Eye of the Beholder (14 page)

“I didn’t ask you if you liked it.” Mullaney turned back to him. “I asked you if you were going to be a team player on this.”

Paul felt the room shrink. He was new to a political office, but he wasn’t stupid. The coach was telling him that he could change quarterbacks anytime. The play had already been called, to move the analogy. It was just a question of who would take the snap.

“I appointed you as my top deputy, over a number of deserving people already in this office,” Mullaney said, carefully, “because you’re the best trial lawyer in the city. And I want the best trial lawyer in the city prosecuting this animal.”

Riley didn’t answer. He was being snowed. Riley had been brought in precisely
because
he was an outsider—a federal prosecutor, above the tarnish of local politics. There had been a scandal that had exploded only a few months ago, a few county prosecutors found to be on the take, in concert with some dirty defense lawyers and cops—and Mullaney had brought in a consummate outsider to show his commitment to an overhaul. It was political cover, and it was insulting for Mullaney to pretend otherwise.

“I’m going to need an answer right now,” Mullaney said.

Riley cleared his throat, his eyes moving from the floor to the county attorney, who stood at the window.

“Grow up, Paul,” he said earnestly. “You said yourself, this is good trial strategy. If a victim declined to press charges, we’d drop a case, right? This is basically the same thing, except the victim can’t ask. Her family can. They don’t want her bloodied any more. Don’t let your imagination—or your pride—get in the way here.”

Riley got to his feet, stuffed his hands in his pockets, chewed on his lip. He couldn’t believe he was being threatened. And he knew what Ed Mullaney was thinking—this was the biggest case a prosecutor could hope for. And it had fallen into Paul Riley’s lap.

Riley looked beyond Mullaney, through the window and onto the plaza. It was a warm, sunny day. Riley pictured himself leaving this office, crossing the plaza to the federal building, knocking on the door and asking for his old job back.

Mullaney was next to him now, a look of compromise on his face.

Riley knew, suddenly, that his days at the county attorney’s office were numbered. Yet Riley wanted this case. He wanted to put away this monster. He didn’t believe, in any way, that Terry Burgos deserved to beat these charges. He had used rational thought all along the way as he butchered those women. He hadn’t come close to meeting the legal definition of insanity.

And regardless of how new Riley was to the job, Burgos had killed these women on his watch.

Riley did the math. It would probably take six to nine months before this case was over. He would convict Terry Burgos, and then he would resign.

“From here on out,” Riley said, “I make the calls.”

“All of them.” The county attorney put a hand on Riley’s shoulder. “Now, go convict us a mass murderer.”

W
AIT, SHELLY. Just wait,” I say, then open my eyes. A brief moment of panic, disorientation, then I lift my head and see the street. Dillard Street, I assume, where I last remember escorting the young lady who called herself Molly. I look for my watch and find only the impression of one, like a tan line, on the skin of my wrist. I make the mistake of touching the back of my head, moist and raw. I manage to get to my feet on shaky legs and instinctively wipe at my suit, damp from lying on rain-soaked trash. I could make a decent salad out of what I brush off my tuxedo.

I’m in an alley that intersects Dillard, where a pair of garbage bags just served as my bed for the last hour or so. I’m still in my clothes, at least, but that’s about all I can brag about. No money, no keys. Still have my wallet and credit cards and license, only the cash missing. They probably figured they wouldn’t have time to spend the limit before I canceled them tonight—
they
being the woman, “Molly,” and whoever hit me with the sledgehammer, which is how I choose to remember it.

My head is ringing but I’ll live. I take a deep breath and catch the odor of city garbage on my clothes.

Oldest damn trick in the book. Jesus, how easy could I make it? I let this lady walk me into an alley, middle-aged and sauced off my rocker. The guy could have been wearing clown shoes and I wouldn’t have heard him. A child of ten could have taken me.

At least I have an
I was mugged in the city
story.

The good news is, I’m only two miles from home. I don’t ordinarily consider it unsafe to walk these streets, and I’m figuring the odds of being jumped twice in one night makes me more or less immune from attack. Not that I have any choice. No cash.

So I walk, hoping that it will sober me up and clear my head, but it’s more like gravity is trying to pull me down with each step I take. A concussion, or a hangover, or both. The cool air helps fight the nausea, but I’m swimming against the current. I try to celebrate with each street sign I pass, that much closer to home, when what I’m really doing is trying to ignore the pain and my gullibility and my bruised ego, and the fact that I was dreaming about my ex-girlfriend when I came to.

I own a brick house on a corner, a single-family place I bought six months ago. Way too big for just me—
a home
for
a
family, Shelly had noted ominously—but I liked the look of it, and I suppose it didn’t hurt that the place had been owned by a U.S. senator at the turn of the century—twentieth, not twenty-first.

Before moving here, I had lived in a high-rise condominium, downtown by the lake, a place that was close to work and very low maintenance but that never really felt like a home. I didn’t like having a doorman who could register my comings and goings, not that there was anything particularly interesting about my life. It just didn’t feel private.

So now I have privacy and then some. Forty-five hundred square feet all to myself. I’m now locked out of my house, but, in a rare moment of invention, I hid a spare key when I first moved in. I was terrified of losing my keys, though I didn’t anticipate losing them this way.

I head to the alley by my garage where I taped the spare key underneath the rain gutter. I open the gate and walk into my backyard, which is small by suburban standards but pretty ample for the city. The border is covered in shrubbery that manages to grow all by itself, thankfully, because I don’t have a clue about that stuff. On the back of the garage is a basketball net, with a small paved area serving as a minicourt. Then there’s a small kids’ play area—swing set, jungle gym—which I think was what spooked Shelly. I might as well have proposed marriage on the spot.

Not the right time,
had been her way of putting it.

A few steps lead down to the basement door. Only then do I realize that I never checked my spare key against this lock. Never checked to see that it worked. I’ve never, in fact, opened this door since I moved in last January. I’m hoping pretty damn hard that it’s the right key, because if it isn‘t, it really doesn’t do me much good, now does it? There are ways to pick a lock, but I have no experience. The only robbery I’ve ever committed is when I send my clients their bills.

I turn the key and say a silent prayer. Nope. No, Mrs. Riley, your son is as scatterbrained as always. He can try the hell out of a case, but don’t give him any menial chores. “God,” I say, “dammit.”

I decide that this door is going to be sorry it kept me out. I go with a rock from the garden. There is probably a safer and more efficient way to do this, but my head is screaming for a pillow, so I wind up like the mediocre baseball player I used to be and slam it against the small pane of glass closest to the lock.

“Dammit,” I yell. “Shit.” I hold up the side of beef that is my right hand, shards of glass cutting between the knuckles, blood cascading down to the sleeve.

Nice night.

I reach through and turn the dead bolt. I try to focus on the relief at being home, rather than yet another chore I have now created for myself, a new pane of glass for the door. They sell you on how well the old places are built. That’s fine if you want to survive a hurricane, but get ready to fix toilets and reignite the water heater and find the circuit breaker in the middle of the night. I didn’t go to law school to be a carpenter. I went so I could afford one.

The basement is huge. Soon to be a recreation area—billiard table, dartboard, wet bar, and, of course, a big-screen plasma television—if I ever get to it, which should be sometime before there’s peace in the Middle East. There are over a dozen boxes I haven’t gotten to. The only thing I have set up in the basement is what I affectionately call the Wall of Burgos. It looks like a trophy case in a high school, except instead of banners and medals there are weapons and scratched notes and barbaric photographs and courtroom sketches.

The city magazine that did a story two months back on my purchase of this house spent more time on the Burgos stuff than on the rest of the house put together. The story was supposed to be a fluff piece about someone buying the old Senator Roche home, but instead it was about the guy who prosecuted Terry Burgos.

After Burgos was executed, those of us who put him away divvied up the items. There were all kinds of photographs and memorabilia in the evidence room, and we ransacked it like looters after the Rodney King verdict. Over a dozen members of the team have at least one item from evidence. I think some of them are on eBay now.

I was the luckiest, probably because I was considered unofficially the head of the Burgos team. I have the original note Burgos wrote, with the lyrics of that stupid song that he used as a blueprint for his murders. There are two photographs of him being led in, and out, of the courtroom during the trial. An article, featuring a photo of me, from
Time
magazine. A photograph of the bathtub where Burgos drowned Maureen Hollis. A transcript of the interrogation where Burgos incriminated himself to Detective Joel Lightner. And, front and center in the montage, two of the weapons in Terry Burgos’s arsenal: First, the knife that Burgos used to remove the heart of Ellie Danzinger and to slice Angie Mornakowski’s throat—an ordinary kitchen knife with a five-inch blade. Second, the machete that Burgos never got around to using. My personal favorite. A heavy-duty, twenty-six-inch, high-carbon spring steel machete.

I blow out a long sigh. That was a real time. Chasing bad guys, putting together links in a chain to prove the case, grabbing beers with the coppers after. Now I’m wealthy beyond my wildest hopes, I have a governor itching to make me a federal judge, and here I’m pining for the past. You spend so much time looking to move up, you forget how much you enjoyed the climb.

I rip a piece of cardboard from one of the unpacked boxes, find some packing tape, and do my best job patching up the hole in the basement door. It doesn’t fix the problem but it provides some temporary relief. Now I need the same thing for the pain in my head and my hand. I decide on a particular medicine, one that is served in a conical glass, I don’t care if it’s past three in the morning, and head upstairs.

L
EO SITS in the coffee shop, back to the wall—never show them your back—eyes on the store window and the door. He pretends to read the paper but looks over it down the street. His eyes feel heavy. His movements are slow. It was a late night—more accurately, an early morning—with Riley and the one in the alley.

He watches each person who enters the café. None of them pay him attention. But that’s exactly what they’d want him to think. They’d want his guard down.

They underestimate him. He knows they could be anywhere, they could be anyone.

He touches his stomach gently, begging the acid to stay away, knowing that the more he obsesses, the more likely, and ferocious, its arrival.

A young, thin, blond-haired woman in a tank top, with sunglasses perched on her head, pushing a baby in a carriage and holding a bottle of green tea, takes a lounge chair three feet away from him. She pretends to tend to the baby but her head turns and she looks in his direction, casually, oh so casually, like it’s not on purpose.

Talk to the lady. Test her.

He tries. He doesn’t do so well with words. Doesn’t say them right.
I like your baby,
is what he wants to say.

The woman turns and smiles at him “Thank you.” Looks at him like she feels sorry for him. “This one kept me up all night.”

He tries to smile. Long night.

At night, I think about dark things.

Try again:
How old is she?
He does okay with that.

The woman answers—“She’s ten months”—and Leo breaks eye contact, but he can see her reaction, she picks up her child and holds her close.

Leo winces at the stabbing in his stomach. The woman gets up quickly and walks toward the counter. He looks out the window just in time to see Paul Riley’s car in the alley, his car backing out into the alley, behind his house.

The woman is looking in his direction, he pretends not to notice, but he’s smarter than her. He can watch her without letting her know he’s watching her.

I know you’re staring at me, you little bitch. I could rip your eyes out without breaking a sweat.

Leo puts on his baseball cap and leaves the café. He looks back. The woman is staring at him through the window, caressing the baby’s head. Bad baby. Fake baby.

Leo jogs to his car. He drives miles away and then turns back toward Riley’s street, entering from a different direction. He keeps north of Riley’s house for a long while, parked by a curb, watching the rearview and driver‘s-side mirrors. Nothing. No vehicle traffic. Nothing. Nobody.

He drives to the next block over and parks. This street is like Riley‘s, expensive houses, high gates and small, elaborate landscapes, fancy lawns, perfect houses, perfect people, shiny and happy. He removes his gym bag from the trunk and walks to the corner, turning in the direction of Riley’s street, stops midblock and turns down the alley.