Reed resisted the urge to glance at Ellery, but he felt her go momentarily still in the booth next to him. She’d been a small-town cop, too. All her experience with serial killers and child abduction was of the personal kind, so she probably didn’t know: it was an amazing testament to her strength that she could sit here across from this guy, having reinvented herself so completely that Manganelli forgot he was prattling on about Coben-type crimes right in front of one of the victims.
“I don’t rank the crazy,” Reed said at length. He’d been at this job long enough to know he had to play the game, had to give to get what he wanted from the local law enforcement personnel. “There was one case I consulted on many years ago now. A wealthy couple in Texas had their home broken into during the daytime. The perpetrator slashed up some expensive paintings, threw some sort of acid on the grand piano and other furniture, and spray-painted badly spelled vulgarities and satanic-type symbols on the walls.”
“Wow, a real nutbag,” Manganelli said around a mouthful of burger. “Did you catch the guy?”
“We got called in to consult because of the possible satanist angle,” Reed said. “Some of the locals were afraid they had a cult on their hands. But it was quickly apparent that was not the case. The crime scene made no consistent sense. The perpetrator was both organized and disorganized in his or her behavior. They hot-wired the alarm at the front gate but then used a rock to break the back patio door. Once inside, they clearly identified the most valuable items—but some they stole, like the jewelry, and others they destroyed, like the paintings. The rest of the damage—the torn couch cushions, the overturned chairs, and the crude sayings on the wall—seemed mostly to be for show. It was like we had an educated, organized offender pretending to be a disorganized, uneducated offender.”
“So what happened?” Manganelli wanted to know.
“We arrested the homeowners. As it turned out, a quick check of their financial situation showed they were deeply in debt and at risk of losing their business. They hid the jewelry and damaged the rest of the goods to try to cash in on the insurance. The tip-off was the one painting that had not been slashed—a portrait done of the couple’s daughter when she was a child. It had no value to anyone other than the family, and that’s precisely why it was spared.”
“Holy crap.” Manganelli sat back in the booth, shaking his head. “People will do just about anything for the almighty dollar—am I right? But at least with those guys, it’s easy to suss out their motive and work backward from there to nail ’em. This rapist we’ve got on our hands, he’s like a ghost. We’ve got nothing to go on.” He heaved a great sigh that made his large belly bump the table and slosh his beer. “I know Wendy Mendoza thinks we haven’t been trying, but the problem is, we’ve run out of stuff to try. So, you know, thanks for taking a look. We’d love nothing better than to nail the sonofabitch.” He reached down and pulled out a sheaf of folders, which he handed across to Reed. “I made copies of what we have, both on this case and the few that might be related. The thumb drive in there has the digital files. I’d tell you that you have to come down to the station to view the physical evidence, but the truth is, we don’t have any.”
Reed opened the file and started leafing through it. Ellery sidled a bit closer so that she could see, too. “Ellery said the man told Wendy he would kill her if she screamed, that he would show her ‘no mercy.’”
“That’s right.”
“Did he say anything else?”
Manganelli made a disgusted face. “Only that she’d better not tell anyone, or he might come back. He took her driver’s license to show her he meant business. We hoped like hell he would come back. We parked an undercover unit on that street every day for a month and got zippo.”
Reed pulled out a photo, a candid shot of a pretty young woman with dark hair sitting on a picnic blanket at a park somewhere. She had a warm, open smile and friendly eyes. “That’s her,” Ellery murmured to him. “That’s Wendy.”
“That picture is from before,” Manganelli clarified. “She don’t look that way anymore. You’d hardly recognize her now. After that bastard attacked her, she shaved off all her hair and got herself tattooed—one on her neck with his words, ‘no mercy.’ He made her hate herself that much.”
“She didn’t do it because she hates herself,” Ellery said flatly. Reed turned to look at her. “It’s protection,” she murmured to him. “The rapist picked her because she looked like that,” she said, nodding at the smiling picture of Wendy. “She made herself as ugly as she could so he wouldn’t want her anymore.”
Manganelli blinked. “She told you that?”
Reed cleared his throat and looked at his lap. He knew Wendy didn’t have to tell her; Ellery had lived it herself. “So he took things from the scene,” Reed noted, changing the subject. “Her driver’s license, some underwear.”
“Trophies,” Manganelli agreed. “Probably beats off to them every night.”
Yes, Reed thought grimly, every night until the memory isn’t enough, and that’s when he has to go find someone new. “I can give you the basics on the classic anger rapist,” he said aloud, “but it’s probably nothing you haven’t heard before or guessed already. He’s pissed off at the world, and at women in particular, because he blames them for his lack of achievements. He’s prone to angry outbursts, which means his employment history is probably erratic. His fury is merged with his sexuality, so the aggression is part of his fantasy. He has violent erotic fantasies that build up over time until the fantasy is not enough; he has to start acting it out. Some inciting incident—an argument with a coworker or girlfriend—may be the trigger. Once he has his victim, he will use as much force as necessary to subdue her. He doesn’t imagine he’s enjoying a romantic encounter with her; her humiliation and fear are part of what gets him off. Now that he has started acting on his fantasies, he is unlikely to stop until someone makes him stop, although his trophies may see him through a long period between attacks.”
Manganelli was nodding along. “Yeah, that’s what we figured. This asshole hates women and gets off on hurting them. He obviously knows the area well enough to realize Wendy would be home alone. We’ve shaken all the usual trees on this one, looked at anyone in the area with a similar sex offense on their record, but there’s just nothing we can prove. My guys knocked on every door in a six-block radius after the attack; no one saw or heard anything.”
“I can take a look at these,” Reed said as he held up the reports, “and give you my opinion on which of them might have been committed by Wendy’s rapist. I would also suggest you expand your search for similar cases back five years and include anyone arrested for peeping or stealing women’s undergarments. This offender probably started slowly and worked his way up to the full-out assault on a grown woman.”
“Good, good, I can do that.”
“Detective Manganelli said we may have to wait until he rapes someone else,” Ellery said, her tone faintly accusatory.
Reed hesitated. “He might be right. This offender has been extremely clever, not to mention lucky, thus far. He will be difficult to catch unless he makes a mistake that allows us to pinpoint his identity.”
But Ellery had stopped listening to him. Her eyes had become fixed on the television behind Reed’s head. Manganelli’s gaze slid up to join hers, and so Reed turned around, too. The TV was tuned to the news, showing what looked like old B-roll of a fire from an era when cameras shot with real tape. The picture shifted to a mug shot of a bleary-eyed Hispanic man with a pockmarked face and a thin mustache. The chyron identified him as Luis Carnevale.
“I saw this story in the Herald today,” Manganelli said, pointing at the TV. “They’re talking about letting him out. His niece or cousin or something is a lawyer and she’s putting pressure on the parole board. If they don’t let him go, she’s going to try to get the whole case retried. Says the Innocence Project might be interested in his story.” His disgusted tone suggested how little credence Manganel
li gave this idea.
“Poor Myra,” Ellery said softly. “This must be killing her.”
As if on cue, the news story switched to show a picture of the murdered little boy, Bobby Gallagher. Reed turned back around and reached for his beer. “It’s been a long time,” he said. “People’s opinions change.”
Manganelli’s face hardened. “Not mine. That asshole burned half the city, and he can stay locked up for the rest of his days as far as I’m concerned.”
“His lawyer said it was a setup,” Ellery told Reed. “I looked it up online last night. The defense was that Carnevale was a handy fall guy for the cops, who were desperate to catch an arsonist—so desperate, his lawyer said, that they made one up. Carnevale’s attorney claimed they had a witness who had seen the fire and would testify that it was not Carnevale who set it. The trouble was this supposed witness was a homeless drifter by the name of—you can’t make this stuff up—The Blaze. No one had ever found him or verified his story, so Carnevale went down for the Gallagher fire. I guess everyone figured he’d made up the whole story about The Blaze.”
“The Blaze?” Manganelli threw back his head to drain the rest of his beer. “The Blaze was as real as you or me. Had a patch on his face right here that looked like a campfire.” He indicated his left cheek. “But he was a drunk and a hustler, no kind of witness. He’d tell you whatever story you wanted for a quick buck.”
“He existed? For real?” Ellery’s eyes widened as she regarded the television again.
“Threw him in the drunk tank myself once or twice, back when I was walking a beat in Southie. He was a figment of his own imagination, but he was real enough to stink up the joint.”
“Why didn’t the cops track him down to get his story?” Ellery asked.
“What story? Some crap about witnessing a fire? We already had the bastard who burned that little boy. Besides, the way I heard it, the cops did look for him, but The Blaze had hit the road again. That or someone rolled him for his last two dollars, and he ended up as a John Doe in the morgue somewhere. Either way, it didn’t matter. Luis Carnevale was guilty as sin—it was true then and it’s true now. He’d better shut his hole and enjoy the comfort of prison while he can because where he’s going, there’s gonna be fire for all eternity.”
Ellery did not reply, but she looked troubled. Reed followed her gaze to the television again, where the large screen played the old video in cinematic glory as the city burned.
3
In the morning, Ellery waited with Bump outside her apartment building for Reed’s taxi to arrive. The unusually mild temperatures reacted with the leftover snow to create a low-lying fog that resembled the skin of hot milk. Ellery leaned against the rough brick exterior while Bump sniffed around, trying to catch the trail of one of the eighty-seven local squirrels. Reed showed up after only a few minutes, his briefcase in hand. “I thought we could get something to eat first,” she said as her dog wagged an enthusiastic greeting around Reed’s shins. “I’m starving, and he could use the exercise.”
“Yes, hello to you, too,” Reed muttered, trying to sidestep Bump. “You seem entirely recovered from your ordeal.”
Speed Bump had taken a bullet for her last summer but, amazingly, survived. “He’s doing great,” she said, leaning down to give Bump’s ears an affectionate scratch. “The vet can hardly believe it. He’s like some sort of super dog.”
“Super slobbery,” Reed replied, making a pained face as Bump licked his shoes, but there was no animosity in his tone. Reed knew better than anyone what Bump had endured. As they fell into step together, Reed glanced up at the large five-story brick building that was her new home. “You have some impressive new digs.”
“I sold my house in Woodbury to the first person who made an offer,” she told him. “There was no way I could stay there.” She didn’t have to say more because Reed would understand this part, too. “This is the Foundry Building,” she explained. The stalwart warehouse had been a fixture in this South Boston neighborhood for almost a century. “It was built in 1920, and the Hershey Manufacturing Company used it for more than sixty years to make everything from steam engines to soap. It was converted to lofts sometime in the 1980s.”
Reed glanced at her, amused. “You’ve become quite the local historian.”
“There’s a Facebook page,” she replied grimly. “All the neighbors are encouraged to join and introduce themselves.”
“I’m dying to know what you said.”
“Nothing. Why would I?” She tugged on Bump’s leash to urge him from his dawdling. “Everyone already knows who I am.”
At Dunkin’ Donuts, she bought a Boston cream donut and cinnamon cruller for herself, and a large black coffee with a honey-oat bagel and cream cheese for Reed. They took the provisions back to her loft, where she put on water for tea while Reed used her coffee table to spread out the files that Joe Manganelli had given them the night before. He picked up each report in turn, read it silently, and then put it aside. Occasionally, he paused to write some notes on his laptop.
Ellery, feeling useless, curled her legs under her and set her mug of tea on the other end of the couch. “Are you finding anything?” she asked after he had viewed several of the additional reports.
“This one is interesting,” he replied, not really looking at her. When he didn’t elaborate, Ellery left him to his reading and got out her own laptop. She started poking around the internet again for more information about the other members of Dr. Sunny’s group. She found a story about the death of Miles’s wife, Letitia. Letitia Campbell was a petite woman with a pixie face and long, dangling earrings. She had been a much-loved music teacher in the Medford Public Schools, and her picture suggested why: she had a twinkle in her dark eyes and an impish, friendly smile. The story of her death was just what Miles had said, that a drunk ran a red light and T-boned the Campbells’ car last December.
Ellery also found a news report about what she presumed was Alex’s story: he and his best friend Nate Norman had stopped into a convenience store one night just before it was held up by a single gunman. The clerk pulled his own weapon, and the robber opened fire on everyone—wounding the clerk, killing Nate, and missing Alex entirely. The cops had arrested the guy two days later.
Strangely enough, Ellery couldn’t find a single story about whatever had brought Tabitha to the crime survivors’ group. Without the woman’s last name or some element of the crime, it was impossible to narrow down. So Ellery switched back to Myra Gallagher and the fires. She found an interview with firefighter Kevin Powell that recounted his heroism. Apparently, Powell had been out drinking at Lucky Sevens with his work buddies and they’d all been fantasizing about being the one to catch the arsonist. Then later, Powell was heading home to his place in Dorchester around midnight when he saw the blaze. “God saved that woman, not me,” Powell said in the interview. “He just put me in the right place at the right time to make it happen.”
Ellery closed out the story with an angry click. And what about the dead toddler? she wondered. Did God just not care enough to save him?
On the other end of the couch, Reed sat back and rubbed his face with both hands. “There are five of these that merit further investigation,” he said. “The two rapes that Manganelli flagged initially—the one with the elderly woman and the other daytime attack involving the gun and the rope—and then also this report of a prowler three blocks from Wendy Mendoza’s apartment, and two other incidents Manganelli emailed me last night involving a possible peeping Tom. If you’re up for it, I’d like to go take a look at the exact addresses. I have the beginnings of a theory, but it needs fleshing out.”
“I’m in,” she said, springing off the couch. Bump sat up with renewed excitement as well. “What’s the theory?”
Reed shook his head. “I need to see the houses first. Then we’ll know.”
“Know what?”
“How he may be picking them.”
* * *
They went to
the old woman’s apartment first. The victim, Edith Bellamy, lived not in Somerville but in nearby Arlington. Her street could have been a carbon copy of Wendy Mendoza’s, with the multifamily houses packed all in a row on both sides of the narrow road. “This is the one,” Ellery said, indicating a blue-gray four-square house with white trim and a loose, hanging gutter.
“So number forty-two is on the second floor,” Reed said as he walked right up onto the porch. Ellery glanced around once to see that no one was watching before she followed suit. Reed peered in the glass in the front door and then inspected the wooden porch railings. He tugged them each in turn to see that they were sound.
“Manganelli said there was no weapon used in this case,” Ellery said.
“Not on the victim, no. But whoever attacked her used a knife to slit the screen on the window before climbing inside.” He glanced around the property once more and then set off down the steps. “Let’s go see the next one.”
They crisscrossed back and forth between Somerville and its neighboring communities until they had viewed all the crime scenes. Four were houses identical to Wendy Mendoza’s, but the last was a traditional apartment building, brick and six stories high. It abutted a small parking lot that was half-filled with snowbanks and surrounded by a sagging chain-link fence. “Carla Watkins, age twenty-five, reported a guy in a ski mask peeping in her bedroom window on the fourth floor,” Ellery read off of the report. Reed was already walking around toward the back, where the fire escape was. “This place doesn’t look like the others,” she called out as she followed him. The surrounding area was more commercial than residential. The deli across the street advertised a five-dollar sandwich special that included chips and a large soda.
“No, it doesn’t look the same, but the other details match,” Reed said. He stood at the bottom of the fire escape and jumped to try to reach the lowest edge, which was one story off the ground. After three tries, his fingers tipped the edge of the metal bar but he had not managed to grab hold. He halted, a little winded. “That’s not as easy as it looks.”
No Mercy--A Mystery Page 5