David Ellis - Eye of the Beholder

Right. But they don’t have proof that Cassie was pregnant, and they don’t have proof Harland Bentley was stepping out with Ellie Danzinger.

Only one way to find out. He’s supposed to see Natalia Lake Bentley, who is returning from vacation tomorrow morning early. And they have Harland Bentley at ten.

“We’ll need to add the professor to our social calendar tomorrow,” he says.

McDERMOTT MAKES it back to the station after leaving the hospital. Grace is already asleep when he calls. His mother says she had a good night. It’s only the third night since Joyce died that McDermott hasn’t put her to bed and read to her. He misses it. It’s part of his pact with her.

What would he do without his mother, Grace’s gramma? A nanny on a cop’s salary would almost break him. His mother, seventy-four next month, is the one now holding this together. She’s healthy as a horse, but he can see she’s slowing down. He thinks about it every day. What would happen to Grace without her?

He shakes away the thought. He pushes out the memory of Joyce lying dead on the floor, the bathroom floor and rug soaked with her blood. He turns from the sight of Grace, huddled in the bathtub, her eyes shut, hands over her ears.

He pretends he didn’t say those things to Joyce, the night before her death.

Joyce was sick, and it had become too much for a husband who worked ten-hour days. Worse yet, there was Grace. If something had happened to her under Joyce’s watch, he’d never forgive himself. Joyce loved Grace more than life, but that wasn’t the point. Sickness was sickness. You can love your daughter with all your heart, but what good does that do if you’ve locked yourself upstairs while your three-year-old daughter is downstairs, wailing for her mommy?

That’s when he’d made the decision, after arriving home late from a double homicide, after gathering his hungry, soiled daughter in his arms as he searched the house for his wife, his heart rattling against his chest in anger and terror with such fury that he could hardly push the calls to his wife out of his lungs. He found her in the spare bedroom, in the corner, wrapped in a ball, weeping quietly. She’d lost track of time, hadn’t any sense of whether Grace had eaten dinner or whether she’d had a nap. She was losing control.

It was time-past time-to institutionalize her. To get some rest, as he put it to her later that night.

He’d consulted an attorney the week earlier. Involuntary commitment was an option. But he wanted so badly for Joyce to agree with him. He wanted her to feel like part of a solution, not a prisoner being locked up. Just give it a try, he pleaded. It’s nothing permanent. The point, he emphasized, was to get her full-time attention and get her on the road to recovery.

We’ll make it through this, he promised.

That was a Thursday night. They talked about the weekend. She had reluctantly agreed. They would do it that weekend.

Why had he given her advance warning?

Why had he left for work on Friday?

He had rationalizations for that one, too: The double homicide he was working. The fact that Joyce looked great-fresh, alert, positive-that Friday morning, seemed to be having one of her good days. Because they weren’t all bad; it wasn’t every day. She was up and down. That morning, he was sure of it, she was up.

He was sure.

I’m fine, she’d said, placing a hand gently on his chest. Like you said - think about the future. This is the right move for us.

Go, she’d said. You can help me pack when you get home.

Eight, ten hours, and he’d be back home, helping Joyce pack a bag for what, hopefully, would be a short stay at the Pearlwood Center. It was really only seven. He’d left work early.

Seven hours, when it all came apart.

“We’ll catch a break tonight,” Stoletti tells him as she plays on her computer.

“What? Oh.” McDermott sighs. She’s referring to the fingerprints that were found on the door to Brandon Mitchum’s apartment. Until they hear back from the lab, there’s not much to do, and it’s no time to rehash the past, so he busies himself with the reports from the Burgos file.

Burgos is not his case, of course, and it’s been solved. His job is to catch the current offender. But there’s no denying a connection. Something was missed. He knows it. And he has to figure it out fast, because fast is a good description of how the offender is moving. Sunday was Ciancio. Monday was Amalia Calderone. Tuesday was Evelyn Pendry. Today, he took his shot at Brandon Mitchum.

McDermott rubs his eyes, finishes off his second cup of coffee and goes for another, his eyes heavy but his body motoring on the caffeine. God, the energy he used to have, as a young cop, working an overnight shift, the thrill he felt when he cruised some of the scariest of neighborhoods. It felt clearer to him then, more tangible, the front lines. Now he’s playing catch-up, solving crimes already committed instead of preventing them. He likes the puzzle, no doubt. But the truth is, most crimes aren’t that hard to solve. Motives usually show themselves almost immediately. Canvass the neighborhood, check the vic’s background, work the forensics, and nine times out of ten, you’re done. And in the end, you don’t bring the vie back, you just put away the offender.

Maybe that’s why, whatever the pressure he may feel, he’s enjoying this case. A chance to prevent, to stop this offender from killing again.

He feels sure that this is an offender covering his tracks. And what, precisely, he’s covering is contained somewhere in these files.

He looks back over the notes he’s made on Burgos. He noted details on times, places, and came up with a clear pattern. There were the hookers, there was Ellie, and there was Cassie. The hookers lined up nice and neat. They had a little bit of information on Ellie and basically nothing on Cassie.

One: The hookers’ disappearances could be pinpointed to particular nights and times, and at least general locations. Two of the hookers were seen getting into a blue Chevy Suburban, and the other two left fingerprints in that same vehicle, belonging to Terry Burgos. Ellie Danzinger’s house was forcibly entered, and the action took place in her bedroom, literally on her bed. Her murder can be pinpointed, circumstantially, to the first night of the murders, a Sunday.

Not so with Cassie. They didn’t know when, or where, Cassie disappeared. They only know she was the last one murdered. And they know there was a two-day break between the last hooker’s death and Cassie’s death.

Two: The hookers were raped before Burgos killed them. Ellie and Cassie were raped postmortem.

Three: Professor Frankfort Albany knew both of the girls. He didn’t know the prostitutes.

Two -the sex thing-was probably not a big deal. Hookers let you have sex with them, that’s the whole point. Nice college girls like Cassie and Ellie-they probably wouldn’t look twice at a guy like Burgos. He’d have to kill them first.

He sits back in his chair and lets it work out in his mind. Let it all out, see what comes back. Usually works for him.

Burgos left bread crumbs all the way to his door, Riley said. They found him before they even began to investigate. Sure, that happens all the time. First place you look, you find your offender. Who wants to make work for themselves? The guy’s right there. He confesses. His basement looks like he was conducting a seminar on torture murders. Don’t make it more complicated.

He remembers what he read about Ellie Danzinger. She’d been bludgeoned in her bed, but then she was left there, her head hanging over the side. The M.E. figured, based on the volume of blood that dripped to the carpet, that it had been at least sixty minutes that Ellie lay there before she was moved to Burgos’s garage, where he removed her dead heart from her corpse.