All Day and a Night (11 page)

“I know he was Anthony Amaro’s lawyer.”

“That’s as much as I expected. I’m probably the only attorney our age who knows what a lion he was in his era. A true voice of the downtrodden. I actually remember this case: he took it pro bono because it was one of the very first cases that was death-eligible in the state of New York.”

Carrie was now regretting that she hadn’t taken the time to conduct a quick Google search of Harry McConnell. His daughter clearly admired the man.

“The client made a point of saying how appreciative he was of your father’s representation on his behalf.” Did that sound as stupid in the room as it sounded to Carrie’s own ears?

“He worked when he should have been enjoying his last healthy years. His opposition to the death penalty was that strong. At least he was able to see capital punishment go down with barely a whimper before this state ever saw a single execution.”

Carrie found herself confused by the direction of the conversation. “I’m sorry if you lost him prematurely.”

Kristin shook her head. “No, my father’s still living and breathing. He just doesn’t remember everything. He had the curse of being told by his doctors early on that he’d lose his memory to Alzheimer’s. I don’t even know why they bother telling people. What are you supposed to do? I wanted him to retire and spend his last capable days enjoying life. He wanted to spend them in practice, and he forced me to make two promises: one—to keep these idiotic files for twenty years, and two—to tell him when it was time to hang it up so he didn’t shortchange his clients. So when you thank me for these dusty documents, just trust me that the second promise was much harder to keep.”

Carrie still didn’t know what to say. She’d been raised in a family that didn’t talk about any of its hardships, and this total stranger was telling her about the difficulties of handling her father’s dementia. “Well, hopefully, your father’s insistence on hanging on to these documents will be fruitful. I take it you kept up his practice?”

“Nope. Thank God that wasn’t the third promise. Personally, I can’t stomach criminal defense work. Took me a while to realize that. I represent crime victims, in fact, because no one else does. The prosecutors represent the state, whatever that means. The defense attorneys do whatever they need to do to get the defendant off. I represent the victims—which usually means pressuring the state to do what’s right, and pressuring the defendant to pay up and plead guilty.”

Carrie was wishing she had sent a messenger to pick up the Amaro files. “Wow, that sounds like a really interesting practice.”

“So is Amaro claiming ineffective assistance of counsel?”

The shift in tone was palpable. What had sounded like a mournful daughter’s meandering now sounded like an attorney’s cross-examination. “No. Um, there’s new evidence. It’s still coming together, but the claim is that he’s innocent.”

“Yeah, but we both know that’s not a legal
thing
. You have to have a basis for constitutional error at trial. I’ve learned over the years that these shitbags my dad bent over backwards for are perfectly willing to claim ineffective assistance of counsel when that’s the last egg in the basket.”

Carrie was done smiling. She bent over and lifted both boxes. Kristin didn’t offer her a hand. And, once again, Carrie wondered what the hell she had gotten herself into.

E
llie’s desk shook as Rogan slammed down his phone. “And that makes oh-for-five,” he declared.

As Helen Brunswick’s next-of-kin, Mitch Brunswick had waived his deceased wife’s rights to privacy, enabling them to obtain her educational records. Based on those records, they knew that in Helen’s early efforts to complete a postgraduate internship in abnormal psychology, she had completed rotations at five different mental health institutions in ten months. She had only two months remaining when she decided to withdraw from the program.

Now they were looking for some connection between her studies, the Amaro victims, and her murder. But so far, none of the hospitals would release information about the identity of her patients, or even the general
type
of patients she was treating.

Rogan tapped his nails against his desk. “You realize it’s just a matter of time before the press finds out we’re calling around upstate mental institutions, asking about Helen.”

“I still can’t believe those reporters were camped outside Mitch Brunswick’s building yesterday. How do you think they knew about the connection to Amaro?”

“It could have been any kind of leak,” Rogan said. “Or, frankly, it might’ve been Mitch Brunswick himself. He’s the one who sent us on this wild goose chase. Pretty smart, when you think about it. Read some old newspaper articles about a serial killer’s signature. Hire someone to do the job, using the same MO. Then send the letter tying the murder to the old cases, using information no one else would know. Call the press to divert their attention. Then just happen to mention that she used to work the nuthouses upstate.”

“I don’t know, Rogan. It’s not like he dropped that information in our laps. Those files he was digging through were recent. It was only after we blew them off that he mentioned her past in Utica.”

Rogan shrugged. “So he’s smart. He wouldn’t be the first.”

“So we keep digging. You haven’t gotten
anywhere
with the hospitals?”

“The most information I got was from Alex Sumner, the shrink Mitch mentioned. He said Helen quit the program after getting a dressing-down from the department head for calling the police about two different patients she thought were a danger to the public.”

“God forbid she should try to protect anyone.”

“Exactly. But there
are
rules about confidentiality, and apparently the powers that be thought she was a little too quick to step outside of them. She decided that dealing with the criminally insane wasn’t a good fit for her after all. According to Dr. Sumner, people who do that work have to have—how did he put it?—
empathy for people who don’t have empathy for others
. They have to believe there’s a hope for change. And Helen didn’t.”

“So who were those two patients?”

“That’s where I thought I was getting somewhere. Dr. Sumner pulled major strings with his hospital contacts and got me the names of the two patients she reported. I made a quiet call to Utica PD’s records department.” Rogan slid a clipped set of documents across the table. She flipped through the pages as he summarized them. “First patient was Gregory Katz. He told her he fantasized about boiling a woman in a pot and eating the stew.”

“Nice.”

“Sumner says Helen’s call to police violated the ethics rules because there wasn’t a specific victim in imminent danger.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“So for half a second, I thought we might actually have someone worth talking to. Not a big stretch to think that a guy who wants to boil women in a pot might break their limbs first. But flip the page and you’ll see the problem.”

It was another Utica Police Department report—a fatal car accident on Christmas Day 1998. Gregory Katz was killed by a drunk driver.

She flashed a thumbs-up. “Go karma.”

Rogan slid another pile of documents across the table, this one much thicker. “Second guy was just a kid: Joseph Flaherty. Not nearly as interesting as the wannabe cannibal. Helen thought he was a danger to a fellow patient at the hospital. According to Brunswick, he was completely noncommunicative and nonsensical when he was off his meds, but obsessive and paranoid when he was on them—accusing this other patient of being the devil and trying to kill his five wives. And, mind you, the kid didn’t have any wives.”

“And calling police on him broke the rules, too?”

“According to Sumner, it did. This time, she at least had a specific individual she was trying to protect; problem was, the potential danger wasn’t grave enough.”

“I can see why she wanted to quit.” Ellie was flipping through the pages of reports. “What’s all this other stuff?”

“The mess that became of that kid, Joseph Flaherty. In and out of hospitals—in fact he’s in as we speak—but mostly he’s homeless. Twenty-two arrests: criminal trespass, disturbing the peace, basically acting a fool. Four of those calls are noise complaints from the same address. Guess Flaherty got obsessed with some cop and kept showing up in the yard, screaming at the windows until neighbors called the police. He was only a teenager when the Utica killings were happening, so not exactly the profile of a serial killer.”

“Not totally unprecedented, though,” she said.

“The real problem’s the timing of Helen’s report. Check out the date.” She flipped back to the first document in the pile. Helen had called police about Flaherty on July 5, 1995. Five women had been killed in Utica by then. “And check out the notation at the end.”

       
Patient is on commitment hold, per mother. Held involuntarily, inpatient, full-time for last nine months
.

Two of the victims were killed in early 1995. A teenager couldn’t stalk prostitutes on the streets of Utica while confined to a mental institution.

Rogan was right: the hospital angle was a bust.

“Any luck on your end?” he asked.

While Rogan had been calling treatment centers, Ellie had been reviewing the information they had about Anthony Amaro and his victims, looking for any connections to Helen Brunswick.

“We’ve got the one New York City victim—Deborah Garner—and the five Utica victims. The first bodies were found in May, 1991, at Roscoe Conkling Park by a family that had taken their cat there for burial. I guess it was Fluffy’s favorite place to run off to every time he escaped. Dad’s digging the hole, and the kids are crying about Fluffy, when Mom whispers to Dad that she sees a bone in the dirt, and the bone looks human.”

“That’s one very detailed police report.”

She shrugged. “I made up the kid tears. And the kitty name.”

“Fluffy? Show some originality.”

“Says the man who named his first dog Snoopy. But, whatever. You get the picture. Family calls police. Police dig for more bones and find the remains of two bodies within a sixty-foot radius. They’re eventually identified as Nicole Henning and Jennifer Bronson. Henning had been dead longer.” To help Rogan keep track, she wrote down their names on a legal pad. “Bronson had a kid, and was reported missing by her brother, but no one called in Nicole Henning’s disappearance. Going by when the women were last seen, plus the best guess of the medical examiner, they estimate that Nicole Henning was killed around February of 1989 and Jennifer Bronson in April of 1991.” She noted the dates next to the women’s names. “Fast forward a year to March 1993. A peach of a mother calls police after it dawns on her she hasn’t seen her thirty-two-year-old daughter since Christmas. It turns out the daughter, Leticia Thomas, has a history of prostitution. On a lark, the police take a cadaver dog back out to Conkling Park and find Thomas’s body. The ME said she’d been dead a couple of months, max.”

She added Leticia’s name and “estimated 1/93” to the growing list of victims and dates.

“So the guy went right back to the same dumping ground,” Rogan said.

“You could literally throw a stone to Leticia’s grave from either of the first two victims’.”

“And this is when Utica PD finally admitted they had a serial killer on their hands?”

“Correct. They didn’t release specifics yet, but they did alert the working girls to be careful and to let police know if they saw anything or anyone suspicious. They also started patrolling the area of the park where the bodies had been found, hoping for a repeat visit.”

Rogan shook his head. “Like the guy’s not going to notice that.”

Ellie made two small hatch marks on the bottom of the page and then continued her summary. “Fast forward again to April 1995. Another family is at Conkling Park, but this time in the northwest corner. They find what looks to be a human bone.”

“Another cat funeral?”

“No cat in this family—at least not to my knowledge. But they did have a dog, who was very much alive. Alive enough to pick up the scent of a dead body during the family hike. The body was identified as Stacy Myer, last seen a week earlier. And she wasn’t buried well, not like the first three. More like she was dumped and covered with leaves.”

“Because the guy knew the police were looking for him by then. He rushed.”

She nodded and made a third hatch mark. “And they probably realized they’d been pretty stupid to do a visual patrol of one part of the park to the exclusion of the rest. So the cadaver dog came back out, and found another body with more advanced signs of decomposition. Donna Blank. Reported missing, also by her mother, shortly after New Year’s, a time frame consistent with her remains. Her body was in a deep grave, like the others, but her postmortem injuries were less severe. Both of her wrists were broken, but the limbs were otherwise intact. Hard to know why exactly, but maybe he had to rush with her, too.” She flipped the legal pad to face Rogan. “Put it all together: five victims in six years and change.”

“The guy accelerated,” Rogan noted. “Two victims within a few months in 1995.”

Ellie added a fourth hatch mark, and then made some additional notes. “Henning, Thomas, and Myer were known prostitutes, all with vice records, Henning and Thomas with convictions. Jennifer Bronson worked out of a lingerie modeling establishment.” She batted her eyes with mock innocence. Back before the Internet had given prostitutes an alternative to working the streets, lingerie modeling shops, massage parlors, and other “jack shacks” provided cover. “Donna Blank worked at a strip club. And her family confirmed she had a drug problem.” The line between stripping and prostitution was a thin one when a drug habit needed to be fed. As she added Donna Blank’s name to the list, something about it felt familiar, as if she had recently seen it in another context. She tried to pull the moment to the surface, but kept losing its edges.

“You still there, Hatcher?”

“Yeah, sorry.” She continued her summary. “Then we get to New York City, October 1995. Deborah Garner. Picked up from a New Jersey rest stop, found dead in Fort Washington Park.”