Riley thought about that. A handyman. Keys to buildings like this auditorium. Knowledge of the school schedule. “Ellie’s the one, her heart was ripped out? The first one?”
They all nodded.
“So you know this guy? This handyman?”
“His name is Terry Burgos,” Monk said. “I have his home address right here.”
Riley looked at Lightner. Did he really need to say the words?
“I’m taking a couple cars with me,” said Lightner.
“Wait,” Riley said. “I need a phone. And someone find me one of the ACAS. We’re not taking any chances. Surround the house right now. If you can get his consent for a search, then go in. Otherwise, freeze the situation until I say so.”
Lightner shot Riley a look. Cops had all kinds of ways of obtaining consent, or saying they did after the fact.
“We’re not fucking this search up, Detective,” Riley said. “Are we clear?”
Riley left the cops and found an assistant county attorney, sending her off to a judge for a warrant. Then he found a phone in the school’s administrative office and dialed the number for his boss, County Attorney Ed Mullaney. “You’ll need to call Harland Bentley,” Riley told him. He looked out the window at a news copter overhead. “If he hasn’t already heard.”
2
12:35 P.M.
BY THE TIME Paul Riley pulled up to Terry Burgos’s house, the Marion Park Police Department had been there for an hour. Burgos had answered Detective Joel Lightner’s knock at the door and had not resisted when Lightner had asked him to wait on the front porch while an assistant county attorney obtained a warrant to search his home.
A news copter hovered overhead. Reporters were lining the po lice tape. The neighbors were out, some of them dressed for work, others in robes, clutching their small children, as they looked on. The news had spread naturally. A killer lived at 526 Rosemary Lane.
The house was nondescript, one of a series of bungalows where the “townies” lived just west of campus. The police were everywhere, looking for trace evidence and footprints in the dirt out back, scanning the garage, where some blood and hair had been found, and working on Burgos’s Chevy Suburban parked in the driveway.
Burgos had been taken to police headquarters, where he would be questioned. Riley wanted to be there, but he wanted a look at the house first. He’d already had a preview. The master bathroom, garage, and truck held some obvious promise, but most of what they needed to know was in the basement.
His stomach was swimming, but he had to keep his composure. This was his case. Everyone would follow his lead. He nodded to Lightner, who was on his way to the garage. He was going to wait for Riley before heading back to the station, but the instructions had been clear enough to the uniforms taking Burgos into custody: No one talked to Terry Burgos until Riley said so.
Riley followed the path of rocks up to the house. The yard had been neglected, brown spots littering the dry lawn. The screen door, which had seen better days, had been removed by one of the cops, leaving the front door, which was propped open by a rock from the front steps.
The interior of the house on the main floor was relatively undisturbed. Some antique furniture, dilapidated tile flooring, a fairly well-kept, humble presentation.
Riley held his breath and took the carpeted basement stairs down, nonetheless noticing the smell first. To the untrained nose, it smelled like sewage more than anything else. Most people, when murdered, lose control of bowel functions and soil themselves. There were no bodies down here, but Lightner had said there was no doubt that the murders happened in the basement.
He was right.
The basement was not furnished, a concrete floor with a small workout area, with a weight bench and a barbell with modest weights gathering cobwebs. A dartboard hung precariously on one wall next to a target for a BB gun. The room as a whole was probably poorly lit, but the police had installed high-powered lighting, leaving the technicians to work in an odd glow.
Riley turned to the back of the basement, where Burgos had a small workshop-a power saw and some hand tools and saw-horses. The floor was spotted and dirty. Bloodstains, most likely that Burgos had attempted to wipe clean. A number of technicians were gathering hairs with tweezers, placing other items in paper evidence bags near the workshop area, where it appeared the murders had occurred.
Riley walked up to the small workbench and sucked in his breath. Resting on the bench was an ordinary kitchen knife, a good five- or six-inch blade, covered with dried blood and other particulate. The first two victims, Elisha Danzinger and an unidentified girl, had been treated to that weapon. Next to the knife was a handsaw, its blade similarly covered in blood, other bodily fluids, and what appeared to be bone. That was the weapon he’d used to dismember the fourth victim.
A freestanding bathtub rested in one corner, looking like something plucked from a garbage dump, with significant corrosion inside. Riley had no doubt that this was where Burgos had scalded the one victim with acid. Sitting on top of a nearby washing machine was a car battery and a glass vial.
Four down, two to go.
Riley already knew that upstairs, in the master bathroom, police had found hairs in the drain of the bathtub, which was presumably where one of the victims had been drowned. And in the garage, they had uncovered a single bullet and a.32-caliber handgun-presumably the gun used to shoot Cassie Bentley through the back of the mouth, either before or after Burgos had beaten her almost beyond recognition.
That covered them all. The guy hadn’t gone to great lengths-
On the workbench, resting next to the knife and handsaw, was a King James Bible, with bloody fingerprints along the pages. A single sheet of paper, tacked to the poster board on the wall behind the workbench, listed a number of passages from the Bible, chapter and verse. He leaned over the bench to get a close look at the sheet, which was written in red ballpoint pen. At the top, set apart, was a verse from Jeremiah 48:10:
Beneath this verse, descending down the page with numbers next to them, were other biblical passages, by citation only:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
