City of Fear (28 page)
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.
