A Winsome Murder (21 page)

“Hey, hey,” Coose said, stepping between them. “Enough! James, back off. Back off !”

Baratov threw up his hands. “Why is this?”

“Asshole,” Mangan yelled as Coose shoved him away.

“Everybody relax,” Coose called out. “Just relax, James!”

Mangan mumbled, “Piece of shit,” under his breath as he forced himself to keep distance. The switch had clicked in him again—
On
—and like an electric current it buzzed his legs and tingled his hands with rage. He removed himself to the other side of the room, breathing deeply, willing himself calmer.

“Why do you do this to me?” Baratov yelled. “I tell you all I know!”

Grigory stepped in. “Mr. Baratov, don't say anything. This is ridiculous, Detective, but nothing that I didn't expect. I do my homework. I know you. I know your history of violence, don't think I don't.” They started out. “We'll be seeing you in court, Detective. Trust to it.”

“You're damn right you will,” Mangan said, catching Baratov's eye. “And by the way, I am personally going to be the one who tells Mr. Nazarkov how your client is going around telling everybody he's in the Russian mafia. Yuri
Nazarkov's
Russian mafia. I'm sure he'll be very pleased to hear that.”

Baratov stopped two steps from the doorway.

“He's a friend of yours, isn't he?” Mangan asked. “Your buddy, Yuri? I'll give him a call as soon as you leave. Let him know where you live.”

Baratov faltered. “Please do not do such a thing.”

“Mr. Baratov,” Grigory said, motioning to leave. “Don't say anything.”

Mangan asked Baratov again. “Why were you meeting with the girls?”

“I, I talk to Deborah because—”

Grigory grabbed Baratov's arm and pulled him away. “Mr. Baratov, please.”

“
Zatknis'!
” Baratov screamed at him, and shoved him off. “Go! You go now!”

Grigory backed slowly through the open doorway. “Very well, Mr. Baratov,” he said, leaving. “I'll, I'll wait for you out in the hall.”

Coose closed the door and Baratov sat back down.

“I will be honest here, Detective.”

“I look forward to that.”

“You will not talk to Mr. Nazarkov?”

Mangan pressed the question again. “Why were you at dinner with Deborah Ellison on the night that she was murdered?”

“I go because Fenyana, she tells me that Deborah wants to work on her own. She does not want to share so much the money with me. Yes? And she does not want Fenyana to work for me no more. She has a computer, the laptop, and the girls now, they do their own online escort service. All by themselves they want to do this, but I tell her this is not safe.”

Coose sat on the edge of the table. “And that you'd be losing a shit-load of money, right?”

“Yes, I will not lie. Yes. I think, maybe she takes my customers. So I go with Fenyana to the restaurant, to talk. Fenyana does not want to leave me, she knows it is not safe. She has been by herself alone before, and beaten, one time very badly. So I tell Deborah, this is dangerous. You cannot be alone. You must stay with me.”

“Did you threaten her?” Coose asked.

“No, I do not really threaten. I want to scare her, yes, but that is all. I tell to her what happens to these girls sometimes. She does not believe me.”

“What did she say?” Mangan asked.

“Nothing. She is mad and says I go home now and she leaves. She is mad at Fenyana too, because Fenyana agrees with me.”

“Where'd you go after she left the restaurant?”

“I follow her, she is not outside. So I send Fenyana to work, in the cab. And I tell her I will go to Deborah, I will find her and convince her.”

“And did you?”

“No. I cannot find her. I go to her apartment, I bang the door. She is nowhere. And that is it. I do not see her again. Fenyana does not see her. She did not come home that night. And then, of course, so sad, later, we hear what has happened to her. It is so terrible. And that it should happen after I speak of such dangers.”

Baratov appeared moved. Authentically. Mangan looked to Coose.

“Is it not strange?” Baratov continued. “And then Fenyana, she goes away too, and one of my girls, she tells me that Fenyana has run away
because she thinks I am the cause for this, for what has happened to Deborah.”

“What does she think?” Mangan asked.

“She thinks I am the person who has done this to Deborah! I am not. I would never.” Baratov dropped his head. “Never. That is all I know. I do not lie.”

“We think she's in California,” Mangan said. “You know why she might have gone there?”

“San Francisco, maybe. Richmond. It is Russian—how you say?—Russian area. She worked there when she first come to America.”

Mangan jotted the information down. He knew he had nothing to hold Baratov on, but what was worse, he believed him. “Okay,” he told him. “You can go.”

“Yes. I go.”

Coose hopped off the table and showed him to the door and said, “I'll keep in touch.”

“Yes. Yes. And, please,” Baratov said, half in the hallway, “please, you will say nothing to Mr. Nazarkov?”

Coose tried to slam the door on him but didn't get a chance because Willie Palmer came barging through first. He shoved Baratov into the hall and closed the door.

“What?” Mangan asked. “You got something?”

“No, no—it's—Wesley Faber, from Wisconsin? The police chief ?”

“Yeah?”

“His daughter was just shot. Just this morning, about an hour from here. They think it's the same guy.”

“Jesus Christ.”

When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions.

“What the hell is going on here?”

E
very morning at six thirty, five days a week, Jennifer jogged the breakwater that led to the Stony Point Marina in Waukegan, Illinois. On this morning, she had been pushing herself. She felt strong, her legs, her breathing. It had been almost a year and a half since having her first child, Kayla, and although she'd hit her goal weight she still didn't feel like she'd gotten her old body back yet, and she was becoming dimly
aware that she might never get it back completely. Her mind drifted as she quickened her pace, wishing she could wear sports bras all the time, wondering whether or not she'd be able to stick to her diet once the holidays ambushed her.

The sun had risen just enough to begin taking the early chill out of the air as she jogged through the entrance of the marina. To her right, Lake Michigan, glittering, looked beautiful; to her left, a wide swath of grass was dotted with picnic tables and clusters of silver birch. Through the trees she could see the dock, crowded with sailboats and power boats of all shapes and sizes. Two charter boats were loading gear and customers on board. At one of the picnic tables in the grassy area sat a man sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He watched her as she ran past in her very short shorts, her long legs and long arms bare, her damp skin sparkly in the morning sun.

At the end of the jogging path, which skirted the breakwater, was a cul-de-sac lined with various sand-boxed exercise stations: a pull-up bar, a place for step training, another for sit-ups. This was the halfway mark of the route Jennifer ran each morning. After some sit-ups and stretching, she would head back home.

A gently windy day. Jennifer sprinted the last few yards, aware that the man she'd passed at the picnic table was still staring at her. She ignored him. She wasn't concerned; the seven o'clock fishing boats hadn't sailed yet, and the concession stand was open, selling coffee and donuts. She did her sit-ups quickly, wanting to stop at one hundred, and almost did, but made herself do one hundred and ten. She stood and leaned over, fingers to toes, to the left, to the right, and then a slow roll up. She reached high above her head and looked out over the ruffled waters of Lake Michigan, a long stretch left, then right. She took in a deep breath, very deep, a yoga class breath, and let it out slowly—

When her head hit the pavement she felt violently nauseous and needed to vomit. A puddle of viscous liquid quickly pooled up around her mouth, thick and warm, and she gurgled in the tepid blood that caught in her throat and bubbled out her nose. Her limbs trembled uncontrollably, her bowels loosed themselves, and then all went still and quiet … and she wondered then, for some odd reason, whether her husband and her baby girl had eaten breakfast yet.

She died quickly.

The bullet, which entered her back a few inches below her left shoulder, had shattered her scapula and sixth rib, ripped through her lungs, and lacerated her pulmonary vein and aorta. A kill shot. A single .243-caliber bullet fired from a distance of perhaps seventy-five or a hundred yards had dropped her to the ground, as one witness would later describe, as if “her legs just went out from under.”

Jennifer Faber Paulsen, daughter of police chief Wesley Faber of Winsome Bay, Wisconsin, was dead.

T
here would be more.

But first he would write.

He would write the story now, for all to see and read.

He spent a long time writing, and while he wrote, a thing like calmness closed in around him. Something about it, about the act of writing, eased the compulsion in him to keep doing more of what he had been doing. If he looked not left nor right, but kept on straight ahead, sailing into the illusionary white square of words before him, his mind settled into what seemed a smooth and glassy levelness.

But then his words ran out.

And he began to hear her.

She was coming.

Her thoughts … were coming …

They had found him again. They pressed at this mind, swelling the space around his brain and bulging his skull inward till her inexistence burst the weir of his mind. Her thoughts spilled everywhere, gushing out his eyes and fingers, leaking onto the keyboard and desk and puddling beneath his chair. These thoughts—the obscene conjectures of his mind—were the frantic rats that gnawed incessantly at his brain: on that unthinkable night, which she did not survive, in her last moments before she ceased to be, what had she been thinking?

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.

D
etective 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.”