A Winsome Murder Read online

  He would never admit it himself, but James Mangan was a closet artist. Not in the fruity I’m-so-special-because-I’m-an-artist sense. There wasn’t an “artsy” bone of that kind in his body, or in his family’s: four boys, Timmy and Eugene were marines—like his dad—and Johnny was a construction worker. Not big men, but bulls, short and thick. Scrappers. In the city Mangan grew up in, you had to be. He was the smallest of the boys, and as a kid he learned quickly that he had to fight—and fight first—with the biggest guys he could find. Most of the time he got the shit kicked out of him. Sometimes he didn’t. It didn’t matter; everyone thought he was crazy. And crazy goes a long way on the streets.

  Much to his own surprise, Mangan became friends with some actors, like Lou Ciccione, who had played Iago in his law class. Lou lived in Rogers Park and worked in most of the Chicago theaters. Back in the day, Mangan was more likely to meet up with Lou for a drink after work than anyone else. The last thing he wanted was to go to a cop bar. No, with Lou’s crowd it was a lot easier for Mangan to forget about work, forget about the horrible shit he dealt with every day, and besides, Lou loved Shakespeare. He and Mangan would talk nights away discussing the plays and arguing about what they meant. Some of the other actors were pretentious dicks of course—actually, most of them were—but Mangan just ignored them. A lot of the guys were gay, which Mangan took full advantage of because that meant a lot of rudderless women looking for direction come closing time.

  After a while Mangan learned to tell the real artists from the bluffs. It was an easy tell: the laziest and least talented always talked the most about being artists. They were the angry ones, angry at the world for not having noticed them, for not having recognized their gifts. They were bitter and resentful and felt slighted and talked shit about everyone else and wanted everyone to know how great they were and to pay more attention to them.

  Christ, Mangan thought, fucking serial killers think like that.

  Emilio Flores was driving south on Sheridan Road, delivering his early run of bread to a long list of Chicago taverns and restaurants. A warm, foggy morning, the sun barely grayed the clouds blanketing Lake Michigan.

  Traffic was already bad.

  Emilio stopped for gas, bought a coffee and two packages of Ho Hos, hurried back to his truck, and pulled into the nearest alley to eat. A mist had rolled in off the lake, shrouding the Dumpsters and garbage cans in a soft milky haze. He rolled down his driver’s side window and jerked suddenly, uncontrollably. He dropped his coffee and began muttering Hail Marys as he fumbled for his cell phone.

  It was raining heavily when Detective Mangan arrived on the scene. The alley had been cordoned off with yellow police tape. Uniformed policemen stood guard, and a CSI team was hurriedly setting up a blue canopy of tarp above the body. Mangan and Coose got out of the car, neither bothering to grab an umbrella, and ducked under the tape. They joined the CSI team beneath the makeshift tenting, the rain smacking crazily on the plastic overhead.

  “I’ll see what they got,” Coose said, heading over to the officers on scene.

  Mangan nodded, staring down at the body, awash in rainwater. It lay in a twisted heap beside a Dumpster. Female. Naked from the waist up.

  Left hand cut off at the wrist.

  The body.

  The one he’d known was out there.

  Mangan crouched beside the ash gray corpse. What stern ungentle hands have lopped and hewed and made thy body bare? The victim’s face, partially submerged in a shallow puddle, was nearly indistinguishable as a face. There were slash marks on both her shoulders and sternum, as well as on her arms. Crimped in its odd pose of death, it flashed images of the plaster casts of the victims of Pompey across Mangan’s mind, something he’d seen as a boy in a magazine somewhere, charcoal-encrusted bodies cradled into each other, seared together in death.

  “Thirty-eight,” Coose said, coming up behind him.

  “What?” Mangan asked, tugging on a pair of latex gloves.

  “First officer on the scene found her purse and ran her license. She was thirty-eight. And get this, her name is Mara Davies. She worked for Kevin Lachlan.”

  “Lachlan?” Mangan said.

  “She was a submissions editor for the American Forum magazine.”

  Mangan looked down at the body again. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Call Eagan and Palmer. Tell them to get eyes on Lachlan right away, bring him in again. Start interviewing his employees. Let’s get ahold of anybody that’s got anything to do with these articles being written about that Wisconsin murder. Call Wesley Faber in Winsome. Tell him what we got going on down here. Let’s find this writer too, whoever’s writing these articles.”

  Mangan leaned in closer and studied the corpse. Her face had been savagely beaten. There were contusions on the front of the neck and underside of the chin. The cheek, forehead, and left eye socket were crushed inward, giving the face a concaved look. Let grief convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage it. Superficial wounds could be seen on her wrists and chest, which Mangan thought at first to be defensive wounds, but on closer examination there was too much symmetry to them. No, he was wrong. He saw it then: her shirt and bra had been cut from her body, leaving shallow knife wounds on the flesh beneath. The wrist had been cut clean through. Mangan assumed that the hand from Kevin Lachlan’s apartment most likely belonged to this victim.

  When the CSI team gave the okay, Mangan called Coose over. They knelt beside the body and carefully rolled it onto its side, the limbs limp, dead long enough that rigor had come and gone.

  Coose noticed it first. “Look,” he said.

  There was something in the corner of the victim’s mouth. CSI moved in and photographed the facial area again. Mangan took a pair of tweezers and carefully removed a small balled up piece of paper.

  There were words on it.

  Another note.

  Mangan carefully pried the wad of paper open. A single sentence:

  STOP WRITING ABOUT HER

  THE CHOOSER

  He hadn’t intended to cut off her hand.

  She’d grabbed him that night and wouldn’t let go, even after she was dead. She was the first. He thought that would be enough. It wasn’t. The second one, he had meant to cut her hand off. It seemed the right thing to do. He had not been looking for her, though. No. He wanted the writer. He wanted to find the writer. He didn’t want everyone reading about the other girl.

  That was wrong.

  He Googled the writer’s name. Jillian McClay. He found her bio. Her résumé. He knew a lot about her. He could not find her address. He searched the magazine’s website and found the staff directory. He found the editor’s name. He wrote it down. He would remember that. Where he lived. He had a home. And an apartment. Jillian McClay wasn’t listed with the staff. He was about to leave the website, when he saw a woman’s picture. Mara Davies. Submissions editor. Mara Davies. It interested something in his brain. He fingered the computer mouse— click. The tab he tapped led him to the woman’s résumé. Another tab— double-click—led him to a short bio.

  Mara Davies graduated from William Ash High School and attended the Writer’s Workshop at UNI. She is the proud daughter of Mrs. Rachel Davies, a retired music teacher, and Mr. Edward Davies, a parole officer in Elgin, IL.

  And that’s when it was revealed to him.

  That’s when the crack in his mind began to expand, and through the opening he now glimpsed the wide arch of the world before him, as if the horizon had suddenly extended outward a thousandfold, and he, rushing toward it, saw the way, the way was being shown to him. That’s why he had been led to Mara Davies, that’s why he had double-clicked the mouse that led to her bio. There was a reason behind all of it.

  Something larger was at work.

  He drove to the city. To the American Forum building. He had a plan for the editor and for Mara Davies. He waited for her. He had nothing else to do. He could not work, could not sleep,
could not think about anything except the bad things. He got dressed up for the trip. He shaved. He combed his hair. He followed the Davies woman after work and took the “L” and sat far away from her, but close enough that he could watch her. He read a book while watching her, but he was not seeing words, he was seeing her face on the pages, her crushed dead face.

  He followed her off the train. She went into a bar. He waited. He went in after her and sat in a far corner. Never looked at her. The music was loud. Very loud. She was with friends. And a man. Smiling. Happy. Touching the man—drink, flirt, touch, drink, flirt, touch, drink, flirt—she started walking his way, right toward him, and he heard her say, “Steven. Steven! I’m going out back for a cigarette. I’ll be right back.”

  No you won’t.

  The heavy back door of the bar slammed shut when he walked out after her.

  “Hi,” she said, turning away to light a cigarette.

  “Hi.”

  And he knew then that this was right. It was as if she had turned her back to him just to allow this moment to occur, her moment, as if she knew what was to come and had accepted it. Then the dark numby thing rose up in him, and he listened to it. It told him to put his arm around her neck. So he did. And then he just started to squeeze, and kept squeezing, harder and harder and harder and harder and he heard the sound of her cigarette lighter clink on the pavement and he felt her body begin to twist and squirm in a kind of bewilderment, and then in a panic, and then she started to make little-girl noises and spit and kick and squeak and he carried her away from the back door deeper into the darkened alley.

  And then she stopped kicking.

  And he let go.

  He stared down at her. He dragged her behind a Dumpster and pulled on his powder-free exam gloves and took out his knife and cut off her shirt and cut the straps of her bra away and then he did things to her face and body with the heel of his boot. He stopped a moment to see what he had done. Then he cut off her hand. He let it drip-drip a little and put it in the pocket of his jacket. He took out the message he had written and placed it into what was left of her mouth.

  Back in his truck, he took out the other note he’d written. He put it in the fat envelope he’d addressed to the editor. Then he put the hand in. Then he dropped it inside the lobby doors of his apartment building.

  It was all so very easy.

  He had done better this time. The first time was very sloppy. If he was too sloppy he would get caught and he would not be able to punish them and make them feel what he had felt, back when he could still feel, before he became the dark numby thing. He didn’t care what happened to himself, no, he knew how that would end, that had been rehearsed a billion years before the oceans rolled.

  But before then, he had much to do.

  Jillian pushed her kitchen window up higher. The night was bright with moon and mist. She lit a cigarette and blew the smoke through the screen. A police car was stationed in front of her house. Michael was in his room packing. Mara Davies was dead.

  Jesus God. Jesus God.

  Wesley Faber had called and explained to her what had happened.

  What have I done?

  Nick McClay, tan and aging too well for fifty, walked into the kitchen. He’d flown in from Florida right away. She hadn’t known who else to call. He had less hair than the last time Jillian had seen him, but he kept it groomed and full of product so that it seemed stylish. He looked out of place in Wisconsin, too bright and thin, like his shirt.

  “Hey,” he said. “How you doing?”

  Jillian tossed her cigarette out the back door. “I just—I keep seeing her, sitting out here. Just a few days ago she was in my backyard.”

  “Jill, I really don’t think you should stay here. You should come with us.”

  “No.”

  “Just till they catch this guy. I’ve got plenty of room.”

  “I can’t, I …” The only thought on Jillian’s mind was keeping Michael safe, and for Jillian that meant getting him as far away from her as possible. “The police need to talk to me, and Mara’s funeral is this week. After that I’ll come down. Okay? I’ll book the flight tonight.”

  “All right. Well, call your dad, at least. He can get out here in a day.”

  “Yeah, I, I hadn’t even thought about that. It’s just—everything’s happening so fast.”

  “Let me do it, I can call him right now.”

  “No, I’ll do it. I should be the one to tell him what’s going on.”

  Michael came walking down the hallway toward the kitchen. He’d been very quiet since Jillian told him what had happened. He seemed unsure of what to say or do, or even where to look.

  “Hey, honey,” Jillian said to him. “Did you pack shorts?”

  “What?”

  “Did you take shorts? It’s really hot down there.”

  “Yeah, um … I got the blue ones.”

  “You need more than one pair.”

  “I couldn’t find any more.”

  Michael looked to the floor and Jillian could tell that he was hiding whatever it was he was feeling. He always looked away or stared at the floor when he was upset, not wanting to make any kind of eye contact. She walked over and as soon as she touched him, the tears came, the inconsolable kind, like a child’s. She held him tightly. It had been so long since she’d held him like that, so long since he’d let her into his private fourteen-year-old life. Despite the horrible thing that had happened, she couldn’t help cherishing a brief moment of feeling like a mom again.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Everything’s going to be okay.” She looked over Michael’s shoulder to Nick. “You’re going to stay with your dad and I’ll be down as soon as I can. Just a couple of days. I’m going to call Grandpa and have him come and stay with me. Okay?” She gently broke the embrace and held him at arm’s length. “I need your help with this, buddy.”

  Michael nodded.

  “All right. Go find your other shorts.”

  He walked away.

  Nick checked the time. “We should hit the road if we’re going to make our flight.” He touched Jillian’s arm, as if asking permission for something. “I’ll put the bags in the car.”

  Jillian nodded, distracted. “Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.”

  He walked away and Jillian couldn’t help feeling a tug of longing for him. She remembered his laugh. There hadn’t been much laughter in her house over the last few years. She remembered his body and the long weight of him on top of her, the pressure, what it felt like to be covered by him and feel safe, pinned beneath and protected.

  She opened the back door and lit another cigarette. Sat on the step. The moon was so bright that the yard seemed to float in the vapory haze that had settled low across the ground. In the far corner of the yard, through a veil of mist, Jillian could just about make out four skinny giraffe-leg-like shadows: Michael’s swing set, from an eon ago, when he’d played on them for hours and hours and hours. She gazed up at the old carriage house on the edge of her property, where her writing studio was. The window on the second floor glowed golden. She’d left her office light on. She wanted to be in there, writing. She always felt better when she was writing.

  Nick called from the front room. “Jill, we have to get going.”

  Jillian stubbed her cigarette out on the steps and hurried in. Michael was standing at the front door, his suitcase in his hand. He looked lost. Like a lost little boy. The one who used to wake smiling and carry bad breakfasts out to her office.

  She wanted to say something to him, something profound and reassuring, but all she could think to say was, “Make sure you wear sunscreen, okay?”

  Michael nodded.

  “I’ll be down in a couple of days.”

  “Okay.”

  “I love you.”

  She kissed him good-bye and watched them leave. She waved to them when they got in the car. She waved to them as they pulled away. She waved until they were out of sight. She stared out her front door for a long time.
She saw the police car parked in front of her house, and began to feel restless, a simmering anger rising in her, angry at herself for feeling so afraid, angry for having to send her son away, angry that she had ever started this whole goddamn thing.

  She slammed the door shut and locked it and went into her bedroom.

  Rummaging through the closet, she found her black enameled safe box, punched in the code, opened it, and pulled out a Beretta M1934 .380-caliber pistol. Her father had given it to her when she’d moved away from home. It was a stubby little thing, lighter than she’d remembered. It felt good in her hands, the rough notched grip, the way her thumb rested neatly on the grooved safety, the oily smell of steel. She reached in and took out the box of 9-millimeter cartridges. The pistol’s magazine was empty, and she’d forgotten how to load it. She fumbled with the bullets, dropping them on the floor as she tried to thumb them into the mouth of the magazine.

  “Damn it …”

  She grabbed her laptop, first Googled, then YouTubed, and in two clicks she was watching a dentally challenged man with a mullet and tattooed forearms instruct her how to load seven rounds into a Beretta. She followed his instructions, smacked the magazine into place, and thumbed off the safety. To the kitchen next and out the back door, hurrying to her writing studio. She ran up the stairs, pushed open the office door, and sat herself in front of the computer. She was going to write. The police had told her about the note the killer had written, warning her to stop. Well, fuck him, Jillian thought.

  I am the writer.

  She put the gun on the desk and took the digital recorder out of her drawer. She hit the Play button and heard her own voice whispering “massive blunt force trauma to the face and skull.” She threw the recorder against the wall. No. No! That’s not what she wanted to write. Not that.

  What then?

  She looked at the quote she kept taped to her wall.

  Do not worry.

  You have always written.