City of Fear (15 page)
On the night of August 16, 2000, a homeless woman named Loretta Thompson thought she had found a safe place to sleep when she passed a pile of Mexican serape blankets tossed into the basement entrance of a Chinese massage parlor on the corner of Fourth Street and Avenue B.
It was a warm, dry night, and Loretta had decided not to check into one of the shelters, filled as they were with strung-out and angry women. She was not like the others. She just needed a break – a friend to take her in for a few weeks, an employer to take a chance on her – some way to get back on her feet after leaving the man whose beatings had caused her to miscarry the only child she’d ever managed to conceive.
When she reached the bottom of the unlit stairwell, she realized that the blankets were wrapped around something firm. Her hope was that it was a rug – something she could use as padding between her body and the filthy concrete. But when she pulled one of the blankets loose from the bundle, she felt something heavy shift beneath it. She tugged at the blanket with more force to get a better look.
Her screams awakened multiple Fourth Street residents. The 911 calls followed.
It took police three days to identify the body as Robbie Harrington, a twenty-four-year-old artist who paid her bills working at a tattoo parlor on the Lower East Side. She was last seen having a drink alone at a dive bar a few blocks from her job. She had been strangled with a brown leather belt that was left wrapped around her neck.
According to the log notes on the outside of the Harrington file, the active investigation had been put to rest about a year after Robbie’s body had been found, and her murder joined the legions of cold case files that gather dust until a new lead lands unexpectedly in the department’s lap. But three years ago, someone had brushed off the dust from the case. Three years ago, Detective Flann McIlroy had requested this file and read the same reports that Ellie had just finished reviewing for the second time at her desk.
She could see why the media reports of Chelsea Hart’s murder would have caught Bill Harrington’s attention. Like Chelsea, Robbie was a very young, white, blond female murdered after leaving a New York City bar, although her club of choice on the Lower East Side was significantly less glitzy than Pulse.
Ellie picked up the phone and dialed the number that Harrington had left that morning when he contacted the department’s tip line. She took note of the Nassau County area code, a change from the Pittsburgh number listed for the Harringtons at the time of their daughter’s death.
‘Hello?’ The man had a smoker’s voice.
‘This is Detective Ellie Hatcher with the New York Police Department. I’m calling for Bill Harrington.’
‘This is him.’
‘You called the tip line about a recent case of ours?’
‘I did. I’m feeling foolish about it now. I don’t know anything about that poor girl’s murder other than what I heard on the news. The minute I called, I regretted it. Some old man’s imagination could keep you from leads that might actually get you somewhere.’
Ellie realized that the man had probably experienced his share of false leads and crank calls eight years ago. ‘Why don’t you go ahead and tell me why you called.’
‘This is going to sound crazy, but I had a dream the other night, and I think it was a message from Robbie. I wasn’t calling the tip line for myself. I was calling for her.’
It took the man some effort to get the words out, but Ellie eventually put the picture together. Flann McIlroy had tracked Bill Harrington down out of the blue three years earlier, looking for additional information about Robbie’s murder. By then, Bill had retired, and he and his wife, Penny, were living in Mineola on Long Island. It had been a year since they’d communicated with anyone from the NYPD about their daughter’s case.
‘At first, when the trail went cold, we’d call every month or so. Usually it was me, not Penny. Then every month became every season, and then just every August on the anniversary. Ultimately, it was our older daughter Jenna who convinced us that to move on with our lives, we needed to accept the probability that we would never know who took away our girl from us. I think that most of Penny’s reason for wanting to move closer to New York was to show that she hadn’t forgotten about Robbie. Being near to the city that Robbie had insisted on living in was my wife’s way of being close to our daughter after it was too late.’
‘I’m sorry if my call has dredged all of this up for you again, Mr. Harrington.’ Ellie hoped she had made the right decision contacting this man.
‘I told you, it was the dream that did the dredging. I called you, remember?’
‘You said in your message that Flann McIlroy told you he thought there were others. What did you mean by that?’
‘That’s what he said when he called us three years ago. He had been working a few months before that on a different case and had pulled up a mess of cold cases looking for patterns, I guess. He told us it turned out the case he was working was some kind of a domestic thing. But in the process of looking at all those old cases, he thought he’d noticed some connections between Robbie’s death and a couple of other unsolved murders.’
‘Did he tell you anything about the other cases?’
‘No names or anything. He said the others were girls around the same age, and they had been out on the town before – well, before someone got to them.’
‘Did he have any leads? I’m trying to understand why he would have called to tell you all this if he didn’t have any developments to report.’
‘I remember exactly why he called. He said the same thing, in fact – that he was sorry for calling us and wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t think it might be important. It was the strangest thing, though. I couldn’t imagine how an offhand comment could possibly matter.’
An offhand comment. Ellie’s fingers involuntarily clenched the handset of the telephone as she braced herself for what Harrington was about to tell her. She did not want the nagging feeling that had pulled her from the bar tonight to go any further. She wanted Flann to have had another reason for calling.
‘He wanted to talk to Penny about something she said when we identified Robbie’s body.’
Ellie knew immediately which single sentence in the voluminous police reports had triggered Flann’s phone call. It was the same line that had caused her to leave the bar earlier than she’d intended.
Victim’s mother
confirmed ID but said victim’s hair looked odd
.
‘What exactly did Detective McIlroy want to know?’ Ellie asked. ‘Would it be better for me to speak directly with your wife?’
‘Penny’s not in a position to answer any questions. She has early-onset Alzheimer’s. It’s advanced.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘It is what it is. She recognizes me on good days but doesn’t understand why I look so old. The only silver lining I’ve been able to find in my wife’s condition is that she seems to have no memory of Robbie’s murder. She either forgets her daughters altogether, or remembers them as they were when they were young and we were still living as a family in Pittsburgh.’
‘Were her memories gone by the time Detective McIlroy contacted you?’
‘They were fading, certainly, but she was still home with me then. She did speak with him directly, and I tried a couple of times to work with her on the information the detective wanted. I never did quite understand what the issue was.’
‘What about at the time she made the comment, after the two of you identified the body. Didn’t she give some idea of what she meant back then?’
‘Not to be specific. She just blurted out that Robbie’s hair looked funny when she saw her lying like that on the table. She brought it up later when we were driving back home, but it was just this observation that made her realize how little we’d seen Robbie since she moved to the city. I guess a mother is like that – figures she should know when her own daughter changes her appearance.’
‘But you don’t know exactly what the change was?’ The fact that Chelsea Hart’s hair had been crudely chopped off had not been released to the public, and Ellie did not want to share the information with Harrington. But she had to think that such a brutal transformation would have been noticed by more than just one of Robbie’s parents.
‘It looked a little shorter to me, but Penny was just so bothered by it, saying it didn’t seem like a style Robbie would go for. I don’t know enough about those kinds of things to be any more specific than that, and by the time anyone asked Penny about it, it was too late. I tried and tried, but all she could say by then was that Robbie liked her hair long. No, wait, that wasn’t it – because Robbie did sometimes keep her hair a little neater, cut up above her shoulders, I guess.’
‘So, I’m sorry – what is it your wife meant?’
‘I don’t know what it’s called, but Penny was saying Robbie liked her hair to be – you know, even. All the same around, how most of the girls wore it back then. She didn’t like it being different lengths, the way you see it now, with all the long hair, but then short on the top.’
‘Do you mean bangs, where it’s cut above the eyebrows?’
‘Yeah, that’s it. Bangs. When Detective McIlroy called a few years ago, I finally got Penny to focus, and she told me that Robbie didn’t like bangs. Apparently she was wearing her hair that way when she was killed.’
‘And you passed that on to Detective McIlroy?’
‘I did. But what does any of this have to do with that girl who was found in the park? I called because she’d also been out all night like my Robbie, and there was something about the picture that reminded me of her, and, well, I told you about my dream.’
If Robbie Harrington really had sent her father to the NYPD tip line, perhaps it was because she was in a position to know something that her father could not – that whoever strangled her on August 16, 2000, may have claimed another victim yesterday morning.
‘I told you. Detective McIlroy would check out stacks of cold cases at a time. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it, and you can stand here all morning while I pull files, and none of that’s going to change.’
Ellie looked at her watch. She didn’t have all day. She had a precinct to go to. But her first stop on Wednesday morning had been to the Central Records Division at One Police Plaza.
She had come in the hope that it would be easy to identify which cases Flann McIlroy had been reviewing along with Robbie Harrington’s. The task was anything but. Flann had a penchant for checking out old files and looking for patterns. It had been his imaginative theories – connecting seemingly unrelated cases – that had earned him both praise and ridicule from his peers in the department, along with the nickname McIlMulder.
‘He had all of these cases checked out at the same time as the Roberta Harrington file?’
She had asked the clerk to pull up any case files McIlroy had checked out in the three months preceding his phone call to Bill Harrington. The resulting printout was pages long.
‘Like I said, he didn’t have all of these at the same time. He had up to fifteen cases checked out at a time. And, as far as I can tell, in that three-month window, he pulled a total of a hundred and seven.’
Once again, Ellie scanned the list of files. Once again, total disbelief.
‘That’s actually a little light,’ the woman remarked. ‘I used to joke he had a ten-file-a-week habit.’
Ellie had already asked the clerk to pull a random sample of the different files, and, on a brief skim, she had been unable to figure out which cases had been linked in McIlroy’s mind to Robbie Harrington’s murder, and which had been of interest for any number of other, unknowable reasons.
‘You want me to pull some more reports or not?’
Ellie looked at the two-foot-high stack the clerk already needed to reshelve because of her morning research project.
‘Don’t feel bad. God knows McIlroy never did.’
It wasn’t that Ellie didn’t want the woman to work. She just didn’t want the work to be futile.
One hundred and seven files? Ellie had only known Flann for a week before his death. During that time, she’d become a staunch supporter, but now she was beginning to wonder if he really had been certifiably insane. Even when she narrowed the list to female victims under thirty-five years old, seventy cases were left taunting her.
‘What day did Flann return the Harrington file to CRD?’
The clerk entered a few keystrokes on her computer and recited a date about nine months after Flann had reached out to Robbie’s father. He had let the theory grind around in his brain for nine months after that phone call, until he’d apparently given it up. She wondered what more she could possibly add.
‘Can you figure out which of these other cases he turned in on the same day?’ Ellie asked.
More keystrokes. ‘He turned in three files all together. Your Harrington case, plus two others: Lucy Feeney and Alice Butler.’
‘And how old were the victims?’
‘Feeney was twenty-one. Alice Butler was twenty-two. Feeney was killed two years before Harrington. Butler, almost two years after.’
‘I’ll take those, please.’
One by one, the men filed into the Thirteenth Precinct’s lineup room.
Watching from the other side of the viewing window, Ellie recognized number 1 as Jim Kemp, a desk clerk from downstairs. Number 2 was Toby Someone, who worked behind the counter at the bagel shop on Second Avenue. Number 3 was Jake Myers. She maintained a neutral expression, lest Myers’s attorney accuse them later of a biased process. Number 4 was another desk clerk, Steve Broderick. Number 5 was a kid they’d found playing guitar outside Gramercy Park.
All young, thin, and brunet. Decent looking. Similar heights and builds. She was just giving herself a silent congratulations on a well-built lineup when number 6 entered, provoking a skeptical laugh from Willie Wells, the defense attorney Jake Myers had retained after his arrest the previous night.
‘You’re kidding me, right?’
Number 6 was the homicide squad’s very own civilian aide, Jack Chen. Young, thin, brunet, decent looking – and noticeably Asian.
‘The kid we pulled from the holding room backed out,’ Rogan explained. ‘A sudden worry he might be falsely accused.’
‘So you found this guy?’ Wells said, pointing at Chen. ‘What? Fat Albert wasn’t available? How about the Abominable Snowman? He’d probably fit in.’
‘Is that your way of saying you’d rather proceed with five?’ Rogan said.
‘I’d rather have a good six.’
Max Donovan intervened. ‘And you know that any court would say the first five will do.’
‘It’s not my job to help you sink my client. Do what you’re gonna do, and if you screw it up, you’ll hear about it at the
Wade
hearing.’
Donovan looked to Rogan, who pressed a speaker button next to the glass and excused number 6.
‘We’re ready?’ Ellie asked, once the lineup was down to Myers and the four suitable decoys. She wished she hadn’t noticed Donovan’s sleepy gray eyes. If he was at all embarrassed about asking her out to dinner the previous night, he wasn’t showing it.
He nodded, and Ellie opened the door to the hallway. Tahir Kadhim sat by himself on a metal folding chair outside the viewing room. Stefanie Hyder, Jordan McLaughlin, and Miriam Hart stood huddled together a few feet away, Paul pacing next to them.
Ellie called in Kadhim first. The taxi driver had not even made it to the glass before pointing to Jake Myers. ‘That’s the man,’ he said. ‘He is the one I saw take the girl from my taxi.’
‘You didn’t actually see anyone
take
Ms. Hart anywhere, did you?’ Wells asked.
Donovan held up a hand. ‘We’re here for a lineup, Willie. If you want to have an investigator chat with Mr. Kadhim on your own time, that’s your call.’
‘And by then you will have no doubt had your standard talk with him.’
‘I am under no obligation to speak to you,’ Kadhim said. ‘You can ask your questions of me at trial.’
‘Ah, I see I’m too late,’ Wells said.
Donovan smiled, and Ellie walked the taxi driver to the door. Next up was Stefanie Hyder.
Unlike Tahir Kadhim, Chelsea’s best friend took her time at the window, but it was not out of apprehension. Her eyes did not dart from person to person. Instead, they remained focused solidly on the middle of the lineup. As she stared at Jake Myers, her face became contorted with hatred.
Finally, after a full minute, she spoke. ‘It’s number three. No doubt.’ She used the sleeve of her sweatshirt to wipe a tear from her cheek, and Ellie placed an arm around her shoulder and walked her out of the room.
Paul and Miriam Hart were waiting in the hallway with expectant eyes.
‘No question,’ Stefanie said. ‘It was definitely him.’
Miriam and Jordan wrapped their arms around Stefanie, while Mr. Hart shook Ellie’s hand with both of his, thanking her for catching the man who had killed their daughter.
‘I just want to go home,’ Stefanie said, crying into Mrs. Hart’s shoulder.
‘You can go back to Indiana whenever you’re ready,’ Ellie said. ‘We needed you to identify Myers, and you’ve done a great job. The trial won’t be for at least a couple of months, and the district attorney’s office will stay in touch with you about any hearings that come up beforehand.’
Mrs. Hart wiped her eyes with a tissue. ‘The girls have something they want to do this afternoon to remember Chelsea – a way for them to close the door on all this, at least in New York. But we’re going to fly home tomorrow. It’s time for us to take Chelsea home.’
As they told her once again how grateful they were for her help, all Ellie could think of were the three cold case files in her blue backpack and the damage a lawyer like Willie Wells could do with them in front of a jury.
Lying on her couch that evening, Ellie closed the files and tossed them on the coffee table. By this point, she had read them enough times to have memorized the critical details.
Lucy Feeney had been killed nearly a decade ago. She was three months past her twenty-first birthday, still in that phase where making full use of one’s legal age was a top priority. She and three roommates shared a converted two-bedroom in Washington Heights, but Lucy could be found downtown during most of her waking hours, where she’d spent the last two years waiting tables at six different restaurants.
The week of Lucy’s murder, she and her roommates, in various combinations, had gone out partying on each of the previous four nights. The roommates’ appetites for adventure had been sated. Lucy’s had not. On the evening of September 23, 1998, she hit the bars on her own. According to her roommates, it wasn’t an unusual move for any of them. They enjoyed semi-regular status at a sufficient number of places that they could be comfortable on their own.
The last time anyone saw Lucy Feeney alive, she was at B Bar on Bowery, enjoying a Cosmopolitan. The bartender remembered her. He also recalled sneaking her a couple extra shots of Stoli, one of the privileges of semi-regular bar status. He did not, however, spend enough time with her to recall anything about the man with whom he saw her leaving shortly before closing time.
Lucy’s roommates did not report her missing for two days, another indication of the kind of lifestyle the girls considered to be normal. Lucy’s naked body wasn’t found until three days after that, wrapped in black plastic garbage bags and dumped in the Bronx near the Harlem River.
She’d been strangled. Stabbed four times in the chest and stomach. And her blond hair had been chopped off in blunt chunks near the roots, just like Chelsea Hart’s.
The second of the three files was Robbie Harrington’s. She too was strangled after a night of barhopping, nearly two years after Lucy Feeney. And if Robbie’s mother was correct in her observation about her daughter’s changed hairstyle, Robbie’s killer may also have tampered with her hair, albeit with more subtlety.
That left the third file, Alice Butler. Alice disappeared a year and a half after Robbie Harrington’s murder. She was twenty-two years old at the time – slightly older than Lucy Feeney, a couple of years younger than Robbie Harrington. Alice had been an on-and-off student at the City University of New York for two and a half years, earning barely enough credit hours to be considered a college sophomore by the time she dropped out for good a year before her death.
She worked behind the counter of a New York Sports Club on the Upper East Side, but lived with her sister in Elizabeth, New Jersey. On the night of her murder, Alice borrowed her sister’s Toyota Corolla for a night of partying in the city with a girlfriend. When she parked on the corner of Thirty-ninth Street and Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, she failed to notice the adjacent fire hydrant. By the time she and her friend returned to the spot at three in the morning, the Corolla had been towed.
According to Alice’s friend, Alice grew increasingly angry while they waited to claim the car at the city tow lot. No doubt fueled by alcohol, she began muttering about abandoning her sister’s car and walking back to Jersey if necessary. The friend left an impatient Alice by herself in line while she sought out a restroom. When she returned five minutes later, Alice was gone.
Ellie recognized a familiar name in the Alice Butler file: Dan Eckels. Six years earlier, shortly before he’d earned his white-shirt status, her lieutenant had been the lead detective on the Butler murder case. As far as she could tell, he’d worked the case as well as possible. The best leads in the days following Alice’s disappearance were three separate phone calls from drivers reporting that they’d seen a blonde matching Alice’s description walking alone on the West Side Highway. Alice’s deteriorated body was found ten days later in Fort Tryon Park, dumped in a ravine between the Cloisters and the Henry Hudson Parkway. Bruises around her throat suggested she had been manually strangled, but the official cause of death had been the eighteen stab wounds to her neck, chest, and abdomen.
Including Chelsea Hart, Ellie was looking at four victims. All were young and blond, killed after late nights in Manhattan bars. But she knew that wasn’t enough for a pattern. Thanks to the inherently dangerous mix of sex, drugs, and alcohol at four in the morning, the sad reality was that several women were killed in the city each year under similar circumstances. Based solely on their demographics, Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, Alice Butler, and now Chelsea Hart were just four of many.
But she could not get past the hair.
Lucy Feeney and Chelsea Hart both had had their hair hacked off, leaving portions of their scalps exposed. Robbie Harrington, in contrast, had been wearing new and unexpected bangs.
Snipping off a few fringes of hair around the victim’s face was a far cry from the kind of angry chop job she’d witnessed on Chelsea.
Since her first skim through the files that morning, Ellie had known there was only one way to determine whether there was a pattern, but she’d forced herself to hold off. She told herself she should sit on it for the day before digging up the past for a murder victim’s family. Flann had been known for his far-fetched theories. This could all be yet another McIlMulder wild goose chase.
She looked at her watch. It was seven twenty. Eleven hours since she’d left One Police Plaza with the cold case files. Eleven hours since she’d taken her first browse of them in the elevator. Eleven hours since she’d opened her cell phone and entered a New Jersey telephone number. Eleven hours since she’d flipped the phone shut without hitting the call button.
Eleven hours, and there was still only one option. She picked up the phone and dialed before she changed her mind.
