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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.”
     
     
     

Chapter 4
     
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 23
1935
     
     
    The lines scared him.
    Snaking up the street and around the corner, a single-file assortment of men in worn clothing and beat-up shoes ended at the door to the soup kitchen. Each of them would get what they could, eat the soup and maybe shove the roll into their pocket for later or to take home to their families. It would almost certainly be their only meal today.
    Some days James looked away. Other days he forced himself to stare at them, to see each man as an individual and not a piece of society’s offal. To remind himself how lucky he was to still have a job and the semblance of a normal life. They came with a price, yes, but the alternative remained more costly.
    The driver’s door opened and his partner, Walter McKenna, dropped into the driver’s seat. Worn-out seat springs protested at his weight. “He didn’t see nothing.”
    They’d spent the morning working their way down Prospect, inquiring with the merchants who were either friendly to cops or known for associating with those who weren’t, trying to scare up information about the burglary of a Euclid jewelry store the previous week. So far they had been “treated” by various shop owners to three cups of coffee each as well as a piece of apple pie, two cigarettes, and a cigar (for Walter) but had not learned anything about the burglary.
    “Let’s go to lunch.” Walter started the car, and after the engine thought about it for a moment or two, it coughed to life. “You worry too much. Stop looking at them.”
    “I know.”
    “That’s not going to be you.”
    “I know,” he repeated, though he didn’t.
    They drove one block over and parked at the curb outside the Arcade—one of the advantages of having a car that said police on the side was the ability to park wherever you wanted, Eliot Ness and his traffic safety program notwithstanding—and went inside. Walter liked what he called “decent” food. No five-bit diner