Eye of the Beholder

by David Ellis

  THE EAST-SIDE DOOR has only an internal push bar. Nothing on the outside but a flat, rusted door. I couldn’t open it with a cannon.

  I walk on uneven, sloping ground to the rear of the building and freeze as I turn the corner.

  There is a single car, a Toyota Camry, in the back lot.

  I sprint with everything I have left, stifling emotions, toward the only door, at the top of a small ramp. I grab the handle, try again, with a prayer, and open it. I’m inside.

  My eyes adjust to the dimness and sweep a spacious room, a storage area, large refrigerators and floor-to-ceiling shelving filled with boxes. I run through the room into a large kitchen, sinks and stoves and more refrigerators. To my left are a staircase and an elevator.

  I rush up the dark staircase and push open the door into light on the ground level. A large, ceremonial room, draped in red and gold, with antique furniture, with sunlight filtering in through large windows. My heart skips a beat. I know this room. The reception area, the anteroom to the auditorium. Forgetting my role as the cool authority figure, I run through another door and I’m in familiar territory, next to the large stage and podium in Bramhall Auditorium, natural light pouring into the theater. I sprint through the aisle, passing the very chairs where Detective Joel Lightner and Chief Harry Clark sat with me, recounting the grisly details of six slaughtered women. I reach the foyer and look to my left, at the door that leads to the basement, to the janitor’s supply room.

  I reach the door, which I know for a fact is a dead bolt that would ordinarily be locked, and quietly open it.

  He’s expecting me.

  52

  LEO OPENS the last door in the basement. He passes the chain-link lockers on the short wall and the shelving units, heads to the large storage lockers on the far wall. He stops a moment and listens. He hears nothing. He opens the middle locker and looks down.

  Shelly Trotter does not look up at him, but her bleary eyes show some trace of recognition. She has received two heavy doses of gamma hydroxybutyrate—GHB—enough to keep her in a thick fog since yesterday morning, when he first subdued her in the shower. Her wrists and ankles are handcuffed, with another set of cuffs linked to the wrist and ankle cuffs, contorting her body into a forced, rounded triangle and allowing her to fit, just barely, into this oversized locker that normally holds a snowblower, shovels, and the like. A locker that now holds only two things: Paul Riley’s love, and a Barteaux heavy-duty, twenty-six-inch, high-carbon spring steel machete.

  A painful body position, he knows, one they used occasionally in the Soviet Union to coerce the unwilling, to break the spirit through elongated periods of discomfort. But her pain is irrelevant to him. He had to leave her for extended periods and had to be sure she couldn’t move. She has, in essence, been in a forced coma since he took her from her apartment.

  Shelly Trotter, Shelly Trotter.

  He can see, now, that she would not have been able to act, notwithstanding the handcuffs. The GHB has worked well. Her head bobs, she groans but is unable to speak. The sweatpants he dressed her in are soiled from her bodily functions, the pungent odor fighting the antiseptic smell of the cleaning materials. Her curly hair is flat against her head. Her lips move but she doesn’t speak, a line of saliva falling from the corner of her mouth.

  He unlocks the third set of cuffs, the ones that link the restraints on her wrists and ankles. Her body reacts, straightening out as best it can in the confined quarters. He slides her out of the locker. He will not remove the cuffs on her wrists and ankles. He debates, for a moment, whether he should give her a third dose of the paralyzing drug but decides against it.

  He hears a noise, a faint echo in the hallway, the pitter-patter of footsteps on stairs. He stands quickly and freezes, controls his breathing, listening. He hears the creak of a door opening—the door at the end of the hallway.

  He removes his gun and waits.

  I FORCE MYSELF to a walk, a spirited but controlled gait, toward the last door in the hallway, the janitor’s room, where the bodies were found. I pass the other storage rooms, knowing he might be in any of them, waiting to ambush me. But I have to assume Shelly is in the janitor’s room. Any room, this time of year, with the school on vacation, would suit his purposes, but he’s been smart. He tried to mimic the lyrics of the song to make the recent murders look like a copycat. He wanted to frame Albany all along, and it was the professor, after all, who knew these lyrics better than anyone. He’d want everything to be the same.

  I reach the final door quickly, realizing I have no plan and no time to formulate one. I turn the door’s lever and push it open, praying that I won’t be greeted with a rain of gunfire.

  But he’s had plenty of chances to kill me.

  I step into the room and a groan escapes my throat. Koslenko is squatting along the back wall against a locker, his gun trained against Shelly’s head. Shelly is barely conscious, her skin deathly pale, wearing a T-shirt covered with grime and badly stained gray sweats. My knees weaken but I manage to maintain my focus, forcing out the images of what she has gone through.

  This is the chance I prayed for. And it’s only one chance. There is no rehearsal.

  I force it to the surface, compel the corners of my mouth upward, expel a noise from my chest that sounds something like a chuckle.

  “Okay, okay,” I say. “We have work to do, Leo. Work to do. You and me.”

  Koslenko looks different. His hair has been shaved to give the impression of a heavily receded hairline, and the coloring is different, too—dirty blond. The glasses, too, but they don’t conceal those eyes, or the half-moon scar beneath. Next to him is a cane.

  Smart disguise. The balding forehead especially. When combined with a limp and a cane, he puts at least ten years on himself.

  It’s a good reminder for me. He might be insane, but he’s not stupid.

  I look at Shelly, watch the movement of her body, the rise and fall of her chest. She’s alive. How close to dead, I don’t know.

  But I can’t think about that. I can’t show the emotion that almost brings me to my knees, that makes me want to beg him to trade my life for hers. I would make that trade, I realize, in an instant. But Leo Koslenko cannot work with weakness or pleading.

  Koslenko looks at me with a quizzical expression. “How—how?”

  “How—did I know to come here? You know how, Leo.”

  I’m keeping it vague, afraid that something too specific will pin me down. The problem is, I don’t know the depths of his psychosis. I don’t know if he hears voices. Does he see a tree and think it’s a spy dressed in bark?

  Crazy, not dumb. But how crazy?

  Regardless, right now he’s suspicious of me. I wait him out, like the answer’s obvious. Koslenko struggles with it.

  “Natalia told me, Leo. What do you think?”

  “Missus—Missus—Bentley? Missus—” Koslenko looks down, but not at Shelly. He is struggling with something internally. “Does she—like?”

  Does she like?

  “Not—ma—mad?” he asks.

  Okay. That tells me something. He’s wondering if Natalia approves of what he’s done this week. He’s telling me that everything he’s done this week, he did alone—not at Natalia’s direction. “Mrs. Bentley,” he called her. Yes. That hasn’t been her name for years. But it was her name back when Cassie was murdered.

  He hasn’t talked to Natalia this week. And that gives me some room.

  “No, Leo, she’s not mad. You were just protecting Cassie.”

  He looks up at me. He doesn’t say anything, but the look on his face reads pure anguish. This man, who has killed several people this week—and maybe some sixteen years ago—looks like he’s about to cry.

  “Nobody knows Cassie killed Ellie Danzinger,” I say. “And I’m going to make sure it stays that way.”

  Koslenko’s eyes cast downward. He looks like a kid who just found out his puppy died.

  “So—scared,” he says. “So scared, so—�
��

  CASSIE, so scared, trembling, crying at the kitchen table, taking Leo’s hand, I think I killed her—I think I killed Ellie, she says. It will be all right, he tells her. Mother, Mother, I have to call Mother. She comes, Mrs. Bentley, Natalia, they go upstairs, Leo stays at the kitchen table, looks out the window into the darkness, he likes the darkness better, he decides it will be all right, okay, everything will be okay. He volunteers, Nat accepts. See if Ellie’s dead, check on Ellie, see if she’s dead. If she isn‘t—if she isn’t—make her dead.

  An address. He knows the name: Terry Burgos. He knows it because of the thing in court, bothering Ellie, following Ellie, they’ll find the body at Terry’s house, he’ll be the obvious suspect, Cassie will be safe.

  Easy, so easy. He double-parks the car. The door is closed but unlocked. Ellie is lying on the bed, faceup, her eyes staring at the ceiling, her body cold and rigid. He carries her to the front door, looks out, no one there, into the car, drive to Terry’s house, same thing, dark, no one awake, carries the body to the back door of Terry’s house and runs back to the car.

  Watch, she’s told him. Watch.

  He moves the car, doubles back on foot. Doesn’t expect it the first night, but it happens, that night, near midnight, afigure, Terry, it’s Terry, Terry carrying a body in his backyard, between the house and the detached garage. Terry enters through the garage’s side door, then runs back to the house, comes back with blankets, a long bag.

  Five minutes. Ten. Twenty. Forty. An hour.

  Then the garage door opens, the Chevy truck backs out of the garage and leaves. He doesn’t know why, he doesn’t know what, he doesn’t know how. He doesn’t know where.

  What is it? What has happened here? This man, Terry Burgos—what has he done with Ellie’s body? Leo had anticipated many outcomes but not this.

  He reports to Natalia. He doesn’t know where Terry took her. Natalia is silent. She is thinking. She tells Leo nothing. He senses it then. He understands. Suddenly—of course—he understands. How did he not see this immediately?

  Terry Burgos is one of us. He has disposed of the body.

  I TAKE TWO steps forward, carefully transferring my weight, as Koslenko comes out of his fog. The revelations—no matter how garbled and rambling—are not lost on me. Cassie killed Ellie after seeing her father come out of Ellie’s apartment. A single blow to the head, on Ellie’s bed, where she proceeded to bleed out. But Cassie had already fled, not to her own home but to the one on the other side of Highland Woods—a house that was largely empty these days, with Mia Lake’s death and Gwendolyn Lake’s globe-trotting. Cassie told her friend, Leo Koslenko, what had happened, and then told her mother, Natalia.

  Natalia sprang into action. She dispatched Leo to remove Ellie’s body and dump it at Terry Burgos’s back door. It was a brilliant move. Burgos stalking Ellie was already a matter of public record. There was the restraining order, as well as Burgos’s own history of mental instability. He was the perfect patsy.

  And when Burgos disposed of Elite—when he brought her to this very room in which we are standing—Koslenko took it as a sign that Burgos was working on his side—that Burgos was one of us.

  Us. A team of spies. A team that included, at a minimum, Natalia Lake Bentley, Terry Burgos, Leo Koslenko, and me.

  Ellie was a gift from God, Burgos had said. He’d meant it literally. God had placed this girl on the back porch of his house, dead from a blow to the head. God was telling him to begin the course of action Tyler Skye had spelled out. God had given him the woman he coveted, as the first of six victims. So he ripped out Ellie’s heart, in accordance with the song, and moved the body to Bramhall Auditorium.

  I consider how quickly I could remove the knife from my jacket and use it, if necessary. But I know that isn’t the play here. I take another step toward Koslenko and Shelly and watch his reaction. His eyes are focused somewhere on the floor. He is reliving what happened sixteen years ago.

  With his left hand, he wipes a stray bang off Shelly’s face. His gun is pushed into her ear, his finger on the trigger. I can’t tell how aware he is, but I can’t risk it. He’s shown his physical abilities to me before. If I rushed him, Shelly would be dead before I reached him.

  And there’s a better way. We are comrades, he and I. It may have taken me a while, in his eyes, to come aboard again—including, ultimately, using Shelly as leverage—but here I am.

  “You’ve done your part, Leo,” I say. “It’s time for me again. Just like before.”

  I take another step toward him. With a little momentum, I could lunge forward and reach him. He watches my feet, then looks up at me.

  “Burn Albany,” I say. “I’ll do it. There’s nothing more you can do.”

  His eyes pinball about. He is lost again in his thoughts. But the gun is still planted in Shelly’s ear. I can’t risk it.

  “You and Terry are heroes,” I say.

  “Te—Terry. Hero—heroes.”

  KEEP WATCHING, Natalia tells him. Keep watching Terry. Tell me what he does.

  Leo obeys, he knows how to watch, knows how to follow, he likes it, another mission. Terry stays in the house all day Monday. Leaves in the Chevy Suburban at a quarter to six in the evening. Drives to a place called Albany Printing a few miles from the Mansbury campus. All the other cars are leaving, he’s working alone, stays there until nine o‘clock, then he pulls out of the parking lot, but he doesn’t go home, no, not home, he goes to the city instead. Leo follows. The Suburban cruises around the city’s west side, driving in a loop. Leo needs to be careful he won’t be noticed.

  But nobody notices Leo.

  The Suburban pulls over to the curb, and a woman, a prostitute, walks up to his car, talks like she knows him, she gets in, he drives off, they go back to his house.

  Same thing around midnight, same thing as last night with Ellie, Terry carrying a body out the back door and into the side door of the garage. Garage door opens, the Suburban backs out. This time, Leo is ready. He follows. The drive is short, not ten minutes, five-six-seven-eight minutes. Terry parks his car in front of some kind of theater, big building, fancy building. Leo stops his car a block away. Terry pops the trunk of the Suburban and removes the woman’s body, wrapped in a bag, rushes up the stairs with her in his arms, uses a key to unlock the tall door. He comes out twenty minutes later. Leo waits for him to leave in his Suburban. This time, he will know everything. He pulls up where Terry pulled up. The front of the building says BRAMHALL AUDITORIUM. He gets by the lock on the tall front door, he’s inside, follows the dirty footsteps to another door, gets through that door, too, follow the footsteps, follow the footsteps.

  Follow the footsteps, they are both there, in the final room down the long hallway, Ellie and the new girl, both naked, Ellie’s chest carved out, bloody gash, huge open wound, no heart, other girl’s throat is slit, all the way across, torn open. He uses his switchblade to mark them, just like they marked their kills in the Soviet Union, where nobody would see it unless they were looking, a slice between the fourth and fifth toes, a sign that the kill was state authorized, authorized by the state, wrap it up, no questions asked, no questions answered, no answers questioned.

  He tells Natalia. She is relieved. She is happy! A job well done, she says. His chest warms with her approval. He has done well. The operation is succeeding.

  She sends him back to watch Terry. It happens again, the next night, Tuesday, a different part of the city, but otherwise like clockwork, out of work at nine, pick up the girl, take her back to the house, then, later, carry her to the garage, drive her to Bramhall Auditorium, and leave her in the basement.

  Next day, Wednesday, he stops at the house, reports to Natalia, he sees Cassie through the crack of the door to the bedroom, oh, poor Cassie, torment washed across her face, no sleep, dried tears on her beautiful face, Natalia watching her carefully, She mustn’t leave the house, don’t let her leave, we have to protect her, go Leo, go, go watch Terry, see if he does it again
tonight—

  Hey, you. Hey! You!

  He turns as he’s leaving the house, after reporting to Nat, after seeing Cassie but not speaking to her, Gwendolyn—

  Gwendolyn Lake, the cousin, her house, but she’s never here, always overseas, but she’s here, she’s been here now over a week, the drinking and drugs, Ellie and a boy named Brandon and Gwendolyn and sometimes Cassie, and, here she is, Gwendolyn, expensive clothes and hair done up fancy, getting out of her Porsche, hiking her handbag over her shoulder, she has looks like Cassie but not gentle, not sweet, harsh, crushing a cigarette with her shoe and looking at him, she never looks at him, but she’s looking at him—

  Leo, right? You have any idea what the fuck is going on? In my house? What the hell is wrong with Cassie?

  He doesn’t answer, he rarely speaks, not out loud, he doesn’t talk so well, he shrugs his shoulders and keeps moving—

  Don’t they have a fucking house of their own across town?

  KOSLENKO LOOKS in my eyes. I nod, as if I knew everything he just said. Terry Burgos provided the ultimate cover for Natalia’s plot to cover up Cassie’s murder of Elite—he went on a murderous rampage and killed four prostitutes. Nobody would suspect that Ellie had been murdered by someone else, given what Burgos had done.

  Maybe we would have looked at the final murder differently, if given the chance. But Natalia asked the county attorney to drop that murder from the case and the county attorney was more than willing to accommodate his heaviest financial contributor.

  And I let him do it. It’s something I will have to live with. But, for the moment, I need to use it to my advantage. Koslenko thought I did it because we were working together. He thought I was part of the cover-up.

  “Under—stand? Underst—stand?”

  I force a soft smile on my face. Understand. He wants me to know the full story because he knows I’m taking over for him.