A Winsome Murder Read online

  An explosion waiting to happen.

  “We generally don’t catch them till they blow themselves up.”

  Jillian pressed the question now that she really wanted to ask. “Do you know if Deborah Ellison was involved with any drugs?”

  Faber hesitated the slightest bit. “I can’t comment on that, ma’am.”

  “The papers said her body had been mutilated somehow. Could you be more specific?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can you tell me how long the body had been there?”

  “Nope.”

  “Can you describe for me what the victim was wearing?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you know Deborah Ellison?”

  “I believe I’ve already answered that, ma’am.”

  “I mean, personally. Did you know her well?”

  “I’ve got a son her age. They went to school together. So, I knew her pretty well.” He gestured to a photo on his desk of a young man kneeling, dressed in full camouflage, holding a rifle in one hand and a dead turkey in the other. “That’s him there, Kyle.” He pointed to another framed photograph. A family picture. “That’s my wife there, and my other two boys, Carson and Matt, and my daughter, Jennifer. And that little peanut there in her arms is our first grandchild, Kayla.”

  “That’s a big family.”

  “Not for around here. You get families of eight, ten, eleven, out on the farms.”

  Jillian tried to steer the conversation back to the murder. “Deborah Ellison was last known to be living in Chicago. Is that right?”

  “I believe so, yes.”

  “What do you think she was doing back here in Winsome?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Visiting family? Or friends?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Do you think she was killed here? Or was her body just—was she killed somewhere else and then left here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you have a guess?”

  “I don’t guess, ma’am.”

  Jillian checked some of the notes she’d gathered from news reports. “The papers said that the victim’s father, officer Tom Ellison, was first on the scene.”

  Faber nodded, barely.

  “But he didn’t identify the body.” Jillian looked at the wall to her left. “That officer did.” She pointed to one of the framed photographs hanging there. “Officer Schaefer.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tom Ellison didn’t recognize his own daughter but Officer Schaefer did?”

  Faber shifted in his seat and adjusted his bulletproof vest, the outline of which was clearly visible beneath his uniform. “From the condition of her body,” he said, “it was obvious that death had occurred. So Tom, well, he stepped away as soon as he seen it and called for backup. He didn’t get a good look at first.”

  “One of the papers said that she’d been beaten beyond recognition. How did Officer Schaefer know it was Deborah?”

  “I can’t say anything to that.”

  “Did anyone else on the scene know it was her?”

  “No. After Schaefer told me who it was, I got Tom out of there fast as I could and sent for Father Ryan. He was the one who told Tom.”

  “Father Ryan?”

  “Tom’s priest over at Saint Francis. He helped out some with Debbie when she was younger.”

  “Helped with what?”

  “Kid stuff, teen stuff.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “Nope,” Faber said, taking out his cell phone. It was buzzing. He looked at the number. “Excuse me,” he said. He spoke to the caller. “Hello? Yes, sir, you’re talking to him. Yes, sir. Yes, I will. Just a minute, please.” Faber looked to Jillian and nodded toward the door. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I have to take this.”

  “Just a few more questions. Please?”

  “No, ma’am, I think we’ll be done here.”

  “But—”

  “Careful driving. Lot of deer out this time of night.”

  J. McClay/Killing/American Forum

  I drove to the north edge of the town after meeting with the Winsome Bay chief of police, Wesley Faber. He’d been less than forthcoming during the interview. I slowed the car as I approached the area where Deborah Ellison’s body had been found. The sun, not quite down, cast a Creamsicle-colored tint across the still blue sky as I pulled into the unfinished development that would someday be the Deer Park Apartments, as a sign at the entrance promised. The site had the look of a vandalized Grant Wood painting: acres of still green hays and soybean fields, slashed and marred by asphalt roads and freshly poured sidewalks.

  Just inside the entrance, two new houses had started to go up, framed out in bone-white two-by-fours, like a barn raising suddenly halted midrise. Piled high to the sides of the houses were stacks of plywood and roofing shingles. Behind the homes were acres of half-harvested farmland. Wide swaths of hays had been cut and raked together into long narrow windrows. They lay there, snakily, field curing. Some of the hay had already been baled into massive cubes and scattered about the earth like the droppings of some giant straw beast. Much of it, though, hadn’t been cut at all. Waist high and willowy, the grassy fields rippled lazily beneath the breeze.

  In the distance, a cloud of dust tumbled behind a slow-moving tractor.

  I drove farther in, to the exact spot where the newspaper said Deborah Ellison’s body had been found. I opened my window and turned off the car. There was a wooden stake stuck into the field there, just off the curb, with a white number 46 painted on it. A string of rosary beads and a blue-ribboned medal hung from it. Someone had propped up a ceramic cross at its base. Stacked on the ground around it were piles of weathered bouquets, their cellophane wrappings gently crinkling in the light breeze. A large square of yellow crime scene tape sectioned off the makeshift memorial from the rest of the field. I stared at the spot, wondering if the future owners of lot 46 would be told of what had happened on their property, or if they’d discover it years later, perhaps whispered to one of their children on a playground during recess.

  Sitting there, I expected, I wanted, to feel differently.

  I didn’t.

  A vague sense of sadness filled me, or perhaps it was disappointment. I expected something momentous to occur as I gazed at the actual spot where the body had been discovered, but I felt nothing. Everything looked so normal. Something unspeakable had happened in this place; there should have been some residue, some echo in the air of that awful night. God should not have allowed the sky to blue or the hay to green in such a place. Deborah Ellison’s body had been dumped here like so much garbage. She may still have been alive. She may have breathed her last breaths not five feet from where I was parked. The grasses might have tickled her face in the warm wind that night, and she, unable to brush away the blades, may have lain there, staring up at some dark star, thinking her last thoughts. A human being had died horribly in this spot, something should be different.

  But nothing, it seemed to me, was different. Except for my presence.

  He may have been here too, parked where I was parked. He may have sat in his car, just like me, with his window rolled down, looking at what he’d done. If Deborah Ellison had still been alive, he may have been able to hear whatever dying sounds she’d still been able to make.

  Jillian stopped writing. She saved her work and closed her laptop and placed it on the seat beside her. The Winsome sky to the east had turned a lilac purple now. She watched it for a time, still hoping to experience something, she didn’t know what, just something: an act of coincidence, an image, a feeling. But nothing happened. She looked around her, up and down the yet to be inhabited streets, croplands to either side, driveways leading to nowhere, waiting for homes to be attached to them. A large black hawk glided across the road and into the field to her right, and Jillian thought for a moment that it was an omen of some kind. It wasn’t; she could feel it right away, it didn’t mean anything. It was just a bird in a field.
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  She took out a pack of cigarettes she’d hidden in her purse and smoked. She wrote down a few notes. Checked the time. She had to be getting home soon. She gave Mara a call and left a message on her voice mail.

  “It’s me again. Where are you? I’ve been calling you for two days. Look, I got some really great stuff. I want to tell you about it. So call me, okay? Even if it’s late. Love ya. Bye.”

  Detective Mangan tracked down the Wisconsin murder victim that Kevin Lachlan had told him about: Deborah Ellison. He called the officer in charge of the investigation, Wesley Faber, the police chief in Winsome Bay. Mangan explained to Faber about the severed hand that had been found in Chicago, then queried him as to the condition of the Wisconsin victim’s body, the details of which had not yet been released to the public.

  Faber told him that Deborah Ellison was missing her left hand.

  “Well,” Mangan said, “guess I can stop looking for a body.”

  “I’m afraid that’s right, sir,” Chief Faber said. “We have her here.”

  Mangan spoke with Faber for a while. He was pleasant enough on the phone, but Mangan could sense that he was a bit overwhelmed by the case, and understandably so. This was his first murder investigation and he’d known the victim and her family.

  “I’ll send you everything I’ve got,” Mangan told him. “Our forensic reports should be coming in soon, and I’ll get them up to you. We’ll keep following up on things here. If I find anything, I’ll contact you.”

  “Thank you” Faber said. “I’ll fax what we’ve got to your medical examiner. You have his number handy?”

  Mangan gave him Rhys’s fax number and wished him luck.

  Why the severed hand of a murder victim from Wisconsin had been dropped off at Kevin Lachlan’s apartment in Chicago was still a mystery to Mangan, but at least he had a corpse now, or rather Wesley Faber had one. It would be Faber’s investigation now and off Mangan’s plate, which was just fine with him. He had more than his share of open cases to keep him busy. He wondered, though, why he’d misread the case. The feelings had been so strong when he’d heard the words, And who has cut those pretty fingers off ? That usually meant he was in for the long haul. But then again, occasionally his instincts were wrong.

  Mangan completed the paperwork, filed it, and finished out the day reviewing his next case: the killing of a Sally-Boy Hicks, a heroin dealer in K-Town shot twice in the back of the head and tossed off a fifteen-story building. Redundant, Mangan thought, but obviously somebody was trying to make a point. After work he stopped off at the Melrose Diner and got dinner to go, eating most of it on the drive home. He headed up Lake Shore Drive, hitting the usual traffic, and continued north to Rogers Park.

  The four-story townhouse where Mangan lived, built in 1920, still had a vintage charm to it, a phrase most often used to camouflage the more dilapidated shitholes in Chicago, but this building was actually in pretty good shape. He’d moved there not long after his wife died and had lived on the fourth floor, apartment 421, for three years now.

  He pulled into his absurdly expensive parking space around back and grabbed what was left of his dinner. Built onto the rear side of the building was a tall zigzagging run of wooden stairs leading nearly to the roof. The stairs opened out onto landings off the back of each apartment’s kitchen entrance. Pretty much everyone used these stairs as the main entrance to the building since the parking was out back. Mangan made his way up the wooden stairway—his exercise for the day—keyed open his back door, and walked into the kitchen. Quiet and dark. He kept his thick window curtains closed during the day. A room at the front of the apartment had a bay window that jutted out slightly from the building. If he stood at just the right angle, Mangan could spy a little piece of Lake Michigan at the far end of the street.

  It was not a small apartment but one of those spaces where the square footage was three times as long as it was wide, like living in a skinny rectangle. There were two large guest rooms off a long hard-wood-floored hallway that led from the back kitchen to the front room. There were no beds or dressers in these rooms, only a single chair in each, a short stepladder, and books—hundreds of books—shelved on every wall. There were books piled on the floors against the walls and stacked in the closets. Out in the long hallway, shelves had been built, floor to ceiling along both sides. They too, were filled with books. In the living room there was a couch and a large coffee table with books strewn on and around them and piled everywhere that there was space enough to do so. This was the other part of Mangan’s world. Books. They were his Yale and Harvard. They cracked the quiet of an otherwise empty home, and he never had to feed them or take them for a walk.

  Mangan ate what was left of his dinner and poured himself a gin. He headed to the front room and called his daughter.

  “Hey, Katie, it’s Dad.”

  “Hey, what’s up?” she said. “Hold on a sec. Shit. Sorry. Okay. Hi. How are you?”

  “What are you, exercising or something? You sound out of breath.”

  “No, just trying to get out of here. Working late tonight. What’s up with you?”

  “Nothing, just calling.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How’s the job?”

  “What?”

  “Work, how’s it going?”

  “Oh, good. Crazy, but good.”

  “You still liking it there?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Mangan heard something fall on the other end. “You okay?”

  “Sorry. Yeah, fine. What did you say?”

  “What?”

  “You just asked me something.”

  “Nothing. Look, I’ll call later. You’re busy.”

  “No, no, I’m fine, Dad, really. I’m just—hold on a second. Okay, I’m good now. I’m sitting. Go ahead.”

  Mangan could hear the preoccupation in her voice. When she was little and didn’t want to talk to him on the phone because she was watching TV, she used to do the same thing. She sounded just the same now at twenty-nine.

  Mangan lied, “Katie, honey, I forgot, I can’t talk right now. I have to make a another call. It’s work. Sorry.”

  “Sure. That’s okay, Dad. Call me later.”

  “Okay.”

  “Love you.”

  “Love you too.”

  “Bye.”

  Mangan listened into the quiet cell phone for a moment, then flipped it closed.

  He took up the copy of Titus Andronicus he’d started reading the night before. Most of the words that had been coming to him lately were from that play. He hadn’t read it in years. He took a slow sip of his drink and started reading. The Lachlan/Ellison case was off his hands now, but he thought he’d finish Titus anyway.

  I’ll find a day to massacre them all,

  And raze their faction and their family,

  The cruel father and his—

  His cell phone buzzed. It was Brian Rhys from forensics. The Wisconsin M.E. had faxed down the Ellison girl’s fingerprints.

  “Hey, Jimbo,” Rhys said. “Got a little hitch. The prints don’t match. It’s not Debbie Ellison’s hand.”

  Jillian McClay was driving home after her interview with Wesley Faber. She was less than satisfied with the results. She was almost to the interstate when she passed the Bar Nun Tavern on the edge of town. Parked in front were two pickup trucks and a police cruiser.

  She checked the time.

  Made a U-turn.

  As Jillian opened the door to the tavern, two feed-capped heads sitting at the bar turned toward her. They lingered on her for longer than was comfortable, then went back to their drinks. The barmaid, tapping at a video poker machine, barely looked up. On the opposite side of the bar was a small back room with a pool table, a few men corralled around it in a haze of smoke. The dark carpeted floors smelled faintly of stale beer and urine. Sitting at a table near the back of the bar was officer Michele Schaefer. Jillian was sure it was her. She had seen the woman’s photo on the wall of the police station while
interviewing Wesley Faber. Schaefer was out of uniform and sitting with three other people. They appeared to be close in age, late twenties, maybe, early thirties, huddled around a table crowded with beer bottles, their conversation hushed.

  Michele Schaefer was the officer who had identified Deborah Ellison’s body.

  Jillian sat at the end of the bar. She didn’t want to approach Schaefer too quickly, didn’t want her to shut down the way Faber had. She ordered a drink and texted her son. Might be late, make a pizza. She called Mara, but again she didn’t answer. She left a long message and then lit a cigarette. The two men in feed caps stared over at her between their swallows of beer and fistfuls of popcorn, and the barmaid paid attention to no one.

  The sound of cue balls cracked occasionally from the back room.

  Eventually, Schaefer glanced Jillian’s way.

  Jillian nodded a polite, and slightly wary, hello. She waited a few more minutes, then ventured over, making an apology to the table, and asking if Schaefer was the officer she’d seen on TV.

  Her friends, all a little drunk, started to object.

  Schaefer waved them quiet. “Whoa, whoa, let her talk,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “I’m a writer,” Jillian said. “I’m here doing a story.”

  “About what?”

  “Deborah Ellison.”

  The two men scraped back their chairs and stood. “Come on,” one of them said, “let’s go.” He was tall and well built, with a scruff of beard and short-cropped hair. The other man, just as big and scruffier, cleared the table of empties and took them to the bar.

  “Cal,” Schaefer called after him, “Cal, wait a second.”

  “I said let’s go.” He turned to Jillian. “Look, she’s not talking to anyone, okay? Just leave us alone.”

  “Aw, don’t be like that,” Schaefer said. “You’re not being very hospitable.” Her last word was slightly slurred.

  The man called Cal appealed to the other woman at the table for help. “Jeannie?”

  She got up. “Come on, Michele.” She was a tall woman, nearly as big as Cal. “We should go.”