Eye of the Beholder (24 page)

“No,” Shelly says. “I mean, why are
you
going?”

A smile creeps to my lips. Shelly can read me pretty well.

“You can’t stand the thought that something happened on that case that you didn’t know about.”

Maybe I can’t. But instead of responding, I punch the speed dial on my cell phone for Joel Lightner. I press the phone’s SPEAKER button and place it between Shelly and me.

“Hey,” he answers, having caller ID.

“Joel, I’m in the car with Shelly.”

“With—oh, great. Shelly!”

“Hi, Joel.”

I give him a brief rundown on what’s happened. Lightner is the only person in the world who knows as much as I do about Terry Burgos.

“Cassie was pregnant?” he says. “I thought she was a dyke. I mean—a member of the gay and lesbian community, Shelly.”

“You’re a true Renaissance man, Joel,” she calls back.

“Joel, I talked to Harland the other night. Evelyn Pendry had spoken with him, too. Asked him all kinds of questions about Cassie.”

“These kinds of questions? Pregnancy and abortion?”

“He never specified, but my guess would be yes. And he was very concerned about these things getting out. You know, ‘Cassie’s already suffered enough,’ that kind of thing. He wanted me to keep a lid on Evelyn.”

“Pretty good lid on her now.”

Yeah, that sure is true. I take my foot off the accelerator as I see what has the makings of a police car, hidden behind an overpass.

“Joel, what do you remember about Gwendolyn Lake?”

“Gwendolyn,” he muses. “Cassie’s cousin. The party queen? I remember nothing, that’s what I remember. Mean and nasty, if memory serves—but she was in Europe during the murders so she didn’t really matter.”

“Right.” I sigh. “What was the name of Cassie’s friend? The guy who hung out with Cassie and Ellie?”

“Oh, the studly guy.”

“Yeah, he was a good-looking guy—”

“Cried like a baby,” Lightner says.

He did. He was an emotional guy. Held up pretty well while I prepped him for his testimony at the sentencing phase but broke down on the stand. Sobbed like a child.

“Handsome
and
sensitive,” Shelly says. “Is he single?”

“Mitchum,” Lightner recalls.

“Brandon Mitchum. Right, right. Joel, find him for me, okay?”

“Why?”

“Why? Because I pay you to do what I ask, not to ask what I do.”

“Is this you acting tough in front of your girlfriend?”

I look over at Shelly, who blushes.

“I mean, you guys
are
boyfriend-girlfriend again, right?”

She laughs. I feel the color on my cheeks, too.

“Well, thank Christ,” he says. “So—Brandon Mitchum? Seriously, Riley—why?”

Same thing Shelly asked. An itch I need to scratch, or something like that.

“Hey,” he says. “Who are the cops you’re working with?”

“Mike McDermott,” I say. “And Ricki Stoletti.”

“Don’t know Stoletti.”

“She transferred from the suburbs a couple years ago. Major Crimes.”

“McDermott’s a good man,” Lightner says. “I know him a little. He’s good. A cop’s cop. Went through a tough thing there with his wife.”

“How’s that?”

“Few years back,” he says, “his wife ate a gun.”

Shelly recoils. McDermott’s wife committed suicide? “Oh, Jesus.”

“She was a—what was it?—manic-depressive, I guess. Bipolar in a bad way. He comes home one day, she’s splayed out in the bathroom. Three-year-old daughter is curled up in the shower, sucking her thumb.”

“Holy shit.” I bring a hand to my face. “Three-year-old daughter?”

That explains McDermott’s reaction, at the task force meeting, to the “whack job” comment. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for him.

“She didn’t see it happen, at least. But, still. Walking in on that? Your mother, with the back of her head blown out? When you’re three years old?”

I shake my head. “Okay, well, I’m going. Off to learn about Cassie Bentley.”

Lightner doesn’t answer immediately. Usually, he’s quick with a line. “Suddenly, you have a personal interest in this thing?”

“Maybe I do,” I say. “Find me Brandon Mitchum.” I punch out the phone.

 

 

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER HOTEL. This one in the suburbs, a midlevel chain.

Leo laps the place in his car three times, peeking into the lobby, watching in the mirror for any new cars that might be entering the parking lot, because they’d keep their distance, they wouldn’t be so obvious.

He is tentative, approaching the lobby, surveying the ambush points, the roof, any cars suddenly moving in the parking lot, but doing it without appearing to do it. He’ll be ready when it comes, but they won’t be ready for him.

The lobby is empty when he enters, but he steps just inside the main doors and hides in the recesses, waiting for anyone to pass, holding a magazine open, should anyone wonder what he’s doing, reading a magazine, just reading, but his eyes are outside, still looking for them. He’s pretty sure he wasn’t followed, but he’ll take no chances.

Five minutes, ten minutes, then he approaches the counter and gives false identification and pays in cash for one night, picks up a complimentary newspaper, takes the elevator up one level and steps out onto the mezzanine overlooking the lobby. Making sure he wasn’t followed.

So he waits, casually opening a copy of the Watch. The front page is splattered with the news, murder, brutal murder, shocking murder, staff reporter, daughter of television anchor Carolyn Pendry, young reporter, crime-beat reporter, nothing in there about how quickly she could move, Leo knows, he has the pulled hamstring to prove it, bad pull, bad leg.

A strong will, he could see it in Evelyn’s eyes, the defiance on her face, even as he exerted complete domination over her. Like Kat, a lot like Kat, the way she steeled her jaw as she stared at death, not like most of them—most of them, doesn’t matter male or female, they freeze up, accept it at the end, the very end, accept it even if they can’t believe it—

He takes the elevator and slides a key card into the door. The beds are a pair of twins. He spent so much of the night avoiding a tail, he needs some sleep. He’d prefer a bigger bed, but he’s used to a whole lot worse than this. In Lefortovo, the metal rods supporting the thin cushion were spaced so far apart the cushion would fall through. He learned to take newspaper or magazines—whatever he was allowed to read—and stuff them between the rods to provide additional support. But he could never shake the feeling that he was sleeping on a set of monkey bars. They did that on purpose, he knew. They didn’t want the inmates well rested. At least not inmates like him.

He falls on the bed and thinks of Kat. She had them all fooled. They saw her as a sweet girl who could never be part of something evil. He remembers tears—his own tears—falling on her face as she stared up at him. She almost made him believe, too.

Two years it took them—twenty—three months and seven days—because he kept count on the wall. Two years of staring into a black door, communicating with fellow inmates by talking into the toilet bowl, down the piping to another cell. Two years of conjuring up ways to get up the wall to the single lightbulb in the ceiling to light a cigarette stub. Two years before they discovered he was right, before the men in the blue piping came for him.

He closes his eyes, feels the exhaustion sweep over him, his eyes sinking beneath the shade of his eyelids.

But then the lightning strike in the stomach, the burning acid. He springs into a ball, the hamstring again, too, he can’t relax, can’t sleep, not until he’s done, and he’s not done, not after Evelyn, it has to be tonight, and he doesn’t even know where Brandon Mitchum lives yet, lot of work to do, because it has to be tonight—

Leo gets off the bed and heads for the door.

 

 

ONCE WE’RE OFF THE INTERSTATE, Shelly reads me the written instructions from Betty. I follow a couple of county roads before I get to the point of intersection between Gwendolyn’s house and the diner that bears her name. As it’s nearing two-thirty, I call the diner. The woman who answers says Gwendolyn’s not around, so I decide to go to her house.

“Fresh,” Stoletti had said about interviewing witnesses. No notice. It makes sense. I’d just as soon pop in on Gwendolyn and see what I can find out.

The roads are wide and largely unmarked. I pass trees and various lakes, a blur of dark browns, greens, and blues. The sky is clouding up, but it’s still bright, anyway. Living and working among high-rises, I don’t get a lot of this. This is what Shelly, who grew up downstate, was talking about, how much brighter and cleaner it is away from the city. It’s not like I’ve never left the city limits, but, despite the money I have, I’ve never owned a second home, or even vacationed much. The law is my job
and
my hobby. I suppose that says something about me.

Soon the roads are no longer paved and the signage becomes scarce. Following the turns, I find myself in what a city boy like me would describe as a subdivision, a cluster of log and wood cabins spaced well apart, little kids running around in swimsuits, dogs chasing after them.

Hoping I have the right place, I pull onto a gravel driveway and stop my Cadillac, the wheels sliding over crunched stone. The house is nothing special, a rustic pine cabin of modest size, heavily shaded with trees. The smell of freshly cut grass mixes with the airy, lake scent. I stretch my legs before we move toward the cabin. Shelly looks around with a serene expression. I look down the sloping backyard to the lake, and to a woman standing by a green canopy on a dock, her eyes shaded by her hand, staring back at me.

Natalia and Mia Lake’s mother was a ballerina in Russia, a beautiful woman named Nikita Kiri-something-or-other. Nikita met Conrad Lake, the heir to the Lake mining fortune in West Virginia who had settled in the Midwest in the forties. The story went that Conrad saw Nikita, then eighteen years old, at the Russian ballet and immediately began to court her, eventually marrying her and bringing her back to the States, supposedly spreading plenty of money among the Soviet politburo to let him remove her from the country. Their daughters, Mia and Natalia, inherited all of their money and much of their mother’s beauty; they, in turn, passed their exquisite features down to their daughters, Gwendolyn and Cassandra. I’m more confident of that assessment with regard to Cassie, having seen a number of photos of her over time; I’d seen one picture of Gwendolyn back then, when she would have been a teenager, which I struggle to recall now. She looked like a Lake, I remember that much, much like Cassie and Natalia and probably Mia, a brunette with a slim build and a hint of the Russian heritage in her long jaw and nose, overall glamorous features. I might have imagined her sixteen years later as something of a beauty, the pieces coming together in maturity and helped along with the finest hairdressers and accessories.

The woman who approaches from the dock fits a different bill. She has a more rounded, likable face, generous red hair that drapes lazily past her shoulders. She’s dressed simply in a long shirt, cutoff denim shorts, and sandals. But even through her horn-rimmed glasses, I can see a glimpse of the beautiful party girl in her eyes, oval and piercing green, though any glamour is overcome by an extra twenty pounds and the granola look. More of a quiet, peaceful beauty about her now—the polar opposite of her former glitz. More my speed, actually.

I introduce Shelly and myself as attorneys from the city, and after an initial look of concern—“Is Nat okay?” she asks, referring to her aunt Natalia—her expression changes to one that tells me she has put the city well behind her, and is glad to have done so.

“How—exactly how did you find me?” she wonders.

Why?
I want to ask.
You didn’t want to be found?

“If I had time to call you and set something up, I would have. I’m sorry. This is very important, and we won’t take up much of your time.”

She takes a moment for internal debate, and I pray this whole thing hasn’t been a waste of time. Then again, if she shuts me out completely, that will tell me something, too.

“There’s a thought,” I say, “that someone is following the song lyrics again. Some people have been murdered.”

That does the trick. Her eyes widen, the expression softening. She points back behind her, to the dock. “I was just about to take a boat ride,” she says.

M
cDERMOTT only briefly glances at the glossies of the victim. He already knows the details—the wound to the right temple, then the massive beating she took to the top of her skull, multiple blows rained down on her. Whoever did this had no compunction about what he was doing, no hesitation whatsoever.

That’s all he needs to see, and more than he wants to.

Stoletti scoops the photos off his desk and looks through them. She’s been partnered with him long enough; she knows he has a problem with female murder victims. She’s smart enough to know why, too, though the two of them have never discussed it.

It hasn’t gotten easier. He figured he needed time after Joyce’s death, after finding her lying dead in the bathroom, before he could look at another dead body without effect. But it’s been four goddamn years, and, still, at least with women, he cringes every time. It’s about a forty-sixty mix of female-to-male victims. That’s a lot of crime scenes you don’t want to handle, a lot of photographs you can’t bear to study.

He can push out the images at night. He can push them out in the sunlight or in the heat of a busy day. Something about the crime scenes themselves, the smell and feel of death so prominent, that brings it back more vividly than his imagination otherwise permits: The vacant stare of her eyes, the awkward posturing of her body—her legs crossed in rigor mortis, her body toppled to the right like a statute knocked on its side—the pool of blood leading all the way to the bathtub, where little Gracie sat motionless, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands over her ears, her body gently rocking.