Trail Of Blood Part 31

Jablonski peered at her. "Greer."

"Uh-oh."

"What?" Chris asked. "Greer who?"

Theresa said, "As in Councilman Greer. The councilman who's so hot on having 4950 Pullman razed to the ground."

"Maybe to cover up an old family secret." Jablonski nodded his head and topped it off by swigging champagne with a theatrical flourish, though he ruined the effect by coughing afterward.

"And maybe," Theresa said, "Greer is simply a common name. We haven't come across anyone named Greer in connection to the building."

"Other than the councilman."

"He just wants to collect his fee for building the recycling plant." His fear at the crime scene had been real, and he couldn't possibly have gotten from the RTA station onto that train with the victim in time to encounter her by the tracks. Not possibly..."Did you see him there?"

Jablonski drained his gla.s.s. "Who?"

She explained her encounter with the councilman.

"He wasn't in the crowd outside the tape when I arrived," Jablonski said insistently. "I milled through everyone present, trying to get tidbits and reactions. If he'd been there I would have interviewed him."

No, she thought, impossible. "Feel free to work on that angle, Jablonski, because my boss is already unhappy with me for getting on Greer's sh-um, list."

"But it would make sense, wouldn't it? Everyone always said the killer came from a wealthy family that covered up any clues to his guilt, and those politico types have usually been in that line of work for generations-"

"Everyone also said he had to have had medical training in order to dismember his victims, and I'm not one hundred percent down with that theory, either. People said a lot of things. They always do in unsolved cases."

"But-"

The door to the garage opened suddenly, letting in the crisp fall air and Rachael, who carried a stack of books, a purse in the shape of h.e.l.lo Kitty, a backpack, a bottle of water, and a duffel bag approximately as large as her torso slung across her back. "Hi, Mom. I wondered whose car that was-"

"Honey!"

Harry barked in excitement. Even the cat leapt from Jablonski's lap in welcome.

And then her daughter, who had apparently not been murdered, been raped, flunked out, or been found dead in a ditch somewhere after a bad car accident, was in Theresa's arms. "Did Tonya give you a ride? Are you hungry? Did you eat dinner? How are your cla.s.ses? Do you like your teachers? What about your roommate?"

"I see you have company," Rachael said as she allowed her mother to divest her of the heavy accoutrements. "Are you celebrating your birthday?"

"Hi, Rachael," Chris Cavanaugh said, shooting a triumphant look at Jablonski.

"Hi, Chris."

The duffel bag thudded to the floor. "No, we were talking about a case. You know Chris, and this is Brandon Jablonski, he's a newspaper researcher. Thank you for the information, Mr. Jablonski, but you both have to leave now."

The young man didn't notice Chris's smugness or Theresa's hint, too busy taking in every inch of Theresa's daughter until his mouth gaped open a bit. "Wow."

"Especially you," Theresa added.

CHAPTER 39.

SAt.u.r.dAY, SEPTEMBER 11.

PRESENT DAY.

Theresa bustled off to work bright and early on Sat.u.r.day morning, intending to finish her examination of William Van Horn and his b.l.o.o.d.y clothing and get home before Rachael rolled out of bed. A month at college and still in teenager mode-without any cla.s.ses to attend, her daughter would not rise before lunchtime.

A stern look combined with a mental pat on the head for his good work in New Castle had gotten Jablonski to shuffle out of her home without much difficulty, though she locked every door and window behind him. Chris Cavanaugh left only after a firm and excellent kiss in her cold garage, so that she went to bed flush with happiness, flattered at his continued (though sporadic) interest-always date interesting men-but mostly glad that her daughter had returned home safely and voluntarily.

Even the half-rotten-groceries smell that had long since permeated every ceramic tile in the old building seemed to greet her like a close friend as she waved to the deskman and plucked Van Horn's ripped pants and s.h.i.+rt from the drying rack. She poked her head into the autopsy room, where Christine Johnson met her with a baleful expression and asked, "Do I have you to thank for this?"

"Yeah, I thought it might save you some time if I started cutting at the scene."

The pretty doctor laughed, then contradicted that by saying: "You are so not funny, missy. I heard you met him the day before he turned up like this. Is that true?"

Theresa said yes. It still felt odd to her. She felt as if she should call Edward Corliss to express her condolences but didn't know quite what to say. I'm sorry the friend you introduced me to was murdered by a modern-day Torso killer. Which wouldn't be you, would it, by the way?

She gathered what information she could from Christine and then went into the amphitheater to spread out the khaki pants. The pair of Burberrys was torn at the back; the pants found with one of the original victims, known only as the Tattooed Man, had also been described as ripped in the back. As in 1936, a white men's handkerchief nestled in the rear pocket. She put that aside without unfolding it.

After noting the size, condition, staining, and label of the pants, she got out the 3M packaging tape and eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets of clear acetate paper and "taped" the front and back, inside and out, for hairs and fibers. As always, even a clean-looking piece of clothing gave up a myriad of loose trace evidence. A few black fibers, pieces of dead gra.s.s, and a dog hair.

She folded the pants-stiffened with blood-loosely and stuffed them into a paper bag. On a fresh, smaller piece of paper, she unfolded the clean handkerchief that had been found in the back pocket. A single bloodstain marred its snow-white material. She opened it carefully, with a magnifying lamp hovering above. She taped both sides and smoothed the tape onto the acetate, then moved the handkerchief to its own brown bag.

The tapings showed only minute particles of lint, except for one dark fiber and three white specks. They seemed to be round and flat. She would have to run them through the FTIR to be sure, but they seemed very similar to the ones found on Kim Hammond.

Theresa covered the table with a fresh piece of brown paper from the large roll mounted at the end and repeated the process with the s.h.i.+rt. The s.h.i.+rt did not offer any new insights, only a few splotches of blood, most likely transfer from the severed head. No particular staining on the shoulders, which supported her theory that the clothing had been removed prior to the decapitation.

When she had finished taping the s.h.i.+rt, she covered the table with yet another fresh piece of paper and placed the s.h.i.+rt on the upper half and the pants on the lower half, both facing upward. Then she pulled out the loafers and held them in her hands. Dirt, dead gra.s.s, and a few pieces of fine gravel had been wedged into the treads.

Frank appeared in the doorway. "Mornin', cuz. I finished your birthday cake for breakfast. Hope you don't mind."

"Not at all-what, you stayed at your mother's last night?"

"I don't know about stayed. Stopped in for a shower and a change of clothes."

Theresa felt guilty. She should have spent a sleepless night working on the case, too, but motherhood had interfered. "But why-"

"A certain young lady didn't take our breakup well and tends to call and pound on my door at odd hours. It's not worth changing my number-she'll get over it before long."

"Frank." Sometimes she wondered where his restlessness came from. No one else in the family was like that. He hadn't learned it from his father-whatever bad habits his father may have had, philandering wasn't one of them. Theresa sighed and didn't bother to tell him that it was high time he grew up and started dating nice, sensible women like Angela Sanchez. The tone of her one word said it all.

He ignored both her tone and her meaning. "What do we have so far?"

"Christine said his coronary arteries would have taken him out in a few more years if someone hadn't cut his head off."

"Is he missing any sections of neck, by the way?"

"Nope. Both halves fit perfectly. Christine also thinks there's a blunt force injury on the back of the head, and no defensive wounds. Not even a bruise."

"So the killer got up close without much difficulty. Like it was someone he knew."

"He seemed a bit hard of hearing when I met him. It might not have been difficult to sneak up on him. So then the killer takes him to the train, undresses him en route, and jumps off for the decapitation."

"Why undress him on the train? How do you know that?"

"Because there's no staining on the s.h.i.+rt that would indicate he had it on at the time of the decapitation, no staining on the shoulders. It seemed to me there should have been more blood at the scene, so maybe he killed Van Horn by slitting his throat somewhere else, but there's no spray or flow down the front of his s.h.i.+rt. No, he undressed him first to save time, then killed him at the scene because that's how the Torso killer did it. He brought a live victim to that valley, just to slaughter him right at our feet."

"Don't take this personally, Tess."

She looked at him as if he'd begun speaking Swahili. "How am I not supposed to take this personally? Aren't you?"

He didn't confess what she knew he believed-It's different for me, I'm a cop-and instead asked, "Did you get any sleep last night?"

"Did you?" she shot back. "What about his house?"

"s.h.i.+pshape and b.u.t.toned up. The man was a neat freak of the highest caliber, and you were right, he had pretty much no life at all outside the preservation society. His datebook had their official doings written in for the next six months and nothing else. No lunch dates, no business meetings. Not even a doctor's appointment."

"Unless he kept two. One for society business, and another for personal appointments."

"Good thought, cuz. But we didn't find a second one and no sign of someone else rifling through his possessions. Besides, the landlady confirmed his loner status. Their lobby is locked and only residents can enter. Of course someone could have buzzed in a delivery boy or the killer could have ducked in behind a tenant. Sanchez has a couple of uniformed guys and they're canva.s.sing the neighbors now. And the scene is still secure-we had to let the rapids start up again, but aside from that-so you can see it in the daylight. Though the two on duty there were going to do a second search as soon as the sun came up."

"Then I don't really need to go, do I?"

He raised one eyebrow. "Do you?"

"I can't see why," she thought out loud, trying to convince herself more than him, or perhaps the ghost of their dead grandfather. Family vs. job she could decide easily. But family vs. family? "I won't see anything the cops won't. I don't have X-ray vision."

"No. But you met the victim."

With a sinking feeling she knew that to be true. She might see the significance in an item the cop with no knowledge of William Van Horn's personality or habits might dismiss. What little she knew about the man was still more than nothing. "All right. I'll go there on my way home."

"Besides, what else do you have to do?"

As she taped the unremarkable turquoise s.h.i.+rt she told him Rachael had come home for the weekend in honor of her birthday. Frank sympathized but did not discourage her from revisiting the crime scene. The department did not waste two cops guarding a hunk of land lightly.

"How does it feel to be over the hill?"

"Terrific. Just great. Two new wrinkles just this morning." Theresa sealed all the bags of clothing with red tape, scribbled her initials, and locked them all in the storage room in record time. Then she collected her sheets of acetate and written report and nudged her cousin, who dozed in one of the many seats in the old amphitheater. "Why don't you go home and get some sleep?" she told him. "I'll call you if I find anything significant."

"I was hoping you'd have some coffee. Then I have to start interviewing Van Horn's acquaintances, if Sanchez finds any worth talking to."

"Come along, then, and we'll forge an a.s.sault on the Braun." They trudged up the three flights of stairs to the trace evidence lab.

Peace and quiet reigned there. Usually Theresa enjoyed her a.s.signed Sat.u.r.day mornings at the lab-giving up part of the weekend was worth it for the uninterrupted time. But this Sat.u.r.day she would have preferred to be at home, planning breakfast.

The fibers trapped in the tape's adhesive appeared to be the usual conglomeration of debris every person carried around with them: lint, khaki-colored and turquoise-colored fibers almost certainly from the clothing items themselves (though she would confirm that), and pieces of vegetation. But she also found a black fiber on the trousers and made a mental bet that it would match the fibers found on Richard Dunlop, one of the two men from the side of the hill, and the fiber from the bottom of the crate that held the body parts of Peggy Hall. She cleaned this new fiber with xylene to remove all traces of the tape's adhesive and folded it into a piece of gla.s.sine paper to wait for the FTIR. She cleaned the yellow dog hair and mounted that on a gla.s.s slide. Organic materials-like hairs and natural fibers-were not uniform enough to yield a reliable spectrum on the FTIR. She would have to do a microscopic examination on the hair, and should they find a dog to compare, the root could be tested for the animal's DNA.

The front of the s.h.i.+rt had not yielded much. But the back of it gave her another dog hair and other animal hairs, too fine and black to belong to the yellow dog, and also a number of white cotton fibers. Terrific. The killer had worn the one fiber so ubiquitous in the world it was considered to have no forensic value whatsoever. White cotton also had other advantages. Any bloodstains would be easy to bleach from white cotton, at least to the point where DNA would be unusable. As a natural fiber it would burn clean, if he chose to go that route, and not leave the gloppy mess that synthetic fibers could. He could bury it and the fibers would disintegrate completely within a few years, provided the killer felt comfortable waiting that long.

The soles of the shoes had two blue, trilobal fibers, and as her cousin returned with a steaming cup she asked him how Van Horn's apartment had been decorated.

"Heavy, ugly curtains; a decent leather sofa; and blue carpeting that should have been replaced twenty years ago."

"I'll need a sample of that."

"Gotcha." He yawned and propped his feet up on the edge of her worktable. If she didn't know better, she might have thought her cousin was now waiting around to talk about their respective relations.h.i.+ps with their grandfather and any inequities in same. But she knew better. Frank never talked about his feelings. Frank didn't admit he even had feelings.

She didn't do much of that herself.

No, he hung around for the coffee and a few moments of peace, period.

"Did he have any pets?" she asked.

"Van Horn? Not so much as a goldfish. No animal lover he-except for birds, he had pictures of birds, but nothing live. I expect he didn't want the place messed up."

One of the white specks from the handkerchief flattened easily and stuck to the salt window after only a few seconds of fiddling. Once the stage had been moved so that the light beam could pa.s.s through the material, the spectrum popped up on the computer screen. Polyethylene and some t.i.tanium dioxide to make it extra white. But why the shape?

Frank sniffed the air. "I smell something musty. Is the stuff from the dead cop up here?"

Theresa allowed that James Miller's notebook lay humidifying in the fume hood. Frank's curiosity must have overcome his weariness because he wandered over to the hood and switched on the light.

Theresa called up the spectrum for the white flecks she had found on Kim. No surprise there. "Hey," she said.

"Hey!" Frank said.

"The white flecks I found on Kim Hammond are identical to the white flecks I found in Van Horn's handkerchief."

"This notebook has the same handwriting as the one in Kim Hammond's apartment."

They stared at each other over the top of her microscope. "What?"

"What?"