A Winsome Murder (6 page)

COPY: Ref. D-M 5

#8912-Pending

Chicago VCTF

Det. Mangan 63

“Okay, that's, like, that's very weird,” Coose said. “I hate weird. Why can't we just get normal murderers.” He took another mouthful of sandwich and slid the note back across the table.

Mangan picked it up. “It's all greasy now.”

“
The Chooser
?” Coose said. “What's that, his name? Did he anoint himself ?”

“I don't know.”

“The press will love it, once they get their hands on it.”

“They're not going to.”

Coose looked at the note again. “What's this word mean, anyway?”

“What?”

“Winsome.”

“You don't know?”

“I kind of know. Generally. You're always telling me to be specific, I'm being specific.”

“You're being lazy, look it up.”

“Oh, don't start that again, for Christ's sake. Just tell me.”

“Don't be lazy.”

“I'm not lazy, I'm efficient. You know what it fucking means, so just—”

“If you read it, you'll learn it. You're being lazy.”

“And you're being a pain in the ass,” Coose said, “like always.” He Googled the word on his laptop, muttering, “Mr. Literature-guy, always thinking you're so smart.” He found the word. “Here, all right, you happy? ‘Winsome: cheerful or pleasant. Often possessing a childlike charm and innocence, as in: He had a winsome smile.'” Coose looked up, feigning surprise. “Hey, just like you.”

“Don't start. I smile enough.”

“Yeah, you got a smile like a comet, James, it comes around every decade or so.”

“You're not funny.”

“Actually, I am. A normal person would have laughed at that.”

“What do you make of the note?”

“I don't know … ‘The first was winsome'? He enjoyed it?”

“Maybe.”

“There's an implied threat there: ‘The first was winsome.' Could mean that there are going to be others, or there
were
others. He might have killed before.”

“Maybe.”

“Anything on the prints? The fingerprints?”

“Not in the system.”

“And we have no body.”

“No.”

“Who's this Lachlan guy, anyway? What's he got to do with it?”

“I don't know. That's what I'm going to find out if he ever gets here.”

“He say anything in his statement about it?”

“About what?”

“The note.”

“No. He didn't know it was there. Forensics found it at the bottom of the envelope.”

Mangan walked over to the window and looked out. A pigeon was shitting on the window ledge. He read the note again, “I will find them out.”

Coose went to the sink and turned the faucet on, letting the water run warm. “You know, James, it could be a kidnapping,” he said, washing his hands. “This woman might be alive somewhere.” He grabbed some paper towels and turned to Mangan. “Hey, you hear what I said? This woman could—”

Mangan wasn't listening anymore.

He was staring at the floor. Words were coming to him. Fractures of sentences. He cocked his head, trying to put them together …
and I … with tears … do wash … the blood away….
He thought he recognized where they were from, but there were other words too … unfamiliar words …
in my heart
…

Coose started to say something but Mangan waved him quiet.

… vengeance … in my heart …

“Hey,” Coose said, “you all right?”

… death in my hand …

“C'mon, James, stop it already. You creep me out when you do that.”

“Shhh!” Mangan said. He stilled himself. He listened.

Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,

Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.

Where did they come from, Mangan wondered, these words, these literary inklings? His subconscious? His imagination? What was the other thing at work in his mind? He really didn't know, but he'd come to trust the poetical oddities that flitted through his mind. He'd trained himself not to dismiss them, not to judge the mind's ideas too quickly. It was part of his job, he'd come to believe, to let the words in, to listen to them, to let the creative mingle with the forensic, to encourage the fiction of it and dream the wicked dreams of murderers, who never played by day-waking rules.

“James!” Coose said, stepping closer.

The words were gone. “Do you mind?” Mangan said, looking up. “I was having a moment there.”

“A moment of what?”

“A moment of—I don't know—of trying to catch this guy before he kills someone else.”

“Someone else? We don't even know if the lady's dead yet. We don't have a body.”

“We will, believe me. I got a bad feeling about this one.”

“You got a bad feeling about everything, James. You were born with a bad feeling.”

“All right, Little Miss Sunshine, just—” There was a knock at the door. “What?!”

Mickey Eagan stuck his head in the doorway. If you had to draw a caricature of what an overweight middle-aged Irish cop from Chicago looked like, it would look like Mickey Eagan. Reading made him sweat.

“Special delivery,” Eagan said, winded. “Mr. Kevin Lachlan. I got him outside.”

O
ut in the hallway, Kevin Lachlan was on his cell phone. He looked impatient and bothered. At a glance, Mangan didn't like him. He knew his type: the church-going North Shore businessman who liked to meet with associates in Chicago for conventions and trade shows, which were really just excuses for them to whore themselves for a weekend. And after the CEOs got tired of whacking their johnnies off to the twenty-four-hour porn stations, provided at their all-expense-paid hotels, they'd turn to the local escort services, just a computer click away, major credit cards accepted. Scum like Lachlan were all over Chicago, and Mangan couldn't do very much about them. If the girls were of age and consenting, he and his men left the tricks and pimps alone or turned them over to vice. But under-agers, or girls forced into the business, well, that was a very different story with Mangan. He'd seen girls beaten unconscious, arms broken, faces pounded into walls, skulls crushed. It angered him irrationally and brought out the worst in him as a cop, or perhaps the best—the distinction was always a little hazy.

Early in his career, he and his team had busted up a strip joint in west Chicago called the Blue Throat. Up on a second floor they'd broken down the door of a room called the Dessert Bar and found about a half dozen girls inside, mostly naked, slumped in wooden chairs. The girls barely moved when they crashed through the door. They didn't look
scared or even surprised that the room was suddenly crowded with police. They looked dead. On a filthy mattress, on the floor, was a girl lying on her side, naked from the waist down. Blood stained her thighs and the mattress beneath her. She couldn't have been more than thirteen years old, maybe ninety pounds.

Not a man easily moved, Mangan had always prided himself on being inured to the things that would make most other officers lose their lunch. He'd seen horrific murders, mutilations, decaying corpses, mob slayings—things done to human bodies which no person should ever have to see or think about.
Habit, the great deadener
, had numbed him. But on the second floor of the Blue Throat that day, looking down at a listless blood-soaked little girl, a strange pressure pushed upward in his chest and throat. He felt nauseous and sweaty. He reached for the wall to steady himself. He was going to pass out, he knew the feeling, he was going to faint right in front of all of these other cops. He struggled to hold on—

And for the first time, he heard the words.

He didn't know why they had come to him, but when he listened to them they seemed to steady him. They stopped his mind and heart from shutting down. They helped him to somehow express the inexpressible. His nausea passed, and under his breath he actually spoke some of the words aloud.

I was not angry until this instant.

And then he nearly beat the club owner to death.

He had felt nothing but heat, a kind of heat in his stomach and balls as he sprinted down the stairs. He grabbed a liquor bottle off the bar and took it to the club owner's head. There wasn't much of the guy's face left when he was done—bottles don't break like in the movies. If Coose and another officer, Willie Palmer, hadn't stopped him, Mangan would have killed the man. That thing, that darker thing inside Mangan had a tricky on-off switch, and it didn't always work right. It was the same thing that helped keep him alive as a kid growing up on the streets of Chicago. It was the same thing that, when kept in check, made him a good cop. It was also the thing that would probably get him killed one day. It was a nasty line to walk, given his kind of work. Not a thin blue line, but a thick fat fucking black one. He'd waded through the shit of it all his life.

This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.

After the episode at the Blue Throat, Mangan was suspended for six months and put on paid leave, then brought up on charges. He lied on the stand. Cusumano and Palmer swore to it. What had happened, they'd said, was that the club owner had rushed at Detective Mangan with a bottle of Slivovitz, which Mangan barely had time to grapple out of his hands. He was then forced to beat the man senseless with it in self-defense. Mangan was acquitted. He received the Cook County Distinguished Service Award and was offered complimentary anger-management counseling.

He accepted both.

Mangan knew there were plenty of things in his life that he wasn't very good at: The nicer things, the lighter things. Smiling, for example. They'd passed him by somehow, or maybe he'd refused to let them in, he didn't know. Shrinks would have a field day with him. A few of his friends, and most of the women in his life, had at some point taken it upon themselves to help fix him. He'd worked a long time at trying to change himself, and now, if he were honest, and he was, he was tired of it. His new outlook on life, arrived at through the wisdom of age—or sheer exhaustion more likely—could pretty much be summed up as, Fuck it, this is me. He was born with a little gloom around his heart, and he knew it. He'd fought it when he was younger. He'd set ideals for himself, honorable ideals, and tried to rise to them, but his other self, the kid from the street, was always tagging along just a few skips behind him, calling out, “And where do you think
you're
going?”

He often wished he'd have turned out to be a better man.

“And screw that too,” he'd think in the very next second. He was a middle-aged cop and good at it. All right, so he'd missed out on some of the nicer things in life. All right, so he wasn't the oh so virtuous guy he'd started out to be. Guys like that don't always have what it takes to catch bad guys, the
really
bad guys: to roll around with them in the muck and the blood, to bite a nose off if that's what it took, or stick a gun into a meth-crusted mouth until the guy vomited and confessed where a missing child was. That's what it often came down to, because real bad guys eat good guys for breakfast. You blink, you're dead. This wasn't TV or some cock 'n' cunt crime novel with a vampire love triangle
at the end. This was Chicago, and the sign over detective James Mangan's door said Room 70, Violent Crimes Task Force—emphasis
violent.

M
angan stepped into the hallway when he saw Kevin Lachlan start to make another phone call. “Mr. Lachlan,” he said, gesturing him into the room. “Thanks for coming in today.”

“Sorry,” Lachlan said, putting the phone away. “I have a lot going on at work.”

“No problem. I'm Detective Mangan.” He gestured to Coose. “My partner, Frank Cusumano.” Coose pulled out a chair at the table and Lachlan sat. Mangan sat across from him. “Sorry it's so hot in here. The AC's out. I keep calling maintenance. They don't like me.”

“Uh-huh,” Lachlan said, glancing around the office. He stood, took off his jacket, and sat back down.

“You okay?” Mangan asked.

“I'm afraid I … I'm not feeling too well.”

This is a subtle whore,
echoed in Mangan's head,
a closet lock and key of villainous secrets
.

Coose asked him, “You want I should get you some water?”

“Please.”

Coose took his cue and left the room. Mangan waited. He let the silence sit. He learned a lot about people from their silences. Lachlan kept wiping his forehead but there wasn't anything there. Coose came back in, gave Lachlan the water, and left the room. Lachlan sat up a little higher in his chair and drank.

“Better?” Mangan asked him.

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Good. So. Look. I'll try and get you out of here as quick as I can, all right? So, to start with, Mr. Lachlan—is that Irish? You Irish?”

“Scotch Irish.”

“Uh-huh,” Mangan said, the words
we have scotched the snake, not killed it
darting through his thoughts. “So to begin, Mr. Lachlan, I want to apologize right off the bat because I'm going to have to ask you some things, and I'm kind of a straightforward guy in my work, because, you know, it just saves a hell of a lot of time.” Mangan opened the case file and placed it on the desk. “And, tell you the truth, I got a friggin' blivit
times three here that I'm trying to clean up. You know what that is, a blivit?”