Eye of the Beholder (48 page)

I
AWAKEN the next morning on a small cot, perpendicular to Shelly’s hospital bed. She is in a large, private room, allowing Governor Trotter and his wife the neighboring bed. My head lifts with some difficulty. Doctors are looking over Shelly, who has recovered relatively well from the ordeal.

A tox scan showed that Shelly had been injected with gamma hydroxybutyrate—GHB—a depressant that acts on the central nervous system. They figure she was given two powerful dosages, spaced apart by twelve hours or so, that rendered her functionally paralyzed, almost comatose. But its effects are not long-lasting.

Other than the drugs draining from her system, she probably has a concussion, but nothing worse, from when she was subdued. She was not sexually assaulted. Leo Koslenko had no interest in her other than leverage.

Shelly came to around noon yesterday. She had suffered retrograde amnesia, so she remembered nothing. She didn’t remember the attack. She didn’t remember that day at all. I’m thankful for that. I figure he got her in the shower, where she would be vulnerable, because Shelly is no pushover physically.

I leave around noon. Her entire family is hovering over her, stroking and coddling her. They are lukewarm toward me, which is understandable. I found her, yes, but, then again, she wouldn’t have been victimized at all had it not been for me. Regardless, I feel like an outsider at a family reunion. I kiss Shelly on the cheek and tell her I’ll be back soon.

I use the emergency-room exit to avoid the omnipresent media surrounding the front of the hospital. When I step outside into the late-morning sun, I use my cell phone. I call information for the number. When I’m patched through, a woman answers the phone.

“Dr. Morse, please,” I say. “This is Paul Riley.”

“You need to make an appointment, Mr. Riley?”

“No. I just need one minute of his time. It’s rather important.”

I look around, to make sure I have my space, no reporters, no police, no anybody. I wait for Dr. Morse to take the phone, but I already know the answer.

 

I DRIVE TO the police station. They tell me McDermott is in the observation room, and, for some reason, no one has a problem with escorting me there. I find him there leaning on the ledge, looking into one of the interview rooms, his collar open, shirtsleeves rolled. He looks over at me with dark, lifeless eyes.

Inside one of the interview rooms, Natalia Lake sits composed, cigarette smoke lingering about her weathered face.

“Natalia here says Cassie killed Ellie.” He nods at her.

I walk up next to him. I wasn’t sure Natalia would say that. I know it wasn’t her idea.

“But she doesn’t know what happened after that. She says they were scared to death of the police coming, but it never happened. She figures Terry Burgos had seen what happened at Ellie’s apartment and went in and removed the body. And she figures, Burgos killed Cassie later to retaliate.”

That’s the story she tried to sell me at her house yesterday. Cassie did kill Ellie, but the rest of what she told McDermott is a lie.

But I won’t tell him differently. Not now, anyway. Maybe never.

“You believe her?” I ask.

He takes a moment, working his jaw. “I guess I don’t know. I’m not sure I could prove anything different.” He nods to me. “For what it’s worth, it sure looks like Burgos killed the hookers.”

He did. I know that from Koslenko. But what makes McDermott so confident?

“I put a rush on DNA tests for the Mansbury girls. Just got back the results. The prostitutes had his semen inside them, and his blood. The intercourse was antemortem, so it seems pretty obvious he did them.”

Right. But the intercourse was postmortem with Ellie and Cassie. And he now knows that Cassie killed Ellie. So who, he’s wondering, killed Cassie?

“You got DNA in a few days,” I comment, trying to change the subject.

“It was high priority. Had to be.” He hits my arm. “Should make you happy. It wasn’t a total miss for you, Riley. At least he killed four of the women.”

I underestimated McDermott. He had the right suspicions from the start. And he’s right, I guess—I can’t deny feeling some relief knowing that Terry Burgos wasn’t completely innocent.

Innocent. Guilty.
Such flimsy words.

“Makes me wonder about Cassie,” he adds.

It isn’t a question, so I don’t answer.

“You got any thoughts on that subject, Riley?”

Now it’s a question. I don’t know what else to tell him but the easy choice.

“Terry Burgos killed her,” I say. “I can’t imagine who else.”

He doesn’t like the answer. I don’t blame him. But the Mansbury murders are not his case. His job was to catch the recent killer, Leo Koslenko, and he did. His job isn’t to solve Cassie’s murder.

Good thing for him. Because Detective Michael McDermott could investigate that case from now until the end of time and not come up with the answer.

“Koslenko, he didn’t tell you anything while you were in that basement with him?”

I shake my head no. I don’t see the need to fill in the spaces for the police.

Not now, anyway. And maybe never.

“How’d you know to go to Bramhall Auditorium?” I ask him.

He takes a deep breath. “Watching you on television, talking to those reporters,” he says. “Stubbornly insisting that Terry Burgos killed all those girls. I didn’t think you believed that. So, I figured, maybe you were trying to draw Koslenko to you. To gain his trust. To ‘behave.’ Only, when I went to your house the next morning, I could see you were already gone. So I got on the radio and had a lookout for your car. And meanwhile, hell, I’ve got nothing to do, I’m on a forced vacation, I hear it’s lovely on Mansbury’s campus in the summer.”

I smile at him. Again, I underestimated him. He probably figured Koslenko was trying to act like a copycat killer, maybe he’d use the same locale. Hell, it was worth a shot.

“So what about Fred Ciancio?” he asks me. “You think getting access to that building was to steal abortion records? Or what?”

I play dumb. But I know that Cassie Bentley didn’t have an abortion. She was never pregnant.

I suspect that Gwendolyn Lake did have a paternity test done, either at Cassie’s insistence or on her own, for spiteful proof. Everyone now knows that Gwendolyn was Harland’s daughter. Harland admitted as much. So I go with that choice.

“The paternity test results probably set Cassie off more than ever,” I say. “So when she saw Ellie sleeping with her father, for God’s sake, she snapped.”

“And Koslenko, afterward, stole those test results because they’d be evidence of Cassie being upset?” He shakes his head. “Plausible but weak.”

I throw up my hands. McDermott doesn’t pursue it. The crime has been solved. Leo Koslenko is now dead from a single, self-inflicted gunshot through his mouth. There will be no trial. There will be no search for motive.

“Did you have any idea Shelly would be in there, alive?” he asks.

Of course I did. But I can’t possibly tell him I knew that. Because then I’d have to tell him how I figured that out.

“No idea,” I say.

He accepts that. No reason for him to think otherwise. I can see he’s not done with questions.

“You think Koslenko acted alone?”

“I do,” I say, relieved to make at least one statement that is true. “Natalia is no killer,” I add, breaking my streak at one.

“And he does all this—Ciancio, then the reporter, everyone—just because he wants to cover up evidence of a stolen paternity test?” His eyes narrow. “That make sense to you?”

“The mind of a madman,” I answer. “Who can say?”

It’s a good cop-out here, an easy explanation for the unexplain able. Koslenko was crazy—who knew
what
he was doing? But it’s not true. He was smart and organized. The premise of his world was nonsensical, but his actions within that world were not. He knew exactly what he was doing.

I think of McDermott’s wife, her bipolar disorder and suicide, and regret using the word
madman.

“So—who was next for Koslenko? He had the kitchen knife and the machete.”

Right. In the auditorium basement where everything ended, the police found a machete identical to the one that I had kept from the Burgos case as a souvenir, a Barteaux heavy-duty, twenty-six-inch, high-carbon spring steel machete. I realize, with a shudder, that Leo Koslenko must have been in my house at some point, to get a good look at that machete so he could buy the same one. If he was a copycat, after all, he needed to play the part as best he could.

“My guess? Koslenko was going to kill Harland Bentley,” I say. “Then finish with Frank Albany. It would make it easier to blame Professor Albany for everything if he wasn’t alive to deny it. Again, my guess—he’d kill Albany but make it look like a suicide.”

“Jesus.” McDermott sighs. “This might seem odd coming from a cop, but I actually feel sorry for Koslenko.”

“It doesn’t sound odd at all. He was sick, Mike. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

McDermott raises his head, nods toward the interview room. “I was sure it was either Professor Albany or Harland behind all this.”

That was Koslenko’s intention. That was always the plan back then, if anything went south with Ellie Danzinger’s murder. They’d put it on Albany. Instead, Burgos went wild after finding Ellie’s body and pretty much insulated them by killing the prostitutes in rapid succession. If Ciancio hadn’t gotten in touch with Evelyn Pendry and Leo Koslenko this week, none of this ever would have come to light.

“Ciancio had ties to the
comradska,”
McDermott tells me. “We just found that out today. So I figure, that’s how Koslenko would have gotten to him. Russian connections.”

Yes, that’s how the connection was made. But it wasn’t made by Koslenko. It was made by Natalia. She had the money to reach far enough, through the right Russian circles, to make an arrangement with a security guard. I have no doubt that she kept her name out of it completely. And that she will continue to do so.

And I won’t say differently. Not now, anyway. And maybe never.

I nod toward the window, toward Natalia Lake. “What’s gonna happen to her?”

Natalia might be in some trouble. She covered up her daughter’s involvement in the murder of Ellie Danzinger. And she might have abused the truth a little this week. But, in the end, from their perspective, she covered up the culpability of someone who became one of Burgos’s victims, too. And they will have a hard time proving any of the things they suspect. They will have to prove that she knew Cassie committed Ellie’s murder and that she played an active involvement in covering it up. How could they prove any of that?

“All we know is that her daughter killed someone sixteen years ago. She doesn’t have to report it. Maybe she had Koslenko break into that building for the paternity tests, but we can’t prove that. Koslenko and Ciancio are dead, and she’s smart enough to know we have nothing.”

“Right,” I agree.

“She was protecting her daughter,” he adds without prompting. “She may have colored outside the lines a little, but she was protecting her daughter. If it were up to me—”

He stops on that. Takes a long breath.

“She didn’t hurt anybody,” he says. “Her daughter did something, and she made the best of the situation. Is that so wrong?”

He turns to me, challenging me, emotion coloring his face.

“You telling me you wouldn’t do the same thing if it were your daughter?”

I raise my hands in surrender, and I haven’t even said a word. He’s fighting with himself.

“Yes,” I say, “I would protect my daughter, too.”

He turns back to the observation window. “Sorry. Jesus.”

“Been a long week,” I say.

He stares at me for a long moment. Sleep deprivation and stress do wonders to a person. McDermott strikes me as a solid-as-rock sort of guy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he burst into tears right now.

“I meant what I said before, Riley. About Burgos. You had him dead to rights. And, look, he did kill four girls, maybe five.” He hits my arm. “Hell, even his own lawyer took one look at the whole thing and pleaded insanity. He didn’t fight you on the facts. It’s not your job—”

“It
is
my job. I had discretion.” I look at him. “Burgos was insane, Mike. He was the dictionary definition of insane. He thought God was speaking to him through a song.”

“Yeah,” McDermott counters, “but he knew what he was doing was a crime, right? He fabricated an alibi. He hid the girls in a basement. Would you change a single thing about your argument to the jury if you could do it over again?”

“One thing,” I say. “I wouldn’t make the argument at all.”

I walk away from him. Yes, Terry Burgos was aware that a law in this state prohibited murder. And, yes, he took steps to avoid getting caught. He manufactured an alibi. He hid the bodies so no one would find them until his spree was finished. He picked victims from different parts of the city so he wouldn’t have to go back to the scene of an abduction. And all of that means, he didn’t fit the definition of insanity, as that definition was written up by a bunch of politicians who don’t want to appear soft on crime.

“Leo Koslenko knew he was breaking the law,” I say. “Oh, and he also ‘knew’ that he was a superspy, protecting the world from undercover enemies posing as prostitutes. He also ‘knew’ that
I
was a spy working with him for that secret world organization.” I flap my arms. “So you’re telling me Koslenko wasn’t insane?”

McDermott shrugs. “You know better than anyone if you appreciate you’re breaking the law—”

“Oh, come on, Mike. I’m not talking about the
legal
definition of insanity,” I say. “I’m saying Burgos’s head was in another galaxy. He thought he was doing God’s bidding, and, if that’s what you
really
think, why would you care about some silly state law?”