Trail of Blood by Lisa Black

Author:Lisa Black
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2010-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 26

SUNDAY, JANUARY 26

1936

James had not forgotten the two headless men on Jackass 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 analysis. 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 Andrassy—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 scuttlebutt, but he knew that the odds of finding a solution grew smaller with every passing day. He and Walter had plenty of burglaries, assaults, 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 shield 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 bassinet, listening to each breath moving in and out of his son’s tiny chest. The cold—little more than a

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