Free A Winsome Murder by James DeVita

the curb, with a white number 46 painted on it. A string of rosary beads and a blue-ribboned medal hung from it. Someone had propped up a ceramic cross at its base. Stacked on the ground around itwere piles of weathered bouquets, their cellophane wrappings gently crinkling in the light breeze. A large square of yellow crime scene tape sectioned off the makeshift memorial from the rest of the field. I stared at the spot, wondering if the future owners of lot 46 would be told of what had happened on their property, or if they’d discover it years later, perhaps whispered to one of their children on a playground during recess.
    Sitting there, I expected, I wanted, to feel differently.
    I didn’t.
    A vague sense of sadness filled me, or perhaps it was disappointment. I expected something momentous to occur as I gazed at the actual spot where the body had been discovered, but I felt nothing. Everything looked so normal. Something unspeakable had happened in this place; there should have been some residue, some echo in the air of that awful night. God should not have allowed the sky to blue or the hay to green in such a place. Deborah Ellison’s body had been dumped here like so much garbage. She may still have been alive. She may have breathed her last breaths not five feet from where I was parked. The grasses might have tickled her face in the warm wind that night, and she, unable to brush away the blades, may have lain there, staring up at some dark star, thinking her last thoughts. A human being had died horribly in this spot, something should be different.
    But nothing, it seemed to me, was different. Except for my presence.
    He may have been here too, parked where I was parked. He may have sat in his car, just like me, with his window rolled down, looking at what he’d done. If Deborah Ellison had still been alive, he may have been able to hear whatever dying sounds she’d still been able to make.
    Jillian stopped writing. She saved her work and closed her laptop and placed it on the seat beside her. The Winsome sky to the east had turned a lilac purple now. She watched it for a time, still hoping to experience something, she didn’t know what, just something: an act of coincidence, an image, a feeling. But nothing happened. She looked around her, up and down the yet to be inhabited streets, croplands to either side, driveways leading to nowhere, waiting for homes to be attached to them. A large black hawk glided across the road and into the field to her right, and Jillian thought for a moment that it was an omen of some kind. Itwasn’t; she could feel it right away, it didn’t mean anything. It was just a bird in a field.
    She took out a pack of cigarettes she’d hidden in her purse and smoked. She wrote down a few notes. Checked the time. She had to be getting home soon. She gave Mara a call and left a message on her voice mail.
    â€œIt’s me again. Where are you? I’ve been calling you for two days. Look, I got some really great stuff. I want to tell you about it. So call me, okay? Even if it’s late. Love ya. Bye.”
    D etective Mangan tracked down the Wisconsin murder victim that Kevin Lachlan had told him about: Deborah Ellison. He called the officer in charge of the investigation, Wesley Faber, the police chief in Winsome Bay. Mangan explained to Faber about the severed hand that had been found in Chicago, then queried him as to the condition of the Wisconsin victim’s body, the details of which had not yet been released to the public.
    Faber told him that Deborah Ellison was missing her left hand.
    â€œWell,” Mangan said, “guess I can stop looking for a body.”
    â€œI’m afraid that’s right, sir,” Chief Faber said. “We have her here.”
    Mangan spoke with Faber for a while. He was pleasant enough on the phone, but Mangan could sense that he was a bit overwhelmed by the case, and understandably so. This was his first murder