“MORNING, MANNY. Can I get a large coffee? No room. And a lemon Danish.”
“No room. You really think I need a reminder on that? Every morning of every day, you get a large coffee, no room. I got it now. We’re good for life, sweetheart.”
“You’re my kind of person to be good with, Manny.” Ellie didn’t mind that the older man behind the deli counter called her sweetheart instead of the official titles he used with the other cops. She’d realized a long time ago that the occasional harmless byproducts of tradition actually made it easier for men of a certain generation to accept her.
Her cell vibrated at her waist. According to the screen, it was another call from Peter, the second already this morning, and it was only eight o’clock.
She’d called him last night when she’d gotten home from St. Vincent’s. Just as Jess had predicted, Peter had an explanation for everything. He had only kept his profile on the First Date site because he thought it might come in handy while researching the book. He had only mentioned her to the Simon & Schuster editor as he was explaining why he was having second thoughts about the project.
An hour into the call, Ellie felt like she was on duty, interrogating a suspect who believed he could talk his way out of anything. She’d ended the conversation by telling him she needed a break. Peter had acquiesced, but he clearly had a different definition of the word. Just as she had earlier, she let the call go to voice mail. Once again, there was no beep alerting her to a new message.
Manny passed her a tall cup of coffee across the counter. “What’d you do to yourself there? Those boys at the precinct aren’t beating up on you, are they?”
She held up her hand, still wrapped in white gauze. “Shark bite. Can you believe it? Jumped right out of the Hudson River.”
“Ah, we got a smart aleck over here now. Get a load of you, a shark bite.”
“It was just a misunderstanding yesterday. I’m fine.”
“The bad guy got it worse?”
Manny had enough cops go through here to know the lingo.
“That goes without saying.”
“Well, if you’re gonna walk around with that humongous bandage on your hand, you need to work on your stories. The best tall tales are the ones you might actually believe are the truth.”
Ellie found herself thinking about Manny’s words during the two-block walk to the precinct. She thought about Chelsea Hart, Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, and Alice Butler. She replayed Rogan’s argument that Chelsea was different: They were all pretty rough city chicks. Hard-knock-life, round-the-way girls, not wide-eyed college students from Indiana. She thought about the murder of Darrell Washington just one day after he’d used Jordan McLaughlin’s stolen credit card at the Union Square Circuit City.
By the time she was at her desk, retrieving her Danish from its greasy paper bag, she had decided that her jumbled thoughts at least warranted a phone call. She used the heel of her bandaged palm to flip through the pages of her notepad.
An electronic voice informed her that Jordan McLaughlin’s cell phone had been disconnected. She tried Stefanie Hyder’s number instead and got an answer.
“Hello?” It was barely seven o’clock in Indiana, but Stefanie sounded alert.
“It’s Detective Ellie Hatcher from the NYPD. How are you holding up?”
“It’s been pretty rough. You know what happened to us on Wednesday?”
“I heard. That must have been awful.”
“It’s not like it was anything compared to Chelsea, but the whole reason we’d gone to the museum was to read this poem she liked in front of the place she had thought was so magical when we went before-well, you know. And then to have it ruined like that… We didn’t get a good look at the guy. It’s like all either of us could see in that moment was the gun.”
“Did someone from the department notify you that they found Jordan’s stolen credit card at another crime scene?”
“Yeah, we got a call last night right after we landed. We were pretty freaked out by the whole thing.”
“It’s probably good that you were finally able to go home. I was actually calling to follow up on something you mentioned the other day. You said Chelsea had a way of making up stories about herself?”
Ellie could hear the smile in Stefanie’s voice. “That was a classic Chelsea move. She didn’t do it to be mean, but if someone really cheesy was hitting on her or something, she’d weave some crazy identity out of thin air.”
“Like what?”
“Whatever happened to strike her as funny. She told some guy at a diner our first morning in the city that we were there to audition for the Martha Graham Dance Company. By the time she was done talking, she had described some elaborate improv thing we were supposedly doing with bar stools. Other times, she’d say she was a stripper. When we were in high school, she’d tell people we were lesbian runaways.”
“Do you think she may have made up one of these stories the night she was killed?”
Stefanie paused. “Not at Pulse. I heard her talking to a couple of guys about Indiana.”
Ellie remembered Tony Russo, Nick Warden’s monogamous financial analyst friend, mentioning the Hoosiers when she had shown him Chelsea’s picture.
“What about earlier in the night? At the restaurant?”
“Yeah. Maybe. The bar was crowded, and I know she wandered off to the bathroom at one point.”
“But you don’t know who she might have talked to?”
“No. What’s this all about? She met that Jake Myers at Pulse, not the restaurant.”
“I know. We’re just making sure we didn’t miss anything. Does Jordan still have that picture of the three of you from that night?”
“No. Her phone was in her purse when it got stolen, and most of our pictures from the trip were in there.”
“Do you know if she backed it up beforehand, or sent it to someone else?”
While Stefanie talked to Jordan in the background, Ellie opened Photoshop on her computer. Damn. Just as she thought.
“She doesn’t have it anymore,” Stefanie said, “and the only people she sent it to were you and that guy at the newspaper.”
Ellie flipped through the mess sprawled across her desk and plucked out a copy of the Sun’s first article about Chelsea’s death. She looked at the byline.
“Was that David Marsters?”
More talking between the two girls.
“She says that’s the guy.”
Ellie thanked Stefanie for her time, then made a quick call to the New York Sun. She got lucky: Marsters was at his desk. After a quick introduction, she gave him her cover story.
“Sorry to bug you, but the DA’s office liked that picture you ran of Chelsea Hart and wants to get a copy of it for trial. Do you still have it?”
“Just a sec. Yep, it’s right here on my computer. Want me to e-mail it to you?”
“That would be great.” She gave him her address. “Do you happen to have the original that Jordan McLaughlin gave you?”
“Hold on. Nope, I plugged her phone right into my laptop. I’ve only got the version I saved after I cropped it.”
“No problem. I’m sure the DA planned to crop it around the victim’s face anyway.”
Ellie had followed the same process as Marsters. Instead of creating a separate file to crop Jordan’s original photograph, she had cropped the only copy she had on her computer, then saved the changes to the same file. She vaguely recalled the faces of bystanders in the background of the original picture, but with the theft of Jordan’s iPhone, there was no way to recover the complete image.
She made another call, this time to Detective Ken Garcia.
“This is Ellie Hatcher. My lieutenant sent me over yesterday to the LaGuardia Houses.”
“Bandage hand.”
“That’s me. I was checking in to see if you have any suspects yet in the Darrell Washington shooting.”
“Nah. Between you and me, my hunch is it’ll go down as an unsolved.”
“Did you find any other guns in the apartment?”
“We found the murder weapon. That’s usually the one that counts.”
“I know, but my robbery victims said Washington was armed. I’m wondering whether you found the gun he may have used.”
“Good catch. I guess we’ll need to look into the possibility he was killed with his own gun.”
As Ellie thanked the detective for his time, she wondered what other possibilities she had overlooked this week.
“HOW’S THE HAND?” Rogan plopped himself down at his desk.
“Not bad,” she said. “Okay, brace yourself for another argument with me: I think whoever killed Darrell Washington killed Chelsea Hart.”
“That’s the dude from the projects?”
“Think about it. Street crime’s down all over the city, especially in Manhattan. Two girls whose friend was murdered just happen to get robbed in broad daylight on the Upper East Side? And then the man who did it just happens to get shot? That’s too many coincidences for me. Someone saw that picture of Chelsea in the Sun and realized he could have been in it. He hired Darrell Washington to steal Jordan’s cell phone, but knew Washington couldn’t be trusted to turn over all the loot. The minute we got a hit on Jordan’s credit card, we would’ve been at Washington’s door, asking questions. Our guy killed Washington to make sure there was no link back to him.”
Rogan nodded throughout her monologue, digesting every argument. “You’re making a whole lot of sense, Hatcher.”
“It’s about time you came around.”
“All except one thing. Given Jake Myers’s current custodial status, he can’t be the someone you’re talking about, correct?”
“No, but it could easily be Symanski. He could have gotten to Washington before we showed up at his front door.”
“One problem with that: I just got off the phone with American Express. Capital Research Technologies took a cash advance of a hundred thousand dollars about four and half hours before we arrested Jake Myers for murder. And Myers signed for it, at the Mohegan Sun.”
The casino was at best a two-hour drive from the city. “So either Myers plowed through a hundred grand in record time-”
“Or he used the company credit card and some casino chips to hide one big-ass payment to someone.”
“Then, lo and behold, two days later, Leon Symanski conveniently steps up and confesses to Chelsea Hart’s murder.”
“The baby daddy’s the missing link,” Rogan said.
She was picturing the same chain, one leading from Myers to Symanski. The connection between Myers and Nick Warden was clear: between their friendship and the hedge fund, the two men were practically inseparable. Warden was tight with his drug supplier, Jaime Rodriguez. And after last night’s sighting of Symanski’s pregnant daughter at the hospital, the safe bet was that Rodriguez was the father of Symanski’s unborn grandchild. Combined with Myers’s quick, covert, and well-timed disposal of a hundred thousand dollars, it all led to one conclusion: Myers had paid Symanski to take the fall for him.
Rogan tapped a ballpoint pen against his palm. “I guess now we know why Warden wanted a deal for Rodriguez as part of his cooperation agreement to flip on Myers: that was also part of the quid pro quo.”
“It also explains why Symanski was so evasive when we asked about the girl we saw at his house. If we’d gone to her, we might’ve found Rodriguez and started drawing the same connections.” Ellie shook her head. “Jesus. First Rodriguez knocks up Symanski’s daughter, then he asks him to go down for a murder he didn’t commit?”
“Maybe he didn’t ask him. Rodriguez spent a night in jail when we popped him on the drug charge. Symanski’s daughter couldn’t have been happy about that. She shows up back at Daddy’s house, crying about the father of her child heading upstate for six to nine as a repeat drug offender. Daddy sees the chance to be a hero before he powers down in a few months anyway from the melathemiona.”
“Mesothelioma.”
Rogan rolled his eyes. “Plus, you’re going to love this. I was picturing how it must have all gone down, and I kept coming back to Nick Warden’s smoking-hot lawyer.”
“Susan Parker.”
“Exactly. The junior associate at a law firm that doesn’t even handle criminal defense. But she’s the one who told us Warden wanted a deal not just for himself, but also Rodriguez. And she was the one who brought Rodriguez to us at the courthouse, pointing the finger at Symanski.”
“You think she was in on it, too?”
“I went to her law firm’s Web site. Turns out she graduated from Cornell.”
“Jake Myers’s alma mater.”
“Right again. She graduated one year ahead of him. They were both members of some club called the Entrepreneur Society. I still haven’t figured out whose idea this was, but she should have known about it. They all did, every link in the chain.”
“Damn it,” Ellie said. “Symanski was looking good for it all.”
“But now we’re back to Myers-who couldn’t have started killing nearly ten years ago.”
“You certainly had a busy morning while I was wasting my time trying to pull up the lost background of a photograph from the computer vortex. You didn’t happen to cure cancer while you were at it, did you?”
“No. I’m saving that for the afternoon, but I do have a health tip for you.” He eyed the half-eaten pastry on her desk. “Did it ever dawn on you to watch what you eat? You aren’t that young.”
“I watch what I eat every day, right before I pop it into my pie hole.”
“Hatcher.”
Ellie looked up to see Lieutenant Eckels standing at his office door on the perimeter of the squad room.
“Morning, boss.”
“How’s that hand?”
“A lot better. Thanks.”
“A word with you both?”
He closed his office door without waiting for confirmation.
“You hear that? He asked about my injury. My lieutenant cares about my well-being.” She used her good hand to fan away fake tears of emotion. “I’m verklempt.”
“You really think Simon Knight saved your ass, don’t you?”
“He said he would last night.”
“You know Eckels could be calling us in there to pull you off this case for good, right? He seems damn chipper about something.”
“Only one way to find out.”
“WHERE ARE WE on this Symanski clusterfuck?”
Rogan gave Eckels a rundown on the previous night’s events, carefully avoiding any mention of Ellie’s presence at the hospital. He also walked him through Myers’s hundred-thousand-dollar cash advance and their theory about the agreement between Myers and Symanski, all facilitated by Susan Parker.
“Now this, I like. Both guilty. Myers of the murder. Symanski of obstruction. We can get everyone in between as accomplices to the obstruction. Prove it, and we might actually come out of this OK.”
No department ever wanted to admit that they’d arrested an innocent man, but having to make such an admission about a rich kid like Myers would be even more costly-both in reputation and money.
“You’re on board with all this, Hatcher?”
“I’m not working the case for now, but, yeah, Rogan’s obviously on to something.”
“What do you mean, you’re not working the case?”
“I was told last night that you wanted me off-”
“I sent you home because any cop needs a night off after being torpedoed in an alley by a cutter. Are you saying you want off the case?”
“No. Not at all.”
“Good, because it’s yours. Yours and Rogan’s. Always has been. I’m sorry if you misunderstood that. Now, does this mean you’re off that nonsense about McIlroy’s cold cases?”
“We’re working the Chelsea Hart case. I get that.”
Of course, if other files turned out to be relevant to the Hart investigation, she’d chase the evidence wherever it led. But she was beginning to wonder herself if the similarities she’d seen among the four murders had in fact been, in Eckels’s words, nonsense.
“One more thing, guys. I spoke to Simon Knight earlier this morning.”
Ellie resisted the temptation to throw a smile in Rogan’s direction.
“Since both Myers and Symanski are in custody, we’ve got to work this thing closely with the DA’s office as they make their charging decisions. From now on, you’ll be working directly with Knight and his assistant through the DA’s Homicide Investigation Unit.”
“What does that mean exactly?” Rogan asked.
“I want you to treat them like your chain of command. Is that a problem?”
They both shook their heads, but Rogan didn’t look happy about it.
“Very well, then. Don’t be surprised when I’m still on your ass. I want updates.”
“Not a problem, sir,” Ellie said, before they both left the office.
“Holy shit,” Rogan said once they were at a safe distance. “Everything last night was a so-called misunderstanding? You weren’t kidding about Knight being smooth.”
“Downright silky.”
“Don’t get too excited. What’s that saying about out of the frying pan and into the fire?”
“All I know is that we need to call the rest of the dream team and tell them we want to have a word with Susan Parker.”
Ellie’s phone buzzed. She checked the screen, worried it would be Peter again, but it was Jess.
“What’s up?”
“I just got a call from Candy at Vibrations.”
“Oh, and I’m sure that’s her real name.”
“They found a body in the parking lot last night.”
Her smile faded. “One of the girls?”
“No, it’s not that. It’s-it’s those files you were reading on the couch the other night. I thought you ought to know.”
“What is it, Jess?”
“When Candy called, she said the girl was all cut up and that her hair looked like part of a costume.”
“HANK DODGE.” The detective waiting for Ellie in the medical examiner’s office was probably in his late fifties. Tall. Bulky. Scruffy gray hair and a five-day beard. When she had called him to track down the details of the body discovered the previous night at Vibrations, he had insisted on being present if she were going to view the victim. “Dr. Karr was just telling me he’d already met you.”
Ellie recognized the bearded pathologist who had conducted the autopsy on Chelsea Hart. She shook hands with both men.
“You were cutting it close on timing, Detective Hatcher. I was just about to start the autopsy when you phoned Detective Dodge.”
“I think that’s the doc’s polite way of saying he hopes you had a good reason for asking us to wait.”
“My brother works at the club where your victim was found. It sounded like there were similarities between this case and the Hart murder.”
“Your brother works at a titty bar?” Dodge asked.
“Long story.” It wasn’t, really. The job at Vibrations was the first Ellie could remember Jess holding down for two months straight. “My impression is that any similarities had to do with the appearance of their bodies. That’s why I was hoping to see the vic before the postmortem.”
“You want the basics first, or should we just head to the body?”
“The basics would be great.”
“Victim’s name was Rachel Peck. Twenty-six-year-old white female. Works as a bartender. On-and-off party girl. Her girlfriend called police last night at one a.m. after Peck went out for a smoke and never came back.”
“Went out from where?”
“Some club.”
“It wasn’t a place called Pulse, was it?” she asked.
The fact that Chelsea Hart had met Jake Myers at Pulse had been widely reported in the press, and Dodge could see where Ellie was headed.
“No,” he said firmly. “Some joint called Tenjune.”
Ellie was familiar with it. “In the Meatpacking District. Three blocks from Pulse.”
“You know how many kids are partying within a three-block radius in that neighborhood? This particular kid told her friend she was going for a smoke and never came back. As you can imagine, the friend’s call-along with a hundred others just like it-got the blow-off at dispatch. Peck’s body got called in at four a.m. from your brother’s fine establishment.”
“Any witnesses?”
“Nope. She was behind a Dumpster at the back of the lot. The way the lot’s situated, a car could pull in behind the Dumpster, ditch a body, and spin right back onto the West Side Highway. As long as they were fast enough, it would look like a car pulling in just to turn around. We do, however, have a suspect.”
Ellie’s surprise must have registered on her face.
“I tried telling you on the phone,” Dodge said. “But you were in such a hurry to get down here, I figured, what the hell. As we speak, my partner’s holding one Hayden Holden Hammond, the victim’s ex-boyfriend.”
“Hayden…Holden…Hammond?”
“Yeah, we’ll see how cute the parents find the alliteration when their kid becomes known as the new Preppy Murderer. Not to mention the instant hit he’ll be in prison.”
“You’re sure it’s him?”
Dodge nodded. “The girlfriend who reported Peck missing says the two had a messy breakup earlier this week. She finally clued in that he was a cheater and a cokehead, and he got a little rough with her when she broke it off. When we found him this morning, he was coked through the ceiling and his apartment looked like he’d been on a three-day bender. I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a confession within the hour.”
“Are you ready to meet Miss Peck?” Karr asked. Ellie nodded, and Karr led the way through the large, sterile room. As they passed two other covered bodies on stainless steel tables, she tried to rein in her curiosity. She had enough corpses to think about as things stood.
When they arrived at the third table, Karr stopped and folded down the white sheet.
“Dr. Karr was telling me a little bit about your case before you got here. Based on what he told me, I think your brother might’ve missed the mark when he called you. About the only commonality is that they were both strangled. And, as you can see, my vic’s still got all her hair. Our biggest problem with her body’s going to be getting rid of it. When we called her father out in Idaho, he made it clear he wouldn’t be coming to claim her.”
Ellie was listening to Dodge’s words, but she could not take her eyes from Rachel Peck. She didn’t need the medical examiner to explain the obvious signs of manual strangulation-the bruises around the woman’s neck, the bloating in her face and eyes. But she did not agree that the similarities between Rachel Peck and Chelsea Hart ended there.
Rachel had been spared the repetitive cuts that had been etched into Chelsea Hart’s entire body, but her face had been the target of the same kind of short, deep stab wounds-one hatched across each of her cheekbones, along with a series of vertical and horizontal marks on her forehead.
But it was the hair that disturbed her most. Rachel’s long, dark blond hair had been pulled into two girlish pigtails on either side of her face. Her bangs were thick and choppy-nothing like the soft, fashionable fringe that so many women were wearing these days.
Something about the look tugged at the back of Ellie’s brain, but she couldn’t quite pull from her memory whatever past image was troubling her. She did, however, know that something was very wrong.
“She may have all her hair, but look at it.”
“What about it?” Dodge asked.
“The stripper who called my brother said it looked like part of a costume. You can’t see that?”
“I don’t understand half the silly things women do in the name of fashion. Aren’t bell bottoms back in?”
Ellie looked at Dr. Karr for support, but got nothing in return but a blank stare.
“No sane woman in Manhattan went to Tenjune looking like that. And if she did, she certainly didn’t get in. Did you ask Rachel’s friend whether she wore her hair this way when they went out?”
“She hasn’t come in for the official ID yet. We found Peck’s credit card in her front pocket. Got her DMV photo from there.”
“You need to get the friend down here.”
“Look, I let you come here because I figured if you wanted to waste your time, it was up to you. But don’t barge in here accusing me of missing the boat because I didn’t chat up the victim’s friends about whether she was having a bad hair day. This is the real world, sweetheart, not a scene out of Legally Blonde.”
Sweetheart. The same term of endearment that she’d actually appreciated this morning from Manny the coffee guy lost all appeal in this context. Ellie forced herself to maintain a level tone. “I apologize that it came across that way. There are other aspects to the Hart case that you would have no reason to know about. One of the angles we’re looking into is the possibility our killer’s a hair fetishist.”
“Isn’t your killer already in custody?”
“Yes, we have a suspect. But we’re also looking at some older cases. It’s just an angle. But, I’m telling you, as a woman, you’re going to find out that your victim’s hair did not look like that when she left the house with her friend.”
“Fine,” Dodge said, apparently mollified for the time being. “We’ll look into it. My guess is maybe she put it that way for some kinky schoolgirl fantasy that she and Hammond were acting out before the reunion went bad. Or maybe Hammond did it to her while he was coked up. What I do know is that we’ve got the right guy, and that he was high enough to have done just about anything. Take a look at these marks.”
He waved her over so they were standing by the victim’s head, looking at her body upside down. “See those cuts on her forehead? H-three. Hayden Holden Hammond. That cocksucker left us a calling card.”
Ellie could see the pattern now among what had originally looked like random lines. Three vertical marks. Four horizontal ones.
“One thing I will say,” Dr. Karr said, “is that these cuts to Rachel Peck could have been made-and I emphasize the words could have been-by the same knife used on Chelsea Hart. They’re of the same approximate width. My guess is a blade of about one and a half to two inches in both instances. Sharp, of course. We don’t know how long, since the cuts were inflicted by slicing into the skin rather than deep plunges.”
“Sounds like eighty percent of the knives you’d find in any kitchen,” Dodge said.
“Fair enough,” Karr said with a nod. “But I thought it was something I should share with you both. The other similarity, of course, is the manual strangulation, but you already knew that. As for anything else, that remains for the autopsy I am still waiting to begin.”
Ellie took the hint for what it was. “Thank you for holding off on my account. You’ve got photographs of her in the event I need them later?”
“Of course.”
She had begun to make her way to the exit when she heard Dr. Karr behind her.
“You and your brother might want to be careful in the coming days,” he said.
“How so?” she said, turning around.
“No black cats or walking under ladders.”
Ellie still didn’t understand.
“I’m sorry. That was in poor taste. It’s just that this young woman was found in the parking lot of the business where your brother works, and I seem to recall that the two of you found Chelsea Hart while you were out jogging. I guess your family is another thing the victims have in common.”
And, with that, Ellie looked down at Rachel Peck’s body and saw the marks on her forehead from a different angle and in a whole new light.
Dodge had seen H 3. Hayden Holden Hammond. But, right side up, the marks made an even clearer pattern: EH. Ellie Hatcher.
This woman had been dumped behind Vibrations, where Jess worked. Jess lived with her. He was sure to tell her about it. Chelsea Hart’s body was left at the turnaround point on her regular running route-the route she and Jess took every day, at least five days a week, and never missed two days in a row. She’d been killed the morning after they had skipped a day. Chelsea’s cell phone alarm had been set for 5:32 in the morning. It had been set to ensure they’d find the body.
As her own initials stared at her from the forehead of poor Rachel Peck, Ellie realized where she had seen the woman’s awkward hairstyle before: that stupid fifth-grade class photograph that Jess had plastered throughout her apartment last year. The one for which she’d attempted to cut her own hair. The one that had been published in so many of the reports about her childhood.
ELLIE BYPASSED THE CROWD at the courthouse elevators and took the stairs to the trial unit on the seventh floor. She was still trying to catch her breath when the receptionist informed her that Mr. Knight was on the fifteenth floor in the Homicide Investigation Unit with ADA Donovan. This time, she opted for the elevator.
Her cell buzzed during the wait. According to the screen, it was Peter. Again. Add that to the call she’d received in the car, and this was now four calls before ten-thirty in the morning. If he didn’t at least leave a message soon, he was about two attempts short of a serious conversation about restraining orders.
Ellie checked in with a receptionist at the Homicide Investigation Unit and was led to a conference room, where she found Simon Knight and Max Donovan seated across from each other at a cherry-veneer table, Rogan leaning against the matching credenza next to them.
“Excellent timing,” Knight said. “I’ve just gotten off the phone with Celina Symanski. She has agreed to meet you and Rogan at her father’s house in an hour. We figured she’d be more likely to break than Rodriguez or Susan Parker. We’ll work our way through the chain from there.”
“Very good,” Ellie said.
“Your partner told us you had a family emergency. I hope everything is under control.”
Rogan let out a small cough, and Ellie immediately filled in the blanks. Rogan was supposed to have informed Knight and Donovan about the body found at Vibrations, but he had held back in the event that the new case had nothing to do with their investigation. As he’d said, “We don’t give so-called exculpatory evidence to prosecutors.”
She was done with that tactic. She’d withheld her suspicions long enough. McIlroy had been onto something three years ago when he pulled those cold case files. When Chelsea Hart had been murdered, even Bill Harrington from his Long Island living room had sensed there was a connection. And now Rachel Peck’s body had convinced her.
But she was not like McIlroy. She was not going to keep this to herself. She might actually get somewhere if she trusted others to help. Maybe if McIlroy had worked his theory with a partner, Chelsea Hart and Rachel Peck would still be alive.
“My family emergency was a call from my brother. They found a body last night where he works, at a bar off the West Side Highway. The woman’s name was Rachel Peck. She was last seen at a club in the Meatpacking District, just three blocks away from Pulse. Like Chelsea Hart, she was manually strangled. She also had the same kinds of cuts across her face, and the ME says the same knife could have been used on both girls.”
“What the hell are you getting at?” Knight said. “We just spent the last hour with your partner coming back to terms with our case against Jake Myers. You’re telling me we’ve got another body to look at?”
“Another four, actually. A detective I worked with on a special assignment, Flann McIlroy-”
“I knew McIlroy,” Knight said.
“A few years ago, Flann was looking at three cold cases. All young women. All killed after late nights out.” She went on to explain Flann’s theory that they were all connected by a single killer who collected the victims’ hair, as well as how Chelsea Hart and Rachel Peck fit into the same pattern.
“Why are we just hearing about this?”
Knight must have noticed the look exchanged between Ellie and Rogan. He also understood its significance. “Ah, I see. Another one of those situations where the police think it’s better not to let the DAs know too much.”
“It sounded far-fetched until this morning,” Ellie said. “Rachel Peck changes that. We’ve now got the three cold cases, plus two girls in the last week. Same pattern. Five girls, all within ten years.”
“And I still don’t see the pattern,” Rogan said. “The victims don’t fit the same socioeconomic profile. We’ve got three murders all within a few years of each other, then we have nothing for six straight years. Now we’ve got two bodies in one week? Why the break? And the pattern with the hair isn’t really a pattern. He chops off all of Chelsea Hart’s hair, but leaves Rachel Peck’s.”
“I agree with you that Chelsea wasn’t living on the fringe the way the other girls were. But, remember, she had a habit of making up stories about herself. If she met someone at Luna, she could have made herself sound more like the other victims. And if whoever she met that night realized that Jordan McLaughlin might have caught him in the background of the picture taken at the bar, that would explain the very uncomfortable coincidence of her phone being stolen by a man who just happened to get killed himself the very next day.”
She had to back up to fill Knight and Donovan in on Darrell Washington’s murder and the discovery of merchandise in his apartment that was purchased with Jordan’s stolen credit card. She could tell they were having a hard time processing all of the new information.
“As for the hair, if he’s a fetishist, it’s not the process of cutting the hair that might be important to him. It’s having the hair itself after the girls are dead. It’s about having a souvenir. And look at the patterns within the patterns. The first of all the killings was Lucy Feeney. Her hair was hacked off, just like Chelsea Hart. The next was Robbie Harrington, where he cut only the bangs, just like Rachel Peck. The next was Alice Butler, where he may have somehow collected her hair after she had it cut at the hairdresser’s, or maybe he only snipped a few pieces. But, each time, he was more subtle as he gained more control, trying to obscure the similarities. Now, he reemerges, and follows the same pattern.”
“So why does he reemerge, as you put it?” Donovan asked. There was no skepticism in his tone, but Ellie wondered whether his formal demeanor was a sign of disappointment in her.
“Maybe he was out of state. Maybe in prison for something else. But there’s another possibility, and this really is where I’m afraid I may sound insane. This is my first week in the homicide unit. I got that assignment after working an extremely high-profile investigation with Flann McIlroy two months ago-his last case, as we all know.”
Their eyes were all on her. They were following her but had no idea where she was taking them.
“I’m the one who found Chelsea Hart. She was on my regular running path. The alarm on her cell phone was set to go off right around the time I usually pass that spot. Rachel Peck was left where my brother works. Take a look at the incisions on Rachel Peck’s forehead.” She dropped a printout of the photograph she’d snapped at the ME’s office on the conference room table. “Am I crazy?”
“Are those your initials?” Donovan asked.
“That’s what I’m wondering.”
Rogan exhaled loudly.
“And look at Rachel’s hair. There’s a picture of me from when I was ten years old where my hair looks just like that. It was on Dateline. It was in People magazine. I’m more than a little embarrassed by the number of people who’ve seen me with precisely this hairstyle.”
Rogan cut in. “We’ve got about half an hour before we’re supposed to meet Celina Symanski in Queens. Did you forget that we have evidence proving that Jake Myers bribed a man to give us a false confession? We have Jake Myers’s DNA on the victim. We know for a fact who killed Chelsea Hart.”
“Or else Jake Myers is innocent but wasn’t so confident he’d get acquitted,” Ellie said.
“You two are making my head hurt,” Knight said. “I’m trying to process the implications of what you’re saying, Hatcher. If we’ve got a serial on our hands, it’s someone with a beef against you?”
“As unsettling as that is, yes, that’s what I’m beginning to think.”
“Any ideas as to who that person could be?”
She shook her head.
“No, of course not. Plus, it’s someone who would have to know how to find the girl with the camera phone.”
“Jordan McLaughlin. Yes, I suppose that’s right.” She was realizing that she sounded even crazier than she’d been prepared for. “He’d have to know where Jordan was staying in the city, and then Darrell Washington could have followed them to the museum from there.”
Rogan shook his head.
“The two of you better go if you’re going to make it to Astoria,” Knight said.
“So that’s it? You’re just ignoring everything I said?”
“No, Detective, because that’s not how we work here. We’re going to look at it all. That’s what we have to do once something’s been brought to our attention, which is why it wasn’t raised with us earlier, I suspect. But first we need to nail down what Jake Myers did with his hundred thousand dollars. We can force the Mohegan Sun to pull video of Myers leaving with the chips if we have to, but my guess is, you can break the daughter without it. We’ll use her for leverage against Susan Parker. We then flip Parker to get another crack at Myers, and then maybe we’ll be in a better position to know whether he’s our man or not. Unless, of course, you think we have more attractive alternatives.”
“No, sir.”
“Very well. I’m sending Donovan with you. This woman needs to know that her boyfriend’s immunity deal on his drug case is in jeopardy because of this bullshit. If a six-year mandatory minimum scared them into a stunt like this, a heart-to-heart about the potential maximums might actually get us the truth. In the meantime, I have obstruction charges to file against Symanski. Until we know what the hell’s going on, I don’t want either of these men out of our sight.”
DONOVAN MUST HAVE SENSED from the silence in the elevator that Ellie and Rogan needed a word in private. As they were leaving the courthouse, he found his excuse.
“I need to hit the men’s room. Pull the car around, and I’ll meet you out front?”
Ellie spoke up as they made their way to the Crown Vic.
“You think I torpedoed you.”
“Nope. If anything, I sandbagged you. We agreed I’d tell them where you went and what you were working on, and I didn’t.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Honestly? I think you’ve got a wild imagination. Even if those cold cases had something to do with each other, I don’t think they’ve got anything to do with Chelsea Hart, or that girl you saw this morning. And I know for damn sure they don’t have anything to do with some personal beef against you.”
Rogan’s cell phone jingled. “Damn it,” he said, eyeing the screen. “It’s Eckels.”
“Yeah, Lou… Hold on, I’m pulling into traffic.” He held the phone against his palm. “I knew he’d bird-dog us,” he whispered to Ellie. “He already wants an update.”
And then Ellie listened with as much gratitude as she could muster as her partner, despite his personal feelings, tried his best not to make her sound crazy.
THEY WERE WAITING for Max Donovan at the curb in front of the courthouse when Ellie recognized the man crossing Centre Street. She watched as he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and flipped it open. A second later, her own phone vibrated.
“Un-fucking-believable.” She was out of the car before Rogan could ask for an explanation. She flipped open her phone. “I’m twenty feet behind you,” she said.
Peter Morse was smiling when he turned to greet her, but his expression changed once he saw her face.
“How many times do you plan on calling me? I told you last night I needed some space, and this is how you respond?”
“Wow. I had no idea you were this angry at me.”
“So now I’m the problem. You get to write a book about me. You get to mislead me about your plans. You apparently even get to surf the Net for other women. But when I say I need a break-and that’s all I asked for, was just some time and space-then I’m angry, bitchy Ellie. That’s really fair, Peter.”
“I just want to talk to you. This book is my chance to get somewhere as a writer. If you would just try to look at this from my perspective-”
“I can’t do that right now, okay? And I explained that to you last night.”
“I hate the way we left things. Can we please just sit down and have a conversation about this?”
“No, we can’t. We can talk when we’re both ready. And your calling me over and over again does not help get me to a place where I want to talk things through with you.”
He raked his fingers through his hair, clearly frustrated.
“Damn it. I can’t believe I have to ask you what I’m about to ask you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“My boss is a fucking asshole. Kittrie wanted me to call you this morning. I was trying to get around it, and he figured out we’re having some problems. So now he’s taking some perverse pleasure in my discomfort.”
“Jesus. You’re about to ask me about the case, aren’t you?”
He pressed his lips together.
“Go ahead and spit it out.”
“There was a body found last night at some strip club on the West Side Highway.” It dawned on Ellie that Peter hadn’t spent enough time with her brother even to know where he worked. “The girl’s friend said she wandered off from Tenjune. I’m covering it, but Kittrie wants to write a separate piece. It’s those cold cases you mentioned the other night. The ones Flann McIlroy was digging around in.”
Ellie felt a vein in her head starting to throb. She knew she shouldn’t have mentioned those cases to Peter. She shouldn’t have called George Kittrie. He wouldn’t have connected the dots on his own.
“He’s going to speculate about a connection?”
Peter nodded. “He’s working on it now. The three old cases. Chelsea Hart. Rachel Peck from this morning. I really hate this, Ellie, but he’s my boss, and you know what an ass he is.”
“Tell him you were a good boy who did precisely what he asked of you, and I said ‘No goddamn comment.’”
CELINA SYMANSKI OPENED the front door of her father’s house before they had a chance to knock. She stepped aside, and they treated the movement as an invitation to come in.
She took a seat in the middle of a small worn sofa in the center of the living room, leaving only a single recliner for her three guests. Ellie helped herself to the spot. She was the obvious candidate to play the good cop in this scenario.
This was Ellie’s first opportunity to view the woman without her coat. She wore a hip-length cable-knit sweater and leggings. Both were stretched tight across her belly. She was an otherwise small woman. Young, probably early twenties. Light hair. Fair skin. Ellie’s best guess was that the baby would be coming in a couple of months.
“I’m Detective Hatcher. This is my partner, Detective Rogan. Max Donovan is from the district attorney’s office. I think you know why we’re here, Celina.”
She shrugged.
“Your father’s not a murderer.”
“I never said he was.”
“No, but he did. And he did it to protect you. Now it’s time for you to step up and protect him.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Celina said.
So much for guilt.
“What your father’s done is going to be all for nothing. We know about the payoff. You won’t be able to spend a nickel of that money. In the meantime, Mr. Donovan can tell you about the potential criminal charges.”
Donovan uncrossed his arms and took a step toward Celina, as if preparing to cross-examine a witness. “We’re filing charges against your father this afternoon, not for murder, as he intended, but for obstruction of justice. We also intend to reinstate drug charges against Nick Warden and Jaime Rodriguez.”
That got her attention.
“See,” Ellie said, “we also know about the father of your child.”
“He made a deal,” Celina said. “The case got dismissed.”
“It was dismissed,” Donovan explained, “without prejudice as a condition of Nick Warden’s cooperation agreement to testify against Jake Myers. But with evidence that Warden was a part of a conspiracy to pay your father to undermine our case against Myers, I can get a judge to set aside the agreement. That means I can go after Rodriguez.”
He turned to Ellie, and she took it as her cue to jump in. “And once your father, Jaime, and Nick Warden are codefendants for conspiracy to obstruct justice, who do you think’s going to get the plea deal then, Celina? The convicted sex offender and janitor who stabbed a cop, the brown guy with a rap sheet and two prior drug pops, or the rich white hedge fund manager?”
Celina sniffled and wiped away a tear, and Ellie knew that one more push should do it.
“That leaves you and your baby alone,” she continued. “No father for either of you.”
Celina stared at her with wide eyes. Ellie saw her upper lip quiver. One more push.
“And that’s assuming the DA’s office doesn’t come after you, too. If you were an active participant in this, your kid might be born into the foster care system.”
Celina placed her face in her hands and began crying. The words were hard to decipher between the sobs, but Ellie got the gist of it. Her father. Her baby’s father. Her fiancé. Poor them. Poor Celina.
Donovan cut in, and Ellie realized that Knight had made the right call in sending him. Pressure from a cop was one thing, but when it came time for cooperation, nothing worked better than a chat about the power of a prosecutor to determine who went to prison and for how long.
“I’ll be in a better position to help everyone involved if we know exactly what happened. At the end of the day, what we really care about is catching Chelsea Hart’s killer. All the rest of this is a distraction. The longer the distraction, the heavier the sentence my office is going to be looking for.”
This time when Celina spoke, her words were clear.
“What do you need to know?”
SUSAN PARKER LOOKED BROKEN. As if a bulb had burned out. The batteries had gone dead. A processor had failed.
Ellie and Rogan were used to hitting defendants with the news that, despite their cagiest plans, they’d been busted. Sitting in Parker’s office, however, Max Donovan was the one doing the talking.
Ellie was almost positive that what Donovan was asking of Susan Parker was wildly unethical. She represented Nick Warden, not Jake Myers. Pressuring her to convince her client to approach Jake Myers on their behalf was definitely not kosher. But Donovan had worded his request in a cagey way, so Ellie assumed he knew what he was doing. More importantly, if the DA’s office didn’t have a problem with it, she certainly wasn’t going to object.
“We don’t have all day here. Are you going to talk to your client or not?”
Parker’s blank stare unfroze with a blink. The parts were turning back on. “You know you’ve created a conflict of interest for me now. I should withdraw from my representation of Nick Warden so he can retain separate counsel.”
“You weren’t so worried about conflicts of interest when you helped broker a deal for Myers to pay off Leon Symanski to give us a false confession.”
Celina had walked them through each step in the sequence of events. After the drug bust at Pulse, Rodriguez had phoned his girlfriend from the jail with the bad news. Distribution of an eight-ball of meth. With his record, he wouldn’t be out until their kid was in first grade. She spent the night crying on her father’s sofa.
By dawn, Leon had conjured up a way to solve his daughter’s problems. He called Nick Warden’s lawyer and proposed a deal. Nick could give the government what they wanted. He could flip on his friend with no remorse, because the so-called real killer would be caught within days. In return, Symanski needed a hundred grand and a walk for the father of his grandchild.
Ellie still didn’t understand how a daughter could allow her father to make that kind of a sacrifice, but she’d long ago ceased trying to understand the inner workings of other families.
“I didn’t broker anything,” Parker said. “I have an obligation to my client to convey communications made to me in the scope of my representation of him.”
“Not when those communications make you a coconspirator,” Donovan said.
“I had no knowledge of the agreement between my client and Rodriguez. You offered my client a cooperation deal, and he was willing to take it. It is not a lawyer’s responsibility to probe a client’s motivations.”
“Give me a break,” Donovan said. “The handover went down in this very office.”
According to Celina, the plan had been her father’s idea, but Parker had overseen the details of its execution. Once the charges against Rodriguez were dismissed and he was freed from custody, he had gone directly from the jail to Parker’s office. Jake Myers had been waiting for him with a hundred thousand dollars in casino chips and a red chandelier earring for Symanski to plant in his house.
“I am not aware of that,” she said, shaking her head. “As you already said, I went to college with Jake. He came here to tell me he wasn’t involved in that girl’s death. Jaime Rodriguez showed up-uninvited, without an appointment-to thank me for getting the deal that he benefited from. If they passed something between them when I stepped out of the office-”
Donovan didn’t bother masking his ridicule. “Are you really ready to sell that story to the partners around here?” He glanced around Parker’s office. “Because I’m picturing you on the street within an hour, juggling all of your personal belongings in a cardboard box, with an ethics complaint brought by this firm against you with the bar. Pushing the boundaries for your white-collar clients is one thing in a place like this, but it won’t seem so hunky-dory when it’s a murder case at stake. The only way to distance yourself from the dirty laundry is to throw it out yourself. They’ll make sure you’re disbarred.”
Parker held Donovan’s stare. She broke first.
“What do you want?”
“I want Jake Myers to take a polygraph.”
“And how am I supposed to get in touch with Jake?”
Once Parker had agreed to represent Warden, no court in America would have allowed her to simultaneously represent Jake Myers. Any attempt by Parker to contact Myers directly would show up in the jail’s records, and she’d then have to explain to Willie Wells why she was contacting his client without his consent.
“You talk to Nick Warden,” Donovan explained. “He visits Jake in custody. Tells him there’s a problem. Convinces him to take the polygraph.”
“As long as you understand he can’t make Jake do anything. And I can’t make Nick do anything.”
“I understand.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll call him now. This all stays in this room? The firm doesn’t hear about any of it?”
“You have my word,” Donovan said.
Ellie and Rogan nodded in silent agreement.
For the second time in a week in this same office, a conspiracy had been struck. The first had been to concoct a lie. Now they were conspiring to get the truth.
FIVE MINUTES AFTER Nick Warden visited Jake Myers in custody, Myers called Willie Wells and fired him as his attorney. His next call was to Susan Parker, seeking her representation for the purpose of contacting Simon Knight and offering to take a polygraph examination to clear his name. By the time that call came in, Knight had already lined up the polygrapher.
They all knew, of course, that the so-called lie detecting machine was far less reliable than its name might suggest. The machines were only as good as their operators and, even at their best, were not entirely accurate. But the intangible value of a polygraph transcended the questionable science.
A defendant’s willingness to sit for one said something in itself, especially if he managed to make it through an entire examination without breaking into a spontaneous confession. And a good polygrapher’s opinion, while no guarantee, would do a lot to confirm the feeling in Ellie’s gut that Jake Myers-although guilty of other wrongs-was no murderer.
The process was painstaking, with the most important components transpiring before Myers was even hooked up to the machine. It started with an open-ended debriefing in which Myers was free to state his version of the facts-at his pace, in his own words. Then he was subjected to detailed questioning from Ellie, Rogan, and Donovan, until all three were satisfied they had asked every possible question that might trip Myers up.
Only after the conversation had been exhausted did the polygrapher hook Myers up to the instruments that would measure his physiological responses during innocuous inquiries such as “Is your name Jake Myers?” and money questions like “Did you cause the death of Chelsea Hart?” By the time the polygrapher announced that he had detected no signs of deception, Ellie could already replay the scene between Chelsea Hart and Jake Myers in her head.
“Holy shit. What the fuck did you give me?”
When Chelsea had snorted the line of whatever Jake had passed her in the VIP lounge, she had assumed it was cocaine. She’d tried it twice before and thought she could handle it, but tonight something was different. Whatever the powder had been, Jake and his friend had done a lot more of it than she had.
“Just a little speed. It’s great for a second wind.” It was meth, actually, but he knew a lot of girls freaked out about the name.
Jake placed his arms around Chelsea’s waist and pulled her closer on the dance floor. She treated him to a little grind and didn’t object when he slipped his hands beneath the back of her shirt. His palms felt good against her bare skin, but she knew it was time for her to wrap things up before they went too far. She had promised Stefanie she’d be just behind them, and she knew what a worrywart her friend could be.
Chelsea pulled playfully on Jake’s skinny black tie and leaned in so he could hear her over the music. “I hate to be a tease, but it’s time for me to go.”
He tried to persuade her to stay, just as they both knew that he would. She looked at her watch. Just past three a.m. “Look at it this way,” she said. “You let me leave now, and you’ve got an entire hour to line up one of these little sluts to go home with you. Waste all your time on me and, well, you and your friend there are on your own-”
She pushed up against him again.
“Damn, you’re hot,” he said, kissing her neck and fingering the top button of her blouse.
“Occasionally. Want me to pick out a girl for you, or are you going to be fine on your own?”
Jake smirked and shook his head. “Let me at least walk you out.” He took her hand and led her from the club. “Do you have a car?”
Town cars and limos were parked and double-parked outside. “Yeah, right. I used my entire student loan check to pay for a car service while we were in New York this week.”
“My car’s in a lot in SoHo,” Jake said. “Nick’s driver’s waiting out here somewhere. Let me just run in and check-”
They both knew a ride in his friend’s car would start something they’d finish en route to her hotel. She was tempted but decided against it. She’d been faithful to Mark the entire trip and didn’t want to mess that up now.
“Really, I’m fine with a cab.”
Jake walked to the curb and tried to hail a taxi, but four yellow cabs passed them by, already taken, their rooftop medallion numbers unlit.
“I’ll be fine,” Chelsea finally said.
He ignored her and remained in the street, one arm raised above his head.
“Tick tock, Jake Gyllenhaal. You’re wasting that final hour. The other players are locking down all the pretty girls at Pulse as we speak.”
He touched her hair and leaned in for a kiss before thanking her for the fun and turning away. As Chelsea watched him return to the club, she still felt his lips against hers and wondered if it was a feeling of regret about turning down the invitation to go further.
Five more taxis passed her by before one finally stopped. She crawled into the back seat and shut the door. “The Hilton at Rockefeller Center, please. Fifty-third Street at Sixth Avenue.”
The cab rolled a few feet and then stopped. “You have cash?”
“Excuse me?”
“You have cash, right?”
“No. I’ll pay by Visa.” Chelsea had spent her final bills on that last Angel’s Tip at the bar. She was so messed up she’d forgotten about the free liquor in the VIP lounge.
“No credit cards.”
Chelsea knocked on the machine installed on the partition in front of her. “What’s this thing for if you can’t take a credit card?”
“It’s broken. Only cash tonight.”
“I’ll pay you when I get there-my friends have money, I promise.”
“I do not run a loan company, miss. I will not drive you if you do not have the money.”
“Well, I’m not getting out of the cab. What do you think about that?”
“The meter is still running, miss, and you don’t have any money. You need to find another taxi.”
Chelsea was startled by a knock against the window. It was Jake.
“My savior,” she said, rolling down the window. “I don’t have any cash, and this asshole won’t take my fucking credit card.”
“He wouldn’t do that to you, now, would you, kind sir?”
“Tell him, kind sir,” Chelsea said. “Tell him how you want to strand a girl here on the streets of New York City all by herself.”
“You need to get your drunk friend out of my car,” the driver said.
Jake touched the tip of his chin, as if pondering the situation. “This is quite a predicament, isn’t it?”
Chelsea knew Stefanie hadn’t seen the appeal, but this guy really was incredible. The hair and clothes were too much, but the smile-those lazy eyes and the softness around his mouth-were irresistible.
“Can I borrow twenty bucks?” she asked. “I mean, I know you’re hurting for money and all, so I’ll be sure to mail it to you from Indiana.”
“I tell you what. Get out of that cab and stay with me a little longer. I’ll make sure you get home.”
“I told you I have to go. My flight’s in, like, three hours.”
“Fine, here’s your money.” He removed a hundred-dollar bill from the money clip in his pocket. Chelsea reached through the window to take it, but Jake snatched his hand back. “As my father always says, there’s no such thing as a handout. You’ve got to earn this money, young lady.”
Chelsea tilted her head to one side. “And what would your father propose I do to earn it?”
“That is it,” the driver said. “Get out of my cab.” He opened his door, and Chelsea knew it was only a matter of seconds before he was going to pull her physically from the car.
She and Jake were still laughing by the time they made their way to the entry stairwell of a basement apartment around the corner.
Chelsea felt the cold concrete against her exposed toes as she dropped to her knees and tried not to think about Mark. This was just a onetime thing. Spring break. New York. Jake Gyllenhaal. It was all a fantasy, and tomorrow, it would be as if nothing happened.
Jake was touching her hair softly at first, but by the time he got close, he was gripping her head firmly with his fingers, guiding her movements. He felt the wire hook in her right earlobe come loose. He did not want it to fall to the ground. Not now. Not at this moment. She might stop what she was doing. He slipped the earring into his pocket and replaced his hand on the back of her head.
When she had finished, he helped her to her feet and gave her a quick peck on the mouth. He loved girls who swallowed, but that didn’t mean he needed to put his tongue in there afterward. She laughed when he brushed the dust from the knees of her pants.
“Where’s my hundred bucks?” she said.
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll take Nick’s car.”
“Don’t you be ridiculous. Give me my money, or my pimp’s coming after you.”
He slipped a hundred-dollar bill into her purse. “Let’s get you a cab before your pimp says I’m monopolizing you.”
“If I can turn tricks in doorways, I’m perfectly capable of hailing my own cab. And now I even have money to pay. You better get back.”
“You sure?”
“Go on. I mean it.”
He kissed her one more time before walking away. He was nearly back to Pulse when he placed his hands in his coat pockets to warm them. He felt the tiny glass beads of her earring. He thought of turning back to find her, but didn’t want to spoil the perfect ending.
ROGAN LOOKED LIKE he’d just seen William Shatner walk through 100 Centre Street in a hula skirt.
“You figured you were innocent, so it was your God-given right to offer up another innocent man to take your place in prison?” Rogan was still coming to terms with Myers’s newfound experimentation with honesty-and he wasn’t happy about it.
Jake Myers stared at his hands. He was seated in the same District Attorney’s conference room, at the same table, where, just yesterday, Jaime Rodriguez had told them about a club janitor who might be of interest.
Susan Parker was a sleazebag of a lawyer, but she was at least trying to protect her new client from Rogan’s outrage. “Give the guy a break. You had him on a murder he knew he didn’t commit, and he freaked out.”
Donovan rose from the table and paced their side of the room. “You could have told him to come clean, Susan. Instead, you orchestrated this.”
Jake looked up from his hands. “You were going to send me to fucking prison for the rest of my life. What was I supposed to do?”
“You could have told us the truth that first night we talked to you at Pulse,” Ellie said.
“Fine. So kill me. I made a mistake. A bunch of cops barged into the club and started asking questions about some girl I got a little crazy with. I’d had a couple drinks-and more, as you now know-and I flipped, okay? I didn’t see how anything I had to say could even matter. But then all I kept hearing about was the evidence you had against me. The cabdriver. My DNA. The time of death. I had nothing. For once, I did a decent thing-I went straight home that night so I wouldn’t have to put up with Nick begging me for the details. I had no one to vouch for me.”
“Then along came Symanski,” Ellie said, “ready to sell his last remaining months to take care of his daughter and unborn grandchild.”
Jake chewed on his lower lip. Without all the hair gel and ridiculous clothing, she could see how Chelsea Hart had found him attractive.
“When Susan first called me, it sounded crazy. But the guy was dying anyway, and he came to me. This wasn’t my idea. He wanted the money. And when Susan told me he had a prior rape conviction, I figured, better him than me. Once I remembered about the earring, I knew we could use that so you’d believe him.”
“It didn’t dawn on you that the person you were helping the most was Chelsea Hart’s actual killer?” Ellie said.
He stared at his hands again. “I wasn’t thinking about that.”
“You were only thinking about yourself.”
“Maybe,” he said quietly, before glancing up at her. “But it’s not like you were looking for anyone other than me, were you?”
Rogan leaned across the table and pointed a finger at Myers. “Don’t put this on us.”
Myers slumped into his chair. Any remaining bravado was gone as he looked to Max Donovan with desperate eyes. “You believe me, right?”
As Ellie scanned the faces in the room, she had no doubt that, at that moment, they all, in fact, believed him.
“DAMN IT.” Simon Knight slammed his fist against his desk. “So now I have to explain to the mayor’s office why Jake Myers is a free man?”
Donovan started to explain that they’d returned a protesting Myers to custody to face obstruction charges, but Knight waved him off.
“Are we absolutely positive about this? Why did Symanski run if the entire point was to take the blame? The guy stabbed a cop, for Christ’s sake.”
Cut, Ellie thought, looking at the white gauze. “According to his daughter, Symanski panicked. The plan sounded fine in theory, but when we showed up at his house, the thought of living his last months in prison got to him. He figured that as long as we found the earring, Jake would get sprung even if he got away. And once I had him cornered in the alley, he decided he’d rather die right then and there. Suicide by cop.”
“So where are we?” Knight asked. “We start from scratch?”
“We’ve got more than you think. We know we’ve got someone who started killing in the late nineties, almost ten years ago.”
Knight furrowed his brow. “Why are you so sure Lucy Feeney was his first kill?”
“There’s no way to be sure until we find the asshole, but it does fit a pattern. What ties the girls together is the collection of their hair. The victims are all grabbed after going out to the clubs, but my guess is that’s not part of anything special to him. It’s opportunistic. It allows him to find girls when they’re vulnerable. It allows him to hide himself by preying upon that vulnerability in a city where a lot of girls have bad things happen to them at four in the morning. So it’s really about the killing and the hair. Lucy Feeney was strangled and also stabbed. She also had her hair blatantly hacked off, like Chelsea Hart.”
“A total release,” Knight said.
“Exactly. No restraint. No fear yet that his MO will be detected. With Robbie Harrington, he strangles her, but does not couple it with stabbing. He’s more discreet about the hair, limiting himself to the bangs. He doesn’t want police to see the pattern. With Alice Butler, he switches things up again. He stabs her eighteen times. There’s some slight bruising on her neck, but he doesn’t strangle her. Something about the fact that she got her hair cut short set him off, but my guess is that he still took a souvenir, either by somehow collecting some of the clippings from the salon when she had it cut, or snipping off some small pieces after he killed her-so subtly that no one noticed.”
“Then we have a six-year break before Chelsea Hart,” Rogan said.
“Exactly, and six years is a long time. By now, he’s no longer worried about law enforcement detecting a pattern. He does what he truly wants. And after six years of controlling himself, he’s got a lot of pent-up violence. He strangles her, cuts her up, and hacks off all her hair.”
“Just like Lucy Feeney,” Donovan said.
Ellie nodded. “That’s why I’m fairly confident that we’re going to find out that Lucy Feeney was his first. Or if he did kill before, it was in another series preceded by another long break, or it was outside the New York City area.”
“So why the hiatus?” Simon Knight leaned back in his office chair and steepled his fingers beneath his chiseled chin.
She shrugged. “He could have been in prison for something else. He could have been in some kind of long-term relationship that somehow satisfied his urges. His life could have changed in a way where he no longer needed to kill to feel satisfied.”
William Summer had stopped murdering women in Wichita around the same time he earned a promotion at his job working private security at a gated community in the suburbs. After his arrest, the residents reported a pattern of abuses of Summer’s power, such as it was. Armchair psychologists had concluded that the new responsibilities in his job had satisfied his egotistical need for control in a way that only murder previously could.
“But now he’s back,” Rogan said, “and that apparently has something to do with you. He dumps Chelsea Hart where you’ll find her, setting her cell phone alarm for added assurances. And he dumps Rachel Peck outside Vibrations, knowing you’ll get wind of it from your brother.”
It felt good to hear her partner articulate the theory aloud. No cynicism. No sarcasm.
“And he messes with Rachel’s hair to send a message to me. This is where we’re way past starting from scratch.”
“Because, as lovable as you are, only so many people can be jonesing to fuck with you this hard.”
“Or one would hope,” Ellie said. “I’ve only been on the job five years, and until a couple of months ago, I was working fraud cases. I only got major time on a handful of creeps, and most of those are still in the pen.”
Simon Knight followed the implications. “So we need to look at your old cases and look for enemies who went to prison after the Alice Butler murder, who recently got sprung.”
“There’s a shot. I’ve been thinking about this, though, and there’s another possibility.”
Ellie paused, making sure she had their complete attention.
“Our guy could be a cop.” She watched the surprise register on all three faces, particularly Rogan’s. With him, it was more than hearing the unexpected. It was the shock of a slap to the face. “I don’t like this theory. At all. But I keep coming back to the timing. I got my assignment to the homicide unit a month ago. I was actually working in the squad for only a week before Chelsea Hart turned up on my running path. He wants to engage us. He wants us to know that after hiding his pattern for so long, he’s coming out to play. And it seems like the person he really wants to play with is me-and I was warned going in that other cops would resent my assignment to homicide.”
“The coming out to play is what’s been tripping me up,” Rogan said. “He bobs and weaves, denying himself the cutting that seems to define his MO. But now he drops a billboard in your front yard.”
“So the question is, Why is he upping the ante after getting away with it for so long? One possibility is, it’s a bad guy I put away in the past. But it’s awfully coincidental that when they get sprung from custody, I just happen to be in the homicide unit, where I can catch the new cases. Another possibility is that we’ve got a cop who stopped for some reason but has now decided to kill again as a way to challenge me.”
“He was clean as a whistle with Chelsea Hart,” Rogan said.
“Right. The only physical evidence we found on her pointed us to Jake Myers. One of the lead detectives on Rachel Peck’s case tells me there’s no physical evidence with her, at least so far. And I’ve seen the files on Feeney, Harrington, and Butler-no blood, no semen, no hairs. This guy is good. And he knows the pattern of city homicides. He knows he can obscure the serial nature of his murders by committing them at night, against drunken party girls, who go down in the books as unsolveds-lessons to be learned by others.”
“Any suggestions on where to look in the NYPD for a person like this?” Knight asked.
“Don’t look at me,” Rogan said. “Hatcher can attest that I was home at bed with my woman when Chelsea Hart was killed. She woke my ass up.”
“Well, we can apparently exclude Rogan and myself. That leaves approximately thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight cops.”
“Do I look like I’m in the mood for jokes right now?” Knight asked. He certainly did not.
Ellie adopted a more somber tone. “I suppose we start by looking at anyone who’s been trying to get into homicide and feels passed over. I think we’ve also got to look at the current homicide squad. They’ve got reason to resent me, plus it’s possible they got wind of Flann snooping around a few years ago, and that would explain why the murders stopped until after his death.”
“So now what?” Donovan asked.
She was about to set out a process for going forward, but Simon Knight interrupted her.
“You all go home for a break, and I call the commisioner. We take a new look at everything tomorrow with an expanded task force, most likely with the assistance of the FBI.”
“Wait a second-” Ellie’s words cut into Rogan’s louder statement of “Absolutely not.”
“We can do this, sir,” she said.
“And we don’t need a break to regroup tomorrow,” Rogan added. “This is our case, and we want to work it.”
“You will work it, but the question of how and with what other personnel is a decision well above your pay grade, and well outside the boundaries of this office. The Chelsea Hart case was being worked out of this office’s Homicide Investigation Unit, with you in my command, because an arrest had been made and we were doing everything with an eye toward the prosecution of Jake Myers. Now that we’re all agreed that we have no murder case against Myers, the two of you go back to police command, where they can figure out what to do with this-I think it’s safe to say-clusterfuck.”
Ellie could see precisely where Knight was headed. He would tell the mayor and the police commissioner that his office had done everything it could with the case that had been given to them so hastily, but had no choice but to dismiss the charges once they had exonerated Jake Myers. Without a suspect, Knight was free to extract himself from the mayhem. Just as Rogan had warned, Knight cared more about himself than he ever would about them.
“No offense, sir, but I hope you’ll point out to police command that Rogan and I deserve to run this. I’m the one the killer wants to engage. The more he’s getting what he wants on that front, the more likely he’s going to do something that will lead us to him.”
“The counterargument, Detective, is that the more he gets to push your buttons, the more dangerous he becomes. We know for a fact that the Daily Post’s break of this story is imminent. Who knows what kind of reaction that could trigger from him.”
“We need to warn people,” she said. She did not want to look at herself in the mirror tomorrow morning if the killer claimed another victim while she was taking Simon Knight’s mandated “break.”
“I don’t want to do anything that validates the Daily Post’s story,” Knight said. “It’s premature.”
“We don’t need to validate the story. Any casual news watcher is going to at least wonder if there’s a connection between the deaths of Chelsea Hart and Rachel Peck. Even without confirming that we’re looking at a single killer, we can contact the clubs and bars. Make sure they’re watching girls, warning them about wandering off alone.”
“They’re not the only ones who need a warning,” Knight said. “I’m sure you’re smart enough to have figured out where this game might be taking this man.”
The thought had more than crossed her mind. A killer who came out of the shadows to announce his existence was taking a risk of getting caught. And if he was willing to get caught, there had to be a payoff. Maybe besting her at a cat-and-mouse game would be enough for him, but she suspected that this was all just a warm-up.
“I can take care of myself.” The words didn’t come out as confidently as she’d intended.
“I’m sure that’s true,” Knight said. “But if I were you, I’d stay away from dance clubs for the time being.”
AN HOUR LATER, she and Rogan had drafted a press release that passed muster with both Knight and the department’s Public Information Office, and had forwarded it to every precinct in Manhattan to hand-distribute to the city’s hot spots. Ellie was impressed that Donovan had stuck it out with them, even going so far as to take a stack of the announcements with him to post around his NoLIta neighborhood.
By the time they finally called it a night, it was eight o’clock. She hadn’t eaten anything since the Danish she’d bought from Manny that morning. She felt guilty thinking about food, but she couldn’t help it. As if pushing her over the edge, her stomach let out a little rumble in the courthouse elevator.
Donovan placed his hand flat on his stomach. “Was that me or you?”
“Nice of you to try to take the blame, but that was all me.”
“I could use something to eat myself. Are you guys up for a bite?”
Ellie looked to Rogan.
“The man said take a break. I’m taking a break and going home for a serious sleep session. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He walked away, leaving Ellie the privacy to accept or reject Donovan’s invitation on her own.
“Food sounds good.”
“FIVE DEATHS, TEN YEARS,” read the headline on the Daily Post’s home page. The photograph accompanying the teaser was a shot of Rachel Peck. She looked more glamorous in the picture than the man had ever seen her-even more than the night he’d taken her off the streets of the Meatpacking District. His guess was that it was a publicity shot taken for a literary agent. From what he could tell, publishers cared about those kinds of things these days.
He clicked on the headline and read the full text of the article at the jump. All of the basics were covered: Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, Alice Butler, Chelsea Hart, and Rachel Peck. All wild. All drunk. All dead, snippets of their hair stolen as souvenirs.
The reporting was remarkably thorough, given that Rachel’s body had just been discovered that morning. It was quite a scoop for the paper. Posting the story on the Web site gave them credit for breaking the news first, but they’d sell a lot of papers in the morning with a more detailed version.
He moved from the sofa onto the floor, slid the ottoman away, and pulled up the wooden tiles, followed by the piece of particleboard. He removed five plastic bags-two new, three discolored with age. Lucy’s and Chelsea’s bags contained the most hair. Robbie’s and Rachel’s were less full. Alice’s held just a few snips. How tempted he had been to retrieve all of those beautiful locks she’d chopped off. He’d caught sight of her walking into the salon and had watched while the hairdresser clipped away. But he hadn’t dared to walk in, let alone attempt to pilfer the piles of hair on the salon floor.
Lucy, Robbie, Alice, Chelsea, and Rachel. Thanks to the Daily Post, he was no longer the only one to know that their stories belonged together.
Now just one last victim remained.
MAX DIRECTED THE CAB to the Flatiron district, and then led the way to Sala One Nine, a Spanish restaurant on Nineteenth Street.
“I hope you like tapas,” he said, opening the heavy wooden door to a red restaurant with exposed brick and stone, lit by small tea candles scattered throughout the room.
“I love anything that involves getting to eat seven different kinds of food in a single sitting.”
The restaurant was already filled with hungry customers. Rather than cope with a forty-five minute wait, they accepted the host’s invitation to eat at the bar, where Max ordered a pitcher of sangria and some queso and croquetas to get them started.
This was their first chance to be alone since their coffee that wasn’t quite a coffee had ended the previous night. The transition from their official roles to what was presumably a date was not an easy one for either of them. Ellie found herself wanting to talk about the case, and apparently Max had questions of his own.
“So, tell me if this is none of my business, but I picked up on a kind of secret language between you and Rogan today.”
“Nothing secret. We’re still getting into the groove of being partners.”
“From an outsider’s perspective, you seem to have found the rhythm pretty quickly. I could tell he was the one who was resistant to let Knight and me in, but the two of you seemed to work it out without even exchanging words.”
“We exchanged words,” Ellie said, flashing back to the scene in the car while they’d been waiting for Donovan. “You just weren’t there to hear them.”
“I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been doing this a few years now, and you’re not like most of the cops I’ve met.”
“Being a girl type person is still enough to stand out in the NYPD.”
“It’s more than that. I don’t know. You were pre-law at some point, right? Do you ever regret not seeing it through?”
Ellie had come across this reaction before. Cops were supposed to be simple-minded, blue-collar traditionalists. She’d gone to college. She lived in Manhattan. Her last boyfriend was an investment banker. She even used big words on occasion.
When people said she didn’t seem like a cop, it often said more about their stereotypes of police than anything having to do with Ellie. The investment banker, for example, had continually asked her when she was going to “get over” being a cop. Bill’s refusal to accept that she wasn’t too good for her job was one of the reasons she lived on her own now. She hoped she wasn’t going to have the same problem with Max.
“When you grow up around here, people are doctors and lawyers and corporate executives. But my father was a cop, and my mother’s a bookkeeper. The neighbor to our left was a plumber. The one on the right worked graveyards at Boeing. Being from Wichita, it never dawned on me that I would need to apologize to anyone for being a cop.”
Donovan set his sangria down and braced his palms against the bar. “Okay, let’s clear up a couple of things. One, I grew up around here, but it was in Kew Gardens, where my father’s still a shoe salesman, and my mother was a dental hygienist. When I told my dad I was turning down a six-digit salary so I could be a prosecutor, he acted more like I was on the other side of an indictment, begging for bail money. So as far as I’m concerned, no one who loves their job ever has to apologize to anyone.”
“I’m so sorry. I just get so used to-”
“No explanation necessary. I should have been more clear about what I meant.”
“You mean you weren’t challenging me to an I-grew-up-poorer-than-you-did contest?” Ellie could still feel the red in her cheeks.
“You’re not like most of the cops I know because you don’t seem to have the same kind of us-versus-them mentality.”
“Ah, well, that’s an easy one,” she said, relieved by the shift in the conversation. “I don’t see the point in any of that. All I care about is getting the work done.”
“And when you were pre-law, did you ever think about being a prosecutor?”
“I like being a cop. I like the directness of it. You’re there from the very beginning. You get to talk firsthand to witnesses and victims and suspects. Your instincts shape the investigation from day one. If I’m going to do law enforcement, I want to do it as a cop. When I thought about being a lawyer, I was in it so I wouldn’t have to deal with the dark, dreary, and depressing shit my father thought about day in and day out. I was in it for the money.”
“So you’re saying I’ve got the worst of both worlds.”
“No offense.”
The truth was, Ellie had wondered a few times in the last two days whether perhaps she was better suited to the district attorney’s office. Where Eckels saw her youth and enthusiasm as hurdles to be surmounted, Knight had seen a dream witness. Dan Eckels and people like him were always going to run police departments, and she would always be butting heads with them. But with Simon Knight, it had seemed like it was all about cutting through the bullshit and getting the work done. She could nail down murder cases for trial without being front and center, on the news, and in books written by ex-boyfriends.
But tonight, when the case against Jake Myers had collapsed, Knight had shown his true colors. He did what he needed to cover his ass with the police commissioner and the mayor’s office. He was talking about a possible task force. Even FBI involvement.
And she had responded just as Rogan had. Possessive. Territorial. Knight had shown his true colors, but so had she. And hers were bluer than she liked to acknowledge.
Her true colors also made her the kind of cop who couldn’t stop talking about work.
“So do you think Myers was right?” she asked.
“To hire some guy at death’s door to take the rap for him? Uh, no, I’m pretty sure in any version of morality, that wouldn’t count as right.”
“No, I mean about us having tunnel vision. We all wanted it to be him. It gave us an arrest. A suspect. A trial. The mayor’s office was happy.”
“I’ve known you three days, and I can already tell you’re a good cop. If he’d told you the truth, you would have fought like hell against everyone to make sure we did the right thing.”
“Maybe,” she said, popping another croqueta in her mouth. “Maybe if he’d come clean Monday night. If he’d told the truth when we first questioned him at Pulse. But once he lied about everything-”
“No jury would’ve believed him,” Donovan said, “that’s for sure.”
“I don’t think I would have either.”
THEY HAD JUST ORDERED another four little plates to share when the television above the bar cut from a break in the Knicks game to a teaser for the night’s local news.
“Tonight at eleven.” At the top of the telecast was a scaffolding collapse on the Upper West Side. A window washer had plummeted thirty-six floors and survived.
Plus, a local newspaper drops an Internet bombshell. Is a serial killer targeting Manhattan’s elite nightclubs? And why isn’t the NYPD telling you about this killer and his shocking MO? The paper promises more details tomorrow morning, but we’ll have the scoop for you tonight, at eleven.
The screen changed to an AT &T ad.
“Jesus,” Max said. “Those kinds of stories piss me off to no end.”
“Did you notice how they phrased it? ‘A local newspaper drops a bombshell.’ That way the story is about the story.”
“That’s what irritates me. One of the tabloid newspapers prints some wild speculation, and then the rest of the bottom feeders pile on, repeating the same crap without having to do any kind of verification like a real journalist.”
“Ah, except this time, the same crap happens to have a wee bit of truth to it,” she said, leaning in so others at the bar would not overhear.
“Well, shit. They don’t know that, and they don’t really care. They scare people and shock them to get better ratings. And if they screw up an investigation, or put people at risk, or make it harder for us to get a conviction-they don’t care about any of that either. Sorry, I get a little riled up.”
“Don’t apologize,” she said. “It’s nice to talk to someone who gets it. My ex-boyfriend-sorry, I know exes are taboo first-date talk, but this was forever ago-he would always ask me why I had to dwell on such depressing topics.”
Like most people, Bill got through each day by refusing to think about the horrible things that people did to each other on a regular basis. With Peter, she had been grateful that he at least shared her inability to blissfully ignore the realities of the world. But they would never see those realities through the same lens. Peter got worked up over crime because a body found in the right location, and abused in just the right way, could make for great copy. His commitment to his book was just a sign that he would never really get her.
“Well, do you know how many women I’ve gotten even semi-serious with before they start asking me when I’m going to cash in on my law degree?”
“Did you go straight from law school to the DA’s office?”
“Nah. I did the big-firm thing for a couple of years to pay down my loans, but I can’t imagine ever going back. Eighty hours a week, all for some multimillion-dollar commercial lawsuit and squabbling over who would get the biggest bonus or who’d make partner first. Once you’ve seen the kind of cases I’ve worked on, you just don’t look at things the same way. What everyone else considers the real world seems like a complete fantasyland. It’s like you get a new definition of normal. Do you know what I mean, or should I stop babbling?”
“Please, you’re not babbling, and I know exactly what you mean.”
Donovan, like her, had seen the aftermath of the crimes of people who were inhabited by pure, untarnished evil-men who inflicted sexual torture, who casually took the lives of others, who could bury a child alive and then make themselves a bologna sandwich.
Ellie had spent her entire adult life chasing the normalcy that came to others as naturally and effortlessly as breathing. Since the day her father’s body was found, Ellie had been convinced that her darkest thoughts would someday be put to rest, once she finally uncovered the true circumstances surrounding his death. But she had returned from Kansas with a new acceptance of the possibility that serenity would never be a part of her makeup. She would always wake up with nightmares. She would never learn to turn off the job.
A new definition of normal. Maybe that was what she needed to get past the feeling that she was never going to be like other people.
The vibration of her cell phone startled her. It was Peter, yet again. She felt the phone buzz in her hand seconds later, indicating a new message.
She did her best to ignore it. She was having a delicious dinner with a smart, sweet, over-the-top-good-looking guy who might actually share her same ridiculous sickness. She had every reason to ignore her stupid phone. She made it through four more bites of chorizo before excusing herself to the ladies’ room.
“HEY. IT’S ME. I swear, I’m not a fucking stalker. Well, okay, maybe a little bit of a fucking stalker, since I am calling from outside your apartment.”
Ellie shook her head. “I shouldn’t have come, I know, but I hate the idea of you hating me. I don’t want things to end this way.” Jess had been right about Peter. The ending itself wasn’t the problem for him. He just couldn’t stand the idea of being the bad guy.
“So I’m sitting on the stoop of your building, being semi-stalkerish, and I noticed a car circle around the block a few times, then park out front. By the time the driver got out, I had gone into the coffee shop to warm up. Anyway, it was your lieutenant. I couldn’t tell if he rang up to your apartment or not, and I just saw him drive away, but I thought I’d let you know. Either you’re having a secret affair with your nemesis, or it’s something important. And, no, I won’t try to figure out what it is so I can write about it.”
She found herself smiling sadly.
“Sorry for rambling. I won’t bother you anymore. The ball’s in your court. Bye, Ellie.”
Ellie knew she’d eventually go to Peter’s apartment to end things with him on a better note, but at that moment all she could think about was the image of Dan Eckels outside her building.
No DNA. Clean crime scenes. A knowledge of city crime patterns. The stakeout abilities to nail down her running routine.
Simon Knight had asked her earlier in the day where they might begin looking for a killer among forty thousand officers in the NYPD. One of them had just jumped to the top of the list.
J. J. ROGAN AND MAX DONOVAN seemed out of place on Ellie’s familiar brown couch. A few weeks ago, she hadn’t met either one of them, and now they sat side by side on her living room sofa, hips nearly touching, surrounded by piles of magazines, clothing, and empty beer bottles, all of which she made a point of blaming entirely on Jess.
As soon as she’d heard Peter’s voice mail, she’d known she had to head straight home. If Eckels was looking for her, she wanted to be here. She wanted to be found. She wanted to look him in the eye and figure out how he’d fooled so many people for so long.
Max had insisted on coming with her. And when she’d called Rogan from the cab, he’d insisted on driving in from Brooklyn. And so now here they sat on her sofa in a room that was usually restricted to her, Jess, and restaurant deliverymen.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Rogan was saying. “Lieutenant Dan Fuckin’ Eckels? Strangling chicks and cutting them up and hacking off all their hair? I mean, Jesus H. We need to think through this shit.”
“I have thought it through,” Ellie said. “He was the lead detective on Alice Butler’s case. He mentioned in the reports that Alice told her sister someone was following her shortly before her murder, but he left out the fact that she picked up on the guy after she left a hair salon.”
“And you’re so sure that’s a detail that you would have included in a report?”
“Would I have included it? Of course.”
“Okay, but you’re fricking rain man. You’re positive that every cop would’ve noted that?”
“Of course not. That’s why I assumed Eckels had simply left it out. But after we caught the Chelsea Hart case, he never bothered to mention the possibility of a pattern. We know for a fact that McIlroy went to Eckels three years ago about the earlier cases. And one of those was Lucy Feeney’s-and you can say that Robbie Harrington and Alice Butler and Rachel Peck don’t look like the Chelsea Hart case, but you can’t deny the similarities between Chelsea and Lucy. Both strangled. Both stabbed. And the hair-give me a break, that’s not something you miss. Why didn’t he mention it? He pressured McIlroy three years ago not to pursue a connection, then did the same thing with me yesterday morning in his office.”
Donovan cleared his throat before interjecting. “And McIlroy’s snooping around three years ago could explain the gap in the killings. Eckels may have been ready to kill again, but got scared off when McIlroy picked up the pattern.”
“And with McIlroy gone,” she said, “the coast is clear. Eckels also knew that the photograph in the Sun-taken that night at the restaurant-came from Jordan McLaughlin. And as a cop, he could have easily come into contact with a guy like Darrell Washington. The neighbors said he had a way of talking to the cops too much.”
“Shit,” Rogan said. “You said Washington lived in the LaGuardia Houses?”
“Right off the Manhattan Bridge. With his grandmother.”
“Eckels used to work out of the Seventh back in the day. He would’ve been in and out of those projects all the time when Washington was a kid. Now I’m getting sucked into this whack idea.”
“And Eckels isn’t exactly my biggest fan,” she reminded them.
“He thinks you’re a pain in the ass,” Rogan said. “That’s not the same as wanting to carve your initials into some girl’s forehead.”
“Then do you want to tell me why Dan Eckels suddenly showed up at my apartment tonight, circling the block and coming to my front door?”
“Maybe Peter made that shit up just to have an excuse to see you.”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Ellie said. “If he says Eckels was here, then he was here.” She hadn’t bothered filling Donovan in on the specifics of her relationship to Peter Morse, and he’d been polite enough not to pry.
“Hopefully we’ll get an explanation soon enough,” Donovan said. He had called Simon Knight, who had covered his butt once again by pointing them to Deputy Chief Al Kaplan for guidance. As the head of Manhattan South Detective Borough, Kaplan had been the one to pull the strings necessary to move Ellie into homicide, and now here she was on his radar again already. Kaplan was unnerved enough to hear that the DA’s office would be dismissing the murder charges against Myers in the morning. He wasn’t about to ignore the possibility-however remote-that one of his own had something to do with this.
The Deputy Chief had been the one to make the call. As the three of them sat waiting in her pigsty of a living room, investigators from the DA’s Homicide Investigation Unit, accompanied by Internal Affairs, were on their way to Eckels’s house in Forest Hills.
DONOVAN WAS PLACING his fourth call to the HIU investigator. “Any sign of him?…I know you said you’d call. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to call you every thirty minutes for an update… Good. Thanks for staying on it.”
He flipped his phone shut and looked at his watch. “Almost one in the morning. Is Dan Eckels the kind of guy who stays out until one in the morning, even on a Friday night?”
Ellie had that discomforting, racing feeling caused by a combination of sleep deprivation and an overdose of adrenaline. “I don’t know anything about the man.”
She remembered Flann McIlroy’s description of a lecture from Lieutenant Eckels: Just imagine the mean, gruff boss in any cop movie you’ve ever seen.
She had come to assume in the short time she’d known her lieutenant that he behaved that way to compensate for his own insecurities. Now she wondered if the adoption of a well-worn and familiar persona wasn’t the perfect cover for a much darker secret.
“I’d feel a lot better if we’d found him by now,” Donovan said.
“Me too.”
She had finally convinced Rogan to go home shortly after midnight, with a promise that she’d call with any news. The more time that passed without any sign of Eckels, the less implausible of a suspect he seemed.
“If he weren’t a cop, you’d be yelling at me to wake up the most conservative judge I could find to sign a search warrant for his house.”
“I wouldn’t yell.”
“Beg?”
“In your dreams.” Ellie sat in her off-white armchair with her knees pulled up tight in front of her, wondering why she wasn’t pushing harder. If they were right, Eckels had already killed at least five women, two on her watch. If they were right, he could at that moment be selecting his next victim, or planning to come after Ellie directly.
But maybe they were wrong.
If they were wrong, and she led the charge to execute a search warrant at Dan Eckels’s house, her career would be over. Tomorrow it would be good-bye homicide unit. Within a year, she’d be chased out of the department altogether. Another cop could go gypsy, relocating to another city to start anew, but not her. She was Ellie Hatcher, that chick on Dateline and in People magazine whose whack job of a father offed himself with his service weapon.
Ellie trusted her gut. She trusted it so much that she’d kick down the door on Eckels’s house personally if her gut told her it was the right thing to do, damn the consequences.
But it wasn’t the devastating consequences of a mistake that had her tucked into a ball in her armchair. Her gut was telling her she was missing something. Her head knew the facts, but her instincts were telling her that there was another way of looking at them. Like a child’s blocks that could be formed into an infinite number of completed shapes, the facts would tell a different story if she could somehow rotate and rearrange them until they fell into the correct combination.
She just wasn’t ready to pull the trigger on Eckels. They had people watching his house. They had investigators quietly calling Eckels’s friends in the department to see where he might be-a girlfriend’s, a late-night poker game, some explanation for his disappearance after the mysterious drop-in at Ellie’s apartment.
Another hour, she thought. Ninety minutes. Two-thirty in the morning would be the tipping point. Two-thirty was late enough to confirm her suspicions. She still had ninety minutes to see what she was missing.
“Don’t you have an apartment of your own that you need to get to?” she said.
“I do in fact have an apartment, but I have absolutely no desire to go there right now. I’m staying here until you kick me out.”
“I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t need you to protect me. Look, big gun,” she said, pointing to the holster she’d tossed on her kitchen counter.
“If you think I want to be here so I can protect you, you have seriously overestimated my manliness. I’m a pencil-neck lawyer. You’re doing all the protecting tonight.”
“You can’t stay all night.” Somehow the words came out in a voice that suggested precisely the opposite. Max heard it, too.
“Don’t think of it as all night. Just until you kick me out. If morning stumbles along before then, so be it.”
“I’ve known you for all of three days.”
“Yeah, but think of how much time we’ve spent together.” He looked at his watch. “Like, fourteen hours, today alone. That pretty much makes this our third or fourth date.”
“A date administering polygraphs and figuring out if my lieutenant is trying to kill me.”
He rose from the couch and walked toward her. “Well, that’s just how I roll. A date with Max Donovan is always an adventure.”
She could tell he was at least as exhausted as she was, and he was forcing himself not to look worried. And in that moment, Ellie-who so often preferred to be alone-found herself happy he was there. Here was a man who might-maybe, possibly, one day-actually understand her.
When he knelt against her chair, she did not stop him. And when he leaned in to kiss her, she decided to stop thinking and to let things simply happen.
LIEUTENANT DAN ECKELS buttoned his trench coat as he walked through the marble-floored lobby of the Trump Place apartment complex, then climbed into his black Dodge Charger. He pulled onto the West Side Highway, feeling slightly less stressed than he had a few hours earlier. Marlene had that effect on him.
It had been four years since he’d met Marlene, and if someone had predicted then the odd relationship he shared with her today, he would have called the paramedics for a straitjacket.
He had busted the sleazeball who paid the rent on Marlene’s high-rise apartment right before he’d earned his white-shirt promotion. Precisely where Vinnie fell in the hierarchy of his crime family was still unclear in Eckels’s mind, but on that particular day, Eckels popped someone under Vinnie’s supervision for scalping counterfeit concert tickets.
When Eckels caught up with Vinnie at Elaine’s, his bleached-blond, fake-tittied goomah was on his arm. When Eckels pulled out the cuffs, Marlene offered to blow him in exchange for cutting Vinnie loose. Eckels was only one year divorced at the time, and he knew guys like Vinnie always managed to beat the rap anyway. Given his own stereotypes of men like Vinnie, Eckels would have expected him to give Marlene a good jab in the temple and to take him down just to save face. Instead, he’d remained at the table to finish his veal piccata while Marlene and Eckels took a little walk to the car.
Four years later, Vinnie didn’t seem to have a problem if Eckels occasionally dropped in on Marlene, as long as Eckels did him the occasional harmless favor in return: fixing tickets, running off a competitor, tracking down a plate-nothing that would get anyone hurt. The two men had an understanding.
Why Marlene put up with any of it remained a mystery. Vinnie took care of her, but she was in a 500-square-foot studio on a low floor just above the elevated portion of the West Side Highway. As far as Eckels could figure, all that mattered to Marlene was that she lived in a building bearing the Trump name.
He was careful not to take advantage of the arrangement. He dropped by Marlene’s maybe four times a year, and only on days when he really needed the escape. She had a way of calming him down.
Being with her tonight had helped, as he knew it would, but he was still anxious. The Daily Post was running a story tomorrow morning tying the Chelsea Hart murder to four others. The department would be going into full-on task-force mode.
He had been so relieved when Jake Myers had come along. The asshole looked good for it, and the possibility of a connection between Chelsea Hart and those other girls floated away. But then Hatcher had marched into his office, ragging about those same old names again.
He didn’t have much time before his captain, or maybe even the assistant chief, started asking him the hard questions. He’d caught the Alice Butler case, the third case in the series, and had failed to see the pattern. That alone would only render him a mediocre detective. No one would have a hard time believing that. He knew he wasn’t the best cop. He’d gotten the promotion based almost entirely on his test scores, but he’d never commanded the respect of the men who worked for him, or above him, for that matter.
But when the department got around to its postmortem analysis, they’d be looking at more than shoddy police work. When Flann McIlroy had come to him three years ago with his wacky theory, Eckels had shut him down and ordered him to stop investigating the cold cases. Not that McIlroy would have ever obeyed an order, but others wouldn’t look at it that way. His biggest mistake by far, though, was failing to speak up when his own detectives caught the Chelsea Hart case.
The department would come after him. He needed to cover his bases. He needed to find Hatcher. She was a pain in the butt, and he had no doubt that she’d gotten where she was based on her sex and her looks, but he had to admit that she was smart. She was also reasonable and, in the end, a decent person. He would find a way to turn those characteristics to his advantage.
He took the Forty-second Street turnoff and made his way east to Fifth Avenue, then hung a left on Thirty-eighth. He planned on parking in front of the same hydrant he’d blocked earlier tonight, but some asshole in a Ford Taurus was already there.
Eckels rolled down his window and gestured for the Taurus’s driver to do the same. “Hey buddy, no standing.”
The streetlamp was shining on Eckels’s car, so he could not see inside the Taurus. He honked his horn and signaled again for the driver to roll down his window, this time flashing the department parking permit he kept on his dash.
“Get a move on.”
The driver’s-side door of the Taurus opened, and Eckels saw the back of a man’s head and a tan coat in the dome light.
“Small world, Lieutenant.”
It took Eckels a moment to recognize the man walking toward his car. This was a prime example of Dan Eckels’s unique brand of bad luck. Eight and a half million people in this city. He gives one of them a hard time, and they just happen to recognize him. On top of all his other problems, all he needed was this loser telling people he was a jerk to boot.
The man removed a gloved right hand from his coat pocket. Eckels extended his own hand to return the shake through his open window.
He saw a quick flash of movement in his periphery. “What the fuck?” Trying to pull away from the damp cloth pressed against his face, he reached for his Glock. His seat belt restricted his movement. His coat was buttoned tight around his body. He could not get to his weapon. In fact, he could not feel it at his side.
Maybe he should have listened. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so wedded to the case against Jake Myers. But with the mayor’s office hounding him at every turn, it had been what he’d wanted to believe. He wasn’t the first cop to get a case of tunnel vision. If he’d mentioned those old files the minute they’d caught the Hart case, he wouldn’t have been in this position. All he’d wanted was to protect his job. If he made things right with Hatcher, she’d cover his ass.
He was getting dizzy. Just before passing out, he realized his gun was on Marlene’s nightstand. If he’d been a better cop, he would have realized that coming here would be dangerous.
THE DRIVER of the Taurus opened Dan Eckels’s door and took a quick look up and down Thirty-eighth Street. A couple was crossing Park Avenue, but they didn’t seem to be paying him any attention. He saw no obvious snoopers peering from the windows of the adjacent apartment buildings.
“You’re in no shape to drive, man,” he said, just to be safe. He unbelted Eckels from his seat, reached in and moved his legs to the passenger side, and then pushed his body over in one full shove.
He removed the parking permit from the dash, tossed it into his own car, and locked up the Taurus before taking a seat at the wheel of the Charger.
He had himself an NYPD lieutenant, and he was willing to bet he could trade him for a young blond detective.
“FUCK. MY EYES, MY EYES. Someone please hand me a spear so I might gouge out my eyes. Cover yourselves, people.”
Ellie sprung from what felt like the deepest sleep of her lifetime. She saw light creeping through the living room blinds and her brother standing at her apartment entrance, keys in hand and grin on face.
“Shit. Shit. What time is it?”
“Five forty-five.”
“Damn it. Ninety minutes. I was only going to wait ninety minutes.”
Max Donovan was coming to on the living room floor next to her. He grabbed a corner of the fleece throw Ellie was clutching to her chest, then settled for a blue pillow instead.
“Shit, we fell asleep,” he said.
“Master of the fucking obvious.”
“My brother, Jess,” Ellie said by way of explanation, scrambling to her feet and wrapping herself in the throw.
“Hey.” Max offered Jess his free hand. “Max Donovan. Uh, sorry about the circumstances.”
“You’ll understand if I don’t return the gesture. I really don’t need to think about where that hand’s been at six in the morning.”
“Jesus, Jess.”
Jess dropped a newspaper on the coffee table. “I thought you’d want to see this. Hot off the presses.”
It was a copy of the Daily Post. A glamor shot of Rachel Peck occupied the entire front page.
With no further pleasantries, Max was simultaneously pulling on his pants and pushing buttons on his cell phone.
“Why the fuck haven’t you called me?…You’ve just been sitting there?…Nothing?…Damn it… No, don’t leave. You stay there until we tell you to leave.”
Ellie had pulled on a blue terry-cloth robe by the time Donovan hung up.
“He never got home. Eckels is in the wind.” He was struggling to get his arms into the sleeves of yesterday’s shirt. “We need to get a warrant. I need to call Knight.”
He was fumbling with the buttons of his cell again when Ellie caught sight of the newspaper headline blaring above Rachel Peck’s photograph: “The Barber of Manhattan: A Serial Killer Strikes Again?” On the bottom of the page in smaller print: “Creep Collects Hair as Souvenirs.”
“That Peter sure does work for a class act,” Jess said.
Ellie found herself reading the words again. Then a third time. Then she picked up the paper and rifled through the pages until she found the cover story.
The nagging feeling that she’d had in her gut before she’d fallen asleep was returning. That feeling that they’d been missing something. The facts unstacked into a jumble of individual blocks, floating in random rotations in her mind-flipping, rearranging, and then settling back down into a new and entirely different pattern.
And then the tumblers clicked. Same victims. Same pattern. Same facts. Different man.
“Stop. Hang up, Max. It’s not Eckels. Hang up.”
She was already hitting a button on her own phone. It rang three times before she got an answer.
“Peter, I need you to tell me about George Kittrie.”
THEY WERE INSIDE Kittrie’s apartment within an hour. Three minutes to make the call to the Twenty-third Precinct to post officers outside the building. Fifteen minutes in the cab on the way to the Upper East Side, while Donovan persuaded Judge Capers to authorize a telephonic no-knock warrant. Five minutes to track down the super and his master keys. Another two minutes to figure out that Kittrie had installed an unauthorized security lock that the super could not bypass. Eighteen minutes to call in the old-fashioned battering ram.
Now Ellie, Donovan, and four backup officers were inside the apartment, and Rogan was on the way. She led a protective sweep through the apartment. As she’d expected, it was unoccupied.
“Damn it. He got to Eckels. I just know it. I should have figured this out yesterday. We could’ve stopped him.”
There was no legitimate way that Kittrie could know about the common link between the murders. When she had called him about the three cold cases, she had kept the fact about the hair to herself. And the killer had been so careful to hide his MO that Ellie herself had been unsure of the connection, even after speaking to Robbie’s father and Alice’s sister. Only after seeing Rachel Peck with her own eyes was she certain.
She’d thought through all of the possible leaks, but there were none. Rogan was solid. And even if Knight or Donovan might have been the type to talk, there hadn’t been time. Kittrie had sent Peter to get a quote from her before she told either of them about the cold cases.
She had assumed that Capra had been the source for the story about Chelsea Hart’s hair, but in fact there had been no leak at all. Kittrie had even covered his tracks by getting the information slightly wrong-asking her whether Chelsea’s head was shaved. And there had been no contact with Flann McIlroy three years earlier. She had assumed that Peter was lying when he said Kittrie had a quick trigger on running the presses, but it had been Kittrie who lied about his contacts with Flann.
George Kittrie knew that a killer was collecting his victims’ hair because he had committed the murders.
When she had met Kittrie with Peter at Plug Uglies, he had looked familiar. Kittrie played it smart, convincing her she could have seen him at the bar during one of his investigative happy hours. But now she knew where she’d spotted him before. He had been caught in the background of the photograph Jordan McLaughlin had given her of the three girls at the Little Italy restaurant.
They had an APB out on Kittrie’s 2004 Ford Taurus and an emergency service unit on its way to his East Hampton cottage. In the meantime, there was nothing to do but begin a search of the apartment.
She snapped on a pair of latex gloves and started with the desk. She found what she was looking for in the file drawer, inside a folder labeled “Medical Records.” She couldn’t make out the terminology on the stack of papers from Sloan Kettering, but she didn’t need an M.D. to understand that repeated references to glioblastoma multi-forme in the cerebral hemisphere were not good.
Those rumors Peter had heard about his boss’s condition were true: George Kittrie had an inoperable brain tumor.
“When we found out about Symanski’s mesothelioma, we were talking about the desperate things people do when they know they’re dying. Symanski wanted to go out a hero. Kittrie wants to take others with him. Or maybe he wants to get caught. If this thing goes to trial, we might even hear some expert argue that it was the brain tumor causing his violent tendencies all along.”
“And why is he so focused on you?” Donovan asked.
“I’ve gotten a lot of media attention, and that’s probably important to him. It could have been those things I said in the Dateline interview about William Summer being a loser. A man like Kittrie could empathize with someone like Summer. Both share the same desires. Both men stopped acting on those desires for long periods of time, which is probably seen by them as a sign of power and control. Summer was just given a life sentence, and now Kittrie finds himself at the end of his life. I can see how his desire to kill again could get transferred onto me.”
She scanned the wide array of titles shelved above Kittrie’s desk. Mostly nonfiction: civil war histories, biographies of the robber barons, a few contemporary memoirs. She spotted three consecutive copies of the same book, 9/11: Scoundrels and Profiteers, by George Kittrie, and pulled one from the shelf. Kittrie smiled at her from a black-and-white photograph on the inside cover. She checked the copyright date. Five years ago.
When she replaced the volume on the shelf, a thick black-leather-bound book caught her eye among the colorful dust jackets. She opened it to find a collection of feature articles authored by George Kittrie, arranged in chronological order. She noticed that the prominence of the stories increased after the publication of his book.
“It could have been the book deal that made him stop after Alice Butler,” she said. “William Summer stopped because he got a promotion at his job. Maybe being a published author gave Kittrie the satisfaction he needed to gain control over his urges. Until I set him off, of course.”
“Hey,” Donovan said. “This is not your fault. He knows he’s dying. He would have killed those girls anyway.”
Ellie nodded, even though she was not convinced. “He must have had this bound after he got his diagnosis. The articles go all the way up to a few month ago,” she said, flipping through the pages. She was about to replace the tome on the shelf when she backtracked a few pages. “Unbelievable. Take a look at this.”
Donovan peered over her shoulder.
“This article from last April is about gangs in the city projects.” The story was accompanied by a large photograph of a man’s back, covered with gang tattoos, as well as smaller photographs depicting life in the projects. “And that picture right there,” Ellie said, pointing to one of the smaller images, “was taken outside the LaGuardia Houses. Kittrie knew Darrell Washington.”
ROGAN CHARGED THROUGH Kittrie’s front door like a racehorse out of the gate.
“I’m on the phone with Pier 76 impound.” He covered the mouthpiece of his cell phone. “Kittrie’s Taurus got towed two hours ago for blocking a hydrant. He had a city parking permit on the dash that didn’t match the registration.”
“It has to belong to Eckels,” Ellie said.
Rogan removed his hand from the mouthpiece. “Where was the car?…Thirty-eighth and Madison?”
“That’s half a block from my apartment,” Ellie said as Rogan flipped his phone shut. “He must have taken Eckels on the street when he came to see me, which hopefully means Eckels is still alive. We’re going to find them at Kittrie’s cottage.”
“We’ve got ESU officers on the way with a truck and tactical weapons,” Donovan said. “They’re almost to the end of the LIE. They will take him down.”
“That’s still an hour away from East Hampton, and we’re another hour behind them. If we have any chance to save Eckels, Kittrie is going to want to see me there. I need to be there.”
Rogan was dialing again. “We can be in a chopper in fifteen minutes.”
IN HER BRIEF TIME as Rogan’s partner, Ellie had never felt a sophistication gap between them. That all changed, however, when they pulled up to the helipad at Thirtieth Street and the West Side Highway.
She wasn’t even sure whether it would have ever dawned on her to request a department helicopter, but the idea certainly hadn’t come to her as quickly and as effortlessly as it had for Rogan. He had immediately called the borough commander, who approved the request and gave the necessary orders. Given her partner’s familiarity with the process at the Westside heliport, Ellie got the impression that Rogan had prior experience with helicopter travel, and she wondered if perhaps her partner hadn’t seriously understated the extent of his outside money.
Rogan badged the officer waiting for them at the gate. “We’re heading out to East Hampton.”
“The Bell 412 just arrived from Floyd Bennett Field.”
“The ten-million-dollar beast, all for us?”
“Nine-point-eight,” the officer corrected. “They weren’t sure how big of a team you’d have. The 412 holds the crew plus seven men. Excuse me, ma’am, seven people.”
Rogan pulled the car to the edge of the concrete, and they scurried across the pad. Rogan helped hoist Ellie into the cabin, and then climbed in himself. He reached behind him to give Donovan a hand.
“You sure you want to come? This isn’t part of your job description.”
“I’m going,” he said, joining Ellie on a bench seat running the length of the chopper. Rogan began distributing Kevlar vests that had already been piled into the back for their use, while Ellie unwrapped the gauze from her hand.
Wasting no time on introductions, the pilot asked if they were going to the East Hampton Airport.
“Suffolk County police will be waiting for us,” Rogan confirmed. “We’ve got what? A forty-minute ride?”
The helicopter’s entire body shook from the power building in the four-blade rotor.
“More like thirty in this bad boy,” the pilot said. “Whatever you’ve got planned out there, I’d start getting yourself ready for it.”
GEORGE KITTRIE’S COTTAGE was on a narrow strip of road called Gerard Drive, surrounded on both sides by water-Accabonac Harbor to the west, and Gardiner’s Bay to the east. By the time their Suffolk County cruiser pulled onto Gerard Drive, the road was lined with police vehicles-a black NYPD Emergency Service truck, three other Suffolk County patrol cars, two ambulances, and four cars that were probably the entirety of the East Hampton Police Department’s fleet.
They had decided on the way to the helipad that there was no point in trying to conduct a stealth takedown of Kittrie. Eckels hadn’t reported to work, and neither had Kittrie. He would know they were coming for him. A massive show of their presence was warranted.
Rogan pointed to the ESU truck at the side of the road, and the Suffolk County officer pulled his cruiser behind it. Rogan was out of the car first and homed in on a man dressed in all-black tactical gear. “J. J. Rogan. My partner, Ellie Hatcher. ADA Max Donovan.”
“Jim Foreman,” the officer said with a nod.
“How are we doing on evacuation?”
“I’ve got officers knocking on doors at every house along this inlet. We’ve got about fifty percent of them confirmed clear.”
“And the others?” Ellie asked.
“The local PD says this road’s popular for vacation houses. They could be empty. On the other hand, they tell me nine a.m.’s considered pretty early around here.”
“So we don’t know how much exposure we have,” Rogan said.
“My men know to make as much noise as necessary.”
The houses on the water were packed closely together. The last thing they needed was to have neighbors hurt in a shootout or for Kittrie to take the battle onto someone else’s property.
“You ready?” Rogan asked.
“Ready to do what?” Ellie said. “If we storm the house, he kills Eckels.”
“I’ll tell him later that you cared.”
“If there’s a later,” she said. “I say we call Kittrie. He obviously knows we’re here.”
Her cell buzzed at her waist. She checked the screen. “That fucker. He’s calling from Eckels’s phone.” She flipped her phone open. “We’re here.”
“I noticed.” Kittrie’s tone was breezy, almost singsongy in its inflection, as if he were a kindergarten teacher feigning artificial patience with an antsy child. “And I assume you know this isn’t your lieutenant.”
“Send out Eckels, or we’ll have twenty police officers storming that little shed of yours within two minutes.”
“Nice try, Detective, but if you’re anywhere near as good as I think you are, then you know that death threats won’t go too far with me. I can’t say the same about Lieutenant Eckels. I think that means I get to set the rules. Since you like the sound of two minutes so much, let’s say you have exactly two minutes to come to my front door. Alone. Unarmed.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Two minutes, Detective. And get rid of the vest. If they take a shot at me, they need to know they might kill you instead.”
The line went dead.
He had known about the vest. He was watching them. She pulled off her Kevlar and threw it to the ground.
“What the fuck are you doing, Hatcher?”
“This is what he wants. Me at the front door in two minutes. No weapons. No vest. Otherwise, he’ll kill Eckels.”
“No way,” Donovan said.
“You don’t get to have an opinion on this.”
“He’s bluffing,” Rogan said. “Shit. We should have brought a fucking hostage negotiator.”
“I don’t need a negotiator. We know enough about this guy to know he’s got nothing to lose.”
“Except his leverage. If he kills Eckels, this is over.”
“And if he doesn’t kill Eckels, it’s over because we’ll know he’s a bluffer. I’m going in.”
Officer Foreman interrupted. “I can’t let you go in there, Detective, as much as you want to. You don’t even know he’ll let his hostage go. His hostage could be dead by now.”
“‘His hostage’ is one of us, and he’s our lieutenant.”
Foreman tried to block her way. She dodged him. Rogan grabbed her arm, but she pulled it away. “Damn it, J. J. If either of you tries to fucking stop me one more time, I am going to physically hurt you.”
She ducked behind the ESU van, and Rogan followed her. “Give me your weapon,” she said, holding out her right hand.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t have time to explain. Just give me your Glock.”
He unholstered his gun and handed it to her. “You can’t do this.”
“I have to do this. Don’t you see that? I did this. I found Chelsea Hart. Those were my initials carved into Rachel Peck’s forehead with a knife. I was the one who had all the information we needed-his cancer, the timing of that book, the knowledge he had about the cases, his fucking picture, for Christ’s sake, before I went and cropped it into the ether. It should be me in there, and I swear to God, I am not going to let you stop me.”
As she spoke, she ejected the magazine and let it fall to the ground, then slid out the chambered round and tossed it aside as well.
“He will kill you.”
“He’ll kill Eckels faster. Me, he wants to brainfuck first. Take any shot you get.” She tucked Rogan’s unloaded weapon in her waistband beneath her coat. “Do you hear me?”
Donovan was next to her now with his hand on her elbow, but Rogan pulled him away. “We’re going to get you out of there, Hatcher. You’re not alone in there, you understand?”
She swallowed and nodded, hoping that he was right, and stepped out from behind the van. She rushed toward the house, stopping in the middle of Kittrie’s yard to unholster her own service weapon and toss it onto the grass.
ELLIE STOOD on the porch for thirty seconds before Kittrie’s front door opened, a tiny gap at first, then another few inches, until she could see the terrified eyes of Dan Eckels peering out at her. His mouth was wrapped with silver duct tape. His hands were taped in front of him, and his legs were bound together at the ankles.
“It’s okay, sir. Come on out.”
She pushed open the door slowly until she heard a voice from farther inside the house. “That’s far enough. I saw your SWAT bus.”
Eckels turned sideways to slip through the crack in the door. He looked into her eyes intensely and gave her a slight shake of his head. He was trying to tell her something. He was telling her not to go inside.
Is…this…a…trap? She mouthed the words silently. Eckels responded with the same intense stare and a harder shake of his head.
“This is a trade, remember. You get in here before he gets out.”
Ellie turned sideways as well and pressed herself past Eckels. As the two exchanged places, she saw him blink back tears.
“Go,” she whispered. He looked at her one more time before hopping down the porch steps. She saw Foreman running to meet Eckels on the front lawn before she heard the voice behind her again.
“Shut that door.”
She closed the door, only to be slammed immediately against it. She could feel George Kittrie’s body pressed against hers, his hands groping beneath her jacket. The weight of Rogan’s Glock left the small of her back.
“That was quite a show when you dropped your weapon in the yard, Detective. I’m not that stupid.”
He yanked off her coat and threw it to the floor. He stepped away from her and moved farther into the house. Ellie turned and took in the layout.
At the front of the house, the living room shades were drawn. The vertical blinds that covered a set of sliding doors off the dining area in the back were pulled shut. He had positioned a wood-framed dining chair in the entry to a small hallway that broke away from the living area. He was smart. The entry to the hallway gave him cover from any incoming bullets.
“On the couch.” He gestured toward a beige sofa against the living room wall as he took his own protected seat in the hall, placing the gun in his left hand on the floor beside him. She tried to keep her eyes on his, but they automatically leapt to the glint of the silver blade on the knife in his right hand.
On another day, in a different context, the image should have scared her. But instead Ellie felt emboldened. He had been holding a police lieutenant hostage. Now he had a new captive, exchanging one source of unpredictability for another. If he was at all comfortable with guns, she would be looking down the barrel of one-either his own or the one he’d just taken from her.
Her instincts had been right. Only one of Kittrie’s victim had been shot-Darrell Washington-and, as Ken Garcia had said, whoever killed Washington had been a lousy marksman. He also used the same weapon Washington had wielded to rob Jordan and Stefanie, then left that gun at the scene. Kittrie’s current location in the hallway ruled out immediate access to any place where another gun might be hidden.
She knew now what Eckels had been trying to tell her-Kittrie didn’t have a gun. Kittrie had apparently managed to restrain her lieutenant before Eckels had established that critical fact. She wasn’t going to let the same thing happen to her. She was a good, strong fighter. If the only advantage Kittrie had on her was a knife and Rogan’s unloaded gun, she might just walk out of here alive.
She took a seat on the sofa as instructed and saw for the first time a pair of orange-handled sewing shears on a glass end table. Kittrie must have noted the movement of her glance, because he said, “Unhunh. Not yet. Later. I want to look at you here. Left hand into the cuffs.”
Only then did she notice a pair of handcuffs dangling from the same glass table where the scissors rested. One end was hooked through the table’s wrought iron base. The other hung open. Ellie slid across the sofa, crossing her left leg in front of her, and closed the cuffs around her left wrist.
“So I would ask you to tell me about your father, but I know how you feel about men who’ve watched Silence of the Lambs too many times. I don’t want to be a cliché.”
He was reciting from her Dateline interview. Ellie stared at him as if he were a lizard on display behind glass.
“Tell me about William Summer instead.”
“What about him?” she said.
“Why are you so convinced you would have found him earlier?”
“I found you, didn’t I?”
“I was waiting to be found.”
“So was William Summer,” Ellie said. “It’s another thing you two have in common.”
“Tell me more about that.”
“You both have an ability to control the pace of your killings more than most profilers believe is common. You both stopped when something else in your lives brought you satisfaction, a feeling of accomplishment. You both resurfaced when your lives started to feel weak again-him because a newspaper article made him sound like an irrelevant relic, and you because there’s cancer metastasized in your brain.”
“So would you say that I, like Summer, have an ‘insatiable ego’?”
“I don’t purport to know you, Mr. Kittrie.”
“Neither did Rachel Peck or Chelsea Hart. Go ahead and pick up those scissors.”
Ellie wiggled her restrained left arm.
“Cute, Detective, but I’m sure you can manage.”
She raised the scissors with her right hand.
“Your hair, Detective. Is it naturally blond?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. And is that the length you usually wear it?”
Ellie’s hair was well past her shoulders, longer than it had ever been since she became a cop five years ago. There had been no time for a haircut in the past two months. “No,” she said. “I cut it this short a few months ago.”
For reasons she would never be able to explain, she took comfort in the small lie.
“Please go ahead and cut the rest of it off for me now.”
“Excuse me?”
“You saw Chelsea Hart, I believe. Go ahead. Not too quickly,” he said, unbuttoning his pants. Ellie suppressed a gag reflex.
She tilted her head and held the scissors up to the lock of hair that fell forward, but could not force herself to bring the blades together.
“Would you like to put the scissors down and find another way to do this, Detective?”
She clenched her jaw and clamped the scissors shut. Six inches of her hair fell to the floor. She reached forward to pick it up, but he stopped her.
“Leave it wherever it falls. It looks good that way.” He was beginning to slowly pleasure himself. Ellie desperately wanted to avert her gaze, but knew that would disrupt the choreography. She opened the shears around another section and snipped again. Then a third section, and a fourth. She tried to stop thinking of the movement of his hand against himself.
She picked up the pace of her cutting and willed herself to look at Kittrie’s pinched face, starting to color. She told herself she had to do this. She had to do this for five girls who had suffered far worse.
She saw the muscles in Kittrie’s body begin to tense and she knew she would have only seconds to respond. She cut away another two clumps, feeling stronger with each lock that fell to the floor.
When Kittrie lurched forward, she was ready. She dropped the scissors and reached for the top of the left ankle boot crossed in front of her. She unsnapped her Kahr K9 and pulled the trigger softly to disengage the striker block and cock the weapon.
Kittrie opened his eyes and spun from his chair, dropping the knife as he reached for the Glock on the floor. She continued to press against the trigger, locking her elbow and tightening her forearm muscles to absorb the recoil.
She heard the blast of the pistol as her arm jerked against her will and searing pain tore through the wound in the back of her hand. A magenta stain slowly blossomed across the left sleeve of Kittrie’s white shirt. She had clipped him in the shoulder.
Kittrie winced as he moved his left hand to support the Glock. Even through the pain of the gunshot wound, he managed a slight smile as he looked down at Ellie, handcuffed on the sofa, and pulled the trigger. Realizing his mistake, his smug expression changed to one of confusion, then anger. He threw the gun at her and lunged for the knife he’d discarded next to his chair.
Ellie fired again, this time a pair of quick shots, compensation for the lack of control that came with one-handed shooting. One bullet through the screen of Kittrie’s television, one in his left side. Kittrie barreled toward her, the handle of his knife clenched in his fist.
She threw her body to the floor and drop-rolled in the direction of the end table. Using the leverage of her cuffed wrist against the wrought iron, she pulled herself up to a forty-five-degree angle. She leveled the butt of the K9 on her left forearm for support, and popped off three rapid-fire rounds.
All three shots landed in center mass. Kittrie’s mouth formed a large O as he stumbled backward, then collapsed to the floor. Ellie allowed her own muscles to relax as the convulsions in his body subsided.
The sound of a thousand cars crashing at once broke the silence. A helmeted ESU officer emerged from the shattered sliding glass door just as Rogan burst through the front door at the head of a battering ram. They must have coordinated the simultaneous entries with the first shot fired. What had felt like an eternity to her had taken place in just seconds.
Ellie then saw the scene in the living room through their eyes. Kittrie dead, shot five times with his pants around his knees. Ellie handcuffed to a table, lying on the floor in a pile of her own hair. She looked at Rogan and began to laugh, hysterically and uncontrollably, until she found herself sobbing harder than she had in years.
“NO ONE TOLD ME it was prom night.”
John Shannon set his roast beef sandwich on his napkin and used the back of his hand to wipe a smear of mustard from the corner of his mouth. Given Rogan’s usual appearance, his black suit and gray silk tie would never have drawn Shannon’s attention. But Ellie’s wardrobe change in the locker room was apparently another story.
Thanks to their squad neighbor, all eyes in the room were on her. Shannon’s partner let out a wolf whistle. Someone else asked if she was already trying on outfits for this year’s Medal Day Ceremony, a reference to the broad speculation that she would be receiving the Police Combat Cross for her role in what the media were now calling the Manhattan Barber case. Apparently the press didn’t see the irony in retaining the sensationalist nickname originally conjured by George Kittrie for his own byline.
Ellie looked down at her black wool A-line dress and slingback pumps, and touched the fringe of her new, very short hairdo. The fact that this stood out as a special effort had her rethinking her everyday attire.
Dan Eckels emerged from his office and placed his hands on his hips. “Quiet down out here. So Hatcher cleans up all right. Leave the woman alone.”
She sucked in her cheeks and faked a model’s awkward pose, and a few more detectives broke into laughter. It had been four days since she killed George Kittrie, and she’d noticed the ongoing efforts to make her smile. It was too soon to know whether the new thaw in the ice was a sign that she had passed some kind of litmus test with the squad, or just a temporary warm front.
“Great. See what happens when I try to stick up for you? You’re encouraging these assclowns.”
She looked at her lieutenant for some kind of confirmation of the rumor she’d heard the previous night at Plug Uglies. Apparently questions regarding the whereabouts of Eckels’s gun when he was abducted had led to some kind of investigation into his extracurricular activities. If the rumors were true, Eckels seemed surprisingly untroubled. Perhaps surviving his night with Kittrie had given him a new perspective on life. Or maybe the rumors were just rumors.
“I believe the two of you have somewhere to be?” Eckels asked pointedly.
“Oh, they need to be somewhere all right,” Shannon said. “‘Going to the chapel, and we’re gonna get married.’”
Ellie held her palms against her ears until Rogan handed her her coat. They could still hear the squad’s off-tune singing when they hit the staircase.
ROGAN PARKED half a block away from their destination on Bleecker Street.
“This was really generous of you, J. J.”
“Stop thanking me.”
They made their way inside and were directed to a room off the main entrance hall. Powder blue velvet curtains hung from ceiling to floor. Mauve upholstered chairs were lined up neatly in four rows. About a third of the seats were already occupied.
Ellie recognized a bulky man in the front row. Detective Hank Dodge gave her a nod of acknowledgment, and she returned the gesture.
At the front of the room, a blowup of Rachel Peck’s author photo, the one that never had the chance to grace the back of a book jacket, rested on an easel next to a simple wreath of pastel roses and a closed casket.
Ellie had phoned Rachel’s father three days earlier, pleading with him to claim his daughter’s body so she would not be buried in a cardboard box on Hart Island, where prison inmates stacked the coffins five high. By the time Ellie hung up on the man, she’d called him several names she was pretty sure weren’t supposed to be directed at a man of God.
She would never have asked Rogan to pay for a funeral, but he had caught her side of the conversation. An hour after she hung up on the Reverend Elijah Peck, Rogan had already set a time and a place. All she had to do was notify Rachel’s friend Gina.
Ellie felt a lump in her throat when she saw a familiar face in the back of the room. Her brother had even worn a sports coat for the occasion.
“Where’d you get this?” she whispered, tugging at his sleeve.
“Don’t ask, at least not without Miranda warnings.”
As they took three seats in the back row, Jess and Rogan muttered their hellos in the whispery tones that came automatically in these settings.
“You are such a softie,” she said, giving her brother’s shoulder a little squeeze.
“It’s no big deal.”
She had told him that morning that she was worried no one would show up at the funeral home. As she looked around the room, she realized her concerns had been misplaced. Rachel may not have had a family, but she had been a woman with friends.
One of those friends took her place now at a lectern beside Rachel’s photograph. She introduced herself as Gina DaCosta. She told the guests that she didn’t know what she was supposed to say at her best friend’s funeral. The nice man who ran the home had suggested a few prayers that would be appropriate, but they all knew that Rachel would come back and haunt her ass for allowing any such thing. So instead she talked about Rachel’s generosity. Her talent. The night she’d given herself a concussion trying to leapfrog a parking meter on Jones Street. She invited others to share their memories as well. No sad talk allowed, she warned.
Ellie recognized the latecomer slipping quietly into the room. Finding a seat, he spotted her in the back and gave her a sad smile. She raised a hand for a quick wave. She had known he was the kind of man who would be here today.
As people took their turns at the front of the room, she clasped her hands in her lap, closed her eyes, and silently delivered her own testimonial: I had three days to save Rachel after I found Chelsea on Monday morning. It wasn’t enough. I wasted thirty-six hours going through the motions while I had three cold cases in my backpack telling me something was wrong. Thirty-six hours would have made the difference. I had three days, and I failed. I second-guessed my own instincts. I wasn’t confident enough. Next time, I won’t hesitate. Next time, I will picture Rachel and Chelsea, and I’ll be better.
When Ellie opened her eyes, she felt her guilt begin to wash away. She felt at peace. She felt like she belonged here, in this room, at that moment. She felt normal.
Tonight, after Jess left for work, and from the solitude of her living room, she would do one last thing before turning the page on the case. She would call Bill Harrington and thank him for phoning the tip line. She would thank him for listening to Robbie.