Trail of Blood (40 page)

But could this be a case of like father, like son? Though she couldn’t quite picture this older man jumping on and off trains carting the dead weight of a full-grown man, he still made at least as good a suspect as Jablonski or Greer.

The fake snow felt wetter today, sticking to her fingers as much as the rough branches of the plastic trees as she watched the trains go round and round. From Cleveland to New Castle, Pennsylvania. James Miller wouldn’t have known about that series of similar murders; he died before the connection between the two cities had been uncovered.

Jablonski had flown with the theory, however. She had checked out the
Plain Dealer
that morning at the lab, and while the young man had thankfully restrained himself from quoting her as a source, he had put nearly every detail of last night’s conversation into his story. When he ran out of facts he moved on to speculations. The man was truly obsessed. Perhaps too obsessed.

Though at least Jablonski wanted to preserve James Miller’s final resting place. Councilman Greer had been agitating to destroy it since they discovered the body. Why? To hide a past crime? To destroy his connection to the current set of murders?

She gazed at the miniature Terminal Tower. Everything remained circumstantial. Just like the original Torso Murders, all the evidence was like a fog in the valley, constantly shifting in appearance and weight. Everything she’d learned in the past week added up to nothing.

“So.” Corliss adjusted two pine trees in the Metropark system as he talked, encouraging their trunks to stand ramrod straight. “Do you still think my father might be this Torso killer?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure we’ll ever know for sure. Unfortunately, James Miller’s body was found in a space that, most likely, only your father had access to.”

“How do you know that?”

She explained about her conversation with Irene Schaffer.

“Dr. Louis? That nutritionist?”

“Yes.”

“He sounds like a much more suspicious man than my father.”

“I agree. But the Torso killer never showed any interest in young girls, and her description of the closet puts it closer to the outer wall than the space in which we found James Miller.”

“But you can’t be sure. Perhaps the closets weren’t of equal size. Perhaps Dr. Louis used them both. And even if there had been a door from my father’s office, that doesn’t mean my father used it.”

She said nothing, having no reason to think the closets weren’t of symmetrical sizes, and though one could say all one liked about proof it was pretty hard to explain away a corpse turning up in your storeroom.

“It would help if we had the original blueprints.”

“If I find them, I’ll let you know.”

She brushed whiteness along the branches of a fir tree, dotted it on the browning leaves of an oak. “I thought you had looked through all your father’s papers already.”

“I did. But they probably had to have the building inspected when they sold it, and any paperwork would be in the Penn Railroad collection. If I find anything, I’ll keep it out for you.”

“Thank you.” Most people would not have been so cooperative with someone trying to prove their parent’s guilt. But perhaps Edward needed to know as much as she did.

The trees at last standing to his specifications, he added, “But you know, I might even be mixed up in my recollections and that wasn’t my father’s office at all. Plus the architects who designed the building worked in it. They could have put in all sorts of secret rooms without anyone else’s knowledge.”

True, though unlikely. The floor had been too solid to be breached from the cellar, and the construction crew had not found anything to indicate access to the space from the second floor. Too craven to press him, she only asked, “Is that enough?”

He inspected her work, saying, “A little more.”

Something tugged at her brain cells, wanting their attention. The mention of their neighbor state had echoed a previous conversation, from her first visit to Edward’s home. “You said your father worked for and then bought a railroad in Pennsylvania?”

“That’s where it was based. The track system went from Harrisburg to Chicago.”

He added the loose fake snow on top of her wet coating, creating a snowfall realistic enough to warrant mention on the Weather Channel.

“Winter has come to your city,” she told him.

He let more flakes drift to the top of the music auditorium. Apparently Cleveland had had a blizzard. “Snow covers up a multitude of sins. Little imperfections, roof sections that don’t perfectly meld.”

Theresa’s legs began to feel heavy. The late night and early morning had caught up with her. “My dad used to say that about paint. Covering up a multitude of sins, I mean.”

Snow. Paint.

“Where did your father live in Pennsylvania? When he worked for the railroad?” To get his attention away from the model, she added, “The one he later bought.”

He recapped the container. “Oh, a little town, you’ve probably never heard of it. There’s pretty much nothing there except train tracks.”

“Where?” she asked again, pursuing some body of thought that would not quite gel.

“New Castle.”

And, just like that, the final piece fell into place.

Arthur Corliss fulfilled every requirement of the Torso killer. He had intimate knowledge of and free access to the railroad system. He worked in the Kingsbury Run area. He had lived in New Castle and had a business there. He owned and occupied not only the building but—apparently—the storage space where James Miller had been slain.

She felt drunk—but not with success, as she could not summon the slightest happiness for solving the Torso killings. For one thing, the evidence seemed damning but still completely circumstantial. For another, she felt dismay on behalf of Edward Corliss. “And your father never—” What? Gave any sign of a depraved violence? Talked about his victims? Displayed his trophies, if he kept any? She knew she should shut up now, put down the white goop, and search the rail yard on her own, leaving him to sort out his family’s ghosts in private. She needed to talk to Frank. Between the two of them they would figure out what to do.

“Never talked to me about being the Torso killer?” Edward gave her a weary smile and straightened. “This is a hell of a job you have, Theresa.”

“I know.”

“The answer is no, he didn’t. I’m sure he would never have mentioned it to Mother, either.”

She felt her forehead crease in a frown, trying to make sense of this last part.

He took the container out of her limp hand. “She didn’t know, you see. She believed him to be a great businessman and philanthropist—which he was—and only that. I would have spent my life believing it, too, if I hadn’t crept into the cellar one day to pinch a beer and found a leg in the stationary tub.”

She waited, the way one does when another person is talking too fast, hoping that if one gives it a little time one’s brain will sort the words into an order that makes sense. Her problem was, they made too much sense already.

Edward went on, his light blue eyes dancing with light reflected from the white walls. “They never caught him, you see. He didn’t go to jail, his family didn’t whisk him off to some fancy asylum. He simply got over the need for attention and learned to hide his victims where no one would ever find them.”

“Where?”

Edward smiled at this and shook his head. “Always the scientist. I don’t know where. After I found half a man in our basement—this basement, I’ll show you the room—I toasted him with the beer I’d taken and went back to my studies. When my father returned from whatever errand he’d been on—probably disposing of the first half of the body—he didn’t know his sanctum had been breached, and I never said a word.”

He picked up a stained towel and began to wipe the white stuff from her fingers as he spoke, gently tugging on each one. “All through the years, I never said a word, though I think I should have. The way he looked at me sometimes…he wanted to share it with his only child. That’s natural for a parent, don’t you think? Don’t you share your secrets with your daughter? My father never told me, but I found my own way of coming and going from the basement so that I could watch.”

“Wahssh—”

“But I never killed.” He moved closer to her, watching her face for its reactions. “Whatever demons drove my father didn’t drive me. Not even when temptation would strike—when you work on roads, Theresa, the one thing you learn about human beings is that most are sheep. They simply do the same things over and over until someone tells them to do something else, and then they’ll do that over and over until redirected again. Boring things, really. But I never harmed a one of them until that blond whore showed up on my doorstep. I have to admit I’m disappointed in you, Theresa. It’s taken you a week to discover what that little bimbo figured out in two days.”

Theresa grabbed for the edge of the table and caught up the bottle of fake snow instead. She opened her fingers to let it fall, then thought better of it. If she damaged the model there was no telling what Corliss could do, and besides, the label caught her attention. Polyethylene.

“Granted, it was only a guess on her part. She found my father’s name in that notebook—”

“Wha no—”

“Some little book from her grandfather. He had written about Arthur in it and then she found his name on the blueprints. I happen to be listed in the phone book, so voilà, she showed up on my doorstep.”

Plastic snow. Polyethylene made to look like tiny snowflakes…circles.

She couldn’t believe how slow her brain was working. Had worked.

As liberally as he applied the fake snow, it must have settled on all sorts of things, just as her pets’ fur did.

“She wasn’t
positive
my father was the killer, but figured the evidence came close enough. I don’t think she even cared. She only had this wild idea about us taking to the talk-show circuit, making the most of her fifteen minutes, I guess. But
I
knew, and I had to get that notebook away from her.”

They had struggled here—Kim brushed her arm against the hot soldering iron as Corliss strangled her, damaging the freshly painted swing bridge, infuriating him all the more. The struggle lodged paint and fake snow in her hair.

Physical evidence could chase all the fog away. And now she had it.

Afterward Corliss took Kim down to his father’s workroom and removed part of her neck to hide his finger marks, and so that the death would resemble the senior Corliss’s work.

“Wheresh the notebook?” she managed to ask, more or less coherently.

“I burned it.”

One of her knees buckled, and she dropped the bottle to lean heavily on the edge of the platform. So little remained of James Miller and his time on this planet and Corliss had destroyed one more piece.

“I thought it prudent,” Corliss added, perhaps at the pained look on her face. “Too bad I couldn’t burn
her
. So I tried to make the most of it. I cleaned her up, just as my father would have done. And he’d never heard the word
forensic
.”

And yet Corliss Jr. left trace evidence behind,
she thought. The snow and paint from his model were stuck in Kim’s hair. Fibers from his car trunk and living room carpeting stayed with the two men on the hill. Polyethylene snowflakes had been on the handkerchief—probably Edward’s handkerchief—placed in Van Horn’s pocket to make the scene more similar to the Tattooed Man’s.

Her pets’ fur on the victim’s clothing hadn’t come from Jablonski or been the result of her own clumsy cross-contamination. The fur had gotten on Edward’s white cotton dress shirt when he helped her down from a moving train car and had transferred onto Van Horn when Corliss wrestled his unconscious form into the trunk of his car.

She saw it all so clearly now and felt strangely unable to do a bloody thing about it. “Whuu’d you do to m—”

“I’m sorry, my dear. It’s Midazolam. When you turned down the tea I had to add it to the snow gel—with some DMSO, of course, so it could be absorbed.”

“Dental anesthetic,” she tried to say. Extremely fast-acting, but temporary.

“Borrowed it from the neighbor. I
did
tell you I minored in chemistry,” he said, chiding her.

“You killed them,” she said dumbly, her words so slurred she couldn’t understand them herself.

“I did. I killed that little bitch and discovered how fun it was. Then you and that reporter showed up here, salivating over my father’s work, and that gave me the idea. If I intended to follow in his footsteps, why not do it right—”

He caught her as her knees buckled and she fell, not gently, so that he had to tighten both arms around her torso firmly enough to leave bruises. Her foot slid into the bottle, scattering polyethylene flakes across the hardwood floor.

“You have no idea how much I regret this, Theresa,” he murmured in her ear.

She felt his lips on hers, and then nothing else.

The zoning and planning department’s hallways were silent, the workers all home enjoying their weekend, and Brent made the most of their lack of supervision by tearing up and down the linoleum and listening to his screeches echo off the walls. His mother did not seem inclined to restrain him. Frank suspected she felt she deserved the officers’ indulgence since they had interrupted her Saturday, or she wanted the kid to burn off all the excess energy he could before they returned to their bungalow. Frank could only hope finding this blueprint would help point them to Kim’s killer, that this entire exercise would not be for nothing.

At least, once her supervisor had arrived to unlock the offices, Sonia Kettle had quickly found what they had come for, since only a week had elapsed since she last retrieved it. She carried the old paper in one hand, as gently as she carried her baby in the other, to a worktable in the center of the storage room. “Here it is.”

“What is that? Let me see!” her son demanded as she spread it on the wooden surface.

“No, Brent. It’s very old.
Do not
touch it,” she added in a tone so stern that the child listened and contented himself with running up and down the aisles of cabinets. While shouting, of course.