A Winsome Murder (25 page)

“Detective Mangan?” Pribyl called from the first floor.

“Yes,” Mangan said, stepping out of the room.

Pribyl took two steps up the stairs and leaned on the banister, looking up. “It's the wife. I've got her in the kitchen.”

E
lizabeth Anderson was sitting at the kitchen table. A frail woman with a panicked look in her eyes, she sat sideways in the chair as if trying to hide within it. She was unkempt in body and clothes. Her gray roots
had spread widely down the center of her once-dyed hair. No makeup. She was struggling to open a pack of cigarettes, her hands shaking. She had the appearance of a thing that had been broken.

“This is Mrs. Anderson,” Captain Pribyl said. “She was at the store. We found her watching from the perimeter line. A neighbor pointed her out.”

Mangan sat opposite her at the table. She flinched slightly and scooted a little farther back into the chair, reminding Mangan of his parakeet, Phoebe. The woman was still trying to get a cigarette out of her pack. Mangan reached out.

“Can I help you with that?” he asked.

“Why are you in my house?” Her voice was thin and weak, but pointed. “Why are you here?”

Pribyl said, “I tried to explain to her—”

“Haven't you done enough?” she said. “Haven't you?”

Mangan spoke easily, “Mrs. Anderson—”

“Get them out of my house,” she said. “All of them. I want them out of my house.”

“Please, Mrs. Anderson, if you'd just—”

“
Get them out of my house!
” she screamed. She stood, kicking the chair away, and crushed herself into the corner of the kitchen. “
Get out of my house! Get out! Get out!
”

“All right,” Mangan said, getting up and backing away.

“
Get out! Get out!
”

“All right.”

Quietly, calmly, she kept whispering, “Get out, get out, get out, get out, get out.”

Mangan called Pribyl over as he stepped out of the kitchen. “Give me a little time with her, okay? Let's get everyone out for now, we'll bring them back in a bit.”

Pribyl called for his team and the CSI unit to clear the house. Coose left too. The whole time there was a soft murmuring from the kitchen, “Get out, get out, get out, get out, get out.”

Mangan knew the woman was in some other place. A place of madness. Not clinically mad, worse: Melvillian mad.
That wild madness that's only calm to comprehend itself
. If she were mad, she might perhaps forget what had happened to her family, her daughter, her life. But no,
Mangan could tell that she was vividly, outrageously, aware of her own life. The story of it was carved into her face.

He waited till the home was completely cleared. He waited a little longer and let some silence settle into the house. Then he ventured toward the kitchen again. Mrs. Anderson had managed to get her pack of cigarettes open. She still hovered in a corner of the room. She looked thinner standing up, as if her body had been drained of something and the skin now hung loose and resigned. His wife came into his mind. Those terrible last days.
My wife, my wife. What wife? I have no wife.

The strike of a match focused Mangan again.

Elizabeth Anderson lit her cigarette, staring at Mangan, her eyes dilated with anger. Life had dealt her a shit hand, Mangan thought, and she had no idea how to play it. He peeled off his latex gloves and sat.

“Can I have one of those?” he asked, gesturing to her cigarettes.

She hesitated for a moment, guarded. Then threw the pack on the table. He took one out and looked at her. She tossed over the matches.

“Thanks,” he said, and lit up. He hadn't had a cigarette in almost three years. My god, it felt good. It tasted like defiance. “Mrs. Anderson,” he said, “I am so sorry. So sorry for what happened to your daughter. I have a daughter. I … I can't imagine.”

Her lips tightened and she stood up a little straighter. “She was a good girl, you know. A good girl. For a long time.”

Mangan nodded.

“It was the drugs,” she said. “It wasn't her. It was the drugs.” She seemed lost in thought for a moment. She ashed her cigarette on the tiled floor. “Why are you here?” she asked. “What is all this?”

“Mrs. Anderson,” he said, “we're here about your husband.”

“He's not here.” She took a long, deep drag of her cigarette. “He's hardly ever here.”

“Do you know where he might be?”

“Why?” she asked.

“We have reason to believe,” Mangan said, “that your husband may have been involved in some very serious crimes.”

Mrs. Anderson's face crooked slightly and she seemed to truly see Mangan for the first time. “Daniel? What are you talking about?”

“We just need to talk to him,” Mangan said.

“What crimes? What do you mean?”

“Do you know where he might be?”

“What crimes?”

“There … there have been some crimes against women, young women.”

“What kind of crimes?”

Mangan didn't want to say it. “Have you read about the recent murders in Chicago and Wisconsin?”

A second of silence, and then, “Daniel?” she said. “No. No, you're wrong.” Her eyes were deeply confused and pained. “He would, he would never do anything like that. He couldn't. That's, that's crazy. He can't do anything. He can't work, he can't eat, he can't be around me—he can't even look at me. That's, that's why he's gone all the time, why he leaves.”

“He's gone all the time?”

“Yes. He can't be here long, in the house. He has to leave after a while. He'll come home, mow the lawn, do some work on the computer, but then he starts wandering around the house and he has to leave again. He's away for days sometimes.”

“Where does he go?”

“He just, he fishes, or hunts. It helps keep his mind off things.”

“But where? Do you know where he fishes?”

“At the cabin.”

“What cabin?”

“We have a cabin over in Lena. On the lake.”

T
hey pulled up quietly, no lights or sirens, some fifty yards from Daniel Anderson's cabin. A silver pickup truck was parked on the side, partially obscured in the trees. Captain Pribyl positioned his SWAT team and again sealed off a perimeter. Mangan and Coose surveyed the layout. A lake was behind the cabin, and a thin expanse of trees to either side.

Coose conferred with Mangan and Pribyl and asked, “How about no introductions this time?”

“Fine with me,” Pribyl said.

Mangan agreed.

Coose nodded and took off at a run, not stopping until he'd cracked in the front door. Mangan entered behind him, sweeping the barrel of his Glock across the main room. Pribyl followed close, clearing the
bedroom and kitchen. Mangan moved quickly along the living room wall and kicked open a bathroom door—left, right—nothing. He backed out, scanning the main room. There was a sliding door, half open, that led to a porch off the back of the cabin. He signaled to Coose to cover right and sidestepped through the open glass doors.

It was empty. The cabin was empty.

“Shit,” Mangan said. “Get CSI in here.”

One step behind, he thought, we're one step behind the guy.

He holstered his gun and looked around. The screened-in porch ran along the back side of the cabin, facing the lake. He walked the length of it, taking a moment to look out at the water. A few hundred yards from the shoreline was a small island that seemed overrun with trees, a floating forest nearly. The sun, beginning to dip low behind the island, skipped wooded shadows across the surface of the water, flat and calm and wide. Far out on the lake, he could make out the silhouette of a small boat puttering toward the tree-lined island, the sound of its outboard a soft, muted murmur. He watched it slip silently behind the island.

He did a quick search of the porch. Nothing. A window there looked into the cabin, into a bedroom. He glanced in. A CSI tech was at a table working on a laptop. Mangan started to go inside, but stopped to look out at the lake once more. He wasn't around this kind of nature all that often, away from the cement and stench and blood of the city. Lake Michigan wasn't anything like this lake; no, Lake Michigan was a city lake, cold and rough, like everything else in Chicago. He lingered a moment longer, enjoying the—

He heard something.

He gripped the handle of his Glock and felt the familiar rush of adrenaline through his body.

If of life you keep a care,

Shake off slumber, and beware.

Something was outside, making a sort of purring noise, a soft, elongated buzz. He eased off the safety of his gun. And then he saw it.

A bird.

Jesus. He put the gun away. It was a hummingbird, hovering head high, just on the other side of the screen. What is it with birds lately? he thought. It was just sort of floating there, eye level, its head and tail a
glint of emerald, its wings a lavender blur—and then it was gone. So fast that it seemed not to fly but to melt into the air.

Mangan pressed close to the screen to see where it might have gone.

H
e was watching them.

From the island.

Watching all of them from his aerie high above, in his father's tree stand, nestled tightly among the limbs of the great white pine. He was very still, as still as the branch on which he nestled his .243-caliber Remington. He chambered a round—softly—nestled his cheek into the rifle stock, and centered the crosshairs of his scope on the policeman on his porch. The man had been walking back and forth, but now he was standing still and looking out the screen, looking straight at him.

Three hundred yards. No wind.

They must think I'm stupid, he thought, bracing his back against the padded crossbar of the tree stand. They must think I'm too stupid to buy a police scanner and listen to everything they're saying, or at least to hear enough of what they're up to before they switch to secure frequencies or use their cell phones. The SWAT team was smart, but the local police put out calls for their ambulances and firemen to be on standby and gave away everyone's positions.

They had come, just as he knew they would one day. That's why he had prepared. That's why he was ready. He adjusted his rifle scope minutely. His breathing was good, calm. The sun was at his back. The target, standing behind a dark screen on his porch. He'd made harder shots than this, much harder. Given the distance, he didn't really want to take a head shot, but the target was probably wearing a vest, so there wasn't much choice. He calibrated his boresighted 40-millimeter scope slightly, rifle zeroed in 2 inches high at 100, elevation good, dead on—and then the man walked back inside the cabin.

He lowered his rifle.

And waited.

He could outwait them all.

He pulled the safety back and folded his arms around the rifle. The lake shimmered a mottled gold. In the distance, he could hear the smallest slapping of waves against the shoreline, not really waves, more like gentle pushes of water, easing themselves up the sand and then
falling back again, being pulled into the darker thing behind them. They tried to leave the lake, tried to break free, but the pull was too strong.

They would never be free.

Like Lynnette.

She could never break free.

She always got pulled back into the darker thing behind her.

A good home. A safe home. A normal home, he'd thought. Work, church, school. Sports. Proms. College visits. Homecoming. And then … He could not help her. She would not listen. She could only hear the other thing, the thing behind her that she could not resist. And then she began to change, a metamorphosing before his eyes, unstoppable, until, like some malformed butterfly, she emerged from her bedroom one day a still-breathing abortion of herself, a skeletonized shadow gorging on her own flesh. Her body, their beautiful daughter's body, ravaged and decayed by poison—oh god, oh god, oh …

His mind was doing it again.

He tried to stop his thoughts but he couldn't.

A lightning crack flashed through his skull, blistering his brain. He doubled over, gripping his rifle so hard his fingers hurt. His thoughts were dragged to the ruined part of his mind again, where the other world was, and he saw his still smoldering flesh there, the actual physical part of his brain that had been ripped open during the earthquake of his mind. He walked to the edge of it and peered down into the dark canyon and watched it fracture open even wider, and he saw—more vividly than ever before—he saw the gaping, milk-white chasm of his mind.

A movement in the cabin window freed him from his thoughts.

He raised his rifle.

W
hat were you doing out there?” Coose asked when Mangan found him in the cabin.

“Bird watching.”

“Yeah, well, come here. I got something to show you.” Coose led him into the kitchen where CSI was snapping photos of the open freezer section of a refrigerator. Coose asked the techie, “You almost finished?” The man took two more photos and stepped away. Coose reached in and removed a plastic bag containing a small human hand.

“Christ,” Mangan said. There were still rings on its fingers. “The Ellison girl?”

“Pretty good bet.”

The cabin was a hush of activity, everyone engaged in their own jobs: bagging, dusting, boxing, photographing, cataloging, videotaping. Captain Pribyl came over, taking off his vest, his blues soaked through with sweat.

“Need anything else?” he asked Mangan. “I'm gonna get my guys back to Rockford.”

“No. You've been great today. Thank your team for me.”

Captain Pribyl turned to a young uniformed officer behind him. “This is Dean Gaffney, from Lena.”

Gaffney, looking as if he'd just stepped out of the academy, came forward. “Sir.”

“He cleared the other cabins around the lake for us,” Pribyl told Mangan. “He knows the area well, grew up here. He'll do a search of the grounds, take a look around the lake.”