Part 7 (1/2)
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 owners.h.i.+p 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 gra.s.sy buffer from was.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.sive 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 a.s.saulted 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.e.xual a.s.sault, she'd have needed the battery-operated alternate light source, so that the s.e.m.e.n 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 s.h.i.+vered, only, she told herself, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s 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 s.e.x. 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 sh.o.r.eline, lay slightly more than a quarter mile offsh.o.r.e. ”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 pa.s.sed 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.”