City of Fear (16 page)
The woman who picked up on the fourth ring seemed put out. Ellie could detect a television playing in the background, along with the sounds of children’s voices. Someone was accusing someone else of hogging something or other.
‘Hi. I’m looking for Michelle Butler?’
Ellie realized she should have run Alice’s sister through the system. After six years, she could be anywhere, and this phone number could belong to anyone.
‘It’s Trent now. Has been for a while. I’ve really got my hands full –’
‘My name’s Ellie Hatcher. I’m a detective with the NYPD. I’m calling about Alice.’
Five full seconds of background noise, then the woman said, ‘Kids, in the family room.’ The kids protested, but apparently realized that Mom meant business when she followed up with, ‘
Now
. I mean it.’
‘Have you found someone?’
Ellie swallowed, hearing the hope in the woman’s voice, picturing the tears that were probably already welling in Michelle Trent’s eyes as she braced herself for words that were long overdue.
‘No. And I’m very sorry to call under those circumstances, Mrs. Trent. But your sister’s case came to my attention in the course of another investigation.’
‘Is this going to happen every time some other girl gets killed after drinking too much? Another detective called me – it must have been three years ago.’
‘Flann McIlroy?’
‘Something like that. Yeah.’
‘Why did he call you?’
‘Jesus Christ. Don’t you people talk to each other?’
Ellie silently cursed McIlroy for not making any notes in the case files. ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said once again. ‘I would speak to Detective McIlroy directly, but he’s passed on.’
Michelle either hadn’t seen the stories about Flann’s murder in the papers, or hadn’t made the connection to the detective who’d phoned her three years earlier.
‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that. When he called me, he was asking questions about Alice’s hair. He wanted to know whether whoever killed her might have cut her hair.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
‘I told him, How could I know? I took one quick look to identify her, and then they had my sister on ice for days. We couldn’t get the body. We couldn’t have the funeral. They had to cut her open for an autopsy so they could explore every little part of her insides, and for what? No evidence. No arrests. Nothing. With all that poking and prodding, if whoever killed her cut off her hair, shouldn’t you people have noticed that?’
‘I know this is very upsetting for you, Mrs. Trent.’
‘Damn right it’s upsetting. I’m married now. I’ve got kids. My sons sleep in the room that was Alice’s when she was here. My own children don’t even know their mom used to have a sister. They think Mommy was an only child. I’ve moved on. And now I’m going to keep getting these phone calls when you’ve got nothing?’
‘If I thought it was nothing, I wouldn’t have called you. I assumed you would want us to do whatever we could.’
‘Okay, fine. So if you have something, it’s going to be news that whoever killed my sister has been out there for the last six years, breathing, eating, sleeping, and now killing other women. I’ve been able to get on with my life by convincing myself karma caught up to this guy. He stepped into the wrong fight, or was burned to ashes in some terrible car accident. Maybe in prison for something else. And now I have to go to sleep tonight wondering if he’s still out there and what he’s thinking and whether he even remembers anything special about Alice.’
Ellie noticed that Michelle had calculated the number of years since her sister died without missing a beat. She’d heard other family members of murder victims say the same thing – that the worst part of it in the long run is realizing that the killer lives in real time with the rest of us. That for every happy moment you have, he might have two. That he might be watching the same television program, or admiring the same sunset, or boasting to his friends about your loved one’s murder while you are putting the kids down for the night.
‘If he’s out there, Michelle, I’m going to do everything I can to find him. And that’s the only reason I would make this phone call. The chance – however small – that I might be able to call you six months down the road with some answers is the only possible reason I would ever ask you to revisit these kinds of questions.’
The line fell silent, and Ellie wondered whether she had missed the click of a hang-up. Then she heard a quiet sniffle.
‘So what do you need to know about Alice’s hair?’
Ellie felt the tension leave her fingers, wrapped so tightly on the handset. ‘In the file, it says you were the one to identify your sister’s body.’
‘That’s right. Our mom died a few years before Alice, and our dad – he wasn’t around.’
‘When you saw her, did you notice anything unusual about her hair?’
‘I wasn’t paying attention to her
hair
. It’s really hard to see your kid sister like that. I made myself look at her face, saw it was her, and made a point not to turn away. But, like I told the other detective, I think I would have noticed if someone had chopped off all Alice’s hair. I assume you have pictures of her like that. Can’t you check?’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t have anything to compare the medical examiner’s photos against.’
‘I’m sorry I sound so angry. It’s just that I don’t understand how this can possibly matter. Back when it all happened, I told the detectives that Alice had thought something was wrong. She told me she was being followed. Why couldn’t they find the guy?’
Ellie recalled a mention in one of Eckels’s reports that, according to Alice’s sister, Alice had complained a week before her murder that a man was following her on the street. Eckels was never able to identify who the man might have been, or even to confirm whether he in fact existed.
‘It was my understanding from the crime reports that your sister didn’t give you any specific information about the person she thought may have been watching her.’
‘What was she going to say? Obviously she didn’t know who it was.’
‘But there was no physical description, no identifying information, nothing to give us a lead on the man. You told the police that this happened somewhere near the health club where she worked?’
‘Right. It must have been a couple of weeks before she was – well, you know, it was a couple of weeks before. She came home from work and told me she might be going crazy, but that she thought someone was tailing her. She said she noticed some guy behind her on the street when she was a few blocks from the gym. Whenever she’d turn around to look at him, he’d check out a store window or a newspaper or whatever. She was pretty creeped out about it.’
‘But she didn’t file a report at the time?’
‘You know, I still blame myself. Once she said she didn’t see the guy again after she got to work, I told her it didn’t sound like a big deal, and she seemed to calm down. Obviously it took on more importance after what happened.’
Ellie knew from the reports that police had canvassed a five-block radius around Alice’s branch of New York Sports in an attempt to find a witness who might have noticed anyone suspicious watching either Alice or the club. It had been a long shot, and, as one could have predicted, it hadn’t panned out.
Something was bothering Ellie, though, about Michelle’s recollection of her sister’s complaint. ‘You said she was on her way
to
work when she saw the man?’
‘Yeah. Near Eighty-sixth and Lex.’
‘The file said she usually worked days, eleven to seven, but that she spotted the guy at night. I assumed she was on her way home.’
The canvassing had focused around evening hours on the assumption that people in the neighborhood likely followed the same weekday routines. If the police had searched at the wrong time of day six years earlier, they may have blown their best chance at locating a witness who might have spotted the man who had been stalking Alice two weeks before her murder.
‘No, that’s right. She did work days. But she got home late that night, and told me she saw the guy on her way to the gym.’
‘So it was in the morning.’ Ellie was getting seriously confused.
‘No, I’m sure it wasn’t. I even asked her because it just didn’t seem like anything creepy was going to happen in the middle of the morning. She told me it was around eight o’clock. Not late, but dark. She said, “It was dark, Shell. I didn’t get a good look at him, but I really think he was following me.” I’m absolutely positive. For so long I blamed myself for not making her call the police. I’d replay her voice over and over in my head. But you’re right. She worked days. And she was home and telling me this story by, like, ten o’clock.’
‘Don’t beat yourself up over it. It’s natural for us to fill in memory gaps over time.’
‘But here’s the thing. She
was
on her way to the club. She told me the route and the various places she spotted him watching her. I remember now. She got off work at seven, ran some errands, and then went back to the club for her bag. Oh, shit. Oh, this is weird. Her errands –’
Ellie took a deep breath.
‘She went to her hairdresser’s. She wanted a change.’
‘How much of a change?’
‘About five inches worth. She got her hair cut into a bob, and the guy was following her when she left. I completely forgot about that. It’s coming back to me now, though. I remember telling the detective about it.’
‘You told this to Detective McIlroy?’
‘No, I mean the detective at the time.’
‘Detective Eckels?’
‘Yeah, that was the one. I told him the guy had followed my sister on her way back to work from the hairdresser’s. I’m sure of it.’
There was no mention of the hair salon in any of Eckels’s reports, but that was the kind of detail that some cops might not jot down. What troubled Ellie more was the certainty that, in the nine months he had carried around these three cold case files, McIlroy would surely have approached the lieutenant who had been the lead detective on one of the cases. And if McIlroy had run his theory by Eckels, why hadn’t Eckels been the one to point out the resemblance between these cases and Chelsea Hart’s?
Peter was waiting for Ellie at the bar when she walked into Dos Caminos at eight o’clock. The popular restaurant was a bit of a scene, especially for the relatively sedate Gramercy neighborhood, and was much fancier than her usual take-out Mexican fare, but she supposed that had been the point when Peter had selected it.
He handed her a margarita on the rocks, with salt. ‘I took the liberty.’
‘You dear, wonderful man.’
They followed the hostess to a small table in the back dining room.
‘So hopefully today was slightly better than the rest of your week?’ Peter asked once they were alone.
Ellie used a chip to scoop up an enormous blob of green salsa, and popped it into her mouth. She nodded happily while she swallowed. ‘No new bodies. No new arrests. Just tying up the loose ends against Myers.’
‘Well, as much as I’ve appreciated your willingness to allow the late-night pop-ins –’
‘I believe the young people refer to them as booty calls.’
‘Yes, right. Lovely. Despite my appreciation for the time together, it’s nice to see you while the hour is still in the single digits. You holding up okay? I think you’ve put in more time in your first week in that unit than I have all month.’
‘I’m good. The truth is, I put in a ton of time off the clock even when I was working garden-variety property cases.’
Finally, for the first time in forty-eight hours, Ellie had a chance to breathe. She was in a great restaurant with a terrific guy and a tasty margarita. She could finally think and talk about something other than Chelsea Hart, Jake Myers, and the little mistakes that had turned a night of spring break into a tragedy.
She should have been appreciative. She should have been bubbling over with non-work-related chatter. But she found herself thinking about those cold case files. She finally allowed herself to raise the subject over her pork tacos.
‘I was following up on some old cases Flann McIlroy had been looking at,’ she said.
‘You get ten minutes of downtime, and you start poking around in someone else’s cold cases?’
‘I know. I’m a glutton for punishment. But, you know, he meant a lot to me, and so –’
‘No explanation necessary.’
‘Anyway, he had these three cases he thought might be connected. I was wondering if he ever reached out to you about them. It would’ve been about three years ago.’
‘Why would he call me?’
‘That was just his way. He’d plant stories in the press as a way to stir up public attention. Maybe turn up a witness who’d never come forward.’ Of course, McIlroy’s critics would have said it was a way of calling attention to his own career.
‘No, I never spoke to the man until I met you. But I’m still pretty new to the crime beat. If he was going to call someone at the
Daily Post
, it would’ve been Kittrie. You should ask him.’
‘Your editor? You haven’t exactly described him as the most accessible man on the planet.’
Peter shrugged. ‘He’s not that bad. Just a little rigid. I might be, too, if I was a boss.’
‘Oh, my God. You look like you’re in physical pain trying to say something nice about the man.’
‘Fine, he’s a fuckstick.’
‘I don’t think you’re allowed to say that about a guy with a tumor.’
‘I told you, I think Justine’s just screwing with my mind, trying to force me to be nice to him.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ she said. ‘You know what they say: People live longer, we’ve got crummy lifestyles, the environment’s going to hell. Cancer rates are up, my friend. We’re pretty much all dying as we speak.’
‘Jesus, you’re depressing. I’m telling you – Kittrie’s fine, in that respect, at least. Just call him, okay? He’s a tool, but he definitely would’ve had a line in to a guy like McIlroy.’ Peter pulled out his own business card and scribbled George Kittrie’s name and number on it. He extended it toward Ellie, then pulled it back. ‘I don’t need to be jealous now, do I?’
‘Oh, definitely. Because, as you know from my own history, I have such a weakness for overbearing, micromanaging bosses.’
He handed her the number. ‘If McIlroy had a story to plant, it would have been with him.’
‘Okay, now I have a single remaining demand of you this evening.’
‘Ooh, a demand? Daddy likey.’
‘Okay, two demands. One, don’t ever say that again. And two, don’t let me talk about work anymore.’
‘But, Detective, what in the world would you talk about if not work, when that’s all you ever do?’
‘Fine, I can talk about normal-people work stuff – my partner, my boss, the heroin addict who left behind his prescription methadone during a burglary –’
‘You’re kidding.’
She shook her head. ‘But I don’t want to talk about my cases.’
‘I think we can work around that.’
And for the rest of the evening, Ellie forced herself to be normal. No talk of killers, either past or current. She and Peter were on a date like two regular people.
And when Peter offered to walk her home, she had anything but work on her mind.
