by David Ellis
She stares into the ground. She is choking up a bit, sniffling and clearing her throat. After a time, she removes her sunglasses and looks up at me with red, wet eyes.
“Okay,” I say. “And there was no pregnancy. No abortion. That was a natural assumption. The break-in to the Sherwood Executive Center. Everyone thinks it was to steal a pregnancy test, or abortion records, or paternity records. That’s all crap, right?”
She says nothing.
“But it’s believable,” I say. “Evelyn Pendry assumed it. The cops assumed it. Hell, I assumed it.” I take a breath. “And then I fed it to you when I came to see you at the lake.”
She’s smart enough to stay silent.
“And once I put that idea in your head,” I continue, “you took it and ran with it. You and Natalia, you got your stories straight afterward. The next day, you both came to us ‘voluntarily’ and told us how Cassie Bentley had been pregnant and had had an abortion. You wanted us to believe that. You wanted us to believe that because it made Professor Albany look guilty. That had been Natalia’s plan all along, right? If anything went south? Blame Professor Albany.”
Burn Albany.
“But that was all just a lie. Right?”
Her eyes drift off as she considers her answer.
“The truth,” I demand. “You have to convince me that I’m doing the right thing.”
She laughs with a tinge of bitterness. “ ‘The right thing.’ You think you know who killed Cassie—”
“No, that’s not going to work,” I say.
She watches me carefully, a slight tilt of her head, narrowing of the eyes. She’s getting the picture now. The walls of this impressive estate are beginning to close in.
She gets out of the chair, turning in all directions as if seeking shelter from this. Finally, she turns to me, regarding me in a different light. Newfound respect. Maybe newfound fear.
“Did you like what Koslenko pulled with Shelly?” I ask. “The chain saw? The poor girl in the bathtub?”
She looks away. Otherwise, she doesn’t respond, but she must have appreciated the irony. Old habits die hard, she must have been thinking.
It took me a while to figure it out, I admit. But I can connect a dot or two.
The murder in the bathtub—the unidentifiable mass of bones and tissue—was one.
Koslenko’s note, for another: If you behave, she will live, too.
Too. As in, also. As in, like others lived.
And Koslenko’s explanation about how Ciancio figured everything out: At the Sherwood Executive Center that night, Ciancio had given Koslenko the keys and left him to commit his burglary. Ciancio only figured it out afterward, Koslenko told me, when the police came to that building on the Burgos case.
But there was only one reason the police came to that building after the bodies were discovered.
“A couple weeks ago,” I say, “I was talking to Harland. We were chasing this red herring about the Sherwood Executive Center. I asked him if his daughter’s doctors were at that building. You know what he said?”
She freezes. She has no idea, of course, but it seems she’s interested.
“I figured he’d have no idea about his daughter’s medical care. But you know what? He did. He remembered taking her there to have a cavity filled when she was a little girl.”
Her face contorts. A fresh tear falls. Her shoulders begin a slow tremble.
“You helped out, too,” I tell her. “When you were describing Cassie’s reaction, seeing her father walk out of Ellie Danzinger’s apartment.”
In the midst of her sobbing, she nods. I imagine, in hindsight, she realized that, too.
You can’t imagine anything so revolting, so disgusting, she had said. A little too personal, too heartfelt, for a secondhand account.
“Natalia sent you off to Paris,” I say. “Wednesday of that week. I assume it’s not entirely different from how you described it—you were a mess. A basket case. You had no idea what was happening. You had no idea what was going to happen.”
“Of course I didn’t.” She looks at me. “ ‘Basket case’ is a good description. I was confused and scared and, by that point, overmedicated. I was a zombie when I got on that plane.”
I believe her. I can’t imagine otherwise. “You didn’t wonder about the passport?”
She shakes her head. “I—I probably should have—but, no.”
And so there she was, safe in France, secure in the knowledge that a French national couldn’t be extradited.
Natalia Lake, I see now, was quite masterful throughout all of this. She had Koslenko move Ellie’s body to Burgos’s house, she cut a quiet deal for mutual silence with Professor Albany, and she got lucky, very lucky, when Burgos began a weeklong murder spree.
But Natalia Lake did more than just cover up a murder. She also ordered a murder, an order that Leo Koslenko obeyed, beating the poor girl beyond recognition and planting her, like Ellie, on Burgos’s back doorstep.
And then she had my boss, the county attorney, drop the charges on that murder so no one would take too close a look.
Cassie saved me, Burgos had said. He’d thought the final murder in the first verse meant he had to kill himself. That was what the lyrics suggested—stick it right between those teeth and fire so happily—and Tyler Skye had played it out that very way when he put a gun in his own mouth. But Burgos, clearly, didn’t want to kill himself. He delayed the move for two days. Maybe he was never going to do it. But then, suddenly, God was giving him a reprieve: Terry found a badly beaten corpse outside his back door, the same place God had left Ellie Danzinger. He couldn’t reconcile this development with Tyler Skye’s citation to the Leviticus passage, so he leafed through the Bible until he found a verse relating to stoning, which was the most apt way to describe what had been done to the woman on his back porch. He crossed out the Leviticus passage on his list and wrote in the one from Deuteronomy. And then, as if to keep consistent with Leviticus and the lyrics anyway, he put a bullet through the corpse’s mouth.
Like everyone else, Burgos thought that corpse lying on his back doorstep was Cassie. Why wouldn’t he? Even with the beaten, crushed face, there was the driver’s license and credit cards in her pants pocket belonging to Cassandra Bentley.
We didn’t stop at identification found on the victim, of course. A family ID is the minimum we do. And Natalia, of course—not her husband—made that identification at the morgue.
Nor did we stop there. With a beaten face like that, and no fingerprints in a database to match, you go to the obvious next step.
You pull the dental records.
When I woke up in the hospital that Saturday after we found Shelly, I put in a call to my dentist, Dr. Morse. He explained that, in 1989, most dentists didn’t have computerized or digitalized dental records. They simply had hard copies of the X rays sticking out of a pouch with a person’s name assigned to them.
Yes, he agreed, back in 1989, if someone broke into his office in the middle of the night and switched dental records from one pouch to another—say, swapping one half sister’s records with the other‘s—nobody would be the wiser. You might have to switch some labels around, but it would be easy, and no one would know.
Fred Ciancio, working his security post at the Sherwood Executive Center the week after the bodies were discovered, must have scratched his head when he saw the police march up to the dentist’s office for the records of Cassie Bentley. Did that have anything to do with Koslenko? he probably wondered.
Then, shortly after that time, he saw a photograph in the newspaper of that same man—Koslenko—standing in the background with an eye on Harland Bentley. He put Koslenko together with the Bentley family and he was probably pretty sure of what had happened. He called the reporter covering Burgos, Carolyn Pendry, but thought twice about it and clammed up. Carolyn finally gave up on Ciancio, and the whole thing stayed quiet.
This June, something brought it all back for Ciancio. Probably it was the specia
l he saw, Pendry’s thing on television, expressing sympathy for Burgos. He managed to find Leo Koslenko and told him it was time for a second installment on the payoff. Somewhere along the line, he also called Carolyn’s daughter, Evelyn. Who knows? Maybe he was debating between coming clean and getting some extra retirement money. He must have given Evelyn some kind of a taste—mentioning the Sherwood Center, probably—but didn’t fully clue her in.
I wonder if Ciancio ever actually figured out the entire truth. Things must have looked hinky to him, but did he know exactly what had happened?
Koslenko, of course, had no intention of letting Ciancio continue breathing. He tortured him and got Evelyn’s name. He tortured Evelyn and got Brandon Mitchum’s name. Each of these people knew something that could point back to the truth.
The truth being that Cassie Bentley was never murdered. Instead, she got on a plane to Paris using Gwendolyn’s passport, while Gwendolyn suffered a brutal death before being cast off as her half sister Cassandra after the switch of the dental records.
Cassie Bentley pulls her robe tight, watching me. “What now?”
“Gwendolyn’s murder,” I say. “Your mother should have to answer for that.”
But the only way that happens, both of us realize, is if everyone learns about Cassie, living here in France under Gwendolyn’s name.
“I don’t approve of what Mother did.” Cassie brings a hand to her face. “I would have stopped her if I knew. But she did it for me, Mr. Riley. She knew the police would come straight to me after Ellie was killed. She knew I wouldn’t be able to withstand any questioning at all.” She flaps her arms. “But if I’m dead, no one looks for me.”
The same strategy Koslenko used when he put in a substitute for Shelly in her bathtub. If I behaved, he was telling me, she would live, too. Like Cassie lived.
I believe what she’s telling me. Nothing I’ve learned about Cassie Bentley makes me think she could have been part of a diabolical plot. She was kept in the house after Ellie’s death, like Koslenko told me, and then shipped off to Paris. She didn’t know they were going to fake her death. She didn’t know what was in store for Gwendolyn.
Gwendolyn, of course, was a natural choice. She didn’t have any real family or any real home; she bounced from continent to continent so she wouldn’t be missed. She looked like Cassie—they shared a father and their mothers were sisters—and her face was crushed, in any event. And Gwendolyn was probably a wild card, anyway. She couldn’t be counted on to play along in a cover-up. A wild card. She was the perfect choice. Two birds with one stoning.
“Your mother had nothing to do with Ciancio, or Evelyn Pendry, or any of the recent murders?” Koslenko already told me he acted alone, but I want to hear her answer.
She is emphatic, showing much more resolve. “Mr. Riley, she hasn’t talked to Leo in years. None of us has. After everything happened, she gave Leo enough money to live out his life, bought him a house in the city, and didn’t speak to him.”
Right. The police found a safe-deposit box for Koslenko with almost a million dollars in cash. Koslenko was off the reservation. He was acting alone. He was trying to protect the woman he loved, Cassie, from being discovered.
“Mother was in Tuscany, with friends, when Leo started killing. She had no idea until the police got hold of her in Italy. I had no idea. When you first came to see me at the lake, it was the first I’d heard of it.”
That makes sense. But then she and her mother talked, they got their stories straight, and they gave it to the cops and me the same way. They gave up Leo, they gave up Albany.
But, in the end, Cassie—as Gwendolyn—came clean, at least enough to spare Albany and Harland. She had probably figured there was nothing she could do to save Leo at that point; he was clearly responsible for the murders of Ciancio, Evelyn Pendry, and Amalia Calderone, plus the failed attempt on Brandon Mitchum. But she could save Harland and the professor. She and her mother had us pointed toward both of them, but, that last day, she marched into that parlor and gave up Cassie—herself. She explained who really killed Ellie, to her mother’s obvious surprise, and over her objection. She was trying to do the right thing while keeping her true identity out of the picture. She did the best she could. Her mother was willing to let Albany, or even Harland, take the fall, anything to protect Cassie, but Cassie, in the end, wouldn’t let that happen.
That’s why I’ve been silent on the whole thing, why I wanted to reserve judgment until I spoke to her. Cassie killed a girl, her best friend, but the circumstances are what they are. The law provides excuses—extreme emotional distress, temporary insanity—in a clumsy attempt to reconcile competing societal concerns, to strike a balance between retribution and compassion. I don’t know what a judge would make of this. What a jury would decide. I have seen it better than anyone, the imperfect application of the law to the facts.
I didn’t stop for a single moment to consider whether Terry Burgos was insane. I went to work immediately to dispel that notion, lining up evidence to beat his defense, telling myself that he had a lawyer, that there was a jury, that the system provided safeguards to ensure that the truth came out.
But I was a prosecutor. My job was about more than winning. Yet in every piece of evidence demonstrating Burgos’s psychosis—and there was plenty of it—I saw only an obstacle to victory, a land mine to sidestep, something I had to discredit. I didn’t care whether I was right. I didn’t even ask the question.
Maybe, I will tell myself, what Burgos did was inevitable, that he had a short fuse that something, somehow, was going to light. If it wasn’t Ellie’s dead body setting him off, it would have been something else. Anyone provoked that easily was probably going to do it, anyway. Surely, I will remind myself, he should not be given a pass. He was a danger to society. He did kill four young women. It will be a debate I’ll play out the rest of my days.
“Do whatever you’re going to do,” Cassie says softly, her eyes shining once more with tears. “I won’t fight it. I‘m—I’m so tired of running.”
A prosecutor is given infinite discretion. He can decline to prosecute for any reason whatsoever. I am no longer a prosecutor, but the Mansbury murders were mine, and what happens to Cassie Bentley is entirely up to me, whether I like it or not.
“Good-bye, Gwendolyn Lake.” I leave Cassie standing motionless, staring out over the horizon, wondering if she’ll ever stop running.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As always, I have relied on the talents and insights of others in helping create and shape this novel.
Bill Kunkle, a former colleague and the lead prosecutor in the matter of People v. John Wayne Gacy, was very generous in sharing his experiences and opinions on the prosecution of a schizophrenic serial killer. I wish I had a fraction of your war stories, Bill.
Dr. Ronald Wright, a forensic pathologist in Florida, again was liberal with his time and patience in answering technical questions and in helping make the discussion of dead people more interesting than I ever would have suspected.
My old law school classmate Matt Phillips was kind enough to lend me the brilliant mind of his wife, Dr. Wendy Phillips, who gave me an overview and some needed details on the subject of paranoid schizophrenia.
Jeff Gerecke gave me excellent direction and advice, as he has done for many years, and I am forever in his debt.
I rounded up two of the usual suspects to read the manuscript and offer anything that came to mind. Jim Jann, urban poet and leader of men, always manages to see things that I cannot and clues me in. Jim Minton, from minor details to plot flow to the big picture, always makes my books better. To this group I added Mike McDermott, who let me use his good name (literally) and whose comments on an early draft are greatly appreciated.
J. A. Konrath, who knows a few things about writing of serial killers and who has given me so much advice in my literary career, provided critical commentary, some advice, and a good jolt of encouragement, too. I owe him one—thousand.
Dan Collins, a federal prosecutor and a friend for life, was always there to answer my annoying questions about law enforcement. Or maybe that’s just because I sprang for drinks.
Larry Kirshbaum, my agent, teaches me something every time he opens his mouth. His enthusiasm is infectious and his wisdom limitless.
It’s not easy being my editor. But Brendan Duffy has been outstanding from start to finish in guiding this novel in matters big and small. This book wouldn’t be the same without him. I’m lucky to have such a talented partner in crime.
And finally, my wife, Susan, who listens to my endless jibber ing about my novels and who keeps me balanced and sane and deliriously happy. You still make my heart go pitter-pat.
