A Winsome Murder Read online

  “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.

  Mystery Story: umbrella term for a type of fiction with several sub-genres, such as the detective story, including the police procedural. These types of fiction often deal with crime—frequently murder—and its successful solution. Suspense arises in the course of seeking that solution, which places the detective, others in pursuit of the villain, or innocent victims, in jeopardy.

  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.”

  It 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 walke
d 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?

  I will find them out,

  And in their ears tell them my dreadful name …

  Revenge.

  Fenyana 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.

  Coose 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 ha
d 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.