Eye of the Beholder

by David Ellis

  “There’s nothing wrong with accepting a grant,” Mitchum says.

  McDermott nods at him. “You and Mr. Bentley ever discuss what we’ve just discussed?”

  He shakes his head. “Never.”

  Stoletti asks, “You think he knew that you knew about Ellie and him?”

  “No,” he insists. “I don’t know if there’s even anything to know. It was just a thought that Cassie had. See, I knew you’d try to make this look bad. He gives millions a year to the arts. I’m one of many. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  The doctor moves between the detective and the patient. “That’s enough for tonight, guys. Really.”

  “We’ll have a guard at your door,” McDermott tells Brandon. “You think of anything, I want you to call me.”

  They step out into the hallway. Stoletti digests the conversation while McDermott checks for messages on his cell phone. None.

  So Cassie is pregnant and having unpleasant conversations with whoever the father is, who seems to want to deny it. Then Cassie is murdered. Then someone gets Fred Ciancio to help break into the building where Cassie’s medical records are located. None of this, save Cassie’s murder, is confirmed. But it makes sense.

  Nor can it be confirmed that Cassie’s father was playing around with Ellie’s best friend. But if he was, then Cassie was having a pretty rough time right before she was murdered.

  “You think Cassie confronted her daddy?” Stoletti asks. “He marries into a billion dollars, and he’s afraid of his wife finding out that he was screwing their daughter’s best friend?”

  “And,” McDermott adds, “we have another someone who doesn’t want Cassie’s pregnancy to come out. Professor Albany sure looks good for the ‘fucking father.”’

  “And just about this time,” she replies, “Ellie and Cassie conveniently turn up dead.”

  Right. But they don’t have proof that Cassie was pregnant, and they don’t have proof Harland Bentley was stepping out with Ellie Danzinger.

  Only one way to find out. He’s supposed to see Natalia Lake Bentley, who is returning from vacation tomorrow morning early. And they have Harland Bentley at ten.

  “We’ll need to add the professor to our social calendar tomorrow,” he says.

  37

  McDERMOTT MAKES it back to the station after leaving the hospital. Grace is already asleep when he calls. His mother says she had a good night. It’s only the third night since Joyce died that McDermott hasn’t put her to bed and read to her. He misses it. It’s part of his pact with her.

  What would he do without his mother, Grace’s gramma? A nanny on a cop’s salary would almost break him. His mother, seventy-four next month, is the one now holding this together. She’s healthy as a horse, but he can see she’s slowing down. He thinks about it every day. What would happen to Grace without her?

  He shakes away the thought. He pushes out the memory of Joyce lying dead on the floor, the bathroom floor and rug soaked with her blood. He turns from the sight of Grace, huddled in the bathtub, her eyes shut, hands over her ears.

  He pretends he didn’t say those things to Joyce, the night before her death.

  Joyce was sick, and it had become too much for a husband who worked ten-hour days. Worse yet, there was Grace. If something had happened to her under Joyce’s watch, he’d never forgive himself. Joyce loved Grace more than life, but that wasn’t the point. Sickness was sickness. You can love your daughter with all your heart, but what good does that do if you’ve locked yourself upstairs while your three-year-old daughter is downstairs, wailing for her mommy?

  That’s when he’d made the decision, after arriving home late from a double homicide, after gathering his hungry, soiled daughter in his arms as he searched the house for his wife, his heart rattling against his chest in anger and terror with such fury that he could hardly push the calls to his wife out of his lungs. He found her in the spare bedroom, in the corner, wrapped in a ball, weeping quietly. She’d lost track of time, hadn’t any sense of whether Grace had eaten dinner or whether she’d had a nap. She was losing control.

  It was time—past time—to institutionalize her. To get some rest, as he put it to her later that night.

  He’d consulted an attorney the week earlier. Involuntary commitment was an option. But he wanted so badly for Joyce to agree with him. He wanted her to feel like part of a solution, not a prisoner being locked up. Just give it a try, he pleaded. It’s nothing permanent. The point, he emphasized, was to get her full-time attention and get her on the road to recovery.

  We’ll make it through this, he promised.

  That was a Thursday night. They talked about the weekend. She had reluctantly agreed. They would do it that weekend.

  Why had he given her advance warning?

  Why had he left for work on Friday?

  He had rationalizations for that one, too: The double homicide he was working. The fact that Joyce looked great—fresh, alert, positive—that Friday morning, seemed to be having one of her good days. Because they weren’t all bad; it wasn’t every day. She was up and down. That morning, he was sure of it, she was up.

  He was sure.

  I’m fine, she’d said, placing a hand gently on his chest. Like you said—think about the future. This is the right move for us.

  Go, she’d said. You can help me pack when you get home.

  Eight, ten hours, and he’d be back home, helping Joyce pack a bag for what, hopefully, would be a short stay at the Pearlwood Center. It was really only seven. He’d left work early.

  Seven hours, when it all came apart.

  “We’ll catch a break tonight,” Stoletti tells him as she plays on her computer.

  “What? Oh.” McDermott sighs. She’s referring to the fingerprints that were found on the door to Brandon Mitchum’s apartment. Until they hear back from the lab, there’s not much to do, and it’s no time to rehash the past, so he busies himself with the reports from the Burgos file.

  Burgos is not his case, of course, and it’s been solved. His job is to catch the current offender. But there’s no denying a connection. Something was missed. He knows it. And he has to figure it out fast, because fast is a good description of how the offender is moving. Sunday was Ciancio. Monday was Amalia Calderone. Tuesday was Evelyn Pendry. Today, he took his shot at Brandon Mitchum.

  McDermott rubs his eyes, finishes off his second cup of coffee and goes for another, his eyes heavy but his body motoring on the caffeine. God, the energy he used to have, as a young cop, working an overnight shift, the thrill he felt when he cruised some of the scariest of neighborhoods. It felt clearer to him then, more tangible, the front lines. Now he’s playing catch-up, solving crimes already committed instead of preventing them. He likes the puzzle, no doubt. But the truth is, most crimes aren’t that hard to solve. Motives usually show themselves almost immediately. Canvass the neighborhood, check the vic’s background, work the forensics, and nine times out of ten, you’re done. And in the end, you don’t bring the vie back, you just put away the offender.

  Maybe that’s why, whatever the pressure he may feel, he’s enjoying this case. A chance to prevent, to stop this offender from killing again.

  He feels sure that this is an offender covering his tracks. And what, precisely, he’s covering is contained somewhere in these files.

  He looks back over the notes he’s made on Burgos. He noted details on times, places, and came up with a clear pattern. There were the hookers, there was Ellie, and there was Cassie. The hookers lined up nice and neat. They had a little bit of information on Ellie and basically nothing on Cassie.

  One: The hookers’ disappearances could be pinpointed to particular nights and times, and at least general locations. Two of the hookers were seen getting into a blue Chevy Suburban, and the other two left fingerprints in that same vehicle, belonging to Terry Burgos. Ellie Danzinger’s house was forcibly entered, and the action took place in her bedroom, literally on her bed. Her murder can be pinpointed, circumsta
ntially, to the first night of the murders, a Sunday.

  Not so with Cassie. They didn’t know when, or where, Cassie disappeared. They only know she was the last one murdered. And they know there was a two-day break between the last hooker’s death and Cassie’s death.

  Two: The hookers were raped before Burgos killed them. Ellie and Cassie were raped postmortem.

  Three: Professor Frankfort Albany knew both of the girls. He didn’t know the prostitutes.

  Two—the sex thing—was probably not a big deal. Hookers let you have sex with them, that’s the whole point. Nice college girls like Cassie and Ellie—they probably wouldn’t look twice at a guy like Burgos. He’d have to kill them first.

  He sits back in his chair and lets it work out in his mind. Let it all out, see what comes back. Usually works for him.

  Burgos left bread crumbs all the way to his door, Riley said. They found him before they even began to investigate. Sure, that happens all the time. First place you look, you find your offender. Who wants to make work for themselves? The guy’s right there. He confesses. His basement looks like he was conducting a seminar on torture murders. Don’t make it more complicated.

  He remembers what he read about Ellie Danzinger. She’d been bludgeoned in her bed, but then she was left there, her head hanging over the side. The M.E. figured, based on the volume of blood that dripped to the carpet, that it had been at least sixty minutes that Ellie lay there before she was moved to Burgos’s garage, where he removed her dead heart from her corpse.

  What happened during those sixty minutes?

  He looks back at his notes. You always ask the question, Who gained? If you believe rumors, the father of Cassie’s child and Harland Bentley both gained from the deaths of Ellie and Cassie.

  But Burgos confessed. McDermott had read the transcript of the interrogation. There was no coercion at all. Burgos knew damn well that Ellie was his first victim, before anyone mentioned her name or showed him her photograph. Hell, he was pissed off that Detective Lightner hadn’t included her picture in the photo array. And there’s no way that evidence of six dead women just found its way into his basement.

  Is there?

  But what if Professor Albany had been the father of Cassie’s child? There’s little doubt he’d lose his job if it came out. And he knew Burgos—he employed him, for God’s sake, and he took him under his wing.

  Could a college professor come up with keys to the Bramhall Auditorium basement?

  So many things unconfirmed. But if Harland Bentley really was slipping it to Ellie Danzinger, he was looking at the loss of a fortune if it came out. He and Albany both had plenty to lose.

  So which one is it? Bentley or Albany?

  “Hey, Mike.”

  McDermott looks over at Stoletti, who is banging away on the computer.

  “We’ve been sitting here thinking, Who looks worse right now? Harland Bentley or Professor Albany?”

  “Right.” When he walks over, she points at the computer, a results screen from a Google search. “We’re looking at Albany, we’re looking at Harland Bentley,” she says. “I thought, why not search both their names together?”

  “They were both players in a heater case, Ricki. It’s not that surprising they’d appear in articles together.”

  “Yeah?” She clinks on a link. “Well, is this surprising?”

  The link is a biography page for Mansbury College. At the top corner of the page is a photo of Professor Albany in a thoughtful pose.

  Then McDermott starts to read the one-paragraph biography:

  Professor Frankfort J. Albany is the Harland Bentley Professor of Cultural Studies at Mansbury College. Endowed in 1990, the chair recognizes Professor Albany for his outstanding contributions ...

  “The Harland Bentley what?”

  Harland Bentley endowed a chair at Mansbury College in Albany’s name?

  “Maybe we don’t have to pick between Harland Bentley or Professor Albany,” he says. “Maybe it’s both.”

  Stoletti says, “Well, that explains how Albany got tenure after teaching a class that got six women killed. A billionaire having your back doesn’t hurt.”

  “He hires Riley right after the Burgos case is done and makes him a millionaire ten times over,” McDermott says. “He gives Brandon Mitchum a yearly stipend after the case is over, maybe as a thank-you for keeping quiet about his supposed affair with Ellie Danzinger. He endows a chair for Albany right after the case and gives him permanent job security.”

  “Harland Bentley was buying something,” she agrees.

  His cell phone rings. His caller ID doesn’t recognize the number.

  “Mike, it’s Susan Dobbs.”

  “Susan.” He checks his watch. What’s an assistant county medical examiner doing this time of night at the morgue?

  “You piqued my curiosity,” she says. “And I know this is important.”

  “I appreciate—”

  “I just checked all three of the victims: Ciancio, Evelyn Pendry, and Amalia Calderone.”

  “And?”

  “Every one of them has a postmortem incision at the base of the fourth and fifth tarsal phalange.”

  McDermott releases a breath.

  “This guy’s clever,” she says. “Or stupid, depending on how you look at it.”

  Right. He’s branding them. He’s leaving a signature.

  “So Susan, how come none of the other autopsy reports show this? Other than Ciancio’s?”

  She sighs. “Mike, you bring in a body that’s overwhelmed with physical trauma—contusions, stabbing wounds, whatever—you’re not looking there. It’s not like there was evidence of poison, so you’re not looking for injection points. Who’s going to think to open up the space between the fourth and fifth toes?”

  “Well, you found it on Ciancio,” he says. “I owe you one.”

  “You owe me more than one.”

  He closes the cell phone. “All three victims,” he says to Stoletti.

  “That was the M.E.?” Stoletti looks up. “So we know they’re all connected. If we had any doubt. Why does he go to the trouble, after mutilating these people, to find the space between their fourth and fifth toes and make a little incision?”

  McDermott rolls his neck. “He wants us to know.”

  “Put it on their face, you want us to know. This is the most hidden signature I’ve ever heard of.” She nods at him. “You didn’t see that incision in any of the autopsies from Mansbury?”

  “No.” McDermott had run through every autopsy from the Burgos prosecution. “But they might have missed it, just like they missed it with two of our three victims, until I had her check.”

  Stoletti doesn’t like it. McDermott can’t disagree. She’s right. This guy is leaving a brand, a small incision in the taut skin between the fourth and pinkie toes, but one that would be incredibly easy to overlook, especially when the bodies are beaten and tortured.

  Why leave a signature that nobody might find?

  “He’s doing this for someone,” McDermott says. But who?

  ACROSS FROM ME at the all-night diner, Shelly chews an ice cube from a glass of lemonade. I nurse a cup of coffee and a number of nagging wounds. I lay it all out for her, the recent developments since she accompanied me to visit Gwendolyn Lake earlier today.

  I’ve flown solo long enough that I’m unaccustomed to seeking out solace. A bachelor’s life is uncomplicated, particularly when money is not an issue, which it certainly is not. Work is not difficult at this stage of my career. Litigation consists primarily of putting up a sufficient fight to force the other side into compromise, and, if it gets as far as trial, most of it is theater, anyway. My personal life? The biggest decision I have to make is whether to watch ESPN Classic or old movies on A&E. It becomes comfortable and that, in turn, becomes enough.

  I turned that all upside down with Shelly. I met her initially like I meet most people in my life—in a courtroom. I got the verdict and heard nothing from her again until
years later, when she asked me to represent a client on a murder charge. Away from the heat of the adversarial duel, I felt something immediately with her, her spirit, her conviction.

  And when she broke things off, I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t find the comfort. My assistant, Betty, was right. I’ve always enjoyed a drink, but I turned it into an Olympic sport, starting that night. I’ve been a wreck the last few months. I’ve been on autopilot at work and feeling sorry for myself.

  Now she’s back, with the proviso that I hold off the pressure, and I’m dumping these problems into her lap immediately. I didn’t want to call her to meet me here, scolded myself as I dialed the cell phone. But I need her, whether I like it or not.

  So far, she hasn’t said a word. She’s good like that, a great listener.

  When I’m done, she says, “Tell me what’s bothering you about this.”

  I laugh. After everything we’ve discussed, I wouldn’t know where to start.

  “It’s not Harland,” she says.

  I push my cup to the waitress, who freshens it. “Fuck Harland.”

  Shelly is briefly amused. She probably never expected to hear those words from me. She’s never been much for the corporate legal world, anyway. I once tried to woo her to my law firm, with a full partnership offer, but I couldn’t drag her away from her children’s advocacy work. For her, it’s about the work, not the compensation.

  That used to be me, too.

  “You think you missed something back then.”

  I cringe at the words. “What I can’t figure out is why it would matter. If Cassie was pregnant, that was a problem for someone, maybe, sixteen years ago. But not today. Harland was sleeping with Ellie Danzinger? Sure, it’s scandalous, sixteen years ago. Not today. I—I can’t see how any of this is relevant.”

  She reaches across the table and takes my hand. “But you can’t see how it’s not.”

  People are dying for a reason, she means. These aren’t random victims of a psychopath. There’s a connection.