Eye of the Beholder

by David Ellis

“Does this remind you of Burgos?” some cop asks me. A big Irish guy. I think they’re all Irish. I think it’s in the union contract.

  I make a face. The answer is, not really. “Burgos, he wasn’t careful at all. He brought them to his house. He had unprotected sex with them, leaving his bodily fluids inside them. He left evidence of the women all over his house. He left evidence of himself all over the auditorium basement. This offender has performed two perfectly executed kills. He came in and out without a trace, controlled them and the scene. This offender feels like a pro. Burgos was not. That’s what I can tell you about Burgos. This offender, I really don’t know what to tell you.”

  “And you’re our expert on serial killers,” Stoletti says.

  I shake my head. “Understand this, everyone. I’m no expert. I’ve never solved a serial killing—not in the way you’re thinking. We found six bodies and caught our offender within an hour. That’s what I mean about him being sloppy. We found Ellie Danzinger dead, first thing we did was go after the guy who had been stalking her so intensely that she got a restraining order against him. This was also a guy, by the way, who had worked for the last few years as a maintenance man in that same auditorium where we found the girls. And when we went to see him—boom!—there it was. It was all there. So don’t confuse me with someone who knows how to track a serial killer. Burgos left bread crumbs all the way to his door. This guy’s notleaving anything for us.”

  “Except notes,” someone says.

  “And his murder weapons. But that’s intentional,” I answer. “No doubt, he wants us to make the connection. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to let us catch him.”

  McDermott runs his hands through his hair and groans. “I’m supposed to ask you if you’ll work with us on this.”

  I smirk. He couldn’t have been less enthusiastic. It isn’t his call, I can see. It’s Carolyn Pendry’s. The police commander is not stupid, not so naïve that he can’t recognize the utility of an ally in the television media. Carolyn wants, Carolyn gets.

  “If I have a question,” I say, “you answer.”

  His smile is tight, forced. “Whatever you say, Counselor.” Then he moves to the center of the room. These are his detectives, I assume, though I didn’t catch a title from him. He reads from a clipboard. “Kopecky, Collins. I want to know every newspaper article Evelyn Pendry worked on for the last year. Especially crime, but whatever. And talk to everyone at the Watch. See if Evelyn dropped some hint about what she was doing. Pittacora, I want you to listen to every song that Torcher ever released. Find the lyrics. They’re probably on the Internet somewhere.

  “Speaking of Internet,” he continues, “Sloan and Koessl, look at every Web site devoted to Terry Burgos. The chat rooms, especially. Anything looks interesting, get a subpoena from Judge Ahlfors and get the URLs. If this guy had a Burgos fixation, maybe he decided to drop a line or two.”

  One of those two, either Koessl or Sloan, a guy who’s paying too much attention to his hair, asks me, “Any idea how many Web sites we’re talking about?”

  “No telling. Dozens, probably.” I snap my fingers. “You better look at Web sites devoted to Tyler Skye and Torcher, too. He wrote the lyrics, after all.”

  “Good.” McDermott nods. “Yeah, especially any cross-reference between Torcher and Burgos. Grab as many uniforms as you need. We need that fast. We need all of this fast. Okay.” He scans his list. “On that same note, Ashley and Knape, hit the DOC. I want to read every letter that anyone ever wrote to Burgos in prison. You will definitely need uniforms for that. Keep in touch with Koessl and Sloan. Again, a cross-reference would be great.”

  “You can probably skip the marriage proposals,” I add, getting a laugh. At least three women proposed to Burgos while he was on death row. I don’t get people. Or maybe my problem is, I do.

  “Saltzman, Bax,” says McDermott. “On Fred Ciancio. Follow up with this guy, Wally Monk, that Riley was talking about. The guy at the security company. I want to know where Fred Ciancio was working back then. I want to hear from everyone who worked at Bristol Security with Ciancio. Anyone who worked side by side with him, or had a beer with him, or ever smelled one of his farts. And look at everyone assigned to Mansbury College back then.

  “Williams and Covatta, also on Ciancio. Find his daughter. Talk to neighbors. Find his safe-deposit box. Anything that could tell us why he might have some secret. And find out who this goon in the background of this photograph is.” McDermott takes a photograph, which I can’t see, and hands it to one of the cops. “Tell me why Ciancio had a copy of this photo,” he says.

  I crane to look at the photo but can’t see it.

  “Powers and Peterson, Ciancio used to work at Ensign Correctional. I want to know about him there. I want to know if he was a good guard or a bad one. And take a copy of this photograph”—he hands another copy of the photo to the nearest cop, who hands it down, again avoiding my eyes—“and see if the goon ever did time at Ensign.

  “Kinzler,” he adds, dropping the clipboard to his side. “Look at recent releases, especially violent offenders.”

  Recent releases from prison, he means. A good thought. That might explain the sixteen-year gap in the murders.

  “Look at mental institutions, too,” I add.

  McDermott points at the guy who must be Kinzler, who writes it down.

  “Yeah, he’s probably a whack job,” says Kinzler.

  McDermott winces, like someone swatted him in the face. The room goes silent a moment—why, I have no idea.

  “Jann, Abrams, Beatty.” McDermott, his face colored now, checks off another box on his list. “Recanvass both crime scenes. Maybe Evelyn Pendry talked to Ciancio’s neighbors. I want to know what she was asking them.”

  “Everyone keeps this quiet,” Stoletti says. “Our anchorwoman out there”—she gestures toward Carolyn, I assume, wherever she is—“is willing to keep a lid on this for now. I don’t think she’ll give us long. But let’s keep it down as long as we can.”

  “Go,” says McDermott. “Meet back here at five. Get me some answers.”

  The group gets up, eager to move forward. The one detective, Kinzler, approaches McDermott, but he waves him off, pats him on the arm. Something about the “whack job” comment but I have no idea what.

  When the place empties, McDermott touches my arm. “Where would you start? Just on a gut call.”

  I think about that, and the answer comes surprisingly quickly.

  “The nutty professor,” I say. “Frankfort Albany. Cassie and Ellie’s teacher, the class about violence and women. Burgos’s employer back then, too.”

  “I’ll do it,” says Stoletti.

  “Let me go, too,” I say.

  Stoletti looks at McDermott, who has the ultimate call. By the look on her face, I think she would rather share a car ride with a flatulent child molester.

  “It’s not a bad idea,” he says. Seems like he enjoys his decision, too.

  “What are you going to do?” I ask him.

  He tugs at his ear, the corner of his mouth turned up. “I want to see your file on Terry Burgos,” he says.

  25

  Head DOWN. Baseball cap, sunglasses. Mustache, beard, eyebrows are fakes, easy to tell it’s a getup, but it’s okay, point is, he won’t see your face, he’ll only see the money.

  Not the way to do it, but no time, have to hurry, there he is, parking his bike by the building, fluorescent vest, removing the biker’s helmet, locking up the bike, now, now—

  Leo approaches the messenger, a bag of parcels over his shoulder, Leo clears his throat, holds out the package, look at the package, pay no attention to the face—

  He does his best, shows the man the package, bearing the name Shaker, Riley & Flemming. Shows him a fifty-dollar bill, too.

  “Yeah—they’re up there. You want me—you want me to deliver this?” His eyes focus less on the package, more on the fifty.

  Leo nods.

  “This”—the kid sha
kes it—“this is a letter?”

  Leo nods. Yeah, a letter.

  “Why don’t you deliver it? Is this like a joke or something?”

  A joke. He likes that. He tries to smile. He tries to smile a lot but he can’t.

  The kid looks at the fifty and shrugs. “Okay, bud.”

  Leo watches the boy burst through the revolving doors.

  “EVERYTHING,” I say into the phone to my assistant, Betty. “Witness lists and profiles, summaries of evidence, transcripts—whatever we have. I need a couple of copies of everything. Yes, everything. And Betty, if anyone asks, I’m just doing a speech or something. This stays between us. Call Detective McDermott when you’re ready.”

  I click off the cell phone. I’m riding shotgun with Ricki Stoletti, with whom I have the privilege of paying a visit to Professor Frankfort Albany. Stoletti looks tired, probably as tired as me. She’s wearing a blouse, under a plaid jacket, and blue jeans. Not clothes recently purchased.

  She tells me she’s been McDermott’s partner for over two years. She joined the city police four years ago, after spending fifteen years working the Major Crimes Unit in the suburbs. Major Crimes was a consolidation of several police departments in the northern suburbs, a multijurisdictional detective’s squad. I know of them well, because I had a homicide case that came from there. That might explain her hostility. I walked a guy on a first-degree and made the cops look pretty bad in the process.

  “Why this guy Albany first?” she asks, maneuvering her Taurus toward the expressway to take us down to Mansbury College. “Because he knows this song so well?”

  “Because if Evelyn was looking into this, she would have talked to him. And because he knows the principals involved. He taught Ellie Danzinger and Cassie Bentley. He was Burgos’s boss. And he was the one who showed these song lyrics to all three of them.”

  “And because he’s a creep?” She looks at me.

  “You’re about to rear-end that Lexus,” I tell her. She hits the brakes. “Yeah, I was never high on that guy.”

  “Why?” she asks. “Anything specific?”

  Nothing specific. Just a vibe I always got from the professor. Something about him that always made me wonder.

  “He was a big witness for you, right?”

  “You could say that,” I agree. “He established Burgos’s attempt at an alibi. Burgos was fudging his time sheets, to make it look like he was at work when he was off abducting the women. His time sheets said he worked from six to midnight, but we know he abducted the girls all around nine or ten o‘clock. His time sheets were a lie.”

  I look over at Stoletti, who seems like she doesn’t get it.

  “By creating an alibi,” I explain, “he showed that he appreciated that what he was doing was criminal. He was trying to avoid being caught—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get the idea.” She turns toward me for a moment, then seems to think better of whatever it was she was going to say.

  “Burgos was given flexible hours,” I say. “He could work as much, or as little, as he wanted, up to six hours. He very deliberately wrote down six to midnight. What about this doesn’t make sense?”

  “Well—no, it makes sense.” She makes a noise, an uncomfortable chuckle. “I mean, one way of looking at that is, Burgos did have an alibi for the murders.” She glances back over at me. “Right? He was at work, so he couldn’t have killed the girls.”

  Now I laugh, with more gusto than she. “But it was a fake alibi. Stoletti, if you admit you killed those girls—which he did—and you then claim you were insane—which he did—then the alibi goes from proving you innocent to proving you guilty.”

  She raises her hand in surrender.

  “Anyway, that’s why we needed the professor. Burgos didn’t testify, so we had no way to pin him to the time sheets without Albany’s testimony.”

  Stoletti gets us on the ramp and we’re on our way down south. It turns out that she drives faster than I do, which is probably easier when you carry a badge. We avoid near-certain death maneuvering around a truck and finding ourselves up close and personal with one of those tiny Saabs. I could learn to like this lady.

  “So Albany was your star witness,” she gathers.

  “One of them, sure. The alibi put a serious dent in their case. They had a decent argument on mental defect, but on appreciation of criminality, they had no chance. Not after that. I was hoping to get down there alive,” I add, after she pulls another stunt, slicing our car between a Camry and a Porsche.

  “Don’t be such a wuss. You, either,” she says into the rearview mirror as the Porsche driver works his horn behind her. I’ll be really impressed if she flips him the bird.

  “We’re not partners,” she says. “You know Albany, and you can probably put some ice in his pants, so you’re tagging along.”

  “Fine by me. Unless I need something. You’re supposed to be cooperative.”

  Stoletti knows the rules. I get full access. But all rules are meant to be twisted and tortured. And she doesn’t seem to like the way I framed them.

  “I do the talking when we get down there,” she informs me.

  “Ask him whatever you want to ask him,” I say. “I’ll do the same.”

  “I take the lead. Understood?”

  “No,” I say. “Not understood. Get off here. I know a shortcut.”

  She veers off onto a ramp and points to her bag, which is between my feet.

  “There’s a manila file in there,” she says. “Your copy.”

  I open it, however much I hate reading in a car. Gives me a headache. But I don’t have to read so much as look, because the file is full of photographs from the Ciancio crime scene. Pictures of the man himself, spread across the bedroom carpet, peppered with knife wounds, primarily in the legs and torso, the fatal one going through his eye.

  There are several photos of the ice pick itself, a steel rod with sharpened point and wooden handle, with plenty of Ciancio’s blood on it. Flipping the page, there is a Xerox copy of what appears to be a dated newspaper photo with jagged edges, having been ripped from the paper. The newspaper photo must have been a black and white and the Xerox isn’t the greatest, but I make out a familiar face.

  Harland Bentley.

  It’s back at the time of the murders, I imagine. It looks like him back then, his hair a little fuller, his face a little tighter. He’s wearing an overcoat. His eyes are cast downward as he fights through a cadre of reporters holding microphones. I can’t place where. Near the courthouse, maybe. Another man is standing in profile a bit apart from the reporters, wearing a fedora, his head turned and his eyes on Harland. Looking at Harland intently, it seems, though photographs tend to have that effect; everyone looks like they’re staring in a still photo. The man looks young, though his eyes are deep-set, something that resembles a scar beneath the right one. Don’t recognize him, but I’m sure I wouldn’t want someone menacing like that looking at me.

  I look up. “Take this to the next light, turn right. This is the ‘goon in the background’ ? This is the photo McDermott was handing out?”

  She glances over at the photo. “Yeah. We know Harland Bentley, and we know those are reporters. But who’s the creepy guy?”

  “Well, I’ve never seen him before. Where’d you find this?”

  “We just got it early this morning. It was in a shoe box in Ciancio’s bedroom closet.”

  “It was in with a bunch of other photos?”

  “No, it was shoved into a box with a pair of shoes,” she says. “He was hiding it:”

  I watch us fly past other cars, opting to withhold comment on the subject for the time being. I’m thinking to myself, What was Fred Ciancio doing with a hidden photo of Harland Bentley?, when Stoletti asks me that very question. I tell her I have no idea.

  “Another stop I’ll need to make,” she says.

  “What—Harland Bentley?”

  “Yeah.” She looks over at me. “Why, you got a problem with that?”

 
; “Well—no, I—have you called him?”

  “I had someone check to see if he was in town. He’s at the office today. I’ll swing by.”

  “Without calling him?”

  She angles her head. “I like these guys better when they’re not expecting me. Before they lawyer-up and make things tougher. Our offender’s gonna move again fast, I think. We need to nip this thing right now. I don’t have time for fancy attorneys.” She nods. “Same thing with the professor. He’s not expecting us. His class ends at eleven and we’ll be waiting for him. Believe me, they’re better fresh.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I say weakly.

  “Am I supposed to care about what you know?”

  “In this case, yes.” I look at her. “Because I’m Harland Bentley’s fancy lawyer.”

  “Oh, you’ve gotta—” She puts a palm out, as in stop. “When did this happen?”

  “About fifteen years ago. I represent all of his companies. It’s not exactly a secret.”

  “Well, it’s news to me. Have you talked about this thing with him? This investigation?”

  “You don’t expect me to answer that.”

  She pulls the car sharply to the curb and stops abruptly. I half expect the air bag to deploy. She shifts in her seat and gets in my face. “Wait just a second. You’re advising Harland Bentley on this case?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yes or no?”

  “Harland Bentley has nothing to hide. Relax, Ricki. Don’t get hysterical.”

  She works her jaw as she glares at me. I happen to know for a fact that women hate it when you accuse them of being hysterical.

  “I don’t like you, Riley,” she says. “You get that?”

  “I was beginning to get that impression.”

  “You were, were you? You’ll be getting the impression of my handcuffs on your wrists if you think you can play both sides here.”

  “Detective Stoletti,” I say calmly. “Put the car in gear and drive to the campus. It’s almost eleven. I’m going to help you find whoever did this, because I think I owe that much to Evelyn Pendry, and because this idiot is sending me letters. And because if you’re like any of the other cops who come from Major Crimes up there in the nice, safe suburbs, you couldn’t find a Catholic at the Vatican.”