Eye of the Beholder

by David Ellis

  “Appreciate you coming down, Mr. Burgos. Do you mind if I record this conversation?”

  Burgos looked over the detective, in rolled-up shirtsleeves. Joel placed his finger on the RECORD button. “The time is 1:25 P.M. on Monday, June 26, 1989. My name is Detective Joel Lightner, chief of detectives for the Marion Park Police Department. I’m sitting with Terrance Demetrius Burgos. Mr. Burgos, do I have your permission to tape-record this conversation?”

  The suspect continued to look him over, then gave a halfhearted shrug.

  “Can you answer out loud, Mr. Burgos?”

  “Okay,” he said. He spoke quietly, hesitantly.

  “Okay, I can tape-record our talk?”

  “Okay” He smoothed his hands over the table. “Got any more Coke?”

  “You want a Coke? No problem.” He went to the door and issued the request. “You’re probably hungry, too, aren’t you? Missed lunch.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What do you feel like?”

  He didn’t answer. Maybe he took the question more literally.

  “A burger and fries?” Joel asked. “A sub?”

  Burgos looked at Joel. “I like tacos.”

  “Tacos? Great. I know a place.” He spoke again to the officer outside the door. Then he returned to the table, settled back into his chair. Lightner’s way was laid-back, slouching and crossing a leg. Some guys didn’t have the natural ease about them, try as they might, and came off looking like someone who was trying too hard to look at ease. Joel, he had it, Riley could already see. “I want to thank you for coming down here. I want you to understand, Mr. Burgos, that you’re here as a courtesy. You can leave if you want to. Okay?”

  The suspect shrugged. “I don’t mind.”

  “Good,” Paul said aloud. Joel had been to school. He had told the suspect he was free to leave, which meant Burgos technically was not in custody and Miranda warnings were not required. But Joel had made sure to offer the guy a meal on the house before mentioning he was free to go. Now Joel could have a nice, casual chat without ever mentioning the word lawyer. Terry Burgos was about to learn that there was no such thing as a free lunch.

  “What-cha been doing this morning, Terry?”

  The suspect shrugged. “Not much.”

  “Listen to the radio at all?”

  “I listened to my music.”

  “You haven’t listened to the radio today?”

  “Nah.”

  “What about TV? Watch any television today?”

  “Nope.”

  “Have you spoken to anyone today? Neighbors? Anyone?”

  Burgos shook his head. “Nobody.”

  Paul’s confidence in the detective was growing. Lightner had just cleared the weeds. By the time the police got to Burgos’s house late that morning, it would have been possible that Burgos had already heard about these killings from news reports on the radio or television. Now, thanks to Lightner confirming that Burgos had not listened to any media sources, any knowledge that Burgos might admit to could not be attributed to TV or radio, or even neighbors. If he knew something, it would be from his personal knowledge.

  “You, uh, you did odd jobs at Mansbury, is that right?” Lightner asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Painting, blacktopping, rake leaves, shovel snow. That sort of thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cleaning?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes I cleaned. Whatever they told me.”

  Joel scratched a cheek.

  “I don’t work there no more,” Burgos added.

  “No? You don’t work at Mansbury anymore?”

  Burgos shook his head.

  “Why not, Terry?”

  “I dunno.” Burgos shrugged. “They fired me.”

  A uniform arrived with the Coke, and Burgos seemed more animated. He popped off the top and took a swig. Paul wasn’t in the habit of second-guessing, but he wasn’t thrilled with these last few questions. He would have told this information to Burgos, not asked, to let Burgos know that he already knew, no bullshit. Lightner was playing dumb.

  But there was more than one way to a confession, and Joel needed to do it his way, as much as Riley wanted to intervene.

  “Terry,” Lightner said, “when you did work there, did you ever work at Bramhall Auditorium?”

  Burgos studied his soft drink like it was a prized diamond. Licked his lips, took another swig. “Yeah. I’ve done that,” he said.

  “Ever go down to that basement, Terry? Where the cleaning supplies are?”

  Well, Joel was cutting to the chase a bit, but this was one of those great questions for an interrogator, damned if you say yes or no.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  Riley turned to Chief Clark, who was standing next to him. “Tell your officer not to deliver that food until you say so.” What Riley meant was, not until Riley said so, but there was no need to step on toes.

  “Can anyone go down there, Terry? Like, could I just walk down there and go to that basement?”

  “You need a key,” he said.

  “Do you have a key?”

  “When I worked there, I had keys to all the buildings.”

  Paul held his breath. This was one of those moments. In an interrogation, you were always looking for the breakthrough. Sometimes, it came remarkably easily. Otherwise, it was a game, where any number of questions could potentially open the floodgates. The interrogator’s job was to poke around the dam, look for the hole.

  Burgos had ducked the question.

  “I mean now,” Lightner said. “Do you still have keys?”

  “I had to return them.”

  Ducking again. Yes, he had returned the keys. But had he made a copy?

  The assumption—the only cautious assumption that could be made—was that Burgos had made copies of every key to the Mansbury facility. So the dean, Janet Scotland, had canceled classes indefinitely and declared all school areas off-limits, while law enforcement scoured every single nook and cranny of every facility to ensure there were no more dead bodies. They had the whole school on lockdown; students there for summer school, which had been scheduled to begin that day, were confined to their quarters, with police guarding every residence hall. Between the university campus and the printing company where Burgos worked part-time, almost the entire police department was searching for bodies and evidence.

  Lightner apparently decided not to press the issue of the keys. He saw, as they all did, that Burgos was sensitive to it. He had decided to tread lightly for now. He asked about what Burgos had been doing, and where, going back the last two weeks. The medical examiner had been confident that the murders had all happened within two weeks, maximum. That worked out to roughly a victim every other day, at the least, and possibly one every day.

  The police had recovered the driver’s licenses of all six women, by this point, from a dresser in Burgos’s bedroom. So the names were known, and they had been run for sheets. There were the students, Ellie Danzinger and Cassie Bentley, and then there were four other women who were not enrolled in Mansbury, each of whom had been picked up at least once for solicitation, which was a nice legal term for prostitution. Two students and four hookers.

  Officers were already fanning out to find the victims’ friends so that a time line could be set. It was always harder to pinpoint when prostitutes went missing because often the traditional sources—employers, parents, spouses—were absent. Still, it could probably be done, most likely through their landlords, if they had a regular place to stay. It would have been nice to know, before questioning the suspect, when exactly these women went missing. Then the questions on Burgos’s alibi could be framed with more precision.

  But there wasn’t time for that now. Burgos could lawyer up at any time, and it seemed abundantly clear that an attorney would muzzle him. So Joel had to go back two weeks and ask about each day.

  A pattern emerged during this line of questioning, as it would with most people’s lives. Terry Burgos h
ad no day job at this point, since he had been fired from Mansbury, but he worked every night, Monday through Friday, at the printing plant owned by Professor Frank Albany.

  “Who works with you there at the printing plant, Terry?”

  “Usually, just me—at night.” He wiggled the empty Coke can, then belched and giggled.

  “This is our mass murderer?” asked one of the prosecutors in the room with Paul.

  “What hours do you work?” Lightner asked.

  “Whatever.” Burgos shrugged.

  “What does ‘Whatever’ mean, Terry?”

  “Whatever they need. Usually, I start at six. Then I go to whenever.”

  When pressed by Lightner, however, the suspect could not be specific on the recent hours he’d worked at the plant. That would be easy enough to find, and it was critical information.

  As for daytime over the last two weeks, Burgos was even less forthcoming. Stayed in the house a lot, sometimes went for a drive in the country in his truck, but he wouldn’t be pinned down on any particular thing on any particular day.

  “How do you record being at the printing plant?” Joel asked, changing the subject back. A common tactic in interrogations. Return to something uncomfortable and watch the reaction. “When you work the night shift, Terry, do you sign in or punch a clock?”

  “I sign in.” Burgos wiggled in his seat. A little claustrophobia, maybe hunger, was setting in.

  “So it’s like an honor system, right, Terry? If you signed in, then left, no one would know?” Joel shrugged his shoulders. “I mean, you told me no one else worked nights but you.”

  “Yeah. I guess I could do that,” he agreed, a little more readily than Paul would have expected.

  Riley looked at his watch. It was twenty past two. “Give him his food,” he said to the chief. A few moments later, the officer stepped in with the bags of food he’d kept in an oven in the department’s lunchroom.

  They needed a segue. Joel seemed to sense it and came out of the room. He entered the observation room, sighed, and rolled his head. “He’s not an idiot,” he said to Riley. “He knows what to admit and where he can squirm. The guy has no commitments during the day, and he works alone at that plant at night.”

  Riley looked around the room. “Any thoughts?”

  There were plenty, from the various prosecutors and detectives. Everyone wanted a part of this thing. Strong-arm him. Accuse him. Make him think he’s not a suspect. Ask for his help. All of those positions could make sense.

  But all Riley could think was, this guy had been sitting in po lice custody going on two hours and he hadn’t demanded an explanation of why he was being held. So much of this, in the end, was going with your gut.

  Riley went to the grouping of the photographs of the six victims. There were over a dozen of each one, from various angles and distances. “Get me a new folder,” he said to no one in particular. In the meantime, he selected a single photo of each victim, cutting down the number of photos from over seventy to just six. Riley placed the six shots into the new folder. He looked at them a moment, then removed the photograph of the first victim, Ellie Danzinger.

  That left five photos, one each of victims two through six.

  Riley had another thought and rearranged the photos, so they were not in the order in which they had been lined up on the floor.

  “Show him these,” he told Joel. “While he’s eating.”

  “Okay.”

  “Make a note of the order they’re in currently,” Paul ordered. Lightner complied, with the entire room as witnesses, scribbling down the order on a notepad.

  “They’re out of order,” Joel noted, but then he looked at Riley and understood. “And we’re leaving Ellie out of it?”

  “Right.”

  “I like that.” Joel used the bathroom while Riley and the others watched Terry Burgos eat his tacos. Burgos did so with precision, pouring a bit of hot sauce and scooping a small amount of guacamole for each bite.

  Joel walked in with the file of photographs and opened it up for Burgos to see. But the suspect was still enjoying his food. So Joel got out of his seat and walked over to the suspect. “What do you think about those, Terry?”

  Burgos put down his food and his fresh, sweaty Coke. He wiped his hands with a napkin and spread out the five photos, leaned in close for a good look. His face showed neither horror nor recognition. The word that came to Riley’s mind was familiarity. He fixed on each one, first carefully wiping his hands with the napkin and then tracing his fingers over the dead corpses featured in the eight-by-ten glossies. He mumbled to himself but nothing audible. He held a finger in the air, still murmuring, then lightly touched each photo. Joel Lightner was watching the suspect closely but knew better than to start the conversation. Not yet.

  Burgos then took the photos and rearranged them.

  Riley’s heart started drumming. He couldn’t see the order in which Burgos had arranged them but he felt sure that, at that moment, they matched the order he had seen them on that floor in the basement of Bramhall Auditorium.

  Burgos looked up at Joel a moment with curiosity, then back down at the photos. He lifted the manila folder up and looked under it. He pinched his fingers on each photo as if he was looking for another one stuck beneath it.

  “Here we go,” Riley whispered.

  The chief started to speak, “What’s he—,” but Riley threw a palm on his shoulder and moved toward the mirror.

  Terry Burgos looked up at Joel. “Where’s the first one?” he asked. “Where’s Ellie?”

  4

  2:20 P.M.

  TWO OF the detectives in the room grabbed each other. The chief clasped his hands together in relief. Riley had been a part of countless interrogations over the years, and he’d seen it happen in various forms. The breakthrough. The moment the witness gave it up, out of vanity, guilt, frustration, relief, coercion.

  Now the tough part, he thought to himself. There hadn’t been much question of guilt, not since they looked inside Burgos’s house. This was now about something else entirely.

  “I have shown you five photographs of women who were murdered,” said Detective Joel Lightner, suddenly aware of the tape recorder and its inability to pick up what he’d done. “You rearranged them in a particular order. And you are asking—”

  “Where’s the first one? Ellie?” Terry Burgos repeated the question, shaking a photo in his hand and then slamming it down. He jumped from his seat and looked off in the distance. At that moment, Riley would have given anything to get a better look at his face. He could only see his profile, which had been an oversight on his part; Burgos should have been facing the one-way mirror.

  Riley couldn’t see the order in which the photographs had been rearranged by Burgos, either, but at this point he had no doubt that they were in the order in which the bodies had been placed in that custodian locker.

  Burgos’s breathing escalated. He seemed incredibly uneasy all of a sudden, but his feet were planted. A couple of the people in the room with Paul jerked at Burgos’s physical movement, but Riley held out a hand. Joel Lightner was the consummate professional, expressing no alarm whatsoever at Burgos’s mild outburst. Though Joel had left his gun outside the door, he knew there were dozens of officers who could rush in on a moment’s notice.

  Burgos, still standing at his chair, slowly pointed to the first photo in the sequence, presumably the second victim, because Ellie Danzinger’s photo had been left out of the mix. This was the woman whose throat had been slit, almost decapitating her.

  “Colombian necklace,” Burgos said.

  “Colombian what?” Chief Clark whispered.

  Colombian necklace. Paul drew a finger across his throat. A figure of speech, slang, in the drug trade. The Colombians would slit the throats of competitors.

  Burgos turned to the next photo, presumably of the third victim. “Assault with a battery.”

  That didn’t register. Assault and battery? The third victim had been burn
ed. But he hadn’t said assault and battery. He’d said assault with a—

  “Battery acid,” Riley mumbled. “Inventory his books,” he called out to no one in particular. “His music, too. Now.” Riley heard some orders issued behind him, and someone left the room.

  Burgos pointed to the next victim, presumably the one whose limbs had been removed and eyes gouged out. “Eye for eye, limb for limb.”

  A biblical reference, which was consistent with what Riley had seen in Burgos’s basement.

  Burgos kept going to the next one, who’d been drowned. “Someone taught her to sleep underwater.”

  “This fuckin’ guy,” someone mumbled behind Paul.

  Burgos pointed to the next one, the last victim, Cassie Bentley. Cassie’s face had been beaten almost beyond recognition. Paul thought of his own daughter and what it would be like to find her in such a bloody and battered condition. Joel Lightner had told Riley that it would be years before he could eat lasagna again.

  “Now it’s time/to say good-bye/to someone’s family,” Burgos said. Paul felt a chill. He was saying it to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club, for God’s sake. “Stick it right/ between her teeth/and fire so happily.”

  Both rooms—the observation room and interrogation room—fell silent. Riley felt a collective shudder among his colleagues. The suspect was making the details of his gruesome murders sound like a corny nursery rhyme.

  Stick it right between her teeth, Burgos had said. Yes. Though Cassie Bentley’s face had been beaten severely, the M.E. had found a gunshot exit wound in the back of her head and gunpowder residue in her mouth.

  Detective Lightner seemed in no hurry to interrupt the recitation, but, after a good minute, it was clear that Terry Burgos, still standing by his chair, eyes on the photos, was going to require some prompting. Riley, trying to keep his emotions out of this, was impressed that Lightner seemed able to do that very thing.

  “You mentioned a ‘first one,’ Terry?” Lightner’s voice was trembling. “You mentioned a name?”