“My dear, poor man.” She sighed again. “Yet you like Daniela, don’t you? You think she is beautiful. I saw it in your face the very first day.”
Had she? How humiliating if so. He prided himself on being a bit harder to read.
“I am here to do a job, Miss Kos,” he said, throwing his napkin down and pushing back his chair. “That is all.”
“And what job is that, Mr. Malone? I have not been able to puzzle that out. I’m guessing Daniela knows. She’s a terrible snoop, though it’s not her fault.”
“It seems to be a family trait,” he said, his voice perfectly mild.
Lenka blinked at him, stunned, and then she snickered.
“I like you, Mr. Malone,” she said. “I like you very much. I think you are exactly what the doctor ordered.”
“Yes. Well. If you’ll excuse me,” he said. “I have work to do, hours of tedious work, and I’d very much like to finish. The sooner the better.”
“Of course, darling,” Lenka said, all sweetness and light. “But don’t be in too big a hurry. And don’t dismiss Daniela. You might miss something important.”
Dani was coming up the stairs when he was going down. She greeted him sedately. He greeted her in the same manner. And they both continued on their way.
The first evidence that there was a Victim #6 had come when pieces of a man’s pale white torso bobbed up in the waters of a stagnant pool vagrants called “the creek” in Kingsbury Run. A vagrant named Jerry Harris, waiting on the banks to hitch a ride on the train, was the lucky witness. That was September 10, 1936.
For a month, authorities dragged the filthy pool with hooks looking for the rest. They found the thighs, the right one and then the left, but never found the man’s arms or his head.
They even sent down a marine diver.
Malone had marveled at that, especially when he read a quote by the man hired to do the job. It was an article published with a picture of onlookers lining the banks of the pond.
“We can’t see anything,” the diver reportedly said. “We’re used to that, having worked in the Cuyahoga River. We operate by sense of touch.”
Reading the article again made Malone think of Dani. What would she have been able to determine if she’d held the clothes the detectives had found in the weeds near the pool?
His heart started to pound at the thought. It wasn’t the first time he’d considered it. Dani would be able to tell him things he couldn’t possibly uncover any way else, just like she’d done with the kid’s cap. He would just have to get his hands on the evidence. Ness could help with that. Maybe sneak them into the evidence locker for an hour or two.
Malone rescanned the list of clothing found with Victim #6, his excitement building. Some items were wrapped in newspaper as if they were gifts for the police. A felt hat, a patched-up work shirt, and a partial pair of underwear with a laundry mark of “JW.” There was blood on the shirt, slash marks too, and blood on the underwear. Like Andrassy and Victim #2, Victim #6 had been emasculated. The coroner’s report claimed that the thin, five ten, twenty-five to thirty-year-old man had been alive when the dismemberment started.
Malone’s excitement crashed like it had been doused in ice water.
No, he wouldn’t want Dani touching the clothes. He didn’t want her anywhere near this case. She’d cried because a dead vagrant had worn his lost love on his dirty sleeve. He did not want her seeing—or feeling—anything to do with the Butcher or the Butcher’s dead.
He sighed, sickened, and tore off the page to start a new one.
On February 23, 1937, the lower half of a woman’s torso washed up on the beach at the foot of East 156th Street. The county pathologist guessed that the woman had been between twenty-five to thirty years old with light brown hair. She’d weighed about 120 pounds and was between five foot five and five foot eight inches tall, which were estimates and extrapolations, and not on actual measurements, as they had only half a torso, and no arms, legs, or head.
On May 5, 1937, almost three months later, the upper half of a torso rolled up on the beach and bottomed out a few feet from the shore. Cold Lake Erie had kept the flesh preserved, and when it was taken to the city morgue, it was a perfect match with the bottom half. The woman was never identified, and no one came forward to claim her. This time there wasn’t even the victim’s clothing from which to draw clues. Dani would be as blind as the rest of them.
But the coroner was reluctant to add the woman to the Butcher’s tally, arguing she hadn’t been found in the Run and that she’d already been dead when she was decapitated. The cuts were less controlled and precise, making the findings easy to waffle over.
The truth they didn’t want to acknowledge was that the first Lady of the Lake had washed up in the exact same place, in roughly the same condition, her torso cut in half. Police didn’t just have a seventh victim, they had an eighth; all indications were that the first Lady of the Lake in ’34 had been the Butcher’s work too.
The papers had begun to refer to the Lady of the Lake in some accounts as Victim Zero so as to not change the original numbering of the dead. Since numbers were all they had, in most cases, to keep their victims straight, Malone could understand why.