by David Ellis
I see no reason not to share what I know with her. Hell, I’ve come all this way. “One of the people who was murdered recently was a reporter. She had asked that question about Cassie.”
She nods slowly yes, then shakes no. “I have no idea,” she says. “I’m not sure I’m the one Cassie would have told, anyway.”
Great. This whole trip is feeling like a waste of time.
“What can you tell me about Brandon Mitchum?” This was the Mansbury freshman who hung out with Cassie and Ellie. Lightner had just reminded me.
Her face lights up. Recognition. “Brandon Mitchum,” she says with reverence. “How is Brandon?”
“You knew him.”
“Yes.” She nods, a quiet smile on her lips. “Yes, I knew Brandon. God.” She reflects on that memory a moment. “He was a nice guy. Oh”—she frowns—“oh, it must have been hard on him. Cassie and Ellie.”
“Tell me about Ellie.”
“Ellie.” She makes a face. “Now, Ellie, she was more like me. A party girl. And she was afraid of him.” She wags her finger. “She was very afraid of him.”
“Afraid of Brandon?”
“No, not Brandon.”
I look at her, stone-faced.
“You mean Terry Burgos,” Shelly says.
“She thought he would do something,” Gwendolyn continues. “She always said a restraining order didn’t mean anything to a psycho.” She nods with conviction. “No, she was very afraid of him.”
A mild breeze brings relief. This whole thing feels so weird. I’m questioning a witness on a boat. Home turf, I suppose, from Gwendolyn’s point of view.
“Did you know Burgos?” I ask.
She frowns and shakes her head. “God, no. But Ellie would talk about him. He really spooked her.”
“What else can you tell me about Brandon?”
“Well—like I said, he was a nice guy.”
“Nice-looking guy, I recall,” I say. “Anything going on between Ellie and him?”
She opens her hand. “I doubt it, but I don’t know. I would spend time with them when I was in the city, Mr. Riley, but I wasn’t in the city much. More likely, I’d be in Europe, or L.A., or—God, anywhere.”
I take a moment, run through my mental list. “Cassie and Ellie socialized with one of their professors. The one whose class Terry Burgos was in. A guy named Professor Albany.”
She nods uncertainly, then angles her head. “A professor, you said?”
“Yes,” I say. “Does it ring a bell?”
She looks off in the distance. “I don’t know—maybe.”
Maybe. Maybe this whole trip was a boondoggle.
“What about drugs, Gwendolyn?” I ask. “Cassie. Or Ellie. Were they into it?”
Her eyes cast down. She nods meekly.
“Cocaine?” I ask. “Pot?”
“Coke.” She frowns. “Oh, probably both. It was college.”
“You ever see them do it? Ever witness them doing drugs?”
She tucks her lips in. “I think I did drugs with them.”
“You think.”
Her eyes fix on me in anger. She doesn’t like the interrogation. “You ever try to block something out, Mr. Riley? You deny the memory for so long, until it’s not there anymore? So it won’t be there anymore? You stow it in some secret place in your brain and lock the door?”
I open my hands in compromise. “Gwendolyn—”
“Yes,” she spits out. “I’m sure I did blow with them.”
“ ‘Them’ being—”
“ ‘Them’ being Cassie and Ellie and—and sometimes Brandon, and sometimes Frank, and sometimes whoever the hell it was who had it at whatever party I was at. Okay?”
She stands up on the deck, the boat being heavy enough to support her without rocking once, and brings a hand to her red face.
“I had a rough childhood,” Shelly says. “I know what you mean. You don’t just turn the page. You close the book and throw it out.”
Gwendolyn takes a moment, then nods. “Exactly.”
“We didn’t want to come up here and bother you,” Shelly adds. “But we feel like we have no other choice. People are being killed.”
“Well—” She raises a hand, like stop, as she looks over the lake. “I am truly sorry about that. I really am. But it has nothing to do with me.” She gets behind the wheel and works some controls. “I’m going back to my restaurant now,” she says. “I’m going back to my life.”
Gwendolyn puts the pontoon into gear and moves us back toward the shore. She navigates under the canopy and kills the engine. She cranks that large wheel in the opposite direction to moor the pontoon.
She dutifully shakes both our hands and gives me a surprisingly gentle smile. The outburst was out of character for her, clearly, and she regrets it. But I’ve been treated a lot worse.
Shelly and I are quiet as we walk back to the car. I start the car and drive out of view before I ask for her opinion.
“She’s scared,” Shelly says.
That may be. At a minimum, she was dishonest. She went from not remembering Professor Albany to calling him “Frank.”
“I think she’s a good person,” Shelly adds. “But she couldn’t decide what to tell you.”
“I suppose that tells me something right there. But what? She’s protecting someone?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.” Shelly rolls down the window and faces into the wind. “She’ll get in touch with you when she’s ready.”
“Yeah?”
“Trust a woman.” She gives my hand a playful grab.
We drive in silence until I get back on the interstate. I put a lot of faith in Shelly’s judgment of people and I think she was right on here. Gwendolyn is a sincere woman, someone not prone to evasion who was being evasive. I only wish I knew what she was holding back.
I sense Shelly watching me again and I look over at her.
“Something was going on with Cassie back then,” she says. “You think so, too.”
I don’t argue. Instead, I search the roll call of numbers on my cell phone. When I was with the U.S. attorney, I worked a lot with a guy named Pete Storino with Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. He moved to Customs a few years later, and now he’s the top guy at the city airport for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
I get him on his cell and he spends ten minutes giving me grief. The small talk over, I get to the point.
“I need a favor, Pete,” I tell him. “Passenger’s name is Gwendolyn Lake.”
30
HE’S NOT ANSWERING his cell phone,” Stoletti says. ”His secretary just said he’s out of the office.”
“Okay. We’ll get him soon enough.”
While he waits for what should be a very interesting conversation with Paul Riley, McDermott occupies himself with the reports thus far on Fred Ciancio and Evelyn Pendry. They have shit on Ciancio. The inventory looks meaningless. A complete lack of trace evidence. The only evidence they have, it seems, is the murder weapon and whatever they can discern from the body. He glances over the preliminary findings from the autopsy, which don’t tell him much, other than the fact that Ciancio’s body was ravaged with superficial wounds—
“What’s this?” he says, taking a closer look. He reads it again but he doesn’t recognize the term. “What the hell is a ‘tarsal phalange’?”
Stoletti comes over. “Huh?”
McDermott points to a line in the report, listing the injuries to Fred Ciancio:
Postmortem incision at the base of the fourth and fifth tarsal phalange.
“What’s a ‘tarsal phalange’?” Stoletti asks.
“I just asked you that.” McDermott sighs. “Sounds like a tail. You think Fred Ciancio had grown a tail?”
“Maybe, Mike. Maybe he was a space alien.”
McDermott looks up to see Tony Rezko, one of the CAT technicians. “Say, Tony, any idea what a ‘tarsal phalange’ is?”
Rezko pauses. “No.”
�
��Then you got something on those notes for me?”
“Something on the second note,” he says.
“Beautiful.” McDermott drops the autopsy report on the pile of evidence. “Let’s hear it.”
I DROP OFF SHELLY andreturn to my office around four. I ignore the blinking light on my voice mail and go straight to the regular mail. I find myself looking for another letter and find none. But then I take a look at the manila envelope at the bottom of the pile. It has my name written on it in Magic Marker, no address. No return address. I open it carefully. Inside is a standard-sized white mailing envelope with the same handwriting, just my name. All indications are, this is another one of these letters. I open the smaller envelope just as carefully. The single page that falls out reads:
Others that hunted ensured respect. Sinners know not our wrath. Our ultimate response shall ensure consequences, reviling ethical traitors.
“Am I even supposed to understand this?” I say to no one. “Betty!”
Betty pops in. “Oh, you’re back. Detective McDermott was looking for you.”
“This was delivered,” I say, holding up the manila envelope. “Not mailed?”
“It came in a delivery.”
“Timing,” I say. “He controls when it gets here.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Betty, get Detective McDermott on the phone. And find out who delivered this envelope.”
Others that hunted. That’s Burgos. Sinners know not our wrath. Apparently, it’s time to show them?
Betty comes in through the intercom. “We have three messengers who dropped off envelopes this morning,” she informs me. “We’ll trace it back.”
It’s probably a dead end. This guy’s been too careful. He wouldn’t contract with a messenger service, leave a credit card or an address.
After a minute, Betty buzzes McDermott’s call through. I tell him that I got another letter, and he should send over a uniform to pick it up.
“Got a better idea,” McDermott tells me. “Why don’t you stop by yourself?”
REZKO, THE CAT TECHNICIAN, is almost a caricature, a bald head and large, square glasses. If he had a squeaky voice, it would be a trifecta.
McDermott hangs up the phone with Paul Riley, a silent prayer drifting to his lips. “Tell me you found prints on the note, Tony.”
“No, no—we had to examine it first. The ninhydrin screws up—”
“Impressions, then,” he tries.
“Right. Well, indentations.” Rezko is excited. This technical stuff is his life. “On the second note, he’d been writing something on top of it. He left indentations.”
Rezko places the note on the desk.
I will inevitably lose life. Ultimately, sorrow echoes the heavens. Ever sensing. Ever calling out. Never does vindication ever really surrender easily. The immediate messenger endures the opposition, but understanding requires new and loving betrayal and new yearning.
“Right,” McDermott says, prodding him.
“We didn’t have time to go to the state lab for electrostatic imaging, so we photographed it in oblique light: You flatten it on glass, and use a light source positioned parallel to the document—”
These techies, they savor this stuff, it’s like a tutorial every time you talk to them. McDermott has half a mind to grab Rezko by his skinny neck, but, hey, it’s his profession, it’s what he lives for, and he’s good at it. He can give the kid thirty seconds.
“—a graphite powder to highlight the indentations, because they were vague—”
McDermott can’t resist. “This is, like, when you turn over the paper and use the side of a pencil to shade a background, right? So you can read what’s on the other side? Like what we did in second grade?”
Rezko draws back, smiling coolly. He’s known Mike for years, he knows it’s in good fun. From behind his back, he produces a photograph, showing a series of words written haphazardly, the indentations clear as day in white against the graphite background:
McDermott looks up at the technician. “So these words were written on another piece of paper, on top of the note.”
“Right. Exactly. He has a real thing with words beginning with V and E.”
Looking over the note, McDermott finds one sentence that contains both. “Never does vindication ever really surrender easily.”
Stoletti had commented on that sentence, too. He didn’t need to say “ever,” he’d already said “never.” The word choice, though deliberate, was odd.
But, like she said: deliberate.
“Thanks, Tony,” he says. “Great work.”
But what the hell does it mean?
THE MAN WITH the long orange apron puts his hand on Leo and signals to another guy. “Guy needs your help,” he says.
Don’t touch. Leo slips his shoulder from the man’s hand. Don’t touch me.
“Sorry,” the man says.
You touch me again, I’ll shove my thumb through your brain.
Leo squats down, pretends to tie his shoe, does a one-eighty in the process, works on the shoelace while he scans—muscular guy in a tank top, pushing an orange shopping cart filled with small pieces of plywood, no, no, he was already here, check the entrance—
A woman walks in, pretty, dirty-blond hair, thin, pink satin shirt, tight black pants, heels, professional but stylish, she looks in his direction—not directly at him, but he knows it now, she’s looking for him, he’s not stupid, but he can’t leave, can’t run, not yet—
She turns away from Leo, down an aisle with lightbulbs and extension cords, where she stops.
I see you.
The hardware store is humongous. Most of the aisles are long, énorth-south aisles, like where Leo is standing, but the woman is down a shorter, east-west aisle.
With a perfect view of the checkout counter. That’s her plan. Wait until Leo checks out and follow him.
“What do you need, sir?”
Leo looks up. Old guy, maybe fifty, balding, overweight, near-sighted, sagging flesh on the upper torso that used to be muscle, long orange apron.
He gets the words out: Chain saw.
“Sure thing. Right down here. Aisle Eleven.”
Leo finishes with the shoe and scans his eyes around the store. Who else? Just one?
A pause. Leo looks up at the man again.
“Get me started,” he says. “What do you need it for?”
Leo gets to his feet, pulling down on his baseball cap. The woman is still in that aisle. She glances to her left, toward Leo.
“To cut,” he says.
The man gives him a look. A lot of people look at him like that. Like they feel sorry for him. Like they think he’s not very smart. “You—you want I should meet you down there, mister?”
Leo nods. The man heads back down toward Aisle Eleven. Leo is standing near Aisle Four.
White woman, pink top, black pants, covering the exit. She reminds him of Cassie’s cousin Gwendolyn.
GWENDOLYN. GWENDOLYN LAKE. He’d heard of her, yes. It was her house, but he’d never seen her. She was never there, but she was coming. She’s nice, Cassie said, but she can be hard to get to know. Just—don’t take it personally if she’s a little—short with you. Okay?
Okay, he said. The way Cassie spoke to him, the kindness in her eyes, the warmth of her hand on his shoulder—and he didn’t care about her cousin, Gwendolyn. He’d been through worse.
Cassie and Mrs. Bentley were there. He didn’t think they were happy about it. Mrs. Bentley kept smoking and pacing outside the house. How long is she staying? Mrs. Bentley asked. How long?
Mother, for the last time, I don’t know. It’ll be fine.
The limousine pulled up within a few minutes. When the driver opened the door for Gwendolyn, she didn’t seem happy, either. She was dressed like she was ready for a party. Tight pants with a bright red top. A cigarette in her mouth and a drink in her hand. Cassie ran to the car and hugged her. Mrs. Bentley stood at the doorway and embraced her, too, but with le
ss enthusiasm.
Then Gwendolyn looked at Leo.
So this is the immigrant.
This is Leo, Cassie said. Be nice, Gwen.
Oh, right, right. Gwendolyn twirled her index finger beside her head. Well, hi there, Leo.
He put out his hand. Gwendolyn looked at it but didn’t take it. She leaned into him.
Well, I can see why you and Cassie get along so well, she said.
Leo didn’t answer. He went to the trunk of the limousine and brought her bags inside. Then he returned to his work, trimming the hedges.
THE WOMAN, pink top and black pants, turns to her left, toward Leo, but she’s still far away, several aisles away, she looks up and acts surprised to see a man, a black guy, she greets him, gives him a quick hug.
Black guy with her now, they’re good, like they’re surprised to see each other, whatever they’re saying to each other, he knows what they’re really saying, We’ve marked him, let’s see what he does, you take the rear, I’ll take the front.
You don’t fool me.
Leo starts toward them, but they separate, she touches him on the arm and says good-bye—looks like good-bye, anyway—and he walks out of Leo’s view.
They separated, getting an angle on him. How many are there?
“Help you, sir?”
Leo jumps. Another man in a long orange apron. He shakes his head while keeping his eyes on the woman.
One thing at a time, no choice here, this is going to have to be fast, he has to do it now, he keeps his head down, walks to Aisle Eleven slowly, his head on a swivel, but he makes it look natural, you’ve marked me but you don’t know that I’ve marked you, too, they’re not going to make their move inside, they’re just looking for information, they just have to report back on what I’m doing here—
He finds the old guy in Aisle Eleven, shelves and containers full of various chain saws.
“I was asking, professional or home use?” the man says. “What are you cutting?”
