by David Ellis
The roads are wide and largely unmarked. I pass trees and various lakes, a blur of dark browns, greens, and blues. The sky is clouding up, but it’s still bright, anyway. Living and working among high-rises, I don’t get a lot of this. This is what Shelly, who grew up downstate, was talking about, how much brighter and cleaner it is away from the city. It’s not like I’ve never left the city limits, but, despite the money I have, I’ve never owned a second home, or even vacationed much. The law is my job and my hobby. I suppose that says something about me.
Soon the roads are no longer paved and the signage becomes scarce. Following the turns, I find myself in what a city boy like me would describe as a subdivision, a cluster of log and wood cabins spaced well apart, little kids running around in swimsuits, dogs chasing after them.
Hoping I have the right place, I pull onto a gravel driveway and stop my Cadillac, the wheels sliding over crunched stone. The house is nothing special, a rustic pine cabin of modest size, heavily shaded with trees. The smell of freshly cut grass mixes with the airy, lake scent. I stretch my legs before we move toward the cabin. Shelly looks around with a serene expression. I look down the sloping backyard to the lake, and to a woman standing by a green canopy on a dock, her eyes shaded by her hand, staring back at me.
Natalia and Mia Lake’s mother was a ballerina in Russia, a beautiful woman named Nikita Kiri-something-or-other. Nikita met Conrad Lake, the heir to the Lake mining fortune in West Virginia who had settled in the Midwest in the forties. The story went that Conrad saw Nikita, then eighteen years old, at the Russian ballet and immediately began to court her, eventually marrying her and bringing her back to the States, supposedly spreading plenty of money among the Soviet politburo to let him remove her from the country. Their daughters, Mia and Natalia, inherited all of their money and much of their mother’s beauty; they, in turn, passed their exquisite features down to their daughters, Gwendolyn and Cassandra. I’m more confident of that assessment with regard to Cassie, having seen a number of photos of her over time; I’d seen one picture of Gwendolyn back then, when she would have been a teenager, which I struggle to recall now. She looked like a Lake, I remember that much, much like Cassie and Natalia and probably Mia, a brunette with a slim build and a hint of the Russian heritage in her long jaw and nose, overall glamorous features. I might have imagined her sixteen years later as something of a beauty, the pieces coming together in maturity and helped along with the finest hairdressers and accessories.
The woman who approaches from the dock fits a different bill. She has a more rounded, likable face, generous red hair that drapes lazily past her shoulders. She’s dressed simply in a long shirt, cutoff denim shorts, and sandals. But even through her horn-rimmed glasses, I can see a glimpse of the beautiful party girl in her eyes, oval and piercing green, though any glamour is overcome by an extra twenty pounds and the granola look. More of a quiet, peaceful beauty about her now—the polar opposite of her former glitz. More my speed, actually.
I introduce Shelly and myself as attorneys from the city, and after an initial look of concern—“Is Nat okay?” she asks, referring to her aunt Natalia—her expression changes to one that tells me she has put the city well behind her, and is glad to have done so.
“How—exactly how did you find me?” she wonders.
Why? I want to ask. You didn’t want to be found?
“If I had time to call you and set something up, I would have. I’m sorry. This is very important, and we won’t take up much of your time.”
She takes a moment for internal debate, and I pray this whole thing hasn’t been a waste of time. Then again, if she shuts me out completely, that will tell me something, too.
“There’s a thought,” I say, “that someone is following the song lyrics again. Some people have been murdered.”
That does the trick. Her eyes widen, the expression softening. She points back behind her, to the dock. “I was just about to take a boat ride,” she says.
29
McDERMOTT only briefly glances at the glossies of the victim. He already knows the details—the wound to the right temple, then the massive beating she took to the top of her skull, multiple blows rained down on her. Whoever did this had no compunction about what he was doing, no hesitation whatsoever.
That’s all he needs to see, and more than he wants to.
Stoletti scoops the photos off his desk and looks through them. She’s been partnered with him long enough; she knows he has a problem with female murder victims. She’s smart enough to know why, too, though the two of them have never discussed it.
It hasn’t gotten easier. He figured he needed time after Joyce’s death, after finding her lying dead in the bathroom, before he could look at another dead body without effect. But it’s been four goddamn years, and, still, at least with women, he cringes every time. It’s about a forty-sixty mix of female-to-male victims. That’s a lot of crime scenes you don’t want to handle, a lot of photographs you can’t bear to study.
He can push out the images at night. He can push them out in the sunlight or in the heat of a busy day. Something about the crime scenes themselves, the smell and feel of death so prominent, that brings it back more vividly than his imagination otherwise permits: The vacant stare of her eyes, the awkward posturing of her body—her legs crossed in rigor mortis, her body toppled to the right like a statute knocked on its side—the pool of blood leading all the way to the bathtub, where little Gracie sat motionless, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands over her ears, her body gently rocking.
He sees these victims, like the one here in the glossies, and he imagines the reaction of the next of kin, something like his own response: Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be worse.
He alternates blame. There are times, yes, when he directs his anger at Joyce, when he attributes to his wife responsibility and self-awareness that he knows, in his heart, she simply no longer possessed.
Most of the time, he finds the right target. He should have seen the changes in her sooner. He should have been more demanding about her treatment.
And what happened the night before her death, and the next morning—there is simply no one else to blame.
Funny, that he never thought of leaving the job. He could make a pretty good argument for why he should. A homicide detective who doesn’t like crime scenes is like an acrobat who doesn’t like heights. But he’s the son and grandson of cops. It’s all he ever wanted. It’s all he’s ever known. He’s done it right, too. He’s sure of it. He’s still a good cop.
Right, a good cop, a solid gut, keen intuition, who couldn’t see that his own wife was slowly losing her mind.
“This whole thing,” Stoletti says. “It just doesn’t make sense.”
McDermott snaps out of his trance. “What?”
“This doesn’t work for me, Mike. It’s weird.”
He takes a breath, drops in a chair. Good. Case talk. Familiar terrain.
“How was he with the Albany interview?” McDermott asks her.
“Fine. Actually, pretty good,” she concedes. “He got the professor to open up better than I did. He gets the credit for uncovering the stuff about abortions and pregnancies.”
McDermott thinks about that. “I suppose, with this new information, you could look on that interview in a different light.”
One of the other detectives, Koessl, walks into the conference room and flips open a notepad. “Mike, there are eight retailers that sell Trim-Meter chain saws. Two in the city, six outlying.”
“Only eight?”
“Trim-Meter hasn’t made a chain saw for almost ten years. A few places sell Trim-Meters used. But none of them has sold one in the last three months.”
“Okay, Tom.” McDermott blows out. “And they have instructions to call us if anyone tries to buy one?”
“You bet,” he says.
When the detective leaves them, they are back where they started.
“Take your personal feelings out of this,” he tells Stolett
i.
She shoots him a look. She deserves better than that. However she may feel about Paul Riley, McDermott has found Stoletti to be a great cop. First time he ever partnered with a woman, and he wasn’t thrilled with the assignment, but she’s probably the best partner he’s had. Something about the lack of testosterone, the smaller ego—she’s always kept a clear head. He’s come to find that he relies on her gut as much as his own.
“The question,” she says, “is whether this new thing is isolated. A coincidence.”
He nods. “It’s hard to think this is a coincidence.”
“But then that makes Paul Riley a murderer,” she says.
Another detective, Bax, pops his head in. “Chief, we got something on Fred Ciancio. Come take a look.”
Stoletti looks at McDermott. “To be continued,” she says, as they both get up.
McDermott grabs her arm as she’s walking out. “The lab should still have samples left over from Burgos, right?”
She says yes. The County Attorney Technical Unit has a massive archives building on the west side.
“We have something now they didn’t have in 1989,” he says.
She stares at him, then gives a slow nod of recognition. “You want to run DNA tests on Terry Burgos and the victims?”
“I do,” he answers. “And we’re not waiting two months, Ricki. You tell them what you need to tell them. Use the commander’s name. This goes to the top of the list.”
DOWN ON THE DOCK, Gwendolyn cranks a large wheel fastened to the boat. I offer to help but she defers, her face showing familiar strain. When the boat is down in the water, she looks back at me, like she’s giving me a second chance. She can probably read the expression on my face. “You don’t like water?”
Shelly eagerly turns to me as well, suppressing a smile, awaiting my response. She knows very well that I have a minor issue with swimming. The minor issue is, I can’t swim. My arms and legs move like they’re supposed to, but I sink, every time. Still, I’d be willing to hang glide over the Andes if it would loosen Gwendolyn’s tongue.
She starts the engine while we step in. The boat is really one long, flat deck, surrounded on all sides by a white leather safety railing and leather-upholstered seating, with the steering and controls off to one side. The deck rests on what, to my eye, are glorified skis. This is like a giant, waterbound sled.
“A pontoon,” she informs me, as she backs the boat out from under the canopy. “So you’re the one who charged Burgos,” she says. “And now you’re Harland’s lawyer,” she says.
The way she puts it together like that makes me uncomfortable. Not altogether different from how Evelyn Pendry said it. “I am. He’s doing well,” I add, though she didn’t ask.
“No doubt,” she mumbles. She moves the pontoon forward, and I sit in relative comfort as the breeze cuts the heat from the overhead sun. We scoot out to the middle of the giant lake, and she idles the boat, which should make the choppiness of the water more apparent, but maybe added stability is one of the benefits of a pontoon. I see lake cabins on both sides of the water, kids jumping off docks and playing on large waterslides. The shouts of people water-skiing or tubing, the grinding hum of motorboats, echo around us.
Gwendolyn’s reaction is consistent with Harland’s opinion of her. When we were investigating the Burgos murders, Gwendolyn’s name came up once or twice, only because there were so few people who knew Cassie. Gwendolyn, from what we’d heard, was the polar opposite of Cassie. Gwen was the spoiled, nasty party girl, Cassie, innocent and solitary. But I never laid eyes on her because she was out of the country the whole time.
Regardless, I have to say, I’m not seeing vile or spoiled in this woman. Time has worked its magic.
“You own a diner?” I ask.
She smiles gently. “The community is losing retail and restaurants. I like having a place where they can get together.” She nods, thinking about that.
I decide to take this slow. Gwendolyn’s expression turns placid as she lets the sun warm her face. This is her escape.
She offers me a drink from a cooler, but I decline. She takes a seat across from me. Shelly is next to me, keeping quiet. She rolls up her sleeves and the cuffs of her pants and closes her eyes to the sun. Shelly’s playing it right. This is supposed to be a casual discussion, and two-on-one makes people uncomfortable. She’s just going to listen.
The breeze carries Gwendolyn’s coconut tanning lotion to me. She has a Russian’s fair complexion and has obviously put the lotion to good use, her skin a dark pink.
Without the benefit of shade, the temperature is almost overbearing. I take off my suit coat, roll up my sleeves, and reconsider that drink offer.
“I like it here,” she tells me. “People say what they mean and mean what they say.”
I look at my briefcase and notice that I have no pen or pad of paper handy. I’m used to having someone else do the note taking, or a court reporter transcribing every word. But I’m sure as hell not going to pull out a notepad now. Notepads and tape recorders tie tongues. Instead, I rest my arms along the upholstery, put my head against the safety railing, and close my eyes to the sun. I could fall asleep out here. I could sleep for hours.
“Having money,” she says, “you don’t think about anything. There’s nothing outside your grasp. So you keep reaching, hoping for some kind of limit. You don’t find it, so you keep pushing until—until you’re over your head.”
“You were over your head,” I say. The boat rocks with a wave.
“Of course I was. I was drinking and doing drugs and sleeping around.”
I listen politely to the rich-kid-in-therapy story, the sad, wealthy socialite, dancing from party to party, jet-setting across Europe, when all she really wanted was to be loved.
“What about Cassie?” I ask, wondering if I should be interjecting here.
“Cassie.” Gwendolyn deflates, stares at the can of soda in her hand. “Cassie had a big heart. A very generous soul. But she had absolutely no idea what she was doing. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to be popular, or good, or what.” Gwendolyn chews on her lip, her face coloring. “She was scared to death.”
“I’m trying to get a feel for what was going on in her life back then, Gwendolyn. I need your help.”
She shakes her head slowly. “I would think you would know better than anyone.”
“As I’m sure you know, we didn’t prosecute Cassie’s murder, so we never got to the point that we were”—I note the look on Gwendolyn’s face—“we never delved that deeply. You know that we didn’t prosecute Cassie’s murder, right?”
She shrugs her shoulders.
She didn’t know that?
“Why didn’t you prosecute Cassie’s murder? I don’t under stand.”
I explain it to her quickly, the notion of holding one murder back, in case Burgos got lucky, to give us a second chance at him. The legal niceties seem lost on her, and I’m still trying to under stand how disconnected she was from this whole thing.
“Where were you when all this happened?” I ask. “We tried to get hold of you.”
Another shrug of the shoulders. “I didn’t know you were trying.”
“Where were you?”
“I could have been anywhere. Back then? It didn’t matter where I was. It was all the same place.”
I sigh. This is like trying to grab hold of sunlight. I need to get this woman off the psychiatrist’s couch and onto a witness stand. But I have no leverage here. She could flip me the bird. She could knock me off the boat and I’d drown.
“The Riviera, probably,” she says. “Or the Caribbean.”
“Then, how about this?” I try. “When was the last time you’d been in the city, before Cassie was killed?”
She poises a hand in the air. “It was probably a month or so before. If you told me it was three months, I’d believe you. If you told me it was three days, I’d believe you.”
“Three days?” I can’t hide the incredulous tone i
n my voice. “Don’t you have some sense of how much time passed between the time you last saw Cassie and when you learned she was murdered?”
“Oh, that’s a different question.” She wipes a stray bang off her forehead, only to have the wind blow it right back between her eyes. “I found out long after. Months after. I don’t think you really understand,” she adds, noting my reaction. “My mother was dead. I never had a father. I’m sure my aunt Natalia was trying to reach me, but she didn’t know where I was. I didn’t answer to anyone. It’s not like there were cell phones, Mr. Riley. And I didn’t exactly leave a forwarding address.”
I try to see it from her perspective. Maybe my initial thoughts on her were a little harsh. Her mother had died in a DUI, and Gwendolyn apparently didn’t know who her father was. I suppose all the money in the world wouldn’t make that any easier.
“It sounds very lonely,” Shelly says.
Gwendolyn smiles at her. Then she looks at me. “Ask me your questions, Mr. Riley.”
“Was Cassie a lesbian?”
“Not to my knowledge.” She smiles plaintively. “You go to an all-girls school and everyone thinks everyone’s gay.”
Okay, fair enough. Mansbury had only recently gone coed when the murders happened.
“Do you think you would know?”
She’s amused by that. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Was Cassie seeing anyone back then?”
“Not that I knew of,” she says. “But that’s not saying much. I don’t recall Cassie dating much, period. She was painfully shy on that level. That was the weird thing. She could be very social sometimes—she would go out and party all night—but I don’t think she had ever been with a man.”
I think of the song lyrics, and of the passage from Deuteronomy, talking about stoning a promiscuous woman.
“You think she was a virgin?” I ask.
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“So I take it you don’t know if she was pregnant?”
“Pregnant?” She draws back. “Why would you think that?”
