A Winsome Murder Page 11

  Traffic was almost stopped.

  “Move!” Coose yelled. “Move it!” He and Mangan had been trying to get out of Chicago for almost an hour and had barely made it to O’Hare. “People in Chicago don’t know how to drive in the rain. It drizzles and it slows to a friggin’ crawl.”

  They were on their way to Winsome. The news of officer Tom Ellison’s suicide traveled quickly, and Mangan had called Wesley Faber right away. They’d already had a meeting set up and decided to keep it. Mangan was anxious to get some more details about the Wisconsin case and wanted to see the dump site of Deborah Ellison’s body. He also wanted to interview Jillian McClay, the writer, who lived in the neighboring town of Enfield.

  The traffic finally opened up a bit, and Coose stopped yelling.

  The security tapes at the American Forum building showed Mara Davies leaving work at 9:07 p.m. on Sunday night. She never made it home. Her body was discovered by a delivery man a few days later behind a bar called the Nite Cap. Forensics was still doing a workup on some fiber and hair trace found on the victim. Dr. Rhys confirmed that Davies had been strangled, her larynx crushed. It appeared that the blunt trauma to the facial area had been inflicted by the bottom of the assailant’s shoe. There were remnant heel marks on portions of the victim’s face. A search of the area—Dumpster, the alley, garbage cans—turned up nothing. Any trace evidence that might have been on the pavement around her had been destroyed by the heavy rains. Rhys also confirmed that the severed hand delivered to Lachlan’s apartment did indeed belong to Mara Davies.

  She had last been seen inside the Nite Cap with a group of friends. The bartender there knew her. She frequented the place with her boyfriend, he’d said. He had been working the night she was killed. Mickey Eagan was interviewing the friends and the boyfriend. He was also going to look at the bar’s surveillance tapes.

  It was nearly three hours before Coose made a left at a sign that said Welcome to Winsome Bay, Home of the Wildcats. The speed limit dropped quickly to twenty-five miles an hour. They drove down what seemed an endless green corridor—acres of cornfields spilled out to either side of the road. Mangan, lost in thought, watched the long, leafy, stalks flicker by.

  It was a lover and his lass,

  That o’er the green corn-field did pass.

  Farther down the road, the farmland ended, and they passed a few houses. Then the small downtown began to appear and Mangan could see that a chaos of reporters and TV crews had converged on the little town. The Davies-Ellison murders were big news in the Midwest now. Enough information had leaked out for reporters to connect the Winsome Bay killing to the Chicago murder. And now, with the suicide of Tom Ellison, the town looked like halftime at the Super Bowl.

  They drove slowly past a long, ranch-style funeral home where uniformed officers and state police were milling about the parking lot. Reporters and news crews were crowded behind lines of police barricades, fighting for position and jostling into each other, jabbing microphones and cameras out at anyone who happened by. The murders had created a frenzy of newscasts. Mangan knew this was coming, for men, like ravenous fishes, will feed on one another. There had been a sufficient amount of gruesomeness to warrant a grand media response, accompanied by the witty wordplay of the sick and shameless. Soon the TV experts, whose qualifications went no further than perky tits or loud mouths, began theorizing around large oak tables ringed with failed novelists and hack copywriters. The tabloids were in heaven. Sell all, sell merrily.

  Few organisms disgusted Mangan more than those in the media.

  Except for politicians.

  Coose drove past the blackened remains of Saint Francis church. A good two-thirds of the building had collapsed into a crushed skeleton of charred timber. Fire hoses were propped up on tripods, spraying fine mists of water over the still smoldering ruins. The parking lot was littered with debris, plastic cups, food wrappers, empty water bottles. Three firemen sat on a curb staring at the rubble, bewildered looks on their faces. Coose drove farther into the town. The business area was tiny. Almost no cars were on the street, an odd sight for a city dweller like Mangan, who spent nearly a third of his life looking for places to park, a very pissed-off third.

  They pulled up in front of the Dew Drop Inn, where they’d agreed to meet the chief of police, Wesley Faber. As Mangan stepped out of the car, he was struck by the smell of early fall already mustering in the clouds and a reeking of wet ash drifting over from what was left of the church. The steel door of the Dew Drop Inn had a horseshoe welded to it for a handle, and it took Mangan two heavy tugs and a yank to get it open. Inside, dark in the daytime, Chief Faber sat alone at the bar. A big guy, a face like Vince Lombardi. He got up and extended his hand to Mangan.

  “You look like a city cop,” Faber said.

  Mangan shook his hand. “You don’t.”

  Faber smiled. “No, guess I don’t.”

  “My partner,” Mangan said, “Frank Cusumano.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Faber leaned in and shook Coose’s hand, grabbed a fat file folder off the bar, and walked to a table at the back of the room. “You find the place okay?”

  “The GPS did,” Coose said, “kind of. They don’t work so good out here.”

  Faber gestured for them to sit down. “You fellas want some coffee or something?”

  “Please,” Mangan said.

  “Lou,” Faber called out to the bartender. “Couple of coffees.”

  Mangan took off his jacket and sat. “Looks like you got a bit of a circus out there.”

  “Yes, I do. Never anything like this in these parts, least not in my time.”

  “I’m very sorry about your officer Tom Ellison.”

  “Thank you.” Faber nodded slightly. “He was a good man.” The bartender came up to the table and set down mugs and a carafe of coffee. Faber poured for everyone. “So, how can I help you gentlemen?”

  Mangan sugared his coffee. “I think we start by sharing information. I’d like to see where Deborah Ellison’s body was found and talk to this Jillian McClay. I understand she lives around here?”

  “Yeah, not far at all.”

  “Well, she hasn’t been very forthcoming over the phone. I tried to get her in for an interview, but she declined. So I thought we’d come to her.”

  “She lives over in Enfield,” Faber said. “I know the chief there. He’s got someone over at her place watching her twenty-four-seven. First, I’ll take you out to where the body was found. It’s on the way. Then we can head over to Enfield.”

  Faber and Mangan discussed Jillian McClay’s connection to Mara Davies. Then they talked about the Ellison murder.

  “You like anyone for it yet?” Mangan asked Faber.

  “No. We called the state in for help. We’re not set up so well for this type of thing around here. Forensics hasn’t turned up much yet. Looks like she was killed somewhere else. They think whoever killed her cleaned up the body and then dumped it here.”

  Faber handed Mangan the latest forensic reports. The Wisconsin lab had found traces of an alkali-based cleaning solution on the Ellison girl’s body, Mangan read, as the words the wide sea hath drops too few to wash her clean again drifted through his head. “This cleaning solution, anything on that?” he asked Faber.

  “Nothing very special about it,” Faber said, “except that it’s not petroleum based, no hydrocarbons or phosphates.”

  “What are you, a chemist?”

  “No. Any farmer around here knows what that means. It’s organic. Biodegradable.”

  “Farmers use it?”

  “Organic farms do. Environmental folks. Marinas and boat owners have to use it on the inland lakes here.”

  “Is it easy to get?”

  “You can buy it just about anywhere. Farmers buy it in bulk, but you can get it in a hardware store, marinas—hell, you can get in the grocery store now. It’s not distinct enough to get any kind of match on. Same with the soil sample.”

  Mangan read on. Some gritty san
d-like soil had been found under one of the victim’s eyelids.

  “It’s a kind of sand,” Faber said. “Forensics is still working on it. It’s probably from where she was killed. This is all old river bottom around here. Dig a foot down just about anywheres and you hit sand.”

  “But she was living in Chicago, wasn’t she?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What makes you think she was killed around here?”

  “Well, I don’t necessarily. I’m just saying, if she was, it could have been anywhere.”

  “Had you seen her around here at all?”

  “No. She’d been gone for a long time. Nobody knew where she was.”

  “Not even her family? They didn’t know where she was living?”

  “No. They got only one letter sent home, to her brother. Postmarked Chicago. No return address. I can get you a copy. We tried just about everything we could think of to get a last known whereabouts on her. Nothing. Can’t find a friend, an employer, credit card with her name on it, nothing.”

  “And the letter? Anything in it?”

  “Not much. She said that she’d found a job and was living with a woman named … hold on …” Faber sorted through the file papers and pulled out a copy of the letter. “A strange name, something foreign. Here it is. Fenyana. That’s the only—”

  “Hold on, hold on,” Mangan said, turning to Coose. “Get Palmer on this right away.”

  “Got it,” Coose said, already taking out his cell phone.

  “Tell him I don’t care what he has to do,” Mangan said, “find this girl and bring her in. She lives in the projects, right? Tell him to get a warrant for her apartment if he can.”

  Coose walked away from the table to make the call.

  “You know this woman?” Faber asked. “This foreign girl?”

  “Yes,” Mangan said, mulling over the link between the two women. “She’s a prostitute in Chicago.” He read the copy of the letter. “And Deborah Ellison was living with her? They were roommates?”

  “Well, more than that, probably …”

  Faber went on then to explain about Deborah Ellison’s sexual orientation, about the relationship she’d had with Melissa Becker and her estrangement from her parents and the town.

  “People found out in high school,” he continued. “A lot of ugly stuff went on. She didn’t have many friends here.”

  Coose came back to the table. “I got Palmer on it. He’ll call as soon as he has anything.”

  Mangan wondered what the hell the connection was between Kevin Lachlan, Fenyana Petrakova, and Deborah Ellison. He ran the absurd scenario in his head: Lachlan has sex with a prostitute who is potentially a lover of Deborah Ellison. His magazine also just happens to be doing a series of articles about Ellison’s murder?

  O God, that one might read the book of fate.

  Mangan turned to Faber. “Let’s try Ms. McClay.”

  Faber took out his cell phone and called the woman. He got her voice mail. Mangan poured another cup of coffee and brought up the subject of jurisdiction. He and Faber discussed it briefly. If the Ellison girl had been alive when she was brought to Wisconsin it might involve interstate kidnapping, and then the feds would come in. The FBI would be involved anyway as they worked closely with VCTF in Chicago. Regardless, Mangan and Faber quickly agreed to share all evidence and start a mutual investigation. Faber, a trained sharpshooter and hunter all his life, was smart enough to know that he’d never tracked down anything that might actually shoot him first.

  “To be honest with you,” Faber said, “I just want the son of a bitch caught or dead, and I don’t give a care much how we do it. Let’s take a ride.”

  Wesley Faber swung by the police station and picked up another officer, Michele Schaefer. It was still raining, and she stooped slightly as she ran past the front of the cruiser. She hunched into the back seat, wet, and apologetic for being so. She smelled of cigarette smoke. Introductions were made all around. Mangan turned in his seat, talking through the safety cage.

  “I’m sorry about your partner,” he said. “Your boss tells me he was a good cop.”

  “Thank you. He was.”

  Faber pulled away, heading out of town.

  “I read your interview,” Mangan told Schaefer. “The one Jillian McClay wrote.”

  “I was off duty and drunk,” Schaefer said, rubbing rain out of her hair. “I didn’t know half of what I was saying. It’s my own fault.”

  “Don’t trust writers. You’re better off walking away.”

  Schaefer nodded and looked out the window.

  On the edge of town the cruiser slowed to an abrupt crawl behind a slow-moving John Deere combine that took up more than half the road. The driver pulled over as far to the right as he could and waved as Faber passed him. They turned into a new subdivision. A large green-and-white PeterSons Construction sign came into view, followed by another sign announcing the coming of the Deer Park Apartments.

  “This is where the body was found,” Faber said.

  The car fell silent but for the dull thudding of the windshield wipers. They drove on, past a few half-built homes, piles of construction materials stacked beside them. Faber pulled over at a spot where no homes had been built yet. There were still crops of some kind growing in the fields. The leafy greens of the short plants had yellowed, their thin sickled pods dangling, rusty colored and furry.

  “That’s all soybean out there,” Faber said, driving slowly. “Coming up here, to the right,” he continued, “that’s all hay. They’re just about done cutting it.”

  The hayfield had been pretty much shorn clean to the ground.

  New-reaped, Mangan thought, like a stubble-land at harvest home.

  There was only one small spot where hay still grew, a small area just off the curb, a single, well-defined square of pale straw. It was about ten by ten, and the grasses there, tall and seed laden, bent heavily under their own weight. Torn pieces of yellow police tape flagged loosely from wooden stakes at each corner of the square. In the rain, which was falling heavier now, the bouquets and cards strewn around the area looked like garbage, sodden and limp.

  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.”

  His 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.

  IT’S AS IF THERE IS A THING INSIDE ME

  THAT IS VERY DARK AND VERY HEAVY.

  LIKE A DEAD CHILD INSIDE MY CHEST.

  THIS BLACK THING OF DEADNESS

  PUSHES DOWN, CRUSHES, NUMBS.

  BUT WHEN I WRITE OF THIS—OF THAT

  WHICH CANNOT BE EXPRESSED—WHEN I FIND

  THE RIGHT WORDS …

  I FEEL.

  THE DEAD THING INSIDE ME MOVES,

  IT BLUSHES WARM AND KICKS.

  AND I KNOW NOW WHAT I AM.

  I AM NOT THE CHOOSER.

  I AM THE RIGHTER

  OF WRONGS.

  It 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.