Eye of the Beholder

outside the box. Understanding requires betrayal of the conventional, and the yearning to want to understand.”

No one comments on that. If anyone has a better idea, they sure as hell aren’t speaking up.

“He uses the word ‘new’ twice,” Stoletti says. “He didn’t need it the second time. ’New betrayal’ and ‘new yearning.’”

“Now it’s a grammar lesson,” says the guy sitting next to her.

She isn’t in the mood. “I’m saying he’s deliberate about his choice of words. This handwriting is very careful. He didn’t write this quickly. He took his time. He thought about every word. ‘Never does vindication ever really surrender easily.’ It’s sloppy. He doesn’t need ‘ever’ because he wrote ‘never’. I don’t know what it means, but it’s weird.”

She’s right. I hadn’t looked at it that way. The handwriting is meticulous. But the choice of words here is odd.

“Let’s everyone think about this,” says McDermott. “We’ve got the originals being worked up right now. Impressions, ninhydrin, everything. Let’s talk about Fred Ciancio.”

Last night, Carolyn Pendry dropped this on us: When she was reporting on Terry Burgos back in 1989, she got a call from a man who said he had some information about Terry Burgos. The man seemed scared, Carolyn said. He said it was important, but he wasn’t sure whether to share the information with her. Then he hung up. But Carolyn, ever the reporter, traced the phone call back to a house. The house was owned by a man named Fred Ciancio.

She visited him at the house and he refused to talk to her. She tried more than once to get him to talk, without success. She looked into his background and came up with nothing. And then the trial began and she never followed up.

“So we have no idea what information Ciancio had for Carolyn Pendry,” McDermott concludes. “All that we know about him is that he was a prison guard in the sixties and seventies, and then a security guard, until he retired two years ago.”

“And,” Stoletti adds, “we know that two days before he was murdered, he called the Daily Watch newsroom.”

Presumably, Ciancio’s phone call to the Watch newsroom was to speak with Carolyn’s daughter, Evelyn Pendry, a Watch reporter. Whatever it was that Fred Ciancio had wanted to say to Carolyn Pendry back in 1989, we assume he said to her daughter Evelyn only a few days ago. That would explain Evelyn’s questions to me about Terry Burgos. That would also explain her unusual interest in the Ciancio crime scene, according to McDermott.

I look at the handouts McDermott has given us. There is a sheet with the lyrics and sheets with brief rundowns on the two victims, Fred Ciancio and Evelyn Pendry. Something on Ciancio’s sheet catches my eye. “Security guard, Bristol Security Services, 1978-2003.”

I knew, from McDermott last night, that Ciancio had been a security guard. But I didn’t know where.

“Bristol,” I say. “Ciancio worked for Bristol Security?”

“Yes.” Stoletti nods. “He worked security at the shopping mall in Wilshire. Why?”

I check the dates again. Ciancio worked for Ensign Correctional, a maximum security prison on the southwest side of the county, until 1978. Then he worked for twenty-five years for Bristol. “Bristol Security was the firm that contracted with Mansbury College,” I say. “Back in the day.”

McDermott watches me a moment. “Did that come into play at all?”

Bristol Security helped us with the search of the grounds for more bodies. I’m sure they were embarrassed that the murders happened on their watch. I think Mansbury canceled their contract after the bodies were found. Like it was their fault. But no, I don’t see anything. I tell McDermott so.

“Bristol Security is a huge security firm,” I add. “They probably have hundreds of contracts all over. It could be a coincidence.”

McDermott nods his head once. “Is that what you think? It’s just a coincidence?”

I shrug. “Wally Monk was the head guy assigned to Mansbury,” I tell him. “Call him. Ask him if he knows Ciancio. I think he’s retired but you can find him.”

Stoletti makes a note, clarifying the spelling with me.

“So,” she asks. “Can we assume that this guy is a copycat?”

There’s a collective release in the room. It’s on everyone’s mind.

Me, I’ve never been a big fan of the copycat theory. These guys either want fame-in which case, why be known as some other killer’s imitator?-or they are deranged and have their own issues to deal with.

But there’s no denying the first two kills, patterned after the second verse. There’s no denying what he wrote-“I’m not the only one”-on the bathroom mirror.

“Why now?” I ask. “Why sixteen years later?”

No one has an answer for that, of course. Hell, they’re looking to me for the answers.

“And why,” Stoletti adds, “are people associated with those murders dying now?”

Another one nobody can answer.

A woman sitting on a desk, her feet on a chair, asks me, “Were Burgos’s victims random?”

I tell her, Burgos always wanted us to think they weren’t. He could ascribe a particular sin to each of the women he murdered. “But I don’t think these victims are random, either.”

McDermott shakes his head, but he’s agreeing with me. We both thought that, last night-too coincidental to be random. Evelyn Pendry was at Ciancio’s crime scene, seemingly troubled. And we know from the phone records that Ciancio had called Evelyn just before he was murdered. Then there was the conversation that I had with her, where she pretended to be interested in Senator Almundo’s prosecution but, in fact, seemed much more focused on the Burgos case.

She seemed, if memory serves, particularly interested in why Harland Bentley hired me so soon after I prosecuted his daughter’s killer.

“Does this remind you of Burgos?” some cop asks me. A big Irish guy. I think they’re all Irish. I think it’s in the union contract.

I make a face. The answer is, not really. “Burgos, he wasn’t careful at all. He brought them to his house. He had unprotected sex with them, leaving his bodily fluids inside them. He left evidence of the women all over his house. He left evidence of himself all over the auditorium basement. This offender has performed two perfectly executed kills. He came in and out without a trace, controlled them and the scene. This offender feels like a pro. Burgos was not. That’s what I can tell you about Burgos. This offender, I really don’t know what to tell you.”

“And you’re our expert on serial killers,” Stoletti says.

I shake my head. “Understand this, everyone. I’m no expert. I’ve never solved a serial killing-not in the way you’re thinking. We found six bodies and caught our offender within an hour. That’s what I mean about him being sloppy. We found Ellie Danzinger dead, first thing we did was go after the guy who had been stalking her so intensely that she got a restraining order against him. This was also a guy, by the way, who had worked for the last few years as a maintenance man in that same auditorium where we found the girls. And when we went to see him-boom!-there it was. It was all there. So don’t confuse me with someone who knows how to track a serial killer. Burgos left bread crumbs all the way to his door. This guy’s notleaving anything for us.”