Part 20 (1/2)

This did not cheer Corliss much. ”I hope you can find out, after all this time. I hate seeing my family name in the papers.”

”That won't happen through me,” she said in the same sober manner, reflecting that he and Frank saw eye to eye on that subject.

”I wasn't worried about you. That Mr. Jablonski has been hovering around me like some kind of vampire bat ever since you found those two bodies on the hillside. He calls, shows up on my doorstep, and leaves messages to ask about my father and the building on Pullman. No matter how much I try to explain, he doesn't understand my father-and neither do you. He liked human beings, and they liked him. He had a great compa.s.sion for people from all walks of life-more, frankly, than I do. He felt lucky to have wealth at a time when some had lost everything they owned, to be well fed while others literally starved to death, to be clean when they lived in cardboard shacks.” He covered her hand with his fingers and looked into her eyes. ”He never renounced a person until they failed to live up to their humanity. I know this. So you see, Ms. MacLean, it's not merely an intellectual exercise to me.”

Theresa tried to extricate her fingers, found them too well pinned, and thought: This is why I could never be a cop. How did they look into the eyes of a mother who thought her son to be pure and sweet and tell her that he had raped a schoolmate? Or prove to a husband that his wife had emptied their bank accounts of her own free will, to run away with her lover? Tell a small child that their parent valued their drugs more than their offspring?

That perhaps Edward Corliss had seen only the side of his father that he wanted to see, or had been permitted to see. Ted Bundy had been quite the charmer as well. ”I wouldn't-”

A third voice interrupted her. ”Finding everything you need?”

She jumped. William Van Horn stood in the doorway, staring at their commingled hands. The sneer on his thin face seemed as irrational as it did obnoxious, and yet it made her heart thud as if she'd been caught chewing gum in study hall.

”Yes, thank you,” she said.

Edward Corliss removed his hand.

When Van Horn dematerialized from the doorway, she leaned across the table and whispered, ”What is up with that guy, anyway? Will this become an election scandal, you caught canoodling with a nonmember?”

He laughed, the air exploding out of his nose before he could stop it. ”And in the library, no less. No, no particular reason for William to look so superior. He just always does. It doesn't win him any friends, but he enjoys his own company so much he doesn't mind.”

Now she snickered. ”Then why is he president?”

”Because his great-uncle was the last CEO of the Pennsylvania Railroad and left all the artifacts of its one-hundred-and-twenty-four-year reign to William. He parcels these out to the society a few at a time, and only as a loan. The pressure gauge in the lobby and the photograph of the Congressional Express are examples.”

”Oh.”

She must have worn a blank expression, because he went on. ”The Pennsylvania Railroad was a behemoth. It absorbed eight hundred smaller companies during its reign.”

”It's not operating now?”

”The lines were eventually divided between Conrail and Amtrak. Twenty years later, Conrail's lines were divided between CSX and Norfolk Southern. It's a heartbreaking business, now that you mention it.”

”You said your father worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad?”

”Yes, but as a lowly brakeman, not CEO. I have no claim to William's collection, so he will continue to ransom them for social acceptance. Ah well, one does what one must, I suppose.”

Theresa shook her head, couldn't think of anything else to ask, and thanked him for a most interesting afternoon. ”Thank you for teaching me how to hop trains. Not that I intend to make a habit of it.”

”You're very welcome. And I will continue to poke around my house to see if anything has survived from my father's business concerns. I doubt I'll find any items of interest, but I'll let you know if I do.” He patted her arm as they left the building, but she had the distinct impression that he would carefully weigh the significance of any such item beforehand. If it could possibly implicate his father she might never hear of it.

But she couldn't do anything about that, and couldn't blame him. Who would want the world to know they were the progeny of a serial killer?

She thanked him for his time and got into her car. As she pulled out of the parking lot she caught his image in the rearview mirror, watching her leave, suddenly looking his age as his shoulders drooped and he frowned. The vitality he'd shown earlier seemed to fade as if his mind now followed tracks it did not care to travel.

CHAPTER 26.

SUNDAY, JANUARY 26.

1936.

James had not forgotten the two headless men on Jacka.s.s Hill, but he no longer carried the blue coat or its pills around with him. After he and Walter exhausted all possibilities for identification, they had turned it over to the identification unit for scientific a.n.a.lysis. Then they personally drove fifteen possible relatives of the unidentified man to the morgue to view the decapitated victim. The staff there would drape a sheet over the ragged bottom of the neck to spare the men, but to James the sharp falling-off of the cloth where a body should have been seemed worse, the situation made even more bizarre by trying to make the gore presentable. And they brought only men there, even if there were mothers or wives who might more easily have recognized the missing person. The morgue was no place for a lady.

Some of those men had fainted straightaway, and all insisted that the dead...thing did not resemble their missing relative or friend or neighbor. It did not help that the body's lack of not only clothing but genitalia convinced every adult in the city that the murderer had to be extremely perverted, and what would their friend or relative or neighbor have been doing in the company of any such man? James worried that someone might recognize the man and simply refuse to admit it.

Officers probed the background of the first victim-identified as petty criminal Edward Andra.s.sy-and his family, friends, and habits, but every lead petered out without revealing the killer.

James kept up with the investigation, pestering the main detectives with questions and carefully absorbing any drop of office scuttleb.u.t.t, but he knew that the odds of finding a solution grew smaller with every pa.s.sing day. He and Walter had plenty of burglaries, a.s.saults, and domestic complaints to keep them occupied; at home Helen did not abandon her quest for new dishes and baby John caught a cold. James consoled himself that the killer had been a hobo who had sensibly hopped a boxcar and left town even as the bodies cooled on the hillside. That way it did not keep him up at night, despite the savagery of the murders. Every cop knew there were ones you weren't going to solve, and you either made your peace with that or you got into another line of work. James wasn't even the lead investigator, anyway, just a rookie gold s.h.i.+eld who didn't take bribes and therefore wasn't trusted.

So he left the two victims to the angels and continued to plod through his daily life. He never expected there would be more.

James had that Sunday off, which had dawned crisp and very cold. Frost covered the windows and Helen didn't even consider going to church services and exposing baby John to the winter air. James had been awake most of the night, lying on his side, facing the ba.s.sinet, listening to each breath moving in and out of his son's tiny chest. The cold-little more than a case of the sniffles-did not truly threaten the baby but still he worried, and besides, concentrating on John gave both James and Helen a break from thinking about each other.

Twelve noon found him at the kitchen table eating a portion of soup, thin but hot, when someone pounded on the door. James opened it to a gust of unheated air and his partner, who began speaking immediately. ”We got another one, Jimmy me boy, and I'm told it makes those two b.u.ms on the hill look like a school picnic. It's the most disgusting-good afternoon, Helen. How is little John coming along?”

James felt the soup turn to ice in his stomach. ”You mean-another body like-”

”But it's Sunday, and you're not even scheduled,” Helen protested. ”You can't have to work on a Sunday.”

Walter grimaced along with her. ”I guess we never sleep, just like those Pinkertons. But we ain't got a choice-every cop in the city will be working this one.”

James got his coat and m.u.f.fler as his wife repeated, ”But it's Sunday. I thought we could go out this evening, leave John with Mrs. Tsolt downstairs and see a show-”

The winter months were hard on her, confined to these four walls with only a coughing baby for company. ”I'm sorry, honey. But there's nothing I can do.”

Her scowl indicated that she found him less than credible.

”You'll have to come over for dinner real soon, Helen,” Walter put in. ”The missus has been asking about you.”

Walter was a nice guy in a lot of ways, or maybe he found Helen his biggest ally in the attempt to get James around to the right way of thinking. In either case, her scowl lessened, and after one more check on the sleeping baby, James went with his partner into the icy streets.

The temperature had been arrested well below freezing; he could tell from the way his nostrils stuck together when he inhaled. Between that and its being Sunday, the roadways were largely empty. Their department-a.s.signed car spluttered a bit before it would start.

”Only one this time?” James asked.