Trail Of Blood Part 19

"Nope. Once the war ended they were on their own, and trains were the fastest form of travel."

She thought about this, watching her step over the gravel. "It must have been cold in the winter."

"They looked for cars that had something in them to use as shelter-bales of hay or livestock, mailbags. They'd use anything they could find, sometimes make small fires if they got desperate enough. That's why the railroads worked so hard to rout them out, to keep them from damaging the cargo."

The cars beside them now moved at a slow crawl.

"That's what they'd call an easy rider," Corliss went on. "A slow-moving train, easy to hop. They wouldn't get on and off here in the rail yards, of course, not within sight of the station. They'd wait a couple thousand feet up the line or even outside of town, at any curve or junction where the train would have to slow down."

She stared at the cars, painted in different, muted colors, coated with the grime of the valley, scratches and scars and rust evident on every surface. When she glanced at Corliss he smiled at her, a hint of mischief around his lips. "Want to try it?"

"No," she said. Then, "Yes."

"What kind of shoes are you wearing?"

She lifted a battered Reebok.

"Those should give you decent footing. Just hang on to the rungs for a few yards and then jump off, okay? You have to land solid and away from the car. Getting off is a lot more dangerous than getting on-you have to fall away from the wheels, not toward them."

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. "Okay."

The train blocked the river breeze, and she began to sweat. She was in the train yard, the Torso killer's old haunt, and the next victim would be a woman.

"This one." Corliss pointed to a freight car rolling toward them, a green color with lettering too small to read at that distance. She shook off her mood and watched the train. Ten feet...five feet...she grabbed an upper rung with both hands and half pulled, half jumped up until her feet found a bottom rail, much higher off the ground than she would have expected. The wind tossed her curls into her face and her heart beat wildly, at least until she realized that the train was moving slowly enough for the older Edward Corliss to walk along beside it.

The distance between her and the gravel made her more nervous than the speed. Also, the rungs she used seemed an impossible distance from the sliding door. To swing from the rungs into an open boxcar, you'd have to be both agile and strong. And fearless.

"What do you think?" Corliss called to her.

The vibrations of the heavy cars no longer seemed to be such an a.s.sault on her senses, now that she had become part of the train. The air patted her face with fumes of oil and steel. "This is kind of fun."

"Ready to get off?"

She looked down. The ground seemed to be moving faster now that she had to land on it, and it sloped toward the median's center. She needed a more level spot.

"The people driving these things still don't like it when we do this, you know," he said, prodding further.

She let go and jumped, focusing all of her mind on her two feet and the gravel beneath them, planting them hard and pulling in the arms that one naturally puts out to the side for balance except in cases where to the side rode a large steel machine with huge turning wheels that one should fall away from, not toward- Corliss grabbed her, two firms hands on her waist, and she grasped his sleeves and tottered in a completely ungraceful motion. "That was cool."

"There, now." He kept his hands on her sides until she had steadied, then let go and guided her another few steps back from the train. "You've ridden the rails."

They walked, following the train's path toward the station. "I imagine actually climbing in and out of cars would be a lot more difficult, especially at higher speeds."

"Oh, yes. It could be quite dangerous-that was the fun of it, for kids. For the down-and-out it was merely an acceptable risk."

"Thanks for the opportunity."

"Any time you want to hop a boxcar, Ms. MacLean, just say the word."

He led her to a small, recently painted building. "This is the old West Third switch-house-now the headquarters of the American Railroad History Preservation Society."

The inside had been recently painted as well, with the large, airy s.p.a.ce set up like a museum. Photographs and lithographs filled the wall s.p.a.ce between each set of windows; the pictures showed Cleveland-area railcars from the late 1800s to the present day, as specified by engraved plaques. Large metal pieces of the engines-a cylinder, a pressure gauge-had been restored and placed on pedestals dotting the floor. Theresa paused before a pen-and-ink drawing of a locomotive, marveling at the intricate detail.

Corliss stood beside her. "That's my favorite. It's a Hudson J Cla.s.s, one of the finest engines ever built. They were developed in the twenties and most were built here in Lima, Ohio. The model city you saw at my house? I have all Hudsons in that array."

A man emerged from the hallway to their left and Corliss added with a slightly raised voice, "And here's the man who drew this picture, our resident artist, William Van Horn."

Theresa offered her hand to the gaunt man with the s.h.a.ggy mustache. He shook it, the muscles of the hand firm beneath thin skin. "It's beautiful."

"Thank you. I feel it is one of my better works. Are you interested in becoming a member of our society?"

"Um, no, actually."

"I'm sorry?" he asked.

"Ms. MacLean needs a crash course in all things trains," Corliss explained, again raising his voice.

Van Horn beamed a thin smile in her direction. "Then I would love to help. I have been the president of the Cleveland chapter for eleven years and will continue to be until my retirement, except in the very unlikely event of an upset in the coming election by the VP here." He waved a dismissive hand in Edward Corliss's direction. "You will not find anyone in the United States who knows more about railroad history than I do. How can I help you?"

Theresa smiled, the slow, sweet curve that her mother said made her look like the saint she'd been named for. Then she slipped her hand through her guide's tense arm and enunciated clearly: "Thank you, but Edward is taking quite good care of me."

The man switched his attention to Corliss, as if wondering how that could be, and Theresa left him to it as she and Corliss wandered toward the back rooms. Her companion seemed to step a little higher and ushered her into a book-filled room with a flourish.

The wooden floors did not give out a single creak. The lead-paned window let in the afternoon sunlight, its beams falling on a small table and three chairs. "This is our reference collection," Corliss explained. "We should be able to find the answer to any question you have in here. What are your questions, by the way?"

"I'm still working on that. This case has-had-so many details that it's impossible to make them all fit one scenario. The killer did many things that made no sense."

"Like what?"

"Like why did he dismember some corpses and only behead others? Why did he throw some in the river and leave others where they were sure to be found? Why kill both men and women?"

"That's unique?"

"Relatively unusual, yes. Though the Night Stalker in California was all over the board like that, too, with different genders, ages, socioeconomic statuses." She paused in front of a large, framed map, with lines to ill.u.s.trate the track system for the northeastern United States. "This is my biggest question, though. New Castle, Pennsylvania."

Corliss joined her at the map. "What about it?"

"Before, during, and after the Torso killings in Cleveland, bodies showed up in a swamp in New Castle, Pennsylvania. At least eleven were killed between 1923 and 1941."

Her companion said nothing, and Theresa glanced at him. At times she forgot that not everyone could discuss violent death as casually as she had become accustomed to doing. But he seemed perplexed, not horrified, and asked: "Are you allowed to tell me these things?"

She burst out laughing. "It's a seventy-six-year-old case, one that's been extensively studied. I'm not saying anything-h.e.l.l, I don't know anything-that you couldn't find in a library book. It can't even really be considered an open investigation...more of an intellectual exercise." He nodded, a bit reluctantly, and she went on. "I surfed the Internet a bit this week and found that New Castle is a major railroad hub-then and now. Most of the Cleveland victims were a.s.sumed to be transients, hobos. Many were found near the tracks. Three of the New Castle dead were actually found in an unused boxcar. Another one had been left by the rails."

"And you think the Torso killer picked his victims from trains?"

"I think the killer came from the trains."

CHAPTER 25.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9.

PRESENT DAY.

Corliss turned to her as if she had uttered a mild blasphemy. "A railroad employee?"

"Specifically, an employee who worked in both Cleveland and New Castle, Pennsylvania. Would there be any way to get a list of such employees?"

His expression changed from consternation to shock. "At this point in time? I doubt any company would still have records. On top of that, there are so many jobs surrounding a railroad. Especially at that time-unskilled labor might be hired for only a day or two, for peak season or a special cleanup job. Sweeping the station or loading, tasks like that would be given out on a piecemeal basis. Then you might have skilled labor called in for some particular electrical or welding job so that you'd have men working here who weren't officially employed by the railroad."

"Like a contract employee."

"Exactly. Though that wouldn't be often. You might also have men who would be laid off from one railway and picked up by another, so they might have had steady work in the area, but with a variety of companies. On top of that, so many of those railway companies don't exist today...in fact practically none of them do. Somewhere in here we have a list of defunct U.S. railroad companies, and there's at least two thousand. Around the turn of the century they all began to merge and combine until now there's CSX and Norfolk Southern and a few others."

She sighed. "Impossible, in other words."

"Pretty much, yes." He seemed disappointed to have disappointed her.

"Let's go at it this way. What sort of job would a man have with the railroad that would entail traveling back and forth between New Castle, Pennsylvania, and Cleveland?"

He sat down at the table, resting his chin in one hand. "Brakeman, fireman, the engineer. Railroad police-the b.u.ms called them bulls."

"Bulls." James had included that word in his list, right under another notation about the railroad.

"Conductor-they had conductors on freight trains, too, not just the pa.s.senger rails. If you're talking a pa.s.senger train with dining and sleeping cars, then you have porters, maids, cooks, waiters, and bartenders."

She sank into a chair across from him. "On every train?"

"Every train." He gave her a rueful smile. "Your next question will be which trains ran between New Castle and Cleveland, right?"

"Right."

"Hundreds. Freight, pa.s.sengers...even by 1935 there would have been cars belonging to fifty different companies. That's why the Terminal Tower was originally called Union Terminal-a union station mean that the trains were not all from the same railroad. Anyway, yes, New Castle was a hub. Railways from all the eastern states went through there."

"How many originated in New Castle? I mean, were there any railroads that ran only from New Castle to Cleveland and back again?"

"I'll see if I can find some references, but it's not likely that records would exist on a company that small. Most railways went at least to Pittsburgh, beyond New Castle, like the Alliance and Northern and the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie. But there's something else."

She looked into his blue eyes and waited.

"Railway workers weren't like stewardesses or business travelers; more like commuters. A conductor or brakeman might have made the run to New Castle on a daily basis, but they didn't stay there overnight or over the weekend or anything like that. The train would be there long enough to unload and load back up and then they'd be heading back to Cleveland. For example, one of the many jobs my father had was brakeman on the Trenton branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad. He went across Pennsylvania every day, from Glenloch to Morrisville and back again, and would still be home in time for dinner."

Her shoulders sank as she saw what he meant. No time for a Cleveland worker to be hanging out in New Castle killing people. "They didn't have layovers?"

"Only as long as it took to unload and load, which could be hours, sure. But the workers had to work, not sit around idle."

She tried another theory. "What about railroad employees who didn't work on the moving trains?"

"Sure...the yardmaster, who controlled which cars were coupled to which trains...baggage handlers, station agents, an operator to work the telegraph. Section hands-those were the men who maintained the tracks. A dispatcher, mechanics, and welders."

"Could a worker hitch a ride on the company's train, like sort of a professional courtesy? Like I'm guessing pilots could let flight attendants hop a ride from one city to another if the plane had an empty seat...at least before 9/11."

"I don't really know, but I'm sure they did. Depending on whom you were buddies with, you could probably ride in the coal car or even the engine or just an empty seat. That would be easier on a train than any other form of transport because there are so many areas available. The engineer and fireman are all the way at the front of the train and the brakeman and conductor are in the very last car, the caboose. A person hitching a ride probably wouldn't even have to work for that particular railway company...as you said, a professional courtesy. Especially for the higher-up positions in the company. But it would have to be someone who fit that criterion, not just some pal who didn't want to pay for a ticket. It would have been too easy to lose a job over something like that, and especially in the 1930s..."

"People couldn't afford to lose their jobs."

"Exactly."

They were silent for a moment, contemplating the various possibilities, as her optimism dispersed like dust motes in the sunlight. Narrowing the cast of suspects to one industry had not helped, not in an industry as extensive and varied as railroads.

Corliss put both his hands on the table, fingers loosely interlaced. "Then there could be employees who didn't even work for the railroad. Mail cars had postal employees aboard each one, because they would spend the trip sorting the mail."

She found that interesting. "Mult.i.tasking."

"Exactly. So perhaps your killer did not work for the railroad but rode it?"

"And stayed overnight?"

"The mail carriers would not have, true, but traveling salesmen were common at the time. I'm sure business travel did not occur as often then as now, particularly during the Depression, but surely larger companies with offices in different cities sent employees back and forth."

"So I need to find an organization that had branches in both Cleveland and New Castle."

"One that still has employee records from seventy-five years ago."

Now she rested her chin on one hand, s.h.i.+fting her bottom on the hard wooden chair. Every cop in the city had worked on the Torso killings when they occurred. Surely many of them had to have had the same ideas she did, back when all the corroborating information could be easily obtained. Yet they had not found the killer, so how on earth could she? Especially from three-quarters of a century away?

Not that she would rest until she'd exhausted every possibility, of course. When you started something, you finished it. Her grandfather had been very clear on that.

"You think it's my father, don't you?"

She blinked in surprise, having hoped this conclusion would escape his notice. Then she would not have to feel guilty about picking his brain while placing his ancestor near the top of her short list of suspects. But Arthur Corliss had spent his life in the rail yards and a dead cop had been found in his building, and his son was not a stupid man.

"Not necessarily. He owned 4950 Pullman, and he owned the railroad. But as you've just pointed out, so many people and professions interacted daily with the train system without being part of it. Then there were the other tenants in your father's building, who could fit our criteria. Maybe that firm of architects had a branch in New Castle-after all, who better than architects to build a secret room into their office-or perhaps it's as simple as the fact that one of them grew up in Pennsylvania and went back now and then to visit."