City of Fear (17 page)
There’s always an easy way and a hard way
.
Ellie had spoken those words to the drug-buying law student at Pulse as a warning that there were two ways she could search her purse. Now it was Thursday morning, and she repeated the phrase to herself as an entirely different kind of warning. She had three cold case files tucked discreetly in her top drawer, and she had a decision to make.
She could return the files to Central Records and pretend she had never received a call from Bill Harrington. Or she could try to retrace Flann McIlroy’s steps, a task that was probably impossible and would only complicate the case against Jake Myers.
She sat at her desk nursing a spoonful of Nutella, looking at the handwritten phone number on the back of Peter’s business card. An easy way or a hard way.
The dream witness in the solid case against Jake Myers. Easy. Cherry pie. Or the cop who breaks the news to Rogan, Dan Eckels, Simon Knight, Max Donovan, the mayor’s office, and – worst of all – Miriam and Paul Hart that there’s a problem. Not easy.
One more phone call.
‘George Kittrie.’
‘This is Ellie Hatcher. We met the other night at Plug Uglies, with Peter Morse?’
‘You finally dumped that kid?’
‘Nope. Not yet, at least. I’m actually calling about another mutual acquaintance – Flann McIlroy?’
‘I’m just giving you a hard time. Morse told me you might reach out. I think he was afraid I might tear your head off if you called without notice. Something about three girls?’
‘Yes, sir. I’ve got a murder victim’s father calling the department for an update, saying McIlroy thought his daughter’s death was related to a couple of others. I figured I’d try to piece together what McIlroy was up to.’
She was walking a fine line here. She wanted to know if McIlroy had contacted Kittrie, but she didn’t want to tip him off to a story in the event that he hadn’t. The vaguer the information, and the more innocuous the request, the less likely Kittrie would go digging.
‘Yeah, that rings a bell. He called, what, it must have been a few years ago – definitely after my book came out, so 2004? 2005?’
‘That sounds about right,’ Ellie said. She wondered if Kittrie had a regular habit of dropping references to his book.
‘He wanted me to write a piece speculating a connection between three murders, all a few years apart. All the girls had been out on the town.’
‘Do you have any notes?’
‘Nah. It sounded like garbage at the time. The city’s a dangerous place at night, you know? And he wasn’t giving me anything to tie it all together. I realized by then that Mac wasn’t above using us. I figured he had an agenda of some kind.’
‘So the club angle was the only thing tying the murders together?’
‘Yeah. You know, same demographics, I guess – young women. But that was it. I’ve always been pretty cautious about what I’ll print under my byline. There was nothing to verify, so I wasn’t going to run with it.’
‘Well, I can see why you’d pass. Thanks a lot for your time. I’ll get back to the victim’s dad and let him know there’s nothing new.’
‘Glad to help those who protect and serve. Maybe I can hit you up for a return favor?’
Ellie had known when she called a reporter that there’d be a quid pro quo. ‘Yeah, shoot.’
‘In the Chelsea Hart case, can you confirm that Jake Myers shaved the victim’s head?’
It felt like Kittrie had punched her in the throat. His information was not a hundred percent accurate, but it was close enough. She couldn’t remember the number of times the Wichita papers had printed something about the College Hill Strangler that may have started out as truth, but had morphed into something entirely different by the time it reached the press, like a fifth-hand message in a child’s game of Operator.
She couldn’t find words as her mind raced through Kittrie’s possible sources. She finally mustered a ‘No comment.’ She was surprised by the force of the handset as she returned it to the carriage.
She was still processing Kittrie’s bombshell when Rogan showed up, a cup of Starbucks in one hand, his cell in the other.
‘You seen the Lou yet?’ He used his jaw to flip the phone shut.
‘Huh-uh. You got a sec? We need to talk.’
‘It’s gonna have to wait. Eckels just called me, pissed off about something. He wants us in his office, like, ten minutes ago.’
Rogan led the way, waving off her attempts to slow him down. He rapped his knuckles against the glass of Eckels’s closed door, then helped himself to the doorknob. Ellie caught a brief glimpse of their lieutenant speaking animatedly into his phone. He held up a hand momentarily, then gave them the all-clear.
‘Ah, Rogan. I see you didn’t come alone.’
‘You said it was about the Myers case. I figured you wanted me and Hatcher.’
‘Sure. Why not? This is, after all, something that should definitely concern her. Have a seat.’
Rogan threw her a worried look.
‘So, I got a phone call from the Public Information Office this morning,’ Eckels announced. ‘Seems they just heard from a reporter at the
Daily Post
. You two know anything about this?’
‘I just gave a no-comment to George Kittrie about five seconds ago.’ Another worried look from Rogan. ‘He wanted confirmation that Myers shaved the vic’s head.’
‘Shit.’ Rogan bit his lower lip.
‘Yeah, no shit, shit. So is one of you going to tell me why we’re losing control of this investigation?’ Although the wording of the question was aimed at both of them, Ellie felt Eckels’s eyes fall directly on her. ‘And, by the way, the reporter who called the PIO wasn’t Kittrie, it was one Peter Morse. I want to know who let this leak.’
The insinuation was obvious. Ellie’s case. Ellie’s boyfriend. Ellie’s leak.
Before she could defend herself, Rogan was doing it for her. ‘Hatcher wouldn’t do that.’
One simple sentence. No hesitation in his voice. No question mark. Rogan wasn’t simply backing her up out of mandatory partner loyalty. He had no doubt at all about her innocence.
‘I wouldn’t,’ she confirmed. ‘And I didn’t.’
‘Who the hell was it, then?’ Eckels demanded. ‘Even inside the house, we kept a lid on that. It was our ace in the hole: the killer took the hair and the earrings, and that was how we’d head off a bunch of whackadoos trying to give us fake confessions.’
‘With all respect, Lou,’ Rogan said, ‘now that we’ve got Myers dead to rights, what does it really matter? The press was going to get hold of it eventually.’
‘It matters because I expect my detectives to show a little discretion.’
‘Maybe it was the girl’s family,’ Rogan said. ‘They’ve been talking to the media.’
‘They were using the media to put pressure on us. Telling the world that their daughter was mutilated, after we’ve already caught the guy, wouldn’t appear to fall into that game plan. Only a handful of us knew the condition of that girl’s body when she was found. And it just so happens that one of them’s boinking the very same reporter who seems to be a leg ahead of every other reporter in the city.’
Ellie wanted to tell Eckels he was out of line. That she didn’t have to sit here and take his abuse. That he wouldn’t make the same assumption if one of his male detectives was dating a female reporter.
But she knew she couldn’t do any of it. He was drawing the same inferences she would in his position. Her case. Her boyfriend. Her leak.
Once again, it was Rogan who spoke up. ‘Hatcher and I – we’ve kept it in the vault. But other people saw the girl. The joggers. The medical examiner. The EMTs. Could be anyone.’
Ellie’s memory flashed to Officer Capra, the first uniform on the scene, holding court the night of Jake Myers’s arrest at Plug Uglies. Peter and his boss, George Kittrie, had gone to the bar that night for the express purpose of finding loose-lipped cops. She would’ve cold-cocked Capra on the spot if he were in the room, but she still wasn’t going to dime him out to Eckels.
‘I knew Peter Morse when everything went down with Flann McIlroy, and you know I didn’t give him any tip-offs on that. It’s your choice whether to believe me, Lou, but I would hope you’d give me the benefit of the doubt.’
Rogan leaned back in his chair. ‘You said the reporter asked if Chelsea Hart’s head was
shaved
? See, now that shit’s not even right. No one who saw that girl would’ve said that. Myers hacked that shit up. Sounds like the paper’s heard something third-or fourth-hand.’
Ellie had been wondering whether to point out the discrepancy to Eckels herself, but it sounded more persuasive coming from Rogan. She was finding it hard to focus on anything beyond the question that kept echoing in her mind: Why hadn’t Peter mentioned any of this last night?
Whether Eckels was persuaded or simply acquiescing to the fact that he couldn’t prove his suspicions, he moved on. ‘For what it’s worth, I told the Public Information Officer to shell out a no-comment to Morse. I expect you –
both
of you – to do the same. I just got off the phone with Simon Knight to give him a heads-up on the story, and I assured him that we will keep control over this case. The last thing we need is a media circus around Myers’s trial.’
Eckels picked up a newspaper that was open on the corner of his desk and dropped it in front of the detectives. ‘This, of course, didn’t help.’
It was a copy of the morning’s
New York Sun
. Most of the page was occupied by a photograph of Jake Myers’s perp walk, snapped while Rogan and Ellie escorted him from the back of a squad car to be arraigned after his lineup at 100 Centre Street.
But it was a smaller headline on the sidebar that Eckels was tapping with a meaty index finger: ‘For Victim’s Friends, Another Encounter with NYC Crime.’ Ellie skimmed the first paragraph. As Jordan McLaughlin and Stefanie Hart had sat on the front steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art the previous afternoon, an armed assailant had snatched their purses from the sidewalk and escaped through Central Park.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Ellie said. Those girls had been put through enough.
‘You mean to tell me you haven’t seen this?’ Eckels asked.
‘I’ve been catching up on other work,’ Ellie said. She’d scanned the coverage of the Hart case this morning, but hadn’t noticed the ancillary sidebar.
Eckels looked at Rogan for his explanation.
‘I just walked in,’ Rogan said. ‘I had some personal stuff I’d pushed off during the heat of the case.’
‘Why didn’t we hear about this yesterday?’ Ellie asked. ‘We spent a lot of time with those girls.’
‘They reported it to museum security,’ Eckels said. ‘The museum turned it over to Central Park precinct, where some uniform took a complaint without thinking to reach out to us.’
She shook her head. ‘I’ll call the girls right away.’
Eckels held up his hand. ‘Already done. Public Information’s getting a victim’s advocate in touch with them for damage control. Make sure they’ve got all their credit cards canceled, that kind of thing. We’ll get them to the airport for their flight later this morning. They’re more than ready to go home. Just promise me you’ll do everything you can to make sure no more shit sandwiches.’
She and Rogan both nodded. Ellie was beginning to detect a pattern: Eckels liked to blow off steam but generally calmed down before breaking the huddle.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t quite ready to break. Easy way and a hard way. All things being equal, she was one to opt for ease. But she saw no detour around this one. She didn’t want to be that cop who twenty years down the road – after an innocent man had been exonerated – had lacked the courage to challenge the conventional wisdom.
‘Sorry, sir. One more thing, while we’re here. We got a phone call off the tip line from a victim’s father on a cold case. His daughter was also killed after getting a little wild, on the Lower East Side in 2000.’
‘So call him back and make nice.’
‘I did, sir. But here’s the thing. His daughter also had her hair chopped off. And if the news is going to come out about Chelsea, then he’s going to see the resemblance between the two cases.’
‘He’s going to see the resemblance, or you are?’ Eckels shot her an annoyed look, but then a glimmer of recognition crossed his face. ‘Please tell me this isn’t that same case McIlroy bothered me about a few years ago.’
‘Probably,’ she said. ‘He apparently was looking into three different cases – all young blondes, all killed late at night, all possibly having to do with their hair.’
‘Emphasis on
possibly
. As in
im
possibly. You really are McIlroy’s long-lost love child. The case I had didn’t fit the pattern at all, as I recall.’
‘It depends what you mean by the pattern. The victim thought someone was stalking her when she left Artistik, a salon on the Upper East Side. Her hairdresser took off five inches. We could be talking about one killer – someone with a hair fetish. He cuts his victims’ hair. In your case – Alice Butler – he could have been set off by the haircut. Or he could have taken more of it when he killed her, and no one noticed because she’d just had the big change.’
Eckels shook his head in frustration. ‘Our job, despite what you may have learned from McIlroy, is not to work cold cases. If you think you’ve got something, send it to the Cold Case Squad and listen to them laugh at you. Until then, Rogan, please get your partner out of my office. I believe you have grand jury today on Jake Myers?’
Rogan looked at his Cartier watch. ‘In an hour.’
‘Fingers crossed, guys. And, Hatcher, no surprises.’
Rachel Peck had been forced to alter her usual writing routine. Today was the second of two days this week she’d agreed to switch shifts with Dan Field, the afternoon bartender. Dan’s request had been accompanied by an explanation that his agent had lined up afternoon auditions for him, but Rachel suspected it was just another ploy to get access to her more lucrative peak-hour tips and to stick her with the lunch crowd. Still, Dan was generally a nice guy, and she didn’t want to be seen as an inflexible bitch, so she’d made the swap.
Her usual routine was to sleep late, do some yoga, and then write until it was time to show up to the proverbial day job, which, in her case, was a night job. Her goal each day was eight hundred words, even if it sometimes meant gluing herself to her keyboard at 2:00 a.m. when she returned from the restaurant.
This morning, however, she’d set her alarm for eight and had skipped the morning yoga so she could work in a couple of hours of writing before covering Dan’s lunch shift.
Rachel was twenty-six years old and had already thought of herself as a writer for a decade. Her literary dabblings began even earlier, when, as a kid in Lewiston, Idaho, her only escape from a household dominated by her angry and possessive father was a spiral-bound journal.
The Reverend Elijah Peck had found himself a single father one night when Rachel was only seven years old. Rachel’s mother had run to the corner market for a quart of milk and never returned. Her one-way Greyhound ticket to Las Vegas turned up on the family MasterCard, but the Reverend didn’t bother trying to chase her down.
Her father’s willingness to let go of the wife who had abandoned him did not, however, extend to the daughter. Rachel had begun running away when she was only thirteen. She hitched rides to Spokane, Missoula, Kennewick, Twin Falls, Seattle.
Elijah would track her down every time. The last time she’d been brought home by her father, he’d found her working at the door of a Portland strip joint, scantily clad and impersonating a hostess of legal age. He hauled her back to Lewiston and told her that if she didn’t stay put and complete her senior year, she’d be dead to him.
When she asked her father what he meant, he looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘I’ll deliver you home to the Lord myself before you set another harlot’s foot in a sinner shack like that.’
Rachel had never understood her father, but she knew him well enough to believe he just might follow through on his promise. For a full year, she stuck to his drill. No more missed classes, no hitchhiking. She even kept curfew. Then the Saturday before her high school graduation ceremony, she packed a bag, found the principal, and did what she needed to do to convince him to let her take her diploma away with her. She hadn’t heard from her father or Lewiston since.
For the first time in years, Rachel was thinking about the Reverend Elijah Peck. The yellowed pages of her old journals lay before her on the dining table she used for a desk. Her eyes were still wet from the intermittent tears that had formed as she’d read her own teenage words and relived all those same emotions.
She was always surprised at how the quotidian details of everyday life crept into her writing. The way a woman at the next table checked the coverage of her lipstick in the reflection of a coffee cup. The pug in her building who wore an argyle turtleneck. The taste of cigarettes and dark chocolate.
But this was the first time she had made a conscious decision to draw on her own biography. The characters were fictionalized, of course. The defiant teenager would be a boy who developed into a killer. The oppressive parent would be a mother whose law enforcement career – always so resented by her always-resentful son – would now become the one means of helping her child, if she chose to do so.
Rachel was in the middle of a pivotal scene between mother and son – the one where the detective finds critical evidence beneath her own roof, implicating her own son – when she caught a glimpse of the time on the lower right hand of her computer screen.
Ten-fifteen. Time to earn a paycheck.
Her fingers tapped away at the keyboard as quickly as she could force them, pulling all of the thoughts stacked in her short-term memory and throwing them onto the screen. Spelling and syntax be damned. As long as she could piece it all together when she returned tonight, she’d be fine.
