Eye of the Beholder

permanent. The point, he emphasized, was to get her full-time attention and get her on the road to recovery.

We’ll make it through this, he promised.

That was a Thursday night. They talked about the weekend. She had reluctantly agreed. They would do it that weekend.

Why had he given her advance warning?

Why had he left for work on Friday?

He had rationalizations for that one, too: The double homicide he was working. The fact that Joyce looked great-fresh, alert, positive-that Friday morning, seemed to be having one of her good days. Because they weren’t all bad; it wasn’t every day. She was up and down. That morning, he was sure of it, she was up.

He was sure.

I’m fine, she’d said, placing a hand gently on his chest. Like you said-think about the future. This is the right move for us.

Go, she’d said. You can help me pack when you get home.

Eight, ten hours, and he’d be back home, helping Joyce pack a bag for what, hopefully, would be a short stay at the Pearlwood Center. It was really only seven. He’d left work early.

Seven hours, when it all came apart.

“We’ll catch a break tonight,” Stoletti tells him as she plays on her computer.

“What? Oh.” McDermott sighs. She’s referring to the fingerprints that were found on the door to Brandon Mitchum’s apartment. Until they hear back from the lab, there’s not much to do, and it’s no time to rehash the past, so he busies himself with the reports from the Burgos file.

Burgos is not his case, of course, and it’s been solved. His job is to catch the current offender. But there’s no denying a connection. Something was missed. He knows it. And he has to figure it out fast, because fast is a good description of how the offender is moving. Sunday was Ciancio. Monday was Amalia Calderone. Tuesday was Evelyn Pendry. Today, he took his shot at Brandon Mitchum.

McDermott rubs his eyes, finishes off his second cup of coffee and goes for another, his eyes heavy but his body motoring on the caffeine. God, the energy he used to have, as a young cop, working an overnight shift, the thrill he felt when he cruised some of the scariest of neighborhoods. It felt clearer to him then, more tangible, the front lines. Now he’s playing catch-up, solving crimes already committed instead of preventing them. He likes the puzzle, no doubt. But the truth is, most crimes aren’t that hard to solve. Motives usually show themselves almost immediately. Canvass the neighborhood, check the vic’s background, work the forensics, and nine times out of ten, you’re done. And in the end, you don’t bring the vie back, you just put away the offender.

Maybe that’s why, whatever the pressure he may feel, he’s enjoying this case. A chance to prevent, to stop this offender from killing again.

He feels sure that this is an offender covering his tracks. And what, precisely, he’s covering is contained somewhere in these files.

He looks back over the notes he’s made on Burgos. He noted details on times, places, and came up with a clear pattern. There were the hookers, there was Ellie, and there was Cassie. The hookers lined up nice and neat. They had a little bit of information on Ellie and basically nothing on Cassie.

One: The hookers’ disappearances could be pinpointed to particular nights and times, and at least general locations. Two of the hookers were seen getting into a blue Chevy Suburban, and the other two left fingerprints in that same vehicle, belonging to Terry Burgos. Ellie Danzinger’s house was forcibly entered, and the action took place in her bedroom, literally on her bed. Her murder can be pinpointed, circumstantially, to the first night of the murders, a Sunday.

Not so with Cassie. They didn’t know when, or where, Cassie disappeared. They only know she was the last one murdered. And they know there was a two-day break between the last hooker’s death and Cassie’s death.

Two: The hookers were raped before Burgos killed them. Ellie and Cassie were raped postmortem.

Three: Professor Frankfort Albany knew both of the girls. He didn’t know the prostitutes.

Two-the sex thing-was probably not a big deal. Hookers let you have sex with them, that’s the whole point. Nice college girls like Cassie and Ellie-they probably wouldn’t look twice at a guy like Burgos. He’d have to kill them first.

He sits back in his chair and lets it work out in his mind. Let it all out, see what comes back. Usually works for him.

Burgos left bread crumbs all the way to his door, Riley said. They found him before they even began to investigate. Sure, that happens all the time. First place you look, you find your offender. Who wants to make work for themselves? The guy’s right there. He confesses. His basement looks like he was conducting a seminar on torture murders. Don’t make it more complicated.

He remembers what he read about Ellie Danzinger. She’d been bludgeoned in her bed, but then she was left there, her head hanging over the side. The M.E. figured, based on the volume of blood that dripped to the carpet, that it had been at least sixty minutes that Ellie lay there before she was moved to Burgos’s garage, where he removed her dead heart from her corpse.

What happened during those sixty minutes?

He looks back at his notes. You always ask the question, Who gained? If you believe rumors, the father of Cassie’s child and Harland Bentley both gained from the deaths of Ellie and Cassie.

But Burgos confessed. McDermott had read the transcript of the interrogation. There was no coercion at all. Burgos knew damn well that Ellie was his first victim, before anyone mentioned her name or showed him her photograph. Hell, he was pissed off that Detective Lightner hadn’t included her picture in the photo array. And there’s no way that evidence of six dead women just found its way into his basement.

Is there?

But what if Professor Albany had been the father of Cassie’s child? There’s little doubt he’d lose his job if it came out. And he knew Burgos-he employed him, for God’s sake, and he took him under his wing.

Could a college professor come up with keys to the Bramhall Auditorium basement?

So many things unconfirmed. But if Harland Bentley really was slipping it to Ellie Danzinger, he was looking at the loss of a fortune if it came out. He and Albany both had plenty to lose.

So which one is it? Bentley or Albany?

“Hey, Mike.”

McDermott looks over at Stoletti, who is banging away on the computer.

“We’ve been sitting here thinking, Who looks worse right now? Harland Bentley or Professor Albany?”

“Right.” When he walks over, she points at the computer, a results screen from a Google search. “We’re looking at Albany, we’re looking at Harland Bentley,” she says. “I thought, why not search both their names together?”

“They were both players in a heater case, Ricki. It’s not that surprising