David Ellis - Eye of the Beholder

A uniform, a beefy Irish guy named Brady, breaks away from a neighbor interview and approaches. “Hey, Chief. Hey, Ricki.”

McDermott stifles his preferred response, raises his eyebrows.

“Frederick Ciancio,” Brady says, flipping a notepad. “Sixty-two. Retired from a security gig, Bristol Security. Worked as a guard at Ensign Correctional before that.”

“Ensign. Huh.” Stoletti chews her gum with enthusiasm. Ensign Correctional is a max security prison on the west side of the county. “When did that end?”

Brady holds a look on Stoletti. A lot of men don’t like women who are taller than they are, and Stoletti, five-ten and physically fit, carries quite the profile. Major point in her favor, that she can handle herself physically. She brushes her bangs off her face. Another major score, she doesn’t color her hair, light brown, but with healthy streaks of gray.

“Neighbors tell me it was late seventies,” says Brady. “Said he worked security like twenty-five years after that.”

McDermott stores away that information. Prison guards are known to make both enemies and friends with the inmates. But twenty-five years off the job is a long time. “Multiple stab wounds?” he asks.

“Multiple is an understatement. My guess for a weapon is a Phillips screwdriver.” Brady nods to the crowd. “A neighbor stopped by when Ciancio was late for poker. His car was still in the garage, so he used the spare key he has to go in and look around. Found him in the bedroom.”

McDermott lets his eyes run over the neighborhood, still bathed in light at nearly six o‘clock on a June evening. There are cops who live up here, people who are required to stay within the municipal boundaries but want something as suburban-read low crime-as possible. The street is humble, mostly bungalows with quarter-acre lots and single-car garages, but it could be plucked out of any number of suburbs. A nice, quiet place.

“Is the M.E. here?” Stoletti asks.

Brady shakes his head no. “But it looks like he died last night. Less than twenty-four hours, I’d say.”

McDermott glances at Brady but lets it go. The uniforms are always looking to impress.

“Good job, Brady,” he says. He ducks under the crime-scene tape, Stoletti following, and enters the home.

There is a burglar alarm pad on the ground floor, which makes sense for a former security guard. “Need to see if the alarm company got called,” he says to Stoletti. Occasionally, intruders will come in on an alarmed house and force the homeowner to give up the password. If that were the case, at least they could pinpoint a time of death.

Another uniform in the kitchen, guy named Abrams who is standing with a County Attorney Technical Unit member, tells McDermott that the back door lock was picked. “And the alarm company hasn’t gotten a call from this house for over a year,” he tells McDermott.

“Good job, Ronnie.” Saved him a phone call. Three possibilities. One is that Ciancio didn’t use his alarm-not likely for someone who worked security, in one form or another, for most of his life. Second, the offender knew the alarm’s password. Third, the offender broke in when the alarm was turned off-middle of the day, for example, while Ciancio was in the house but unsuspecting-then the offender surprised him later, probably in the middle of the night; the alarm wouldn’t matter because he was already in the house. But that would mean the offender got the alarm password out of Ciancio before he killed him, because he must have deactivated it before leaving.

The CAT unit is dusting for prints on the staircase as McDermott and Stoletti climb. McDermottreminds the technician to check the alarm pads. The stairs are carpeted in thick, white industrial. Splotches of the carpet have been removed on several steps.

McDermott feels it, like always, the flutter of his heartbeat as he approaches the scene, even as he reminds himself: The victim is an elderly male, dead from multiple stab wounds and a broken neck. Not his thirty-four-year-old wife, his high school sweetheart. Not Joyce, splayed about the floor, dead from a single gunshot wound.

The bedroom is right at the top of the stairs. The scene looks contained to the bed. Fred Ciancio is lying on his back, mouth and eyes open. He is wearing a pajama top, a solid white that has now been peppered with dark stains from where the incisions were made around his body. The deepest, most obvious is right in the Adam’s apple. His head rests on the pillow. The bedspread is still gathered around his ankles. The smell of bodily fluids, including urine and feces, is made worse by the thick air coming through the open windows. Someone probably thought it would help to air it out, but when there’s humidity it makes it worse.

“I counted twenty-two,” says a CAT technician named Soporro, emerging from the bathroom. “Twenty-two wounds. Fatal one in the neck.”

But the other stabbings came first, before he died. Too much blood spilled out of too many holes. If the wounds had been postmortem, his heart would not have pumped blood and little would have escaped from the body, even due to gravity. McDermott gets up close to the body, looks at some of the wounds that aren’t covered by the pajama top, in the upper chest and shoulder. Small, circular punctures.

A Phillips screwdriver, the uniform had thought.

The wounds are shallow, enough to penetrate the skin but not by much.

“He was tortured,” McDermott mumbles.

“Mike.” A uniform calls to him from the hallway. “We found the weapon.”

THE STOMACHACHES ARE BACK. The acid penetrates the stomach walls, sets fire to the lining. Like sandpaper on a raw wound.

No more. No more. He bites his lip and counts it out, one, two, one-two, one-two. It’s temporary. A flash of lightning. The question is how long before it returns.

Leo looks at himself in the rearview mirror of his car. He runs his finger over the scar beneath his eye, the half-moon, the only menacing feature on an otherwise long, soft, pockmarked face.

Soft. That’s what they think of me. Soft like a feather. Soft like a kitten.

He jumps as a man in uniform brushes the driver‘s-side window. Leo tucks his chin into his chest, pretends to look in the glove compartment-an excuse to turn to his right to see if they have someone on the other side of the car, too. His left foot taps softly along the carpet in the footwell, touching the handgun, edging it closer so he can reach it more easily if necessary.

But, so far, the right flank is clean. He holds his breath and counts backward from twenty.

Nineteen… eighteen…

The man-in-uniform is putting a ticket on a windshield, two cars ahead. Did he look back at Leo? Did he look past Leo, at someone behind him?

Leo turns in his seat, cranes his neck to look behind him. A blur of pedestrians and traffic.

No one there.

Leo turns back just as Paul Riley emerges from the building in a tuxedo, only twenty-five minutes after he arrived. Riley is walking with another man. Is that-is that-? Could that-is that-?

The cop? Lightner?

Right. Joel Lightner.

Riley looks annoyed, arguing with Lightner, as he raises his hand for a cab.

Joel Lightner. Lightner, Joel.

Leo looks back at the rearview mirror. Watch for the diversion, that’s when they’d do it, they’d wait until he sees Riley, when he’s looking forward, and then come for him, look right, look left, nobody, no one, they haven’t found him yet, not yet.

Riley and Lightner.

Leo starts his car. He tries on a smile for size, but it doesn’t work, it doesn’t fit. He puts the car into gear as Riley and Lightner jump in a cab.

McDERMOTT EMERGES from the house an hour later. He sucks in the warm, clean air and avoids eye contact with a couple of reporters huddling near the police tape.