David Ellis - Eye of the Beholder

“You need a key,” he said.

“Do you have a key?”

“When I worked there, I had keys to all the buildings.”

Paul held his breath. This was one of those moments. In an interrogation, you were always looking for the breakthrough. Sometimes, it came remarkably easily. Otherwise, it was a game, where any number of questions could potentially open the floodgates. The interrogator’s job was to poke around the dam, look for the hole.

Burgos had ducked the question.

“I mean now,” Lightner said. “Do you still have keys?”

“I had to return them.”

Ducking again. Yes, he had returned the keys. But had he made a copy?

The assumption-the only cautious assumption that could be made-was that Burgos had made copies of every key to the Mansbury facility. So the dean, Janet Scotland, had canceled classes indefinitely and declared all school areas off-limits, while law enforcement scoured every single nook and cranny of every facility to ensure there were no more dead bodies. They had the whole school on lockdown; students there for summer school, which had been scheduled to begin that day, were confined to their quarters, with police guarding every residence hall. Between the university campus and the printing company where Burgos worked part-time, almost the entire police department was searching for bodies and evidence.

Lightner apparently decided not to press the issue of the keys. He saw, as they all did, that Burgos was sensitive to it. He had decided to tread lightly for now. He asked about what Burgos had been doing, and where, going back the last two weeks. The medical examiner had been confident that the murders had all happened within two weeks, maximum. That worked out to roughly a victim every other day, at the least, and possibly one every day.

The police had recovered the driver’s licenses of all six women, by this point, from a dresser in Burgos’s bedroom. So the names were known, and they had been run for sheets. There were the students, Ellie Danzinger and Cassie Bentley, and then there were four other women who were not enrolled in Mansbury, each of whom had been picked up at least once for solicitation, which was a nice legal term for prostitution. Two students and four hookers.

Officers were already fanning out to find the victims’ friends so that a time line could be set. It was always harder to pinpoint when prostitutes went missing because often the traditional sources-employers, parents, spouses-were absent. Still, it could probably be done, most likely through their landlords, if they had a regular place to stay. It would have been nice to know, before questioning the suspect, when exactly these women went missing. Then the questions on Burgos’s alibi could be framed with more precision.

But there wasn’t time for that now. Burgos could lawyer up at any time, and it seemed abundantly clear that an attorney would muzzle him. So Joel had to go back two weeks and ask about each day.

A pattern emerged during this line of questioning, as it would with most people’s lives. Terry Burgos had no day job at this point, since he had been fired from Mansbury, but he worked every night, Monday through Friday, at the printing plant owned by Professor Frank Albany.

“Who works with you there at the printing plant, Terry?”

“Usually, just me-at night.” He wiggled the empty Coke can, then belched and giggled.

“This is our mass murderer?” asked one of the prosecutors in the room with Paul.

“What hours do you work?” Lightner asked.

“Whatever.” Burgos shrugged.

“What does ‘Whatever’ mean, Terry?”

“Whatever they need. Usually, I start at six. Then I go to whenever.”

When pressed by Lightner, however, the suspect could not be specific on the recent hours he’d worked at the plant. That would be easy enough to find, and it was critical information.

As for daytime over the last two weeks, Burgos was even less forthcoming. Stayed in the house a lot, sometimes went for a drive in the country in his truck, but he wouldn’t be pinned down on any particular thing on any particular day.

“How do you record being at the printing plant?” Joel asked, changing the subject back. A common tactic in interrogations. Return to something uncomfortable and watch the reaction. “When you work the night shift, Terry, do you sign in or punch a clock?”

“I sign in.” Burgos wiggled in his seat. A little claustrophobia, maybe hunger, was setting in.

“So it’s like an honor system, right, Terry? If you signed in, then left, no one would know?” Joel shrugged his shoulders. “I mean, you told me no one else worked nights but you.”

“Yeah. I guess I could do that,” he agreed, a little more readily than Paul would have expected.

Riley looked at his watch. It was twenty past two. “Give him his food,” he said to the chief. A few moments later, the officer stepped in with the bags of food he’d kept in an oven in the department’s lunchroom.

They needed a segue. Joel seemed to sense it and came out of the room. He entered the observation room, sighed, and rolled his head. “He’s not an idiot,” he said to Riley. “He knows what to admit and where he can squirm. The guy has no commitments during the day, and he works alone at that plant at night.”

Riley looked around the room. “Any thoughts?”

There were plenty, from the various prosecutors and detectives. Everyone wanted a part of this thing. Strong-arm him. Accuse him. Make him think he’s not a suspect. Ask for his help. All of those positions could make sense.

But all Riley could think was, this guy had been sitting in po lice custody going on two hours and he hadn’t demanded an explanation of why he was being held. So much of this, in the end, was going with your gut.

Riley went to the grouping of the photographs of the six victims. There were over a dozen of each one, from various angles and distances. “Get me a new folder,” he said to no one in particular. In the meantime, he selected a single photo of each victim, cutting down the number of photos from over seventy to just six. Riley placed the six shots into the new folder. He looked at them a moment, then removed the photograph of the first victim, Ellie Danzinger.

That left five photos, one each of victims two through six.

Riley had another thought and rearranged the photos, so they were not in the order in which they had been lined up on the floor.

“Show him these,” he told Joel. “While he’s eating.”

“Okay.”

“Make a note of the order they’re in currently,” Paul ordered. Lightner complied, with the entire room as witnesses, scribbling down the order on a notepad.

“They’re out of order,” Joel noted, but then he looked at Riley and understood. “And we’re leaving Ellie out of it?”

“Right.”

“I like that.” Joel used the bathroom while Riley and the others watched Terry Burgos eat his tacos. Burgos did so with precision, pouring a bit of hot sauce and scooping a small amount of guacamole for each bite.

Joel walked in with the file of photographs and opened it up for Burgos to see. But the suspect was still enjoying his food. So Joel got out of his seat and walked over to the suspect. “What do you think about those, Terry?”

Burgos put down his food and his fresh, sweaty Coke. He wiped his hands with a napkin and spread out the five photos, leaned in close for a good look. His face showed neither horror nor recognition. The word that came to Riley’s mind was familiarity. He fixed on each one, first carefully wiping his hands with the napkin and then tracing his fingers over the dead corpses featured in the eight-by-ten glossies. He mumbled to himself but nothing audible. He held a finger in the air, still murmuring, then lightly touched each photo. Joel Lightner was watching the suspect closely but knew better than to start the conversation. Not yet.