Trail of Blood Page 7

  Then she thought of her fiancé, dead for fifteen months now, and it all seemed absurd. Her, her job, a seventy-four-year-old corpse.

  “All of you,” Corliss added.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said of the train, and placed it back on the shelf.

  “Thank you for showing us around.”

  “Any time. I’m only too happy to share my collection. See this gear? It’s from an original Union Pacific steam locomotive.”

  “We have to go,” Frank said.

  “Mr. Corliss, did your father ever mention the Torso Murders?” Jablonski asked.

  “The what? Oh, those, the bodies in the river. I’m not that old, young man. Those things happened long before I was born.”

  “Now,” Frank added.

  Both host and reporter seemed disappointed as the party moved back to the front door, their voices echoing slightly against the foyer’s high ceiling. Corliss said, “Do come back if I can help in any other way. Take my card, Detective—there’s my phone number. It’s been a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Thanks,” Frank said.

  Jablonski asked if he could come back with follow-up questions, perhaps in the next day or two, and Corliss agreed.

  “Thank you,” Theresa told him. He responded by touching her elbow as she made her way over the threshold, a courteous gesture, gentlemanly, except for the way his thumb caressed her forearm as he did it.

  As she slid into the passenger seat, she noticed Corliss still watching from the open door. “That was interesting.”

  Frank mumbled under his breath.

  “Did you get a call?”

  “I’m going to drop you off at your car, Mr. Jablonski,” he said by way of response, and nosed the car out onto the boulevard.

  “Your boss said I could stay with you two all afternoon, following the investigation….”

  “Only the cold case. Not a current one.”

  The grim way he said it convinced Theresa that the rest of her day had just been claimed as well.

  Jablonski sprang forward like a pointer catching a whiff of quail. “You mean there’s been a homicide?”

  “No comment.”

  “Oh, come on!” he protested. Theresa could hear real frustration bubbling up from his carefully maintained persona.

  “No.”

  The reporter threw himself back in the seat. “We’ll see about that.”

  CHAPTER 9

  MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 6

  PRESENT DAY

  The Cleveland Air Show began as national air races, an idea brought to the United States from Europe by Joseph Pulitzer, the man for whom those prizes are named. The purpose in 1920, as now, was to encourage interest in aviation. The show rotated through several cities until Cleveland hosted the largest and most (indeed only, to that point) financially successful show in 1929. Fully three times larger and longer than today’s shows, the 1929 show established Cleveland’s ownership of the event.

  Particularly in these early days, the work could be dangerous. Occasionally a pilot would be lost. But in 1949 a racer banked his Mustang too sharply at one turn and crashed into a house in Berea, killing a young mother and her baby son. The air show shut down for the next fifteen years.

  Today, the usual commercial and air taxi services at Burke Lakefront Airport are suspended every Labor Day weekend as citizens pack the bleachers to watch pilots, wing walkers, and parachutists defy the law of gravity. Nearly all of them would remain unaware of this year’s tragedy, but then, this death had nothing to do with airplanes.

  When Clevelanders say “lakefront airport,” they mean it. Walk north one hundred and some feet from the runway and your shoes will get wet. The edge is built up with piled rock to keep the grassy buffer from washing away, though the Port Authority officers patrolling this Labor Day were not concerned about natural predators. Only human ones. Cleveland did not have a large number of possible terrorist targets (much to the relief of its citizenry), but the air show, with its large military presence, had to qualify.

  And so the Port Authority officer had been policing the perimeter on foot when he discovered the girl’s body. Or rather, part of it. He stared at it for a long time, that completely obvious yet somehow indecipherable object. Then the officer took out his radio, called his supervisor, and said a silent prayer of thanks that the piled stones sloped downward to the water and therefore the body or part of a body lay just below the line of sight from the bleachers. There were a hundred thousand spectators on the south side of the tarmac. At least half of them carried binoculars.

  Theresa had attended the show in exactly two of her (almost) forty years. She wondered if this visit counted as number three, though they didn’t enter the show, only skirted around it down a small access road between the runways and the water.

  A marked patrol vehicle led the way, without activating his lights or sirens—the air show organizers wanted only scripted drama for the customers. Theresa did not feel discretion to be the better part of valor while on such an active tarmac and tried to look in all directions at once as she drove. Did someone tell the pilots that they were coming? Around her were biplanes, fighter jets, and one massive thing that had to be some kind of military transport. What if one landed on her?

  The patrol car ahead pulled off the road and parked on the patchy lawn next to the seawall.

  Noise assaulted her ears as she stepped from the car. A deafening, thorough noise that invaded the head and then bounced around inside, crowding out the smell of gasoline and dead fish and the excited hum of the spectators. Theresa forgot all about the dead body she had come to see, forgot about getting her camera or crime scene kit, nearly forgot her own name, just stared at the sharp-edged jet suspended in space between her and the bleachers. The people in those seats appeared as oscillating pixels of color through the light-bending waves of heat put out by its engines.

  Frank appeared at her elbow. “Come on.”

  “What is that thing?”

  “Harrier. It hovers. Come on.”

  He helped by carrying the toolbox with the large plastic markers numbered one through thirty. She would use them to photograph small pieces of evidence within the scene. She also took her camera case, her sketching kit, and a plastic crate stuffed with paper bags, evidence stickers, and measuring tape. That covered the necessary equipment for most of her duties, though if there had been a shooting she would have had to get the laser trajectory kit and maybe the metal detector to find spent casings. If there had been a sexual assault, she’d have needed the battery-operated alternate light source, so that the semen would glow in the ultraviolet light. If the body had been buried, she’d have had to get the shovels and the sieves to sift the dirt. This was why Frank had driven Theresa back to her office, to pick up the battered county station wagon with all her equipment. At least they had gotten rid of the persistent Mr. Jablonski.

  Another officer, in a uniform Theresa did not recognize, waited at the water with Frank’s partner, Angela Sanchez. They watched her approach with ominous solemnity. Frank had told her only that a body had been found near the air show. Driving separately, she could not get any further details and now guessed she would not care for any details once learned.

  The edge of the land crumbled into a protective wall of large stones before dipping into Lake Erie. She could not hear the water lapping on the rocks but caught its fishy smell. The officer, she noted from his uniform, was from the Port Authority.

  Spread out over the rocks lay a woman’s body, back to the rocks, chest to the sun, the right hand trailing lazily into the water as if she had been trying to get one last tan this summer. But only part of her. The torso ended at the waist, and at the neck.

  No lower body, no head.

  No sun would tan this now-bloodless corpse.

  Theresa said, “Wow.”

  “Yeah,” Angela said. “Not something you see every day.”

  “Something I could have happily never seen.” Theresa shivered, only, she told her
self, because the brisk lake breeze carried a hint of winter.

  “Any chance that’s a very early and very effectively rendered Halloween decoration?”

  Theresa shook her head. “Definitely a real human being. Or at least she used to be.”

  The woman had been skinny, with the perky breasts of youth. No jewelry or nail polish, no injuries other than the obvious, except for a scratch on her left middle finger. The nails, bitten down until the ends of the fingers bulged past them with that puffy, rounded shape, would tell them nothing about defensive actions. There would be no skin cells from the killer left under that worn-down keratin.

  Theresa moved closer, tested the piled rocks before depositing her weight, and steeled herself before examining the torn neck and bisected waist. She might have seen blood and guts every day on the autopsy table, but encountering it in a new way could still come as a shock. The white vertebra surrounded by dark red muscle was gross to look at and didn’t tell her much. Nevertheless she would safeguard that area in particular since a pathologist could garner a great amount of information from it—what weapon had been used, how it had been used, whether any trace evidence had been left in the mess.

  Frank stepped gingerly onto the rocks behind her. “Please tell me it’s a boating accident. She got drunk, fell overboard, and got run over. The boat’s owner didn’t report it because he’s married and didn’t want his wife to find out he was pleasure-boating in more ways than one.”

  He didn’t have to shout anymore; the Harrier had finally landed and its engines eased down into quiet. Now Theresa could hear the crowd, the sound of distant milling and conversation. “I’ll let the pathologist make that determination—but I doubt it. It depends on the size of the propeller, of course, but I have a feeling there would be more cuts, and of varying depth.”

  Frank sighed. “This day is just getting better and better. So it’s deliberate—probably still a boyfriend.”

  “Probably.” To do such damage to a body required a great deal of energy and the rage to fuel it. Unless the killer turned out to be the rare complete psychotic, he most likely felt quite personal about the victim. A criminal mob might use beheading to strike fear in their enemies, but throwing the body away where it might never be recovered would defeat the purpose. Dismemberment might make a body easier to conceal, but the lake could handle any size corpse. A killer might dismember the body to hamper identification, but leaving the hands with potentially recoverable fingerprints would defeat that purpose. This killer had no purpose in mind other than hatred. While she lived, the victim most likely received a healthy amount of attention from the opposite sex. Perhaps it had turned into an unhealthy amount.

  “A personal connection would be a really good thing in this case. If we can identify her, the killer will pop up somewhere in her circle.” Angela’s optimism sounded forced.

  Theresa said, “It would be helpful, because chances of finding trace evidence are slim to none. Smart money’s on none. There’s nothing quite like soaking in a large body of water to wash any incriminating hairs and fibers away.”

  “How long do you think she’s been in there?”

  “Not long. She’s only just beginning to bloat. I’m surprised she surfaced at all.” Usually bodies didn’t float until they had decomposed enough for the tissues to fill with gas. This one should still have been on the bottom, and each wave bubbling up through the piled stones threatened to carry the body away again. Theresa poised herself to grab the left wrist should it become necessary.

  “There was a lot of activity inside the breakwall this morning,” the Port Authority officer informed them. “Anyone who has a boat is out on it, watching the air show. The water got churned up.”

  The low concrete breakwall, designed to keep the treacherously shallow Lake Erie from eroding the shoreline, lay slightly more than a quarter mile offshore. “That must stretch at least two miles in either direction,” Theresa pointed out. “How likely is it that she got in here from the open water?”

  The officer squinted at the sun reflecting off the waves, pondered the breakwall, and took a deep breath. Theresa expected him to lick one finger and hold it up, but instead he said, “I’d guess she was inside the breakwall to begin with, since you say she hasn’t been in there long. But there’s really no way to be sure. That’s the thing about water. It does what it wants.”

  Another noise ramped up, higher in pitch than the Harrier but equally loud. “Is that the Blue Angels?” Theresa asked, trying not to sound like a teenage girl and having a hard time of it. The Navy jets had been the stars of the air show for as long as she could remember.

  “Thunderbirds,” Frank said, correcting her. “We get the Thunderbirds now. They’re Air Force.”

  Six jets passed overhead, flying, of course, in perfect formation. The sound of them seemed to come up from the ground and invade her body like an electric shock, reverberating in her heart. That sound, not quite like any other in her experience, had always been her favorite part of their act. Once again she neglected the victim to gaze, unabashedly, at the sky. “Wow.”

  “Yeah, wow,” Frank said. “Can we get back to the dead person, please?”

  “Mm-hmm, okay—hey.”

  “What?”

  Out on the tarmac, the air made hazy by the dust and heat the planes kicked up, something appeared to be moving toward them. Not a plane. A person.

  She squinted. Two people, strolling across the runways with complete disregard for the dozen planes possibly taking off or landing at any moment. “Should they be doing that?”

  The Port Authority guy looked, swore, but stayed by their side as he radioed the situation to his colleagues. “What kind of nuts are these?”

  “Probably drunk bigwigs,” Angela Sanchez guessed. “They came from the VIP tent.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I thought it was part of the show.”

  The Port Authority guy scowled, moved out in front of them, and put his hand on the butt of his gun.

  Neither of the two people appeared to be Brandon Jablonski, so Theresa left him to it and returned her attention to the body. Four inches below the dead woman’s right elbow, on the outside of the forearm, something triangular and very thin had left a light singe mark in the skin and pale hair. Not torture—right on the surface, as if she had brushed up against something small and hot, rather than its being pressed into her flesh.

  A voice made her look up. The two walking people had crossed the road nearest them and wound past their vehicles. A car with flashing lights—Theresa assumed it to be the Port Authority reinforcements—came tearing up the entry road from the far west edge of the airport but would not reach them before the people did. Not that this gave her any cause for concern, since the two people approaching them did not appear threatening: a young woman in a body-hugging miniskirt, making impressive time in strappy platform sandals, and a man wearing a well-cut suit and tie. He did not seem as enthusiastic about their little jaunt as his girlfriend and scowled at her back.

  “Stop right there,” the Port Authority cop said. Frank said nothing, only watched with a tight face. They were on the port department’s turf, Theresa realized. You don’t poach another man’s authority, no matter how tempted.

  “OMG,” the woman said, pronouncing each initial. Her face seemed familiar, as if Theresa might have seen it on the society pages or a billboard. “What’s going on? Did you find a bomb? Or is it a dead body?”

  “You just walked across an active airfield, ma’am,” the cop said.

  “Don’t you think that’s a little dangerous?”

  “There weren’t any planes coming or going. The Thunderbirds are going to be up for the next fifteen minutes.”

  As if to emphasize her point, the team of jets zoomed overhead again, and again Theresa could not resist watching them until they became minimized by distance.

  Unfortunately they proved equally irresistible to the Port Authority officer, and the woman adva
nced another five feet before he noticed and said, “This is an active crime scene, ma’am. You’ll have to leave.”

  “It’s okay,” she assured him with the confidence of the clueless and waved a hand at her companion. “This is Councilman Greer.”

  The man in question said, “Tasha—”

  “I don’t care who he is.” The Port Authority officer had run low on patience, or perhaps he also didn’t care for the councilman’s voting record. “You’re leaving the area. Now. This car pulling up will give you a ride back to the bleachers so you don’t have to walk across the tarmac—”

  Tasha had pointed the toes of her impressively long legs, and the extra few inches were all she needed to see down the slope. “Oh my—look, Benjy, it really is a body! Look at that! It’s all torn up!”

  The Port Authority officer waved to his colleague, who was now crossing the grass, and repeated his order that they leave the area immediately.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, she’s just looking,” the councilman snapped. He was a handsome man of indeterminate age, indeterminate race, and, if today’s exhibition gave any indication, indeterminate sense.

  Tasha had grasped his arm, but not for support or comfort. She nearly jumped up and down in excitement. “This is so cool! It’s so gross!”

  At this Theresa stood up and planted her feet directly in front of the body. “This isn’t TV, ma’am. This was a person, not an object for you to gawk at just to put a thrill into your perfect little life.”

  Tasha had apparently made a lifetime habit of simply ignoring anything unpleasant and only twisted her body to see around Theresa. The councilman flushed. “There’s no need to get insulting. You do this for a living—how ghoulish does that make you?”

  The second Port Authority officer reached them, assessed the situation with one glance, and took Tasha by the forearm. “This way, ma’am.” She could have moved or been gently pulled off her feet, so she walked, her face still turned toward the water, while dipping and turning to get one more glimpse of the mutilated corpse.