Eye of the Beholder (46 page)

“Is that really necessary?” Nat approaches me. “Under the circumstances—”

“Under
what
circumstances?” I ask. “She planned a cold-blooded murder. It doesn‘t—”

“She didn’t
plan
anything!” Gwendolyn’s face becomes a glowing crimson. “She wasn’t some calculated killer. She saw her father come out of her best friend’s apartment, Mr. Riley. You can’t imagine anything so revolting, so disgusting—”

She breaks it off, covering her eyes with a hand. Natalia’s stoic façade begins to crumble.

I call on all my experience as a trial lawyer, trained to feign calm in the midst of surprise, taught to stifle emotion and maintain a cool front. My limbs begin to tremble. Sweat breaks out all over. I have to go. I have to get out of here. I don’t think I can even speak, over the surge of adrenaline coursing through me.

I walk away from them, toward the door. Natalia calls to me, “Please think about this, Paul,” or something like that. I can’t hear her anymore. I am overcome now by hope, by a promise so consuming I have to remind myself to put one foot in front of the other.

They’ve told me a lot, much of it lies or misdirection. But between the lines they have told me something much more important than what happened sixteen years ago.

Shelly might still be alive.

HERE HE COMES. Here he comes. He’s with us now. Back with us. He’s talked to Mrs. Lake now. She fixed it. Now
he’ll
fix it. Just like he did before.

Leo raises the newspaper as Riley’s car passes, turning onto Browning Street.

What did she tell him? Does he know everything?

What’s he going to do now?

Follow him now. But not too close. Wait and see.

 

WHAT DO I DO NOW? I move my car down Browning Street, unsure of my next step. The idea was that Koslenko might be following me. If my hunch about Natalia Lake was right—that she pulled the strings, with Koslenko as the puppet—and he saw me visiting her, he might think I am on his side now. That, plus the statements I made to the press last night at the police station—insisting that Terry Burgos killed the six Mansbury women—would have to be enough to convince him that I am his ally again, his
comrade,
in the cover-up.

Where is Shelly? Just asking the question, considering the possibility that I might be right about her, turns my stomach into a full-scale revolt.

So what do I do now? Wait for Koslenko to come to me? How do I make that happen? I’ve done everything I can, between my public comments and my visit to Natalia Lake, to reel him in. Is there something else I can do?

Shelly could be anywhere. Koslenko would have a million places to hide her. I’m going to have to see Koslenko face-to-face. I have to find some way to get him to tell me—

A football bounces into the street in front of my car, followed almost immediately by a boy, a young teen, scrambling after it. I slam on my brakes and stop about five feet short of him. He looks up at me like the whole thing is my fault.

Jesus, kid,
I think to myself, adrenaline decelerating.
Don’t you have school or something?

But then I snap to attention, as the kid in the street gives me the finger, and I answer my own question.

God. Of course.

He doesn’t have school. School’s out for the summer.

 

RILEY’S CAR SCREECHES TO a halt. Leo slows his Camry, three vehicles back. But after a moment, after the kid in the street returns to the sidewalk, Riley’s car guns forward like a rocket, passing one car and blowing a red light, multiple car horns sounding their objection.

No. No. No. Leo maneuvers his car and gets lucky with a green light. He wants to stay back but not too far back. And the way Riley’s driving now, it won’t be long before Leo loses him. No, no, can’t lose him—

He’s turning. Up ahead, two blocks ahead, his car maneuvers into the right-turn lane. Leo tries to make out the street, flooring the accelerator. Then he sees it.

Riley is getting on the highway, heading south.

 

YOU CAN’T IMAGINE anything so revolting, so disgusting
...

I speed through the Mansbury College campus, the images surreal to me now, everything the same but everything so very different. The campus is largely deserted, as it was this time sixteen years ago. Next week will be the beginning of summer school. The question is, will they find another body?

Bramhall Auditorium takes up half the block, a dome-topped structure arising from a large concrete staircase, a threshold supported by granite pillars, with a manicured lawn to each side. I pull up to the curb and kill the engine. I reach under the car seat, pull up the carpet, and remove the ordinary kitchen knife, with the five-inch blade, that Terry Burgos used to remove the heart of Ellie Danzinger and to slice Angie Mornakowski’s throat.

At least, that’s what I thought. When I removed the knife from its encasing on the Wall of Burgos in my basement this morning, I had to admit that I was no longer sure about that.

Sixteen years ago, I emerged from a car very close to this precise spot. And my life changed.

Last time, the place was surrounded with police officers and technicians, residents of the town pressed against the police tape, and six dead women lay inside. This time, if I’m right, there is only a victim inside, and she’s still alive. And there are no police. It’s what Koslenko would want. I couldn’t risk bringing in McDermott or anyone else.

If you behave, she will live,
too.

I put the knife into the inner pocket of my sport coat. I don’t own a handgun and couldn’t get one on short notice. I could have brought any number of kitchen knives, but maybe, just maybe, this particular one will come in handy.

I say a quiet prayer to a God I have neglected and get out of the car. The building looks undisturbed, vacant. This week—the sixteenth anniversary of the murders—is one of the few weeks of the entire year that the entire Mansbury campus is shut down.

I turn, as if to look back at my car, and do the best I can to look around me. Is Koslenko here? Is he watching me? I will only have one chance to do this. I have to play this right.

Which means, ignoring the internal turmoil, I take the stairs slowly, with confident authority.

There are three entrances. Front door, a maintenance entrance on the east, and a service door for deliveries in the back—north—side. I try the massive front door. Disappointed, but not surprised, that it’s locked.

I walk around to the east side of the building.

 

LEO PULLS UP TO the north side of the auditorium—the rear side—leaving his car in the adjacent parking lot. He runs up a ramp and goes to work on the service door with his tension wrench and short hook. The dead bolt slides open and he pulls the handle, entering the darkness.

 

THE EAST-SIDE DOOR has only an internal push bar. Nothing on the outside but a flat, rusted door. I couldn’t open it with a cannon.

I walk on uneven, sloping ground to the rear of the building and freeze as I turn the corner.

There is a single car, a Toyota Camry, in the back lot.

I sprint with everything I have left, stifling emotions, toward the only door, at the top of a small ramp. I grab the handle, try again, with a prayer, and open it. I’m inside.

My eyes adjust to the dimness and sweep a spacious room, a storage area, large refrigerators and floor-to-ceiling shelving filled with boxes. I run through the room into a large kitchen, sinks and stoves and more refrigerators. To my left are a staircase and an elevator.

I rush up the dark staircase and push open the door into light on the ground level. A large, ceremonial room, draped in red and gold, with antique furniture, with sunlight filtering in through large windows. My heart skips a beat. I know this room. The reception area, the anteroom to the auditorium. Forgetting my role as the cool authority figure, I run through another door and I’m in familiar territory, next to the large stage and podium in Bramhall Auditorium, natural light pouring into the theater. I sprint through the aisle, passing the very chairs where Detective Joel Lightner and Chief Harry Clark sat with me, recounting the grisly details of six slaughtered women. I reach the foyer and look to my left, at the door that leads to the basement, to the janitor’s supply room.

I reach the door, which I know for a fact is a dead bolt that would ordinarily be locked, and quietly open it.

He’s expecting me.

L
EO OPENS the last door in the basement. He passes the chain-link lockers on the short wall and the shelving units, heads to the large storage lockers on the far wall. He stops a moment and listens. He hears nothing. He opens the middle locker and looks down.

Shelly Trotter does not look up at him, but her bleary eyes show some trace of recognition. She has received two heavy doses of gamma hydroxybutyrate—GHB—enough to keep her in a thick fog since yesterday morning, when he first subdued her in the shower. Her wrists and ankles are handcuffed, with another set of cuffs linked to the wrist and ankle cuffs, contorting her body into a forced, rounded triangle and allowing her to fit, just barely, into this oversized locker that normally holds a snowblower, shovels, and the like. A locker that now holds only two things: Paul Riley’s love, and a Barteaux heavy-duty, twenty-six-inch, high-carbon spring steel machete.

A painful body position, he knows, one they used occasionally in the Soviet Union to coerce the unwilling, to break the spirit through elongated periods of discomfort. But her pain is irrelevant to him. He had to leave her for extended periods and had to be sure she couldn’t move. She has, in essence, been in a forced coma since he took her from her apartment.

Shelly Trotter, Shelly Trotter.

He can see, now, that she would not have been able to act, notwithstanding the handcuffs. The GHB has worked well. Her head bobs, she groans but is unable to speak. The sweatpants he dressed her in are soiled from her bodily functions, the pungent odor fighting the antiseptic smell of the cleaning materials. Her curly hair is flat against her head. Her lips move but she doesn’t speak, a line of saliva falling from the corner of her mouth.

He unlocks the third set of cuffs, the ones that link the restraints on her wrists and ankles. Her body reacts, straightening out as best it can in the confined quarters. He slides her out of the locker. He will not remove the cuffs on her wrists and ankles. He debates, for a moment, whether he should give her a third dose of the paralyzing drug but decides against it.

He hears a noise, a faint echo in the hallway, the pitter-patter of footsteps on stairs. He stands quickly and freezes, controls his breathing, listening. He hears the creak of a door opening—the door at the end of the hallway.

He removes his gun and waits.

 

I FORCE MYSELF to a walk, a spirited but controlled gait, toward the last door in the hallway, the janitor’s room, where the bodies were found. I pass the other storage rooms, knowing he might be in any of them, waiting to ambush me. But I have to assume Shelly is in the janitor’s room. Any room, this time of year, with the school on vacation, would suit his purposes, but he’s been smart. He tried to mimic the lyrics of the song to make the recent murders look like a copycat. He wanted to frame Albany all along, and it was the professor, after all, who knew these lyrics better than anyone. He’d want everything to be the same.

I reach the final door quickly, realizing I have no plan and no time to formulate one. I turn the door’s lever and push it open, praying that I won’t be greeted with a rain of gunfire.

But he’s had plenty of chances to kill me.

I step into the room and a groan escapes my throat. Koslenko is squatting along the back wall against a locker, his gun trained against Shelly’s head. Shelly is barely conscious, her skin deathly pale, wearing a T-shirt covered with grime and badly stained gray sweats. My knees weaken but I manage to maintain my focus, forcing out the images of what she has gone through.

This is the chance I prayed for. And it’s only one chance. There is no rehearsal.

I force it to the surface, compel the corners of my mouth upward, expel a noise from my chest that sounds something like a chuckle.

“Okay, okay,” I say. “We have work to do, Leo. Work to do. You and me.”

Koslenko looks different. His hair has been shaved to give the impression of a heavily receded hairline, and the coloring is different, too—dirty blond. The glasses, too, but they don’t conceal those eyes, or the half-moon scar beneath. Next to him is a cane.

Smart disguise. The balding forehead especially. When combined with a limp and a cane, he puts at least ten years on himself.

It’s a good reminder for me. He might be insane, but he’s not stupid.

I look at Shelly, watch the movement of her body, the rise and fall of her chest. She’s alive. How close to dead, I don’t know.

But I can’t think about that. I can’t show the emotion that almost brings me to my knees, that makes me want to beg him to trade my life for hers. I would make that trade, I realize, in an instant. But Leo Koslenko cannot work with weakness or pleading.

Koslenko looks at me with a quizzical expression. “How—how?”

“How—did I know to come here? You know how, Leo.”

I’m keeping it vague, afraid that something too specific will pin me down. The problem is, I don’t know the depths of his psychosis. I don’t know if he hears voices. Does he see a tree and think it’s a spy dressed in bark?

Crazy, not dumb. But how crazy?

Regardless, right now he’s suspicious of me. I wait him out, like the answer’s obvious. Koslenko struggles with it.

“Natalia told me, Leo. What do you think?”

“Missus—Missus—Bentley? Missus—” Koslenko looks down, but not at Shelly. He is struggling with something internally. “Does she—like?”