Trail of Blood by Lisa Black Page B

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 sexual thing.”
    “Are you kidding? He emasculated a couple of them. Besides, is serial murder ever
not
a sexual 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.”
    Theresa stared at her boss, his face a ghostly echo in the weak UV light.
    “What?” Leo said. “That didn’t occur to you?”
    “Yes, but—” The idea had been there since they had found the body, of course, but putting it into words forced her to picture it: A dedicated cop tracked down the monster the entire city had been looking for. He solved the crime of the century but never had a chance to tell anyone. His only legacy came to be that of a deserter, a bum who walked off the job.
    In a split second James Miller went from being an intellectual exercise to a tragedy.
    “What?” Leo said again. “What are you looking all sniffly about?”
    They were jumping to conclusions, of course, not just jumping but leaping with reckless abandon, both feet off the ground. Yet she had never been more certain of anything in her life.
    A beam of light split the room, cleaving her and Leo to opposite sides.
    Christine appeared in a white coat, backlit like an angel. “Here you are again. What is it about you forensic types and the dark?”
    Theresa cleared her throat. “We’re used to it. Years of working for the county have taught