A Winsome Murder (15 page)

Mangan stepped out of the cruiser. Faber followed, opening an umbrella. He handed it to Mangan and told Cusumano, “I've only got one.”

Coose shrugged and flipped up his collar.

Mangan stood in the road. The air smelled of warm dirt, steamy and wet.

He could feel him. He'd been here. The killer.

Odd, Mangan thought. He felt closer to him here than he had in the alley where Mara Davies's body had been found. Why was that? Mangan opened himself up to what was around him and took everything in: the odors, the light, the colors of the field, the sounds, air, his feelings.
He stared at the barren fields beyond and the grassy ground where the body had been dumped. “
Here never shines the sun
,” he said out loud.

“What's that?” Faber asked.

Mangan didn't hear him, the words continuing in his thoughts,
here nothing breeds.

“Don't mind him,” Coose said, stepping in. “He does that a lot, talks to himself.”

Mangan walked to the edge of the curb and stepped up.

Faber stood off a ways, hands on his sides, watching. Schaefer stayed in the cruiser, staring out the window. Mangan studied the area where the body had been found.
Like to a slaughtered lamb, in this detested, dark, blood-drinking pit
. He walked back and stepped off the curb and knocked the mud off his shoes. He crouched and scanned the fields to either side, rain dripping heavily off his umbrella. He looked left, right. No streetlights anywhere. The killer knew it would be pitch black at night. He knew the area. A local maybe?
I must talk of acts of black night, abominable deeds
. The words were coming faster now. Like the beeps of a Geiger counter, when he was closer to a killer, or a killer's energy, or whatever it was, the words seemed to sound more often.

A crimson river of warm blood …

He walked back to the car and told Faber, “Let's go see this McClay woman.”

H
is memory of the first one was nearly gone. It was no more than a blurry vagueness now, spider webbed and packed away deep within the crawl spaces of his mind. He remembered … birds, bird tattoos, tiny, like her, and how slippery the brick had been.

He had wanted to feel something after he had done it. But there was nothing. There had been nothing but blood and dirt and, afterward, quiet. She had been very quiet at the end, almost peaceful, like she was actually seeing something very pleasing behind him as he sat on her chest and crushed her throat. He'd almost turned around to look over his shoulder, to see what she was looking at. But he hadn't. He just pushed down harder and made her eyes go gray. But there had been no relief in it.

He felt as dead as her.

He thought of this, and wrote.

It took a long time for the words to come to him.

I
t never ceased to amaze Mangan just how much blood was actually in the human body. Five quarts or so in the average male. Women, a little less. One has to actually see it spilled outside of the body to truly appreciate its volume. Imagine slowly pouring an entire gallon of milk on your kitchen floor and letting it run and pool everywhere. Now picture the milk as very thick, syrupy, like olive oil, and red, a deeply rust-ridden red. Now imagine a chair in the middle of this blood pool and a body sitting in it, its throat slit open, because that's what Detective Mangan and Chief Faber found when they entered Jillian McClay's writing studio.

“Oh my God,” Faber said under his breath.

“Seal it off,” Mangan said, thinking,
Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?

Everyone backed away. Schaefer looked slightly sick. Faber, shaken. He called for backup, local EMS, and a CSI team from the City of Madison. From the open doorway of the office, Mangan stared at the body. Three. Three dead women now. They officially had a serial killer on their hands. They stepped outside when the CSI team arrived. Mangan saw Faber talking to a cop who was sitting in a cruiser. The officer looked distraught. Mangan walked over and listened. It was the man who had been assigned to protect Ms. McClay. He thought she'd been in the house the whole time. Apparently she'd snuck out the back door and gone into her office sometime during the night. The officer had been parked in the front of the house when she'd been murdered.

The CSI squad gave Mangan and Coose protective gear. They pulled thin covers over their shoes, stepped into loose, papery jump-suits, and tugged on latex gloves.

Carefully, and behind the CSI techs, they entered the room again.

In her chair, poised in front of her computer—
posed
actually—was the body of Jillian McClay. Her hands, propped up on the keyboard. Her head hung uneasily to the side, eyes open. Blood was everywhere, beneath the chair, splashed across the desk and flooded between the crevices of her keyboard. Dappled arcs of arterial splatters had sprayed across the computer screen like a crimson Pollock painting. The deep gash across the victim's throat had severed both carotid arteries, leaving the white sheen of her trachea clearly visible. A merciful kill, Mangan thought; she would have been unconscious quickly.

On the desk beside the computer, Mangan saw a handgun.

“Behind you,” one of the CSI techs said, stepping in and carefully photographing and then bagging it.

A local sheriff stepped in and said, “We'll run a check on it.”

Another technician, kneeling beneath the desk, was retrieving a digital recorder that lay in a viscous puddle of blood. The rest of the forensic team wandered noiselessly about the room collecting, photographing, cataloging. Mangan stood back as they did their work and took in the rest of the office. He spied a small wastebasket under the desk, filled with books that appeared to be in good condition. Odd, he thought. After it had been photographed, Mangan removed one of
the books and read the title off the spine:
Crime Writing for Rookies.
He flipped through it, stopping at a paragraph highlighted in yellow.

Mangan couldn't help a wry shake of his head. He wasn't a big fan of tragic irony, but sometimes he just couldn't help acknowledging it.

From the blood spatters it appeared that Ms. McClay had been killed at her computer, perhaps while she was writing. Most likely she'd been grabbed from behind, her head pulled back and her neck slashed. One cut, deep, till the blade stopped at the bones of the spinal column. A large knife had been used, a very large and very sharp knife. There were no indications of any sawing motion around the wound site. It appeared to have been one powerful, swift cut.

On the blood-smeared computer screen there appeared to be something that had been finger painted into the once-wet blood, presumably by the killer. Mangan took a pencil and gently tapped the corner of the space bar on the keyboard. The computer brightened to life, backlighting the words etched across the blood-glazed screen.

I am the Righter
.

“He's changed his name,” Mangan said, the line
turning your books to graves, your ink to blood
coming to him. Coose peered over his shoulder.

A document was also up on the screen. Mangan could just make out some of the words through the film of dried blood, words presumably written by the victim. The first sentence was: “I don't know what to write.” Below it was another paragraph, and from what Mangan could read, Ms. McClay seemed to have been writing about the trouble she was having writing about the Ellison murder case. The rest was too hard to read through the dried blood.

“Excuse me,” a CSI tech said, stepping between Mangan and the computer.

“Sorry,” Mangan said.

He and Coose looked around the small office, crowded with people. Nothing particularly noteworthy jumped out at him. It looked just about how he thought a writer's office would look: shelves jammed end to end with books, more books piled on top of them. Sloppy, though, not ordered or catalogued like Mangan's books. Not much light for a writing studio: one window, western exposure.

Chief Faber came up to Mangan and said, “We're going to go door to door.”

I
t was another three hours before the CSI crew finished up their work. The keyboard, light switches, doorknobs, drawer handles, and areas near and around the computer were photographed and examined for trace evidence. Mangan was pretty sure they wouldn't find anything. He'd been on enough cases to know when a team was scratching cold, like watching a baseball player run out a short pop to center: they know they're out and they're just going through the motions, because, well, you never know. But they know. If the killer had been careful enough not to leave any physical evidence at the Ellison and Davies crime scenes, he wouldn't be leaving anything here. The CSI techs tagged, bagged, and ziplocked Jillian McClay, and local EMS carried out her body.

Mangan stood in the middle of the office and peeled off his rubber gloves as the CSI unit packed up and left the room. They made a racket tromping down the wooden stairs. He waited for the quiet he knew would follow. This was the time when he would think the clearest. The time he always took. After everyone had left.

When the words might come.

Mangan took into account not only the facts and physical evidence, but also the suppositions, the what-ifs, the horrible imaginings of his mind, because those thoughts had to come from somewhere, he reasoned, from some informed place. There were always larger things at work, Mangan was sure of that. After nearly thirty years on the force, one of the only things he was sure of was that some of his biggest successes had had very little to do with him. He was a part of it, yes, of course, he was in the mix, but something else was at play too, something that worked in his head, on its own, when he was asleep. Whatever this thing was, it
was smarter than he was. He'd learned to listen to it, for it often led him to places where murderers slept.

“Could I have a minute?” Mangan asked the local sheriff in charge.

“Sure,” the man said, and started away.

“Excuse me,” Mangan called after him, “any word on that gun yet?”

“Not yet. They're still running the serial number.” The sheriff checked his notes. “The victim's got a kid too. He's with her ex-husband right now. Nicholas McClay. We're trying to track him down. He's in Fort Lauderdale.”

“Ex-husband, huh?”

“We'll question him as soon as we find him. I'll let you know what we get.”

“Thanks,” Mangan said, jotting down Nicholas McClay's name.

Coose said, “I'll be outside,” and left the room.

Mangan was alone now. He listened.

A human being who had killed another human being had stood right where he was standing. He closed his eyes. He breathed.
Who are you?
he thought, his first and sometimes last question to a killer,
Who are you?

The theory of trace evidence contends that every contact a living being makes with another object, no matter how slight, leaves some mark on it. There are many kinds of trace evidence, some that can never be seen, and that's the kind that Mangan was searching for, the unseen evidence, the evidence that had to be sensed or felt. He knelt and touched the carpet. There was nothing there to the eye, but he felt it anyway. The killer had walked on it. Mangan felt a little closer to him now. Not much, but closer. He stayed there for a long while, crouched, hand flat on the floor. He wanted to absorb him.
Show me something
, he thought. This kind of killer should leave a greater mark, something should be left behind, some dark energy, some unseen shimmer of evil. Mangan wanted to feel it, to absorb whatever it might be.

“Who are you?” he asked out loud, and this time an answer came to his mind.

I am Revenge, sent from the infernal kingdom

To ease the gnawing vulture of my mind.

… Revenge?

Revenge for what? What had these women done to deserve this? How were the other two victims connected to the first? Or was it just the Ellison girl that the killer had taken revenge on? But why the others? Had they all done something to him? Do they represent something for him? It had to be more than just anger about the
American Forum
articles. Or
was
that enough? But they'd canceled the series, so why wasn't the killer satisfied?

If I digged up thy forefathers' graves

And hung their rotten coffins up in chains,

It could not slake mine ire, nor ease my heart.

Till I root out their accursed line,

And leave not one alive, I live in hell.

What could Deborah Ellison have done that was so horrible?

Going to the door, Mangan retraced what he thought might have been the killer's steps. Deadbolt on the door, unlocked. No sign of forced entry. Everything pointed to the victim being at work at her computer and the killer coming up behind her. Why didn't she see or hear him? If she had, surely there would have been some signs of struggle. How had the killer known she'd even be here?