Trail of Blood

Seventy-five years ago, a madman nicknamed the Torso Killer terrorized Cleveland. His horrific spree lasted four years and crisscrossed the entire city. Overall, he was credited with more than a dozen murders. And he was never caught.

Today, forensic scientist Theresa MacLean is called to an abandoned building where a desiccated, decapitated body has been found in a room that’s been sealed off for years. Although there’s no immediate proof, everyone assumes the same thing: that the newly discovered corpse was a Torso Killer victim. The body has decayed beyond recognition, leaving few forensic clues, but Theresa sees this as an opportunity to shed some light on a big piece of Cleveland’s past that until now has been shrouded in mystery.

But then another body—this one recently deceased—turns up, and all signs at the scene seem to indicate the work of a new Torso Killer. Suddenly, Theresa’s investigation takes on a whole new meaning. Her examination of the old body has opened a door to the past—a door someone wanted to keep closed—and she shifts her focus from solving a historical puzzle to catching a very dangerous, present-day psychopath.

But as the body count rises, Theresa finds herself nearer to danger than she ever imagined. For the killer is keeping a watchful eye on Theresa, and she begins to feel his presence everywhere. Each step brings them closer and closer to each other—at one point separated by no more than a speeding train in a railroad switchyard—as Theresa scours the city in her hunt for a murderous lunatic intent on reliving a terrifying past.

Fall had come early this year, and Theresa could see why people considered it the season of death. With the sun behind clouds the trees appeared as a palette of dull browns. Weeds had overtaken the train tracks below, though she knew a rapid transit car would rattle by at any moment. The only spots of color belonged to graffiti on the pylons supporting the bridge. It was Labor Day weekend according to the calendar, but it might as well have been the middle of winter on this edge of the city.

“Why am I here?” she asked the cop. He stood next to her, further crumbling the edge of the asphalt street with one toe.

“Metaphorically speaking?” The brown autumn tableau did not seem to bother him and he drew in the crisp air with relish; but then he was young, and in uniform, and would not get a chance to deal with homicides very often. “That I couldn’t say. But probably because I called the sergeant and the sergeant called Homicide and Homicide called Dispatch and Dispatch called the Medical Examiner’s Office. ‘Sounds weird,’ the sergeant told me. ‘I’ll call Forensics.’ And here you are.”

“What’s weird about it?”

He waved at the valley and its train tracks. “Know what that is?”

She declined to answer, tired of playing Q & A with a boy half her age, and gave him a mild glare instead.

“Kingsbury Run,” he said.

She knew the term, of course. Everyone in Cleveland did. “So?”

“Come with me.” He turned away from the valley he’d just pointed out without waiting to see if she would follow or offering to carry her crime scene kit. And she was an old woman now. Forty, as of next Friday.

She left her car parked along Pullman. Traffic did not present a hazard—no one ventured up this deserted road on the edge of the downtown area except for employees at the electrical station on the corner. A white car labeled security sat at the entrance; its lone occupant watched her progress with great suspicion, as if he could see no reason why terrorists would not arrive in a Medical Examiner’s Office station wagon or appear as a mild-mannered forensic scientist.

The two-story structure had been constructed with stone instead of brick and had probably been an attractive building a century ago, before the property hedged on one side by train tracks became trapped by the tail end of I-490 on the other. Square, about a hundred feet by a hundred feet. The lawn around it had long since descended into weeds and garbage. The building had no glass in its window spaces, no door at its threshold. Obviously empty, obviously a victim of fire at some point. Obviously dead.

Her phone trilled with a text message from Chris. She did not send a reply.

The cop strolled up to another young officer guarding the entrance—that was when you knew you had aged, when they all started looking not old enough to drive—and exchanged some sort of wisecrack. The one guarding the door, however, did not find the fall air or the weird homicide as invigorating as his compatriot. He broke off a yawn to shout something to the interior of the building, and the detective appeared just as she reached the front stoop.

“I might have known this would be your doing,” she said to him.

“What, like it’s my fault?” Frank Patrick had been a Homicide detective for ten of his years and her first cousin for all of them. Pinpricks of sweat appeared around his mustache and a swipe of dust marred his dark slacks. “Watch your step.”

She moved into the dank interior. Chunks of plaster and concrete lay on top of ancient pop cans and other garbage, and gaping holes appeared in the ceiling, but the floor felt plenty solid enough to support her one hundred and thirty pounds. A film of white dust still hung in the air. Some of the walls had been removed from the area to her left and gray light from the far windows provided a hazy illumination. On her right a dim maze of rooms still existed. It smelled of urine, decomposed fast food, and old smoke, which explained the blackened surfaces on the south wall of the building.

“Arson,” Frank said without being asked. “That keeps happening to the collection of old warehouses that cluster this dying city. I quote a particularly depressing columnist. It’s either kids with nothing better to do or some homeless guy trying to get cozy.”

“You got me out here for an arson?” Theresa had been trained in many avenues of forensic investigation. Arson was not one of them.

“You got something better to do?”

“Just my job.” This overstated the case a bit. Leo and Don were at the lab, surely keeping things under control.

“Your job includes getting away from the microscopes now and then,” he reminded her. “Forget the arson, that happened weeks ago. The fire guys came with their shiny trucks and took out what little structural integrity this building had left.”

She glanced up at the ceiling. “It’s not going to cave in on us right this minute, is it?”

“No guarantees. Think anyone would miss us?”

Good question. Her fiancé had been dead for over a year and her ex-husband was probably out with the latest in a line of pole dancers. But her mother certainly would, and her daughter would notice when the tuition check didn’t clear. Chris—who knew? She stumbled over a collection of crushed Coke cans and decided to concentrate on her cousin’s gray blazer as it advanced into the gloom.

He went on. “This prompted the city council to once again address the issue of empty buildings and their absentee landlords and file a claim to seize the property for destruction. Councilman Greer, as you know, has made it clear that cleaning up the city of Cleveland is his personal mission in life and only he can save us from ourselves. No protests ensued to save this little blight on the landscape, so they hired Mr. Lansky’s construction company”—he gestured toward a man up ahead, who was standing off to the side with a paunch and an unlit cigar—“to demolish the place lest it just up and collapse one day on a homeless squatter or some innocent but high-spirited youth.”

Another glance at the ceiling. It did not appear to have moved. “Or us.”

“So far, so good. The construction guys, or rather the deconstruction guys, started from the top down and tossed the walls through those holes in the ceiling. Upstairs is just empty space. But when they started taking out the sections on the ground floor, well”—he stopped at the edge of an incomplete wall, his tall frame outlined by light from the other side of it—“they found this.”

She reached the area, blinking in the brilliance provided by portable halogen lights. Bordered by two walls and a collection of two-by-four studs stood a table. It had been roughly but sturdily constructed of unfinished wood and bolted to the floor.

On that table stretched the body of a man. And that man had been dead for a very long time. His flesh had sunk to only a papery, peeling cover over the bones and left no odor in the air. The body’s arms and legs lay straight, the back flat against the surface of the table. It would have seemed a fairly peaceful repose, were it not for the white vertebrae protruding from the collar of the shirt without a skull to cap them off.

Theresa approached the table, thrown into erratic shadow by the lights crouching along the floor. She only assumed the body to be male—the shapeless pants and leather belt did not suggest femininity, and neither did the dark, long-sleeved shirt. She touched a fold at the elbow and the material became dust under her finger. “It’s desiccated, like a mummy.”

She picked up one of the halogen lights, careful to use the handle and not the hot casing. Its electrical cord snaked off through the structure to where a generator hummed in the distance.

The head had been removed from its rightful place, but not from the area. It rested between the flopped-open feet in their brown leather shoes. The hollow eye sockets stared up at her. It had retained some flesh and even some hair, yes, but not enough to resemble a face, not something human, just a badly done Halloween decoration.

“See what I mean?” The young cop had followed them. “Weird.”

The damp of the surrounding gloom finally reached her bones, and she shuddered. Now she knew what he had meant about Kingsbury Run and its very special history.