Part 9 (1/2)
CHAPTER 11.
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 7.
PRESENT DAY.
Theresa picked up the miniature notebook, which James Miller had left folded open to the most recent page; many of the preceding pages were covered in writing, stuck to each other in some spots, and the sheets after that point were blank. The first section of the notebook had wound up in the center; thus protected, the writing remained relatively clear.
James had begun his notes on April 20, 1936, with the case of a purse s.n.a.t.c.hed from a lady's arm outside the Playhouse Square movie theater. His handwriting could get murky, but it seemed James had noted the woman's description of the perpetrator (twenty-five to thirty, torn brown jacket) and the movie she had intended to see (A Quiet Fourth with Betty Grable). He had interviewed a few witnesses, expressing his opinion of their veracity with a system of exclamation points and question marks. Theresa could picture him, in a brown suit coat with a hat pulled low on his brow, the marquee lightbulb glinting off his eyes as he stared down a squirrely customer.
Leo's voice at her elbow made her jump. ”So is it him?”
”Who?”
”The Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.”
”Leo, aren't we're going to look a bit foolish if we suggest to the population of Cleveland that we have a nonagenarian serial killer in our midst?”
”They'd love it. If we can link this guy to the Torso killer the national outlets will pick it up. Then these local TV wimps will have to run the story, councilman or no councilman. What's that? Is that from the girl?”
”No, our 1935 victim.” She began to separate the pages, gently, using a plastic set of tweezers. ”The girl didn't have anything on her but a tiny blob of brown paint in her hair. It's got a fiber in it, though, probably carpeting, red polyester in a trilobal shape. Oh, and also two little flecks of white stuff.”
”Stuff is not a forensic conclusion.”
”I'll run it through the FTIR. Otherwise the lake scrubbed her poor little body 'til it gleamed. There was no one in Latent Prints on the holiday, but I suspect they'll turn up her ID today-she looks unnaturally skinny to me, with that junkie pallor.” The tips of the notebook pages crumbled as she pulled on them to open the book flat.
”You going to put that under the ALS? I'll go with you.”
She protested. ”You really don't have to do that....”
”Don't be silly. I'm always ready to help one of my staff with a th.o.r.n.y problem. Besides, U.S. News and World Report will be calling this afternoon and I'd like to have something to tell them.”
”But I thought we never released information on an open ca-”
”I'd like,” he repeated, holding the door open for her, ”to have something to tell them.”
She kept her sigh to herself and carried the notebook in its tray down the two flights of steps. The ultraviolet light apparatus stayed in the amphitheater, since she normally used it for clothing examinations.
They were in luck. The decomp fluid hadn't caused the ink to run, and the ultraviolet light moved past the decades-old blood and decomposition fluid as if they weren't there, then sank into the writing as if filling up its indentations with blackness.
”It seems to be a list.” She stared at the page, sorting out the words in her head.
”One would a.s.sume he took notes on his investigation, just like any detective,” Leo mused, breathing into the cubic foot of air surrounding their work. He had lunched on something with curry in it. ”I wonder if he was working on the Torso Murders. Hey-maybe he is the Torso killer. Wouldn't that be great?”
”No,” Theresa snapped. ”That wouldn't be great at all.”
”Well, interesting, anyway. Famous serial killer turns out to be cop. It's usually the number three theory anyway, after 'doctor' and 'spoiled son of a wealthy family.' The same ideas they had about Jack the Ripper.”
Theresa wrote her translations onto her worksheet, squinting in the near dark. ”Any theories about why the Torso guy took their heads off?”
”He thought they were vampires and wanted to make sure they stayed dead?”
”I've been reviewing the literature. Decapitation as a method of murder is very rare, so rare I can't find anything written on the subject. Bodies are often dismembered to make them easier to dispose of, but the Torso killer must have had other reasons. Sometimes he divided his victims into pieces but then left them where they were sure to be found, so it wasn't done to hide the body. Sometimes he scattered them about town.”
”Proving that no man is an island, that sort of thing?” Leo guessed.
”Then some he hung on to for a while. And yet he had such an eclectic mix of victims-all genders and ages, like the Zodiac killer or the Night Stalker. So maybe it's not a s.e.xual thing.”
”Are you kidding? He emasculated a couple of them. Besides, is serial murder ever not a s.e.xual thing?”
”Good point,” Theresa said. ”Then with a number of his victims, he removed only the head. Why the head?”
”They do it in the Middle East.”
”But that's more of a political statement. I suppose it's always been popular for political murders, from the samurai to Vlad the Impaler to the French Revolution. But for your average psychopath, not so much.”
”Maybe both our killers wanted to be different.”
”But why decapitation?”
”I don't know, okay? Can you figure out what that says?”
James Miller had written: pills dog hair newspaper food in stomach RR tar?
bull?
”How are you making that out?” Leo demanded.
”If I can read my own handwriting, I can read anyone's.”
”His lists are just like yours. A bunch of words that don't mean anything.”
”My lists mean something to me.” She turned a page, moving backward into the notebook. ”These must have meant something to him.”
Kingsbury-June 5, 1936 decapitated WM, about 20s slim, many tattoos naked no blood!
right in front of RR police-why?
clothes piled-J.D.
”So he was definitely still alive in 1936,” she said. ”And he was investigating the Torso Murders.”
”And solved them. He caught up with the guy.”