The Millers Kill Police Department was small enough so no one needed lockers to hold their stuff. Desk drawers in the squad room, a row of hooks for coats and umbrellas and bags, one small refrigerator where you kept your lunch and took a chance that no one would eat it. So whoever wanted to send Hadley a message didn’t have to exert himself to break a combination. He could just slip a note beneath her laptop or hang something off her hook.
This morning it was a pair of lacy thong panties, tucked inside her windbreaker. She held them for a moment—they appeared to be brand-new and unworn, thank God—debating whether to go to the chief again. He had already spoken to every man in the department, including the part-time guys, individually. He had read them the riot act about sexual harassment and respect for the uniform. It hadn’t made much of a difference.
Hadley hadn’t been in the station house the afternoon her ex-husband’s little gift for the MKPD had arrived. A box full of fifteen-year-old tapes. If the chief had been there, she liked to think, no one would have put one of them into the VHS player. Or if they had, he would have pulled the plug as soon as he saw what it was. But the chief had been with the board of aldermen, getting the news that all their jobs might be gone come Election Day, and half the force saw her in the flesh, writhing with her co-stars in College Girls Go Down. The box had been full of movies, all starring her, and by the time she had gotten back to the station house from her afternoon shift, every one of her co-workers knew the one and only female officer on the force had been in porn when she was twenty. Practically half a lifetime ago, not that it mattered. When it came to what people thought of you, it was never far enough in the past.
She stuffed the panties in her pocket.
“Knox? Good, you’re here.” The chief beckoned to her from the squad room doorway. “Are you familiar with the state CCRF?”
“Yeah. I mean, familiar enough. I’ve used it four or five times.”
“Thank God. Lyle and I could use some help from someone a little more computer literate than we are.”
The chief wasn’t all that bad on a database interface, just slow. The dep, on the other hand, approached computers like they might explode at any moment. Kevin Flynn had actually written down step-by-step directions so MacAuley could attach files to an e-mail. Of course, he was gone now. Off to the Syracuse PD. Couldn’t help any of them anymore. The self-righteous lying bastard.
“Knox?”
“Absolutely, Chief.” She followed him into the squad room, an overly modern name for the high-ceilinged, high-windowed area furnished with old metal desks and a battered pine table the chief liked to sit on while he thought. Bulletin boards and maps hung on the walls and a slightly wobbly whiteboard stood at the front, along with a scattering of chairs from the morning briefing.
“Oh, good.” MacAuley got up from the laptop he’d been staring at. “A young person.”
Hadley plopped down in the vacant seat. “I’m thirty-five, Dep.”
“Like I said, a young person. I messed something up and now I can’t get the damn machine to do anything. You better try it again.”
Hadley logged MacAuley out and logged herself in. The state Cold Case Referral File was supposed to be the end repository of all the unsolved cases that had piled up in various law enforcement agencies across New York State. In theory. In actuality, its database was limited to cases someone had had the time to scan and enter in, which left a lot of potential gaps. Every police department in the country would swear, when asked, that cold cases weren’t lower priority than those on the front burner. But when push came to shove, closing cases talked and PR walked.
Hadley looked up at the chief as the interface loaded. “Did the crime scene guys find anything yet?” The chief had asked the staties to help search the site yesterday, while MacAuley and Eric McCrea focused on ID’ing the decedent.
“Nothing,” the dep said.
“Did Dr. Scheeler confirm she wasn’t a medical?”
“Nope,” the dep said. “And no, we haven’t gotten any info on who she was yet.” He glanced toward the chief with something in his eyes Hadley couldn’t read.
“We’ve got a request in with the federal ViCAP database.” The chief’s voice was firm. “They’ll send us any open cases that resemble ours. Following up on the cold cases just makes sense.”
Hadley realized she had walked in at the back end of an argument that had been going on for a while.
“Throwing everything we’ve got into an investigation when we’re not even sure a crime’s been committed is not good sense,” MacAuley said. “Especially when we’re short-handed. I’m on overtime right now.”
“She didn’t just walk down that road by herself and have a heart attack.”
“You don’t know that. She could have dumped her date in a huff and had a stroke before he had a chance to pick her up again. She could have had alcohol poisoning.” MacAuley waved his arms. “Hell, she could have gotten a mosquito bite and died of West Nile fever!”
The chief gave him a look.
“Okay, okay, maybe not West Nile fever. But my point is still good.” MacAuley dropped his voice. “We can’t afford to be seen running up OT and calling in the staties at every turn when this might be a case of unlicensed disposal of a body.”
The chief rapped his pine table. “What we can’t afford is letting the Golden Hours slip away doing the bare minimum and then find out we’ve let someone get away with murder. Trust me, that’s going to look a hell of a lot worse to the voters than Tim and Duane getting time-and-a-half for flagging road repairs. Knox.”
Hadley jumped in her seat. She had thought they’d forgotten about her.
“You know how to enter the parameters of the search, right? Unsub, no visible cause of death, rural location—no, change that; the important thing is that the body is dumped—”
“If the body is dumped,” MacAuley said.
“Between midnight and dawn,” the chief continued, ignoring the dep. “Party dress, makeup, and don’t forget the missing shoes and purse.”
Hadley glanced up from where she was typing. “The dress? You think that was a component?”
“I do.”
She shrugged and continued entering the search terms, slotting them in order of possible importance, adding every synonym she could think of.
“Not every girl carries a purse nowadays,” MacAuley said.
“Yeah, but have you ever known one to go anywhere without her cell phone? They carry them on these little dangly things…” The chief stopped. “Oh, hell.” He thumped himself on the forehead. “I’m an idiot. Cell phone towers. We need to get a list of the calls relayed through the area cell phone towers.”
“I’m on it.” MacAuley headed toward his office, a space that had once been a cloakroom when the MKPD had had a lot more officers on hand.
The chief was making little noises of frustration. “This is what happens when you think too much about past cases.” He leaned against the table, frowning ferociously at the county map on the opposite wall. Hadley didn’t think he was talking to her. “Cell phones. Cell phones!”
She finished outlining the search request and entered it. “Okay, Chief, it’s all set. It’ll probably take awhile—” She cut herself off as a short list of cases popped up in a window. “Damn, that’s fast.” She clicked OPEN ALL, and an array of scanned records spilled across her screen. She blinked at what she saw. “Chief?” She turned to him. Van Alstyne looked … guilty. “The top match is from right here. It’s a cold case from the MKPD.”
He frowned at his boots. “Is there anything from any other locations?”
“It’s still searching. It’ll return more hits in descending order of matches.” She turned back to the screen. A line of blue words beneath the law enforcement agency names and case file numbers indicated how many search terms the document contained. The previous MKPD record had them all. She hit the PRINT key. “Chief.” She chose her tone carefully. “This isn’t just a close match. It’s identical.”
The printer, located just inside the door where the dispatcher could reach it as well, chunked away.
Van Alstyne sighed. “I know, Knox.” He glanced at the printer. “Better make copies for everyone.”
“Okay, the good news is, we don’t need to apply for a warrant to get the cell transmission records.” MacAuley emerged from his office waving a slip of notepaper. “The company doesn’t require one unless we’re going after somebody’s individual number.”
He slapped the note on the desk next to Hadley. “Thank God for the Patriot Act.” He pointed to where he had scribbled an address. “We have to file a request on one of those online pdf things. That’s where you’ll find it, Knox.” He paused, as if he had finally noticed the strained air in the room. “What’s up? You find something?” He put on his reading glasses and bent over Hadley’s shoulder to look at the screen. “What the hell?”
The printer stopped. Hadley crossed behind the big pine table and began collating the documents into separate batches, partly to be a good worker bee—if she was going to be thrust into the role of secretary, she might as well try to shine—and partly to keep out of the way of the dep and the chief.
MacAuley snatched one of the stacks of papers off the table and began reading. “What the hell?” he repeated. He flipped a page. “What the ever-loving hell?” He looked at the chief. “There wasn’t another Russell Van Alstyne waltzing around here in 1972, was there? A cousin, maybe? An uncle?”
The chief shook his head. “No.”
“You were the prime suspect.”
The chief nodded.
“In a death that was,” the dep glanced at the pages in his hand again, “exactly the same as this one.”
“Yeah.”
MacAuley looked toward Hadley. He had the expression of someone watching an alien spaceship land, or maybe pigs flying. She shrugged.
“I didn’t tell you right off the bat because I didn’t want anyone’s approach to the case tainted by the events of the past. Anyone else’s, I should say.” Van Alstyne tilted his head back, cracking his neck. “My head’s so stuffed with the ’72 case, I’m having a hard time objectively seeing the facts on the ground.”
His mutterings about cell phones suddenly fell into place.
“For chrissakes, Russ. Give the rest of us a little credit.” MacAuley flipped through the papers. “They had a couple leads that didn’t pan out.” He paused and read more closely. “You weren’t exactly cleared, were you? They just couldn’t link you up to the vic.” Hadley could hear a faint thread of suspicion in the dep’s voice.
Evidently, the chief could, too. “Really, Lyle? You want to put me up on the board as a person of interest?” He crossed his arms. “Go right ahead.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m just saying—”
“Could this be a copycat crime?” Hadley said. Both men stopped their antler-clashing and looked at her. “I mean, obviously, the previous case wasn’t so very long ago that it couldn’t be the same person. Only … doesn’t it have a kind of ritualistic feel to it? With the clothing and the makeup and the missing shoes and all exactly the same?”
MacAuley nodded. “It does, yeah.” Inadvertently or not, he looked at Van Alstyne. “But that makes it more likely it was the same perp.”
“Like me, you mean?” The chief glared at the dep.
“Except the gap in time argues this isn’t the same killer.” Both men’s attention swung back to her again. “Murderers who kill for ritualistic or sexual purposes usually don’t stop cold for—” She did the math in her head. “—thirty-four years. Not unless they’re dead or have been put away for an unrelated crime.”
“Or have relocated.” The chief pointed to the laptop, where the CCRF program was still searching the old records. “This is just the New York State cold case database. There could be identical killings somewhere else in the country.”
“Are we agreeing to call it murder?” MacAuley said.
“What do you think?”
MacAuley nodded. “One woman walking down the road and dropping dead, I can see. Two is pushing it.”
The chief took a deep breath. “How about a third?”