Trail Of Blood Part 5

"The chief also figured that since it's the coldest case Cleveland PD's ever worked, the killer has to be as dead as his victim, so publicity won't cause a problem at a trial."

"I don't know. Some people can be pretty hardy."

Every time Theresa glanced at the rearview mirror she met Brandon Jablonski's warm brown eyes, as if they shared some secret joke-probably how he thought of scaring the c.r.a.p out of her in the parking lot last night. Now he said, "What would you do if you find the guy and he's ninety-six years old?"

"Arrest him," Frank said.

"Really," the man said thoughtfully.

"Yep."

Theresa stole another look at Brandon Jablonski. "PR," she said.

"Sometimes I swear your chief and Leo must be twins. They never miss a trick."

"They could be, since that's why you're here as well as Mr. Jablonski."

"What?"

They continued through Lakewood, crossed the Rocky River, and took a right. "The chief likes the cousins angle."

Jablonski added, "The combination of police work and forensic science, represented by two members of the same family, tackling Cleveland's toughest case. You can't make up stuff better than that."

Frank made that face again. "He thinks it's cute."

"Well, we are sort of cute," she admitted.

"Especially you." Jablonski grinned. "What was that you said about your grandfather?"

Theresa hesitated. Speaking of her family out of pride was one thing, speaking of it for possible publication quite another. But she had opened the door, so she said, "Our grandfather and great-grandfather were cops."

"Really," Jablonski said. "Did they teach you about the Torso Murders?"

"Not really. They occurred before Grandpa Joe's time, and our great-grandfather was a juvenile probation officer, more of a social worker. He met Eliot Ness, though."

"Yeah?" The researcher leaned forward, resting his elbows on the back of the front seat like a restless teenager. "The great man himself?"

"Yeah, when Ness founded the Cleveland Boys' Town. Great-grandpa didn't care for him, though. Too dapper."

Jablonski frowned. "Dapper?"

"Something of a ladies' man."

"Oh." She could feel his breath on her neck. "Am I dapper?"

"I wouldn't have any idea. And shouldn't you be wearing a seat belt?"

He sat back, lips curved. "Still, that's intriguing. Can the current generation solve the crime that stumped their forefathers?"

Frank went on as if neither she nor Jablonski had spoken. "Also, you see bodies cut open every day. We need to figure out who installed a dismemberment chamber in that building, and you'll probably know what to look for more than I will. Like that drain hole."

Jablonski promptly returned his face to the back of the front seat. "You think that was how he got rid of the blood? They always theorized that the Torso killer had to have medical or surgical-or even pathology-training, since he decapitated his victims so neatly."

Theresa didn't ask how he knew the details of the table in the building, only said, "Yeah, but I don't buy that. One summer-I call it the Summer of the Stabbings-"

Her cousin gave a small groan. "Not this story again."

"One each, in June, July, and August, I had a guy come in dead of a single stab wound. Big guys, healthy guys. All three hit in the upper left shoulder, because when a killer is right-handed and faces their victim for their Norman Bates moment, they stab the left shoulder. The knife went down behind the rib cage and nicked the heart. All three died before help could arrive, even though at least one had another person present who promptly called 911. All three had been stabbed by their girlfriends or ex-girlfriends."

Frank tried to cut in. "Now-"

She didn't let him. "Now, these girls weren't med students, and they certainly weren't doctors."

"Still," Jablonski said, his attention pinging back and forth between them, "it can't be easy to cut someone's head off. So how do you learn to do it without nicking a bone if you're not a doctor or a surgeon, or a butcher?"

"Same way you learn anything else. Practice. And," she added, "he practiced a lot."

"We're here," Frank said.

Edward Corliss lived in the smallest house on a very expensive street, with nothing on the other side of the structure but Lake Erie. The home had stained gla.s.s in the front door, marble steps, and a modest but expensive dark sedan in the drive, but Theresa considered its prettiest a.s.set to be the sweeping maple tree in the center of the yard, its leaves ablaze in red, yellow, and orange. The private coc.o.o.n of fall foliage nearly hid the neighboring drives, but she could just glimpse a man in a white lab coat stepping into a Mercedes.

She stepped out of the car and sucked in the smell of autumn.

Frank walked beside her and Jablonski took up the rear, following too closely for comfort. She sidled over a bit, uncomfortable with a man both flirtatious and too young for her. She had not encountered one before this. Most men flirting with her these days were in the midst of retirement planning.

Their peal went unanswered. Frank, never one for patience, suggested they look around back.

"It might take him a while to get to the door," Theresa pointed out. How old is he?"

Already walking away, Frank said, "Sixty-one. And he sounded hearty enough on the phone."

Theresa followed her cousin and Jablonski followed her. "Tell me about your grandfather. He was a cop?"

"Forty years," she replied. Ivy covered the wall on her left and shrubs lined up to her right. She brushed her hand along their piney branches as they filed to the back. There, the blue expanse of water with the sun reflecting from each wave both greeted and blinded them.

A single dock jutted from the sh.o.r.e, with a small sailboat tied up at its end. Frank had been right; a man made his surefooted way along the bow as he wrapped the sail-though Theresa doubted this could be Edward Corliss. Perhaps he had a son.

When Frank reached the dock and kept going, Theresa followed eagerly. Like any Clevelander, she never needed an excuse to go near the water and breathe in that familiar scent of gasoline and dead fish that meant family vacations on Catawba Island and that feeling of peace a body of water always conferred.

The man on the boat heard them and turned. Wearing a plain burgundy sweatshirt and jeans, he had blue eyes and silvered hair and appeared delighted to see them. "h.e.l.lo! You must be the detectives."

He leapt to the dock, causing only a minor tremor in the wood, and Frank completed the introductions. Edward Corliss shook hands with each of them, pressing Theresa's gently in his firm fingers. He had an easy smile and the trimness of one who had long ago embraced whole wheat tortillas.

"I'm sorry if you waited at the front-I didn't expect you to get here so quickly."

"Are you getting it ready for winter?" Frank asked, nodding at the sailboat.

"No! It's too early yet. I don't put Jenny away until the lake threatens to freeze. Let's go inside and see if I can help you, shall we?"

He took up the rear, guiding them off the dock like a good captain, and they followed him inside. Theresa ran her fingers through her hair to repair whatever damage the lake's gusty winds had done to it.

Corliss ushered them into an oversize front room done up in russet and gold tones, the colors splashing against the white walls. Windows made up most of the north wall, from which every whitecap on the lake could be seen in frothing clarity. Scarlet carpeting, jacquard sofas, a vast fireplace.

And trains. Lots of trains.

They collected on every surface, end tables, the high mantel, and circled the room on three high shelves. A mahogany table that could have seated twelve had been given over to a mountaintop village with miniature houses and farms and more train tracks than any real mountaintop village would have. Two engines with several cars wound through it, occasionally pa.s.sing but not colliding with each other. She swore she could smell the evergreens.

"Wow," Theresa said.

"Yes," Corliss said. "I went a little overboard in here. One of the hazards of bachelorhood, not having a wife to stop me. But you're here about my father's building, right? Would you like to sit down?"

Theresa would rather have studied the snow-covered village and its trains but followed her cousin to the crisp settee. Jablonski perched on the edge of a wing chair, pulling a tiny camcorder from one of his two camera bags. He clicked it on and aimed it at Theresa.

"Your father constructed the building at 4950 Pullman?" Frank began.

"Yes. I mean, he contracted for it to be built."

"Did he have any other buildings in Cleveland?"

"No, no. My father was a railroad man; he only dabbled in landlord-ship that one time, and only as an investment. My father-his name was Arthur-"

"We know."

Corliss spoke of the large train systems with the same enthusiasm he showed for his miniature ones. "He started working in the rail yards as a boy, moving through every job they had, from loading to shoveling coal to coupler, eventually to detective-like you-with a small railroad company in Pennsylvania. By the time the line's owner began to fall into ill health, my father had enough saved to buy the line. You see, around the turn of the century there were hundreds of small, limited-span lines. In the 1910s and '20s, bigger companies began to buy up the mom-and-pop lines and turned into conglomerates like the Pennsylvania Railroad and the B&O."

Theresa fingered a pair of binoculars on the end table, wondering how close they would bring the whitecaps and seagulls. But she didn't pick them up. They looked too heavy and too expensive.

"Oh," Frank said. Jablonski finally switched the camcorder's gaze from Theresa to Corliss.

"My point is, Pennsylvania bought my father's company and made him one of their vice presidents, as well as a very wealthy man. Rich enough that he could have retired right then, but he loved the trains too much, and besides, the Depression had arrived. He needed a safe investment for his money and figured real estate would be as safe as any."

Frank made a note. Jablonski, the camera perched on one knee, plucked a gold figurine of a steam engine off the coffee table in front of him. Corliss looked askance, and the researcher put it back with the gentlest clink.

Frank went on. "He kept an office there for himself?"

"I believe so, yes. He'd take me around there during my younger days, before he sold the place. He also had a desk at the rail yard station-big brick place right on the river, they tore it down in the sixties-and he'd spend a lot of time there, too. He used the office on Pullman more for managing his personal affairs, the building, other investments, and as a place to store his growing collection." The man waved his hand to take in the room. One of the moving trains gave a toot and released a puff of smoke into the air. The not-terrifically-pleasant smell of burned oil reached Theresa's nose. "He pa.s.sed a lot of these pieces down to me. Could I serve you some coffee, or tea? Ms. MacLean? You look a bit chilly."

"No, thank you. I'm fine."

He seemed to glow a bit at her smile, though it could have simply been from talking about trains. Or his father.

Frank got him back on topic. "Do you remember the building's tenants? From the 1930s?"

"Oh, my, let's see. I remember the architects most, I guess. They rented a unit nearly the entire time my dad owned it. They were always very late or very early with the rent, depending on how their contracts came along. He also had an artist, just after the Second World War-until the guy ran out of canvases one day and painted all over the walls; then my dad kicked him out. Didn't care for the man's taste, he said, nor his judgment." Corliss chuckled over that until Theresa laughed with him.

Frank asked, "How were the units numbered? One through four were the ground floor?"

Jablonski pulled a camera from the second bag. An older digital model, it had double the bulk of the camcorder.

"Yes, and five through eight the second story. He had a medium for a couple of years-a woman who said she could communicate with the dead. My father loved stuff like that. And, as he always said, she paid the rent on time. Unlike the doctor."

"Doctor?"

"In the office next to his. Every month my father would have to threaten him with eviction to get the rent, but he'd cough it up at the last minute and buy himself another thirty days."

"What kind of medicine did this man practice?" Frank asked ever so casually. Theresa wished she could hide so much with her voice.

The model train let out another toot. Jablonski took a few quick snaps, all of Theresa. When she frowned at him, he aimed the lens at Corliss.

"Some sort of dietary therapist."

"A nutritionist?"

"I suppose. A bit of a quack, according to my father-there were plenty of them around in those days. You have to remember that antibiotics hadn't been discovered yet and people would try anything. But my dad must have liked the man, or he wouldn't have put up with the rent always being late. He could be very softhearted."

"Must have been a lot of people late with the rent then," Jablonski put in. "Unemployment in Cleveland reached twenty-three percent during the Depression, and most households had a single wage earner. That's why there were so many homeless and transients for the Torso killer to choose from."

"Torso killer?" Edward Corliss blinked at the younger man.

"Would you have any records from your father's ownership of the building?" Frank asked before Jablonski could expound upon the infamous murderer and all his crimes.

Now the silver-haired man blinked at him. "Any receipts from his tenants? Leases? Tax returns?"

"Oh, I see what you mean. No, no, I'm sure I don't. He sold that building in-um..."

"Nineteen fifty-nine."

"Yes. I cleaned this house from end to end after he died, when I moved back from England. My father was not a pack rat, all the trains notwithstanding. I don't recall finding anything related to the building. He had tax returns, but supposedly you only have to keep those for seven years, so I destroyed them."

"What about photographs?" Theresa suggested. "Did your father have any pictures of his building, especially from the 1930s?"

He considered this, hand to chin. "I don't believe so. People didn't take photos of every single thing the way they do now. But we could look." He stood up with the energy of a man half his age and held out his hand to her.

After being helped to her feet in such a courtly manner, she followed him from the room, past the mountaintop village.

"This must have taken years to build," she told her host.

"Oh, this is merely an introduction to my world," Edward Corliss told her. "Let me show you my real pride and joy."

CHAPTER 8.