David Ellis - Eye of the Beholder

A painful body position, he knows, one they used occasionally in the Soviet Union to coerce the unwilling, to break the spirit through elongated periods of discomfort. But her pain is irrelevant to him. He had to leave her for extended periods and had to be sure she couldn’t move. She has, in essence, been in a forced coma since he took her from her apartment.

Shelly Trotter, Shelly Trotter.

He can see, now, that she would not have been able to act, notwithstanding the handcuffs. The GHB has worked well. Her head bobs, she groans but is unable to speak. The sweatpants he dressed her in are soiled from her bodily functions, the pungent odor fighting the antiseptic smell of the cleaning materials. Her curly hair is flat against her head. Her lips move but she doesn’t speak, a line of saliva falling from the corner of her mouth.

He unlocks the third set of cuffs, the ones that link the restraints on her wrists and ankles. Her body reacts, straightening out as best it can in the confined quarters. He slides her out of the locker. He will not remove the cuffs on her wrists and ankles. He debates, for a moment, whether he should give her a third dose of the paralyzing drug but decides against it.

He hears a noise, a faint echo in the hallway, the pitter-patter of footsteps on stairs. He stands quickly and freezes, controls his breathing, listening. He hears the creak of a door opening-the door at the end of the hallway.

He removes his gun and waits.

I FORCE MYSELF to a walk, a spirited but controlled gait, toward the last door in the hallway, the janitor’s room, where the bodies were found. I pass the other storage rooms, knowing he might be in any of them, waiting to ambush me. But I have to assume Shelly is in the janitor’s room. Any room, this time of year, with the school on vacation, would suit his purposes, but he’s been smart. He tried to mimic the lyrics of the song to make the recent murders look like a copycat. He wanted to frame Albany all along, and it was the professor, after all, who knew these lyrics better than anyone. He’d want everything to be the same.

I reach the final door quickly, realizing I have no plan and no time to formulate one. I turn the door’s lever and push it open, praying that I won’t be greeted with a rain of gunfire.

But he’s had plenty of chances to kill me.

I step into the room and a groan escapes my throat. Koslenko is squatting along the back wall against a locker, his gun trained against Shelly’s head. Shelly is barely conscious, her skin deathly pale, wearing a T-shirt covered with grime and badly stained gray sweats. My knees weaken but I manage to maintain my focus, forcing out the images of what she has gone through.

This is the chance I prayed for. And it’s only one chance. There is no rehearsal.

I force it to the surface, compel the corners of my mouth upward, expel a noise from my chest that sounds something like a chuckle.

“Okay, okay,” I say. “We have work to do, Leo. Work to do. You and me.”

Koslenko looks different. His hair has been shaved to give the impression of a heavily receded hairline, and the coloring is different, too-dirty blond. The glasses, too, but they don’t conceal those eyes, or the half-moon scar beneath. Next to him is a cane.

Smart disguise. The balding forehead especially. When combined with a limp and a cane, he puts at least ten years on himself.

It’s a good reminder for me. He might be insane, but he’s not stupid.

I look at Shelly, watch the movement of her body, the rise and fall of her chest. She’s alive. How close to dead, I don’t know.

But I can’t think about that. I can’t show the emotion that almost brings me to my knees, that makes me want to beg him to trade my life for hers. I would make that trade, I realize, in an instant. But Leo Koslenko cannot work with weakness or pleading.

Koslenko looks at me with a quizzical expression. “How-how?”

“How-did I know to come here? You know how, Leo.”

I’m keeping it vague, afraid that something too specific will pin me down. The problem is, I don’t know the depths of his psychosis. I don’t know if he hears voices. Does he see a tree and think it’s a spy dressed in bark?

Crazy, not dumb. But how crazy?

Regardless, right now he’s suspicious of me. I wait him out, like the answer’s obvious. Koslenko struggles with it.

“Natalia told me, Leo. What do you think?”

“Missus-Missus-Bentley? Missus-” Koslenko looks down, but not at Shelly. He is struggling with something internally. “Does she-like?”

Does she like?

“Not-ma-mad?” he asks.

Okay. That tells me something. He’s wondering if Natalia approves of what he’s done this week. He’s telling me that everything he’s done this week, he did alone-not at Natalia’s direction. “Mrs. Bentley,” he called her. Yes. That hasn’t been her name for years. But it was her name back when Cassie was murdered.

He hasn’t talked to Natalia this week. And that gives me some room.

“No, Leo, she’s not mad. You were just protecting Cassie.”

He looks up at me. He doesn’t say anything, but the look on his face reads pure anguish. This man, who has killed several people this week-and maybe some sixteen years ago-looks like he’s about to cry.

“Nobody knows Cassie killed Ellie Danzinger,” I say. “And I’m going to make sure it stays that way.”

Koslenko’s eyes cast downward. He looks like a kid who just found out his puppy died.

“So-scared,” he says. “So scared, so-”

CASSIE, so scared, trembling, crying at the kitchen table, taking Leo’s hand, I think I killed her-I think I killed Ellie, she says. It will be all right, he tells her. Mother, Mother, I have to call Mother. She comes, Mrs. Bentley, Natalia, they go upstairs, Leo stays at the kitchen table, looks out the window into the darkness, he likes the darkness better, he decides it will be all right, okay, everything will be okay. He volunteers, Nat accepts. See if Ellie’s dead, check on Ellie, see if she’s dead. If she isn‘t-if she isn’t-make her dead.

An address. He knows the name: Terry Burgos. He knows it because of the thing in court, bothering Ellie, following Ellie, they’ll find the body at Terry’s house, he’ll be the obvious suspect, Cassie will be safe.

Easy, so easy. He double-parks the car. The door is closed but unlocked. Ellie is lying on the bed, faceup, her eyes staring at the ceiling, her body cold and rigid. He carries her to the front door, looks out, no one there, into the car, drive to Terry’s house, same thing, dark, no one awake, carries the body to the back door of Terry’s house and runs back to the car.

Watch, she’s told him. Watch.

He moves the car, doubles back on foot. Doesn’t expect it the first night, but it happens, that night, near midnight, afigure, Terry, it’s Terry, Terry carrying a body in his backyard, between the house and the detached garage. Terry enters through the garage’s side door, then runs back to the house, comes back with blankets, a long bag.

Five minutes. Ten. Twenty. Forty. An hour.

Then the garage door opens, the Chevy truck backs out of the garage and leaves. He doesn’t know why, he doesn’t know what, he doesn’t know how. He doesn’t know where.

What is it? What has happened here? This man, Terry Burgos-what has he done with Ellie’s body? Leo had anticipated many outcomes but not this.

He reports to Natalia. He doesn’t know where Terry took her. Natalia is silent. She is thinking. She tells Leo nothing. He senses it then. He understands. Suddenly-of course-he understands. How did he not see this immediately?