Eye of the Beholder (6 page)

“The fun happened upstairs,” Lightner said. They took carpeted stairs up to a great room and a master bedroom. The top floor looked more lived in, a stereo and television in the great room, a tiny kitchenette that seemed to serve more as a bar. Lightner gestured toward the dishwasher. “It was full. Everything inside was washed.”

So nothing could be taken from any of the glasses. But that seemed like a dead end, anyway. There was no chance Ellie Danzinger had invited Terry Burgos in for a drink.

Riley walked slowly into the bedroom. The bed was unmade. The comforter was bunched at the bottom of the bed. There were spatters of blood on the wall and some on the bed, but not much. To the left of the bed, however, was a sizable bloodstain, encrusted on the carpet fibers.

“The M.E. thinks she died on the bed,” Lightner explained. “She was hit over the head, and she bled out right there.” He motioned to the bloodstain. “M.E. says she lost over a liter and a half of blood.”

Riley didn’t know if these details were significant.

Lightner got close to the bed but not too close. “M.E. figures Ellie was lying on the bed, faceup, right? Her head was hanging over the side of the bed. That’s the only explanation.”

“Why is that the only explanation?”

“The amount of blood,” he answered. “Other than ripping her heart out—which we know he did at his house—the only other wound on her body is the blow to the head. A significant blow, but not normally enough for her to bleed that much. Gravity played a part. Her head was lower than the rest of her body.”

Okay. That made sense. “This is relevant?”

Lightner shrugged. “To bleed out that much, Ellie must have been lying there for at least an hour. The M.E. says there’s no way she would have bled that much any quicker.”

Riley thought it over. “So he didn’t move her right away. He waited at least an hour. Why?”

“Maybe for nightfall to come,” Lightner speculated.

“But she’d been in bed.” Riley shook his head. “It would’ve already been night.”

“Yeah. I don’t know.” Lightner looked tired. It had been quite a day for all of them.

“Maybe that’s when he had intercourse with her,” Riley suggested. “It is a bed, after all.” It was quite the image. The intercourse, according to the M.E., had clearly been postmortem.

It was a possibility. But Lightner didn’t know. Nobody knew, yet.

“They find that professor yet?” Riley asked. “The guy who employed Burgos?”

“Albany,” Lightner said. “We’ll find him.” He hit Riley on the arm. It was time to head back to the station. Nobody had any illusions about going home anytime soon.

 

 

I
T WAS NEAR MIDNIGHT. Someone had turned on a television in the police station. The local channels had been covering this all day, flashing in and out of soap operas and game shows and, later, prime-time offerings. The “Mansbury Massacre,” they were calling it.

Riley and several others pulled together two detectives’ desks to form something like a conference table. Riley played with a cup of lukewarm coffee and looked around the table at Chief Clark and Detective Lightner. None of them had eaten all day. Clark had subsisted on coffee and cigarettes; Lightner, coffee only. Riley’s stomach was crying to him but he knew he couldn’t eat. Nothing would go down if he tried. The station, at this point, smelled like a locker room. They were coming down from the initial high of the brutal murders and then, in the same day, catching the killer. Everyone was catching his breath. Virtually everything had been done, and what hadn’t yet been done could wait. But Paul already knew that the physical evidence would tie up Burgos. He wanted to know more about the hideous poetry Burgos was reciting when describing the murders. He knew this wasn’t about guilt or innocence anymore.

It had been a song, as they’d suspected. And it hadn’t taken them long to find it. Burgos had been listening to the tape on his headphones before the questioning. The tape was amateur grade, bearing a makeshift label with the name of the musical group—“Torcher”—handwritten in bloodred ink in a thick Gothic font like calligraphy. The title of the tape—“Someone”—was written beneath it in the same manner.

The song with the relevant lyrics bore the same title, “Someone,” a song that lasted less than three minutes. It started slowly with an acoustic guitar playing single notes, but then all hell broke loose, violent guitars, thumping bass, incessant drumming, while the vocalist screamed the lyrics like machine-gun fire. If you closed your eyes and listened, you wouldn’t comprehend anything. But they had a copy of the lyrics, which they had found handwritten on a piece of paper in Terry Burgos’s bedroom.

The lyrics from the first verse of “Someone” described six murders, in more or less the precise manner that Burgos had committed them:

The lyrics, however sophomoric, were filled with rage. Riley imagined an outcast, rejected by women, probably by everyone. Terry Burgos likely would fit that bill. But Burgos hadn’t written the lyrics. And what was really bothering Riley were the biblical verses that Burgos had cited on the paper found in his basement. Six different passages. He’d read them all, thanks to a cop who had a King James Bible in his locker. All but one of them was from the Old Testament and could be attributed in some way to these acts of violence.

The book of Hosea said that for nonbelievers, God would “rend the caul of their heart”—or “open a heart once so cruel.” Romans wrote of lesbians being worthy of death, which corresponded with the “lesbian” in the song. Leviticus talked of burning a promiscuous woman to death, which could be loosely translated to being scalded with battery acid. Exodus referenced the infamous eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-tooth, limb-for-limb language for those who practice abortion—in the lyrics, a senior “now trim since she got rid of him” probably referred to a senior who’d had an abortion. The book of Kings suggested death to those who mocked a prophet. The biblical verse hadn’t mentioned anything about drowning, but presumably the “neighbor’s daughter” in the song had mocked the song’s author, who evidently considered himself some kind of prophet.

That left the final murder described:
Now it’s time, to say good-bye, to someone’s family, stick it right between those teeth and fire so happily.
This last murder in the first verse had a different quality in the song; the percussion and bass disappeared, and the singer had sung the lyrics a cappella to the tune of
The Mickey Mouse Club.

And Burgos had followed these lyrics. He had stuck a gun between Cassie Bentley’s teeth and fired a bullet through the back of her mouth. He had done so after beating her severely. The corresponding biblical passage, from Deuteronomy, had described a different act of violence—the stoning of a whore. The lyrics and the biblical passage weren’t compatible. Burgos had followed them both; he had stoned Cassie
and
shot her.

But Burgos had originally written down a different verse, not from Deuteronomy but from Leviticus, which had talked about adultery, and which called for death to both the adulterer and the adulteress. Why had Burgos changed biblical passages?

Riley didn’t know. It was just the first day of a long investigation. But he could already see his arguments forming. He would need to find discrepancies between the lyrics and Burgos’s actions. An insanity defense was inevitable—Burgos had killed at the direction of God—and Riley would need to show that Burgos hadn’t followed that direction faithfully.

A cop knocked on the door to the room and told them that Professor Albany was here. Riley had very much wanted to make the professor’s acquaintance. Albany owned the printing company where Burgos worked nights. And, more important, they had learned Albany had taught a class that both Cassie Bentley and Ellie Danzinger had attended.

Frankfort Albany walked into the room looking every bit the college professor in an off-white shirt, open at the collar, with a tweed sport coat, and slacks in desperate need of an ironing board. He wore his hair long and off his face. All he was missing was the pipe. His washed-out expression resembled those of many people Riley had seen this long day, people who had gone through a range of emotions.

They sat, Riley, the chief, Joel Lightner, and Professor Albany, around the desks with the tape recorder in the center. The professor looked around the table at each of them, as if he wanted to say something but didn’t know where to start. Ordinarily, Paul would break the tension, but he wanted to hear what Albany would say.

“I really—I just can’t believe this.” He reached into his jacket and removed a small metallic case, opened it up. Cigarettes. “Does anyone mind?”

“Not if you’re sharing,” the chief said.

The professor’s movements were tentative. He was shaken up, and falling back on ritual comforts, tapping the cigarette, flipping open the lighter, squinting into the fire as he lit up. He slid the case over to the chief, his eyes catching on the course materials sitting in front of Paul.

“Tell me about Terry Burgos,” Riley asked.

“I—I have to say I like Terry,” Albany said with a trace of apology. “He did his work without supervision and got it done. He was good at setting the artwork, careful with detail. He never left a job half finished. He kept a clean work space. He was—well, he was a loner. Even after he lost his day job at Mansbury, he wanted to continue working nights. I think he liked working alone. And since he got the work done, I had no reason to say no.”

That was an interesting point. Burgos had requested the night shift even when he had nothing to do during the day. Paul was working on the assumption that the prostitutes, at least, were abducted and murdered during the evening—that was when most streetwalkers plied their trade.

“What hours did he keep?” Lightner asked. “Burgos said he worked ‘whenever.”’

“That’s more or less correct. His hours were variable.” Albany crossed his leg. “We’d have overflow—work that didn’t get completed during the day—and we’d leave it for Terry. Sometimes it was two hours’ worth of work. Sometimes five.”

“Sometimes none?” Lightner asked.

Albany shook his head. “When is there ever
nothing
to do? No, there’s always something.”

“What kind of a job has variable hours?” Riley asked.

“A job,” Albany said testily, “where you’re trying to give someone a break. He needed the work, and he did a good job on the overflow. It worked out for both of us. Is that okay with you?”

“You have records of his time entries,” Riley said. “We’ll need them.”

Albany nodded absently.

“And no one else worked with him at the plant?”

“Correct. It was just Terry at night.”

“How did you know he entered his time correctly?”

“I—well, I didn‘t, I guess,” Albany conceded. “I trusted him.”

Paul noticed that Joel Lightner was watching Albany closely.

“What class did you teach with Ellie and Cassie?” Riley asked.

Albany nodded. Riley figured the professor was aware that Cassie Bentley and Ellie Danzinger were two of the victims. Everyone was, by now.

“It’s called ‘Violence Against Women in American Culture.’ We discuss the glorification of hostility toward women in pop culture. Movies, television, music.”

Violence against women in music. How appropriate, under the circumstances. Riley snapped to attention, as Lightner did the same.

“Wait a second.” Riley slid the paper with the song lyrics across the table to Albany. “Does that music look familiar to you?”

Albany looked at it for only a moment. “Of course. This is Tyler Skye’s song. ‘Someone.”’

“For God’s sake.” The chief leaned forward. “You
teach
this?”

Albany looked at the chief like he’d look at a student.
“Study
it, is a better description. Yes, of course. Can you think of a more appropriate song?”

“And who’s Tyler Skye?” Riley asked.

“The man—well, really, the boy who wrote these lyrics. He was a high school student. I mean, this is the anthem of the rejected boy, no?” When no one responded, Albany cleared his throat and explained. “Tyler Skye was a student who wrote this diatribe and posted it, one night, all over his school. They discovered he was the author and expelled him. A year later, he’s a high school dropout and the lead singer in a garage band called Torcher. And he committed these lyrics to song, obviously. Torcher was very big in the underground music scene on midwestern campuses. The lyrics aren’t particularly well written, but they are certainly edgy. That appeals to students, the controversy, the rebellion. That’s often more important than the substance.”

The professor looked around the decidedly hostile table, smoking his cigarette nervously. “Look, the point of the class was, these lyrics were harmful. Part of a larger problem about society’s view of women. I can’t imagine how Terry could have come away with anything different from our class.”

“Terry
took the class?” Riley sprang forward.

Albany’s eyes cast downward. “I let him sit in, yes. Terry—Terry wasn’t educated, but that didn’t mean he was dumb. He was—curious is a good word. I gave him many things to read and consider. He didn’t bother anyone. He sat in the back of the class and didn’t say a word. Until, that is—well, you know about Ellie.”