An excerpt from Lisa Black’s upcoming novel TRAIL OF BLOOD, on sale this September.

The Torso Murders of Kingsbury Run began in 1935, unless one counted the pieces of a woman washed up by Lake Erie the year before, in which case they would have begun in 1934. The murders stopped in 1938, or perhaps 1950, if one could accept a twelve-year gap in the killer’s activities or supposed that he became more circumspect in hiding his victims—while aware that circumspection had never been part of his style. When victims weren’t cut into pieces and dropped into either the lake or the river, they were wrapped in paper and left like parcels for unsuspecting passersby to find. Some particularly unlucky male victims were divested of not only their heads but their genitalia. Sometimes the heads remained missing, sometimes only the heads were found, and sometimes the heads were placed near the body, in one case buried close by with the hair quite noticeably visible above the earth. He killed both men and women; only three of the victims were ever identified, and one of those tentatively.

His reign produced either twelve or fourteen victims, depending on which individuals were included or excluded. Unless one considered the rash of skeletons and other bodies found around New Castle, Pennsylvania, and one found in Youngstown, in which case the list of murders added up to twenty-six occurring between 1923 and 1950.

He was never caught.

The Torso murderer, also known as the Mad Butcher or the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run if you really wanted to get dramatic, was Cleveland’s very own serial killer, more prolific, equally as bent, but slightly tidier than Jack the Ripper.

Standing over the body, Theresa asked herself if she could really solve this, finish the case that her cop grandfather had told her about, repeated over and over at her request like a macabre bedtime story. He would have been thrilled at this development. He would have—

She stopped herself. Time to get real. If the case couldn’t be solved in its own time, what could she hope to do so many years later? All the city would get out of this latest chapter would be more frustration. Not to mention the maelstrom of media attention any whiff of it would inevitably produce. And this dead cop would give off more than a whiff . . . more like a sirocco.

Theresa swept her thumb over the gold badge. “It looks just like yours.”

“It would,” Frank told her. “The design hasn’t changed since 1906. Unfortunately detective shields don’t have numbers, so we can’t run him down that way.”

“You’d have lists of which cop had what number, three-quarters of a century back?”

“A police department is a bureaucracy. It keeps lists of everything, including the serial numbers of department-issued weapons.” He plucked the gun from the table and pulled out his phone, squinting at both of them—the little numbers on the phone and the little numbers on the gun. He had not yet given in to reading glasses. Neither had Theresa.

Her phone rang. Chris again. She snapped it shut without answering.

“Is that Leo?” Frank asked, referring to her problematic boss. He watched her with the phone to his ear, obviously on hold.

“No.” She brushed the last specks off the badge, avoiding her cousin’s eye. He had many of the characteristics of an older brother—the annoying ones. If he sniffed an uncomfortable subject, he’d run that rabbit to ground every time.

He merely raised an eyebrow, phone still clamped to his ear. “Who, then?”

“Chris.”

“Cavanaugh?”

“Yep.”

“You’re not taking his calls? Why?”

“Because I have more important things to do right now.”

“What’d that showy ass do, stand you up for a date?” Frank had never been a fan of the high-profile hostage negotiator.

“That wouldn’t be possible, since we’re not even really dating.”

“I should think not—what? Yes, I’m here.” He relayed the gun information to the person on the phone, and Theresa turned back to the body.

She set the badge next to the left foot. The shoe on that foot had what appeared to be masking tape wrapped around the toe.

The body snatchers, the Medical Examiner’s Office transport ambulance, were on their way with a Sawzall. She would cover the body with paper but still refused the plastic wrap idea—too much static electricity.

Frank snapped his phone shut. “James Miller.”

“What?”

“CPD assigned a Smith and Wesson with that serial number to a James Miller.”

“How did you find that out so fast?”

“We got a great guy running our history museum and he’s got all the rolls from back then. Miller joined the force in 1929, promoted to detective in 1932, dismissed in 1936 for dereliction of duty.”

“Don’t you have to turn in your gun and badge when you get fired?”

“Usually. The historian has got to check some other records but says it isn’t clear why he was fired—the way the notes he could locate are worded, they could mean that Miller became derelict and was therefore fired. In other words, went AWOL.”

Theresa looked down, automatically directing her gaze to the head of the body when of course the head no longer sat at its usual spot at the top of the spinal cord. “Wouldn’t a cop suddenly going missing cause a stir?”

“Of course it would. I’m sure they investigated, but it will take a while to track down those reports. That’s if this is even him, and not someone who stole James Miller’s badge and gun either to pawn it or use it. Those were desperate times. The Torso killer wasn’t the only one operating in Cleveland.”

“What do you mean? We had another serial killer?”

“I meant the other kind of serial killers—mobsters. Cleveland was a wide-open town then. They’d cracked down in New York and Chicago, but here they stayed under the radar and had most of the cops on the force on their payrolls. That Untouchable guy had to come here and clean it up.”

“Eliot Ness. I know, but I thought hit men dumped their bodies, not constructed little shrines to them.”

“It’s not a shrine. I’ve gone through every pebble on the floor and they left nothing in this room but the body. And they would have wanted to make absolutely sure this body did not turn up—even then, they didn’t kill cops if they could help it. This table could have been here for another reason, gambling, making bathtub gin. Miller finds them, or wants a bigger cut or something, so they slit his throat, wall the place up, and conceal two crimes at once.”

“I don’t know,” she said skeptically. “Why make such a statement with the beheading if you didn’t want to display it as an object lesson for everyone else?”

“We don’t know that they didn’t. There could have been a gap of time between the murder and closing the room.”

She didn’t want to picture a line of delinquent clients traipsing past to gape at the body of James Miller. Spreading the brown paper shroud over the bones, she tucked it in at the edges. Officer Miller would be subjected to only empathetic gazes from now on.

Theresa picked up one of the halogen lights, aimed it at the remaining wall. The light danced off the ancient wood and the plaster welling up through its cracks. The construction appeared steady and strong; the job had not been done in haste. It might be the original structure, but then they had no way to tell what the two and a half missing walls had been like before their destruction. If the walling up of James Miller had been flimsily done it wouldn’t have kept him secret all these years.

The wood had aged over the years with a speckled pattern of discoloration. She took a small bottle of Hemastix test strips out of her crime scene kit and dampened the ends with distilled water. Then she got Frank to hold the light for her while she pressed a wet yellow tip to a large stain, dark against the dark wood. The feltlike yellow material instantly turned a deep blue. “There’s blood on the walls.”

“Wow, what a shock. Wouldn’t cutting someone’s head off produce a lot of blood?”

“That depends on how it’s done. If it takes a number of cuts to the carotids, then there would be blood spraying everywhere for a few seconds. Even if there’s only one quick stroke severing the neck, the heart could keep pumping out the rest of the blood since cardiac tissue can function more or less independently of the brain—assuming the victim is still alive, of course. But this”—she stood back, taking in all the darkened spots as a pattern and not merely a characteristic of the wood—“isn’t one or two arterial spurts. The drops are more discrete, separated.”

“Castoff?” Frank suggested.

“Upon castoff upon castoff, upon castoff.”

“As if someone got really medieval on his ass?”

Theresa couldn’t help but picture the Mad Butcher, dancing around the room covered in his victim’s blood, each thrust of the knife scattering red liquid across the wood and plaster. A fall breeze drifted through the windows behind her, carrying with it a hint of winter, and brushed the back of her neck.

She tested a few more stains. They all reacted positively. “Yes, it’s only four feet from the table, but it seems like an awful lot of drops for a relatively small amount of damage to the body. There’s no evidence of multiple stab wounds and/or bludgeoning, and no fractures.”

“If it’s mob work, it could have been something more subtle, some technique that hurts a lot but doesn’t kill quickly. Maybe they had questions for Officer Miller he didn’t want to answer. Or asked for something he didn’t want to give back. Though I can’t see why they’d leave him armed, in that case.”

Theresa dug a sliver of wood from one stain with a disposable scalpel, dropping it into a small manila envelope. She marked the location on her crime scene sketch before moving on to another stain. “Or this guy isn’t the only person who was killed in this room.”

“You really do think this is the Torso killer’s workshop?”

“I think I need to sit down.” A joke, with no place to sit—but it really was too much: the bizarre circumstances, the time warp, the victim being a cop, the possible connection to a historic serial killer. “Who’s going to tell Mr. Lansky that we need to hang on to this building for a while?”

“I vote for you.”

“I vote for Leo.” Her boss had a deft hand for dealing with anyone he thought potentially useful to him—i.e., anyone outside the Medical Examiner’s Office—and would have the clout to hold up even a city councilman’s pet project. Whether he would have the fortitude, of course . . . Leo’s grasp of local politics exceeded even his considerable grasp of forensics.

“Good luck with that,” her cousin told her.

The plastic scalpel, meant to slice soft flesh and perhaps fabric, snapped in two and left the blade stuck in the hard wood. She couldn’t waste supplies and continued to work with it, careful not to let her fingers slide down to the cutting edge. “There isn’t any huge hurry, is there? Jacobs isn’t planning to build a mall here or anything?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then we need to keep this. Besides, if we really can link it to the Torso killer, it will probably beat out the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to become the city’s number one tourist attraction.”

“You sound almost hopeful.”

She started on a third stain, snapped the scalpel further. “I can’t decide what to hope for. I’d love to know, like everyone else in Cleveland. But I don’t want to jump to conclusions. And how do we go about investigating a seventy-four-year-old crime? We may not be able to get DNA out of such old bones, or this ancient wood. What if all this blood doesn’t belong to him? What if he slaughtered half a dozen victims in this little den—how do we find reference samples after so many years?”

“Cheer up, cuz. You and I have worked cold cases before.”

She sealed another manila envelope with red tape. A metallic rattle from the building’s entrance told her the body snatcher team now approached with a gurney and, she hoped, a big-ass electric saw. “This case isn’t just cold. It’s frozen-solid cold. It’s liquid-nitrogen cold.”

“That’s why I need you.”

 Lisa Black spent the five happiest years of her life in a morgue. As a forensic scientist in the Cuyahoga Co. coroner’s office she analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood and crime scenes. Now she’s a latent print examiner and CSI for the Cape Coral Police Department. She has been published in Germany, the Netherlands, France, the United Kingdom, Spain and Japan.  For more information visit Lisa-Black.com

Other books in the Theresa ManClean series:

TAKEOVER: Forensic Scientist Theresa MacLean is investigating an early-morning murder when she gets word that her fiancé has been taken hostage with seven others in a bank robbery at Cleveland’s Federal Reserve. East 6th turns into a war zone. High-profile negotiator Chris Cavanaugh hasn’t lost a victim yet, but Theresa wonders if he might be too arrogant to save the day this time around. Once she gets inside the bank, Theresa must use all her smarts, experience, and forensic skills to get control of the crisis.

EVIDENCE OF MURDER: Theresa MacLean is unable to summon much interest when beautiful escort Jillian goes missing—but when the woman turns up dead, Theresa is moved not only by guilt but empathy for Jillian’s infant daughter, Cara. She suspects Jillian’s new husband, Lakewood video game designer Evan Kovacic, but Jillian’s body shows no trace of foul play. Homicide detective Frank Patrick thinks Theresa is letting her grief deflect her from Jillian’s obsessive ex-boyfriend Drew, and Theresa’s boss believes a serial killer is at work. Theresa is forced to face the master gamer on her own, but can she find her way through this maze in time to save Cara?