Eye of the Beholder (20 page)

“What is this, Philosophy 101?” Lightner asked. “Today’s generation is greedy and immoral? Today’s cop is hungry for a cheeseburger.” He nodded at Riley. “Can we go?”

Riley reread the letter. “This is weirder,” he repeated.

“Lawyers.” Lightner sighed. “Don’t make this more difficult, Riley. I’m starving over here: ”

“Yeah.” Riley thought for a moment.
Don’t make this more difficult.
He dropped the copy of the letter into the garbage and headed out for lunch.

T
HE DETECTIVES’ squad room at Area Four, Third Precinct, is filled with detectives and some uniformed officers, too. Detectives Ricki Stoletti and Mike McDermott stand up front. It’s nine in the morning. Everyone is on alert, a collective energy in the room.

Everyone is reading the sheet that has been put in front of them, the now-numbered lyrics to the second verse of Tyler Skye’s song “Someone.”

Ricki Stoletti speaks first. “‘An ice pick a nice trick praying that he dies quick.’ That’s Ciancio. ‘A switchblade oughta be great for lobotomy.’ That’s Evelyn Pendry.”

“So next up is a razor blade,” says someone in the back of the room.

Another guy, seated at the table, says, “So all we have to do is find out who has bought a shaving kit over the last ten years.” He gets some laughter, but this isn’t exactly a merry moment, least of all for Mike McDermott.

Still another guy raises a hand and nods to me. “It says ‘on the seventh day I rest.’”

I nod. “The sixth kill is suicide. He kills himself. No more itch. No more strife. No more hate. He’s done now. He kills himself on the sixth day, with the kitchen knife. On the seventh day, he rests. Obviously comparing his actions with those of God, in creating the world.”

A woman in the back says, “So the offender’s gonna do us all a favor and kill himself?”

“Burgos didn’t.” I shrug. “The first verse called for suicide at the end, too, and he ignored it.”

“That’s one of the reasons you beat his insanity defense, right?” says an older guy in the back. “Because he didn’t follow the song lyrics.”

Score one for the old-timer.

“Maybe when he’s done with this song,” says a big guy, standing against the wall, “he’ll follow the lyrics to that old Randy New-man song and start killing short people.”

“Yeah, maybe so,” says McDermott. “That’s strictly fucking hilarious.”

The minor burst of animation in the room quiets. When McDermott talks, they listen.

McDermott squints into the air. “Let’s start with what we know. We know this offender leaves a totally pristine crime scene. Two kills, no prints, no trace evidence. He holds them down and tortures them. Controls them. The scene is highly organized. Clean entries and exits. He leaves the weapons behind.”

He leaves the weapons behind. A good point. Everything else he did, he did on purpose.

He wants us to know.

“And then, page four of the packet,” McDermott continues. “We think this is our same guy who sent Riley these.”

Everyone flips to the back page.

“The first one—‘If new evil emerges’—Riley got on Monday. Two days ago.”

“The second one, he got yesterday.”

“In the first one,” I say, “he’s saying, if the murders start again, will we link it to Burgos—to past actions? Apparently, he’s about to tell us.”

“Yeah, and what about the second one?” Stoletti asks.

We’ve already been through these notes. I went to my office last night and showed them to Stoletti and McDermott.

“Hell if I know,” I say, rereading the message myself. “He’s mortal? He won’t go easily, but he’ll go at some point?” I look at McDermott.

“He’s talking about understanding,” he says. “Understanding the true message, whatever he thinks that message is. Right?”

“You have to be willing to betray convention,” I speculate. “To think outside the box. Understanding requires betrayal of the conventional, and the yearning to
want
to understand.”

No one comments on that. If anyone has a better idea, they sure as hell aren’t speaking up.

“He uses the word ‘new’ twice,” Stoletti says. “He didn’t need it the second time. ’New betrayal’ and ‘new yearning.’”

“Now it’s a grammar lesson,” says the guy sitting next to her.

She isn’t in the mood. “I’m saying he’s deliberate about his choice of words. This handwriting is very careful. He didn’t write this quickly. He took his time. He thought about every word. ‘Never does vindication ever really surrender easily.’ It’s sloppy. He doesn’t need ‘ever’ because he wrote ‘never’. I don’t know what it means, but it’s weird.”

She’s right. I hadn’t looked at it that way. The handwriting is meticulous. But the choice of words here is odd.

“Let’s everyone think about this,” says McDermott. “We’ve got the originals being worked up right now. Impressions, ninhydrin, everything. Let’s talk about Fred Ciancio.”

Last night, Carolyn Pendry dropped this on us: When she was reporting on Terry Burgos back in 1989, she got a call from a man who said he had some information about Terry Burgos. The man seemed scared, Carolyn said. He said it was important, but he wasn’t sure whether to share the information with her. Then he hung up. But Carolyn, ever the reporter, traced the phone call back to a house. The house was owned by a man named Fred Ciancio.

She visited him at the house and he refused to talk to her. She tried more than once to get him to talk, without success. She looked into his background and came up with nothing. And then the trial began and she never followed up.

“So we have no idea what information Ciancio had for Carolyn Pendry,” McDermott concludes. “All that we know about him is that he was a prison guard in the sixties and seventies, and then a security guard, until he retired two years ago.”

“And,” Stoletti adds, “we know that two days before he was murdered, he called the Daily Watch newsroom.”

Presumably, Ciancio’s phone call to the Watch newsroom was to speak with Carolyn’s daughter, Evelyn Pendry, a Watch reporter. Whatever it was that Fred Ciancio had wanted to say to Carolyn Pendry back in 1989, we assume he said to her daughter Evelyn only a few days ago. That would explain Evelyn’s questions to me about Terry Burgos. That would also explain her unusual interest in the Ciancio crime scene, according to McDermott.

I look at the handouts McDermott has given us. There is a sheet with the lyrics and sheets with brief rundowns on the two victims, Fred Ciancio and Evelyn Pendry. Something on Ciancio’s sheet catches my eye. “Security guard, Bristol Security Services, 1978-2003.”

I knew, from McDermott last night, that Ciancio had been a security guard. But I didn’t know where.

“Bristol,” I say. “Ciancio worked for Bristol Security?”

“Yes.” Stoletti nods. “He worked security at the shopping mall in Wilshire. Why?”

I check the dates again. Ciancio worked for Ensign Correctional, a maximum security prison on the southwest side of the county, until 1978. Then he worked for twenty-five years for Bristol. “Bristol Security was the firm that contracted with Mansbury College,” I say. “Back in the day.”

McDermott watches me a moment. “Did that come into play at all?”

Bristol Security helped us with the search of the grounds for more bodies. I’m sure they were embarrassed that the murders happened on their watch. I think Mansbury canceled their contract after the bodies were found. Like it was
their
fault. But no, I don’t see anything. I tell McDermott so.

“Bristol Security is a huge security firm,” I add. “They probably have hundreds of contracts all over. It could be a coincidence.”

McDermott nods his head once. “Is that what you think? It’s just a coincidence?”

I shrug. “Wally Monk was the head guy assigned to Mansbury,” I tell him. “Call him. Ask him if he knows Ciancio. I think he’s retired but you can find him.”

Stoletti makes a note, clarifying the spelling with me.

“So,” she asks. “Can we assume that this guy is a copycat?”

There’s a collective release in the room. It’s on everyone’s mind.

Me, I’ve never been a big fan of the copycat theory. These guys either want fame—in which case, why be known as some other killer’s imitator?—or they are deranged and have their own issues to deal with.

But there’s no denying the first two kills, patterned after the second verse. There’s no denying what he wrote—“I’m not the only one”—on the bathroom mirror.

“Why now?” I ask. “Why sixteen years later?”

No one has an answer for that, of course. Hell, they’re looking to
me
for the answers.

“And why,” Stoletti adds, “are people associated with those murders dying now?”

Another one nobody can answer.

A woman sitting on a desk, her feet on a chair, asks me, “Were Burgos’s victims random?”

I tell her, Burgos always wanted us to think they weren’t. He could ascribe a particular sin to each of the women he murdered. “But I don’t think these victims are random, either.”

McDermott shakes his head, but he’s agreeing with me. We both thought that, last night—too coincidental to be random. Evelyn Pendry was at Ciancio’s crime scene, seemingly troubled. And we know from the phone records that Ciancio had called Evelyn just before he was murdered. Then there was the conversation that I had with her, where she pretended to be interested in Senator Almundo’s prosecution but, in fact, seemed much more focused on the Burgos case.

She seemed, if memory serves, particularly interested in why Harland Bentley hired me so soon after I prosecuted his daughter’s killer.

“Does this remind you of Burgos?” some cop asks me. A big Irish guy. I think they’re all Irish. I think it’s in the union contract.

I make a face. The answer is, not really. “Burgos, he wasn’t careful at all. He brought them to his house. He had unprotected sex with them, leaving his bodily fluids inside them. He left evidence of the women all over his house. He left evidence of himself all over the auditorium basement.
This
offender has performed two perfectly executed kills. He came in and out without a trace, controlled them and the scene. This offender feels like a pro. Burgos was not. That’s what I can tell you about Burgos. This offender, I really don’t know
what
to tell you.”

“And you’re our expert on serial killers,” Stoletti says.

I shake my head. “Understand this, everyone. I’m no expert. I’ve never solved a serial killing—not in the way you’re thinking. We found six bodies and caught our offender within an hour. That’s what I mean about him being sloppy. We found Ellie Danzinger dead, first thing we did was go after the guy who had been stalking her so intensely that she got a restraining order against him. This was also a guy, by the way, who had worked for the last few years as a maintenance man in that same auditorium where we found the girls. And when we went to see him—boom!—there it was. It was all there. So don’t confuse me with someone who knows how to track a serial killer. Burgos left bread crumbs all the way to his door. This guy’s notleaving anything for us.”

“Except notes,” someone says.

“And his murder weapons. But that’s intentional,” I answer. “No doubt, he wants us to make the connection. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to let us catch him.”

McDermott runs his hands through his hair and groans. “I’m supposed to ask you if you’ll work with us on this.”

I smirk. He couldn’t have been less enthusiastic. It isn’t his call, I can see. It’s Carolyn Pendry’s. The police commander is not stupid, not so naïve that he can’t recognize the utility of an ally in the television media. Carolyn wants, Carolyn gets.

“If I have a question,” I say, “you answer.”

His smile is tight, forced. “Whatever you say, Counselor.” Then he moves to the center of the room. These are his detectives, I assume, though I didn’t catch a title from him. He reads from a clipboard. “Kopecky, Collins. I want to know every newspaper article Evelyn Pendry worked on for the last year. Especially crime, but whatever. And talk to everyone at the Watch. See if Evelyn dropped some hint about what she was doing. Pittacora, I want you to listen to every song that Torcher ever released. Find the lyrics. They’re probably on the Internet somewhere.

“Speaking of Internet,” he continues, “Sloan and Koessl, look at every Web site devoted to Terry Burgos. The chat rooms, especially. Anything looks interesting, get a subpoena from Judge Ahlfors and get the URLs. If this guy had a Burgos fixation, maybe he decided to drop a line or two.”

One of those two, either Koessl or Sloan, a guy who’s paying too much attention to his hair, asks me, “Any idea how many Web sites we’re talking about?”

“No telling. Dozens, probably.” I snap my fingers. “You better look at Web sites devoted to Tyler Skye and Torcher, too. He wrote the lyrics, after all.”