A Winsome Murder

by James DeVita

  A guttural cry escaped him at the thought. He clutched his head and slammed it down on the keyboard. A searing split ripped open deeper, yes, even deeper in his brain, and the rats burrowed in further, pushing, chewing—and so he cut himself, in the wound which had not yet healed. “Yes, yes …” He drew the blade up his forearm, “… yes,” until the pain passed and the thick red warmth drowned her thoughts, it bubbled up and floated her out of the room and out of his brain.

  She drifted off, a dead, rose-tinted phantom.

  He could not bear it.

  Could not bear it, could not bear it, could not bear it …

  He knew who would be next.

  Detective Sergeant Linda Brennan walked Mangan through the Stony Point Marina in Waukegan, where Wesley Faber’s daughter had been murdered. A sunless day, and nightfall not far off, Lake Michigan looked leaden.

  “A one-shot kill,” Brennan said, pointing to a parking lot in the distance. “We think from over there.”

  The murder had happened in broad daylight. In a public area. There had been a note found at the scene, but other than that, there was nothing consistent in the killer’s MO. Not even in the choice of victim, aside from being female. The other three murders were at least somehow connected. Why this woman? It made no sense.

  Tell him Revenge is come to join with him,

  And work confusion on his enemies.

  Mangan and the sergeant ducked under a taped-off area near the pier and stood in the spot where Wesley Faber’s daughter was last seen alive. “Witness says the victim was facing pretty much south, southeast. Angle of entry puts our shooter in the north corner of the parking lot somewhere. We found the note there also, stuck beneath the wiper blade of a car.”

  The shooter’s note, with a large hoop earring taped to it, read “I am the Righter”—the same message etched into the blood-smeared screen of Jillian McClay’s computer, which hadn’t been made public knowledge yet. Four killings now. The earring belonged to Deborah Ellison, confirmed by her mother and corroborated by the surveillance tapes at O’Rourke’s Pub and Grill. Deborah Ellison had been wearing it the night she was murdered.

  “The parking lot was about a quarter full that morning,” Brennan said, “ten, twelve cars. He might have been in a car or hiding behind one. No cameras in the parking lot. One witness thinks he remembers a light gray or silver pickup truck in the lot. Said it was parked oddly, away from the other cars. That’s as specific as he got. We’re checking everybody who was working here that day, and also the customers on the boats.”

  “Anybody hear the shot?”

  “No. Plenty of people around too.”

  “Any other noise that day? Construction crews? Garbage pickup?”

  “Not that we know of. Probably used a suppressor of some kind.”

  Mangan walked over to the picnic table where the witness had been sitting.

  “Which side was he on?”

  “That one.”

  “Here?”

  “More center.”

  Mangan sat at the table. “What was he doing here?”

  “He was going fishing, waiting for his charter boat to load.”

  He looked at the other two picnic tables. He looked at the position of the birch trees. “So this witness just happened to sit at the one table that had a clear view of the victim?”

  “Not exactly. She was a pretty girl, sports bra, shorts. He sat here to get a better view. She was over there stretching when she got hit. He thought she fainted or something and ran over. Saw the blood, panicked, and ran to the concession stand for help.”

  “His story check out?”

  “Yes. He was pretty shook up.” She led Mangan over to the parking lot. “There were people around all morning.” She pointed to her left. “An eight-person fishing charter right over there, loading at the time of the shooting. The concession stand was open. Nobody saw anything.”

  They strolled the lot, empty now but for Mangan’s car and two police cruisers.

  He looked back to the victim’s last position. “Pretty clear shot from here.”

  “Yes.”

  “Shell casings?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. We swept it clean up to the—” A slur of static from Brennan’s walkie-talkie interrupted their conversation. “Excuse me,” she said, taking the call.

  Mangan walked off by himself.

  Something in the killer was changing, he thought, deepening. No passion this time. No rage. No mutilation. Not so much how he killed now, as long as he killed. Stabbing or strangulation is extremely intimate, personal. This killing showed indifference, detachment. The Beltway Sniper attacks crossed Mangan’s mind, two killers working in tandem, a driver and a shooter. Could the killer be working with someone else? What the hell’s the motive, though?

  I have done a thousand dreadful things

  As willingly as one would kill a fly,

  And nothing grieves me heartily indeed

  But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

  He’s starting to enjoy it, Mangan thought. He’s believing he’s untouchable, killing in public, changing his MO.

  “Detective,” Sergeant Brennan called across the parking lot. Mangan had wandered clear to the other side. They met in the middle. “That was ballistics I just talked to,” she said. “It was .243-caliber. About a 140-yard shot.”

  A marksman, perhaps. This meant Mangan could start checking military records, hunting licenses, rifles, silencers. Ballistics would work up the rifling patterns from the bullet taken from the victim’s body. Finally, a little more to go on. This was the sick way it worked, he thought: the more victims, the more chances the killer has of being caught. Each murder brings more data, more information, more evidence. More opportunities for the killer to make a mistake. He’s mobile, Mangan considered, traveling to Enfield, Winsome, Chicago, Waukegan. What’s he drive? Where’s he from? What’s he do for a living? Is he missing work? The killer had thought things through and chosen this spot. Had he known the victim’s routine? Or had he just followed her that morning? An impulse kill? No, no, he must have known what he was going to do before he arrived that morning.

  “Excuse me, Detective,” Brennan said. “Anything else I can do for you?”

  “No, no, just thinking.”

  “Well, you’ve got my number. Feel free. Anything comes up on my end, I’ll give you a call.”

  “Thank you.”

  Brennan started toward her squad car. Mangan looked again to the position where the victim had been shot. A beautiful young woman. He thought of Wesley Faber, losing his daughter. He thought of his own daughter and could not envision the kind of a man he might be if anything ever happened to her.

  Alack, alack, my child’s dead,

  My soul and not my child.

  Where were those lines from? Mangan thought. It was hard to know. So many of Shakespeare’s stories dealt with the loss of children, and sometimes the words intermingled in his mind, lines from one play merging with those of another, transposing themselves, paraphrasing. It didn’t always make sense.

  Dead art thou, alack my child is dead.

  Shakespeare knew death well. He’d lost his own son, Hamnet, when the boy was only eleven.

  The sweetest, dearest creature’s dead.

  The words were coming steadily now, easily. Mangan walked a tight circle, keeping his mind open, listening.

  Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff.

  Life and these lips have long been separated.

  He was close to something, he could feel it, hovering just out of reach. ’Tis here, but yet confused. What was he missing? What was the connection between Faber’s daughter and the other victims?

  If ever you chance to have a child,

  Look in her youth to have her so cut off.

  He stopped.

  The last line ran deeper to his heart, something about it … it kept repeating itself—look in her youth to have her so cut off, look in her youth to have her—a
nd then suddenly Deborah Ellison’s father loomed large in Mangan’s mind. He remembered the other victims, Jillian McClay, Mara Davies, all of them, all the victims had—

  “Shit!” Mangan said, fumbling for his notepad. “Sergeant! Sergeant!”

  Linda Brennan hurried back as Mangan skimmed the histories of the other victims. Mara Davies: daughter of Edward Davies, a parole officer. He flipped to another page, to the gun found in Jillian McClay’s office: registered to her father, a cop in Philadelphia.

  “What is it?” Brennan asked. “What?”

  “They’re all cops.”

  “What?”

  “The fathers of all four victims,” Mangan said. “They’re all cops.”

  That was the connection. It was right there the whole time—and then Mangan’s heart dropped for a horrible moment.

  His daughter, Katie.

  “Jesus.”

  He fumbled for his cell phone, deep in his coat pocket. “Fuck!” He had the number on speed dial. He pressed the number. Answer, he prayed, please, God, please, God, let her answer. She did. “Katie it’s Dad. Yeah, yeah—I’m sorry, no—hold on a second, just—Kathleen, stop! Just listen! ”

  The dad voice came out of him, the sound he’d made when Katie was six years old and almost walked in front of a car, the sound he’d made when she was eight and climbed the pine tree at her grandpa’s house and was inches away from touching a power line, and he had yelled, “Kathleen, stop! ”

  That was the sound that had just come out of Mangan.

  Katie silenced immediately on the other end. She knew the sound too. As fast as he could, Mangan explained the situation. He hadn’t told her anything about the investigation yet—they usually didn’t talk about each other’s cases—but he got the gist of it across quickly and asked her to reach out for protection. She promised she would, and that she’d sleep somewhere else that night and keep her service revolver with her at all times. Mangan wanted more assurances, but just at that moment another thought struck him. He took off at a run for his car.

  “What!” Sergeant Brennan asked, jogging close behind.

  Mangan yanked open the car door and rifled through a number of American Forum magazines strewn across the back seat. He found the article he wanted: Jillian McClay’s interview with officer Michele Schaefer. He scanned it quickly, hoping he was mistaken.

  He wasn’t.

  “Schaefer’s dad, a cop for twenty years, retired early to run an organic dairy farm.”

  Mangan flung aside the magazine, searching desperately through his cell phone for the number of the Winsome Bay police station.

  Michele Schaefer sat behind the police chief ’s desk.

  It was quiet in the station. Tom Ellison was dead and Wesley Faber had taken a leave of absence. He and his family were in Illinois for his daughter’s funeral. The Winsome police force pretty much consisted of herself and Dan Ehrlich now.

  Schaefer shuffled and stacked the paperwork she’d been trying to get through. She’d been sitting there for almost an hour and hadn’t done much of anything. Her mind kept wandering: have to find a replacement for Tom Ellison, have to meet with the town council, have to go the DARE program at the high school, have to help Dad get the hay in, have to stop thinking, thinking all the time about these murders. She lost track of time. The room dimmed as evening slipped in the windows. She pulled the chain dangling from Faber’s reading lamp. It illuminated the framed photo beneath it: Faber’s wife and kids—his daughter.

  Part of Schaefer wanted to scream right then. She wanted to tear through the police station and break things and pound the paneled walls. She saw herself doing it, heard her own screams, like a scripted action sequence in a movie: “Suddenly Schaefer sweeps the desk clear—lamps, photos, papers flying everywhere. She’s wild. Uncontrollable. She flips the desk over, letting out a wrenching howl of anguish. Jump-cut: Schaefer curled on the floor, fetal position, sobbing.”

  But no. She did nothing like that.

  Her rage had settled so deeply that she felt extremely, frighteningly, calm.

  “Do something,” she told herself. She took up the paperwork she’d been putting off. She read the first report: a chicken loose in town. She crumpled it and tossed it in the trash. She read the next—

  There was a noise then.

  Different from the noises she was used to hearing at the station. Footsteps down the hall, toward the office, running now. Schaefer stood and—

  Dan Ehrlich burst into the room, a panicked look on his face.

  “You’re here!” he said from the doorway, breathing heavily, rambling. “You scared the hell out of me. I thought you were in your office, and I was trying find you, and I got worried ’cause I just got off the phone with the guy, the guy from Chicago who—what’s his name—”

  “Slow down!” Schaefer said.

  “The detective. What’s his name? The one that—”

  “Mangan? You talking about Detective Mangan?”

  “Yes! He … I …”

  “Dan, stop! Dan, look at me!”

  He stopped. Caught his breath.

  “Now,” Schaefer said, “what did he say?”

  “All the victims so far … all of the victims’ fathers were cops. The killer is targeting the daughters of cops. Mangan called here trying to find you ’cause he knew your dad was a cop, and he wanted to warn you. You gotta watch yourself and get some protection at—”

  “Oh my god,” Schaefer said.

  “What?”

  “My sister.”

  Jeannie Schaefer wiped her sleeve across her cheek and pulled her cap back on. Even though it was nearly dark and the wind was picking up, it was still stifling up in the barn. All she could think about was taking a shower. She and her brothers had been hauling and stacking hay all day.

  Another bale came tumbling off the elevator. Jeannie sank her two red-handled hay hooks into it, squatted low, dragged it to the back of the mow, and then ran back for the next one. Her brothers were out in the field, hauling in a last load, and she and her father were trying to get this one in and stacked before the rains came. At sixty-seven her father could load fifty-pound bales faster than most men half his age.

  “Dad!” she called down from the mow. He was loading the bales too close together, they were coming too fast. “Dad, slow it down!” He couldn’t hear. The hay elevator was running rough this year and, ever the frugal farmer, he’d refused to get it fixed. Jeannie threw a water bottle down at him.

  “What?” he yelled up.

  “I can’t—”

  She had to stop as another bale fell off the conveyor belt and nearly knocked her over. She snagged it and pulled it sloppily to the side as another tumbled off. She gave up and let them pile crazily beneath the end of the conveyor. She sank the two hay hooks into a rogue bale and walked back to the opening beneath the roof peak.

  “Dad, load ’em farther apart!” she said, hanging halfway out the mow. “I can’t keep up!”

  “Don’t be a candy-ass,” he yelled up, grinning. “The rain’s coming, we gotta get ’em in! Don’t worry about stacking ’em right, just—” The engine died then. “Christ all-Friday!” he cursed, trying to start it again.

  Jeannie laughed as the engine sputtered and choked. “That’s what you get for being so cheap!” she said. “Gonna give yourself a heart attack trying to save a buck.”

  Her father didn’t hear her because at that moment the motor barked into a loud rumble and he started swinging bales onto the raised links of the conveyer belt again. They were coming at a decent pace now. Jeannie turned back, tugged her gloves tight, and reached for the red hay hooks she’d left stabbed into a bale. They weren’t there. She stood there, puzzled for a moment, and had just enough time to register a sense of movement to her left. It was slow, and in her mind, for some reason, she thought then of a cow—a slow shadow, and she’d thought of a cow—and in that same fleeting instant she knew that she was on the second floor of the barn and it couldn’t be a
cow because—

  That was all her synapses had a chance to flicker through because in the next instant there was a six-inch piece of sharp steel embedded in the back of her skull, flush to the curve in the hay hook handle. It felt to her, at first, as if someone had grabbed her by the back of her head. There was no pain for the merest of moments, and then there was, and then a hot pressure behind her eyeballs and blood clogging her throat and then suddenly she was yanked backward and spun around on her feet.

  A man was facing her. He had one of her hay hooks in his hand.

  She was going to say something to him, but didn’t, or couldn’t, because her brain went black as he raised high the second hook and wracked it deep into the side of her neck and ripped downward till the hook caught at her clavicle. He wrenched it out and let her fall. He crouched and held the hook before her eyes, slick and wet with her own blood. She didn’t seem to be able to see it. Her eyes were empty now.

  So he stabbed them out.

  The man stared at the blank document on his computer screen a very long time.

  She’ll have her own chapter, he thought. Each of them will. And then he would mail them to the fathers. So they could have the details. Policemen like details. Testimonies. Statements. They had given him many details. They deserve the same.

  He had watched the one in the barn for some time, waiting behind her on the ladder to the loft, her flannel shirt all covered in wispy bits of straw, like cat hairs only yellow, like she was a magnet, a straw magnet. He had read about her in one of the American Forum articles. The woman’s sister, Michele Schaefer, had been interviewed for the magazine. In the article she talked about how big her family was, and how her father had been a police officer, and how she had five brothers.

  And a sister.

  Jeannie.

  She was easy to find. They were all easy to find. Especially the first one, Deborah Ellison. She had been handed to him. In the beginning, he was only going to punish her and her father. They were the cause of all. He knew that killing Tom Ellison’s daughter was the way, kill her horribly and let him ruin his mind with the thought of it, destroy his brain with the never ending, never ceasing, always waking, thought of it. That should have been enough, and it would have been, but then the others were shown to him and the dark thing in his depths rose into the back of his mind and spoke quietly, but fiercely, and it said,