A Winsome Murder (16 page)

I will find them out,

And in their ears tell them my dreadful name …

Revenge.

F
enyana gripped the armrest of her seat and prayed. She didn't really believe in a God anymore, but still, when she was scared, she prayed. She hated flying, but she'd learned at a very young age, in Kujzistinau, that when you are in trouble, you don't run
to
the police, you run
from
them.

“We should be out of this turbulence shortly,” the pilot announced. “If you look out the right side of the plane, you can see the Pacific coastline.”

Fenyana glanced out. Sheeted gusts of rain raked the wings of the plane, the clouds were slate gray, and, for a moment, surprisingly, a pleasant thought came to her: At the beach, as a little girl, a rainy day, playing in the sand, a trip to the river Nistru. It had rained and rained and she had stayed and played in the sand, happy, with her mother,
and her little sisters, Alyona and Anitsa. What might they look like now? she wondered. It seemed impossible to know, for so long had she not seen them. She tried to remember more. Small memories remained, unnamed graspy memories, fragments of a time before things had happened, bathing suits and sandy feet, flowers, she often remembered flowers, but those rememberings, the good ones, did not last. No. Thoughts of home, if she allowed them in, always turned to hunger and hurt. Home was not a home but only a place she had survived. The little girl, the happy one she once was, had been left on the rainy banks of the Nistru many years ago.

She was fourteen when they took her.

She'd screamed that her father would come for her, but he was dead, and she knew that, long dead, only a boy himself, killed in Afghanistan. She never knew him. After they beat her enough, she stopped screaming. The woman from Chisinau paid off the local police. She told her to stop fighting it and not to be afraid. There was work for girls like her in America, so many jobs, waitressing, housekeeping, dancing—but
she
, the woman had told her,
she
was so pretty, such eyes, so tall, she could be a model. Two thousand dollars a month, maybe more. They would even pay for her plane fare. She could pay them back after she got work and then send money back home to her mother, as the other village girls did, and she could live in America. Her village was so poor and polluted, the land contaminated by the waste of abandoned military sites after the wall went down. Trees festered, fish died, birds fell from branches. But Fenyana,
she
was so pretty, such eyes, so tall, she could be a model and live in America.

And Fenyana went.

But they did not take her to America. They went to Mexico. It was cheaper that way, they told her, to get to America. And there she met many other girls, each one a pretty could-be-model just like herself, only some even younger. And in Mexico they took away their passports and their shoes and their luggage, and they told them that they had to pay for their plane fares, and their food and housing, and when one tried to question anything, one was beaten. And Fenyana herself was warned, and remembers still the small man's mouth, wet and gray, as he told her that if she ran away he would find her mother and her sisters
and do things to them, and if still she ran, he would, back home, slit slowly her little sister's throat from ear to ear, sweet little Anitsa.

He knew her name.

And Fenyana never ran.

Across the border into Texas. Every few weeks, it seemed, moving from house to house as they taught her the things they wanted her to do. She'd had a boyfriend once, Dimi, funny Dimi, and they had done some things together under the beech tree by Mr. Veselov's pond, but still she did not know how to do the things they wanted her to do. They did not believe her, and they beat her on her head and legs and kept her awake and gave her drugs and starved her and taught her the things to do.

And Fenyana learned.

For the younger ones, they put honey on the man to teach them how to do it, and beat them until they learned not to gag, and pushed things into them to help them learn to open up better. They taught them how to sound sexy in their talk or scared or hurt. Most of the men who bought them wanted them to sound scared and hurt. That was not hard to do. Later, after Fenyana had learned herself, she taught the younger ones how to float away so things wouldn't hurt as much.

She'd been floating ever since.

From Texas to San Francisco to Phoenix to Detroit to Chicago, where Fenyana first saw Deborah at a dance club. So small she looked, and light, that night, like sweet Anitsa might have looked now. A little girl's body but not. But there was something else about her too, something wild. She danced so hard, a rage of dancing it seemed, angry at the air around her. And she danced alone. And Fenyana stepped into her aloneness and looked into her eyes and they danced together, and raged together, and then, that night, late and hot and loose, Fenyana whispered, between their sweat-soaked kisses, of easy money. Work with me, she said, be safe with me. And Deborah listened. And they left that night together, and they worked together, and they lived together, and, Fenyana thought, sometimes, a little, they loved together, and Fenyana also got 10 percent from Savva for her. Savva liked little Deborah. He had customers that would like her very much.

With the extra money they rented a new apartment as clean and white inside as they were not, but, as Grandmother told her, the
nadezhda bush grows best in blackest dirt, and Fenyana knew that her work had nothing to do with real life. Work was forgotten hours, floating hours. When it was over, she and Deborah had each other, and, together, they were a little happy.

But they should never have met, Fenyana thought, as the plane yawed slowly to the left. She looked out the window. He was only supposed to scare her. Beat her, maybe, but not badly. Maybe break her hands or a leg. Something like that had happened to all of them at one time or another. But something had gone horribly wrong. She had warned Deborah about trying to get out. There is no out once you are in. There may be better buyers or worse, more money or less, beatings or no beatings, but there is no out. Deborah would not believe her. Things like that don't happen here, she'd say, maybe in Russia but not in America, like it was all the stuff of Hollywood movies. Deborah was not afraid of anything.

She should have been.

C
oose and Mangan stayed in Wisconsin the night that Jillian McClay's body had been discovered. They grabbed some food at a Culver's out on the highway, and some necessities at the local Stop 'n' Shop. Enfield had no hotels, so they drove to the neighboring town of Acushnet and pulled into a motel called the Barn, which, indeed, looked like a barn. The parking lot was filled with an assortment of pickup trucks and motor homes.

Mangan and Coose grabbed their laptops and headed in.

A small congress of teenage girls with tiny asses and babies cocked on their hips hovered outside the lobby, smoking. “Excuse me,” Mangan said to a pubescent mom who looked at him like he'd just asked to buy her child. Inside they waited for a foreign-looking front desk clerk to stop talking on his cell phone and acknowledge their existence. Check-in was an ordeal that took nearly forty minutes. From the way the man typed, he appeared to have a phobia of computer keyboards. He also spoke very little English. Learn the fucking language if you're going to live in this country, Mangan thought. He couldn't help it. He was tired. And, anyway, he meant it. The lazy-ass clerk finally got them checked in, without once making eye contact, and Coose and Mangan headed to their rooms.

The carpeted hallway had the antiseptic smell of recently cleaned mold, and whoever was in charge of maintenance must have thought that any kind of repair in the building could be easily accomplished with a generous application of caulk. A heavy woman with tattoos and a twelve-pack of Busch Light passed Mangan in the hallway as he found his room and opened the door.

He turned back to Coose, “What time you want to leave tomorrow?”

“We should get on the road around eight. We go too early, we're going to hit traffic.”

Mangan agreed and closed the door.

God, he'd been in so many rooms like this so many times throughout his career. No matter where he went, they all looked the same. Squalor had no originality. He checked that the sheets were clean and thought to call his daughter. It was getting late though, so he decided not to. He took off his jacket, put his gun and holster on the nightstand, and cranked the AC. He opened the fifth of gin he'd bought, grabbed a glass from the bathroom, and poured a drink.

He sipped and thought.

Lachlan.

There was something slippery about the guy, something Mangan couldn't hold onto, but he didn't like him for the murder. Eagan had been keeping him under surveillance, and Lachlan had been in Chicago at the time of McClay's murder. He was a misogynistic dick, yes, but not a killer.

Mangan recalled the words he'd heard at the McClay murder scene,
I am Revenge, sent from the infernal kingdom.
Those words had been from
Titus Andronicus
. He'd recognized them right away, but couldn't remember where the other lines were from:
If I digged up thy forefathers' graves and hung their rotten coffins up in chains
. He sat at the tiny motel desk and tried to Google it on his laptop, but there was no Internet service. He opened his file of the collected works of Shakespeare and searched the phrase.

It was from
Henry VI, part 3
.

The character of Clifford, seeking revenge on the House of York for his own father's death, says those words before he kills a child:

Had I thy brethren here, their lives and thine

Were not revenge sufficient for me;

And till I root out their accursed line

And leave not one alive, I live in hell.

The child, at knife's point, then pleads with his murderer.

RUTLAND:
Be thou revenged on men, and let me live!

CLIFFORD:
In vain thou speak'st.

RUTLAND:
I never did thee harm; why wilt thou slay me?

Then Clifford stabs the child to death.

Mangan took another sip of his drink …
Why wilt thou slay me?
What could Deborah Ellison possibly have done to deserve such a horrific death? Somehow she was deeply connected to her killer, maybe intimately, Mangan felt sure of it. And if he could find out what that connection was, it could be the key to the other murders. But what was it? Deborah Ellison had been living with a prostitute. Had she been working the streets also? Had the killer been a customer? Had she humiliated him somehow? Sexually? But why murder the other women?

These wrongs, unspeakable, past patience,

Are more than any living man could bear.

Mangan finished his drink and got undressed. He needed a shower. He ran the water in the closet-sized bathroom and stepped into the tub. There was hardly any water pressure. He angled the cracked showerhead and let the water dribble over his head for a long time. His mind wouldn't quiet. Had the first murder been an act of vengeance, and then the killer developed a taste for it?

Past cure I am; now reason is past care.

Is he killing as it occurs to him? Is there a next victim?

My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are.

Does he have a plan or is he mad?

O, full of scorpions is my mind.

Nothing, no answers were coming to Mangan. It was all questions now, all unknown—all Melvillian. Something was hovering nearby, though, some connection just beyond the reach of his grasp. There's always a connection. No matter how sick a motive, there was always a connection between victim and killer, some pattern, some horrific logic. Even the lack of pattern was a pattern.

Mangan got out of the shower and toweled off. He headed back into the room, a cloud of steam following at his heels. He poured another drink and sat on the edge of the bed.

Confusion now hath made his masterpiece.

He didn't need Shakespeare to tell him that.

M
angan and Coose got back to Chicago around eleven thirty the next morning. Willie Palmer was waiting for them in Room 70. Born and raised in the projects, Willie knew the streets better than just about anyone in the VCTF. At six foot three, he towered over Mangan and Coose and made it a point to stand as close to them as possible whenever he could. He dressed as if he were continually auditioning for
Miami Vice
and was confident that he was going to get the part. The hookers loved him. He was also annoyingly chipper. All the time.

“Morning, boys,” he said, eyeing them both. “Well, don't
you
look like shit today.”

“I always look like shit,” Mangan said.

“I look like shit because I'm starving,” said Coose. “He wouldn't stop to eat.”

“They had bagels at the motel,” Mangan said.

“They weren't bagels, they were Wonder Bread made round with holes in them.”

“Can we stop talking about food, guys?” Willie said. “We got things to do.”

“What have you got on this Fenyana girl?” Mangan asked.

Willie opened a file folder and placed it on the table. “Well, she's probably somewhere in California right now. I ran her real name, Petra Nadzenia. Even call girls got credit cards. She bought a ticket two days ago to San Francisco. Her card hasn't been used since, and her bank account is empty. Withdrew everything the day before she left. Almost four grand.”

Mangan looked at the file. “She's running from something.”

“The guy that killed her girlfriend maybe?” Coose said.

Mangan asked Willie, “We got anyone on the coast to reach out to?”

“Working on it now.”

Mangan paged through Willie's file. “I hope this isn't more of that Russian shit.”