Eye of the Beholder

by David Ellis

  That’s Harland. We’re meeting, as agreed, after I left the police at the hospital, but still he’s putting me on the defensive up front. The assistant who escorted me into the room—a private security guard with an earpiece and wraparound mike who speaks in a deep British accent—leaves us alone in the room.

  Harland taps the next one wide left, too, banging the orange ball off the wooden backdrop, and this time he spits out a cuss. “Hate making the same mistake twice, Paul. Know what I mean?”

  No, I don‘t, and I’m in no mood for games. I almost got killed for the second time this week by a guy who tried to frame me for murder, and I have cops breathing down my neck for my trouble.

  “You had something to tell me,” I say.

  Harland, in the midst of measuring up another putt, freezes in place. This is his way of showing offense. He decides what, and when, to discuss topics. He returns his focus to the ball and taps it straight into the hole, which proceeds to spit it back out and off to the right. “There,” he says. “I’m not keeping my wrist straight.” He takes a break from the putting and looks at me for the first time, as if finally attending to an annoying child.

  He is wearing a bright blue shirt, open at the collar, with immaculate slacks, and caramel loafers polished to a shine. His sport coat, matching his shoes, is hanging on the door.

  “While you kept me waiting,” he says, “I had the chance to review some recent invoices. I see for the month of April, I paid your firm over 1.2 million dollars in fees.”

  That sounds about right.

  “I take it,” he says, “you enjoy being my lawyer.”

  I don’t respond.

  “I take it you’d like to continue being my lawyer.”

  I open my hands. “Harland.”

  “I just want to know who I’m speaking to, Counselor.” He places the putter in the small stand and puts on his sport coat. “Am I talking to someone working for the police or am I talking to my lawyer?”

  I take a moment with that. A guy with his kind of money, it’s always an implied threat. But he’s never said it before.

  “I didn’t realize I’d have to choose,” I say.

  “And if you did?”

  “I’m a lawyer, not a cop.” I’m too stubborn to entirely capitulate, but I gave him what he wanted.

  The smug expression returns. Harland always gets his way.

  “Good,” he says. “Then we can talk.” He moves past me. I follow him down the hall to his office.

  A DOCTOR EMERGES FROM Brandon Mitchum’s room and tells McDermott and Stoletti that the patient is ready for a short interview. McDermott is on his cell phone, a call he just got from the CAT unit.

  “Looks like we got some latents off the door, Mike,” the lab tells him.

  McDermott’s heart does a leap. A break—maybe. Best thing they’ve had yet.

  And just like Riley predicted.

  “Okay, no one goes home until we’ve run them.” McDermott punches out his cell phone before he can hear the groan on the other end. He gives Stoletti the good news. “Finally, we catch some damn luck.”

  Brandon Mitchum is in a hospital bed, awake but sedated. His face is heavily wrapped, but his cloudy eyes, peeking over the bandage, stare at the photograph of the man standing in the background behind Harland Bentley.

  It only takes a beat, looking at the photo, before Mitchum inhales sharply. That’s as good as an identification.

  “He said he was a cop,” Brandon says, handing back the photograph. “He had a badge. Said—said he wanted to talk about Evelyn...”

  The sedatives are doing their work. Good, for his sake, but bad for McDermott. He reaches for Brandon and touches his shoulder. He needs this kid tonight, not tomorrow.

  “I didn’t want to let him in,” Mitchum continues. “He sort of forced his way in.”

  Right. Put his hand on the door. Thus, the fingerprints.

  Brandon asks, “Evelyn’s dead? Was that part true?”

  Stoletti answers. “She was murdered, yes.”

  “Ohhh ...” Mitchum’s eyes close. “And it was this guy?”

  “We think so, yeah.”

  His eyes still closed, Mitchum swallows hard, nods his head. “I was next. I could tell.”

  “We need to know what happened, Brandon. Hard as that may be.”

  “I know.” His eyes open, turn toward the window. “Guy was a freak.”

  “Start at the beginning,” McDermott says. “He says he’s a cop. Comes up. You let him in—”

  “Before I knew it, he put that blade against my throat and pushed himself in. He got me”—his voice halts—“on the floor. He—God, the guy was, like, crazy. He started talking, like, almost gibberish. He said my name over and over. ‘Brandon, Brandon, Brandon.’ Then it‘s, ‘Tell me what you told her, tell me what you told her.’ He knew I’d talked to Evelyn.”

  Brandon shakes his head absently. McDermott is suddenly glad for the sedative. “You’re doing great,” he tries.

  “He started with the blade.” His hand reaches to a spot on his hospital gown around the rib cage. “He stuck it in pretty good. Y‘know, it wasn’t gonna kill me. It just hurt.”

  “Right. Sure.”

  “I told the guy, Evelyn just wanted to know about Cassie and Ellie and Gwendolyn.”

  Gwendolyn. “Gwendolyn—Lake? Cassie’s cousin?”

  Brandon doesn’t respond, lost in the nightmare. “So he goes, ‘Gwendolyn, Gwendolyn, Gwendolyn.’ He gets all excited. ‘What about Gwendolyn? What about Gwendolyn?’ Then he goes again with the blade.” Brandon slashes his fingers diagonally across his chest. “I yelled out but his hand was over my mouth. He’d do that. He had one hand on my throat, but before he’d cut me he’d cover my mouth.”

  McDermott thinks about what Riley said when he struggled with the offender—the guy knew what he was doing. He’d done it before, too. He managed to torture both Fred Ciancio and Evelyn Pendry in what appears to have been relative quiet. That’s not easy to do.

  “So, then I told him what I told Evelyn about Gwen. I told him about the fight.”

  “The fight.”

  “Yeah, back during finals that year—y‘know, late May, early June of that year—a couple of weeks before the murders. Gwendolyn came into town. Y’know, she’d do that. She’d pop in from Europe, or the Caribbean, or wherever, and she’d party with Cassie and Ellie. Anyway, Cassie and Gwen, they didn’t exactly get along. They were so different. Gwen was, like—aggressive, I guess. Kind of harsh, y‘know? But, okay, so Cassie and Gwen had some monster fight, like, a few days before exams started. It was one of those things, we were—well, we’d been—we weren’t necessarily sober, I guess—”

  “I don’t care about that, Brandon. You guys were, what, stoned? Wired?”

  He nods. “We’d been doing some blow. So, we’re at the house, and it’s me, Cassie, Ellie, and Gwen. It‘s, like, three in the morning, we’ve been out, and now we’re back at the house—”

  “House. What house?”

  “Oh. Gwendolyn’s house. Her mother’s house, which was now all hers. Y‘know, her mom died in a car crash a few years earlier. I think Mrs. Bentley moved in there, after the divorce. But this was before that.”

  “Go on, Brandon.”

  “So, anyway, Ellie and I had basically passed out on a couch downstairs, and, suddenly, upstairs, Cassie and Gwen are having some knock-down, drag-out fight. I mean, everyone was pretty fucked up. I’m not sure Ellie even woke up. But, anyway, yeah, there was this big fight, and, by the time I’m on my feet, realizing what’s going on, Cassie’s running down the stairs and out of the house. She jumps in her car and drives away.”

  “Why were they fighting?” Stoletti asks.

  He shrugs. “I never knew. She wouldn’t talk about it. And, honestly, the next day, for me, it was back to studying. I needed to do well. Ellie and Cassie, they didn’t need grades. They had all this money. But not me. I had to cram for finals.”

  “Point be
ing,” McDermott says, trying to move it along, “you never really got the scoop.”

  “Right. I have to say, the rest of that week, Cassie was even moodier than usual. Normally, I’d hang with her more, get her to open up to me. But not that week. I was afraid I might flunk Sociology.”

  “And you told this to the intruder.”

  “Yeah.” He clears his throat painfully, his face in a grimace. “Yeah, it wasn’t quite as calm as now, but, yeah—I told him they had a fight, I didn’t know why. Then he was like, ‘What else about Gwendolyn, what else about Gwendolyn, tell me, tell me, tell me’—I mean, this guy was whacked-out. Meanwhile, he’s cutting my skin, muffling my shouts. I mean, this guy was, like, totally out of control, but, y‘know, totally in control, too. In control of me, at least.”

  McDermott rolls his hand to keep Mitchum on story.

  “Well, then, I’m telling the guy, I never saw Gwendolyn again after that—I mean, like, couple weeks later there was the murders, and then, y‘know, there’d be no reason I’d ever see her again, I guess. She was Cassie’s cousin, and Ellie’s friend. I wouldn’t have expected her to look me up again.”

  “All right—”

  “So then it’s on to Cassie, and he’s doing the same shit. ‘Tell me, tell me, tell me.’ Man, I didn’t even know how to answer that. But then he says to me, ‘Fucking father, fucking father, fucking father,’ and then I know what he’s talking about.”

  McDermott rocks on his toes.

  “He goes into this ramble. First he says ‘Fucking father,’ like, eight times, then he says ‘Evelyn, Evelyn, Evelyn, Evelyn,’ then ‘What did she say, what did you say’—I mean, this guy. I thought he was going to do it right there, just stick that blade in my eye or slit my throat or something. He cut me again on the chest.”

  “So what did you tell him about the ‘fucking father’ thing?”

  “The truth. See, that week, that week of the fight, Cassie was all upset, like I said. Worse than usual, and she was always a troubled girl. Sweet as candy but really unhappy. So, anyway, I heard her on the phone, in her dorm room. I’m walking by, and she’s yelling into the phone. At least, the last part she’s yelling. She says, ‘You’re the fucking father!’ And I walk in, and I‘m, like, ‘What’s wrong?’ But she wouldn’t talk about it.”

  You’re the fucking father. “And the intruder knew about that, Brandon?”

  “Yeah, he knew about that. He must have gotten it from Evelyn. Because I told her.”

  Makes sense. Brandon told Evelyn, and Evelyn must have told the offender, probably under compulsion. So now the offender wanted to get the full story from Brandon.

  “Okay,” Stoletti chimes in. “You told the intruder about the ‘fucking father’ story. Then what?”

  “This guys says to me ‘Who’s the father, who’s the father,’ going on like that. But then he freezes, he covers my mouth and looks at the door. I could hear it, too. Footsteps. Then Mr. Riley is banging on the door, and I think he yelled out ‘Police,’ which was pretty smart of him.”

  “And then what?”

  “Well, I saw it as my chance. He took one swipe at me with the blade, and I think he was trying to kill me, but I moved, y‘know? He caught my face. Then he was off and running, and Mr. Riley came in, and Mr. Riley went running after him, and then—well, that was it.”

  McDermott nods. “What took place between Riley and the intruder?”

  Brandon shakes his head. “I was so freaked-out, I couldn’t tell you. I thought I was gonna pass out, and Mr. Riley ran in and called 911, and put a towel on my face and talked to me.” He blows out a nervous sigh. “Thank God for that guy. He saved my life.”

  The door pops open. A doctor walks in. He wants a moment to check on the patient. McDermott nods to Stoletti. They’re not done, but it’s not a bad time for a break.

  Out in the hallway, Stoletti walks in a small circle, a habit when she’s lost in thought. Usually, she does two or three laps, then comes up with something good.

  “Maybe this idea of Cassie being pregnant isn’t such a bad one,” McDermott says. “Sounds like Cassie had an angry phone call with the father of her child.”

  Stoletti stops and says, “The offender was doing the same thing to Mitchum that he did to Ciancio and to Evelyn Pendry. The superficial wounds. But now we have a different context for it.”

  McDermott agrees. “We thought he was torturing them for fun. We were wrong.”

  She nods. “He was interrogating them. He wanted to know what they knew.”

  “This isn’t a copycat, Ricki.” McDermott looks up at the ceiling. “This is a cover-up.”

  35

  WITH TREMBLING HANDS, Leo tapes the photograph on the bathroom mirror in the hotel room. He calms himself, uses a breathing exercise Dr. Pollard taught him, straightens himself, and tries to smile at the photograph. She needs him to be calm.

  It’s a double from a high school yearbook photo. Her head is tilted in a slightly unnatural way, her focus just off center. She is wearing a simple, pink V-neck sweater with a charm necklace. Her hair is freshly cut, above her shoulder, her smile simply angelic.

  You look pretty.

  In his mind, the conversation is fluid:

  No, I don’t.

  Yes, you do. I promise, you look pretty. And I don’t want you to worry. I’m going to take care of everything. They’re going to say things about you, but I will stop them. I won’t let anyone find out.

  But Brandon’s alive.

  I know he is, my love, my beautiful, but I have a plan now.

  He traces his finger over the outline of her face. Very pretty, so very pretty.

  I love you, Leo.

  And I love you, Cassandra.

  If you love me, then tell me your plan.

  Shhhh ... please don’t worry.

  Leo puts his face close to the photo, brushes his lips against her forehead.

  I have to go now, but I’ll be back soon.

  ROUND TWO WITH BRANDON MITCHUM. He looks calmer now,as the sedatives do their work. He chews on his lip as Stoletti and McDermott resume their places.

  McDermott realizes that Riley is right. The offender was sloppy this time. He’s off plan now. He must have Evelyn Pendry’s computer, which is why they can’t find it. He’s reading what she had written about her investigation. He found Brandon Mitchum’s name and paid him a visit, but he worked quickly—just one day after killing Evelyn—and didn’t have time to scout out the place. He didn’t know that the security door on Brandon’s building was busted. Didn’t think he had time to break into the apartment and ambush him, like with the others.

  And he’s good. He’s skilled at controlling people, and he knows how to pick locks.

  Evelyn was on the right track, and now the offender is following the same trail she was, trying to clean it up. Evelyn talked to Ciancio and he’s dead. Evelyn talked to Brandon and he was next. They know Evelyn talked to Professor Albany, too, which is why McDermott just put in a call and sent a patrol car to Albany’s house.

  Stoletti begins. “Did Evelyn Pendry tell you what she was up to?”

  “Writing about Terry Burgos, I assumed.” Brandon’s voice is scratchy and flat now. He’s wearing down. “Doing some expose or something.”

  “An exposé,” McDermott says, joining in again. “Something beyond background.”

  Brandon brings a hand to the bandage on his face. “Evelyn—y‘know, she’s a reporter, so—she was pretty coy about the whole thing. Protective, y’know, about her story. But she seemed concerned. I got the feeling that she thought there was more to the Burgos murders than everyone thought. She was all interested in Cassie and Ellie and Gwen, like I said. Seemed like, as much as anything, she was just trying to get down their personalities.”

  “So give them to us.”

  Brandon’s eyes move to the ceiling. “Mansbury, y‘know, it fancies itself one of the elite liberal arts colleges, right? And it is, I guess. But you get an elite school, you ge
t a lot of money. Lots of trust fund babies, y’know? Me, I came from downstate, but Cassie and Ellie? They had money. Cassie, obviously—but Ellie’s family owned some big steel manufacturer, I think, in South Africa.”

  “Anyway?” McDermott prompts.

  “Yeah, anyway. Ellie? She was one of these rich girl partiers. Nice enough girl, don’t get me wrong, but she didn’t have a whole lot of—I don’t know, what’s the word?—substance, maybe? Yeah.” He chuckles. “Not a lot of substance. Trendy clothes, expensive hairstyle, all the right connections. Oh, she was okay, I guess. But the only reason she ever gave me the time of day was Cassie.

  “Now, Cassie,” he says, realizing that the detectives are listening closely, “was a real sweetheart. I mean, that girl had soul. Know what I mean? She had more money than God, but she was such a generous spirit. She did volunteer work, she studied hard, she was always there if you needed her. But here’s the thing—”

  McDermott rocks on his toes.

  “Cassie was so fucking messed up. I mean, look, she’s got all this money and everything, so I’m not saying we should play the violins for her. And she wouldn’t have wanted that, either. It’s more like, she just wasn’t really sure who she was.” He sighs. “She could never make herself happy. I had no idea why. She was kind, she was intelligent, she was beautiful, but she was a train wreck inside. And then, after that fight with Gwendolyn—I mean, there was no talking to her. She was a basket case. Here, everyone’s cramming for finals, so we’re all a little off-kilter, right? But Cassie? I mean, she wouldn’t eat. She wouldn’t talk. And as far as anyone could tell, she wasn’t even studying. After finals that year, we’re all heading out for one last hurrah before summer break, and Cassie sat in her dorm room with the door locked. I mean, she even gave Ellie the cold shoulder, and Ellie lived with her.”

  McDermott sneaks a peek at Stoletti. He knows what she’s thinking. This sounds a lot like a girl who had just found out she had an unwanted pregnancy.