'Oh, Eliot-don't you be silly.'
'Look, we just had a fling. I'd rather not talk about that. That's the past. I'm interested in the present.'
'And the future?'
'And the future.'
He held her close and she let him.
They were headed back to their table when a waiter stopped them.
'Mr. Ness,' he said. 'Telephone for you in the lounge.'
He left Ev at their table and walked to the bar in the dimly lit, walnut-paneled lounge. He hadn't left word where he'd be, but he wasn't terribly surprised to have been tracked down. It didn't take much of a detective to figure Ness would be in the Vogue Room on a Saturday night. The only other two possibilities were the Bronze Room at the Cleveland Hotel or his country club.
The bartender directed him to the one of the over-stuffed davenports where a table with a phone waited. He sat and spoke his name into the receiver.
It was Curry.
'Chief, he's back at it again.'
'You don't mean the Butcher?'
'That's exactly who I mean.'
'Christ. Tell me.'
'We got an arm without a hand; a lower leg, from ankle to foot. Clean dismemberments with a sharp knife, I'd say.'
'God. Where?'
'Washed up on the riverbank near the foot of Superior Avenue, below the Run. Not far from where some pieces of the last two turned up.'
'An arm and a leg at the foot, huh,' he said wryly. 'Where are you now?'
'Merlo's still at the scene. I'm calling from a saloon that I don't imagine is quite as nice as the one you're in.'
'Can you tell anything from what you've seen? Man or woman?'
'Woman. Not much decomposition. It's either fresh or refrigerated. One new twist.'
'Oh?'
'He might've tortured this one, some.'
'How?'
'The arm's scarred up, blistered. They look like sores or acid burns or something. Suppose that means something?'
'I'm sure it does,' Ness said. 'I just wish it did to me.'
He told Curry he'd meet him at the crime scene and hurried in to make his apologies to Ev. She would understand. They always did at first.
TWO
CHAPTER 15
Sam Wild was standing in a rock and refuse-strewn wasteland near the intersection of East Ninth Street and Shore Drive. It was five-thirty in the afternoon, within spitting distance of the business district, though you'd never know it, judging from these several desolate sloping acres of rubble and rubbish. He was perhaps twenty-five feet from Shore Drive, where homebound traffic was clogged, many motorists stopping there and on East Ninth, perhaps two hundred feet away; a cordon of uniformed cops was keeping hordes of onlookers back.
Word of the latest torso find had spread fast.
Scouting the vast dump was a handful of plainclothes detectives, including the youngish Curry and older, haunted-looking Merlo. The slabs and chunks and hunks of cement beneath their feet, and the occasional concrete pillar that lay about as if discarded by some nonchalant Samson, were debris from the expo. All that was left of a once-proud city of the future.
In charge, of course-and in this summer heat the only man in a vested suit rather than shirtsleeves-was the safety director himself, who was at the moment bending over the headless body of a woman, waving away flies.
The upper and lower arms and upper and lower legs and hands and feet had all been neatly severed from the torso by an unknown party; but the pieces had been put back where they belonged, assembled like a puzzle, by Ness and Coroner Gerber. The small pale coroner, with his salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, and wire-frame glasses, all in medical white, seemed strangely out of place in this desert of garbage and stones. He was kneeling over the reassembled corpse, raising a hand over it like a priest making a benediction.
The remains had been discovered, less than an hour ago, by an out-of-work young man named James Beason, who'd been searching the dump for scrap metal; at the moment he was being questioned just within Wild's earshot by Curry.
Wild, who'd been in Ness's office when the call came in, had been allowed along on the condition that he didn't take any notes; otherwise, other reporters-not invited along-would take offense. That was okay with Wild. He had a hell of a memory.
Beason, a man of average build in dungarees and workshirt, seemed calm, considering.
'I was getting ready to gather up the scrap iron I found and put it in my wheelbarrow,' he was saying. 'You know… so I could sell it to a junkyard? Then I seen what looked like a real colorful coat sticking out from under these rocks that was piled up neat.'
'Go on,' Curry said, writing it down.
Beason shrugged. 'I took a couple of rocks off the pile and then I noticed these human limbs. So I went to call a policeman at a filling station on East Ninth Street. And that's all I know, I swear.'
'Well, you're going to have to repeat this at headquarters. We'll have some more questions.'
'What about my scrap metal?'
'We'll make sure nobody takes it.'
Curry walked Beason to a uniformed cop and gave some instructions that Wild didn't hear; then the cop took Beason away.
Wild moved closer to Ness and Gerber.
Gerber was standing now, saying, 'The technique is unmistakable, Eliot. Hesitation marks are all too familiar. This is no copycat. It's the genuine article. Our man is back at it. Butcher victim number twelve.'
'An even dozen.'
'I should think a butcher's dozen would number thirteen,' Gerber said with a grim smile. 'Let's hope he doesn't reach that tally.'
The most recent corpse (till now), as yet unidentified, had turned up-actually washed up-in April; an arm and a leg first, then both thighs, one foot and the torso in two halves, wrapped in potato sack burlap, floating in the Cuyahoga.
Truth be told, Wild was glad this case was active again; it made for hot copy.
Ness was saying, 'What can you tell me about her, Doctor?'
Good. Mentally, Wild began taking it all down.
Gerber scratched his chin, glancing down at her. 'Well, she was white.'
That was a hell of an observation, Wild thought.
'Between twenty and thirty-five, I'd say,' the coroner continued. 'Five feet five-allowing for the absent head.'
