Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

“It’s OK,” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “You’re doing the right thing here. Just get it off you.”

“It wasn’t of him having sex, OK?” Rylan said, his eyes bugging wi

th stress. “It was…sick…evil. It starts with this girl standing in a fancy kitchen. She looks like a high school kid, like a babysitter or something, has her little purse, puts it on the counter. Then Chayefsky comes through the swinging door, six-three, ripped, and buck naked.

“He has a crowbar in his hand, and he just hits her, smashes her right in the face with it…He…ties her up and brutally tortures this girl to death. Her screams. I had to turn off the sound. Then after she’s finally dead, he ties on a chef’s apron, puts on some classical music, and starts to…cut her up like a chicken. I fast-forwarded it, but the last scene I saw was him frying something, Mike. Standing there bare-assed in the blood splatter, swirling butter around something in a copper pan.”

It was my turn to stare at the floor tile as he broke down, sobbing and sniffling. It all clicked together. Luminous Properties. Cannibalism. Naomi Chast’s murder.

“I’d heard rumors that Chayefsky was into sick, twisted stuff, but I’ve peeked into the window of hell, Mike. I keep seeing the expression on this girl’s face as she’s sitting there. So screw it. Put me back inside. I don’t want it anymore. Keep the money, Wall Street, everything. I don’t want anything anymore. I’m done swimming in this river of shit.”

I stood to leave.

Rylan suddenly wiped his nose and stared at me.

“But that’s not why I’m telling you. I sent him a girl. He said he needed a hooker, so I sent him this girl I know for some special party he’s having tonight. He kept asking all these questions about her that I realized were attempts to see if she’d be missed. Don’t you see, Mike? You have to find them. This maniac is going to kill her.”

CHAPTER 103

A LITTLE BEFORE SIX that evening, Lopez and Doyle and I looked at each other nervously as I sped us off Exit 3 from Interstate 95 near Long Island Sound in the part of Greenwich, Connecticut, known as Old Greenwich.

We had reason to be tense and alert. We’d recovered the smartphone from where Rylan had stashed it in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and had seen the video on it. It was exactly what Rylan had said. The billionaire mogul was indeed some kind of serial killer, and we had to find him and Rylan’s associate, Iliana, before Chayefsky killed her.

After ten minutes of weaving our way through a neighborhood of winding private roads, we stopped at a gate call box. I told the tinny voice we were police and were there to speak to Mr. Chayefsky. I had to show my shield to the video camera above the box before we were buzzed through the heavy iron gate onto the driveway of Chayefsky’s estate.

We drove up a curving, wooded rise. At its crest, a little past a rock formation, an inlet suddenly came into view, a ruffling wilderness of salt-marsh cattails against a sweeping, stunning expanse of placid glittering blue.

“How can this be Chayefsky’s property or anybody’s property?” Lopez said, amazed. “It looks like a state park. Who’d he buy it from? The government?”

“Nope. Jay Gatsby,” Doyle said.

The house, when we finally saw it another eighth of a mile later, was even more ridiculous than the grounds. It looked like an English mansion out of a Jane Austen novel, or maybe something a school would take a day trip to. It had two towers and at least four chimneys and a huge antique weather vane with a verdigris copper dolphin leaping from between the waves of dormers in the blue-gray sea of the slate roof.

We parked in the circular driveway and climbed up wide stairs onto a white-on-white covered porch you could have thrown a wedding on. Off the porch to the right was a massive gentle slope of manicured lawn, on which I spotted a fenced-in grass tennis court and a hedge maze and beyond it, a faded dock, where a pristine thirty-foot white sailing sloop bobbed softly.

“So this is what they mean by happily ever after,” Doyle mumbled as the Fort Knox–like door swung open.

We stood looking at the woman standing there. It was hard not to.

In the doorway, near the base of a set of Gone with the Wind–style stairs, stood a beautiful woman in skintight white yoga clothes. She was about six-one, with a perfect toned body, perfect olive skin, and bright-green almond-shaped eyes in a face that demanded to be looked at. Her lush russet-colored hair was worn up, but it looked like it could easily do that Pantene knot-untying thing with a flick of her pointed chin.

I would have said she was a model, but models weren’t as relaxed and elegant and kept up. She looked like she could be anywhere from twenty-two to forty-two. A retired model, I thought. An expression popped into my head from nowhere. Private Viewings Only.

“Mrs. Chayefsky, I’m Detective Bennett. We’d like to talk to your husband,” I said.

“My husband? He’s not here. I’m not even sure if he’s in New York. In any case, he doesn’t come home until quite late. But you can talk to me. Have you found Consuela’s car? She’s already gone. We had a car service take her home.”

“Consuela?” Arturo said.

“Yes. One of our housekeepers. Her car was stolen from the train station,” the gorgeous woman said. “Isn’t that what this is about?”

No, it’s about your husband’s proclivity for killing and eating people, I felt like saying.

“We need to speak to your husband. It’s urgent,” Doyle said.

“Urgent?” she said. “What’s going on?”

“He could be in grave danger,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. He was in grave danger. Of being put into a mental asylum for the rest of his life.