Eye of the Beholder by David Ellis Read Free Book Online

undisturbed. No trail of blood.
    “The fun happened upstairs,” Lightner said. They took carpeted stairs up to a great room and a master bedroom. The top floor looked more lived in, a stereo and television in the great room, a tiny kitchenette that seemed to serve more as a bar. Lightner gestured toward the dishwasher. “It was full. Everything inside was washed.”
    So nothing could be taken from any of the glasses. But that seemed like a dead end, anyway. There was no chance Ellie Danzinger had invited Terry Burgos in for a drink.
    Riley walked slowly into the bedroom. The bed was unmade. The comforter was bunched at the bottom of the bed. There were spatters of blood on the wall and some on the bed, but not much. To the left of the bed, however, was a sizable bloodstain, encrusted on the carpet fibers.
    “The M.E. thinks she died on the bed,” Lightner explained. “She was hit over the head, and she bled out right there.” He motioned to the bloodstain. “M.E. says she lost over a liter and a half of blood.”
    Riley didn’t know if these details were significant.
    Lightner got close to the bed but not too close. “M.E. figures Ellie was lying on the bed, faceup, right? Her head was hanging over the side of the bed. That’s the only explanation.”
    “Why is that the only explanation?”
    “The amount of blood,” he answered. “Other than ripping her heart out—which we know he did at his house—the only other wound on her body is the blow to the head. A significant blow, but not normally enough for her to bleed that much. Gravity played a part. Her head was lower than the rest of her body.”
    Okay. That made sense. “This is relevant?”
    Lightner shrugged. “To bleed out that much, Ellie must have been lying there for at least an hour. The M.E. says there’s no way she would have bled that much any quicker.”
    Riley thought it over. “So he didn’t move her right away. He waited at least an hour. Why?”
    “Maybe for nightfall to come,” Lightner speculated.
    “But she’d been in bed.” Riley shook his head. “It would’ve already been night.”
    “Yeah. I don’t know.” Lightner looked tired. It had been quite a day for all of them.
    “Maybe that’s when he had intercourse with her,” Riley suggested. “It is a bed, after all.” It was quite the image. The intercourse, according to the M.E., had clearly been postmortem.
    It was a possibility. But Lightner didn’t know. Nobody knew, yet.
    “They find that professor yet?” Riley asked. “The guy who employed Burgos?”
    “Albany,” Lightner said. “We’ll find him.” He hit Riley on the arm. It was time to head back to the station. Nobody had any illusions about going home anytime soon.

7
    11:45 P.M.
     
     
    I T WAS NEAR MIDNIGHT. Someone had turned on a television in the police station. The local channels had been covering this all day, flashing in and out of soap operas and game shows and, later, prime-time offerings. The “Mansbury Massacre,” they were calling it.
    Riley and several others pulled together two detectives’ desks to form something like a conference table. Riley played with a cup of lukewarm coffee and looked around the table at Chief Clark and Detective Lightner. None of them had eaten all day. Clark had subsisted on coffee and cigarettes; Lightner, coffee only. Riley’s stomach was crying to him but he knew he couldn’t eat. Nothing would go down if he tried. The station, at this point, smelled like a locker room. They were coming down from the initial high of the brutal murders and then, in the same day, catching the killer. Everyone was catching his breath. Virtually everything had been done, and what hadn’t yet been done could wait. But Paul already knew that the physical evidence would tie up Burgos. He wanted to know more about the hideous poetry Burgos was reciting when describing the murders. He knew this wasn’t about guilt or innocence anymore.
    It had been a song, as they’d suspected.