Angels Tip by Burke, Alafair -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

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PART I / The Best Night Ever CHAPTER 1 THE MAN LEANED FORWARD on his stool to make room for a big-boned redhead who was reaching for the two glasses of pinot grigio she’d ordered. He asked for another Heineken while the bartender was down his way, figuring he could enjoy a second beer before anyone in the restaurant bothered to take note of him. He was good at blending into the background in even the most generic settings, but he certainly wasn’t going to stand out here, given the commotion at the other end of the bar. Four men in suits and loosened ties were throwing back limoncello shots, their second round with the group of girls that had brought the man to the restaurant in the first place. Actually, his interest was not in all three—just the tall blond one. He was used to taking more time with his selections, but he needed to find a girl tonight. This would be his first time on a schedule, let alone a tight one. NoLIta had seemed as good a starting point as any. Lots of bars. Lots of booze. Lots of beautiful CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 SOMEHOW STEFANIE HYDER always knew that her friendship with Chelsea Hart would lead to a night like this. Since the day Stefanie had been introduced to her second-grade class at Fort Wayne Elementary as the new girl from Miami, the two had been inseparable. By the end of Stefanie’s third week, she had earned her first-ever detention after the girls were caught reading Judy Blume’s Wifey on the playground. As planned, the girls insisted they’d mistaken the book for the sequel to Blubber, but Chelsea had already earned her reputation with the teacher. Over the course of the intervening years, Stefanie had survived her fair share of Chelsea-induced drama. Chelsea tapping at her window, well after curfew, cajoling her to sneak out for a forbidden cigarette. The R-rated games of truth or dare that Chelsea invariably initiated at middle-school parties. Rocking a sobbing Chelsea to sleep after Duncan Gere snubbed her in the ninth grade, despite the previous weekend’s activities in t CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3 THEY SAY NEW YORK is the city that never sleeps, but Ellie Hatcher knew it got pretty drowsy around five in the morning. So did she. “Wake up.” Ellie felt her sticky eyelids flutter open, then immediately fall shut, shielding her from the sliver of brightness peeking into her bedroom through the unwelcome crack in the door. The crack widened into a flood of white light, and she pulled her comforter over her head. “Unngh,” she groaned under the safety of the navy-blue down. She felt something hit her right hip, then heard her brother’s voice. “Get up, El.” Jess sounded annoyingly chipper, so Ellie did what any sane person would do in the face of such early-morning cheer. She ignored him. Another quick thump, this time dangerously close to her head. Ellie threw the comforter aside, tossing the source of the two thumps—a pair of Saucony running shoes—to the parquet floor. “Go away,” she muttered, burrowing back into the covers. “This is your own fault,” Jess said, tugging at the CHAPTER 3 CHAPTER 4 THE JINGLING TURNED OUT to be a Gwen Stefani ring tone on the dead girl’s cell phone. The alarm had been set to go off at 5:32 a.m. Thirty-two minutes after Ellie woke up. One hour and twenty-eight minutes before she was due at the Thirteenth Precinct. What had been the significance of that specific moment to this unnamed girl? It could have been her preferred time to get up on a Monday morning. Or maybe it was a reminder to go home on Sunday night. Time to take her medications, or walk her dog. Whatever the alarm’s original purpose, by 5:32 a.m., the girl was dead, and the sound’s only effect had been to draw the attention of three passing joggers to her corpse. It would take Ellie’s partner at least twenty minutes to reach the scene from his apartment in Brooklyn Heights. For now, she had to make sure his trip would not be wasted. The uniform officer riding in the passenger seat exited the sector car first. He looked like a lot of new cops. Fit. Baby-faced. Enthusiastic. Sh CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 ELLIE WAS STILL in her T-shirt and sweatpants when J. J. Rogan pulled up in a white Crown Vic, hopped the curb off the FDR, and claimed a patch of dirt as his parking spot. As she walked toward her partner, she cursed the young Officer Capra for not yet having returned from what should have been a quick errand. Her mind flashed to an image of her brother showing off a guitar riff to his newest fan while she worked a crime scene in her dirty running gear. Her self-consciousness only heightened as Rogan stepped out of the car. As usual, he was dressed to the nines. Today’s ensemble consisted of a three-button black suit, well-starched steel gray shirt, and a purple tie with small white dots. Two days earlier, she’d seen the label on a jacket he’d thrown on the back of his chair. Canali. About two grand. She assumed this one ran about the same. Ellie hadn’t figured out how her new partner could afford the wardrobe—or whatever other, less obvious indulgences he might have—but she CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6 WHEN ELLIE WAS SEVEN years old, her father had come home with a bandage on his temple. Jerry Hatcher had been working a missing child case for more than a month. For more than thirty nights, the family had known their daughter was missing. The family had known for more than a month that their girl was last seen leaving Cypress Park with an adult male whose description was wholly unfamiliar. Ellie’s father focused on a suspect who had a pattern of arrests for indecent exposure to children in Cypress Park. The guy had missed work the day of the abduction. The next day, too. The evidence was thin, but the case was high-profile. Ellie’s dad managed to get a warrant. He found the missing girl’s body in an oil drum that was buried beneath the suspect’s brand-new hot tub. Three days after delivering the news to the girl’s parents, Detective Jerry Hatcher had used the past tense. He hadn’t known how to fill the silence as the parents sat side by side on the sofa, staring at the frame CHAPTER 6 CHAPTER 7 ELLIE STUDIED HER LIEUTENANT for ten full seconds through the open slats of the blinds covering the window between his office and the squad room. Dan Eckels’s short, chunky frame rested in his black leather armchair, and as far as she could tell, he was staring into space, doing absolutely nothing. She tapped her knuckles three times against his closed door. “Enter.” Eckels’s square face darkened when he looked up to find Ellie in the threshold of his office. “Morning, Lou. I come bearing pastry.” She extended the napkin-wrapped Danish in his direction. “Is that powdered sugar on there, Hatcher, or did you get carried away this morning with a little arsenic?” “They always say you’ve got a wicked sense of humor.” They didn’t. No one. Ever. Ellie suppressed a stomach growl and tried not to think about how much she would have enjoyed that cherry pastry. Eckels met her fake smile with his. It wasn’t a look that worked for him. With his salt-and-pepper hair, block-shaped head, and CHAPTER 7 CHAPTER 8 THE PROCESSING of the East River Park crime scene was in full swing. NYPD vans lined the park, backing up traffic on the FDR in both directions as drivers slowed to rubberneck. Yellow police tape, fortified by rows of uniform officers, closed the park from Sixth Street down to Cherry. They badged an officer standing guard north of the tennis courts, ducked beneath the yellow tape, and made their way to the construction site. Ellie had never been here in full daylight. Torn up and cluttered with piles of dislodged dirt, backhoes, and other heavy equipment she couldn’t name, this area of the park would have been almost as desolate as it had been during her early-morning runs, were it not for the chaos of the ongoing police investigation. Four officers were working the scene inside the fence. Rogan headed directly for a tall female officer with long red hair pulled into a braid that ran down her back. She was crouched in a squat, using tweezers to place something in a ziplock ba CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9 BY ELLIE’S ESTIMATE, the drive from East River Park to the medical examiner’s office up by Bellevue would take at least eight minutes, even with the help of police lights on the FDR. Eight minutes wasn’t a lot, but it was too long to ride in total silence, and just about the right amount of time to ask Rogan the question that was on her mind. “So I noticed Mariah Florkoski said you were lucky not to get paired up with Larry Winslow.” She had seen Winslow around the squad room. As far as she could tell, he worked on his own, and only on desk jobs. “You got Florkoski’s name after just one meet? I thought I was good with names.” “I think the name I was more interested in was Larry Winslow.” “The guy’s the next to retire. And he’s lazy. Now Casey, my old partner, he did it right. Everyone knew he wanted to ride out the end in Arizona, but he worked the job a hundred percent every day. Everyone was surprised when he took off right at twenty years. But Winslow’s just counting down CHAPTER 9 CHAPTER 10 CHELSEA HART’S FAVORITE MOVIES were Run Lola Run, The Notebook, and The Princess Bride. Her favorite books were Wuthering Heights and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Her favorite drink was called an Angel’s Tip, a mix of dark crème de cacao and heavy cream that she swore prevented hangovers. She wanted to meet Ellen DeGeneres and Johnny Depp. She had ninety-two friends. Ellie scrolled through Chelsea’s MySpace profile one more time as she snacked on spoonfuls of the Nutella spread she kept in her top desk drawer. “You sure you don’t want any?” she asked, extending the open glass jar in Rogan’s direction. He glared at her. “Are we going to continue this ritual every afternoon? You offer me that funky stuff you call food, so I can say, No, thank you?” She pulled the jar back and removed a healthy spoonful. “Seems rude not to offer.” “You can offer it to me today, tomorrow, and every day ’til I retire, and I promise I will always decline. So consider yourself excused from al CHAPTER 10 PART II / Dream Witness CHAPTER 11 THE DISTANCE BETWEEN the Thirteenth Precinct and the Meatpacking District was almost exactly two miles, but culturally, the neighborhoods were a globe apart. The short drive from the east twenty-something blocks of Manhattan to the far west teens unveiled a dramatic transformation from the sterile and generic high rises of Stuyvesant Town to what was currently the city’s hottest neighborhood. The key to the Meatpacking District’s current popularity rested in its unique blend of glamor and grit. All of the upscale requirements were here—high-end boutiques, trendy clubs with signature cocktails, expensive restaurants with tiny portions piled into aesthetically pleasing towers. But they existed in loftlike, pared-down spaces that still had the feel—if not the actual structure—of rehabbed warehouses. The streets outside were narrow, many still cobblestone, adding to the sense of an old neighborhood uncovered, dusted off, and polished by its latest visitor. And, of course, there CHAPTER 11 CHAPTER 12 THEY HAD A LATENT PRINT. Now all they needed was a suspect. That left them back at their adjacent desks, divvying up their to-do list. In her one year as a detective, Ellie had gotten used to other cops assuming she would be the one to do this kind of paper-driven legwork, perhaps because she was junior, but most likely because some of the older detectives—at least in the general investigation units—were not yet comfortable with the technological end of modern police work. She and Rogan, however, were sharing the load. He had the list of the club’s credit card charges, while she ran the list of its employees through the department’s database of crime reports and through NCIC for criminal records. Rogan scribbled something on the notes in front of him, and then thanked the person at the other end of the line before hanging up. “I still can’t get over these bar bills. Here’s one for three thousand dollars, plus the guy tacked on a five-hundred-dollar tip.” Ellie shook her head CHAPTER 12 CHAPTER 13 THE PERSPECTIVE OF the camera continually changed, but the images always came to her in black and white. Sometimes Ellie watched the scenes unfold through the eyes of the victims. On other nights, she was a neutral and omnipotent observer floating overhead. This time, she was pushing open the unlatched heavy oak door of a prairie-style home. She walked through the living room, passing in front of a fireplace, and then turned into a long hallway that led to the bedrooms. She found the boy’s body first, laid out on his twin bed with a plastic shopping bag over his head, a rope around his throat. His mother was in the master bathroom, blindfolded in the tub with a bandanna. Ellie knew that the woman had been tortured before being drowned—held repeatedly under water to the brink of suffocation, then revived, only to be submerged again. As she descended the basement stairs, she tried to block the image that she knew would come next. William Summer had saved the twelve-year-old da CHAPTER 13 CHAPTER 14 NOT ONLY HAD JESS heard of Pulse, he was pretty sure he knew someone who worked there. He scrolled through his cell phone directory until he came to the name he was looking for. “Here she is. Vanessa.” “Vanessa Hutchinson?” Ellie asked. “I don’t do last names. I met her a few weeks ago at a bar in Williamsburg. She’s a friend of Kate. You met her once. She came with me to Johnny’s about a year ago.” “The lawyer?” “No, that was Rose. Kate’s in marketing or something. Short brown hair? Really tiny?” Jess was proving once again the vast reach of his impressive social network, yet another difference between them. Ellie would love to be one of those women with a tight circle of best friends, but a good portion of her life was dominated by a job that made her an outsider to most women, and those same women certainly didn’t want her cozying up to their husbands and boyfriends. Between work, serial monogamy, and part-time caregiving to the rest of the Hatcher family, she had enough CHAPTER 14 CHAPTER 15 “THIS DETECTIVE WORK’S really hard.” Jess used a gap between two customers seated at the bar to drop off his empty glass. It had taken them only fifteen minutes to circle the entire club. Now they were back where they began, at the bar. “So tell me what you noticed,” Ellie said. Jess shrugged. “Hot girls. Rich guys. A lot of booze and bad dancing.” “See, here’s what I noticed. That girl over there?” She pointed to a petite brunette in a sleeveless turtleneck and skinny black pants. “She’s wearing the turtleneck to cover up marks on her throat, but when she looked in the mirror she didn’t see the finger-shaped bruises on the backs of both her arms. That explains the scratch on her boyfriend’s face.” Jess looked at the brunette’s male companion, a tall guy with a prominent forehead, five o’clock shadow, and, sure enough, a couple of claw marks near his right eye. “My guess is it happened last night or this morning,” Ellie explained over the mind-numbing dance music. “He’s taki CHAPTER 15 CHAPTER 16 VANESSA MET THEM at the end of the bar, in front of the office door Ellie had seen the club manager use earlier that day. “Jess. I love you, man, but I gotta work.” “This’ll just take a sec.” “If someone just walked through that curtain over there”—Ellie pointed to the place where she’d last seen the shaggy-haired blond—“can you tell which VIP room that is?” “Yeah, sure.” “Can you find out what credit card’s being used to hold the room?” A worried look crossed Vanessa’s face. “Look, I don’t know what you guys have in mind, but—” Ellie leaned in closer. “I’m a cop. I was here today with my partner, talking to your manager, Scott Bell. Is he here?” Vanessa’s expression changed to one of recognition. “Oh, shit. Is this about that girl?” “Scott told you?” “I heard him talking about it on the phone when I came in tonight. Oh, my God. I thought you were just here with Jess—” “I am. Do you remember seeing Chelsea Hart here last night? She would’ve been drinking Angel’s Tips.” “For CHAPTER 16 CHAPTER 17 “HOW MANY TIMES do I have to tell you?” Jake Myers’s voice was strained. Twenty minutes in, and he was sticking by his story. “She told me she had an early flight and left the club before I did. I haven’t heard from her since.” “What time did she leave?” Rogan asked. “I don’t know. I remember that bitchy friend of hers coming by and trying to get her to leave right before.” “Well, that bitchy friend just ID’d you as the last person to see Chelsea Hart alive. You might want to start coming up with specifics.” Myers licked his lips nervously. “My guess is she left about half an hour after that, but I’m not sure. It was a late night, and I wasn’t checking my watch.” “Did you walk her out?” “No. She left by herself, as far as I could tell.” “Were you outside of the club with her at all?” Rogan asked. “No.” “Not at any point?” “I told you, we were just dancing and hanging out.” “When did you leave?” “Late. Ask Nick. He was with me.” “Anyone else leave with you?” “No, just me and CHAPTER 17 CHAPTER 18 THE COVERAGE OF Chelsea Hart’s murder had hit full throttle by Tuesday morning. It was the lead story on NY1’s morning show, and Chelsea’s photograph dominated the front page of both the New York Sun and the Daily Post. The case even warranted a story in the Metro section of the New York Times. Ellie noticed that the Sun had run the photograph with which she was now long familiar—cropped around Chelsea’s smiling, happy face while she waited for a table at Luna, the last restaurant she’d ever frequent. She wondered whether the Sun had paid Chelsea’s friend Jordan for the picture or simply given her the standard line about how important it was for the public to see Chelsea as she had actually lived. In contrast, both the Daily Post and the New York Times ran the same formal, posed headshot—Chelsea’s senior high school portrait, provided directly by the Hart family. After their talk the previous day with a caseworker from the Polly Klaas Foundation, Paul and Miriam Hart had app CHAPTER 18 CHAPTER 19 ONE HUNDRED CENTRE STREET not only famously houses many of the city’s criminal courts, but is also home to most of Manhattan’s five hundred assistant district attorneys. Rogan and Ellie checked in with a receptionist on the fifteenth floor and were directed to the office of ADA Max Donovan in the Homicide Investigation Unit. Ellie already knew that the professional lives of ADAs were not glamorous. She had met with enough of them to know that the spacious, mahogany-highlighted offices, complete with brass lamps, antique scales, and matching volumes of leather-bound books, were the stuff of fictional lawyers on television. Most prosecutors worked long hours out of cubbyhole-sized cubes of clutter, all for a paycheck that wasn’t enough to cover both Manhattan rent and law school student loans. Still, she would have thought that an attorney who’d been in the office long enough to earn a slot trying murder cases would warrant digs better than these. An ornately framed diploma fr CHAPTER 19 CHAPTER 20 “WHAT CAN I GET YOU, HATCHER?” “Johnnie Walker Black. Rocks.” “A week on the job together, and I still don’t know your drink,” Rogan said. “That ain’t right.” As much as Ellie wanted to go home, flip on the tube, and crash on the couch, this had been her first invitation for a group drink out of the Thirteenth Precinct, and she was not about to blow the opportunity. They were celebrating Jake Myers’s arrest at Plug Uglies, a cop bar on Third Ave. between Twentieth and Twenty-first. Even though this wood-paneled pub—originally named for one of the city’s old Irish gangs, now accessorized with the shoulder patches of hundreds of police and firemen—was the official hangout of the Thirteenth Precinct, this was Ellie’s first visit with other cops. Her only previous invitation had come from Jess after her first day in the homicide squad—not his sort of place, but it was close to work, and with a $2 happy hour, it was one of the few spots in Manhattan where her brother could afford CHAPTER 20 CHAPTER 21 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 CHAPTER 21 PART III / No Surprises CHAPTER 22 “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 CHAPTER 22 CHAPTER 23 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 ove CHAPTER 23 CHAPTER 24 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 takeout 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 appreciat CHAPTER 24 CHAPTER 25 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—Mir CHAPTER 25 CHAPTER 26 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 b CHAPTER 26 CHAPTER 27 ROGAN HAD DRIVEN past Cooper Square and was on the Bowery by the time he permitted Ellie to speak. “What I’ve been trying to say is that I’m sorry I didn’t give you advance warning. I tried, but you were in such a hurry—” “So this shit is my fault?” “No, of course not.” Rogan shook his head and kept his eyes on the road as he changed lanes to pass a minivan with Virginia plates. “What are the chances you’re actually going to listen to Eckels and leave this shit alone?” “Mmmm, thirty-five, forty percent?” “Higher than I would’ve thought. All right. Lay it on me.” Ellie mapped out all three cases for him. Robbie Harrington and her unlikely bangs. Alice Butler and her new haircut. And Lucy Feeney, whose hair had been hacked off just like Chelsea Hart’s. She pulled Feeney’s autopsy photograph from her bag, but Rogan didn’t bother to look at it. “Like the Lou said, it’s all for the Cold Case Squad.” This time, she held the ME’s photograph above the dash, forcing Rogan to see the CHAPTER 27 CHAPTER 28 SIMON KNIGHT HAD wanted to meet the two cops he was calling his “dream team” on the Jake Myers case before presenting their testimony to the grand jury. Just as Knight had already apparently decided that he loved his investigative team, Rogan had already decided that he hated the team leader. He made his feelings known in the elevator ride to the seventh floor. “Are you kidding me? The dream team? He sees a black detective, and so his mind jumps to O. J. Simpson?” “Oy. I wish I’d never mentioned it to you. I think it evolved because Max Donovan was calling us dream witnesses.” “Correction. I believe your new boyfriend called you his dream witness. And if his boss is now calling us the dream team before he’s even talked to us? It’s because he’s having a wet dream over the idea of a pretty blond girl detective and what I’m sure he’ll deem to be a—quote—articulate black man to testify against a rich, preppy white boy in front of a New York City jury. It’s got nothing to do with CHAPTER 28 CHAPTER 29 AN HOUR LATER, without a word to the other three people in the room, Simon Knight picked up the telephone in a conference room in the District Attorney’s Office and dialed an extension. “Call the clerk to give the grand jurors their lunch break. We won’t be presenting any further evidence this afternoon in the Myers case.” Knight had just closed the door behind Jaime Rodriguez, Nick Warden, and Susan Parker, and apparently had heard enough. Rogan was the first to speak up. “We came down here because the case was ready for grand jury.” “And that was before Rodriguez told us that a janitor with a past sex offense somehow knows more about Chelsea Hart than what’s been reported by the media. So far, of course. I’m told the Daily Post is onto the fact that the victim’s hair was cut. And that’s why the two of you need to go see this Symanski while we still have some control over that information.” “As far as the NYPD is concerned, the case has been cleared.” “You’re telling me you CHAPTER 29 CHAPTER 30 DARRELL WASHINGTON FLICKED his favorite lighter, the one shaped like a bullet. He ran the flame up and down the length of the Optimo, spinning the blunt slowly to give it a good bake. They cost a little more than Swisher Sweets, but Optimos burned forever and were so mild that, with strong weed, you could barely taste the cigar. Darrell lay back on a bare mattress on the floor of his mother’s living room on the eleventh floor of LaGuardia House 6 and gave his lighter another flick. He took a long toke off the fat blunt and held his breath, deep inside his lungs, before letting it go. His mom would go ape-shit if she caught him smoking inside again. Some noise about how she could lose her public housing, all because of his weed. That didn’t sound right to him. Besides, even if she smelled it when she got home, he’d deny it. Darrell wasn’t good at much, but he was good at lying. His whole life, no one had ever been able to get a read on him. It wasn’t likely to come up anyways CHAPTER 30 CHAPTER 31 LEON SYMANSKI LIVED on the first floor of a split-level duplex in Queens. Ellie and Rogan had been watching the house for twenty minutes. “I swear,” Ellie said, “every time I’m in Astoria, I think of Archie Bunker. My father freaking loved that show. He’d watch the repeats at night, even though he’d seen them all five times. I’m sure it never dawned on him his daughter would be pulling a stakeout in the neighborhood where it was shot.” “See, in our house, we loved the Jeffersons. That’s what I think about when you say Archie Bunker—that Mr. Jefferson had to be damn happy to get the hell out of Archie Bunker cracker town. ‘Well we’re moving on up, to the East Side.’” “I never knew the words to either of those songs. I thought the first line of that song Archie and Edith sang was, ‘Boil the weakling millipede.’” Ellie wouldn’t normally burden another human being with her horrible singing voice, but she figured there had to be an exception for botched television theme song lyri CHAPTER 31 CHAPTER 32 ELLIE COULD HEAR Rogan yelling behind her, using all the major cuss words, but she wasn’t thinking about her partner. She was focused on the back of Leon Symanski’s head, bouncing on top of his plaid flannel robe, hauling ass a full block ahead of her. He apparently had found the time to pull on a pair of running shoes before slipping out the front door. She didn’t have to process the words coming out of Rogan’s mouth to know why he was screaming at her. They had stopped by for a knock-and-talk. They weren’t wearing vests. They didn’t have backup. And they hadn’t searched either Symanski or his living room for a weapon. Rogan was telling her it wasn’t worth it. They would set up a periphery. They’d bring out the dogs. They would find him within blocks. But, at that moment—as she felt the rubber soles of her Paul Green boots slamming against the concrete of the street, the force of the impact shooting up through her knees and quads—all she could think about were the faces of CHAPTER 32 CHAPTER 33 “DOES IT HURT?” From Ellie’s vantage point on the ambulance floor, Rogan looked as sheepish as she’d ever seen him. She caught the eye of the EMT who was placing another stitch in the back of her hand. “Will you be insulted if I don’t say that you’ve managed to magically convert all of my pain into an unprecedented feeling of euphoria?” The man shook his head. “This very nice man is sewing, with a needle, into the back of my hand. As Samuel Jackson might say, yes, it mother-fucking hurts.” “I’d feel less guilty if you said you had a thing for pain.” “I don’t, but you shouldn’t feel guilty. You told me not to run. And you were right. We would have tracked him down anyway.” After all that running—up into the subway station, back down on the west side—Ellie had made the arrest only two blocks from Symanski’s house. “When I saw you going after him, I went for the car. I thought I’d have a better chance of catching up to you, but I lost you at the train station.” “It’s okay, J. J CHAPTER 33 CHAPTER 34 TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY Madison—Street, not Avenue—was also known as the LaGuardia Houses, a nine-building brick cluster of high-rise housing projects erected in the 1950s when the Lower East Side was still dominated by squatters and hardworking immigrants. Now, if developers had their way, they’d evict the 2,600 residents, knock down the projects, and fill the space with more luxury condos. Ellie ignored the suspicious eyes that followed her as she made her way from the Crown Vic, through the rundown courtyard, into House 6. She took the elevator to the eleventh floor. The moment the doors pinged open, she was welcomed by a giant X of crime tape across a door at the end of the hall. She ducked beneath the tape and flashed her shield to the uniform officer at the door. He nodded toward the back of the living room. One man in a suit stood out among the crowd of uniforms and technicians in the apartment. He was telling a woman with a camera to make sure she got plenty of photogr CHAPTER 34 CHAPTER 35 ELLIE HAD SUCKED DOWN half of her grande peppermint mocha by the time she finished giving Donovan the play-by-play of the events at Leon Symanski’s house. “Unbelievable. When Susan Parker showed up at the courthouse this morning with Jaime Rodriguez, I really assumed it would all turn out to be b.s. Either Rodriguez was lying, or his friend was lying, or maybe Symanski was some insane criminal wannabe.” “Instead, he’s some insane criminal actually-be who says he killed Chelsea Hart. Although,” she quickly added, “Rogan did float the possibility that Myers is still our man.” As things stood, she had mixed feelings about meeting alone with Donovan. Until Rogan was around, the least she could do was to sound neutral. “Well, with Symanski’s confession, we’ve got enough to prosecute him, but whether we’d win at trial is another question.” Donovan broke off a chunk of the banana bread they were sharing. “They’ll argue the confession’s coerced. And then even if we can use the confe CHAPTER 35 CHAPTER 36 “OH, COME ON, MAN. You have got to be kidding me. Them?” The girl with the platinum blond hair and four-inch heels obviously wasn’t happy that the bouncer had waved two other women past the velvet rope at Tenjune without a wait. Implicit in the girl’s outrage was her belief that she was taller, thinner, and hotter than Rachel Peck and her friend Gina, a belief that was undoubtedly true, but which failed to take into account the network of friendships among the little people who kept the city’s biggest hot spots up and running. Rachel high-fived the bouncer at the door. “Thanks, Rico. You’re the best.” Two years earlier, before a very active gym membership and his discovery of tight black Tshirts, Rico the bouncer was Ricardo the Mesa Grill busboy. News to the blonde in the stripper shoes: to get into a club like Tenjune, you either have to be somebody or know somebody. They made their way down the stairs, past a lounge area of velvet seating, to the crocodile-skin bar. An ol CHAPTER 36 PART IV / The Final Victim CHAPTER 37 “MORNING, MANNY. Can I get a large coffee? No room. And a lemon Danish.” “No room. You really think I need a reminder on that? Every morning of every day, you get a large coffee, no room. I got it now. We’re good for life, sweetheart.” “You’re my kind of person to be good with, Manny.” Ellie didn’t mind that the older man behind the deli counter called her sweetheart instead of the official titles he used with the other cops. She’d realized a long time ago that the occasional harmless byproducts of tradition actually made it easier for men of a certain generation to accept her. Her cell vibrated at her waist. According to the screen, it was another call from Peter, the second already this morning, and it was only eight o’clock. She’d called him last night when she’d gotten home from St. Vincent’s. Just as Jess had predicted, Peter had an explanation for everything. He had only kept his profile on the First Date site because he thought it might come in handy while researching CHAPTER 37 CHAPTER 38 “HANK DODGE.” The detective waiting for Ellie in the medical examiner’s office was probably in his late fifties. Tall. Bulky. Scruffy gray hair and a five-day beard. When she had called him to track down the details of the body discovered the previous night at Vibrations, he had insisted on being present if she were going to view the victim. “Dr. Karr was just telling me he’d already met you.” Ellie recognized the bearded pathologist who had conducted the autopsy on Chelsea Hart. She shook hands with both men. “You were cutting it close on timing, Detective Hatcher. I was just about to start the autopsy when you phoned Detective Dodge.” “I think that’s the doc’s polite way of saying he hopes you had a good reason for asking us to wait.” “My brother works at the club where your victim was found. It sounded like there were similarities between this case and the Hart murder.” “Your brother works at a titty bar?” Dodge asked. “Long story.” It wasn’t, really. The job at Vibration CHAPTER 38 CHAPTER 39 ELLIE BYPASSED THE CROWD at the courthouse elevators and took the stairs to the trial unit on the seventh floor. She was still trying to catch her breath when the receptionist informed her that Mr. Knight was on the fifteenth floor in the Homicide Investigation Unit with ADA Donovan. This time, she opted for the elevator. Her cell buzzed during the wait. According to the screen, it was Peter. Again. Add that to the call she’d received in the car, and this was now four calls before ten-thirty in the morning. If he didn’t at least leave a message soon, he was about two attempts short of a serious conversation about restraining orders. Ellie checked in with a receptionist at the Homicide Investigation Unit and was led to a conference room, where she found Simon Knight and Max Donovan seated across from each other at a cherry-veneer table, Rogan leaning against the matching credenza next to them. “Excellent timing,” Knight said. “I’ve just gotten off the phone with Celina Symans CHAPTER 39 CHAPTER 40 CELINA SYMANSKI OPENED the front door of her father’s house before they had a chance to knock. She stepped aside, and they treated the movement as an invitation to come in. She took a seat in the middle of a small worn sofa in the center of the living room, leaving only a single recliner for her three guests. Ellie helped herself to the spot. She was the obvious candidate to play the good cop in this scenario. This was Ellie’s first opportunity to view the woman without her coat. She wore a hip-length cable-knit sweater and leggings. Both were stretched tight across her belly. She was an otherwise small woman. Young, probably early twenties. Light hair. Fair skin. Ellie’s best guess was that the baby would be coming in a couple of months. “I’m Detective Hatcher. This is my partner, Detective Rogan. Max Donovan is from the district attorney’s office. I think you know why we’re here, Celina.” She shrugged. “Your father’s not a murderer.” “I never said he was.” “No, but he did. CHAPTER 40 CHAPTER 41 FIVE MINUTES AFTER Nick Warden visited Jake Myers in custody, Myers called Willie Wells and fired him as his attorney. His next call was to Susan Parker, seeking her representation for the purpose of contacting Simon Knight and offering to take a polygraph examination to clear his name. By the time that call came in, Knight had already lined up the polygrapher. They all knew, of course, that the so-called lie detecting machine was far less reliable than its name might suggest. The machines were only as good as their operators and, even at their best, were not entirely accurate. But the intangible value of a polygraph transcended the questionable science. A defendant’s willingness to sit for one said something in itself, especially if he managed to make it through an entire examination without breaking into a spontaneous confession. And a good polygrapher’s opinion, while no guarantee, would do a lot to confirm the feeling in Ellie’s gut that Jake Myers—although guilty of oth CHAPTER 41 CHAPTER 42 ROGAN LOOKED LIKE he’d just seen William Shatner walk through 100 Centre Street in a hula skirt. “You figured you were innocent, so it was your God-given right to offer up another innocent man to take your place in prison?” Rogan was still coming to terms with Myers’s newfound experimentation with honesty—and he wasn’t happy about it. Jake Myers stared at his hands. He was seated in the same District Attorney’s conference room, at the same table, where, just yesterday, Jaime Rodriguez had told them about a club janitor who might be of interest. Susan Parker was a sleazebag of a lawyer, but she was at least trying to protect her new client from Rogan’s outrage. “Give the guy a break. You had him on a murder he knew he didn’t commit, and he freaked out.” Donovan rose from the table and paced their side of the room. “You could have told him to come clean, Susan. Instead, you orchestrated this.” Jake looked up from his hands. “You were going to send me to fucking prison for the CHAPTER 42 CHAPTER 43 MAX DIRECTED THE CAB to the Flatiron district, and then led the way to Sala One Nine, a Spanish restaurant on Nineteenth Street. “I hope you like tapas,” he said, opening the heavy wooden door to a red restaurant with exposed brick and stone, lit by small tea candles scattered throughout the room. “I love anything that involves getting to eat seven different kinds of food in a single sitting.” The restaurant was already filled with hungry customers. Rather than cope with a forty-five minute wait, they accepted the host’s invitation to eat at the bar, where Max ordered a pitcher of sangria and some queso and croquetas to get them started. This was their first chance to be alone since their coffee that wasn’t quite a coffee had ended the previous night. The transition from their official roles to what was presumably a date was not an easy one for either of them. Ellie found herself wanting to talk about the case, and apparently Max had questions of his own. “So, tell me if thi CHAPTER 43 CHAPTER 44 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? CHAPTER 44 CHAPTER 45 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 CHAPTER 45 CHAPTER 46 “FUCK. MY EYES, MY EYES. Someone please hand me a spear so I might gouge out my eyes. Cover yourselves, people.” Ellie sprung from what felt like the deepest sleep of her lifetime. She saw light creeping through the living room blinds and her brother standing at her apartment entrance, keys in hand and grin on face. “Shit. Shit. What time is it?” “Five forty-five.” “Damn it. Ninety minutes. I was only going to wait ninety minutes.” Max Donovan was coming to on the living room floor next to her. He grabbed a corner of the fleece throw Ellie was clutching to her chest, then settled for a blue pillow instead. “Shit, we fell asleep,” he said. “Master of the fucking obvious.” “My brother, Jess,” Ellie said by way of explanation, scrambling to her feet and wrapping herself in the throw. “Hey.” Max offered Jess his free hand. “Max Donovan. Uh, sorry about the circumstances.” “You’ll understand if I don’t return the gesture. I really don’t need to think about where that hand’s been CHAPTER 46 CHAPTER 47 IN HER BRIEF TIME as Rogan’s partner, Ellie had never felt a sophistication gap between them. That all changed, however, when they pulled up to the helipad at Thirtieth Street and the West Side Highway. She wasn’t even sure whether it would have ever dawned on her to request a department helicopter, but the idea certainly hadn’t come to her as quickly and as effortlessly as it had for Rogan. He had immediately called the borough commander, who approved the request and gave the necessary orders. Given her partner’s familiarity with the process at the Westside heliport, Ellie got the impression that Rogan had prior experience with helicopter travel, and she wondered if perhaps her partner hadn’t seriously understated the extent of his outside money. Rogan badged the officer waiting for them at the gate. “We’re heading out to East Hampton.” “The Bell 412 just arrived from Floyd Bennett Field.” “The ten-million-dollar beast, all for us?” “Nine-point-eight,” the officer corrected CHAPTER 47 CHAPTER 48 ELLIE STOOD on the porch for thirty seconds before Kittrie’s front door opened, a tiny gap at first, then another few inches, until she could see the terrified eyes of Dan Eckels peering out at her. His mouth was wrapped with silver duct tape. His hands were taped in front of him, and his legs were bound together at the ankles. “It’s okay, sir. Come on out.” She pushed open the door slowly until she heard a voice from farther inside the house. “That’s far enough. I saw your SWAT bus.” Eckels turned sideways to slip through the crack in the door. He looked into her eyes intensely and gave her a slight shake of his head. He was trying to tell her something. He was telling her not to go inside. Is…this…a…trap? She mouthed the words silently. Eckels responded with the same intense stare and a harder shake of his head. “This is a trade, remember. You get in here before he gets out.” Ellie turned sideways as well and pressed herself past Eckels. As the two exchanged places, she sa CHAPTER 48 CHAPTER 49 “NO ONE TOLD ME it was prom night.” John Shannon set his roast beef sandwich on his napkin and used the back of his hand to wipe a smear of mustard from the corner of his mouth. Given Rogan’s usual appearance, his black suit and gray silk tie would never have drawn Shannon’s attention. But Ellie’s wardrobe change in the locker room was apparently another story. Thanks to their squad neighbor, all eyes in the room were on her. Shannon’s partner let out a wolf whistle. Someone else asked if she was already trying on outfits for this year’s Medal Day Ceremony, a reference to the broad speculation that she would be receiving the Police Combat Cross for her role in what the media were now calling the Manhattan Barber case. Apparently the press didn’t see the irony in retaining the sensationalist nickname originally conjured by George Kittrie for his own byline. Ellie looked down at her black wool A-line dress and slingback pumps, and touched the fringe of her new, very short hair CHAPTER 49

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