CHAPTER

9

ANY HOMICIDE WAS a gruesome parody of intimacy: personal for the killer, personal for the victim, personal for the cops investigating it. It was a grim commentary on the nature of his job and his years working it that Magozzi had somehow learned to separate himself from murder victims in the interest of self-preservation. When he walked onto a scene, he saw a knifing or a shooting or an assault; he saw blood, bruises, broken bones; and beyond, heartbreak and tragedy that had to be kept at arm’s length. In order to be effective, you had to focus on the minutiae of each crime instead of the big, sorrowful picture of a prematurely terminated life. That was the only way a homicide got solved.

But this scene was different and he knew it would probably actively haunt him for the rest of his life. The rage he felt, the sorrow, the disgust over what humans were capable of was almost impossible to put away. This wasn’t the grotesque horror of a serial killer carving up a body and scattering the pieces, like a spoiled kid dumping a jigsaw puzzle on the floor. But it was sick and deeply disturbing in its own special way.

The victim’s wrists were manacled to the bed frame with handcuffs, her ankles tethered to the footboard with rope. She was naked, her legs spread wide, her entire head encased in duct tape—a common household product put to hideous use. It was turned to the side, probably blindly looking for escape even as she suffocated. Her skin was black in places where the blood had been shunted by her restraints, ghastly pale in others.

There were welts across her stomach and thighs but no bleeding anywhere. A bruise circled her neck, but there was no immediate sign of the ligature that had caused it. The honey-blond hair that wasn’t trapped beneath tape was the only thing that looked healthy and alive.

Gino was breathing shallowly out of his mouth. “Jesus Christ,” he finally said.

Magozzi felt the fragile barrier of detachment from the victim collapse. This pitiful, violated thing had been somebody’s baby once. Somebody’s Elizabeth. He shook his head fiercely, chasing his daughter out of his head.

“Don’t go there,” Gino said sternly.

“I’m trying not to.”

“Your daughter doesn’t belong here. Let’s get that straight right now.”

Gino understood—he had a smart, beautiful daughter named Helen, who was looking at colleges now, and a much younger son named Noah he still referred to as “The Accident”, because he had been. Magozzi had always privately wondered how his partner had been able to separate his work from his life, and now he was going to have to figure it out for himself.

“Yeah. Thanks.” He turned away and saw a tote bag sitting on the dresser, fine leather embossed with the repetitive pattern of a high-end designer’s monogram. A large sunburst mirror hung on the wall above the dresser and he thought of Blanca Szabo. She was right about one thing: this mirror had seen everything, but it wouldn’t share its secrets with him, just like the mirror in Blanca’s vision hadn’t shared with her.

She can’t move, she can’t breathe …

A skillful con by a devout practitioner. Psychics painted pictures with broad brushstrokes, keeping their prognostications as vague as possible. There was a fifty-fifty chance that whatever they said would hit some sweet spot. Still, her words shadowed his thoughts.

Gino was obviously tracking in the same direction. “We need to talk to Blanca again. She’s not a psychic, but she could be a killer. Crazy attention-seeker goes to the cops, feeds them some details of a crime, then goes out and commits it.” He stopped, catching Magozzi’s eye. “What? You’re looking at me like I’m the one who’s nuts.”

“Blanca Szabo didn’t do this anymore than she can see into the future.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s kind of a stretch, even for me, but still, she might know something. Even if it’s something she doesn’t know she knows.”

“We’ll talk to her again.” Magozzi gloved up and started going through the contents of the handbag, a temporary distraction from the horror on the bed. “Wallet full of cash and credit cards. Keys to her car. Driver’s license belongs to Kelly Ann Ramage. Five-five, one twenty-five, long blond hair in the photo.”

He showed the license to Gino, who nodded. “Matches the registration on the Merc in the driveway, matches the homeowner’s and husband’s story and description. It’s her.” Gino walked around the bed and pointed to the pile of women’s clothing and provocative black lingerie on the floor. “A planned hook-up that went really, really wrong?”

“Seems like it. Doesn’t read random stranger attack. No sign of breaking or entering, no disturbance in the front of the house, and if it was a robbery, they would have taken her Louis Vuitton and her eighty-thousand-dollar SUV.”

“If this started out as consensual before it got out of control, there should be prints all over the place.”

“We can hope.”

Gino shook his head and looked away for a moment. “I’m afraid to see what’s under that duct tape.”

“We’re going to have to wait for the autopsy to find out. No way the ME is going to remove it in situ.” Magozzi reached the bottom of Kelly Ramage’s tote and pulled out the latest model of iPhone, which would, of course, be obsolete by the end of the year. “Point of contact with the twisted bastard who did this is probably right here. This might be our golden ticket.”

“Almost guaranteed. What did we do back in the old days when people still had belly buttons instead of umbilical cords attached to their phones?”

“Those were sweaty, hard-working days.” Magozzi turned on the phone and it came to life with a familiar chime. “It’s locked.”

“Of course it is. By the look of things, she was a married woman leading a double life.” Gino walked into the adjacent bathroom and Magozzi followed. They found a small travel kit open on the vanity, the kind you put your cosmetics and toothbrush in, except this held a very different assortment of personal products: condoms, a variety of lubricants, a vibrator, and a small plastic bag with three pills in it. They were green with smiley faces printed on the front.

“Ecstasy,” Gino said. “The start of the party was planned, the ending wasn’t.”

Magozzi looked under the vanity and pulled out a small stainless-steel trash can. There was a clean plastic liner and a single crumpled tissue with lipstick on it. Kelly had freshened up for her visitor, but hadn’t gotten any further than that. “None of the personal stuff looks like it was used, and there’s nothing in the bedroom either. No condoms or condom wrappers, no tubes of Joy Jelly, no ligature, no whip.”

Gino shrugged. “Maybe he tried to clean up when he realized he killed her.”

“Or maybe torturing and killing her was his plan all along and this was never about sex.”

“Tough to prove intent. I don’t know shit about bondage and S&M, but maybe this is how it goes. Torture is the foreplay and the rest got cut short when this asshole wrapped her head in duct tape and forgot she had to breathe.”

They did a tour of the rest of the house, kitchen first. It was spotlessly clean, the dishwasher empty.

“No half-full glasses of wine covered with fingerprints and saliva,” Gino sulked, picking up the sponge perched on the stainless lip of the sink. “Bone dry. Nobody washed up last night.”

“I don’t think it was that kind of date.” Magozzi opened the refrigerator. It was mostly empty, except for the usual condiments, what you’d expect from a homeowner who was planning to be out of town for a while. There was a bottle of popular French champagne in the door, priced at the low end of the spectrum, but still costly for 750 milliliters of grape juice.

“This stuff is overrated and overpriced. You can do much better with a smaller producer or a Crémant de Bourgogne,” Harley had told him, while instructing him on the finer points of bubbles. Magozzi hadn’t understood most of what he’d said, but he’d certainly enjoyed the experience immensely. “Maybe the killer brought the champagne and left some prints on the bottle.”

“That would be dandy.” They both started when they heard shouting coming from the front of the house. Outside, two of the uniforms who had been working the neighborhood canvass were restraining a hysterical man. Middle-aged, salt and pepper hair, nice suit, no overcoat. “That’s my wife’s car!” he shouted into the wind. “I need to get in there!”

“Shit,” Gino muttered.