag to get ready for more photographs while Zoe, as always, waited with what patience she could muster. The other pathologist in the room did not have Christine's brisk style and had not yet finished the external examination of Richard Dunlop, dutifully noting each blemish on Dunlop's young skin, bruises, abrasions, needle tracks. Theresa decided not to wait and left the autopsy room, to the disappointment of the male pathologist and his diener, whose conversation wandered back to the Indians and the deservedness, or lack of same, of their division ranking.

CHAPTER 22.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24.

1935.

James Miller entered the building at 4950 Pullman. It had not changed much in the half a year or so since Irene Schaffer ran from it, screaming and half undressed.

As before, he and Walter found Dr. Louis Odessa in his office, ushering a well-coiffed lady in a smart wool jacket out the door. She thanked him profusely for whatever services he had offered and departed, trailing promises to take note of every single thing she put in her mouth, every single thing. James shot his partner a warning look, knowing too well the sort of comment Walter would make after an opening like that.

Odessa invited them in, apparently not concerned about their unexpected appearance. His office still lacked decor but had gained more bottles and books on its shelves. "Good afternoon, gentlemen. What can I do for you?"

Walter sprawled in one of the cus.h.i.+oned chairs meant for guests-or patients, as no doubt Odessa would have insisted. "We were in the neighborhood, thought we'd stop by and see if you have any young girls tied up in your closet."

The man chuckled. It made James's blood begin to rush at the memory of the day he found the narrow cot exactly as Irene Schaffer had described it. He clenched and unclenched his hands, closed and open.

"I remember now," Odessa said. "That excitable girl. At least she embarra.s.sed herself too badly with that wild story to come around here anymore."

"So you don't make a habit of bringing underage girls by to...a.n.a.lyze them?" Walter injected the verb with an insulting amount of skepticism for someone who hadn't believed Irene Schaffer. He thought her a fast girl who had picked the wrong guy to hustle.

James, on the other hand, figured if Irene did anything in the street it was probably to play baseball.

The doctor only made it worse by chuckling again. Most men would not be so cool when accused of mas.h.i.+ng, especially of a girl Irene's age. "A typical example of my clientele left just before you, officers. Do I appear to be a man who needs to waste time with unwashed urchins?"

James turned away from the smarmy idiot to look over the contents of the shelving, pace a bit, fiddle with the faucet on a small sink at the inner wall, and bounce on his toes, anything to relieve the tension. "Mind if we check?"

"Go right ahead. There's nothing in there but paper and empty bottles." The doctor didn't even watch as James strode behind him and opened the door to the little room. Smart guys often cooperated with police, thinking it would allay suspicion...which it didn't.

No girl stretched on the little cot, of course, and the rest of the area appeared as Odessa described it. James closed the door again and moved back to the shelves.

"Why do you keep a bed in there, anyway?" Walter asked as if from the idlest curiosity.

"I catch a nap after lunchtime. It helps with the digestion."

"And that's what you're all about, isn't it? Digestion?"

Odessa spoke to Walter. "Digestion is only half of the puzzle. Coaxing the body into absorbing the right things entails giving it the right things to absorb. Our bodies are incredible machines, but without proper maintenance they do not work at peak efficiency, or they wear out prematurely."

"And you're here to save people from themselves."

"Someone must."

James stole a glance at the man while pretending to read a bottle label. For the first time, the doctor looked like a doctor, somber and serious as he lectured: "The Great War shook this country from its sleep. We had to go to war and found out that one-third of our eligible soldiers had to be turned down for poor health. One-third, gentlemen. And it's not only our bodies, but our minds, too-we couldn't find enough men in the general populace suitable to become officers. That's why education is now mandatory in all forty-eight states."

"But we wind up paying for people who don't need it." Taxes were a pet annoyance to Walter. "Like Negroes, and girls."

"All are part of the whole," Odessa argued. "Ignorant people only create more work for those who are not. Raising up individuals raises up the entire society."

"What sort of doctor are you?" James asked, both to throw Odessa off stride and because he had no interest in debating education with Walter once again. Baby John would go to school, period, for as long and as well as James could afford.

"I have a degree in nutrition science," Odessa said.

"Is that like an M.D.?" James knew it wasn't, since he now stared at the framed certificate on the wall and it said nothing about being a bachelor's or doctorate. He didn't know much about college but felt fairly certain that real degrees used one of those two words.

"No. I treat the whole body, the intake and outflow and the interaction of the same with our living cells. I don't saw off limbs or look at your teeth or deliver babies." He added this as if such trivialities were beneath him.

"Vitamins?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Do you give people vitamins?"

"Yes. Vitamins-and minerals, too-are the single most important line of defense between ourselves and our graves."

Walter took over. "Do you have any vitamin A?"

"Yes. Why, Detective, do you suffer from night blindness?"

"Huh?"

"A deficiency of vitamin A causes night blindness, a difficulty seeing in dim light. But just as importantly, it can interact with-"

James placed photographs of the two Jacka.s.s Hill victims on the man's desk, hoping especially to shock this smarmy b.a.s.t.a.r.d with the half-decomposed face of the second victim. "Do you recognize these men?"

"No."

He had decided that quickly. "Are you sure?"

"Yes." Odessa waited for another question, switching eye contact from James to Walter. He did not look at the photographs again.

A hustler and a transient, James thought, killed by a guy swell enough to own a car with which to transport the bodies. How would a guy like that get acquainted with a punk like Andra.s.sy? He must be a chameleon, or he's got the kind of job that gets him accepted everywhere. Like a doctor.

James pulled out the unidentified pill and set it on the desk. "Do you know what this is?"

Louis Odessa picked up the tiny lump of whiteness and took a magnifying gla.s.s from his desk drawer. After a long examination, he set it back down on the edge of his desk and said, "I would guess it's either niacin or folic acid. I have some here...." After retrieving two bottles from his collection, he p.r.o.nounced it most similar to the thiamine tablets he bought from a large pharmaceutical company in New York. "Not exactly the same," he added, though the pill certainly looked identical to those in the bottle as far as James could tell, "but I'll bet it's some brand of thiamine. There's really no way to tell without chemical testing."

"Why would a doctor prescribe it?" James tried a little grease. Walter rolled his eyes at the idea of prescribing pills to otherwise healthy people.

"It works against beriberi-a common disease to Orientals, the poor ones who live on rice-and diabetes. Alcoholics, also, can have a deficiency of thiamine and need supplements."

"And you're sure you've never seen these men? Separately or together?" James asked again.

"No, I haven't. Would you two care to go over your diets? I have a few minutes before my next patient. No? Are you sure? Because you need either fresh fruit or vitamin C tablets or you'll wind up with scurvy, and you"-he switched his gaze to Walter-"need to eat less-caloric foods."

James's portly partner did not care for the direction in which the conversation had turned and stood up. "No, thanks. We gotta go. But we'll be around in case you bring home any more little girlfriends."

Odessa continued to smile, but the edges appeared brittle.

James followed his partner into the hallway. Sunlight streamed in from both the front door to the north and the back door to the south. Lettering on the frosted gla.s.s across from Odessa's office read MADAME MORELLI, MEDIUM. KNOCK TO ENTER. James heard low voices inside, one punctuated with a gasp. Laughter spilled from an open office door while two men stood outside on the south lawn. James tapped Walter's elbow and went toward them.