Trail of Blood Page 10

  She crossed her legs. “Who else besides the McKennas?”

  Quicker to get the scissors himself. He sliced through a mere four sets of stitches at the bottom of the liner, figuring he could explain it to the Bertillon unit when he turned it over to them. James also figured he’d better address Helen’s latest gambit before she invited half the neighborhood. “I’m not sure we can afford new dishes. I’m not sure we can afford spaghetti.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “Can you hold this up? By the shoulders, like this. I need to work out whatever’s in the lining.” He hoped any future newspaper accounts would not mention this coat. If Helen ever found out what she’d put her hands on, they’d have another murder to investigate—his own.

  She took her time about it but helped him suspend the coat over the kitchen table. He shook the lining and worked one side of the coat’s layers toward the tiny opening he’d created. Along with the lint and grains of dirt, a penny and two pills fell out. “I know it’s hard for you to stretch this household as far as you do, honey. But the whole country’s in a depression.”

  “We don’t have to be. You choose to.”

  He started on the other side of the coat instead of responding. His fingers worked out the stick, and that’s all it was, a thin twig from some kind of plant. Why would a guy have something like that in his pocket? But he had clover in the other one, so why not?

  “All I’m saying is, next time a butcher wants to give you a roast or a grocer offers you a sack of apples, take it. Just take it. If they want to give you gifts, who are you to turn them down?”

  He snorted, unable to ignore the terminology. “Gifts? Is that what Walter’s wife calls them?”

  Helen dropped the coat onto the table and resumed her seat.

  The 1932 penny had a spot of tar on its reverse. The pills were different, both round and white, but one had an A stamped into it and a slightly larger diameter. “What are these?”

  “How should I know?” Helen leaned forward to glance at them. “Aspirin? Ask a pharmacist.”

  His breath whistled through his teeth in frustration. “They’ll be closed this time of night.”

  “Yes, they will. At least take it from the guys running numbers, or the—what d’ya call them, the bad men—pimps. At least take their ‘gift.’

  It will just go back into their business if you don’t.”

  “Well, that’s a handy bit of reasoning.”

  “You’d let your son starve for your pride?”

  They’d had this conversation so many times now that he wouldn’t have believed it could still wound him. “Of course not. But Johnny’s not starving, and it’s not just my pride.”

  “Then what is it? Don’t tell me you’re afraid of losing your job, James, because they can’t fire the whole force. You’re more likely to lose it because your superiors don’t trust you because you’re not like them.”

  Helen was not stupid.

  Maybe I am, James thought, unable to find the words to describe what he meant. “It’s not pride—it’s not only pride. It’s because if I’m like everyone else, if being a cop doesn’t stand for something but makes me just one more hustler in with all the other hustlers, then…what’s the point?”

  “Point? Your life has to have a point?”

  It sounded ridiculous the way she said it, and yet…“Yes. Doesn’t everyone’s?”

  She stared at him so long that he expected a burst of either tears or laughter. But in the end she merely stood up and walked out, taking her magazine with her, their inability to communicate intact.

  Helen had buried both her parents, left her family farm, and withstood the birth of Johnny with barely a whimper. She could handle adversity when she knew no alternative existed. But what James saw as integrity looked to her like a willful, purposeless deprivation. A seething anger had replaced any former admiration for him, but he didn’t know what to do about it. They had no one in the city to talk to except each other, and lately they couldn’t even do that.

  James warmed up the coffee and, not for the first time, wished he could afford a shot of bourbon in it. But if it meant depriving his wife of her Fiesta whatsits, then he could not indulge himself. He thought perhaps he should give in. What difference would one more corrupt cop make, in a city crawling with them?

  His gaze fell on the two pills, a more concrete topic than his marriage, and one with concrete answers. When did the drugstore open?

  CHAPTER 13

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8

  PRESENT DAY

  Theresa finished transcribing the notebook found in James Miller’s pocket, except for several pages too badly stuck together by decomposition fluid. He had definitely investigated some of the Torso killings. He had even sketched one of the crime scenes at Kingsbury Run, the area that used to be known as Jackass Hill, with two sad stick figures without heads to represent the victims. One had been labeled “A” for Edward Andrassy, she guessed, one of the few identified victims. The other had a question mark.

  In the margin, he’d noted, Don’t tell Helen.

  His wife? What couldn’t he tell her? And why?

  Not that there wasn’t a mountain of daily details Theresa had kept from her daughter, ex-husband, and mother over the years. Tiny facts that could not be gossiped about at the workplace or beauty salon because you never knew who talked to whom, and knowledge or lack of it could convict or exonerate a suspect. Or items that were simply too gruesome or disturbing to unleash upon those who weren’t trained to live among them. It could be a lonely line of work, always filtering one’s speech, always compartmentalizing one’s life for the protection of others.

  The infrared spectrometer gave a beep; it had finished searching its database for a spectrum like that from the two white flecks found on Kim Hammond. The specks had appeared to be nearly circular under the stereomicroscope, bright white and soft, like plastic. The Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer interpreted a transmission of light through the specks and produced a spectrum showing the functional groups present in its molecules. Polyethylene. Great. One of the most common polymers around.

  The lines wavered before her eyes and she yawned. Sleeping hadn’t been so easy in the past few years, especially since the incident at the Federal Reserve. Sometimes she could still feel the barrel of a gun grinding into her flesh—another thing she and James Miller had in common. But she had lived through her experience. James had not been as lucky.

  Her desk phone rang, and she bruised one shin getting around the FTIR in time to answer it.

  “Is this Theresa MacLean?” a woman demanded, her aged voice quavering a bit.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you investigating the Torso Murders?”

  How did this get past the switchboard? All calls had been routed to the police department, where they had more operators and were used to dealing with the cranks and the nuts and the people who simply wanted to chat about Cleveland’s colorful past. “I need to refer you to—”

  “I saw your name in the paper. I want to talk to you about who killed that man you found in the building on Pullman.”

  “You need to speak to the police.”

  “I’ve already spoken to the police. I’ve spoken to the police for the past eighty years and they’ve never done me a bit of good. I want to speak to you.”

  Eighty years? “I appreciate that, but I doubt I can help you—”

  “Never doubt, young lady. The world is just waiting for a sign of doubt to pin your feet to the floor and keep you in your place. I signed up to be an army nurse and spent the Second World War in the Pacific. Then I built an orphanage, walked along the Great Wall, knocked over a bank, and had three children. Never doubt.”

  “Okay,” Theresa said. “And you know something about who killed James Miller?”

  “I should.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he almost killed me, too.”

  She called Frank, who assured her that since the murder
had occurred seventy-four years previously she should feel free to investigate to her heart’s content and not worry about stepping on CPD toes, especially since his toes were currently following the trail of the murder that had occurred that week. “You want to go visit some old lady, go right ahead.”

  “Her name is Irene Schaffer Martin—but she was Irene Schaffer then, a young girl. If she can actually recall the players in that building—”

  “—and she’s not completely senile,” Frank added, “then sure, it could be helpful.”

  “I would think you’d be more interested in the murder of a fellow police officer.”

  “Notes made at the time suggest that my fellow police officer was up to his neck with a local boss named Harwood, and I’m not seeing anything to refute that.”

  “Did this Harwood make a habit of beheading his victims like the Torso killer?” she shot back.

  “Speaking of that,” he answered without answering, “the homicide unit received twenty-five phone calls just this morning from people whose great-grandpa or distant uncle or ex-neighbor told them who the Torso killer was. We even had one who said he was the Torso killer despite the fact that he wasn’t born until the late fifties. Recall also that the entire police force worked on this case for over a decade and got nowhere. The freakin’ untouchable Eliot Ness got nowhere. My own captain says he can’t decide if he’s assigning it to me as a reward or a punishment. Meanwhile I got a twenty-two-year-old with her head cut off, so excuse me if I find that a little more pressing, especially since nothing gets the media’s attention like the brutal murder of the young and nubile. So go ahead and talk to this lady, and if she’s got anything real or even plausible to say, I’ll come out and take a statement. Deal?”

  “All right.” Perhaps that would be best, anyway. The woman had been firm about not wanting the police, and given Frank’s mood, Theresa didn’t want him either.

  “Did you hear about—”

  “Speaking of James Miller,” she said at the same time, “did you get the ballistics back?”

  “They’ve got to work the rust out before they can do a test-fire. Say, you might want to check out that nursing home while you’re there. Now that you’ve passed over the hill.”

  “You’re farther down the other side than I am. And it’s a retirement community.” She placed the receiver in its cradle and enjoyed approximately ten seconds undisturbed by any male animal before Leo stood in front of her desk with a mass spec report and a cell phone, as if ready to dial up U.S. News & World Report at any moment. “What’s up?”

  “Um…nothing.”

  Better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, and better to check out Irene Schaffer before unleashing the hounds of gonzo journalism on her. Or Leo.

  Theresa went looking for Christine Johnson. She found the doctor in the autopsy room reserved for decomposed bodies—an odor-soaked room that could make grown men ill—snipping the fingers off James Miller’s desiccated body. Theresa averted her eyes. “I hate it when you do that.”

  “Cleveland PD wants ’em.” The doctor brought the handles of the pruning shears together, the snap sound identical to the sound of a small branch breaking. “They think if they work with the skin enough they can tease out a positive ID with prints. Apparently all cops were fingerprinted, even back then. Good luck to them, I say—these suckers are dry.”

  Of course merely finding James Miller’s gun and badge on the corpse would not be sufficient identification. But the man being made to suffer this final indignity overwhelmed her. She tried to focus on an empty latex glove box on the counter. No one ever stocked the decomp room. “I wanted to know if you’d reached any conclusions about Kim Hammond and her missing section of neck.”

  “Nope.” Snap.

  “No?”

  “I can’t really be sure what killed her, much less what happened to her neck.”

  “Having her head cut off didn’t do it?”

  “She had too much blood left in her heart to have died of exsanguination. But so far tox is negative, no drugs, certainly no OD. She had edema in the lungs, no edema in the heart, and petechiae in the eyes.” Snap. “That might mean asphyxiation, but pulmonary edema can result from a dozen different things, probably three dozen.”

  Theresa turned to ask, “Could she have been—augh. How many times are you going to have to do that?”

  “Ten. I should think that would be obvious. Ten fingers, five on each hand. Humans are remarkably consistent that way.”

  “Could Kim have been smothered?”

  “Doubt it. There were no impressions of her teeth against the inside of her mouth.”

  “Strangled?”

  “Possibly.”

  Theresa watched her drop a severed, shriveled digit into a small jar of 70 percent alcohol and tried not to picture James Miller’s hands as he took his careful notes. “You think someone could have cut out part of her neck to disguise the fact that she’d been strangled and not decapitated?”

  “Or he saw a TV show where the cops got a fingerprint or the precise and unique size of the killer’s hand from a bruise on the victim’s skin or some such nonsense. Or he doesn’t care what we think the cause of death is but does care what we think of his handiwork, and”—snap—“he did such a hack job taking the head off that he kept trying to neaten up the edges, which would be no easy task once the head had been disarticulated. Then he wound up shaving a lot more off than intended.”

  Theresa helped her zip up James Miller’s body bag. “It just seems weird.”

  “Really? You mean the part where he killed her or the part where he cut her body into pieces and threw them in the lake?”

  “I mean assuming Kim is a strangulation that looks like a decapitation. James Miller is a gunshot that looked like a decapitation.”

  Christine screwed lids onto the jars, tightening each one. “Oh, sure. The two have a lot in common, except that one occurred seventy-five years before the other. That kind of sets them apart.”

  “Seventy-four. I don’t think they were committed by the same person. I just think it’s weird.”

  “Maybe your respective killers don’t care about official cause of death. They just like removing people’s heads.”

  Theresa nodded.

  “Or the pathologists who worked here in the 1930s got so distracted by the headlessness of the bodies that they missed other CODs. They wouldn’t have had any women in the autopsy room then, you know,” Christine added, as if this would explain any errors. “All men. Too many egos getting in the way of accuracy.”

  “I doubt it—chauvinistic or not, scores of people observed every last bit of flesh and evidence in the Torso killings. I wonder sometimes if they were more thorough than we are today—they didn’t have technology to fall back on, no DNA or infrared spectroscopy or databases. Every piece of trace evidence had to be run down by old-fashioned legwork. And I don’t think headlessness is a word.”

  “If it’s not,” Christine said as she stacked the jars into a small box, “it should be.”

  “What are you going to put on the death certificate?”

  “I don’t know yet. Why do you think I’m down here dodging the phones? Members of the media are calling me every five minutes wanting to know if she was dismembered alive. What is wrong with people?”

  “I don’t know, but if I did it would certainly explain the appeal of certain Hollywood offerings.”

  “I keep telling them that I’m waiting for the medical records and that will buy me some time. At least I can fill in one box with absolute certainty.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s definitely a homicide.”

  Theresa left the fusty decomposed autopsy room and climbed the two flights of steps to the third floor to knock for admittance to the toxicology department. Unfortunately the team of pleasant, younger women who largely staffed the place had gone to lunch, and that left Oliver.

  Theresa tiptoed into his lair, a corner bordered by a windo
w, a workbench, a barrier of tall gas tanks, and the mass spectrometer. Oliver sat with his body mass spilling over the edges of the task chair, reading a gas chromatograph spectrum as if it were a racing form. And ignored her.

  She watched the mass spec twirl its samples for a while and then said, “Kim Hammond.”

  Oliver turned a page. “The inside of that girl’s body must have borne some resemblance to a nuclear plant after meltdown.”

  “Actually it wasn’t bad. But that’s youth.”

  Oliver grunted.

  “I take it you found drugs in her hair?”

  The dead cells of the hair shaft had long been used to detect drugs and poisons and their metabolites. Since hair generally grew at the rate of half an inch per month, it could provide a timeline for that activity as well.

  “It would be simpler to tell you what I didn’t find. To put it in layman’s terms, cocaine, heroin, Xanax, THC—that’s marijuana—”

  “Thanks.” She gritted her teeth. Putting up with Oliver’s rampant self-esteem was the price one paid for prompt and thorough information.

  “I know.”

  “—oxycodone, and some little gobbledygook I think might be airplane glue. Plus amounts of caffeine and nicotine that should have been fatal in a little thing like her. This girl was an omnivore.”

  “What’s in the last half inch or so?” The hair that grew during the past month would tell them of her most recent activity.

  “Nothing. Sad, I suppose. She got off the stuff and died anyway.” He did not sound sad. He sounded as if he were observing an unusual but not particularly interesting peak on a mass spec graph, which, to him, was all Kim Hammond represented.

  “Poisons?”

  “If you mean toxic compounds, no, not that they would have had time to grow into her hair anyway. But of course I checked the blood, urine, and gastric as well, since that’s what I live to do here, one might call it my raison d’être, to put disgusting things into little tubes so it can tell us disgusting secrets.”