Eye of the Beholder

by David Ellis

  Trim-Meter chain saw cheerleader’s brains all paint on the stained wall.

  He hears commotion on the staircase. He steps out of the bathroom and moves to the doorway. Paul Riley looks like a running back trying to shed tacklers. Halfway up the final staircase, with two officers clutching at him, he makes eye contact with McDermott, still a trace of irrational hope on his face.

  “I’m sorry,” McDermott says.

  “I want to see her.” The struggle begins anew between Riley and the officers. McDermott takes a few steps down and grips Riley’s arm.

  “There’s nothing left to see, Paul,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  Riley collapses on the staircase, crying out Shelly’s name. McDermott looks back at Stoletti, who says to him, quietly, “We have to call the governor.”

  47

  SEVEN O‘CLOCK. Radio still mentioning his name, Leo Koslenko, wanted for questioning, armed and dangerous, Chrysler LeBaron, and now the new scoop, Trotter, Michelle Trotter, governor’s daughter, daughter of the governor, might be a connection, wanted, dangerous, armed—

  Guide the Toyota Camry off the interstate, follow the signs through town. New construction at this intersection, not what he’s seen before, weird, feelings return, but the place looks different, he’s never come back here, always stayed away, no reason to go back, but now he feels like he’s back in every way, he’s back to work, back in the game—

  Mansbury College, welcome to Mansbury, where vision meets opportunity.

  McDERMOTT TAKES ANOTHER REPORT from the neighborhood canvass, another report of nobody seeing anything. One neighbor did hear a chain saw earlier today, midday, but that was not terribly out of the ordinary in the summer, near the tree-lined park on the lake.

  Midday, on a weekday. Koslenko must have subdued her while she was in the shower, getting ready for work, and then waited for the apartment building to clear before going to work on her. The guy may be crazy, but he isn’t dumb.

  The County Attorney Technical Unit and the medical examiner have nearly completed their work. They will run prints but everything was wiped down, and, anyway, they know who the hell it is. They just can’t find him. They’ve had an all-points bulletin out on Koslenko and his car since this morning to no avail.

  He takes a call on his cell phone from the squad room, where, apparently, Harland Bentley and his lawyer have had their fill of waiting for McDermott. They were there solely as a courtesy, his lawyer said, so they were free to leave.

  “Albany left, too, Mike. We couldn’t very well—”

  “That’s fine,” he says. He has his hands full tonight. But he tells them to post a car at both houses, Bentley’s and Albany‘s, and follow them if they go anywhere.

  He looks into the living room, where Paul Riley sits on the couch, his face buried in his hands, his toes tapping on the carpet. They tried to get him into a squad car, but he refused. McDermott let him stay when he promised to keep out of the way.

  Riley is wearing more than sorrow, more than shock on his face. He is wearing guilt. This is his fault, no matter what anyone tries to tell him. Over time, he’ll work on the same rationalizations. He will tell himself that he did the best he could with Burgos’s prosecution. He will tell himself that it was Leo Koslenko who killed Shelly, not him. But he won’t accept any of that. He will put this squarely on himself.

  McDermott knows that better than anyone.

  He had the ability, the right, to have his wife institutionalized against her will. With a three-year-old child involved, he had more than that—he had the responsibility. How could he have left Joyce with Grace that day? After seeing her unglued the night before?

  How could he do that to little Gracie?

  She blames herself, the doctor said.

  How could she do that to their daughter? No matter how sick, no matter how consumed by her illness—how could Joyce do that to Grace?

  Get the shoe box from the closet.

  Open it up.

  Give it to Mommy.

  He finds himself standing at the threshold of Shelly Trotter’s bathroom. What happened in here was evil, whatever the face you paint on it, no matter that it was the product of mental illness. Death has no exceptions, only victims.

  The angle. The crime-scene technician, thinking he was out of McDermott’s earshot. Thinking that McDermott, devastated, clutching his three-year-old daughter, wasn’t listening intently to every word from the next room.

  The angle’s unusual for self-infliction.

  “Mike.”

  She would’ve had to hold the gun a couple feet away from her and aim it back.

  “Mike.”

  Then that’s how it happened, said Ricki Stoletti, his partner of four months at the time. That’s how it happened.

  Stoletti touches his arm. She avoids looking into the bathroom, but the situation is not lost on her. They’ve never discussed it, not even at the time. Back then, after that conversation with the technician, Stoletti had avoided eye contact with McDermott.

  It’s closed, was all she’d said to him. Suicide.

  “Hey, Mike.”

  Thank you, he did not say out loud to her. Not then, not ever.

  “The governor’s here,” she says. “Put on your game face.”

  I GET TO MY FEET as Governor Trotter walks into Shelly’s apartment, in a suit and olive raincoat, his wife Abigail and a cadre of security detail close behind. He rushes up to me and grabs my hands, his own hands trembling, his eyes red but stoic. He is not crying. He’s already done that.

  “How—?” His eyes search mine for answers that I don’t have.

  “It’s because of me,” I say. “He killed her because of me.”

  He shakes his head, like he doesn’t get it. Nothing about it makes sense. It won’t make sense, maybe ever. Behind him, his wife is trying to get past McDermott to see Shelly.

  “Abby, don’t go in there,” I say. “That’s not Shelly any—anymore.”

  “How could this happen?” She turns to face me, looking years older than I’ve ever seen her. “What did you do, Paul?”

  There’s nothing I can say. McDermott comes over, takes the governor by the arm, and walks him and his wife into the kitchen to talk to them. The governor breaks free and looks into the bathroom, a deep, soulful wail soon following.

  McDERMOTT, distracted by the presence of the commander and the governor’s staff, finally breaks away from them as they head to the station. It’s approaching nine o‘clock now. Second night in a row that he didn’t put Grace to sleep. Could be the second night in a row that he won’t sleep at all. He becomes aware of it, for the first time in hours, as his adrenaline finally decelerates. His brain is exhausted. His legs move painfully.

  Susan Dobbs, the assistant medical examiner, is one of the few people left in the apartment now. The color has returned to her now; she seemed awed by the crime scene upon her arrival, hours ago, and that’s saying something, working corpses in this city. “The governor needs to sign a DNA authorization,” she says. “To verify identification.”

  “Nothing left of her.” McDermott sighs.

  She zips up her medical bag. “Just the one left foot.”

  “Oh, I forgot.” McDermott snaps his fingers. “God, in all this flurry I—”

  “Yes,” she says, “it was there. A postmortem incision at the base of her fourth and fifth toes. He cut everything into pieces but the left foot. He wanted to make sure you saw it.”

  “Thanks, Sue.”

  She appraises him with sympathetic eyes. “When’s he gonna be done, Mike? You said this was from those lyrics?”

  McDermott nods, making a peace sign with his fingers.

  “Two more kills,” he says. “Unless I catch him.”

  DRIVE THE CAR BACK on the interstate, north toward the city, pass the downtown, a motel would be best, one where he can hide the rental car in the back. No one’s going to be looking for the Camry, but he’ll be careful, be careful, he finds a place off the
highway, uses his last fake identification, wears glasses and fake facial hair and a baseball cap, pays in cash, waits around the lobby but nobody’s following, all clear, everything coming together now.

  The governor’s daughter is dead, all over the news, he sits on the bed and watches it, then turns it off and goes into the bathroom, empties the bag from the drugstore on the vanity—

  He tapes Cassie’s photograph on the bathroom mirror, traces the outline of her face with his fingers, pretty, so beautiful—

  He uses the electric razor, shaves the front and top of his skull, no bald head, too obvious, not bald, just a bald spot, a patch of skin shaped like a horseshoe—

  You look funny.

  I know. But they won’t notice me this way. They might expect me to shave my head, but not to shave a bald spot.

  You still look funny.

  Hair coloring will change from deep black to dirty blond, different color, different style, he looks at himself in the mirror, sees a middle-aged man with male-pattern baldness, light brown hair on the sides, glasses—

  I’m scared.

  I know you are, but the plan is working. Riley will help us now.

  He drops on the bed, puts his head against the pillow, momentarily satiated but never expecting sleep.

  ELEVEN O‘CLOCK. The detectives’ squad room is like a train station, the commander taking up residence in the lew’s office, where e he and Governor Trotter confer. The governor’s son, Edgar Trotter, who is the chief of the state police, is in there, too, barking out orders and bringing in his top lieutenants in what appears to be a coup d’état. The younger Trotter stopped short of kicking McDermott off the case but made a point of saying the task force needed more effective leadership and suggesting that, if the slow-footed local cops had been quicker on the chase, maybe “this” wouldn’t have happened.

  Stick around, he told McDermott. We might need you for details.

  Media relations is all over this, coordinating things with the governor’s people, preparing statements, twisting and refining words so that they say just enough to give the appearance of sufficiency. The national press has arrived, too, lending a heightened sense of attention, if not panic, to the press people.

  Panic, as he thinks about it, is not a bad way to describe the current state of affairs. There is unquestionably a defensiveness about the brass, a reaction, justified or not, to the feeling that the police are to blame for Shelly Trotter’s murder. If that is ultimately the way this shapes up, there’s no doubt who will take the bullet. It’s unfair—Leo Koslenko got a tremendous head start on them, and they identified him within a handful of days of the onset of his murder spree—but fairness has never been an ingredient in the stew of local politics.

  They all but tied an anchor to his foot. He’s just a consultant on the case now, and when it’s over, however it ends, who knows what he’ll be doing?

  It won’t be foot patrol. That would be a level three. The union wouldn’t stand for it. No, it will be a job at a desk—a desk in the basement, something that will force him to leave. When all is said and done, maybe McDermott will muster the energy to care.

  He pops his head into the conference room and checks on Riley. Riley, he realizes, will take it harder than anyone. If this turns out the way it’s looking, he either convicted the wrong man or failed to catch an accomplice, a coconspirator. If his client, Harland Bentley, is involved, the media will have their choice of motives—Riley obstructed the investigation either to hide his own negligence sixteen years ago or to protect his client.

  But what the press, and maybe the county attorney, do to Riley will be nothing compared to what he will do to himself. This will never leave him. It will recede at times but return with violence, and without warning. It will temper every moment of happiness, color every scene.

  McDermott knows it better than anyone.

  Mommy did this, he would tell Grace, so many times he lost count. It was Mommy. Mommy was sick and wanted to go to Heaven.

  He doesn’t know exactly how it happened. He never will. He plays it out like he would revise a painful memory of his own, finding the path of least resistance: All she wanted from Grace was to get the shoe box from the closet; she was going to send Grace downstairs, so she wouldn’t have to see it happen; she was going to call her husband first, to come for Grace; maybe she wasn’t even sure she was going to use the gun. Maybe she was going to change her mind.

  The gun went off. It was an accident. She didn’t tell her daughter to pull the trigger. No, no matter how tormented her mind, she wouldn’t put that on her daughter. It was an accident.

  But he doesn’t know. He never will.

  Mommy did this. Hoping that the repetition would confirm the memory. Say it enough times and she’ll believe it. Do three-year olds even have memories? His earliest one, he was five. Sitting on a brick stoop by a fireplace, playing with toy animals and a barn. But three?

  Dr. Sutton says no. Only a very minimal chance she would retain that information. If she ever appreciated it to begin with. If it even happened that way.

  Riley is motionless in a chair, oblivious to McDermott’s presence. His eyes are bloodshot and sunken into a washed-out face. His hair is a mess. His tie has disappeared. However this might end up, McDermott has made up his mind: Riley is guilty of no crime. He could play with the facts either way, but his gut has taken him pretty far and he trusts it. Why, after all, did Riley visit Gwendolyn Lake? Why did he go see Brandon Mitchum?

  Because whether he admitted it to himself or not, he wanted to know if he missed something during the Burgos prosecution. He didn’t let it go. He pursued it. He was willing to tear down the banner achievement of his professional career to get to the truth.

  “Burgos fell into your lap,” he tells Riley. “He had motive, he had opportunity, he had evidence all over his house. He confessed. I read the transcript. Anyone in your position would have stopped right there, with the guy in front of you.”

  It’s as if Riley can’t hear him. He is smoothing his hands over the tabletop, like he’s brushing away sand from an artifact. Like he’s looking for words.

  “I need your help, Riley. Your head clear enough to help?”

  Riley says nothing. But McDermott’s got nothing to lose. Maybe catching Riley off guard, defenses down, is a good play. Maybe it will be good for him, too, focusing on the case instead of the pain.

  So he lays it out for Riley, though Riley probably knows or suspects much of it. Harland is Gwendolyn’s father—something Cassie discovered near her death. Cassie was pregnant, and had an abortion, near her death—confirmed by Cassie’s mother—and she’d been involved with Professor Albany. Cassie thought her father was sneaking around with her best friend, Elite—again, near the time of both of their deaths.

  He doesn’t need to tell Riley that this points toward both Harland Bentley and Professor Albany. But if there’s any doubt, he seals it with the note he found in Koslenko’s possession, now confirmed by Albany: Harland made a trade with Albany—keep quiet about my affair, I keep quiet about yours.

  Lots to lose. Wealthy wives, tenure-track positions. Lots to gain with the deaths of two young women.

  Riley doesn’t speak. Not a word from him yet. McDermott begins to wonder why he’s even sharing this with Riley.

  Riley pushes himself out of his chair. He walks to the corner of the room, staring off into space.

  “Harland Bentley had his daughter whacked, Paul. And Ellie, too. He used a ranch hand with a history of mental instability and violence to do the wet work. He didn’t keep his marriage together but his wife was too messed up to fight him, so she threw him a cool twenty million just to make him go away, and he took it. All told, not a bad deal for the guy.”

  Riley doesn’t move. McDermott’s just talking to himself.

  “I don’t know how Albany fits in yet. I think he helped with the other murders. He’d probably be able to get keys to the auditorium where the bodies were left. He’d probably b
e able to snatch Burgos’s keys, too, to use his Suburban to get the women, and to get into Burgos’s house. I’m sure it was his idea to use those song lyrics—I mean, Christ, who knew those song lyrics better than Albany?”

  Riley puts a hand against the wall.

  “The other murders covered up Ellie’s and Cassie’s. Made it look like a murder spree spawned by the song lyrics. And just to be sure about Cassie, they made you drop the charges on her murder. It all makes sense, Riley. It does. But that doesn’t get us any closer to finding Leo Koslenko. I think this guy’s off the reservation. Whoever was controlling him—Bentley, Albany—they’re not controlling him now.”

  McDermott takes a breath. It’s a lot to put on the guy, on top of finding his girlfriend in a hundred pieces tonight. But he doesn’t have time for diplomacy. He senses that Riley will do whatever’s necessary to catch Koslenko, and he needs that help now.

  “Riley,” he says quietly. “Everyone murdered this week—Ciancio, Evelyn Pendry, Amalia Calderone, and Shelly—every one of them had a cut between their fourth and fifth toes on their left foot. A postmortem incision. That mean anything to you?”

  Riley is completely still. His lips move silently, like he’s replaying what he just heard.

  “I have to go,” he says.

  AT A QUARTER TO MIDNIGHT, I step out of the detectives’ squad room, sleep-deprived and overloaded. The governor still has not left the police station. His press people gave out some statements earlier, but the media’s still waiting for the red meat.

  Beside me is a uniform, who is taking me home. I see the press barricaded from the police parking lot and from the front steps of the station house by wooden traffic horses, but I can hear them calling to me by name.

  “Paul, did Leo Koslenko kill Shelly?”