A Winsome Murder Read online

  “Jesus Christ!” he screamed. He dropped the envelope and backed away, fumbling for his cell phone. “Jesus fuck! FUCK!”

  At the end of a long hallway, on the second floor of Chicago police headquarters, inside a room known only as Room 70, detective James Mangan waited for the shitty coffeepot to stop gurgling so he could pour himself a cup of shitty coffee. Room 70 was off limits to the public and most other detectives. The door, always shut. A handwritten note in the hallway: No Press. The room was home to the Violent Crimes Task Force—the VCTF—which investigated bank crimes, drug violations, kidnappings, and extortion. Serial killings, murder, sexual assault, and other crimes of violence, however, were given the highest priority.

  As Detective Mangan waited for his coffee, he sorted through a file of his open cases—two rapes, a North Side drive-by, a robbery gone bad with a baseball bat, and a dealer thrown off a roof in the projects— thank you, good morning. He fumbled with the teeny slivered clasp of a manila envelope, opened it, and slid out an eight-by-ten photograph of a dismembered hand.

  A new investigation.

  He tossed the photo on the table and went over to the half-sink, strewn with dirty plates and coffee cups caked with grime. He grabbed the least filthy cup he could find and cleaned it. He was sweating already. The air-conditioning had been out for two days now. He took off his two-button wool blazer, a jacket he was rarely without, even in summer. It hid his gun well and made him look as if he was in better shape than he actually was. It also obscured the extra flesh beginning to muffin out around his waist, a thing that mortified him. He’d complained about it so much that Dr. Brian Rhys, the forensic pathologist, had recently dropped a Men’s Health article on his desk: “101 Ways to Lose Your Gut.” Mangan was going to wrap a dead salmon in it and put it in Rhys’s car, but on second thought he decided to give it a try. He quit after number two: “avoid foods that come in a bag or box.” He was lazier now, and he knew it. He didn’t like working out anymore, didn’t like running or stepping on a scale, or having to watch what he ate, and hated that his doctor had made him quit smoking. He wanted his other body back, the maintenance-free one of his youth, the one like aluminum siding that he only had to hose down once in a while.

  The shitty coffeepot hissed and pissed to a finish. Mangan poured a cup and denied himself a third packet of sugar—as if that was going to make a difference—and looked more closely at the photograph of the bloodless hand on the table. He put his glasses on and read the prelim notes attached to the photo. The hand had been severed from the basilar joint of the left thumb on a clean diagonal across the wrist between the metacarpal and the trapezium bones. It is this joint, where the metacarpal bone of the thumb attaches to the trapezium bone of the wrist, that allows movement of the thumb into the palm, or opposition, a motion that distinguishes human beings from most beasts, as Rhys liked to say.

  Mangan sipped his coffee and read on.

  A small-toothed serrated blade had been used to sever the hand, no trace under the fingernails, no signs of decomposition. A female appendage. A ring still on the small finger. A five-leafed clover inlaid with a greenish stone, malachite. Detailed forensic analysis was pending.

  Mangan wasn’t holding out much hope of finding a one-handed woman strolling along Lake Shore Drive. He knew whoever the hand belonged to was dead. The body would show up soon, though, he thought. It had been hot as hell in Chicago for weeks now, over ninety, somebody would nose her up in a few days. He read the remaining notes. The hand had been placed in an envelope addressed to a Mr. Kevin Lachlan, a magazine editor, and discovered within a box of submissions. There was no return address on the envelope. No postmark. A clerk at the front desk of the building had found the envelope in the lobby and had put it with Lachlan’s other mail. A note had also been found in the envelope, allegedly written by the perpetrator. Mangan took up a photocopy of it to give it a read, when a thought sounded in his mind—a question actually—a cadence of words singing quietly in his head.

  And who has cut those pretty fingers off ?

  “Shit,” he muttered, taking off his glasses. He listened more closely.

  Thou hast no hands to wipe away thy tears.

  And he knew, then, that this was going to be a case that would not leave him alone. It was going to haunt him until he caught or killed whoever had done this.

  What accursed hand hath made thee handless?

  “Shit,” he said again.

  These verbal quirks, these teasings of thoughts that pinged around in Mangan’s brain on occasion, always began in the same way: snatches of words, lines of poetry, minisoliloquies in his mind. And when they came to him, he paid attention, because in some strange way he knew they were there to help him. They helped him to find murderers. And no, he wasn’t crazy, this wasn’t ESP or psychic detecting or voodoo magic, or any fruity woo-woo crap like that.

  It was just true.

  At about five thirty in the morning, her mouth still tasting of sleep, Jillian did as she did every morning: filled her thermos with coffee, hobbled out her back door, and headed to her writing studio. A hazy, warm morning, muggy. She tugged open the rotted wood door of the carriage house and tripped over a lawnmower.

  “Damn it.”

  Michael had left it just inside the doorway again. The first floor of her carriage house was filled with more crap than Jillian knew what to do with. She’d promised herself that spring, as she did every spring, that she was going to clean it out. It was now late August, her next installment on the Ellison murder was due, and she didn’t have time to clean her kitchen, never mind the garage. The summer was flying by. The first few installments had gone well, but for the last week or so her writing had begun to slow. This morning it was practically sloth-like. She needed more material, but her interview with the police chief in Winsome Bay was still a day away.

  She poured a cup of coffee and read through the first few installments again to see what she’d already covered. Shit, she suddenly thought, has this been done before? This whole idea, which she’d been thinking was so original—true crime, creative nonfiction—had it already been done by someone else? There’s probably a movie about it already, or a TV series with absurdly beautiful people playing the leads.

  Relax, she told herself, stop it. The murder was original, it couldn’t help but be. So were the characters. Besides, Lachlan liked her writing. She was being published. She was getting paid. It was all okay. She stopped the looser thoughts in her brain, which, monkey-like, had a habit of leaping around unexpectedly.

  She looked at the framed quote she kept next to her computer.

  Just write something, she told herself.

  Anything.

  J. McClay/Killing/American Forum

  . . . . . . . .

  Nothing.

  Nothing was coming.

  She started looking around her office. I should vacuum in here, she thought. She checked her e-mail. She called Mara, who didn’t answer. She left a long message. She wondered if she should repaint.

  Focus, she told herself.

  Again she read through what she’d already written. It all felt wrong. The pacing was slow, there was too much back story, too many quirky details and locations and new characters, not enough action—

  Stop it, she thought, scolding herself, don’t start rushing. It’s not a movie script, it doesn’t need heart-stopping action in every chapter, it doesn’t need the obligatory sex and violence scenes this early. Pace will come, action will come. He will come. Whoever murdered Deborah Ellison, that is, and when he’s caught she’d have a wealth of material to write about: the arrest, the trial, maybe a jailhouse interview with the killer, his final words dictated to her on death row, then the call from Oprah—

  A wisp of shame blurred Jillian’s thoughts for a moment. She looked away from the computer and took a sip of coffee. Was she sensationalizing this girl’s murder merely to make a buck? Was it only about fame and money? Was she becoming the kind of writer that she’d
looked down at all her life, cannibalizing lurid tragedies, adding to the glut of garbage already out there, the “reality shows” of literature? No, she told herself. No. She felt a need, an uncontrollable urge, to write these articles. She was bound to them. She was bound to Deborah Ellison. And keeping the story of this girl’s murder alive and vivid in the public eye might even help catch whomever had killed her.

  Jillian heard a noise outside her office door.

  She turned quickly in her chair. A slight chill trickled down her neck. She looked around the room. The door was unlocked. She waited a moment—no sound—then ran to the door and locked it.

  Her heart was racing.

  She was scared.

  She’d heard authors say that writers should write about what scares them. What if this was what they meant? To write about a subject that literally terrified her. Murder. Random horror. Unspeakable evil. Maybe this was the very thing she needed to be writing in order to grow as a novelist. She’d been feeling inauthentic in her work for years now, uninspired, repeating things. She bored herself. She needed something drastic to push her into whatever was next.

  “Then use this,” she thought. “Write about the fear. Write about feeling bored and repeating things. Write about getting up from the computer and locking the door. It’s true, so write it.”

  Jillian filled her coffee cup, faced off with the computer screen before her, and began to write.

  Detective Mangan opened the door of Room 70, looked down the hallway, and slammed it shut. He called maintenance for the third time that day and badgered them until a janitor finally showed up outside the door. He set down a filthy, once-white, standing fan and walked away without a saying a word.

  “Appreciate it,” Mangan called after him as sarcastically as he could. He grabbed the fan and brought it into the room. “Hey, Coose,” he said to his partner, “plug this in for me, would you?”

  “In a second, I’m eating.”

  “I’m not asking you to stop eating, just plug it in. Is that so hard?”

  “Why don’t you do it then?”

  “Oh, for—” Mangan said, starting to do it himself.

  Coose grabbed the fan from him, “I’m just busting your ass.” He pulled the fridge away from the wall and plugged in the fan. “Why you so pissy today?”

  “Because I’m dying of the heat in here, we’re out of coffee, my back is bugging me again, and this guy is pushing forty minutes late now.” They were waiting for Kevin Lachlan to show up for an interview. “And that’s just for starters.” Mangan turned the fan on. It blew more dust than air for a moment, then settled into a noisy sweep of the room. “Where the hell is this guy, anyway?”

  Coose shrugged, “I don’t know,” and peeled open a drippy sausage and pepper sandwich.

  “They said he was on his way.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “Eagan and Palmer.”

  “Then he’s on his way.”

  Mangan watched Coose devour half the sandwich. “Breathe,” he told him. “Breathe between bites.”

  Coose mumbled something unintelligible.

  Mangan opened a file, talking half to himself. “Look at this … like I’ve got nothing better to do than to track down the owners of errant limbs.” He sorted through some papers. “I’ve got statements from officers on scene, a clerk in the lobby, and this Lachlan guy.” Kevin Lachlan was the editor of the American Forum who’d had the misfortune of finding a severed hand in his mail. He’d been questioned by uniformed officers the day of the incident, but something about his statement didn’t sit right with Mangan. He held out a clutch of papers to Coose. “Here, tell me what you think.”

  “You think. I’m eating.”

  “I already thought. It’s your turn.”

  “In a minute.”

  Frank Cusumano (Coose), ten years younger than Mangan but with less hair, stood about five foot eight, 210 pounds. In great shape, and he hardly ever went to the gym. A fact which irritated the hell out of Mangan. The two of them weren’t the tallest detectives ever to walk onto a crime scene, but they might very well have been the widest: Mangan, a short bull of an Irishman whose former V-chest was now something like a square block, and Coose, a tree trunk of an Italian with very little neck, who looked a bit like Sly Stallone in Rocky after he’d had the shit kicked out of him for four consecutive movies. What the two of them lacked in height they made up in thickness, physically and mentally. They bickered like an old married couple and enjoyed it.

  “Would you finish eating already,” Mangan said. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Coose wiped his chin. “I get agita if I eat fast.”

  “You get agita ’cause you eat crap.”

  “You’re gonna talk about what I eat? Mr. Krispy Kreme four hundred calories a pop?”

  “You and your calories—like a girl.”

  “You should count a few yourself, lose that gut. There’s no real nutritional value in gin, you know that, right?” Coose negotiated another bite of his sandwich. “Moderation, James. Word o’ the day.”

  “Moderate your mouth.” Mangan held up a copy of the note found with the severed hand. “You see this yet?”

  “I just got in, for Christ’s sake. I haven’t seen anything.”

  Mangan dropped the note on the table.

  “You want agita? Read that.”

  COPY: Ref. D-M 5

  #8912-Pending

  Chicago VCTF

  Det. Mangan 63

  SHE WAS CHOSEN.

  YOU WERE CHOSEN.

  EVERY TICK OF TIME

  SINCE THE UNIVERSE BEGAN

  HAS GUIDED YOU TO THIS MOMENT,

  RIGHT NOW, READING THESE WORDS.

  YOU THINK YOU CHOOSE.

  YOU CHOOSE NOTHING.

  I AM THE CHOOSER.

  I WILL FIND THEM OUT.

  THE FIRST WAS WINSOME.

  “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.”

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nbsp; “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.