Eye of the Beholder

Riley didn’t think so, but there’d be time for that.

Riley nodded toward the list of verses he’d put in front of Albany. “The last murder,” Riley said. “Burgos wrote down something from Leviticus, then crossed it out and wrote in something from Deuteronomy.”

Albany took a moment to recover, then looked over the list and slowly nodded. “Tyler Skye had cited Leviticus as the justification for that murder. Death to those who commit adultery.”

“What about Deuteronomy?”

Albany shook his head. “I don’t know. Tyler Skye didn’t mention Deuteronomy here. What does that passage say?”

Riley told him-it mentioned the stoning of a whore.

But Albany didn’t know. “Tyler didn’t cite that. Stoning? No, that’s not what Tyler meant.”

“Right,” Riley agreed. “ ‘Stick it right between those teeth and fire so happily.’ He’s not talking about stoning. He’s talking about shooting someone. And he said that came from Leviticus?”

Albany nodded. “Leviticus doesn’t mention shooting per se, of course. Just death to those who commit adultery. But Skye definitely meant the use of a gun. We know that because of what Tyler Skye did, ultimately.”

Riley stared at him. Albany clearly held the room’s attention.

The professor cleared his throat. “About a year ago, Tyler Skye killed himself. He shot himself in the mouth.”

Stick it right between those teeth and fire so happily.

“Apparently, his girlfriend left him because of his infidelity.”

The others in the room reacted with appropriate disdain. But Riley was focused. Tyler Skye, purportedly justifying his lyrics through the Leviticus passage, had committed suicide, following the lyrics to the letter-putting the gun between those teeth, meaning his teeth.

But Burgos hadn’t followed that example. He had beaten Cassie with a stone, or some similar object, and introduced a new passage from Deuteronomy to justify it. And then he had fired the bullet in her mouth-but had not turned the gun on himself.

He hadn’t been faithful to the lyrics. It was a positive development, no doubt, for the prosecution. But it also raised a question.

Why? Why had Burgos decided to improvise, to introduce a new biblical passage never cited by Tyler Skye or suggested by his lyrics?

“Can’t say I’m sorry to see Mr. Skye go,” Chief Clark muttered.

“Well, maybe you should be,” Albany replied. “Torcher has sold twice as many records since Skye’s death. Now,” he added ominously, “he’s a legend. He has a cult following.”

“How many people we talking about?” Chief Clark asked, his eyes downcast. “How many psychos we got running around here, waiting to act out these lyrics?”

“I would say Torcher has thousands of listeners. Not tens of thousands.”

Paul frowned, not at Albany’s estimation, but at the chief’s acknowledgment in his question. He was suggesting what was inescapable now: Terry Burgos had been following the lyrics to a song, or at least pretending to. And he’d matched the lyrics to verses in the Bible.

Terry Burgos killed those girls because God told him to.

He could envision the defense now. Burgos was going to claim that the lyrics were preaching God’s word-burning and beating and torturing young women for various sins. He had interpreted these asinine song lyrics as a coded directive from the Almighty Himself. Tyler Skye, in his twisted way, had mimicked biblical passages, and Burgos had taken them as literal direction.

That would be a problem. It made the job more difficult. It would be a nice, simple story for the jury to understand, without fancy terminology like psychosis and sociopathology. The guy thought the song was a call to him and he acted on it. He must be crazy. Could you imagine anyone doing this who wasn’t insane?

They worked on Albany for a while longer. But Paul was no longer listening. There was no doubt that Terry Burgos committed the crimes. The evidence, less than a day into it, was overwhelming, and he’d more or less admitted it. This was no longer about guilt. This was about insanity. If the state still used the modified ALI definition of insanity, then Burgos had to prove two things: that he was suffering from a mental defect at the time he committed the killings, and that he didn’t understand that he was committing a crime.

But Paul knew, already, that he could find discrepancies between these acts and the lyrics of the songs. That would be key to showing that, if Burgos thought he was following the word of God-or the word of the prophet Tyler Skye-he hadn’t done a very good job. He already had more than one discrepancy-Burgos had introduced a new biblical passage and he hadn’t killed himself, like he was supposed to. And Burgos had engaged in sexual intercourse with each of the women-the prostitutes before their death, the students postmortem-and there was nothing in the Bible about that. He had committed these crimes during summer break, before the start of summer school, understanding that once summer school started the bodies would be found. He knew, in other words, that what he was doing was a crime, so he was doing it quickly before someone would find the bodies. They also knew that the four prostitutes had worked different parts of the city, which suggested that Burgos was smart enough not to return to the same place. Again, this demonstrated his appreciation that he was breaking the law, and not wanting to get caught.

And Paul was just getting started. By the time this went to trial, he’d punch enough holes in Burgos’s conformity to the lyrics, and to the Bible, to sink a ship. And he’d have plenty of evidence to show that Burgos knew that what he was doing was illegal.

Professor Albany was in tears a half hour later. Paul didn’t blame the guy for what happened, but he didn’t have the time or energy to care. There was only one person he cared about now, only one person he would care about for the next nine months.

Terry Burgos, he was sure, didn’t stand a chance.

June 5, 1997

Deathwatch

Being parents was everything to us. Everything that was good and true in our life centered around Cassie. This man-this monster-has taken away our life. He has taken our daughter, our dreams, everything that a parent has.

– Harland Bentley, in a statement to the Daily Watch, June 29, 1989

This man deserves what his victims received. This man deserves death.