by David Ellis
The fifth victim’s eyes were wide-open, like her mouth, and the petechiae on her neck and face suggested suffocation.
The last of the victims was the most recent, he assumed from the color of her skin, and because it seemed clear that whoever did this was placing them in chronological order. Her face was swollen from premortem bruising, her nose crushed, the bones above her eyes and on her cheeks clearly smashed as well, the top of her skull battered to mush. Her dark hair was sticking out in all directions, matted from the blood and brain matter. This, from what he’d been told, was Cassandra Bentley.
Six young women had been lined up like sides of beef, murdered and mutilated in various ways.
Okay, he’d seen it. It was important to view the crime scene, if you were going to prosecute a case. And there was no doubt Riley was going to handle this one.
His limbs electrified, his head woozy, Riley made his way back up the stairs. Neither the hallway nor the staircases showed any signs of blood. The fun hadn’t taken place here. They’d been murdered somewhere else and transported to this auditorium.
When he opened the door into the lobby, a tall, skinny man with dark curly hair nodded at him. “Paul Riley? Joel Lightner. Chief of Detectives at M.P.”
Riley removed his gas mask and shook Lightner’s hand. Lightner looked midthirties and baby-faced. Riley wondered how many detectives a small town like Marion Park could possibly have.
“Chief Harry Clark,” Lightner said, motioning behind him. Clark was one of those guys who would look sloppy without the uniform, bad posture, a sizable midsection, soft in the chin, with small eyes, and a military cut to his thin hair.
“And Walter Monk, head of security at Mansbury.”
They all shook hands and exchanged notes. Lightner flipped open his notepad and read off the list of injuries. The first girl, a blow to the skull and her heart had been removed; second girl, throat slit near the point of decapitation; third girl, burned with sulfuric acid; fourth girl, arms and legs severed, eyes gouged out; fifth girl, strangulation, or drowning; final girl, beaten savagely about the face and skull, with a single gunshot wound through the back of the mouth.
“There was intercourse in each case,” Lightner added. “The M.E. thinks the first victim is about a week old. Each one seems more recent than the—it looks like maybe it was one murder a day, for a week. The last one, they figure, was probably yesterday.”
“They were down here a whole week and no one noticed?”
Monk, the security guy, had to be near sixty. His long, beaky face nodded slowly. “Between spring semester and summer school, there’s a two-week period off. The whole school basically shuts down.”
And whoever did this, Riley thought, knew that.
“The last one is Cassie Bentley?” he asked. “The rich girl?”
Monk sighed. “Hard to tell for sure, she was beaten so badly.”
Riley surely agreed with that. The poor girl’s face had been crushed. They’d need dental records for confirmation.
“But, yeah,” Monk said, “I think so. Especially because the first one’s Ellie, so it makes sense.”
Riley perked up. He was playing catch-up here.
“Elisha Danzinger,” Lightner explained. “Ellie. She and Cassie shared a dorm room. Best friends.”
Riley turned to Monk. “How many kids here at Mansbury?”
He made a face. “About four thousand.”
“Four thousand. And how is it you know these two girls so well? ”
Monk grunted a laugh. “Oh, well, everyone knows Cassie Bentley. She’s a Bentley.” His face turned sour. “And she’s had her share of trouble. Disciplinary things. Cassie’s a little—kind of a troubled young girl.”
Lightner hit Monk with the back of his hand. “Tell him what you just told me about Ellie.”
“Yes, Ellie.” Monk took a breath. “Ellie had had some trouble with a college employee. A part-time handyman. He did odd jobs. Painting, blacktopping, maintenance. He’d been assigned this block of buildings when he worked here.”
“And?”
“And he’d been following Ellie around campus. Stalking her. She’d gone to court last year and gotten a restraining order. And we fired him, of course.”
Riley thought about that. A handyman. Keys to buildings like this auditorium. Knowledge of the school schedule. “Ellie’s the one, her heart was ripped out? The first one?”
They all nodded.
“So you know this guy? This handyman?”
“His name is Terry Burgos,” Monk said. “I have his home address right here.”
Riley looked at Lightner. Did he really need to say the words?
“I’m taking a couple cars with me,” said Lightner.
“Wait,” Riley said. “I need a phone. And someone find me one of the ACAS. We’re not taking any chances. Surround the house right now. If you can get his consent for a search, then go in. Otherwise, freeze the situation until I say so.”
Lightner shot Riley a look. Cops had all kinds of ways of obtaining consent, or saying they did after the fact.
“We’re not fucking this search up, Detective,” Riley said. “Are we clear?”
Riley left the cops and found an assistant county attorney, sending her off to a judge for a warrant. Then he found a phone in the school’s administrative office and dialed the number for his boss, County Attorney Ed Mullaney. “You’ll need to call Harland Bentley,” Riley told him. He looked out the window at a news copter overhead. “If he hasn’t already heard.”
2
12:35 P.M.
BY THE TIME Paul Riley pulled up to Terry Burgos’s house, the Marion Park Police Department had been there for an hour. Burgos had answered Detective Joel Lightner’s knock at the door and had not resisted when Lightner had asked him to wait on the front porch while an assistant county attorney obtained a warrant to search his home.
A news copter hovered overhead. Reporters were lining the po lice tape. The neighbors were out, some of them dressed for work, others in robes, clutching their small children, as they looked on. The news had spread naturally. A killer lived at 526 Rosemary Lane.
The house was nondescript, one of a series of bungalows where the “townies” lived just west of campus. The police were everywhere, looking for trace evidence and footprints in the dirt out back, scanning the garage, where some blood and hair had been found, and working on Burgos’s Chevy Suburban parked in the driveway.
Burgos had been taken to police headquarters, where he would be questioned. Riley wanted to be there, but he wanted a look at the house first. He’d already had a preview. The master bathroom, garage, and truck held some obvious promise, but most of what they needed to know was in the basement.
His stomach was swimming, but he had to keep his composure. This was his case. Everyone would follow his lead. He nodded to Lightner, who was on his way to the garage. He was going to wait for Riley before heading back to the station, but the instructions had been clear enough to the uniforms taking Burgos into custody: No one talked to Terry Burgos until Riley said so.
Riley followed the path of rocks up to the house. The yard had been neglected, brown spots littering the dry lawn. The screen door, which had seen better days, had been removed by one of the cops, leaving the front door, which was propped open by a rock from the front steps.
The interior of the house on the main floor was relatively undisturbed. Some antique furniture, dilapidated tile flooring, a fairly well-kept, humble presentation.
Riley held his breath and took the carpeted basement stairs down, nonetheless noticing the smell first. To the untrained nose, it smelled like sewage more than anything else. Most people, when murdered, lose control of bowel functions and soil themselves. There were no bodies down here, but Lightner had said there was no doubt that the murders happened in the basement.
He was right.
The basement was not furnished, a concrete floor with a small workout area, with a weight bench and a barbell with
modest weights gathering cobwebs. A dartboard hung precariously on one wall next to a target for a BB gun. The room as a whole was probably poorly lit, but the police had installed high-powered lighting, leaving the technicians to work in an odd glow.
Riley turned to the back of the basement, where Burgos had a small workshop—a power saw and some hand tools and saw-horses. The floor was spotted and dirty. Bloodstains, most likely that Burgos had attempted to wipe clean. A number of technicians were gathering hairs with tweezers, placing other items in paper evidence bags near the workshop area, where it appeared the murders had occurred.
Riley walked up to the small workbench and sucked in his breath. Resting on the bench was an ordinary kitchen knife, a good five- or six-inch blade, covered with dried blood and other particulate. The first two victims, Elisha Danzinger and an unidentified girl, had been treated to that weapon. Next to the knife was a handsaw, its blade similarly covered in blood, other bodily fluids, and what appeared to be bone. That was the weapon he’d used to dismember the fourth victim.
A freestanding bathtub rested in one corner, looking like something plucked from a garbage dump, with significant corrosion inside. Riley had no doubt that this was where Burgos had scalded the one victim with acid. Sitting on top of a nearby washing machine was a car battery and a glass vial.
Four down, two to go.
Riley already knew that upstairs, in the master bathroom, police had found hairs in the drain of the bathtub, which was presumably where one of the victims had been drowned. And in the garage, they had uncovered a single bullet and a .32-caliber handgun—presumably the gun used to shoot Cassie Bentley through the back of the mouth, either before or after Burgos had beaten her almost beyond recognition.
That covered them all. The guy hadn’t gone to great lengths—any lengths—to cover this up. He’d left the murder weapons in full view. He’d left trace evidence of the victims in his basement, car, and garage. He’d left the victims’ identification-purses, driver’s licenses, clothes—in a garbage bag in his bedroom. Yes, he’d confined the murders to his property, or so it appeared at first blush, but otherwise Terry Burgos had made little attempt to clean up or discard his weapons.
On the workbench, resting next to the knife and handsaw, was a King James Bible, with bloody fingerprints along the pages. A single sheet of paper, tacked to the poster board on the wall behind the workbench, listed a number of passages from the Bible, chapter and verse. He leaned over the bench to get a close look at the sheet, which was written in red ballpoint pen. At the top, set apart, was a verse from Jeremiah 48:10:
Cursed be he that doeth the work of the LORD deceitfully, and cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood.
Beneath this verse, descending down the page with numbers next to them, were other biblical passages, by citation only:
1. Hosea 13:4-8
2. Romans 1:24-32
3. Leviticus 21:9
4. Exodus 21:22-25
5. 2 Kings 2:23-24
6. Deuteronomy 22:20-21
In the last of the six citations, a reference to Leviticus had been scratched out in favor of a passage from Deuteronomy. The edit had been done with a thin black Magic Marker.
Riley let out his breath. Six girls dead, six verses from the Bible.
Okay. Enough. The crime scene wasn’t his specialty, he’d just wanted a taste. Riley appreciated the fresh air when he stepped outside again. He found Lightner near the garage. Lightner’s body language suggested a fully charged cop working the biggest case of his career, but his eyes showed something dark and evil. They had just seen two gruesome crime scenes. Now it was time to connect them.
“Let’s go get a confession,” Riley said to him.
3
1:17 P.M.
PAUL RILEY nursed a cup of water and watched the suspect through a one-way mirror in the observation room. You learned more from your eyes than you ever did from your ears. Innocent people were nervous in custody. Guilty people often weren’t.
Terry Burgos was sitting alone in an interrogation room, wearing headphones he’d been allowed to bring, moving his head and tapping his foot to the beat, sometimes playing drums on the small table in front of him. The guy looked the Mediterranean part, short, beefy in the chest and torso, dark around the eyes, lots of thick, curly dark hair. Had a baseball cap pulled down and appeared to be humming to himself. He had drunk two cans of Coca-Cola and gone to the bathroom once. Had not requested a lawyer and had not received Miranda warnings.
Burgos had sat idle in the room for over an hour. Riley had wanted time for the police to gather whatever information they could before questioning the suspect. That, and he wanted Burgos hungry for lunch. Riley had hoped for more time, but there was no way anyone was letting go of Burgos, and there was only so long you could hold someone and keep lawyers away. Everyone, soon enough, was going to know about Terry Burgos, and it wouldn’t take long for an attorney of some kind or another to be knocking on the door.
Various cops and prosecutors came in and out of the observation room, peering in on the suspect with morbid curiosity. There was a palpable intensity in the police station because they knew they had their man, and it was the biggest thing this town had ever seen.
Burgos did not have a clean sheet. Two years earlier, he’d been arrested on suspicion of battery of a young woman, but it ended in a nolle prosequi, meaning the charges were dropped. Paul assumed the woman had failed to show for the hearing. Last year, he had been charged with sexual assault, but the case had been pleaded down to a misdemeanor battery, and he hadn’t done any time.
Elisha Danzinger had gone to the police to swear out a complaint against Terry Burgos in November of the previous year, 1988. She had alleged that Burgos, at the time a part-time handyman at Mansbury, had been following her around the campus, making threatening comments and generally making her feel uncomfortable. The police had brought Burgos in but hadn’t charged him. There was nothing on which they could charge him. Paul knew, from the Mansbury staff, that this past January Ellie had gotten an order of protection against Burgos, a civil action not contained in the police file, which had prohibited Burgos from coming within five hundred feet of her.
Burgos was age thirty-six, lived alone, and had worked two jobs. The first was a part-timer for Mansbury until he was fired this February, primarily landscaping but occasional cleaning assignments as well. For his second job, which he still held, he worked in an off-campus printing company owned by Mansbury College professor Frankfort Albany.
Terry Burgos, by all accounts, was moderately intelligent, if undereducated, and introverted; didn’t get an A plus for hygiene; didn’t complain much; and seemed generally indifferent to life. The unconfirmed word was he’d had a difficult childhood growing up in Marion Park, spousal abuse charges between his parents, and very poor school performance, ending short of a high school diploma.
Joel Lightner was standing next to Paul, watching through the one-way as Burgos jammed to his music. Lightner was bouncing on his toes, like a pitcher in the bull pen who was about to get the tap on the arm from the coach. “When do we start?” he asked.
“Do we have the photos?” Riley asked.
He nodded, handed Riley a file.
There was no reason to wait much longer. Unless Burgos’s nerves had completely overtaken him, which Riley doubted from looking at him, Burgos was probably hungry. Things like withholding food were bases for a defense attorney to argue coercion.
Riley sighed and stretched his arms. “You up for this, Detective?”
Lightner nodded efficiently. “Marion Park’s not Mayberry, Paul. I’m no virgin.”
That was true enough. Marion Park, a nearby suburb, didn’t have the city’s crime, but at least one prominent gang, the Columbus Street Cannibals, had begun to have a presence down there.
“Doesn’t mean I’m not open to suggestions.”
“Okay” Paul looked through the one-way mirror again. “Hands off, first of al
l.”
“Only way I do it.”
“Let’s make it a courtesy, for starters. Don’t let him leave, obviously, but tell him he can. See if he tries.”
“We’ll do lunch,” he suggested. Riley’s thought exactly. A conversation over lunch was more casual. So they were on the same page. It was standard practice for detectives to interrogate suspects, not ACAs. Paul could overrule that and take it himself, but then he’d be a witness and disqualified from prosecuting the case. There were some other ACAs floating about right now, guys Paul had summoned from the city, including the chiefs of the criminal prosecutions and special prosecutions bureaus. But Paul made the call, right there, that Joel Lightner would get first crack. He had caught the case and it was his. Besides, if they were right about this guy, he wasn’t going anywhere, whether he confessed or not.
“Record it,” Riley said, as Lightner walked out of the observation room. Paul brought in the bureau chiefs, plus Chief Clark and three other of his detectives. All of these people could verify anything that the tape recording couldn’t. Riley also wanted to hear their thoughts on the progress made so far.
They all watched, in silence, through the one-way mirror. Terry Burgos was quietly bopping along to the music from his headphones. He didn’t even look up as Joel Lightner entered the room, carrying a tape recorder. Lightner placed it down on the small wooden table and extended the cord to the wall socket. Only when he felt the vibration of the recorder hitting the table did the suspect take notice.
Lightner took a seat opposite Burgos and gestured with his hands that he should remove the headphones. Burgos fumbled with the player, finally turned it off, and removed the tiny speakers from his ears.
