David Ellis - Eye of the Beholder

The interior of the house on the main floor was relatively undisturbed. Some antique furniture, dilapidated tile flooring, a fairly well-kept, humble presentation.

Riley held his breath and took the carpeted basement stairs down, nonetheless noticing the smell first. To the untrained nose, it smelled like sewage more than anything else. Most people, when murdered, lose control of bowel functions and soil themselves. There were no bodies down here, but Lightner had said there was no doubt that the murders happened in the basement.

He was right.

The basement was not furnished, a concrete floor with a small workout area, with a weight bench and a barbell with modest weights gathering cobwebs. A dartboard hung precariously on one wall next to a target for a BB gun. The room as a whole was probably poorly lit, but the police had installed high-powered lighting, leaving the technicians to work in an odd glow.

Riley turned to the back of the basement, where Burgos had a small workshop-a power saw and some hand tools and saw-horses. The floor was spotted and dirty. Bloodstains, most likely that Burgos had attempted to wipe clean. A number of technicians were gathering hairs with tweezers, placing other items in paper evidence bags near the workshop area, where it appeared the murders had occurred.

Riley walked up to the small workbench and sucked in his breath. Resting on the bench was an ordinary kitchen knife, a good five- or six-inch blade, covered with dried blood and other particulate. The first two victims, Elisha Danzinger and an unidentified girl, had been treated to that weapon. Next to the knife was a handsaw, its blade similarly covered in blood, other bodily fluids, and what appeared to be bone. That was the weapon he’d used to dismember the fourth victim.

A freestanding bathtub rested in one corner, looking like something plucked from a garbage dump, with significant corrosion inside. Riley had no doubt that this was where Burgos had scalded the one victim with acid. Sitting on top of a nearby washing machine was a car battery and a glass vial.

Four down, two to go.

Riley already knew that upstairs, in the master bathroom, police had found hairs in the drain of the bathtub, which was presumably where one of the victims had been drowned. And in the garage, they had uncovered a single bullet and a.32-caliber handgun-presumably the gun used to shoot Cassie Bentley through the back of the mouth, either before or after Burgos had beaten her almost beyond recognition.

That covered them all. The guy hadn’t gone to great lengths- any lengths-to cover this up. He’d left the murder weapons in full view. He’d left trace evidence of the victims in his basement, car, and garage. He’d left the victims’ identification-purses, driver’s licenses, clothes-in a garbage bag in his bedroom. Yes, he’d confined the murders to his property, or so it appeared at first blush, but otherwise Terry Burgos had made little attempt to clean up or discard his weapons.

On the workbench, resting next to the knife and handsaw, was a King James Bible, with bloody fingerprints along the pages. A single sheet of paper, tacked to the poster board on the wall behind the workbench, listed a number of passages from the Bible, chapter and verse. He leaned over the bench to get a close look at the sheet, which was written in red ballpoint pen. At the top, set apart, was a verse from Jeremiah 48:10:

Cursed be he that doeth the work of the LORD deceitfully, and cursed be he that keepeth back his sword from blood.

Beneath this verse, descending down the page with numbers next to them, were other biblical passages, by citation only:

1. Hosea 13:4-8

2. Romans 1:24-32

3. Leviticus 21:9

4. Exodus 21:22-25

5. 2 Kings 2:23-24

6. Deuteronomy 22:20-21

In the last of the six citations, a reference to Leviticus had been scratched out in favor of a passage from Deuteronomy. The edit had been done with a thin black Magic Marker.

Riley let out his breath. Six girls dead, six verses from the Bible.

Okay. Enough. The crime scene wasn’t his specialty, he’d just wanted a taste. Riley appreciated the fresh air when he stepped outside again. He found Lightner near the garage. Lightner’s body language suggested a fully charged cop working the biggest case of his career, but his eyes showed something dark and evil. They had just seen two gruesome crime scenes. Now it was time to connect them.

“Let’s go get a confession,” Riley said to him.

1:17 P.M.

PAUL RILEY nursed a cup of water and watched the suspect through a one-way mirror in the observation room. You learned more from your eyes than you ever did from your ears. Innocent people were nervous in custody. Guilty people often weren’t.

Terry Burgos was sitting alone in an interrogation room, wearing headphones he’d been allowed to bring, moving his head and tapping his foot to the beat, sometimes playing drums on the small table in front of him. The guy looked the Mediterranean part, short, beefy in the chest and torso, dark around the eyes, lots of thick, curly dark hair. Had a baseball cap pulled down and appeared to be humming to himself. He had drunk two cans of Coca-Cola and gone to the bathroom once. Had not requested a lawyer and had not received Miranda warnings.

Burgos had sat idle in the room for over an hour. Riley had wanted time for the police to gather whatever information they could before questioning the suspect. That, and he wanted Burgos hungry for lunch. Riley had hoped for more time, but there was no way anyone was letting go of Burgos, and there was only so long you could hold someone and keep lawyers away. Everyone, soon enough, was going to know about Terry Burgos, and it wouldn’t take long for an attorney of some kind or another to be knocking on the door.

Various cops and prosecutors came in and out of the observation room, peering in on the suspect with morbid curiosity. There was a palpable intensity in the police station because they knew they had their man, and it was the biggest thing this town had ever seen.

Burgos did not have a clean sheet. Two years earlier, he’d been arrested on suspicion of battery of a young woman, but it ended in a nolle prosequi, meaning the charges were dropped. Paul assumed the woman had failed to show for the hearing. Last year, he had been charged with sexual assault, but the case had been pleaded down to a misdemeanor battery, and he hadn’t done any time.

Elisha Danzinger had gone to the police to swear out a complaint against Terry Burgos in November of the previous year, 1988. She had alleged that Burgos, at the time a part-time handyman at Mansbury, had been following her around the campus, making threatening comments and generally making her feel uncomfortable. The police had brought Burgos in but hadn’t charged him. There was nothing on which they could charge him. Paul knew, from the Mansbury staff, that this past January Ellie had gotten an order of protection against Burgos, a civil action not contained in the police file, which had prohibited Burgos from coming within five hundred feet of her.

Burgos was age thirty-six, lived alone, and had worked two jobs. The first was a part-timer for Mansbury until he was fired this February, primarily landscaping but occasional cleaning assignments as well. For his second job, which he still held, he worked in an off-campus printing company owned by Mansbury College professor Frankfort Albany.

Terry Burgos, by all accounts, was moderately intelligent, if undereducated, and introverted; didn’t get an A plus for hygiene; didn’t complain much; and seemed generally indifferent to life. The unconfirmed word was he’d had a difficult childhood growing up in Marion Park, spousal abuse charges between his parents, and very poor school performance, ending short of a high school diploma.