Trail Of Blood Part 28

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 s.h.i.+ft ended, so that she could remain on duty and get the overtime, important since her husband had lost his job at a GM dealers.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+ft 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, a.s.signed 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 sh.e.l.l 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, m.u.f.fled crackle every so often. When the wind picked up, entering through the southwest holes where windows used to be and blowing out the northeast s.p.a.ces 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 ma.s.sive 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 b.i.t.c.h, 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 h.e.l.l 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 gra.s.s 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.

So as she watched the valley around her she tried to recall which side of the graph was x and which was y, and what went over what to get the slope. She did not lean against the concrete column, having more concern for her clothing than Frank had for his.

The female officer in the trees heard voices to her right. Two or maybe three men were having a discussion in the middle of Berwick Road. So far it sounded friendly.

The male officer waiting on the Fifty-fifth Street bridge returned to his car for his raincoat. It said police on the back, but he wasn't getting soaked to the skin for n.o.body. It took only wetness to change the cool of the fall evening from brisk to miserable, and cop work didn't pay enough to cover miserable.

The officer hunched by the building at 4950 Pullman, protected from the rain but still feeling its chill and, he hoped, invisible in the shadow of the stone wall. The wind's faint moan raised the hairs on the back of his neck. Give me a matter-of-fact drug bust any day, he prayed, Heat instead of Friday the 13th, Ed McBain instead of Anne Rice. He tried to rewrite the evening in his head, turning it into a funny story to tell his wife over breakfast, but nothing amusing came to mind.

Frank saw a woman emerge from the station and make a beeline for the north edge of the parking lot. He hoped it would not be Theresa but felt sure it would be.

She did not run or shout or use the radio. He pushed himself off the column and moved to the next one, took a careful look around it, and continued on to meet her at the edge of the lot. If the killer noticed her at all, perhaps he would see only an RTA employee going to her car.

He met her between a battered pickup truck and a s.h.i.+ny new Cobalt. "What are you doing?"

"Sorry. I got scared." She explained her fear that the next victim could be a cop. "It would be enormously appealing to him, to thumb his nose at us at the same time he continues his pattern. Not to mention the fact that if he knocks a hole in our perimeter, how much more does that increase his chances of getting away?"

"I see that, but my cops have enough on the ball to keep anyone from coming up behind them. Go back inside."

"I'd rather stay with you."

"Don't be dumb. This is a stakeout. I didn't bring you along just to have someone to chat with."

The rain picked up a bit and reached her scalp. "What about Angela? She's all bundled up with the Kevlar vest and sweats.h.i.+rts-what if he doesn't get a good look at her, doesn't realize she's a woman?"

"What if he sees you running up to people all night and decides to dump tonight's body someplace else? Do you have any idea how stupid you and I are going to look?"

"He won't. He can't. Besides, is that the most important thing? How you look?"

"Yes. Yes, it is, because the next time I try to tell them a killer is on his way, no one is going to listen. Understand?"

"Yeah, yeah. Oh, and Greer is here."

"What? Why?"

"To make sure we do our jobs and protect the citizens of Cleveland, etc., ad nauseam. Meaning he sensed a photo op but the idea of meeting a killer turned him pale and sweaty. He's inside with the RTA staff and the coffee machine."

"Good. All the more reason not to blow this. Go back inside. If you have to contact me again use the cell. I have it on vibrate."

She thought, chewed the inside of her lip, and finally nodded her a.s.sent. But she didn't move, painfully reluctant to let her cousin out of her sight.

The train coming from the east continued to rumble and the track next to them began to vibrate. The 9:17 rapid appeared from the west. Frank crossed the closest set of tracks, staying within a line of deep shadow provided by a bridge column. Rain acc.u.mulated in Theresa MacLean's hair until it overflowed to the back of her neck, and she said "Frank!" in a fierce stage whisper.

He turned, only eight or ten feet away. "What?"

"About our grandfather-"

"Not now, Tess!" he hissed, and walked away, no doubt trying to stalk as un.o.btrusively as possible.

His cousin watched him. Theresa knew what they had at stake this evening, but all the killers in the world weren't more important than her family.

"He loved you," she said. He couldn't possibly hear her, not with the rapid transit roaring into the station behind her and the other train bearing down on him, the driver blowing his horn, no doubt wondering why RTA couldn't keep its pa.s.sengers from wandering all over the valley.

Frank turned anyway, clearly visible in the bright headlamp of the train, and looked back at her just before the train pa.s.sed between them, cutting him off from her sight. Theresa put one hand on the battered pickup to steady herself in the roiled air as the train rocketed through the night.

"I love you," she said.

Thirteen or so cars pa.s.sed, revealing an empty valley. Theresa told herself that Frank had gone back to his place of concealment under the bridge, and not to be an idiot, of course the train didn't hit him and the killer didn't kill him. Now, how to get back inside the station without being too obvious about it, and before she got soaked to the skin?

The 9:17 departed while yet another train approached from the east, a short thing of only four cars. She let the rain pelt her head for another moment while she watched it flow up the tracks. Its driver, too, let out a short toot on the horn, a habit or perhaps a requirement with the busy rapid station nearby.

He had liked this area, the Torso killer, needing the trains to travel back and forth between Cleveland and New Castle and to troll Kingsbury Run for victims, but not only for those reasons. He came there because he felt comfortable there. It was home to him.

She crouched between the cars and opened her cell phone, practically burying her head in her lap in order to m.u.f.fle her voice and protect her phone from the rain.

A man's voice answered. "h.e.l.lo?"

"Mr. Corliss?"

"Ms. MacLean! It's nice to hear from you again."

"I'm sorry to bother you."

"Not at all. I'm just putting the boat away. It's a bit too windy for an evening sail."

She could hear the erratic humming of the breeze behind his voice. "I have a quick question that I should have asked you earlier. The two railroads operating in Kingsbury Run-the Nickel Plate and the New York Central-did they go to New Castle?"

"Sure," he said promptly. "Both of them. As I said, it was a hub. They'd stop for the Northern Ohio food terminal on Orange Avenue. It's the post office building now."

She stared at the track in front of her, wondering how that bit of information helped her.

A faint light shone on the tracks in front of her, growing in strength, and she felt the now-familiar rumbling. "I have to go, but thank you."

The clacking of the wheels grew in volume. "Theresa," Edward Corliss said, "are you near a train?"

"Yes. I'll tell you about it later."

"Just be careful," he said emphatically, and hung up. She had to grin. No doubt he thought letting nontrain people in a train yard sharply akin to allowing children to play in traffic. But she had no intention of wandering onto the tracks.

Cleveland to New Castle. Trains. She straightened, cautiously, and watched this new row of cars appear from the west. She knew she should get back inside before her hovering spooked the killer, but she found herself lost in the physics of the sight. Trains were large and heavy, unable to operate without their tracks. Very heavy. The phrase "stopping in its tracks" was not accurate; a train couldn't just stop. They acc.u.mulated too much force behind them.

Momentum. Ma.s.s times velocity. Trains had a great deal of ma.s.s, and the velocity could get impressive.

A rapid transit car, basically a hollow aluminum tube, had much more stopping power because it had less weight. A shorter train could stop faster than a longer one. That train that had just pa.s.sed, the one with four cars, would be able to throw on its brakes much more effectively than this longer one now approaching.

So if you wanted to get away, pick a long train. Even if the cops flagged down the engineer or got the dispatch center to call him, even if he threw on every stopping mechanism he had, the train would still be a mile away before it came to a halt, before the police could swarm it. By which time you would have jumped off at any point in the stopping process, preferably by a main road where you could catch a cab or a bus, or, if you appreciate irony, the rapid transit. Though a rapid transit station could have cameras. For real irony, how about another train?

But how to murder the victim there at the scene? Forgo that detail? Or jump off the train from the front, decapitate the (presumably incapacitated) victim, then hop back on one of the rear cars? Difficult, but possible. a.s.suming the train moves slowly enough. And is really long. Like this one.

Obeying an instinct she did not truly understand, she burst into a run and sprinted across two sets of tracks with at least four seconds to spare. It only felt like less. The driver let out an annoyed blast from the horn, not caring to cut it close any more than she did. The earsplitting sound proved so startling that it shoved into her with physical force until she stumbled over the third set of tracks and wound up stretched across them like the hapless heroine of a silent movie.

Scrambling to her feet, she moved to a tiny strip of gra.s.s and scanned the other tracks for oncoming cars. Nothing. The rain pelted, let up, and pelted again, its dynamics affected by the push and suctioning of the pa.s.sing cars and the gaps in between each one as they rushed by her. The large boxes alternately blocked and allowed the bright lighting of the RTA station to pa.s.s through, and some cars had lights. This inconsistency ruined any night vision, effectively blinding her. She turned away, looking up and down the ten-foot-wide sliver of dirt and spa.r.s.e weeds that ran along the tracks under the bridge.

She thought the killer should leave the corpse near the bridge, but that seemed too risky. If the cops were present-and, unless completely insane, he would a.s.sume they were present-that's where they would hide. He would pick a new spot, farther east or west of the bridge, where he could do his grisly work and be gone before they discovered it.

Theresa moved under the bridge, better hidden by its deep shadow. Frank would be poised on the other side of the next pylon. She knew she shouldn't move around, yet they had too much ground to cover and too much of it became hidden as trains pa.s.sed by.

Under the bridge, to the west, stood a low structure, probably an abandoned platform. She crept closer to it. The train continued to rumble by.

The original killer had not only murdered this victim at the scene, but he had left the head and the body in two different places-only a thousand feet apart, but far enough that the body had not been discovered until the following day. What would today's killer do about that? Ignore it? Jump off, decapitate, leave the body, and jump back on the train with the head, then toss that out farther up the line?

That would work, actually. The body had been found near the bridge, with the head found between the bridge and Kinsman Road to the east. Her thighs ached but she moved a few more feet along the platform in a low crouch, keeping her head below its surface. The rain had penetrated her cloth jacket and reached her skin, and this, she told herself, caused her trembling.

Movement.

At the west end of the abandoned platform, a flicker of darker against dark. An animal? A bush blasted with violent air from the pa.s.sing train? A cop, wondering who the h.e.l.l she was? Maybe lining up his sights right now?

Another step. Definitely movement.

She crept forward, feeling, curiously, no fear. The killer would not harm her; she was not male and killing her would ruin the authenticity of the scene.

But then, Peggy Hall should have been a heavyset sometime prost.i.tute over forty. Perhaps authenticity was not his top priority.

She moved faster. She thought she could hear the rustling of his movements now, but that could not be possible, not over the roar of the train. It was probably Frank, and they'd scare the bejeebers out of each other like they did as kids playing Spotlight in Uncle Glenn's bas.e.m.e.nt.

He appeared. A tall bundle of raincoat and hat and nothing where a face should be. He was not Frank, nor any other cop. Some sort of black mesh hid his features and he held a bundle in his arms. She knew exactly what that had to be.

He stood completely still for a moment, watching the train pa.s.s. She did not move-she couldn't-and yet his head snapped to her direction as if she'd jumped up and down.

Now she felt fear. Paralyzing, gut-twisting fear that squeezed every molecule of air out of her lungs.

He leapt toward the tracks and neatly caught the rungs protruding from one side of a boxcar, pulling his body up with much more feline grace than either she or Edward Corliss would be able to command. He melded with the train car as if he were part of it, mercury joining back into mercury with one hand, the other still clutching the bundle.

Her legs carried her forward before she knew it, as he pa.s.sed on her left, until she reached the end of the platform. A body lay splayed across the dirt and weeds, with no clothing, and no head.

She turned and launched herself toward the train. He had done it.

She could, too.

Another car rushed by her in a dizzying blur. This next one-see the rungs? The weak streetlights shone down from the bridge and glinted off each metal protrusion. Grab, pull. Just make sure your feet come up and don't swing into the wheels, to be chopped off at the ankles and pulverized.

She reached out a hand.

It collided with a rung hard enough to break bone, and she stumbled, landing on the gravel shoulder only inches from the clacking metal wheels.

She looked ahead. The killer watched her from only three cars up, hanging easily off the side and facing back toward her, so the train could not be moving that fast. It was just the momentum. Ma.s.s times volume.

"Frank!" she shrieked, in a presumably hopeless attempt to alert the officers, and bounded up and along the side of the cars. That's how they did it in the movies, lessen the difference between the train's speed and yours.

It still outpaced her. She would have to grab the rungs of the next car.

It did occur to her to wonder what she would do if she caught it. She had no way of moving forward on the train toward the killer-unlike a pa.s.senger train, this one would have no pa.s.s-throughs between cars-but at least she could see where he jumped off. She could jump as well, pursue him, though once out of the crime scene he need have no qualms about ruining the effect by tacking on an extra murder.

But she had to catch the d.a.m.n thing first.

She vaguely registered a sound that might have been Frank calling her name and hoped it was. The end of this car, the coupling between them, reach out and- The killer pitched his bundle, tossing it underhand as one might abandon a basketball once the game ended. It landed in the narrowing strip of gra.s.s, directly in her path. If she didn't stop running she might step on it.

Her right hand connected with the rung. It hurt slightly less than the other one had. Then her right foot slid in the loose gravel and she went down, instinctively curling into a ball to keep all fingers and toes and arms and extremities off the tracks and out of the blender of moving parts underneath the train cars.

Her body came to a stop with her face in the gravel and her knees only an inch or so from the rails, but without losing any bits of itself.

She opened her eyes to find someone else returning her look, but with the unwavering, unseeing gaze of the dead. The killer had thrown the head, wrapped loosely in a pair of pants, just as she had expected him to do, just as the original Torso killer had prescribed.

He still watched her from up the tracks, receding farther into the east with every split second, the train picking up speed as it moved out of the more populated downtown area. Could he see her reaction from there, or did he simply enjoy letting his gaze linger on the tableau he'd created?

Frank caught up with her. "Tess. I saw you fall, are you hurt? What the h.e.l.l were you doing?"

"He did it. Surrounded by cops, he still did it."

Frank clicked on his flashlight to see the head, though it was clearly visible in the parking lot lights strobing through the pa.s.sing cars. He opened his mouth but apparently couldn't think of a profanity bad enough to express his thoughts and pulled out the radio instead. He'd arranged for a link to the downtown train yard dispatch center and now asked them to tell the driver to stop the train, though they both knew that when he did, the killer would be long gone.

"He did it," Theresa repeated.

"d.a.m.n," Frank said.

CHAPTER 37.