Eye of the Beholder (19 page)

I walk into the living room, which is undisturbed. The fun, I assume, will begin in the bedroom, the other half of the condo. I feel an adrenaline spike. This is what I used to do. Chasing bad guys. Solving puzzles.

As I get closer to the archway between the living room and bedroom, I feel my body slow, a defense mechanism. I look down and a noise escapes my throat. It doesn’t matter that I knew it was going to be Evelyn Pendry. I can’t stifle the shock upon seeing this happen to the person who hounded me yesterday with questions.

She is lying on the carpet, naked to her underwear, her arms and legs spread, her head rolled to the right. Her left temple wears an ugly, bloody gash, what looks like a deep wound. Her mouth is open. The color of her skin has already begun the death fade. She looks like she was in midsentence, as if something had just occurred to her, something important, or like she hadn’t completed what she’d set out to do.

The bright lights in the room seem garish under the circumstances, plunging this murdered woman into a spotlight at the point in time where she most deserves privacy. I want to cover her in a blanket and close her eyelids. I watch her vacant eyes, waiting for her to blink.

I walk within a few feet of her and bend over. The foul smell coming from the young girl’s body is urine and feces; her sympathetic nervous system had broken down as she’d fought the killer. Or fought the pain.

The wound to her head aside, Evelyn Pendry’s body has been ravaged with knife cuts. Some are superficial, others deeper. There is blood from each wound, which means they happened before her heart had stopped circulating blood.

She was tortured before he killed her, before he put one through her brain.

I look back at the detective and see that Carolyn isn’t in the room with us. I’m glad for that, though she’s obviously already seen this.

“He enjoyed himself first,” I say, taking another look, bending down. There is no blood that I can see splattered around. “He held her down right here and went to work on her.”

I look at the detectives, neither of whom seems impressed so far. I don’t know what they expect from me. I still am not entirely sure why I’m here.

“How’d he get in?” I ask.

Nobody answers at first. I don’t expect them to like me, but I don’t really care.

“How’d he get in?” I repeat.

McDermott shrugs. “No forced entry. Either he picked the lock or she let him in.”

“Was there sexual trauma?” My eyes avoid Carolyn, who is in the room with us now.

McDermott shakes his head no. “He just wanted to hurt this girl.”

I stand up and look at the detective. “You don’t think she let this guy in,” I say.

He doesn’t respond to that.

“The bathroom,” he says. “Tread lightly.”

I turn and walk carefully into the bathroom. The light is already on. I look first with my eyes down on the floor. Then I catch it in my peripheral vision. I look up at the mirror and see my reflection, with ghoulish words written on the glass in red lipstick:

I step back, almost losing balance. I look at the cops, who seem to be making something out of my reaction.

“That mean something to you?” Stoletti asks.

I let it happen, let it rip through me, grip my insides and twist them in knots.

“You okay?” McDermott asks me.

I walk past them and again look at Evelyn, squat down carefully to examine the wound to her head. A young one. Never got her age, but she had so much ahead of her. Smart and ambitious. I recall what I said to her the last time we talked, my dismissive brush-off. There’s always that regret if you left on a bad note, said something negative, like I did. But there is more than one reason now that I wish I had listened to her.

“Switchblade, right?” I look at them. “That’s what he used here?”

“Right,” McDermott says, as Stoletti asks, “How did you know that?”

“This wasn’t the first victim, though.”

Nobody answers, at least not verbally. Their expressions are enough. The detectives look at each other.

“She’s the second victim,” I say. “There was a first.
Right?”

“Right.” McDermott nods. “What was the weapon there?”

“An ice pick,” I say.

His look tells me I’m right. “What the fuck,” he mumbles.

Carolyn parts the detectives. “Is this another song, Paul?”

I stand up and look back at the bathroom. My heart rattles against my chest.

“Same song,” I answer. “Second verse.”

First Assistant County Attorney Paul Riley placed the tape in the cassette and hit PLAY, reading along with the lyrics, which had been printed on poster board and left in one of the designated war rooms for the Burgos case. Tyler Skye, the lead singer of Torcher, screamed, over angry guitar chords, what he called the second verse of the song “Someone”:

Both the guitar and percussion kicked up after this introduction, as Tyler Skye’s voice erupted, spitting out a litany of violent lyrics faster than the human ear could follow:

The second verse ended in suicide, just like the first verse—the
Mickey Mouse
lyrics.
Ditchin’ life ... no more itch and no more strife.
No more of that because he killed himself. It only bolstered the interpretation of the final murder in the first verse—
stick
it right
between those teeth and fire
so
happily
—suicide. But Burgos hadn’t killed himself. He’d taken Cassie instead, and presumably was getting ready to move on to the second verse when he was apprehended. They had found all of the weapons described in the second verse—the ice pick, straight razor, chain saw, machete, and kitchen knife—in Burgos’s basement. All of them seemingly pristine, unused. Not a trace of blood or anything else found on any of them.

They had caught him before he could get to the second verse.

Joel Lightner walked in while Riley sat against a long table, staring at the lyrics on the board and listening to the music. Lightner raised his eyebrows to indicate his opinion of the lyrics. They were not different, in any meaningful way, from the first verse. They listened, together, to the refrain, which was a slight variation on the refrain following the first verse:

The music, already loud and vicious, exploded with a heavy percussion line, guitars blaring, as Tyler Skye completed his final rhyme, screaming it ferociously:

Riley killed the cassette player. They didn’t speak for a long time.
I’m not the only one,
probably the most horrific of all the lyrics. This music was out there, for any deranged person to buy into, to act upon.

“We’re absolutely positive there’s not a second burial site,” Riley said.

Lightner made an equivocal grunt. They’d used the county dogs and covered the entire Mansbury campus. They’d searched every inch of Terry Burgos’s house, excavating his garage and basement, digging up his yard. They’d looked everywhere and come up empty. “There’s no reason to think so,” Lightner said. “The murder weapons were totally clean. The machete was still in its wrapping. And I think ol’ Terry would tell us if there was another site. He’s not exactly shy about this.”

That much was true. Burgos had not been shy with the psychiatrists, who had begun to examine him after Burgos pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity two weeks earlier. He’d gone into great detail, not on how he committed the murders but why. He’d recounted the biblical verses and Tyler Skye’s lyrics, and the sins committed by the victims that made them worthy of his wrath.

“So,” Lightner said, “we’re officially down to five kills now.”

Last Friday, August 11, Riley informed the court that the prosecution was dropping the charges on the murder of Cassandra Bentley. Within about five seconds of the words leaving his mouth, simultaneous press releases came from the offices of the county attorney and the Bentley family. It was the Bentleys’ express wish that their daughter not be subjected to the cruel innuendo that would accompany this insanity defense, their accusations of promiscuity and whatever else a “desperate defendant” might try to say. It was enough, the Bentleys’ press release said, that Burgos was now conceding that he had killed Cassie, and that he would be prosecuted for the other five murders.

Riley forgot about it the moment he left the courtroom. It didn’t matter anymore. It was all about the insanity defense now. Burgos would have to demonstrate that he was suffering from a mental defect and that he was unable to appreciate the criminality of his actions. So it was now the prosecution’s job to prove the opposite—that Burgos was
not
suffering from a mental defect and that he
knew
that what he was doing was a crime.

Burgos had a decent argument on mental defect. He’d been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic for several years. And he had the easy, commonsense argument, too. How could someone who did this
not
be crazy?

The second prong of the insanity test was another story. Burgos would have to establish that he did not appreciate that he was committing a crime when he murdered those girls. Appreciation of criminality was less about shrinks and more about facts. So the task force focused on gathering such evidence, and things were already looking hopeful on that score. Burgos had killed the girls during the short break between the end of the spring term and summer school, knowing that no one would be checking the basement of Bramhall Auditorium during that time period. And he’d picked prostitutes from different parts of the city, so that he’d never have to show his face back in the same neighborhood while he continued on his murderous spree. All of these actions were indicative of a man who knew he was breaking the law and didn’t want to be stopped—a man who was not legally insane.

Lightner moved in for a closer look at Riley. “You eaten anything today, sweetheart?”

Riley waved him off, but his wife had made the same comment. Riley had dropped about six pounds in the last three weeks. Food was the last thing on his mind. This prosecution would be the biggest thing he’d ever do as a lawyer, and on top of that, he was trying to oversee one of the largest prosecutorial offices in the country.

“Let’s get a greasy cheeseburger at Baby‘s,” Lightner suggested.

Riley glanced at the clock. It was past one o‘clock. He’d been in the office since seven and hadn’t eaten a thing. He walked with Lightner back to his office for his suit jacket and found his secretary, Betty, placing the mail on his chair.

“More fan mail,” Betty said when she saw them.

The cops and prosecutors had received all kinds of weird mail about the Old Testament and wrath of God stuff since they began to prosecute Burgos. Almost none of the correspondence actually favored what Burgos had done, but many letters warned “sinners” of the consequences of their actions.

“This one, I thought, was especially weird,” Betty said.

Riley took the letter and, along with Lightner, read it:

He looked at Betty, who shrugged. “This is weirder,” he agreed. Most of the letters they got simply recited verse from the Old Testament, or predicted rather dire consequences for people who did not follow the Lord’s teachings. But whatever else they were, they were not vague. “You have the original?”

She nodded. “Tagged and stored.”

As a precaution, the county attorney was tracking all of the original letters sent to its office, keeping each one sealed in plastic and dated.

“I don’t even get what this says,” Riley said.

“Some people need evil like others need faith,” Betty speculated, looking over his shoulder. “And today’s generation is greedy and immoral.”