A joke. He likes that. He tries to smile. He tries to smile a lot but he can’t.
The kid looks at the fifty and shrugs. “Okay, bud.”
Leo watches the boy burst through the revolving doors.
“EVERYTHING,” I say into the phone to my assistant, Betty. “Witness lists and profiles, summaries of evidence, transcripts-whatever we have. I need a couple of copies of everything. Yes, everything. And Betty, if anyone asks, I’m just doing a speech or something. This stays between us. Call Detective McDermott when you’re ready.”
I click off the cell phone. I’m riding shotgun with Ricki Stoletti, with whom I have the privilege of paying a visit to Professor Frankfort Albany. Stoletti looks tired, probably as tired as me. She’s wearing a blouse, under a plaid jacket, and blue jeans. Not clothes recently purchased.
She tells me she’s been McDermott’s partner for over two years. She joined the city police four years ago, after spending fifteen years working the Major Crimes Unit in the suburbs. Major Crimes was a consolidation of several police departments in the northern suburbs, a multijurisdictional detective’s squad. I know of them well, because I had a homicide case that came from there. That might explain her hostility. I walked a guy on a first-degree and made the cops look pretty bad in the process.
“Why this guy Albany first?” she asks, maneuvering her Taurus toward the expressway to take us down to Mansbury College. “Because he knows this song so well?”
“Because if Evelyn was looking into this, she would have talked to him. And because he knows the principals involved. He taught Ellie Danzinger and Cassie Bentley. He was Burgos’s boss. And he was the one who showed these song lyrics to all three of them.”
“And because he’s a creep?” She looks at me.
“You’re about to rear-end that Lexus,” I tell her. She hits the brakes. “Yeah, I was never high on that guy.”
“Why?” she asks. “Anything specific?”
Nothing specific. Just a vibe I always got from the professor. Something about him that always made me wonder.
“He was a big witness for you, right?”
“You could say that,” I agree. “He established Burgos’s attempt at an alibi. Burgos was fudging his time sheets, to make it look like he was at work when he was off abducting the women. His time sheets said he worked from six to midnight, but we know he abducted the girls all around nine or ten o‘clock. His time sheets were a lie.”
I look over at Stoletti, who seems like she doesn’t get it.
“By creating an alibi,” I explain, “he showed that he appreciated that what he was doing was criminal. He was trying to avoid being caught-”
“Yeah, yeah, I get the idea.” She turns toward me for a moment, then seems to think better of whatever it was she was going to say.
“Burgos was given flexible hours,” I say. “He could work as much, or as little, as he wanted, up to six hours. He very deliberately wrote down six to midnight. What about this doesn’t make sense?”
“Well-no, it makes sense.” She makes a noise, an uncomfortable chuckle. “I mean, one way of looking at that is, Burgos did have an alibi for the murders.” She glances back over at me. “Right? He was at work, so he couldn’t have killed the girls.”
Now I laugh, with more gusto than she. “But it was a
She raises her hand in surrender.
“Anyway, that’s why we needed the professor. Burgos didn’t testify, so we had no way to pin him to the time sheets without Albany’s testimony.”
Stoletti gets us on the ramp and we’re on our way down south. It turns out that she drives faster than I do, which is probably easier when you carry a badge. We avoid near-certain death maneuvering around a truck and finding ourselves up close and personal with one of those tiny Saabs. I could learn to like this lady.
“So Albany was your star witness,” she gathers.
“One of them, sure. The alibi put a serious dent in their case. They had a decent argument on mental defect, but on appreciation of criminality, they had no chance. Not after that. I was hoping to get down there alive,” I add, after she pulls another stunt, slicing our car between a Camry and a Porsche.
“Don’t be such a wuss. You, either,” she says into the rearview mirror as the Porsche driver works his horn behind her. I’ll be really impressed if she flips him the bird.
“We’re not partners,” she says. “You know Albany, and you can probably put some ice in his pants, so you’re tagging along.”
“Fine by me. Unless I need something. You’re supposed to be cooperative.”
Stoletti knows the rules. I get full access. But all rules are meant to be twisted and tortured. And she doesn’t seem to like the way I framed them.
“I do the talking when we get down there,” she informs me.
“Ask him whatever you want to ask him,” I say. “I’ll do the same.”
“I take the lead. Understood?”
“No,” I say. “Not understood. Get off here. I know a shortcut.”
She veers off onto a ramp and points to her bag, which is between my feet.
“There’s a manila file in there,” she says. “Your copy.”
I open it, however much I hate reading in a car. Gives me a headache. But I don’t have to read so much as look, because the file is full of photographs from the Ciancio crime scene. Pictures of the man himself, spread across the bedroom carpet, peppered with knife wounds, primarily in the legs and torso, the fatal one going through his eye.
There are several photos of the ice pick itself, a steel rod with sharpened point and wooden handle, with plenty of Ciancio’s blood on it. Flipping the page, there is a Xerox copy of what appears to be a dated newspaper photo with jagged edges, having been ripped from the paper. The newspaper photo must have been a black and white and the Xerox isn’t the greatest, but I make out a familiar face.
Harland Bentley.
It’s back at the time of the murders, I imagine. It looks like him back then, his hair a little fuller, his face a little tighter. He’s wearing an overcoat. His eyes are cast downward as he fights through a cadre of reporters holding microphones. I can’t place where. Near the courthouse, maybe. Another man is standing in profile a bit apart from the reporters, wearing a fedora, his head turned and his eyes on Harland. Looking at Harland intently, it seems, though photographs tend to have that effect; everyone looks like they’re staring in a still photo. The man looks young, though his eyes are deep-set, something that resembles a scar beneath the right one. Don’t recognize him, but I’m sure I wouldn’t want someone menacing like that looking at me.
I look up. “Take this to the next light, turn right. This is the ‘goon in the background’? This is the photo McDermott was handing out?”
She glances over at the photo. “Yeah. We know Harland Bentley, and we know those are reporters. But who’s the creepy guy?”
“Well, I’ve never seen him before. Where’d you find this?”
“We just got it early this morning. It was in a shoe box in Ciancio’s bedroom closet.”
