Tell No One

Carlson took out his notebook and Mont Blanc pen. He wrote Defensive knife wounds?!?! and then he underlined it several times. Defensive wounds. That wasn’t KillRoy’s style. KillRoy tortured his victims. He bound them with rope, did whatever, and once they were too far gone to care, he killed them.

Why would there be defensive knife wounds on her hands?

Carlson kept reading. He scanned through hair and eye color, and then, halfway down the second page, he found another shocker.

Elizabeth Beck had been branded postmortem.

Carlson reread that. He took out his notebook and scratched down the word postmortem. That didn’t add up. KillRoy had always branded his victims while they were alive. Much was made at trial about how he liked the smell of sizzling flesh, how he enjoyed the screams of his victims while he seared them.

First, the defensive wounds. Now this. Something wasn’t meshing.

Carlson took off his glasses and closed his eyes. Mess, he thought to himself. Mess upset him. Logic holes were expected, yes, but these were turning into gaping wounds. On the one hand, the autopsy supported his original hypothesis that Elizabeth Beck’s murder had been staged to look like the work of KillRoy. But now, if that were true, the theory was coming unglued from the other side.

He tried to take it step by step. First, why would Beck be so eager to see this file? On the surface, the answer was now obvious. Anybody who scrutinized these results would realize that there was an excellent chance that KillRoy had not murdered Elizabeth Beck. It was not a given, however. Serial killers, despite what you might read, are not creatures of habit. KillRoy could have changed his M.O. or sought some diversity. Still, with what Carlson was reading here, there was enough to make one ponder.

But all of this just begged what had become the big question: Why hadn’t anybody noticed these evidentiary inconsistencies back then?

Carlson sorted through possibilities. KillRoy had never been prosecuted for Elizabeth Beck’s murder. The reasons were now pretty clear. Perhaps the investigators suspected the truth. Perhaps they realized that Elizabeth Beck didn’t fit, but publicizing that fact would only aid KillRoy’s defense. The problem with prosecuting a serial killer is that you cast a net so wide, something is bound to slither out. All the defense has to do is pick apart one case, find discrepancies with one murder, and bang, the other cases are tainted by association. So without a confession, you rarely try him for all the murders at once. You do it step by step. The investigators, realizing this, probably just wanted the murder of Elizabeth Beck to go away.

But there were big problems with that scenario too.

Elizabeth Beck’s father and uncle—two men in law enforcement—had seen the body. They had in all likelihood seen this autopsy report. Wouldn’t they have wondered about the inconsistencies? Would they have let her murderer go free just to secure a conviction on KillRoy? Carlson doubted it.

So where did that leave him?

He continued through the file and stumbled across yet another stunner. The car’s air-conditioning was seriously chilling him now, reaching bone. Carlson slid down a window and pulled the key out of the ignition. The top of the sheet read: Toxicology Report. According to the tests, cocaine and heroin had been found in Elizabeth Beck’s bloodstream; moreover, traces were found in the hair and tissues, indicating that her use was more than casual.

Did that fit?

He was thinking about it, when his cell phone rang. He picked it up. “Carlson.”

“We got something,” Stone said.

Carlson put down the file. “What?”

“Beck. He’s booked on a flight to London out of JFK. It leaves in two hours.”

“I’m on my way.”

Tyrese put a hand on my shoulder as we walked. “Bitches,” he said for the umpteenth time. “You can’t trust them.”

I didn’t bother replying.

It surprised me at first that Tyrese would be able to track down Helio Gonzalez so quickly, but the street network was as developed as any other. Ask a trader at Morgan Stanley to locate a counterpart at Goldman Sachs and it would be done in minutes. Ask me to refer a patient to pretty much any other doctor in the state, and it takes one phone call. Why should street felons be different?

Helio was fresh off a four-year stint upstate for armed robbery. He looked it too. Sunglasses, a doo-rag on his head, white T-shirt under a flannel shirt that had only the top button buttoned so that it looked like a cape or bat wings. The sleeves were rolled up, revealing crude prison tattoos etched onto his forearm and the prison muscles coiling thereunder. There is an unmistakable look to prison muscles, a smooth, marblelike quality as opposed to their puffier health club counterparts.

We sat on a stoop somewhere in Queens. I couldn’t tell you where exactly. A Latin rhythm tah-tah-tahhed, the beat driving into my chest. Dark-haired women sauntered by in too-clingy spaghetti-strap tops. Tyrese nodded at me. I turned to Helio. He had a smirk on his face. I took in the whole package and one word kept popping into my brain: scum. Unreachable, unfeeling scum. You looked at him, and you knew that he would continue to leave serious destruction in his wake. The question was how much. I realized that this view was not charitable. I realized, too, that based on surfaces, the very same could be said for Tyrese. That didn’t matter. Elizabeth may have believed in the redemption for the street-hardened or morally anesthetized. I was still working on it.

“Several years ago, you were arrested for the murder of Brandon Scope,” I began. “I know you were released, and I don’t want to cause you any trouble. But I need to know the truth.”

Helio took off his sunglasses. He flicked a glance at Tyrese. “You bring me a cop?”

“I’m not a cop,” I said. “I’m Elizabeth Beck’s husband.”

I wanted a reaction. I didn’t get one.

“She’s the woman who gave you the alibi.”

“I know who she is.”

“Was she with you that night?”

Helio took his time. “Yeah,” he said slowly, smiling at me with yellow teeth. “She was with me all night.”

“You’re lying,” I said.

Helio looked back over at Tyrese. “What is this, man?”

“I need to know the truth,” I said.

“You think I killed that Scope guy?”

“I know you didn’t.”

That surprised him.

“What the hell is going on here?” he said.

“I need you to confirm something for me.”