Eye of the Beholder (47 page)

Does
she like?

“Not—ma—mad?” he asks.

Okay. That tells me something. He’s wondering if Natalia approves of what he’s done this week. He’s telling me that everything he’s done this week, he did alone—not at Natalia’s direction. “Mrs. Bentley,” he called her. Yes. That hasn’t been her name for years. But it was her name back when Cassie was murdered.

He hasn’t talked to Natalia this week. And that gives me some room.

“No, Leo, she’s not mad. You were just protecting Cassie.”

He looks up at me. He doesn’t say anything, but the look on his face reads pure anguish. This man, who has killed several people this week—and maybe some sixteen years ago—looks like he’s about to cry.

“Nobody knows Cassie killed Ellie Danzinger,” I say. “And I’m going to make sure it stays that way.”

Koslenko’s eyes cast downward. He looks like a kid who just found out his puppy died.

“So—scared,” he says. “So scared, so—”

 

CASSIE,
so scared, trembling, crying at the kitchen table, taking Leo’s hand,
I think I killed her—I think I killed Ellie,
she says.
It will be all right,
he tells her.
Mother, Mother, I have to call Mother.
She comes, Mrs. Bentley, Natalia, they go upstairs, Leo stays at the kitchen table, looks out the window into the darkness, he likes the darkness better, he decides it will be all right, okay, everything will be okay. He volunteers, Nat accepts. See if Ellie’s dead, check on Ellie, see if she’s dead. If she isn‘t—if she isn’t—make her dead.

 

I TAKE TWO steps forward, carefully transferring my weight, as Koslenko comes out of his fog. The revelations—no matter how garbled and rambling—are not lost on me. Cassie killed Ellie after seeing her father come out of Ellie’s apartment. A single blow to the head, on Ellie’s bed, where she proceeded to bleed out. But Cassie had already fled, not to her own home but to the one on the other side of Highland Woods—a house that was largely empty these days, with Mia Lake’s death and Gwendolyn Lake’s globe-trotting. Cassie told her friend, Leo Koslenko, what had happened, and then told her mother, Natalia.

Natalia sprang into action. She dispatched Leo to remove Ellie’s body and dump it at Terry Burgos’s back door. It was a brilliant move. Burgos stalking Ellie was already a matter of public record. There was the restraining order, as well as Burgos’s own history of mental instability. He was the perfect patsy.

And when Burgos disposed of Elite—when he brought her to this very room in which we are standing—Koslenko took it as a sign that Burgos was working on his side—that Burgos was
one of us.

Us.
A team of spies. A team that included, at a minimum, Natalia Lake Bentley, Terry Burgos, Leo Koslenko, and me.

Ellie was a gift from God,
Burgos had said. He’d meant it literally. God had placed this girl on the back porch of his house, dead from a blow to the head. God was telling him to begin the course of action Tyler Skye had spelled out. God had given him the woman he coveted, as the first of six victims. So he ripped out Ellie’s heart, in accordance with the song, and moved the body to Bramhall Auditorium.

I consider how quickly I could remove the knife from my jacket and use it, if necessary. But I know that isn’t the play here. I take another step toward Koslenko and Shelly and watch his reaction. His eyes are focused somewhere on the floor. He is reliving what happened sixteen years ago.

With his left hand, he wipes a stray bang off Shelly’s face. His gun is pushed into her ear, his finger on the trigger. I can’t tell how aware he is, but I can’t risk it. He’s shown his physical abilities to me before. If I rushed him, Shelly would be dead before I reached him.

And there’s a better way. We are comrades, he and I. It may have taken me a while, in his eyes, to come aboard again—including, ultimately, using Shelly as leverage—but here I am.

“You’ve done your part, Leo,” I say. “It’s time for me again. Just like before.”

I take another step toward him. With a little momentum, I could lunge forward and reach him. He watches my feet, then looks up at me.

“Burn Albany,” I say. “I’ll do it. There’s nothing more you can do.”

His eyes pinball about. He is lost again in his thoughts. But the gun is still planted in Shelly’s ear. I can’t risk it.

“You and Terry are heroes,” I say.

“Te—Terry. Hero—heroes.”

 

KEEP WATCHING,
Natalia tells him.
Keep watching Terry. Tell me what he does.

Next day, Wednesday, he stops at the house, reports to Natalia,
he
sees Cassie through the crack of the door to the bedroom, oh, poor Cassie, torment washed across her face, no sleep, dried tears on her beautiful face, Natalia watching her carefully,
She mustn’t leave the house, don’t let her leave, we have to protect her,
go Leo, go, go watch Terry, see if he does it again tonight
—

Hey, you. Hey! You!

Leo, right? You have any idea what the fuck is going on? In
my
house? What the hell is wrong with Cassie?

He doesn’t answer, he rarely speaks, not out loud, he doesn’t talk so well, he shrugs his shoulders and keeps moving
—

Don’t they have a fucking house of their own across town?

 

KOSLENKO LOOKS in my eyes. I nod, as if I knew everything he just said. Terry Burgos provided the ultimate cover for Natalia’s plot to cover up Cassie’s murder of Elite—he went on a murderous rampage and killed four prostitutes. Nobody would suspect that Ellie had been murdered by someone else, given what Burgos had done.

Maybe we would have looked at the final murder differently, if given the chance. But Natalia asked the county attorney to drop that murder from the case and the county attorney was more than willing to accommodate his heaviest financial contributor.

And I let him do it. It’s something I will have to live with. But, for the moment, I need to use it to my advantage. Koslenko thought I did it because we were working together. He thought I was part of the cover-up.

“Under—stand? Underst—stand?”

I force a soft smile on my face.
Understand.
He wants me to know the full story because he knows I’m taking over for him.

“Fred. Fred,” he says. “Under—under—”

“Fred Ciancio,” I say. “The security guard. He let you into that building.”

Koslenko’s head pivots. He checks every angle around him. What he’s looking for, I don’t know.

“She said—don‘t—don’t tell him. Keys. Just—keys.”

“Mrs. Bentley,” I clarify. That makes sense. A woman with money like that, and probably some connection to Russian money and influence here in the city, could find a way to reach out. It’s never surprising when a former prison guard like Ciancio keeps in touch with inmates for less than virtuous reasons. And there were plenty of members of the Russian mafia—the
comradska
—in prison at any given time.

“You didn’t tell Ciancio anything?” I ask. “Then—how did he figure it out?”

I say it with empathy, like I’m just as disappointed as Koslenko that Ciancio put one and one together.

“Po—lice. Cops. Cops after.”

“He figured it out when the police came to the Sherwood building afterward.”

Right. That makes sense. Of course.

“Listen, Leo—”

I stop, as I hear the same thing Koslenko hears. Noise above us. The sound of glass shattering. Someone breaking into the front of the building.

Shit. I look at Koslenko, then back up at the ceiling.

Koslenko, panicked, fixes on me, the gun pushed farther into Shelly’s ear.

A door slams against a wall. The door to the stairway leading down.

“They don’t matter,” I say quickly. “They trust me, Leo.
They always have.
Look what I did before. I’ll do it again. Natalia—Mrs. Bentley told me to do it again. I will. But not if you hurt Shelly, Leo. If you hurt her, I’ll tell them about Cassie.”

Koslenko’s eyes ricochet about, a soft moan escaping his throat. He is mumbling something I can’t hear.

No, I realize, just words I don’t understand.

Footfalls on the staircase now. Less than half a minute before they storm in. All bets are off then. Shelly won’t have a chance.

“I’ll protect her, Leo. I always have.”

“Protect. Protect.”

“Always, Leo. Always.”

But he’s not listening to me, or to the sounds of the men rushing toward this room.

“It’s your time, Leo. Just like it was Terry’s.”

“Skoro,
Katrina,” Koslenko says, as the door to the room kicks open, Detective Michael McDermott training his gun in our direction.

I close my eyes as the sound of a single gunshot echoes through the basement.