“I TOLD YOU. Detective McIlroy would check out stacks of cold cases at a time. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it, and you can stand here all morning while I pull files, and none of that’s going to change.”
Ellie looked at her watch. She didn’t have all day. She had a precinct to go to. But her first stop on Wednesday morning had been to the Central Records Division at One Police Plaza.
She had come in the hope that it would be easy to identify which cases Flann McIlroy had been reviewing along with Robbie Harrington’s. The task was anything but. Flann had a penchant for checking out old files and looking for patterns. It had been his imaginative theories-connecting seemingly unrelated cases-that had earned him both praise and ridicule from his peers in the department, along with the nickname McIlMulder.
“He had all of these cases checked out at the same time as the Roberta Harrington file?”
She had asked the clerk to pull up any case files McIlroy had checked out in the three months preceding his phone call to Bill Harrington. The resulting printout was pages long.
“Like I said, he didn’t have all of these at the same time. He had up to fifteen cases checked out at a time. And, as far as I can tell, in that three-month window, he pulled a total of a hundred and seven.”
Once again, Ellie scanned the list of files. Once again, total disbelief.
“That’s actually a little light,” the woman remarked. “I used to joke he had a ten-file-a-week habit.”
Ellie had already asked the clerk to pull a random sample of the different files, and, on a brief skim, she had been unable to figure out which cases had been linked in McIlroy’s mind to Robbie Harrington’s murder, and which had been of interest for any number of other, unknowable reasons.
“You want me to pull some more reports or not?”
Ellie looked at the two-foot-high stack the clerk already needed to reshelve because of her morning research project.
“Don’t feel bad. God knows McIlroy never did.”
It wasn’t that Ellie didn’t want the woman to work. She just didn’t want the work to be futile.
One hundred and seven files? Ellie had only known Flann for a week before his death. During that time, she’d become a staunch supporter, but now she was beginning to wonder if he really had been certifiably insane. Even when she narrowed the list to female victims under thirty-five years old, seventy cases were left taunting her.
“What day did Flann return the Harrington file to CRD?”
The clerk entered a few keystrokes on her computer and recited a date about nine months after Flann had reached out to Robbie’s father. He had let the theory grind around in his brain for nine months after that phone call, until he’d apparently given it up. She wondered what more she could possibly add.
“Can you figure out which of these other cases he turned in on the same day?” Ellie asked.
More keystrokes. “He turned in three files all together. Your Harrington case, plus two others: Lucy Feeney and Alice Butler.”
“And how old were the victims?”
“Feeney was twenty-one. Alice Butler was twenty-two. Feeney was killed two years before Harrington. Butler, almost two years after.”
“I’ll take those, please.”
ONE BY ONE, the men filed into the Thirteenth Precinct’s lineup room.
Watching from the other side of the viewing window, Ellie recognized number 1 as Jim Kemp, a desk clerk from downstairs. Number 2 was Toby Someone, who worked behind the counter at the bagel shop on Second Avenue. Number 3 was Jake Myers. She maintained a neutral expression, lest Myers’s attorney accuse them later of a biased process. Number 4 was another desk clerk, Steve Broderick. Number 5 was a kid they’d found playing guitar outside Gramercy Park.
All young, thin, and brunet. Decent looking. Similar heights and builds. She was just giving herself a silent congratulations on a well-built lineup when number 6 entered, provoking a skeptical laugh from Willie Wells, the defense attorney Jake Myers had retained after his arrest the previous night.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
Number 6 was the homicide squad’s very own civilian aide, Jack Chen. Young, thin, brunet, decent looking-and noticeably Asian.
“The kid we pulled from the holding room backed out,” Rogan explained. “A sudden worry he might be falsely accused.”
“So you found this guy?” Wells said, pointing at Chen. “What? Fat Albert wasn’t available? How about the Abominable Snowman? He’d probably fit in.”
“Is that your way of saying you’d rather proceed with five?” Rogan said.
“I’d rather have a good six.”
Max Donovan intervened. “And you know that any court would say the first five will do.”
“It’s not my job to help you sink my client. Do what you’re gonna do, and if you screw it up, you’ll hear about it at the Wade hearing.”
Donovan looked to Rogan, who pressed a speaker button next to the glass and excused number 6.
“We’re ready?” Ellie asked, once the lineup was down to Myers and the four suitable decoys. She wished she hadn’t noticed Donovan’s sleepy gray eyes. If he was at all embarrassed about asking her out to dinner the previous night, he wasn’t showing it.
He nodded, and Ellie opened the door to the hallway. Tahir Kadhim sat by himself on a metal folding chair outside the viewing room. Stefanie Hyder, Jordan McLaughlin, and Miriam Hart stood huddled together a few feet away, Paul pacing next to them.
Ellie called in Kadhim first. The taxi driver had not even made it to the glass before pointing to Jake Myers. “That’s the man,” he said. “He is the one I saw take the girl from my taxi.”
“You didn’t actually see anyone take Ms. Hart anywhere, did you?” Wells asked.
Donovan held up a hand. “We’re here for a lineup, Willie. If you want to have an investigator chat with Mr. Kadhim on your own time, that’s your call.”
“And by then you will have no doubt had your standard talk with him.”
“I am under no obligation to speak to you,” Kadhim said. “You can ask your questions of me at trial.”
“Ah, I see I’m too late,” Wells said.
Donovan smiled, and Ellie walked the taxi driver to the door. Next up was Stefanie Hyder.
Unlike Tahir Kadhim, Chelsea’s best friend took her time at the window, but it was not out of apprehension. Her eyes did not dart from person to person. Instead, they remained focused solidly on the middle of the lineup. As she stared at Jake Myers, her face became contorted with hatred.
Finally, after a full minute, she spoke. “It’s number three. No doubt.” She used the sleeve of her sweatshirt to wipe a tear from her cheek, and Ellie placed an arm around her shoulder and walked her out of the room.
Paul and Miriam Hart were waiting in the hallway with expectant eyes.
“No question,” Stefanie said. “It was definitely him.”
Miriam and Jordan wrapped their arms around Stefanie, while Mr. Hart shook Ellie’s hand with both of his, thanking her for catching the man who had killed their daughter.
“I just want to go home,” Stefanie said, crying into Mrs. Hart’s shoulder.
“You can go back to Indiana whenever you’re ready,” Ellie said. “We needed you to identify Myers, and you’ve done a great job. The trial won’t be for at least a couple of months, and the district attorney’s office will stay in touch with you about any hearings that come up beforehand.”
Mrs. Hart wiped her eyes with a tissue. “The girls have something they want to do this afternoon to remember Chelsea-a way for them to close the door on all this, at least in New York. But we’re going to fly home tomorrow. It’s time for us to take Chelsea home.”
As they told her once again how grateful they were for her help, all Ellie could think of were the three cold case files in her blue backpack and the damage a lawyer like Willie Wells could do with them in front of a jury.
LYING ON HER COUCH that evening, Ellie closed the files and tossed them on the coffee table. By this point, she had read them enough times to have memorized the critical details.
Lucy Feeney had been killed nearly a decade ago. She was three months past her twenty-first birthday, still in that phase where making full use of one’s legal age was a top priority. She and three roommates shared a converted two-bedroom in Washington Heights, but Lucy could be found downtown during most of her waking hours, where she’d spent the last two years waiting tables at six different restaurants.
The week of Lucy’s murder, she and her roommates, in various combinations, had gone out partying on each of the previous four nights. The roommates’ appetites for adventure had been sated. Lucy’s had not. On the evening of September 23, 1998, she hit the bars on her own. According to her roommates, it wasn’t an unusual move for any of them. They enjoyed semi-regular status at a sufficient number of places that they could be comfortable on their own.
The last time anyone saw Lucy Feeney alive, she was at B Bar on Bowery, enjoying a Cosmopolitan. The bartender remembered her. He also recalled sneaking her a couple extra shots of Stoli, one of the privileges of semi-regular bar status. He did not, however, spend enough time with her to recall anything about the man with whom he saw her leaving shortly before closing time.
Lucy’s roommates did not report her missing for two days, another indication of the kind of lifestyle the girls considered to be normal. Lucy’s naked body wasn’t found until three days after that, wrapped in black plastic garbage bags and dumped in the Bronx near the Harlem River.
She’d been strangled. Stabbed four times in the chest and stomach. And her blond hair had been chopped off in blunt chunks near the roots, just like Chelsea Hart’s.
The second of the three files was Robbie Harrington’s. She too was strangled after a night of barhopping, nearly two years after Lucy Feeney. And if Robbie’s mother was correct in her observation about her daughter’s changed hairstyle, Robbie’s killer may also have tampered with her hair, albeit with more subtlety.
That left the third file, Alice Butler. Alice disappeared a year and a half after Robbie Harrington’s murder. She was twenty-two years old at the time-slightly older than Lucy Feeney, a couple of years younger than Robbie Harrington. Alice had been an on-and-off student at the City University of New York for two and a half years, earning barely enough credit hours to be considered a college sophomore by the time she dropped out for good a year before her death.
She worked behind the counter of a New York Sports Club on the Upper East Side, but lived with her sister in Elizabeth, New Jersey. On the night of her murder, Alice borrowed her sister’s Toyota Corolla for a night of partying in the city with a girlfriend. When she parked on the corner of Thirty-ninth Street and Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, she failed to notice the adjacent fire hydrant. By the time she and her friend returned to the spot at three in the morning, the Corolla had been towed.
According to Alice’s friend, Alice grew increasingly angry while they waited to claim the car at the city tow lot. No doubt fueled by alcohol, she began muttering about abandoning her sister’s car and walking back to Jersey if necessary. The friend left an impatient Alice by herself in line while she sought out a restroom. When she returned five minutes later, Alice was gone.
Ellie recognized a familiar name in the Alice Butler file: Dan Eckels. Six years earlier, shortly before he’d earned his white-shirt status, her lieutenant had been the lead detective on the Butler murder case. As far as she could tell, he’d worked the case as well as possible. The best leads in the days following Alice’s disappearance were three separate phone calls from drivers reporting that they’d seen a blonde matching Alice’s description walking alone on the West Side Highway. Alice’s deteriorated body was found ten days later in Fort Tryon Park, dumped in a ravine between the Cloisters and the Henry Hudson Parkway. Bruises around her throat suggested she had been manually strangled, but the official cause of death had been the eighteen stab wounds to her neck, chest, and abdomen.
Including Chelsea Hart, Ellie was looking at four victims. All were young and blond, killed after late nights in Manhattan bars. But she knew that wasn’t enough for a pattern. Thanks to the inherently dangerous mix of sex, drugs, and alcohol at four in the morning, the sad reality was that several women were killed in the city each year under similar circumstances. Based solely on their demographics, Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, Alice Butler, and now Chelsea Hart were just four of many.
But she could not get past the hair.
Lucy Feeney and Chelsea Hart both had had their hair hacked off, leaving portions of their scalps exposed. Robbie Harrington, in contrast, had been wearing new and unexpected bangs.
Snipping off a few fringes of hair around the victim’s face was a far cry from the kind of angry chop job she’d witnessed on Chelsea.
Since her first skim through the files that morning, Ellie had known there was only one way to determine whether there was a pattern, but she’d forced herself to hold off. She told herself she should sit on it for the day before digging up the past for a murder victim’s family. Flann had been known for his far-fetched theories. This could all be yet another McIlMulder wild goose chase.
She looked at her watch. It was seven twenty. Eleven hours since she’d left One Police Plaza with the cold case files. Eleven hours since she’d taken her first browse of them in the elevator. Eleven hours since she’d opened her cell phone and entered a New Jersey telephone number. Eleven hours since she’d flipped the phone shut without hitting the call button.
Eleven hours, and there was still only one option. She picked up the phone and dialed before she changed her mind.
THE WOMAN WHO picked up on the fourth ring seemed put out. Ellie could detect a television playing in the background, along with the sounds of children’s voices. Someone was accusing someone else of hogging something or other.
“Hi. I’m looking for Michelle Butler?”
Ellie realized she should have run Alice’s sister through the system. After six years, she could be anywhere, and this phone number could belong to anyone.
“It’s Trent now. Has been for a while. I’ve really got my hands full-”
“My name’s Ellie Hatcher. I’m a detective with the NYPD. I’m calling about Alice.”
Five full seconds of background noise, then the woman said, “Kids, in the family room.” The kids protested, but apparently realized that Mom meant business when she followed up with, “Now. I mean it.”
“Have you found someone?”
Ellie swallowed, hearing the hope in the woman’s voice, picturing the tears that were probably already welling in Michelle Trent’s eyes as she braced herself for words that were long overdue.
“No. And I’m very sorry to call under those circumstances, Mrs. Trent. But your sister’s case came to my attention in the course of another investigation.”
“Is this going to happen every time some other girl gets killed after drinking too much? Another detective called me-it must have been three years ago.”
“Flann McIlroy?”
“Something like that. Yeah.”
“Why did he call you?”
“Jesus Christ. Don’t you people talk to each other?”
Ellie silently cursed McIlroy for not making any notes in the case files. “I’m very sorry,” she said once again. “I would speak to Detective McIlroy directly, but he’s passed on.”
Michelle either hadn’t seen the stories about Flann’s murder in the papers, or hadn’t made the connection to the detective who’d phoned her three years earlier.
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. When he called me, he was asking questions about Alice’s hair. He wanted to know whether whoever killed her might have cut her hair.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I told him, How could I know? I took one quick look to identify her, and then they had my sister on ice for days. We couldn’t get the body. We couldn’t have the funeral. They had to cut her open for an autopsy so they could explore every little part of her insides, and for what? No evidence. No arrests. Nothing. With all that poking and prodding, if whoever killed her cut off her hair, shouldn’t you people have noticed that?”
“I know this is very upsetting for you, Mrs. Trent.”
“Damn right it’s upsetting. I’m married now. I’ve got kids. My sons sleep in the room that was Alice’s when she was here. My own children don’t even know their mom used to have a sister. They think Mommy was an only child. I’ve moved on. And now I’m going to keep getting these phone calls when you’ve got nothing?”
“If I thought it was nothing, I wouldn’t have called you. I assumed you would want us to do whatever we could.”
“Okay, fine. So if you have something, it’s going to be news that whoever killed my sister has been out there for the last six years, breathing, eating, sleeping, and now killing other women. I’ve been able to get on with my life by convincing myself karma caught up to this guy. He stepped into the wrong fight, or was burned to ashes in some terrible car accident. Maybe in prison for something else. And now I have to go to sleep tonight wondering if he’s still out there and what he’s thinking and whether he even remembers anything special about Alice.”
Ellie noticed that Michelle had calculated the number of years since her sister died without missing a beat. She’d heard other family members of murder victims say the same thing-that the worst part of it in the long run is realizing that the killer lives in real time with the rest of us. That for every happy moment you have, he might have two. That he might be watching the same television program, or admiring the same sunset, or boasting to his friends about your loved one’s murder while you are putting the kids down for the night.
“If he’s out there, Michelle, I’m going to do everything I can to find him. And that’s the only reason I would make this phone call. The chance-however small-that I might be able to call you six months down the road with some answers is the only possible reason I would ever ask you to revisit these kinds of questions.”
The line fell silent, and Ellie wondered whether she had missed the click of a hang-up. Then she heard a quiet sniffle.
“So what do you need to know about Alice’s hair?”
Ellie felt the tension leave her fingers, wrapped so tightly on the handset. “In the file, it says you were the one to identify your sister’s body.”
“That’s right. Our mom died a few years before Alice, and our dad-he wasn’t around.”
“When you saw her, did you notice anything unusual about her hair?”
“I wasn’t paying attention to her hair. It’s really hard to see your kid sister like that. I made myself look at her face, saw it was her, and made a point not to turn away. But, like I told the other detective, I think I would have noticed if someone had chopped off all Alice’s hair. I assume you have pictures of her like that. Can’t you check?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t have anything to compare the medical examiner’s photos against.”
“I’m sorry I sound so angry. It’s just that I don’t understand how this can possibly matter. Back when it all happened, I told the detectives that Alice had thought something was wrong. She told me she was being followed. Why couldn’t they find the guy?”
Ellie recalled a mention in one of Eckels’s reports that, according to Alice’s sister, Alice had complained a week before her murder that a man was following her on the street. Eckels was never able to identify who the man might have been, or even to confirm whether he in fact existed.
“It was my understanding from the crime reports that your sister didn’t give you any specific information about the person she thought may have been watching her.”
“What was she going to say? Obviously she didn’t know who it was.”
“But there was no physical description, no identifying information, nothing to give us a lead on the man. You told the police that this happened somewhere near the health club where she worked?”
“Right. It must have been a couple of weeks before she was-well, you know, it was a couple of weeks before. She came home from work and told me she might be going crazy, but that she thought someone was tailing her. She said she noticed some guy behind her on the street when she was a few blocks from the gym. Whenever she’d turn around to look at him, he’d check out a store window or a newspaper or whatever. She was pretty creeped out about it.”
“But she didn’t file a report at the time?”
“You know, I still blame myself. Once she said she didn’t see the guy again after she got to work, I told her it didn’t sound like a big deal, and she seemed to calm down. Obviously it took on more importance after what happened.”
Ellie knew from the reports that police had canvassed a five-block radius around Alice’s branch of New York Sports in an attempt to find a witness who might have noticed anyone suspicious watching either Alice or the club. It had been a long shot, and, as one could have predicted, it hadn’t panned out.
Something was bothering Ellie, though, about Michelle’s recollection of her sister’s complaint. “You said she was on her way to work when she saw the man?”
“Yeah. Near Eighty-sixth and Lex.”
“The file said she usually worked days, eleven to seven, but that she spotted the guy at night. I assumed she was on her way home.”
The canvassing had focused around evening hours on the assumption that people in the neighborhood likely followed the same weekday routines. If the police had searched at the wrong time of day six years earlier, they may have blown their best chance at locating a witness who might have spotted the man who had been stalking Alice two weeks before her murder.
“No, that’s right. She did work days. But she got home late that night, and told me she saw the guy on her way to the gym.”
“So it was in the morning.” Ellie was getting seriously confused.
“No, I’m sure it wasn’t. I even asked her because it just didn’t seem like anything creepy was going to happen in the middle of the morning. She told me it was around eight o’clock. Not late, but dark. She said, ‘It was dark, Shell. I didn’t get a good look at him, but I really think he was following me.’ I’m absolutely positive. For so long I blamed myself for not making her call the police. I’d replay her voice over and over in my head. But you’re right. She worked days. And she was home and telling me this story by, like, ten o’clock.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it. It’s natural for us to fill in memory gaps over time.”
“But here’s the thing. She was on her way to the club. She told me the route and the various places she spotted him watching her. I remember now. She got off work at seven, ran some errands, and then went back to the club for her bag. Oh, shit. Oh, this is weird. Her errands-”
Ellie took a deep breath.
“She went to her hairdresser’s. She wanted a change.”
“How much of a change?”
“About five inches worth. She got her hair cut into a bob, and the guy was following her when she left. I completely forgot about that. It’s coming back to me now, though. I remember telling the detective about it.”
“You told this to Detective McIlroy?”
“No, I mean the detective at the time.”
“Detective Eckels?”
“Yeah, that was the one. I told him the guy had followed my sister on her way back to work from the hairdresser’s. I’m sure of it.”
There was no mention of the hair salon in any of Eckels’s reports, but that was the kind of detail that some cops might not jot down. What troubled Ellie more was the certainty that, in the nine months he had carried around these three cold case files, McIlroy would surely have approached the lieutenant who had been the lead detective on one of the cases. And if McIlroy had run his theory by Eckels, why hadn’t Eckels been the one to point out the resemblance between these cases and Chelsea Hart’s?
PETER WAS WAITING for Ellie at the bar when she walked into Dos Caminos at eight o’clock. The popular restaurant was a bit of a scene, especially for the relatively sedate Gramercy neighborhood, and was much fancier than her usual take-out Mexican fare, but she supposed that had been the point when Peter had selected it.
He handed her a margarita on the rocks, with salt. “I took the liberty.”
“You dear, wonderful man.”
They followed the hostess to a small table in the back dining room.
“So hopefully today was slightly better than the rest of your week?” Peter asked once they were alone.
Ellie used a chip to scoop up an enormous blob of green salsa, and popped it into her mouth. She nodded happily while she swallowed. “No new bodies. No new arrests. Just tying up the loose ends against Myers.”
“Well, as much as I’ve appreciated your willingness to allow the late-night pop-ins-”
“I believe the young people refer to them as booty calls.”
“Yes, right. Lovely. Despite my appreciation for the time together, it’s nice to see you while the hour is still in the single digits. You holding up okay? I think you’ve put in more time in your first week in that unit than I have all month.”
“I’m good. The truth is, I put in a ton of time off the clock even when I was working garden-variety property cases.”
Finally, for the first time in forty-eight hours, Ellie had a chance to breathe. She was in a great restaurant with a terrific guy and a tasty margarita. She could finally think and talk about something other than Chelsea Hart, Jake Myers, and the little mistakes that had turned a night of spring break into a tragedy.
She should have been appreciative. She should have been bubbling over with non-work-related chatter. But she found herself thinking about those cold case files. She finally allowed herself to raise the subject over her pork tacos.
“I was following up on some old cases Flann McIlroy had been looking at,” she said.
“You get ten minutes of downtime, and you start poking around in someone else’s cold cases?”
“I know. I’m a glutton for punishment. But, you know, he meant a lot to me, and so-”
“No explanation necessary.”
“Anyway, he had these three cases he thought might be connected. I was wondering if he ever reached out to you about them. It would’ve been about three years ago.”
“Why would he call me?”
“That was just his way. He’d plant stories in the press as a way to stir up public attention. Maybe turn up a witness who’d never come forward.” Of course, McIlroy’s critics would have said it was a way of calling attention to his own career.
“No, I never spoke to the man until I met you. But I’m still pretty new to the crime beat. If he was going to call someone at the Daily Post, it would’ve been Kittrie. You should ask him.”
“Your editor? You haven’t exactly described him as the most accessible man on the planet.”
Peter shrugged. “He’s not that bad. Just a little rigid. I might be, too, if I was a boss.”
“Oh, my God. You look like you’re in physical pain trying to say something nice about the man.”
“Fine, he’s a fuckstick.”
“I don’t think you’re allowed to say that about a guy with a tumor.”
“I told you, I think Justine’s just screwing with my mind, trying to force me to be nice to him.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” she said. “You know what they say: People live longer, we’ve got crummy lifestyles, the environment’s going to hell. Cancer rates are up, my friend. We’re pretty much all dying as we speak.”
“Jesus, you’re depressing. I’m telling you-Kittrie’s fine, in that respect, at least. Just call him, okay? He’s a tool, but he definitely would’ve had a line in to a guy like McIlroy.” Peter pulled out his own business card and scribbled George Kittrie’s name and number on it. He extended it toward Ellie, then pulled it back. “I don’t need to be jealous now, do I?”
“Oh, definitely. Because, as you know from my own history, I have such a weakness for overbearing, micromanaging bosses.”
He handed her the number. “If McIlroy had a story to plant, it would have been with him.”
“Okay, now I have a single remaining demand of you this evening.”
“Ooh, a demand? Daddy likey.”
“Okay, two demands. One, don’t ever say that again. And two, don’t let me talk about work anymore.”
“But, Detective, what in the world would you talk about if not work, when that’s all you ever do?”
“Fine, I can talk about normal-people work stuff-my partner, my boss, the heroin addict who left behind his prescription methadone during a burglary-”
“You’re kidding.”
She shook her head. “But I don’t want to talk about my cases.”
“I think we can work around that.”
And for the rest of the evening, Ellie forced herself to be normal. No talk of killers, either past or current. She and Peter were on a date like two regular people.
And when Peter offered to walk her home, she had anything but work on her mind.
THERE’S ALWAYS an easy way and a hard way.
Ellie had spoken those words to the drug-buying law student at Pulse as a warning that there were two ways she could search her purse. Now it was Thursday morning, and she repeated the phrase to herself as an entirely different kind of warning. She had three cold case files tucked discreetly in her top drawer, and she had a decision to make.
She could return the files to Central Records and pretend she had never received a call from Bill Harrington. Or she could try to retrace Flann McIlroy’s steps, a task that was probably impossible and would only complicate the case against Jake Myers.
She sat at her desk nursing a spoonful of Nutella, looking at the handwritten phone number on the back of Peter’s business card. An easy way or a hard way.
The dream witness in the solid case against Jake Myers. Easy. Cherry pie. Or the cop who breaks the news to Rogan, Dan Eckels, Simon Knight, Max Donovan, the mayor’s office, and-worst of all-Miriam and Paul Hart that there’s a problem. Not easy.
One more phone call.
“George Kittrie.”
“This is Ellie Hatcher. We met the other night at Plug Uglies, with Peter Morse?”
“You finally dumped that kid?”
“Nope. Not yet, at least. I’m actually calling about another mutual acquaintance-Flann McIlroy?”
“I’m just giving you a hard time. Morse told me you might reach out. I think he was afraid I might tear your head off if you called without notice. Something about three girls?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve got a murder victim’s father calling the department for an update, saying McIlroy thought his daughter’s death was related to a couple of others. I figured I’d try to piece together what McIlroy was up to.”
She was walking a fine line here. She wanted to know if McIlroy had contacted Kittrie, but she didn’t want to tip him off to a story in the event that he hadn’t. The vaguer the information, and the more innocuous the request, the less likely Kittrie would go digging.
“Yeah, that rings a bell. He called, what, it must have been a few years ago-definitely after my book came out, so 2004? 2005?”
“That sounds about right,” Ellie said. She wondered if Kittrie had a regular habit of dropping references to his book.
“He wanted me to write a piece speculating a connection between three murders, all a few years apart. All the girls had been out on the town.”
“Do you have any notes?”
“Nah. It sounded like garbage at the time. The city’s a dangerous place at night, you know? And he wasn’t giving me anything to tie it all together. I realized by then that Mac wasn’t above using us. I figured he had an agenda of some kind.”
“So the club angle was the only thing tying the murders together?”
“Yeah. You know, same demographics, I guess-young women. But that was it. I’ve always been pretty cautious about what I’ll print under my byline. There was nothing to verify, so I wasn’t going to run with it.”
“Well, I can see why you’d pass. Thanks a lot for your time. I’ll get back to the victim’s dad and let him know there’s nothing new.”
“Glad to help those who protect and serve. Maybe I can hit you up for a return favor?”
Ellie had known when she called a reporter that there’d be a quid pro quo. “Yeah, shoot.”
“In the Chelsea Hart case, can you confirm that Jake Myers shaved the victim’s head?”
It felt like Kittrie had punched her in the throat. His information was not a hundred percent accurate, but it was close enough. She couldn’t remember the number of times the Wichita papers had printed something about the College Hill Strangler that may have started out as truth, but had morphed into something entirely different by the time it reached the press, like a fifth-hand message in a child’s game of Operator.
She couldn’t find words as her mind raced through Kittrie’s possible sources. She finally mustered a “No comment.” She was surprised by the force of the handset as she returned it to the carriage.
SHE WAS STILL processing Kittrie’s bombshell when Rogan showed up, a cup of Starbucks in one hand, his cell in the other.
“You seen the Lou yet?” He used his jaw to flip the phone shut.
“Huh-uh. You got a sec? We need to talk.”
“It’s gonna have to wait. Eckels just called me, pissed off about something. He wants us in his office, like, ten minutes ago.”
Rogan led the way, waving off her attempts to slow him down. He rapped his knuckles against the glass of Eckels’s closed door, then helped himself to the doorknob. Ellie caught a brief glimpse of their lieutenant speaking animatedly into his phone. He held up a hand momentarily, then gave them the all-clear.
“Ah, Rogan. I see you didn’t come alone.”
“You said it was about the Myers case. I figured you wanted me and Hatcher.”
“Sure. Why not? This is, after all, something that should definitely concern her. Have a seat.”
Rogan threw her a worried look.
“So, I got a phone call from the Public Information Office this morning,” Eckels announced. “Seems they just heard from a reporter at the Daily Post. You two know anything about this?”
“I just gave a no-comment to George Kittrie about five seconds ago.” Another worried look from Rogan. “He wanted confirmation that Myers shaved the vic’s head.”
“Shit.” Rogan bit his lower lip.
“Yeah, no shit, shit. So is one of you going to tell me why we’re losing control of this investigation?” Although the wording of the question was aimed at both of them, Ellie felt Eckels’s eyes fall directly on her. “And, by the way, the reporter who called the PIO wasn’t Kittrie, it was one Peter Morse. I want to know who let this leak.”
The insinuation was obvious. Ellie’s case. Ellie’s boyfriend. Ellie’s leak.
Before she could defend herself, Rogan was doing it for her. “Hatcher wouldn’t do that.”
One simple sentence. No hesitation in his voice. No question mark. Rogan wasn’t simply backing her up out of mandatory partner loyalty. He had no doubt at all about her innocence.
“I wouldn’t,” she confirmed. “And I didn’t.”
“Who the hell was it, then?” Eckels demanded. “Even inside the house, we kept a lid on that. It was our ace in the hole: the killer took the hair and the earrings, and that was how we’d head off a bunch of whackadoos trying to give us fake confessions.”
“With all respect, Lou,” Rogan said, “now that we’ve got Myers dead to rights, what does it really matter? The press was going to get hold of it eventually.”
“It matters because I expect my detectives to show a little discretion.”
“Maybe it was the girl’s family,” Rogan said. “They’ve been talking to the media.”
“They were using the media to put pressure on us. Telling the world that their daughter was mutilated, after we’ve already caught the guy, wouldn’t appear to fall into that game plan. Only a handful of us knew the condition of that girl’s body when she was found. And it just so happens that one of them’s boinking the very same reporter who seems to be a leg ahead of every other reporter in the city.”
Ellie wanted to tell Eckels he was out of line. That she didn’t have to sit here and take his abuse. That he wouldn’t make the same assumption if one of his male detectives was dating a female reporter.
But she knew she couldn’t do any of it. He was drawing the same inferences she would in his position. Her case. Her boyfriend. Her leak.
Once again, it was Rogan who spoke up. “Hatcher and I-we’ve kept it in the vault. But other people saw the girl. The joggers. The medical examiner. The EMTs. Could be anyone.”
Ellie’s memory flashed to Officer Capra, the first uniform on the scene, holding court the night of Jake Myers’s arrest at Plug Uglies. Peter and his boss, George Kittrie, had gone to the bar that night for the express purpose of finding loose-lipped cops. She would’ve cold-cocked Capra on the spot if he were in the room, but she still wasn’t going to dime him out to Eckels.
“I knew Peter Morse when everything went down with Flann McIlroy, and you know I didn’t give him any tip-offs on that. It’s your choice whether to believe me, Lou, but I would hope you’d give me the benefit of the doubt.”
Rogan leaned back in his chair. “You said the reporter asked if Chelsea Hart’s head was shaved? See, now that shit’s not even right. No one who saw that girl would’ve said that. Myers hacked that shit up. Sounds like the paper’s heard something third- or fourth-hand.”
Ellie had been wondering whether to point out the discrepancy to Eckels herself, but it sounded more persuasive coming from Rogan. She was finding it hard to focus on anything beyond the question that kept echoing in her mind: Why hadn’t Peter mentioned any of this last night?
Whether Eckels was persuaded or simply acquiescing to the fact that he couldn’t prove his suspicions, he moved on. “For what it’s worth, I told the PIO to shell out a no-comment to Morse. I expect you-both of you-to do the same. I just got off the phone with Simon Knight to give him a heads-up on the story, and I assured him that we will keep control over this case. The last thing we need is a media circus around Myers’s trial.”
Eckels picked up a newspaper that was open on the corner of his desk and dropped it in front of the detectives. “This, of course, didn’t help.”
It was a copy of the morning’s New York Sun. Most of the page was occupied by a photograph of Jake Myers’s perp walk, snapped while Rogan and Ellie escorted him from the back of a squad car to be arraigned after his lineup at 100 Centre Street.
But it was a smaller headline on the sidebar that Eckels was tapping with a meaty index finger: “For Victim’s Friends, Another Encounter with NYC Crime.” Ellie skimmed the first paragraph. As Jordan McLaughlin and Stefanie Hart had sat on the front steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art the previous afternoon, an armed assailant had snatched their purses from the sidewalk and escaped through Central Park.
“Oh, Jesus,” Ellie said. Those girls had been put through enough.
“You mean to tell me you haven’t seen this?” Eckels asked.
“I’ve been catching up on other work,” Ellie said. She’d scanned the coverage of the Hart case this morning, but hadn’t noticed the ancillary sidebar.
Eckels looked at Rogan for his explanation.
“I just walked in,” Rogan said. “I had some personal stuff I’d pushed off during the heat of the case.”
“Why didn’t we hear about this yesterday?” Ellie asked. “We spent a lot of time with those girls.”
“They reported it to museum security,” Eckels said. “The museum turned it over to Central Park precinct, where some uniform took a complaint without thinking to reach out to us.”
She shook her head. “I’ll call the girls right away.”
Eckels held up his hand. “Already done. Public Information’s getting a victim’s advocate in touch with them for damage control. Make sure they’ve got all their credit cards canceled, that kind of thing. We’ll get them to the airport for their flight later this morning. They’re more than ready to go home. Just promise me you’ll do everything you can to make sure no more shit sandwiches.”
She and Rogan both nodded. Ellie was beginning to detect a pattern: Eckels liked to blow off steam but generally calmed down before breaking the huddle.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t quite ready to break. Easy way and a hard way. All things being equal, she was one to opt for ease. But she saw no detour around this one. She didn’t want to be that cop who twenty years down the road-after an innocent man had been exonerated-had lacked the courage to challenge the conventional wisdom.
“Sorry, sir. One more thing, while we’re here. We got a phone call off the tip line from a victim’s father on a cold case. His daughter was also killed after getting a little wild, on the Lower East Side in 2000.”
“So call him back and make nice.”
“I did, sir. But here’s the thing. His daughter also had her hair chopped off. And if the news is going to come out about Chelsea, then he’s going to see the resemblance between the two cases.”
“He’s going to see the resemblance, or you are?” Eckels shot her an annoyed look, but then a glimmer of recognition crossed his face. “Please tell me this isn’t that same case McIlroy bothered me about a few years ago.”
“Probably,” she said. “He apparently was looking into three different cases-all young blondes, all killed late at night, all possibly having to do with their hair.”
“Emphasis on possibly. As in impossibly. You really are McIlroy’s long-lost love child. The case I had didn’t fit the pattern at all, as I recall.”
“It depends what you mean by the pattern. The victim thought someone was stalking her when she left Artistik, a salon on the Upper East Side. Her hairdresser took off five inches. We could be talking about one killer-someone with a hair fetish. He cuts his victims’ hair. In your case-Amy Butler-he could have been set off by the haircut. Or he could have taken more of it when he killed her, and no one noticed because she’d just had the big change.”
Eckels shook his head in frustration. “Our job, despite what you may have learned from McIlroy, is not to work cold cases. If you think you’ve got something, send it to the Cold Case Squad and listen to them laugh at you. Until then, Rogan, please get your partner out of my office. I believe you have grand jury today on Jake Myers?”
Rogan looked at his Cartier watch. “In an hour.”
“Fingers crossed, guys. And, Hatcher, no surprises.”
RACHEL PECK HAD been forced to alter her usual writing routine. Today was the second of two days this week she’d agreed to switch shifts with Dan Field, the afternoon bartender. Dan’s request had been accompanied by an explanation that his agent had lined up afternoon auditions for him, but Rachel suspected it was just another ploy to get access to her more lucrative peak-hour tips and to stick her with the lunch crowd. Still, Dan was generally a nice guy, and she didn’t want to be seen as an inflexible bitch, so she’d made the swap.
Her usual routine was to sleep late, do some yoga, and then write until it was time to show up to the proverbial day job, which, in her case, was a night job. Her goal each day was eight hundred words, even if it sometimes meant gluing herself to her keyboard at 2:00 a.m. when she returned from the restaurant.
This morning, however, she’d set her alarm for eight and had skipped the morning yoga so she could work in a couple of hours of writing before covering Dan’s lunch shift.
Rachel was twenty-six years old and had already thought of herself as a writer for a decade. Her literary dabblings began even earlier, when, as a kid in Lewiston, Idaho, her only escape from a household dominated by her angry and possessive father was a spiral-bound journal.
The Reverend Elijah Peck had found himself a single father one night when Rachel was only seven years old. Rachel’s mother had run to the corner market for a quart of milk and never returned. Her one-way Greyhound ticket to Las Vegas turned up on the family Master-Card, but the reverend didn’t bother trying to chase her down.
Her father’s willingness to let go of the wife who had abandoned him did not, however, extend to the daughter. Rachel had begun running away when she was only thirteen. She hitched rides to Spokane, Missoula, Kennewick, Twin Falls, Seattle.
Elijah would track her down every time. The last time she’d been brought home by her father, he’d found her working at the door of a Portland strip joint, scantily clad and impersonating a hostess of legal age. He hauled her back to Lewiston and told her that if she didn’t stay put and complete her senior year, she’d be dead to him.
When she asked her father what he meant, he looked her straight in the eye and said, “I’ll deliver you home to the Lord myself before you set another harlot’s foot in a sinner shack like that.”
Rachel had never understood her father, but she knew him well enough to believe he just might follow through on his promise. For a full year, she stuck to his drill. No more missed classes, no hitchhiking. She even kept curfew. Then the Saturday before her high school graduation ceremony, she packed a bag, found the principal, and did what she needed to do to convince him to let her take her diploma away with her. She hadn’t heard from her father or Lewiston since.
For the first time in years, Rachel was thinking about the Reverend Elijah Peck. The yellowed pages of her old journals lay before her on the dining table she used for a desk. Her eyes were still wet from the intermittent tears that had formed as she’d read her own teenage words and relived all those same emotions.
She was always surprised at how the quotidian details of everyday life crept into her writing. The way a woman at the next table checked the coverage of her lipstick in the reflection of a coffee cup. The pug in her building who wore an argyle turtleneck. The taste of cigarettes and dark chocolate.
But this was the first time she had made a conscious decision to draw on her own biography. The characters were fictionalized, of course. The defiant teenager would be a boy who developed into a killer. The oppressive parent would be a mother whose law enforcement career-always so resented by her always-resentful son-would now become the one means of helping her child, if she chose to do so.
Rachel was in the middle of a pivotal scene between mother and son-the one where the detective finds critical evidence beneath her own roof, implicating her own son-when she caught a glimpse of the time on the lower right hand of her computer screen.
Ten-fifteen. Time to earn a paycheck.
Her fingers tapped away at the keyboard as quickly as she could force them, pulling all of the thoughts stacked in her short-term memory and throwing them onto the screen. Spelling and syntax be damned. As long as she could piece it all together when she returned tonight, she’d be fine.
ROGAN HAD DRIVEN past Cooper Square and was on the Bowery by the time he permitted Ellie to speak.
“What I’ve been trying to say is that I’m sorry I didn’t give you advance warning. I tried, but you were in such a hurry-”
“So this shit is my fault?”
“No, of course not.”
Rogan shook his head and kept his eyes on the road as he changed lanes to pass a minivan with Virginia plates. “What are the chances you’re actually going to listen to Eckels and leave this shit alone?”
“Mmmm, thirty-five, forty percent?”
“Higher than I would’ve thought. All right. Lay it on me.”
Ellie mapped out all three cases for him. Robbie Harrington and her unlikely bangs. Alice Butler and her new haircut. And Lucy Feeney, whose hair had been hacked off just like Chelsea Hart’s. She pulled Feeney’s autopsy photograph from her bag, but Rogan didn’t bother to look at it.
“Like the Lou said, it’s all for the Cold Case Squad.”
This time, she held the ME’s photograph above the dash, forcing Rogan to see the resemblance. “J. J., it could be the same guy.”
“And what year did all this go down?” he asked, eyes back on the road.
“Three women, all killed between ’98 and ’02.”
“And how old was Jake Myers at the time?”
Myers was currently only twenty-five years old. “I know. I’ve done the math.”
“So then you know those cases can’t be connected to ours.”
“The problem is, I don’t know that. What I know is that if there is a connection, we might have jumped too soon with Jake Myers.”
“When a pretty white girl from Indiana gets sliced up like a roast beef, there’s no such thing as jumping too soon. We’ve got a good case, a thousand sets of eyes on us, and once that DNA match comes in, we’ll have it locked and loaded.”
“Unless we missed something, in which case it’s a hell of a lot better to figure that out now instead of in the middle of a trial. It really disturbs me that Eckels didn’t say anything earlier. He told us himself that McIlroy went to him about these cases three years ago, so he knew the theory was out there. Then we catch the Chelsea Hart case, and he doesn’t bother mentioning any of this?”
“Because Jake Myers is our guy, and he couldn’t have done any of those other girls.”
“But what about when we first caught the case? When we didn’t have a suspect yet? You’d think Eckels would have taken the time to say, Oh, yeah, by the way, there’s some old cases you might want to look at.”
“Except the cases don’t make a pattern, Hatcher. Killers don’t murder three girls within four years, then lay low for the next six.”
She gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look.
“Fine, with the exception of William Summer, killers don’t stay dormant for years on end. And you’re blowing this whole thing with the hair out of proportion. Cutting bangs on a victim, or snipping off a few pieces from a new hairdo? That sounds like a serious fetish. Hacking it all off with a knife is anger, or maybe destruction of physical evidence. It’s not the same. And Chelsea’s not like your victims. They were all pretty rough city chicks. Hard-knock-life, round-the-way girls, not wide-eyed college students from Indiana.”
Ellie wasn’t persuaded, however, and Rogan knew it. They were nearing their turn onto Worth Street, but he had slowed the car in the right lane. “You never heard the term ‘exculpatory evidence’ on patrol, Hatcher?”
“Of course I did. It’s evidence suggesting that we may have gotten the wrong guy.”
“Nope. All exculpatory evidence means is some bullshit that a defense attorney could use to confuse a jury into thinking we got the wrong guy. And if the prosecutor finds out about so-called exculpatory evidence, they’ve got a duty to turn it over to said defense attorney. But we don’t. And that’s why we don’t give so-called exculpatory evidence to prosecutors.”
She returned the photograph of Lucy Feeney to her bag and zipped it shut.
“So we’re keeping that to ourselves?” he asked.
“Was that a question or a conclusion?”
Rogan pulled the car into a spot across the street from the courthouse. “Let’s get something straight here. I’m not your boss, Hatcher. I’m your partner, so I’ll back you, even when you do something stupid.”
“Don’t you mean if I do something stupid?”
“No. I mean when, whether it’s this or some other thing a year from now.”
“Well, I appreciate that.”
“Wait, I’m not done. I’m saying this because that’s the kind of partner I am, no matter who I’m paired up with. And, I’ll be honest with you, before Casey, I had some problems in the partnership department.”
Ellie waited for an explanation.
“My extra pocket change was an issue for some people.”
“Jealousy?” Then another possibility dawned on her. “You didn’t have another cop go to IA on you? Talk about assuming the worst.”
Rogan shook his head. “I guess you could say they assumed the worst, but they didn’t go to the rat squad. They wanted a piece of the action. And it happened more than once. I became a magnet for trouble. Then, two partners ago, I wound up on IA’s radar for something I had nothing to do with.”
“What happened?”
“I showed them bank records, my grandmother’s will, everything I had to prove I was clean. But it wasn’t enough. It didn’t explain why my partner was living just as well as I was, and they knew I had to have suspected what was going down.”
“So you cooperated.”
“The man deserved it.”
To a lot of cops, that wouldn’t matter: anyone on the job who went along with Internal Affairs was a turncoat.
“Then I got paired up with Casey, and it was all good. And now I’ve got my whole you-think-a-brother-can’t-have-money riff, and that puts the issue to rest.”
“I’m sorry, J. J.” She had a better idea now why Rogan might have been willing to roll the dice as her partner.
He waved off her apology. “All I’m saying is that I want things to work out with you, Hatcher. But, that said, it’s a hell of a lot easier to be a good partner when it’s a two-way street. Just know that any decision you make, it’s for both of us. And I’m telling you, Myers is our guy.”
HE STOOD on the corner of Grand and Ludlow on the Lower East Side, watching Rachel Peck emerge from a four-story brick walk-up. Based on the blankets and stained sheets that served as makeshift curtains for most of the building’s windows, he gathered that it wasn’t the homiest place to live. A bartender probably couldn’t afford much better in Manhattan these days, however.
He had followed Rachel home last night and had come back this morning to check on her. Ten thirty-five. It would take her twenty minutes, max, to get to Mesa Grill on the F train.
She kept her word about covering her coworker’s shift. He liked loyalty. And she was prompt. He liked that, too. Good old reliable Rachel. He was beginning to feel like he knew her. He was looking forward to her night off.
In the meantime, he had places to go. In ten minutes, he would meet a man called Darrell Washington in Tompkins Square Park. It was an important meeting. It would determine whether Darrell lived or died.
SIMON KNIGHT HAD wanted to meet the two cops he was calling his “dream team” on the Jake Myers case before presenting their testimony to the grand jury. Just as Knight had already apparently decided that he loved his investigative team, Rogan had already decided that he hated the team leader.
He made his feelings known in the elevator ride to the seventh floor. “Are you kidding me? The dream team? He sees a black detective, and so his mind jumps to O. J. Simpson?”
“Oy. I wish I’d never mentioned it to you. I think it evolved because Max Donovan was calling us dream witnesses.”
“Correction. I believe your new boyfriend called you his dream witness. And if his boss is now calling us the dream team before he’s even talked to us? It’s because he’s having a wet dream over the idea of a pretty blond girl detective and what I’m sure he’ll deem to be a-quote-articulate black man to testify against a rich, preppy white boy in front of a New York City jury. It’s got nothing to do with who we actually are.”
“J. J. Rogan, I had no idea you were so profound.”
“No, just a pissed-off token,” he said with a smile that indicated he wasn’t really so angry after all.
Simon Knight’s office reflected his seniority over Max Donovan. Not only was it twice the size, it was furnished with leather chairs, a Persian rug, and what at least appeared to be an antique mahogany desk.
The man came across as equally dignified. Ellie took in the dark, graying hair, the fine lines etched into his thin patrician face, and the conservative navy blue suit. If someone had told her he was a four-star army general, she would have believed it, but chief prosecutor of the trial unit of the New York District Attorney’s Office suited him just as well.
Max Donovan handled the introductions, and Ellie and Rogan took a seat across from the two lawyers, who settled into a brown leather sofa. She and Donovan exchanged a glance, and she found herself wondering who had looked first at whom.
“Well, detectives”-Knight clasped his hands together in front of his chest-“there’s nothing better than being able to introduce myself to the both of you with a piece of excellent news. I told the crime lab I wanted preliminary DNA results before grand jury. They said it was impossible, but I got the call half an hour ago-the semen on the victim’s blouse and in the oral swab is a match to Jake Myers’s. One in 300 billion.”
“I guess you’ll have to add the criminologist to the dream team.”
Ellie shot a disapproving look at her partner, but somehow Rogan was actually pulling it off with a broad smile and seemingly earnest enthusiasm. Had it not been for their conversation in the elevator, she would have thought that he was proudly owning his spot on the team.
Knight was eating it up. “Yes, I will, Detective,” he said, with an extended index finger. “Yes, I will.”
She could already picture Rogan impersonating Knight to the rest of the house over drinks at Plug Uglies.
“So,” Knight said, continuing his rundown of the case, “we can place the defendant with the victim shortly before her death. We have ironclad proof of sexual contact, also shortly before time of death. We have the defendant’s attempt to create a phony alibi, now contradicted by his friend Nick Warden. We have the photograph of the defendant leaving the club alone with the victim. We’ve locked down all the other folks who were with him that night, and no one saw him again after three-oh-three a.m., the time stamp on the photograph. And of course now we have the other girl.”
“What other girl?” Ellie asked.
“They haven’t heard?” Knight asked.
Donovan shook his head. “I knew we were meeting this morning.”
“Donovan here worked his ass off yesterday making some calls to Cornell.”
“Myers’s alma mater,” Max explained. Ellie didn’t need the reminder. Even seemingly irrelevant details about suspects were cataloged in her memory. She still remembered the date of birth of the first person she ever arrested.
“Five years ago, when Myers was a junior in college, it seems he had a little too much to drink at a party and tried to rape a girl after offering to walk her home,” Knight said. “The girl didn’t file a complaint, but we’ve got two of her friends who say she reported it to them the next morning.”
“You can use that at trial?” Ellie asked. A decade had passed since her on-and-off pre-law classes at Wichita State University, but she recalled serious evidentiary restrictions on using a defendant’s prior acts against him.
Knight nodded. “We’ll argue it forms a pattern. Alcohol. A little flirting. It helps that the previous girl was the same age, also a blonde. She says he was very rough with her and grabbed her neck. He ran out of her dorm room when she grabbed a bottle of hair spray and shot him in the eye with it. We’ll argue that this time he didn’t give up so easily.”
Knight’s argument sounded like a stretch to Ellie, but she kept her thoughts to herself.
“As the two of you know, grand jury will be a breeze. Just us and twenty-three regular New Yorkers. And, no, that’s not an oxymoron.” The joke was obviously one of Knight’s old chestnuts, but Ellie smiled politely anyway. “Any questions?”
Ellie and Rogan shook their heads.
“Very well, then. It’s time for the dream team to show ’em what we’ve got. No surprises, right?”
That was twice this morning that Ellie had heard the phrase. Both times, she had felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach as she thought about Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, and Alice Butler. Even as Ellie took her seat in the front of the twenty-three sets of watchful eyes in the grand jury room, she had not yet decided for herself what to do about the doubts she was carrying about Jake Myers’s guilt.
The grand jury room, as Simon Knight had pointed out, contained only the prosecutors, their witnesses, and twenty-three regular New Yorkers. The grand jury foreman, a barrel-chested man in a plaid shirt and glasses with thick lenses, asked Ellie if she swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
No defendant. No judge. No defense attorney. No cross-examination. No difficult questions. There’s always an easy way and a hard way. What in fact was the whole truth?
Ellie took her oath and, like a dream witness, spelled out the state’s case against Jake Myers-every bit of it truthful. As it turned out, the surprises that day would not be of her making.
THE FIRST CURVEBALL was the attractive redhead waiting outside the grand jury room when Ellie had finished with her testimony. She wore a fitted black suit with patent leather high heels and carried an alligator attaché that must have cost more than Ellie took home in a month. She couldn’t have been any older than Ellie, but, from all appearances, carried no insecurities about either her age or her corresponding lack of experience.
“Hey, Max. I was starting to wonder whether you were leaving us out of the party.” She gave Donovan the kind of smile women tend to give men who looked like Donovan.
Donovan cleared his throat. “Everyone, this is Susan Parker. She’s Nick Warden’s lawyer.”
Simon Knight popped his head out of the grand jury room. “What’s going on? They’re ready to hear from Warden.”
“Mr. Knight, you obviously need no introduction,” Parker said, extending her hand for a shake before introducing herself to Rogan and Ellie.
Ellie recalled Donovan mentioning that Warden’s lawyer was a young attorney at an aggressive securities firm. The fact that criminal courts weren’t her usual gig no doubt explained why she was considerably better dressed than the defense lawyers Ellie was used to.
“Where’s your client?” Knight asked.
“He went to find the little boy’s room. The problem is, he brought a friend with him.”
“The only friend of his we care about is at Rikers Island on a no-bail hold,” Knight said.
Then Parker dropped the second surprise. “I’m talking about Jaime Rodriguez.”
“That’s the bouncer?” Knight asked, looking to Donovan for clarification. Donovan nodded. “I would have thought your client would be scared enough to just say no these days. I don’t need him taking another pop before Myers’s trial.”
“We have a problem,” Parker said, any playfulness in her tone gone now. “Much to my considerable consternation, there is apparently still contact between Rodriguez and my client. And that’s how I’ve come to learn that Rodriguez has a story to tell that you might find interesting.”
“Enough with the teasing,” Knight said. “Get to the part where we have a problem.”
“According to Rodriguez, another employee at Pulse knows a little too much about the murder of Chelsea Hart.”
“What’s there not to know?” Knight asked. “The press has been all over this from the second that girl’s body was found.”
“So you’re saying everything’s out there? There’s nothing left that only the real killer would know?”
“Jake Myers is the real killer,” Donovan said.
Parker held up her hands. “Not my job to figure this out. Apparently someone at Pulse says the killer took something that belonged to the victim. I for one had not read that in the paper, so I thought I was doing a good deed by persuading Rodriguez to come here and talk to you. If you don’t care about that, send the guy home.”
“Rodriguez doesn’t even work at Pulse anymore,” Rogan said.
“No, but he still has friends who do. And one of those friends talked to this janitor who seems to think he knows something.”
“It’s a janitor who said this?” Ellie asked. Besides Rodriguez, the only other employee at Pulse who had a conviction was the janitor, Leon Symanski.
“That’s right. Why? That means something to you?”
Ellie didn’t have a chance to respond, because apparently Simon Knight had heard enough. “I think we need to have a little chat with Mr. Rodriguez before we ask for our indictment.”
AN HOUR LATER, without a word to the other three people in the room, Simon Knight picked up the telephone in a conference room in the District Attorney’s Office and dialed an extension.
“Call the clerk to give the grand jurors their lunch break. We won’t be presenting any further evidence this afternoon in the Myers case.”
Knight had just closed the door behind Jaime Rodriguez, Nick Warden, and Susan Parker, and apparently had heard enough.
Rogan was the first to speak up. “We came down here because the case was ready for grand jury.”
“And that was before Rodriguez told us that a janitor with a past sex offense somehow knows more about Chelsea Hart than what’s been reported by the media. So far, of course. I’m told the Daily Post is onto the fact that the victim’s hair was cut. And that’s why the two of you need to go see this Symanski while we still have some control over that information.”
“As far as the NYPD is concerned, the case has been cleared.”
“You’re telling me you want me to call your lieutenant and notify him that you’re refusing to investigate your own case?” Knight asked.
“I was giving you my opinion that the case has been fully investigated. We’re a team, right?”
Ellie could see where Rogan was going. There had been cases in which the department had pressured the DA’s office to pursue charges by threatening-implicitly or explicitly-to portray prosecutors as obstructionist if they delayed. But Rogan wasn’t necessarily packing the heat he’d need to win this fight.
Knight turned to Ellie. “What do you think, Detective Hatcher?”
Ellie looked at Rogan. Rogan looked at Ellie. Ellie looked at her bag, still holding three files about murders that had occurred when the janitor named Leon Symanski was in his thirties-still well within the window for serial violence.
“The man asked for your opinion,” Rogan said.
“I think we should check out Symanski, but only so Myers’s lawyer can’t spring anything during trial. We’ve got the right guy,” she said, doing her best to sound convinced.
Donovan backed her up. “The whole thing’s going to turn out to be bullshit. Rodriguez probably heard about this guy’s prior and is making all this up to help out Myers. It’s payback, since Myers’s pal got him his deal on the drug case. ‘The killer took something from the victim?’ What does that mean? It could be a robbery, a souvenir, her virginity. Say it in any case, and it’s bound to be true. It’s like those so-called psychics who say, ‘I’m getting a message from someone, and I see the letter B.’ It’s vague, meaningless P. T. Barnum stuff. It lets us see whatever we want.”
“So we’ll have a chat with Symanski,” Ellie said. “We’ll find a way to prove Rodriguez is lying.” Or they could find something to tie Symanski not only to Chelsea Hart’s murders, but to the other cases as well.
“Very well, then. Are you all right with that, Detective Rogan?”
“Right as rain.”
“Call me when you’ve got something. And by the way, Hatcher, I saw you last month on Dateline. You were terrific.”
As they left the district attorney’s office, her cell phone rang. She flipped it open. It was Peter.
“I need to take this,” she said, holding her palm across the mouthpiece. “I’ll meet you outside?”
This was a conversation that would require some privacy.
SHE FOUND RELATIVE SOLITUDE and decent cell phone reception next to a window in the courthouse hallway.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Peter. I need to talk to you-”
“Too late,” she said. “You might’ve given me a heads-up before you called the Public Information Office three hours ago. Or how about last night over dinner, or on the way home? Or, oh yeah, while you were reenacting the Kama Sutra in my bedroom?”
“That’s not fair, Ellie. I didn’t even know about it until this morning. And I couldn’t call you.”
“Your phone suddenly stopped working?”
“Did you call me when you found a body by the East River? Did you bother mentioning that you’d made an arrest when I saw you Tuesday night?”
“That’s not the same.”
“It’s exactly the same. And don’t think I didn’t start to call you. I did. But even if I had, it would have been like I was feeling you out for information. And the last thing I’ve ever wanted to do since we met is to take advantage of you as a source. But you can’t expect me to notify you any time we unearth something the department wants to remain secret.”
“Well, as it stands, my lieutenant assumes I was your source. He knows about us, and now you know something you’re not supposed to know.”
“But that’s ridiculous. I’m on the crime beat. Is he going to think you’re helping me on every case I cover?”
“Yeah, probably. If it’s a case of mine.”
“So I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him-”
“You’ll tell him what, Peter? The only thing that’s going to convince him I’m not the leak is if you give him another name.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“You don’t need to. I already figured it out. It’s that kid Jeff Capra. I checked him out. He’s not even in the Thirteenth, but he shows up at Plug Uglies to tell everyone he was first uniform on the scene. He’s one of about ten people who knows what was done to Chelsea.”
“So it is true. Her head was shaved.”
She resisted the temptation to tell him that he wasn’t quite accurate. “I can’t believe you. You just did exactly what you said you didn’t want to do, your supposed reason for not calling me this morning before I got bombarded by Eckels.”
“I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant. Can you please just stop and look at this from my perspective? I’m a reporter. Just like you can’t tell me inside information about your case, I can’t tell you a source, or even whether I know the source.”
“Oh, so now you don’t even know your own source.”
“Look, this one wasn’t even my call. Kittrie’s been all over it. He’s got a really quick trigger finger. He’ll go to press with anything to get a head start on the other papers.”
Ellie felt like screaming into the telephone. She had spoken to Kittrie herself that morning. She had listened while he’d explained how cautious he was in his reporting. It was the reason why he hadn’t run with McIlroy’s story about the three cold cases.
“Don’t try to blame this on your boss, Peter.”
“Look, I’ve already said more than I should. Please don’t jump to conclusions. And stop treating me like a suspect. Haven’t I earned even a little bit of your trust by now?”
She remembered her own anger that morning in Eckels’s office, her outrage that her lieutenant had not given her the benefit of the doubt. She and Peter had a lot more between them than she and Eckels did.
“So when are you going to print?” Ellie asked, her voice calmer now.
“Afternoon edition. It’ll be on newsstands in a couple of hours.”
“Okay, thanks for the heads-up.”
“We can talk about this more later?”
“Yeah, okay. I’ll call you when I free up. It might be late.”
“You know me. I like late. Need a guy on the porch at three a.m.? I’m your man.”
ROGAN BEGAN DECONSTRUCTING the morning’s developments the second Ellie hit the passenger seat. His assessment was blunt: “Simon Knight’s a fucking prick.”
“He wasn’t that bad.”
“Are you kidding me? I hate guys like that. Pretend they’re down with the cops. Equals. Part of the team. The minute there’s a disagreement, he threatens to pull rank.”
“But, J. J., I thought you were ‘right as rain’ with all of this.”
“You don’t think sarcasm suits me, huh? And what was that shit when we left about Dateline? Like you’re some monkey performing a trick. You’re Heather Fucking Mills crying on the Today Show. Does he think that’s easy, for you to go on national television and talk about that shit with your father, and then all he can say is you were great, like it’s appropriate for some passing conversation?”
Ellie had never heard anyone but Jess acknowledge that her occasional forays into the media had not been for her own enjoyment. Rogan, however, apparently got it.
“So, at the risk of getting all relationship-y on you again, are we okay?”
“Yeah, we’re cool. Honestly, you saved my ass back there. I almost stepped in it, huh?”
She laughed. “What? You don’t think Eckels would’ve backed us up if we’d gone on strike from the investigation?”
“Right, because whenever I think of Eckels, that’s what I picture-backup. There was a minute there, though, when I thought you were going somewhere else. I’m starting to get a read on you. You had to be doing the math. Jake Myers is too young to have killed those other women, but Symanski’s not. He’s in his forties now, right?”
“Forty-six.”
“But you didn’t say anything.”
“Better for us to take a look at it first, right? Just the two of us.”
“You’re actually having doubts about Jake Myers?”
More than doubts. “I don’t want to, but, yeah, honestly, I am. I’ll feel a whole lot less guilty about it if it turns out Symanski’s good for all four of the murders.”
Ellie used her cell to call the records department for Leon Symanski’s contact information, then dialed the phone number. A man who sounded of the right age picked up.
“Is this the pharmacy?” she asked.
“You’ve got the wrong number,” the man replied.
She apologized and flipped her phone shut. “He’s home,” she said. “You ready to roll?”
“Twenty bucks says this is nothing. Symanski’s either some loudmouth talking out of school, or Rodriguez made the whole thing up. You want a piece of that action?”
She took the bet, unsure whether it was one she wanted to win.
DARRELL WASHINGTON FLICKED his favorite lighter, the one shaped like a bullet. He ran the flame up and down the length of the Optimo, spinning the blunt slowly to give it a good bake. They cost a little more than Swisher Sweets, but Optimos burned forever and were so mild that, with strong weed, you could barely taste the cigar.
Darrell lay back on a bare mattress on the floor of his mother’s living room on the eleventh floor of LaGuardia House 6 and gave his lighter another flick. He took a long toke off the fat blunt and held his breath, deep inside his lungs, before letting it go.
His mom would go ape-shit if she caught him smoking inside again. Some noise about how she could lose her public housing, all because of his weed. That didn’t sound right to him.
Besides, even if she smelled it when she got home, he’d deny it. Darrell wasn’t good at much, but he was good at lying. His whole life, no one had ever been able to get a read on him.
It wasn’t likely to come up anyways. His mom was working uptown today, taking care of some rich old white lady in a wheelchair. Then she usually walked his nieces home from P.S. 2 at the end of the day, even though it was only three blocks away. As far as Darrell could tell, there wasn’t nothing his mom wouldn’t do to make sure those two little girls didn’t wind up like his sister.
Compared to Sharnell, Darrell was the one who’d turned out right. He was twenty years old. No prison. No guns. No gangs. Compared to everyone else he knew, he was doing all right.
He just didn’t have the dollar bills they had. Coming up, his friends would all say to forget those by-the-hour jobs he was always working and losing. They’d make more slangin’ in a day than he’d bring home in an entire two-week paycheck. But Darrell still lived a life that made him a chump as far as most of the people around LaGuardia saw it. His most recent job was at the new Home Depot on Twenty-third Street, but he lost that when he spilled a can of paint on aisle 8 and forgot to clean it up before his break. He stayed with his mom. He helped out with his nieces. He did day work here and there as a mover for a couple of companies who took work off of Craigslist.
Today’s Optimo and its skunky contents came out of cash he got for doing a job for this guy he knew. He called the guy Jack but had no idea if that was the dude’s real name.
About a year ago, Jack had shown up with a tape recorder, asking questions about gangs in the projects. Most folks either laughed at him or gave him the stink eye, but Darrell saw an opportunity. He told Jack he’d talk to him as long as no one knew about it. They’d meet every once in a while at Tompkins Square. Darrell would talk and leave with some easy cash in his pocket.
Darrell figured the dude for a cop, but Jack never pressured him to name any names. Instead he’d just sit and listen while Darrell explained the difference between the genuine article, hard-core gang members, and poo-butt juvenile wannabes. And the various factions-Bloods, Crips, MS-13, Saint James Boys-weren’t about turf, like something out of West Side Story. With new condos and clubs popping up every week, there wasn’t no turf left to fight over. Instead, it was all about the rock. The chronic. The X. The horse. You name the drug, you could find it in the projects. And with each new condo or club, the market expanded, and there was more to fight over.
Sometimes Darrell would talk about stuff that had nothing to do with gangs or drugs. Life in the projects. Life on the streets. Just life. Jack would still pay him, and for a while Darrell wondered if maybe Jack was a faggot.
About eight months back, Jack stopped coming around. Then he showed up again yesterday morning with another job. This time Darrell had to do more than talk, but he also got paid a lot more.
The job wasn’t exactly legal, but Jack had learned enough about Darrell in their earlier talks to know he wasn’t squeaky clean. He just didn’t do any major thugging. As far as Darrell could tell, the police had their hands full. As long as he stayed away from drugs, gangs, and guns, he’d stay alive and out of prison.
After frisking Jack for a wire, Darrell did the job for the man, just like he asked, and gave him what he was wanting today in Tompkins Square. But something was off. It was like he didn’t believe Darrell the ten times he’d told the man he’d turned over all of it. Even after he gave him the gun he had bought for the job, just like the man asked. It was like Jack knew more than he could, like he knew Darrell had skimmed a little something for himself.
Fuck it, he thought, drawing another toke. It was only one little credit card. Dude’s probably some chicken hawk anyway. No way he could get a read on Darrell. No one ever could.
LEON SYMANSKI LIVED on the first floor of a split-level duplex in Queens. Ellie and Rogan had been watching the house for twenty minutes.
“I swear,” Ellie said, “every time I’m in Astoria, I think of Archie Bunker. My father freaking loved that show. He’d watch the repeats at night, even though he’d seen them all five times. I’m sure it never dawned on him his daughter would be pulling a stakeout in the neighborhood where it was shot.”
“See, in our house, we loved the Jeffersons. That’s what I think about when you say Archie Bunker-that Mr. Jefferson had to be damn happy to get the hell out of Archie Bunker cracker town. ‘Well we’re moving on up, to the East Side.’”
“I never knew the words to either of those songs. I thought the first line of that song Archie and Edith sang was, ‘Boil the weakling millipede.’” Ellie wouldn’t normally burden another human being with her horrible singing voice, but she figured there had to be an exception for botched television theme song lyrics. “And I thought the Jeffersons went ‘to a beat up apartment in the sky-y-y.’”
“Now that’s just racist.”
“Oh, and in the bridge-”
“The Jeffersons theme song had a bridge?”
“My brother’s a musician. I thought it was, ‘Key lime pie in the kitchen, Bees don’t buzz on the grill.’”
“That is so damn sad.”
“What do you want? I was five years old. Oh, check it out,” Ellie said, tapping on the dash. “We’ve got something.”
Behind a screen entrance, a walnut door with a small stained glass window opened toward the interior. They couldn’t see inside the house. Seconds later, the screen door opened, and a woman with long, light brown hair emerged in a bright orange peacoat. She held the screen, continuing her conversation with whoever was inside, and then finally let it shut behind her when she turned to walk away.
They had the same reaction.
“She’s pretty young, right?” Rogan asked.
“Yeah, even with your self-proclaimed inability for cross-racial age identifications, yes, she’s young. Really young. My guess is early twenties, maybe even younger.”
“And really pregnant?”
“It’s hard to tell for sure under the coat, but, yeah, I thought the same thing.”
“Should we stop her?”
“No legal basis for it,” Ellie said. “She’s not in distress. And we run the risk that she makes a scene and tips off Symanski.”
They watched as the woman made her way down the street, turned the corner at Thirty-first Street, and took the stairs up to the elevated N train.
“Should we go have a talk with the man inside?” Ellie asked.
“Ready when you are.”
A MAN IN A PLAID FLANNEL house robe answered the door. It took him thirteen seconds after Ellie knocked. Long enough that she and Rogan exchanged a look and placed hands on their service weapons. Not so long that they unholstered.
She recognized Leon Symanski from his booking photo, even though the picture had been as old as the woman who’d left his house moments earlier. The man in front of her was less heavy and had thinning gray hair and whiskers on his chin. He had wrinkles, and his face was beginning to sag. But he also had the same broad nose and hooded eyes as the man who was arrested for sexual misconduct twenty years earlier.
“Leon Symanski?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
“We’re detectives from the NYPD. Mind if we have a word with you?”
“What is this about?”
“It’s cold out here, sir. You think we could come on in?”
Symanski opened the screen door and stepped aside. The living room was small with a red brick fireplace and worn furniture. Ellie noticed two small framed photographs on the mantel, but could not make out the images from this distance.
“You work at a club called Pulse?”
Symanski nodded. “Did something else happen there?”
“No, sir. It’s about the murder we’ve been investigating. A customer named Chelsea Hart.”
He nodded again.
“You’ve apparently been talking about it,” Rogan said.
“Of course. One of the regulars in our club kills another customer? Everyone has been talking about it.”
“But only you seem to know more about the case than some late-night club janitor should know.”
“I don’t know anything. Just what others have been saying.”
“The problem,” Ellie said, “is that one of the others tells us that you’ve had some things to say about the case that aren’t in the public domain. Obviously we’ve got to look into an allegation like that.”
“An allegation? Against me? I don’t know anything.” Symanski seemed very interested in the threadbare carpet beneath his feet.
“Is it true that you told a coworker that Chelsea Hart’s killer took a souvenir?”
“Like a New York City tchotchke?”
“No, I think you know what I mean, Mr. Symanski. A souvenir. Did you tell one of your coworkers that whoever killed Chelsea Hart took something from her? Because that’s our understanding of the words you used: that the killer ‘took something’ from her. What did he take?”
Symanski laughed nervously and scratched his balding head. “Is this a riddle or something? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“It’s not hard. Let’s start with this: Did you say anything like that to anyone?”
Rogan was already giving Ellie an I-told-you-so look. He was apparently writing off Rodriguez as a liar and preparing to collect on his bet.
“No. I didn’t-I don’t even talk about the case, really. Everyone else does. I listen.”
“So if someone came to us and told us that they heard you say those words, you’d tell me they were lying?”
“Yes.” His eyes fell again to the floor. “Or, I don’t know, maybe they didn’t hear me right.”
“And if I tell you I have a recording of you saying that?” Ellie asked. She pulled the digital recorder she kept on hand for witness interviews from her purse. “You know how many of those new high-tech gadgets have things like microphones in them.”
“Maybe. Maybe I said it. I don’t know. I may have repeated something I heard from someone else.”
“Tell us who you heard it from, Leon, and we’re out of here. We’ll go talk to them instead. We’ll confirm that they were the ones who told you, and then we’ll be on our way.”
“I don’t remember. I don’t even know the names of most of the people who work there. They all look the same.”
“What did he take from her?” Ellie asked again. “Tell us what he took.”
She watched Symanski closely. She knew Rogan was doing the same, because they were the same kind of cop. They trusted their instincts. They believed that a suspect’s reaction under pressure could tell a good cop-in the gut, where it mattered-more than even the most damning piece of physical evidence.
And because they were the same kind of cop, she knew Rogan was seeing the same thing in Symanski that she saw. The slow swallow. The darting eyes. It was more than nervousness. It was an awakening, a realization. They were watching the man come to an understanding about his new reality.
He had a problem. And he knew that they knew.
“Let me propose a suggestion,” Ellie said. “Why don’t you let us take a quick look around the house, make sure we don’t see anything that might have belonged to Chelsea Hart. That’ll put our minds at ease, I think, and we can go back to the DA and assure him we did what we were asked. Is that all right with you?”
“If you go through my house?”
“Just to take a look around.” Taking a look around sounded so much less intrusive than searching. “You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”
“No. No, I don’t have any problems with the police.”
“All right. Can we ask you to stay put right here while we do that? We can trust you not to run off, right?” She smiled at the ridiculousness of the thought.
“No, I’m not running anywhere.”
“And you’re here alone?”
“Yes. I live alone. My wife died many years ago.”
“What about the woman who just left here? She doesn’t live here?”
For the first time since they’d walked into the house, Ellie saw something dark cross Symanski’s face. “No. I live alone.”
“So who was she?” Rogan asked. “The girl who left?”
“No one. You said you were going to look around and then leave me alone.”
“And we’re going to do just that,” Ellie said. It was better to let the subject drop for now before Symanski revoked his consent to search. “You just sit tight here for a second.”
The house was small, just the living room, two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and the kitchen. It was clean and uncluttered.
They started in the smaller of the two bedrooms. It was even cleaner and less cluttered than the rest of the house, apparently unused. The room’s only contents were a nightstand, dresser, and double bed with baby pink sheets and a darker pink quilt.
Ellie opened a small drawer in the nightstand. “Empty, unless you count a couple of rubber bands and an old Chapstick.”
“Same with the dresser,” Rogan said.
She walked to the closet and opened it. It contained nothing but empty hangers and a few items of women’s clothing.
“His wife’s?” Rogan asked.
“Depends what he meant when he said she died a long time ago. These look pretty new to me.”
“Right, because you’ve got your finger on the pulse of fashion.”
“Mean,” Ellie said.
They made their way to the master bedroom, with its own separate bath. Ellie opened the medicine cabinet. Heavy-duty psychotropic drugs might have been a tipoff, but instead, she found a razor, shaving cream, deodorant, aspirin, cough syrup, and all the other usual stuff. The only pills she found were some vitamin B supplements and two prescriptions she had never heard of. She was jotting down the names in her notebook when Rogan called to her from the bedroom.
“You better get out here.”
It took her a moment to recognize the object dangling from the pencil Rogan was holding out toward her in the master bedroom. It was a red beaded chandelier earring.
Beyond the bedroom, she heard a door slam.
“God damn it. He’s running.”
And for the first time since she’d found Chelsea Hart, so was Ellie.
ELLIE COULD HEAR Rogan yelling behind her, using all the major cuss words, but she wasn’t thinking about her partner. She was focused on the back of Leon Symanski’s head, bouncing on top of his plaid flannel robe, hauling ass a full block ahead of her. He apparently had found the time to pull on a pair of running shoes before slipping out the front door.
She didn’t have to process the words coming out of Rogan’s mouth to know why he was screaming at her. They had stopped by for a knock-and-talk. They weren’t wearing vests. They didn’t have backup. And they hadn’t searched either Symanski or his living room for a weapon.
Rogan was telling her it wasn’t worth it. They would set up a periphery. They’d bring out the dogs. They would find him within blocks.
But, at that moment-as she felt the rubber soles of her Paul Green boots slamming against the concrete of the street, the force of the impact shooting up through her knees and quads-all she could think about were the faces of four young women who had nothing in common in life but were perhaps all tied together in death by the man in front of her. She had let his frail appearance and meek mannerisms fool her. They had left a killer sitting alone in his living room.
She pumped her arms harder at her sides as she picked up her pace. No way was a gaunt, gray-haired janitor in a bathrobe going to outrun her.
Symanski took a right on Thirty-first Street, then a quick left into the Astoria Boulevard subway station, taking the steps two at a time. He pushed his way through a crowd of commuters heading down the stairs, throwing two of them to the ground.
Ellie held out her shield, yelling, “Get down! Get down!” She had to assume Symanski had a gun. He could open fire on the platform.
Terrified bystanders fell to all fours. Others slammed their bodies flat against walls and railings. Ellie dodged and weaved around them, surprised at Symanski’s speed.
Inside the station, she came to a stop. She could feel her heart pounding like fists against her breastbone. No Symanski.
Separate sets of turnstiles stood on each side of her for the east and west sides of the tracks. He could have taken either one. This was the end of the N/R line. There were no northbound tracks. Nowhere to go on the east side of the platform.
She placed her right hand on the butt of her Glock. Twist, then up, she pulled the gun from her holster. She was about to hop the southbound turnstiles when she heard screams from a stairway behind her, on the opposite side of the station.
She followed the sounds of panic, sprinting down the stairs so quickly that she nearly tumbled from the momentum of her own weight. She hit street level and was wondering if she’d lost him when she saw a flash of Symanski’s robe move into an alley past a four-story brick apartment building on the other side of Thirty-first Street.
She ran after him, drawing horn blasts from oncoming traffic. When she reached the alley’s entrance, she pressed her back against the wall of the apartment complex, feeling her fingers wrapped firmly around the Glock, thumbs pressed together near the safety.
She needed to know if the alley cut through or was a dead end. Were there fire escapes that Symanski could reach from the ground? Businesses with unlocked back doors? She had no idea if she could even spare the seconds she was using to think through all of the unknowns. And where in the hell was Rogan and the backup?
She peeked her head around the corner-once quickly, then a more cautious look, two full seconds.
In two seconds, this is what she learned: no gunshots. That was good for the obvious reason, but it might also mean Symanski was gone. Two Dumpsters on opposite sides of the alley. A black Ford Explorer on the left. No accessible fire escapes. No signs of loading or unloading, so any back doors to businesses were probably locked. No visible exits, but the chain link fence at the end of the alley was easily scalable.
And no sign of Symanski.
Where was Rogan?
Ellie took a deep breath and swung her body around the corner.
“You’re trapped, Symanski.” A false statement if he’d already jumped the fence, but true if he could hear her. She heard nothing but the hum of traffic on the BQE and a Poland Spring water bottle rolling on the concrete with the wind.
She crouched low and jogged to the Dumpster on the right, squatting against the end of it for cover. In her mind, she created a blueprint of the alley and pictured Symanski’s available hiding places. Not behind the high-riding SUV. His legs would be visible. Inside, perhaps, but everyone in New York locked their cars. That left four spots: on the north side of each of the two Dumpsters, or inside the two recessed doorways on the ground floor of the apartment building to the east.
She mapped out her route.
Still squatting, she made her way like a crab around the side of the Dumpster, then sprang into an Isosceles shooting stance. Nothing but two black garbage bags.
She stepped sideways to her right, to the first doorway. It was clear. She checked the door. Locked.
From the safety of the doorway, she surveyed the alley again. Two spots remaining: the Dumpster or the last doorway. They were almost directly across from each other on opposite sides of the alley. There was no way to check them sequentially and still be covered.
Fifty-fifty odds.
She stretched farther, struggling to see inside the next doorway. Nothing but darkness.
If it were her, she would choose the Dumpster. It was deeper, invulnerable to angles. Behind a barrier of that size, her adversary would not have to expose himself to get to her. And a Dumpster wouldn’t block her in. She could still bolt around her adversary. In the doorway, it was close combat. No escape.
She would definitely pick the Dumpster. Better than fifty-fifty. Where the hell was Rogan?
Crouching low again, she ran to the second Dumpster. She turned the corner, keeping a tight stance. It was clear.
She immediately rotated clockwise to get a look inside the final doorway. Also clear.
Damn it. She felt her shoulders drop as the stress fell from her deltoids. She reholstered the Glock. Her mistake had been pausing at the alley’s entrance. Symanski had used the opportunity to jump the fence. She unclipped her cell phone from her waist to call Rogan.
She had flipped the phone open and was scrolling for Rogan’s number when she saw a blur moving next to her. She turned toward it.
Symanski had pushed open the metal lid of the Dumpster with his left hand and was reaching toward her with his right. She caught only a quick glimpse of the blade of his knife before her Glock tumbled to the ground and she felt a searing pain on the back of her right hand.
She saw blood.
Two steps, and she scooped up her Glock. She spun toward Symanski, who was pulling himself out of the Dumpster. Even with her cut hand, she had a shot. Symanski stumbled and fell to the ground. He knelt before her, knife in hand.
“Drop it, Symanski.”
“Just kill me. Shoot me.”
Ellie felt her finger against the trigger. Only five pounds of pressure. That’s all it would take to put this guy down. Not like this, not with him on his knees like this. Only if he takes another swipe at me.
“Drop the knife.”
“I did it. I strangled her, and I cut her up, and I took her earring. I don’t want to die in prison. Kill me.”
She heard sirens approaching and saw the knife in Symanski’s hand begin to shake. She took a quick step toward him with her left foot, preparing to land a right heel against his knife hand in a push kick.
But as she lifted her leg, Symanski lunged at her and grabbed her ankle with his left hand while he raised his knife with his right. The weight of his body carried both of them to the ground. She saw Rogan in her periphery, running down the alley toward them, but there wasn’t time.
There wasn’t time to wait. There wasn’t time to think. In a millisecond, her instincts processed the only information that mattered. Symanski was on top of her. He had a knife. She’d lost control over her service weapon once already. If it happened again, she was dead. There wouldn’t be time to reach for the backup gun inside her boot.
Ellie was bracing herself for the kickback of the Glock when she felt Symanski’s body weight leaving hers. She heard a crash as Rogan threw Symanski against the Dumpster, once, then twice, then a third time-all in seconds-before Symanski’s body went limp and he dropped the knife.
“What about the others?” Ellie screamed. “How many other girls did you kill?”
But Symanski wasn’t answering. Rogan checked to make sure he was breathing. “He’s out.”
“He did it, Rogan. He gave it up. He killed Chelsea Hart.”
Rogan looked at her with a furrowed brow, then dropped his gaze to the concrete beneath his feet and shook his head.
And then Ellie understood. What Rogan had seen was a man on his knees in an empty alley at gunpoint. What the hell kind of confession was that?
“DOES IT HURT?”
From Ellie’s vantage point on the ambulance floor, Rogan looked as sheepish as she’d ever seen him. She caught the eye of the EMT who was placing another stitch in the back of her hand.
“Will you be insulted if I don’t say that you’ve managed to magically convert all of my pain into an unprecedented feeling of euphoria?”
The man shook his head.
“This very nice man is sewing, with a needle, into the back of my hand. As Samuel Jackson might say, yes, it mother-fucking hurts.”
“I’d feel less guilty if you said you had a thing for pain.”
“I don’t, but you shouldn’t feel guilty. You told me not to run. And you were right. We would have tracked him down anyway.”
After all that running-up into the subway station, back down on the west side-Ellie had made the arrest only two blocks from Symanski’s house.
“When I saw you going after him, I went for the car. I thought I’d have a better chance of catching up to you, but I lost you at the train station.”
“It’s okay, J. J. It’s not your fault. Besides, you saved me.”
“Yeah, right. Turns out I saved the bad guy. You would’ve blasted him pretty good if I hadn’t come along.”
“Like I said, you saved me.”
Rogan took a closer look at her wounded hand. “How many does she need?”
“Twelve.”
That meant four more to go. They both winced at the thought. “She’s gonna have one bitch of a scar.”
“Hello? The she is sitting right here and can handle a little mark on the back of her hand. It’ll be a conversation piece. I can make up various tales of adventure to explain my mysterious defect.”
Rogan continued to mutter apologies until the twelfth stitch was completed, then asked the EMT to give them some privacy.
“What happened in that alley?”
She gave him a play-by-play, including Symanski’s confession. “I didn’t get a chance to ask him about the other girls. We need to talk to him about Lucy Feeney. Robbie Harrington. Alice Butler. There could be others.”
“We can’t talk to him about anything just now. He was still out cold when the wagon carried him away, and when he eventually comes to, the first thing he’ll do is ask for a lawyer, and then we’ll have a better shot at questioning Elvis. You really got him to cop to killing Chelsea Hart?”
“What do you mean, I got him to?”
“Hey, it’s just us. I saw what I saw.”
A man on his knees in an empty alley at gunpoint.
“It wasn’t like that. He attacked me. He cut me,” she said, holding up her patched-up hand for emphasis.
“And then you took control of the situation, pointed a gun at the man, and asked him for a confession?”
“No. He still had the knife. He was begging me to shoot. I wasn’t even questioning him. He blurted it out. He couldn’t have been more eager to confess. ‘I strangled her, and I cut her up, and I took her earring.’ That’s what he said.”
Before she had allowed the EMT to stitch her hand, she had made him write down the exact words in her notebook, not because she thought she’d ever forget them, but so she could back up her testimony with a contemporaneous written record.
Rogan had her run through everything two more times to make sure he understood it all.
“The DA’s still going to have a problem with that. Whether you were threatening to kill him, or he was begging you to do it, he was still under distress. They’re going to argue that he just said that because he knew he was about to go down for life in prison, and he’d rather die. Maybe you pressured him because you had all those doubts about Myers.”
“The DA’s going to say that, or you’re saying that?”
“All Symanski said was that he cut her up. That doesn’t bother you? What about the hair?”
The news about the killer chopping off Chelsea’s hair had still not gone public.
“That’s what he meant by ‘cut her up.’ He cut her body. He cut her hair. And what about the earring, J. J.? You’ve seen the picture. It’s the exact same earring.”
“I talked to Eckels about that-”
“You called Eckels already?”
“He called me for an update. I couldn’t exactly hide the fact that one of his detectives had been stabbed.”
“I prefer the word cut.” It didn’t sound nearly so dire that way.
“Eckels pointed out that Symanski could have found the earring at the club.”
“And you believe that?”
“It’s possible. Let’s say Myers takes Chelsea into the alley for a little action after he finds her outside by the cab. He gets rough-we know he has it in him because of his past incident at Cornell. When he realizes she’s dead, he tries to make it look like some crazy killer got to her. He throws her into his car, chops off her hair, slices her all over, and dumps the body under the Williamsburg Bridge.”
“And, again, the earring?”
“He notices when he chops off all that long hair that one of her earrings is missing. If someone finds that earring at Pulse, it’s a link between the vic and the club, which would lead us to him. So he dumps the second earring.”
“And when Symanski finds the original at the club, he somehow realizes it belonged to Chelsea Hart and starts telling people the killer took something from her body? I don’t buy it.”
“Look, I’m just talking out loud. No conclusions. That’s what investigations are for. We’re going to tear up that house looking for more evidence, that’s for sure. And once Symanski’s got his lawyer, maybe we can get a sit-down with him.”
“Yeah, right.”
Ellie’s cell phone rang at her hip. It was Jess. She let it go to voice mail, but it rang a second time and then a third. She struggled to get the phone open with her left hand.
“What’s up, Jess? I’ve kind of got my hands full here.”
She waved her bandaged hand at Rogan and smiled.
“I need to talk to you, El. Can you come home?”
“No. I’m working. I can’t just leave. Bad guys? Evildoers? You know, the whole I’m-a-police-officer thing?”
“Seriously, I really need to talk to you.”
“Where are you?”
“At home. The apartment.”
“I’ll call you later.”
“Ellie-”
She hung up, knowing her brother would forgive her within seconds. They’d done far ruder things to each other but had never found a sin that couldn’t be cured with a joke or a drink.
“If your brother needs you, you should go.”
“It can wait.”
Rogan placed his hands on his hips and sighed. “I hate this as much as you do, but you need to take a break. Eckels-”
“You’re fucking kidding me? He’s sending me home?”
“He doesn’t want you questioning Symanski or being part of the search, at least for now.”
“Because of what happened in the alley? He thinks I did something wrong?”
Rogan shook his head. “You may prefer the word ‘cut,’ but you’ve still got twelve stitches because of this asshole. It makes sense for you not to be in the middle of the investigation minutes after something like that. Plus he got a call about that mugging of Chelsea Hart’s friends yesterday. He wants you to follow up.”
He ripped a page from his notebook and handed her an address.
It sounded rational enough, but she could tell from Rogan’s expression that there was more to the explanation. She had been hoping for even a modicum of progress with her lieutenant, but his opinion of her seemed to be falling by the hour. And he apparently thought she was the kind of cop who would coerce a confession out of someone just to prove she was right.
“Just let me finish going through the house. You can stay with me and watch my every move.”
Rogan looked down at the street. “Please don’t put me in this situation.”
Ellie realized she didn’t have any good choices. “Can I take the car?”
“Of course.”
“Promise me you won’t let Eckels brush this off. Look for anything and everything, okay? And don’t forget about the other girls. Symanski could be our guy. The timing is right.”
Rogan pressed his lips together.
“It’s like you said, J. J. We’re partners. Any decision you make, it’s for both of us.”
He placed one hand on her shoulder. “I’ll look for anything and everything. I promise.”
TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY Madison-Street, not Avenue-was also known as the LaGuardia Houses, a nine-building brick cluster of high-rise housing projects erected in the 1950s when the Lower East Side was still dominated by squatters and hardworking immigrants. Now, if developers had their way, they’d evict the 2,600 residents, knock down the projects, and fill the space with more luxury condos.
Ellie ignored the suspicious eyes that followed her as she made her way from the Crown Vic, through the rundown courtyard, into House 6. She took the elevator to the eleventh floor. The moment the doors pinged open, she was welcomed by a giant X of crime tape across a door at the end of the hall.
She ducked beneath the tape and flashed her shield to the uniform officer at the door. He nodded toward the back of the living room.
One man in a suit stood out among the crowd of uniforms and technicians in the apartment. He was telling a woman with a camera to make sure she got plenty of photographs of dark burgundy splatter across the television screen and the wall behind it.
“Ellie Hatcher,” she said by way of introduction, struggling to hold up her badge with her left hand. “I was told you had news for me about a robbery?”
“Ken Garcia,” he said, offering his hand, then quickly rethinking the gesture upon seeing Ellie’s bandages. “Your lou said someone might be coming by. Didn’t seem necessary to me.”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not just here about a mugging.”
“Nope. Our RP’s an eight-year-old girl upstairs. Called nine-one-one by herself over shots fired.” When schools taught children how to dial 911, they probably weren’t envisioning them becoming the reporting party to a homicide. “You just missed the body. Twenty-two-year-old black male named Darrell Washington. While the first responders were waiting for the homicide team, they found two brand-new handheld GPS devices purchased yesterday from the Union Square Circuit City.”
“That kind of loot out in the open and the shooter leaves it behind?”
“Hell, no. Stupid uniforms were snooping around where they didn’t belong. The bag was in the refrigerator. Guess Washington was hiding them. Who knows. Anyway, the sales receipt was still in the bag. The charges came back to Jordan McLaughlin’s credit card. Your lieutenant had a flag in the system for the Thirteenth to be notified on any developments, and I guess this counts as a development.”
“Any indication Washington’s murder was related to the mugging?”
Garcia shook his head. “Word so far-from the residents willing to speak to us-is that Washington was an outsider. A little too on his own. A little too quick to talk to cops. It could be a retaliation thing. Or we might be looking at a home invasion where the bad guy got his apartments mixed up. Narcotics has been monitoring some dealing going on next door. One thing’s for certain: whoever did it was a lousy shot-two bullets in Washington, but three in the living room wall. No dummy, though. Left the murder weapon on the floor. No serial number. No prints.”
“Did you find the credit card?”
“Nah. Washington probably used it once and ditched it. I told all this to your lou about an hour ago so he wouldn’t need to send a body over. No offense, but you must be in some kind of doghouse.”
Ellie took a quick walk through the apartment, just to make it look like there was a purpose to her being there. But she knew that Eckels had sent her here just to pull her away from Symanski’s house.
There was nothing left for her to do but go home.
JESS WAS WAITING at the apartment door for her with an open bottle of Rolling Rock. He helped her shrug her coat off around her bandaged hand.
“How bad is it?”
“I could show you,” Ellie said, “but you’ve already puked once this week.”
She plopped herself onto the sofa and took a long draw from the beer.
“So are you going to stand there looking all sorry for me, or are you going to tell me what was so important that you needed me to come home?”
He shrugged. “This whole feeling-sorry-for-you-thing, my brain’s having trouble processing it. It’s usually the other way around. And I called you before I knew some crazy dude stabbed you.”
She was really getting tired of that word. “Out with it.”
Jess took a seat next to her on the couch, and she knew it was serious. He had a determined, almost somber look on his face. She hadn’t known her brother’s facial muscles were physically capable of such an expression.
“You got a phone call about an hour ago. God knows how the wench got your number, but it was from an editor at Simon & Schuster. She was trying to verify facts in a book proposal she received from Peter Morse.”
Ellie didn’t know what to say. It had been only three days since Peter had called the book pie in the sky. He certainly hadn’t mentioned sending a proposal to any editor.
“What kinds of facts?” she asked.
“Well, it’s not like she dictated a list of questions, but she was saying all kinds of stuff about Dad and the College Hill Strangler case. The book’s not just about First Date, Ellie. It’s about you. I don’t get it, El. You’ve been a vault when it comes to that stuff and now it’s in the hands of some reporter?”
Ellie wanted to defend Peter, to say he wasn’t just some reporter. He was the first man she’d met in a long time whom she could actually picture herself with. He cared about her. He could be trusted. But instead she sat in silence on her sofa, wishing she had never spoken to Peter about William Summer.
“Ellie, are you listening to me? You need to call that editor and tell her Peter’s full of shit and that you never said any of this to him.”
“I can’t lie, Jess.”
“Oh, Jesus. Not this Girl Scout shit. He’s the one who’s the fucking liar.” He flipped open her laptop on the coffee table. “There’s something you need to see, Ellie. He’s still online. I’m really sorry.”
And, sure enough, there he was. “Unpublished,” the journalist and struggling author she’d first noticed online two months ago, was still listed on the very Internet dating service where they had first met.
Same profile. Same photograph. Same just-out-of-bed brown hair and piercing green eyes. All the same, as if he hadn’t met anyone yet. As if they hadn’t spent those nights together before she left for Kansas. As if they hadn’t spoken every day while she was gone.
“I’m sorry, El. He’s not the guy he pretended to be.” He placed a hand on her outstretched leg.
Ellie wiped her face, suppressing a sniffle. “I’ll call him first.”
“No. Don’t call him. Don’t talk to him. Ever.”
“I at least owe it to him to let him explain.”
“No, you don’t. You met him, what? Two months ago? And you were out of town for almost all of it? Jesus, I’m sorry if this is harsh, but you’re such a 1950s monogamist. Just because you go on a few dates with a guy doesn’t make him your husband. You know how many women I’ve dated who just stopped taking my calls one day? I’ve been dumped by text message. My e-mail address is blocked from, like, half the women in Manhattan.”
She gave him a sad smile.
“Trust me, he’ll get over it. I mean, it’ll take a while. This is, after all, the one and only Ellie Hatcher we’re talking about.” His tone became serious again. “I mean it, El. You’re one of the last single girls to make it to thirty without some asshole doing a number on your head. You know how many good guys are out there who’d kill for a chick like you? Don’t let this guy turn you into a basket case for the next good one who comes around the corner. Save the drama for your mama. You need to cut him loose.”
Her cell phone rang. She recognized the prefix as a courthouse number.
“Hatcher.”
“It’s Max Donovan. I heard what happened at Symanski’s. Knight wants to talk to you.”
“I’m not sure that’s going to work. My lieutenant seems to have sidelined me.”
“That’s why Knight wants you to come in. It would just be the three of us.”
“I don’t hide anything from my partner.”
“Fair enough. We’re not trying to get in the middle of things. Knight just wants to make sure everything’s getting a proper look. He can help you out with Eckels; he just wants to meet with you first.”
“What time?”
“He’s tied up until six.”
That gave Ellie an hour before she would need to leave her apartment.
“Yeah, okay.”
“And, not to press my luck, but I’m pretty much sitting here waiting around with nothing to do until then.”
“Why do I sort of doubt that?”
“Okay, fine. But I do have time for coffee. If, you know, if coffee sounded good to you.”
Ellie looked at her brother’s worried face. She pictured Peter boasting to some editor about his relationship with her to sell a book. She remembered his attempt that morning to blame his boss for the story about Chelsea Hart’s shorn hair. She looked at his smiling photograph on her open laptop screen.
“Coffee would be good.”
AN HOUR LATER, the man sat at his desk and watched another minute tick by on his computer’s digital clock. He had a little time to spare.
He opened Mozilla Firefox and typed “youtube” in the address box. Once he was on the site, he entered the search he had memorized as the quickest method for pulling up the clip he wanted: “Dateline College Hill Strangler.”
A list of videos filled the screen. He clicked on the top one and waited while the data loaded. There she was, face to face with Ann Curry against a severe black set, in her white turtleneck sweater and black skirt. He’d seen the entire segment many times-her walking in front of the site of William Summer’s first kill, kneeling at her father’s grave, the childhood photograph with those little blond pigtails-but this was the part he liked best.
It wasn’t about her childhood. It was about the present. It showed the woman she had become-smart, cocky, joyously uppity with that I’ve-got-your-number half-smile.
“How do you explain the fact that it took the Wichita police thirty years to capture this man? Was he that much of a master criminal?”
There was the half-smile. “Oh, no. My father had a profile that was spot-on: he’d be a man who craved authority, maybe a badge bunny. Like a wannabe cop,” she said, quickly clarifying her use of the police slang. “The people who worked with him would describe him as petty and autocratic. He might be in a relationship but would frequent prostitutes. All of it turned out to be right. The problem is, the WPD shut down the investigation. My father was one man working out of his basement around his other cases, and without any support. This person was no master criminal.”
“So if the department dropped the ball, how did they finally catch the killer?”
“He did himself in. It was his own desire for recognition and notoriety that led police to him. His desire to taunt and to show off-the letters, the drawings, the poems-were the equivalent of a billboard pointing directly to him. Killers like William Summer get caught because of their insatiable egos.”
The man hit the pause button at that moment. Such confidence.
Killers like William Summer get caught because of their insatiable egos.
On that point, he had to take issue. Summer got caught because he was stupid. He, however, was not.
Still, he hoped he had not made a mistake getting rid of the gun he’d fired only three hours earlier. In a straight contest of strength, he would always have the upper hand against a girl, so he had avoided guns until this afternoon. Too noisy. Too unpredictable.
But as he looked at the face of Ellie Hatcher, he wondered if he couldn’t use the extra help.
He went to the Tools menu and clicked on the Clear Private Data command, erasing his search information on YouTube before closing the browser window. Rachel Peck would be leaving work soon and enjoying her night out on the town.
ELLIE HAD SUCKED DOWN half of her grande peppermint mocha by the time she finished giving Donovan the play-by-play of the events at Leon Symanski’s house.
“Unbelievable. When Susan Parker showed up at the courthouse this morning with Jaime Rodriguez, I really assumed it would all turn out to be b.s. Either Rodriguez was lying, or his friend was lying, or maybe Symanski was some insane criminal wannabe.”
“Instead, he’s some insane criminal actually-be who says he killed Chelsea Hart. Although,” she quickly added, “Rogan did float the possibility that Myers is still our man.” As things stood, she had mixed feelings about meeting alone with Donovan. Until Rogan was around, the least she could do was to sound neutral.
“Well, with Symanski’s confession, we’ve got enough to prosecute him, but whether we’d win at trial is another question.” Donovan broke off a chunk of the banana bread they were sharing. “They’ll argue the confession’s coerced. And then even if we can use the confession, we need other evidence to corroborate it. At least we’ve got the earring. That would get the case to a jury, but convincing twelve people beyond a reasonable doubt wouldn’t be easy.”
“Rogan thinks a good lawyer can argue the earring fell off while Chelsea was at the club and Symanski found it.”
“It also doesn’t help that the guy who pointed us in Symanski’s direction was a drug dealer who runs with one of Jake Myers’s buddies. They’ll argue Rodriguez was sending us in the wrong direction as a favor to his pal.”
“So it all comes down to Symanski’s confession in the alley. Either it’s real, or I forced it out of him at gunpoint. Terrific. Now I can see why Eckels sent me home.”
“That’s why Knight wants to see you. Eckels thinks it looks bad if you’re working the case after what happened between you and Symanski in the alley, but Knight thinks it looks a lot worse if you get pulled. If the department treats you like a bad apple, a jury might be inclined to see it the same way. The key is to keep you on this. You and Rogan work well together, right?”
“Yeah. No question.”
“All right. So you work it side by side. Two good detectives, backing each other up. That way there’s not too much pressure on the word of either one of you. By benching you, Eckels is causing major problems for us at trial.”
“Between me and you, Eckels doesn’t care if he causes problems for other people.”
“Hey, stop worrying about it. Knight will work something out. You saw that the Daily Post broke the story about the victim’s hair being chopped off?”
“Although I believe they said ‘shaved.’ Salacious just the same, though.” She’d seen the update on the paper’s Web site at her apartment. Byline: George Kittrie and Peter Morse. Ellie wondered if breaking the story had been worth it all to Peter.
“So, come on, you haven’t given me your take yet. Is Symanski our guy or not?”
“I don’t know.” Neutral. Report the facts. Present both sides. Let Donovan make up his own mind.
“Oh, come on. The guy told you he did it. What’s in your gut?”
I strangled her, and I cut her up, and I took her earring. There were only two possible explanations for what happened in that alley. Either Ellie forced Symanski to speak those words, or he had murdered Chelsea Hart. And whether anyone accepted it or not, Ellie knew that Symanski hadn’t simply recited that sentence. He’d looked her in the eye. He’d spoken with a pleading desperation that was unambiguous: he had truly wanted her to believe him.
“I know I didn’t coerce that confession, so, yeah, I think he did it.” Ellie felt guilty that she might be biasing Donovan, but at least she was still keeping the cold cases to herself. She wanted to raise the subject once more with Rogan before she brought anyone else in on her theory.
“And Jake Myers is totally innocent?”
“It would follow. But are you really sure enough to drop the charges?”
Donovan shook his head. “What a mess. I’ve got law school friends who make four times my salary, and all they have to think about is which enormous company should get how large a pile of cash. Why do we do this to ourselves?”
“Hey, speak for yourself, Mr. ADA. I get paid even less than you, but all I have to do is catch the perps and hand them over. You get to make all the decisions about charges and plea bargains and sentences and all that business.”
“Yeah, but I don’t have to worry about getting stabbed in an alley.”
“Well, at least not at work.”
“Oh, and you’re funny too. That’s just great.”
“You’ve got something against funny?” she asked.
“No, in fact I’m a very big fan of the sense of humor.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“It’s yet another reason to wish this coffee wasn’t just a coffee. But, that’s all right. I’m good at keeping it strictly professional.”
“Is that what this is? A strictly professional coffee that’s just a coffee?”
“I assumed so, what with the nondescript ‘plans’ you had the other night and everything.”
“Actually, I don’t think I’ll have any plans along those lines in the future.”
“So, the extremely polite shutout from the other night-”
“Consider it retracted. If I’m permitted to retract, that is.”
“I think it can be managed.” He looked at Ellie with a cool smile that made her suddenly aware of the unflattering overhead lights in Starbucks. “Unfortunately, with that, our coffee that wasn’t just coffee may have to end. Knight will kill me if we’re late.”
THANKS TO CALLER ID, Rogan didn’t bother with a greeting.
“Let me guess. You’re on your third drink and have pasted Eckels’s picture to a dartboard.”
“One beer, one peppermint mocha. No dartboard, but an excellent suggestion nevertheless.”
“Beer and peppermint mocha? Disgusting.”
“Where are you?”
“St. Vincent’s. Symanski’s finally awake.”
“I’ll be right there.” Ellie hung up before he could argue.
SHE FOUND ROGAN sitting in a wheelchair in the third floor hallway of St. Vincent’s Hospital. A uniform officer stood guard at the door across the hall.
“You shouldn’t sit on that when your legs work,” she said, kicking one of the wheels. “Bad karma.”
“I’d lie in an empty casket right now. My ass is whooped tired.”
“Is Symanski talking?”
“Yeah, if ‘Get me a lawyer’ counts as talking.” He used his hand as a puppet to act out Symanski’s single sentence.
“Fabulous.” She used the wall next to Rogan as support and slid down into a crouch.
“Speaking of karma,” Rogan said, “Symanski’s in bad shape.”
“He’s probably faking it. You didn’t hit him that hard.”
“No, not from me. He’s got some kind of melanoma.”
“Skin cancer?”
“No, like lung cancer or something. The doctor said it was from asbestos?”
“You mean mesothelioma?”
“Yeah, that’s it. You’ve been attending med school on the side?”
“No, like almost everything I know, I learned it from the television.” She parodied a familiar ad for one of the city’s omnipresent personal injury law firms. “‘If you’ve been diagnosed with mesothelioma, you know there are hundreds of questions about what steps to take. Let Datz and Grossman help you with your legal rights while you deal with this difficult diagnosis.’”
“Damn, girl, you do watch too much TV. Now you better go and get your butt out of here. Eckels will go nuts if he finds out.”
“That’s what we need to talk about. Simon Knight called me in and said he wants us both working on this-together. He’s worried that if a jury hears Eckels pulled me from the case, it will taint me as a witness.”
“A witness against who?”
“Pick one. It’s eventually going to be either Myers or Symanski. The whole point is, we’ve got to figure out which one of them killed Chelsea, and whoever it turns out to be, I’m already part of the picture of the case. They don’t want me to be a problem at trial.”
“No, we couldn’t let that happen to the dream team, could we now?”
“I know you’re not a big fan of Simon Knight.”
“And you are? That guy doesn’t give a shit about anyone. He just wants to win his cases. And he’d sell either one of us out in a heartbeat if necessary. Casey had a trial about eight years ago where the defendant said Casey planted evidence. Instead of proving the fat fuck was a liar, Knight went in front of the jury and said, ‘So what?’ Detective Casey might be a bad cop, but all the other evidence showed the guy was good for it.”
“The rogue detective framed a guilty man,” Ellie said.
“Except Casey was a good, honest cop. And Knight didn’t care what he said about the man as long as he got his conviction.”
“That’s a DA’s job.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Well, Knight’s getting my back on this one. Big-time.”
“As long as you realize that could all change, like that,” he said, snapping his fingers.
“I’m a big girl, Rogan.”
“Did you tell him about those cold cases?”
“No, not yet. I want to, though. It was different before we knew about Symanski. Now that he’s part of the picture-”
“Okay.”
“Okay, as in, you’re okay with it? Or okay, as in, you’re pissed at me and want me to stop justifying my position?”
“Believe it or not, okay as in okay. I see the point. If we’re taking another look at the case against Myers anyway, we should at least make sure we do it right.”
Ellie wanted to jump on Rogan’s wheelchair and give him a big bear hug. Instead, she nodded. Nodding was always an acceptable way for cops to communicate with each other.
She was scooching her way out of her crouch when she spotted the woman in an orange coat step from the elevator. In the time it took Ellie to realize she looked familiar, the woman caught sight of the officer posted outside Symanski’s door and stepped back into the elevator.
“Did you see that?” Ellie asked.
“What?”
“The woman at Symanski’s house. The pregnant girl.” Ellie was already running down the hall. “She got spooked and jumped into the elevator.”
Ellie pushed the call button, but the elevator was heading down. Slamming open the door to the stairwell, she took the stairs two at a time. She could hear Rogan’s footsteps behind her.
“Try the second floor,” she yelled. “I’m going to the lobby.”
On the first floor, she looked both ways, but there was no sign of the bright orange coat. She bolted out the hospital doors to Seventh Avenue in time to see the woman shut the passenger-side door of a gold Acura Legend.
And, once again, the day dealt Ellie a surprise. As the car drove off, she recognized Jaime Rodriguez behind the wheel.
ROGAN WAS WAITING for her when she emerged from the stairwell on the hospital’s third floor.
“I asked the nurse whether a pregnant woman had been here earlier to see Symanski.”
“And?”
“No luck. But a guy delivering flowers from the gift shop overheard me. He says a pregnant lady in a bright orange coat was downstairs half an hour ago throwing a fit because her father had been taken here by the police.”
“Her father?”
“Yep. And for some reason Symanski didn’t want us knowing who she was when we asked about her at the house.”
Ellie thought about the bare dresser drawers in Symanski’s guest room. The empty hangers in the closet.
She removed her notebook from her bag. The most recent entry was Symanski’s confession, scrawled at her command by the EMT: “I strangled her, and I cut her up, and I took her earring.” Just above the confession were two words in her own handwriting: “Pemetrexed” and “Cisplatin,” the two prescriptions she had discovered in Symanski’s medicine cabinet. She had no doubt they would turn out to be treatments for his mesothelioma. She recalled joking morbidly with Peter last night about the apparent ubiquity of cancer.
Symanski knew he was dying, but he hadn’t called the law firm of Datz & Grossman to solve his problems. He had tried to handle them on his own.
“We need to look at Jake Myers’s banking records.”
“OH, COME ON, MAN. You have got to be kidding me. Them?”
The girl with the platinum blond hair and four-inch heels obviously wasn’t happy that the bouncer had waved two other women past the velvet rope at Tenjune without a wait. Implicit in the girl’s outrage was her belief that she was taller, thinner, and hotter than Rachel Peck and her friend Gina, a belief that was undoubtedly true, but which failed to take into account the network of friendships among the little people who kept the city’s biggest hot spots up and running.
Rachel high-fived the bouncer at the door. “Thanks, Rico. You’re the best.”
Two years earlier, before a very active gym membership and his discovery of tight black T-shirts, Rico the bouncer was Ricardo the Mesa Grill busboy. News to the blonde in the stripper shoes: to get into a club like Tenjune, you either have to be somebody or know somebody.
They made their way down the stairs, past a lounge area of velvet seating, to the crocodile-skin bar. An old Beastie Boys song blasted through the speakers, mixed and scratched together with a Madonna tune.
“Two Bombay Sapphire martinis,” Rachel asked once she finally got the bartender’s attention. “No vermouth. Up. Twists.”
The bartender looked annoyed when she handed him a credit card. Too bad for him. At thirty-five dollars a round, a splurge like tonight belonged on the Visa.
She tucked her card in the front pocket of her jeans and handed Gina her glass, then took a big sip from her own to bring the meniscus to a safer level. One good bump in the crowd could cost her half a cocktail. The gin was cold and smooth as it ran down her throat.
She followed Gina into the next room, where they found comfortable standing space not too far from the club’s horseshoe-shaped dance floor.
“To girls’ night,” Gina said, leaning forward to be heard.
Rachel clinked her glass against her friend’s and took another swallow. The toast was a subtle reference to Rachel’s recent breakup with a stockbroker she’d met three months earlier while she was bartending at the restaurant. She usually brushed off the advances of the drunken, overgrown frat boys knocking back tequila shots at the bar, but Hayden had seemed different. He’d flirted with her that night, no question, but he’d come back the next day at lunch, alone, to ask for her number. It seemed like a classy move on his part.
For a while, Rachel allowed herself to believe that she might have lucked in to one of those relationships girls somehow seemed to find in the city. Hayden was a decent guy with a good income. He was smart and fun and actually read her short stories and appeared to appreciate them. She even entertained the thought that if things worked out, she could quit bartending and focus on her writing full-time.
But like anything that seemed too good to be true, Hayden had an imperfection. A big one, too, unless you could look past an insatiable fondness for cocaine and the other women who started to look pretty attractive after a few lines. The first time Rachel found evidence of another woman at Hayden’s apartment-maraschino cherries and sour mix in the refrigerator for some girlie drink Hayden would never imbibe-she forgave him. It was the coke, he said. He’d stop using, he said. It wasn’t an addiction.
And then when she found his stash in the nightstand, she forgave him again. He had a bigger problem than he realized, he said. He’d get help.
But by then, Hayden had a read on her. She was a sucker and a doormat. She was the kind of woman who could be confronted with evidence that she’d been lied to and cheated on, and then simply forgive. She shouldn’t have been surprised when she smelled Fendi perfume in his sheets four days ago.
But at least she hadn’t bought Hayden’s most recent round of apologies. He even cried. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I can’t just appreciate what I have with you. As if she were supposed to feel sorry for him.
She’d seen another side of him when she walked out. His tears had turned to anger. It wasn’t what Rachel would call violence, but he did try to stop her. Physically. She had some fingerprint-sized bruises on her left bicep, but nothing major.
So now here she was with Gina, back out on the scene from which she had hoped Hayden might save her. The men in these clubs were rich. The women were pretty. For most, there was an implicit tradeoff in light of the gender preferences that drove Manhattan dating life. Men got the advantage on age and looks; women on finances.
“Shit,” Gina said. “One martini and I have to pee already.”
They both knew that a pit stop to the ladies room could be a fifteen-minute wait, depending on the length of the line and the number of girls using the stalls to get high. Rachel held her index and middle fingers to her lips and puffed, indicating she’d use the time to smoke one of the cigarettes that Gina was always trying to get her to toss.
Outside, Rachel’s ears felt cloudy from the sudden drop in volume. The blonde with the high heels was not happy to see her.
“Seriously? You waltz in, and now you’re back out here already?”
“Rico, cut the girl some slack.” Rachel protected her lighter from the wind and sparked up a Newport. “Poor thing’s half naked and perched on top of some hardcore spikes.”
The bouncer formerly known as Ricardo gave the girl the cursory and disapproving look that kept a certain kind of clientele coming back for more. “I didn’t tell her how to dress.”
Rachel took a second, longer puff. “I’m going to tell Carlita on you.”
Carlita was Rico’s mother. Even when Ricardo had just begun his transformation into Rico, Rachel had overheard Carlita complaining at the restaurant about how “fancy” her son had become.
Rico rolled his eyes and unhooked the velvet rope for the now jubilant blonde and her friends. “Guilt trip much?” he said in Rachel’s direction.
“Just keeping it real,” Rachel said with a smile. The optimistic eyes of the other expectant people in line now firmly on her, she walked east on Little Twelfth Street, then watched the bustle of Ninth Avenue while she enjoyed her smoke on the corner.
A blue Ford Taurus approached from Greenwich Street and pulled to the curb in front of her. The driver rolled down his window. “You know where a club called P.M. is?”
“Yeah, you just passed your turn.” Rachel pointed to Gansevoort Street.
“I get so turned around down here,” the man said.
Rachel could see why. Greenwich, Gansevoort, Little Twelfth (not the same as Twelfth), and Ninth Avenue all merged together at this humble intersection.
“No offense,” Rachel said, “but you don’t exactly look like a P.M. kind of guy.”
“I’m not. It’s a long story.”
“Sounds interesting.” Rachel liked hearing stories. It was one of the reasons she’d learned how to tend bar. Overheard conversations morphed into ideas that transformed into written words.
“Not really. Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere? You look familiar.”
“Wow,” she said. “You’re really going to need better material if you’re going for P.M.”
“Look at me. I’m in a Ford Taurus, for God’s sake. I’m in no position to try a line. You really do look familiar.” He snapped his finger at the recognition. “You make an excellent margarita. Mesa Grill.”
“Mesa Grill,” she confirmed, rubbing her arms for warmth.
“That smoking ban’s harsh in winter. Here, hop in.” The man nodded toward the passenger seat.
“Do I look like the kind of girl who jumps into cars with strangers?”
The man shifted his weight to the left, pulled out a wallet with his right hand, and flipped it open. She took a close look at it.
“See? I’m legit. That long story behind my going to P.M.? I’m out here checking out the clubs on official duty. I’m dreading it. You’re freezing. The least I can do for a woman who made me such a memorable margarita is to let you finish your smoke in my warm car. Then we’ll both get on with our lives.”
She had a good half of a cigarette to go, and she was freezing.
When she got into the car, she nearly hit her head on the flipped-down sun visor.
“Here, let me get that for you.” When the man reached across the car with his left arm, she saw the blur of a piece of fabric in his hand, then immediately felt a wet towel pressed hard against her face. She felt her seat recline abruptly. As she lost consciousness, she wondered who would call her father. She wondered if she would ever get a chance to finish that scene she was working on-the one in which she had hoped he would find the secret meaning.
The man flicked Rachel’s cigarette out the window and pulled into traffic on Ninth Avenue.