Eye of the Beholder

And so there she was, safe in France, secure in the knowledge that a French national couldn’t be extradited.

Natalia Lake, I see now, was quite masterful throughout all of this. She had Koslenko move Ellie’s body to Burgos’s house, she cut a quiet deal for mutual silence with Professor Albany, and she got lucky, very lucky, when Burgos began a weeklong murder spree.

But Natalia Lake did more than just cover up a murder. She also ordered a murder, an order that Leo Koslenko obeyed, beating the poor girl beyond recognition and planting her, like Ellie, on Burgos’s back doorstep.

And then she had my boss, the county attorney, drop the charges on that murder so no one would take too close a look.

Cassie saved me, Burgos had said. He’d thought the final murder in the first verse meant he had to kill himself. That was what the lyrics suggested- stick it right between those teeth and fire so happily-and Tyler Skye had played it out that very way when he put a gun in his own mouth. But Burgos, clearly, didn’t want to kill himself. He delayed the move for two days. Maybe he was never going to do it. But then, suddenly, God was giving him a reprieve: Terry found a badly beaten corpse outside his back door, the same place God had left Ellie Danzinger. He couldn’t reconcile this development with Tyler Skye’s citation to the Leviticus passage, so he leafed through the Bible until he found a verse relating to stoning, which was the most apt way to describe what had been done to the woman on his back porch. He crossed out the Leviticus passage on his list and wrote in the one from Deuteronomy. And then, as if to keep consistent with Leviticus and the lyrics anyway, he put a bullet through the corpse’s mouth.

Like everyone else, Burgos thought that corpse lying on his back doorstep was Cassie. Why wouldn’t he? Even with the beaten, crushed face, there was the driver’s license and credit cards in her pants pocket belonging to Cassandra Bentley.

We didn’t stop at identification found on the victim, of course. A family ID is the minimum we do. And Natalia, of course-not her husband-made that identification at the morgue.

Nor did we stop there. With a beaten face like that, and no fingerprints in a database to match, you go to the obvious next step.

You pull the dental records.

When I woke up in the hospital that Saturday after we found Shelly, I put in a call to my dentist, Dr. Morse. He explained that, in 1989, most dentists didn’t have computerized or digitalized dental records. They simply had hard copies of the X rays sticking out of a pouch with a person’s name assigned to them.

Yes, he agreed, back in 1989, if someone broke into his office in the middle of the night and switched dental records from one pouch to another-say, swapping one half sister’s records with the other‘s-nobody would be the wiser. You might have to switch some labels around, but it would be easy, and no one would know.

Fred Ciancio, working his security post at the Sherwood Executive Center the week after the bodies were discovered, must have scratched his head when he saw the police march up to the dentist’s office for the records of Cassie Bentley. Did that have anything to do with Koslenko? he probably wondered.

Then, shortly after that time, he saw a photograph in the newspaper of that same man-Koslenko-standing in the background with an eye on Harland Bentley. He put Koslenko together with the Bentley family and he was probably pretty sure of what had happened. He called the reporter covering Burgos, Carolyn Pendry, but thought twice about it and clammed up. Carolyn finally gave up on Ciancio, and the whole thing stayed quiet.

This June, something brought it all back for Ciancio. Probably it was the special he saw, Pendry’s thing on television, expressing sympathy for Burgos. He managed to find Leo Koslenko and told him it was time for a second installment on the payoff. Somewhere along the line, he also called Carolyn’s daughter, Evelyn. Who knows? Maybe he was debating between coming clean and getting some extra retirement money. He must have given Evelyn some kind of a taste-mentioning the Sherwood Center, probably-but didn’t fully clue her in.

I wonder if Ciancio ever actually figured out the entire truth. Things must have looked hinky to him, but did he know exactly what had happened?

Koslenko, of course, had no intention of letting Ciancio continue breathing. He tortured him and got Evelyn’s name. He tortured Evelyn and got Brandon Mitchum’s name. Each of these people knew something that could point back to the truth.

The truth being that Cassie Bentley was never murdered. Instead, she got on a plane to Paris using Gwendolyn’s passport, while Gwendolyn suffered a brutal death before being cast off as her half sister Cassandra after the switch of the dental records.

Cassie Bentley pulls her robe tight, watching me. “What now?”

“Gwendolyn’s murder,” I say. “Your mother should have to answer for that.”

But the only way that happens, both of us realize, is if everyone learns about Cassie, living here in France under Gwendolyn’s name.

“I don’t approve of what Mother did.” Cassie brings a hand to her face. “I would have stopped her if I knew. But she did it for me, Mr. Riley. She knew the police would come straight to me after Ellie was killed. She knew I wouldn’t be able to withstand any questioning at all.” She flaps her arms. “But if I’m dead, no one looks for me.”

The same strategy Koslenko used when he put in a substitute for Shelly in her bathtub. If I behaved, he was telling me, she would live, too. Like Cassie lived.

I believe what she’s telling me. Nothing I’ve learned about Cassie Bentley makes me think she could have been part of a diabolical plot. She was kept in the house after Ellie’s death, like Koslenko told me, and then shipped off to Paris. She didn’t know they were going to fake her death. She didn’t know what was in store for Gwendolyn.

Gwendolyn, of course, was a natural choice. She didn’t have any real family or any real home; she bounced from continent to continent so she wouldn’t be missed. She looked like Cassie-they shared a father and their mothers were sisters-and her face was crushed, in any event. And Gwendolyn was probably a wild card, anyway. She couldn’t be counted on to play along in a cover-up. A wild card. She was the perfect choice. Two birds with one stoning.

“Your mother had nothing to do with Ciancio, or Evelyn Pendry, or any of the recent murders?” Koslenko already told me he acted alone, but I want to hear her answer.

She is emphatic, showing much more resolve. “Mr. Riley, she hasn’t talked to Leo in years. None of us has. After everything happened, she gave Leo enough money to live out his life, bought him a house in the city, and didn’t speak to him.”

Right. The police found a safe-deposit box for Koslenko with almost a million dollars in cash. Koslenko was off the reservation. He was acting alone. He was trying to protect the woman he loved, Cassie, from being discovered.

“Mother was in Tuscany, with friends, when Leo started killing. She had no idea until the police got hold of her in Italy. I had no idea. When you first came to see me at the lake, it was the first I’d heard of it.”

That makes sense. But then she and her mother talked, they got their stories straight, and they gave it to the cops and me the same way. They gave up Leo, they gave up Albany.

But, in the end, Cassie-as Gwendolyn-came clean, at least enough to spare Albany and Harland. She had probably figured there was nothing she could do to save Leo at that point; he was clearly responsible for the murders of Ciancio, Evelyn Pendry, and Amalia Calderone, plus the failed attempt on Brandon Mitchum. But she could save Harland and the professor. She and her mother had us pointed toward both of them, but, that last day, she marched into that parlor and gave up Cassie-herself. She explained who really killed Ellie, to her mother’s obvious surprise, and over her objection. She was trying to do the right thing while keeping her true identity out of the picture. She did the best she could. Her mother was willing to