City of Fear

City of Fear Alafair Burke An electrifying thriller that will keep you guessing until the very end, City of Fear is for anyone who loves Tess Gerritsen and Michael Connelly.In a city full of victims, it's murder to choose just one…Fresh-faced student Chelsea Hart spends her final night in New York in an elite nightclub with girlfriends and a fake ID. The next morning she is found murdered, in East River Park her celebrated blonde hair hacked off.NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher is first on the case and quickly homes in on the city slickers last seen with Chelsea. When a tight case is brought against one of them, the department is elated. But Ellie isn't so sure.Chelsea's murder is eerily similar to three other deaths that occurred a decade ago: the victims were young, female, and in each case, the killer had taken hair as a souvenir. Is Ellie right to have her suspicions, or is she delving too deep into a simple case?Ellie's search for the truth pits her against her fellow cops and places her under the watchful eye of a psychopath, eager to add her to his list… ALAFAIR BURKE City of Fear Copyright (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. AVON A division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in the U.S.A. by HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, NY, 2008 Copyright © Alafair Burke 2008 Alafair Burke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks. HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9781847561114 Ebook Edition © MARCH 2009 ISBN: 9780007320035 Version: 2018-05-30 For James Parker, Emma Marie, Jack Owen and James Lee. From your favorite aunt. Contents Cover Page (#u114e0a8a-f30f-5508-a312-53aacfff921c)Title Page (#u63d52936-de65-5e69-842c-8f0b0c6b8e4f)Copyright (#u9a3aa4bd-7b34-52d4-b635-05ad8c0b72dc)Dedication (#uf7125e75-0471-50aa-88df-9d1d10e946f1)Part I: The Best Night Ever (#u19479655-02e1-5131-bf18-885b33e4dc96)Chapter One (#u644849ec-d07c-5421-9ba5-efff727a2a2d)Chapter Two (#u5a559098-a369-5226-9569-52b60075d963)Chapter Three (#uf9becfe1-3173-5771-87ad-00398a65eab9)Chapter Four (#u26375ea0-836a-51da-9ae1-2a142e96ef5c)Chapter Five (#u904b787b-13ae-52a0-ac4f-8c21717e406b)Chapter Six (#u41cc6381-eae0-5ce6-93dc-ef6b0987f3d7)Chapter Seven (#u5ad1c66d-6f94-5abd-8c32-f0775d7cb11f)Chapter Eight (#uaa05e875-4435-5fec-b851-95fd2b6bcab8)Chapter Nine (#u990cbdb3-444e-5965-843c-2f777d79982b)Chapter Ten (#udfdcb722-c680-529e-af8e-df9a40ad7443)Part II: Dream Witness (#u39bf6e3d-ead6-5f12-afd9-2590b8567d2e)Chapter Eleven (#u668ea864-55a8-5375-a080-943715ed8f1f)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)Part III: No Surprises (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)Part IV: The Final Victim (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Thirty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty-One (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Forty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)Review (#litres_trial_promo)About The Author (#litres_trial_promo)About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Part I (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) The Best Night Ever (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) Chapter One (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) 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 young people trying so hard to have fun that they paid little attention to someone like him. He had been wandering the neighborhood for about half an hour when he’d spotted the trio crossing Prince Street, the blonde the obvious leader. The other two were nothing special: one average-looking brunette in average-looking clothes; the other, petite one slightly more interesting with her close-cropped black hair and bright yellow dress. But it was the tall blonde who was a head-turner, and she knew it. She wore tight black pants and a low-cut red satin tank over a gravity-defying push-up bra. Topping off the ensemble was a well-placed V-shaped choker necklace – the equivalent of a vertical arrow sign hanging from her clavicle, instructing, ‘Direct Gaze Here.’ And her hair was perfect – long, shiny, white-blond waves. He’d ducked into Lord Willy’s on Mott and perused the dress shirts while they’d passed, then continued his pace about forty feet behind them until they’d parked themselves next to the bar at Luna. Fortunately, the girls had been kept waiting for their eight o’clock table, so he’d had plenty of time to study the blonde up close before making a final decision. He liked what he saw. He even had a chance to speak to her briefly when she split off from her friends to go to the restroom. That had been risky on his part. But her two gal pals were so smitten with the limoncello boys that they hadn’t noticed the exchange. He felt a twinge of disappointment as the hostess notified the girls their table was ready. Then he heard a male voice. ‘Stay for one more shot.’ Apparently the men in suits believed that plying the girls with drinks was going to get them somewhere. Instead, the short girl in the yellow dress handed one of the men her cell phone and asked him to take a picture of the three friends. Mission accomplished, the brunettes followed the hostess to their table with barely a thank-you to their liquor-pouring benefactors. At least the blonde gave them each a hug before she trailed along. The decibel level in the bar area fell noticeably in the wake of the girls’ departure. The other patrons seemed relieved, but he took it as a signal to leave. On Mott, he walked north toward Houston, forcing himself to adopt a leisurely pace. His car was parked only ten blocks away, and the girls would need at least an hour for dinner. He had plenty of time. Chapter Two (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) 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 the backseat of his father’s SUV. Hitchhiking home from a frat party in Ann Arbor their junior year. Chelsea was trouble, no question. Stefanie’s mom lovingly called her the Notorious B.I.C., short for Bad Influence Chelsea. But she had a spark that made her recklessness endearing and infectious, and she was unfailingly loyal, and so over the course of the past ten years, she and Stefanie had remained fast friends. They even chose the same college, where they were now suite mates. Stefanie’s parents had warned her not to be surprised if she and Chelsea went their separate ways at Indiana University, but here they were in New York City, spring break of their freshman year, as tight as ever. Until this final night of the trip, Chelsea had more or less kept her most impulsive ways in check. At Stefanie’s insistence, they had hit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Guggenheim. Jordan, who lived down the hall from them at school, hung on to all of the admission buttons for the scrapbook she promised she’d be assembling back home. They also made a point of seeing a different neighborhood every day: Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Midtown, the Village, SoHo, even Chinatown. By the third day of their trip, they were relying on subways instead of taxis, and by the fifth, a stranger stopped them on the street for directions. But on this night – their last in Manhattan – Stefanie sensed that Chelsea’s inner wild child was determined to come out and play. It started with the slutty outfit, then continued at the dive Italian restaurant. All the attention from the guys at the bar hadn’t stopped Chelsea from flirting with some other men on her way to their table, fabricating a farcical autobiography the way she always did in these situations. If it had been up to Stefanie, they would have turned in early after dinner, happily sated with pasta and gelato, but Jordan agreed with Chelsea that their last hours in Manhattan should not be squandered. They wound their way through Little Italy into NoLIta, across SoHo, and up the West Village into the Meatpacking District. Jordan insisted they hit a club called Pulse because, according to US Weekly, Jared Leto had celebrated his birthday there three weeks earlier. Thanks once again to their fake Indiana driver’s licenses and Chelsea’s megawatt smile, they had made it past the red velvet rope and through the club’s heavy wooden double doors. Stefanie had to admit they had entered fifty thousand square feet of nightlife paradise. The DJ worked from an elevated booth surrounded by stagelike platforms. Cameras projected the dancers’ images throughout the club in staccato sync with the music. The centerpiece of the club was the twenty-five-foot pink-lit runway protruding from the bar. Even on a Sunday night, the place was filled to capacity. With Jordan leading the way, the girls nestled into a pocket of space adjacent to the dance floor. Stefanie had taken only one sip of the club’s signature martini – a toxic concoction that tasted like Robitussen-infused lemonade – before she noticed Chelsea talking to a guy with blond floppy hair. Catching her eye, Chelsea pointed excitedly to the white curtains that set off a VIP lounge from the rest of the club, then disappeared through the curtains behind the blond. Stefanie hesitated. She hated the way her friend was so open with strangers. Chelsea, despite her occasional lapses in judgment, was a good and decent person at heart, and so she automatically – and carelessly – assumed the same of others. Still, as usual, Stefanie and Jordan followed Chelsea where she wanted to go. Stefanie began to sense what was coming around one o’clock, when she noticed both the time and Chelsea’s glassy-eyed wobble. She pointed to her watch, but the gesture proved too subtle. Forty-five minutes later, she went so far as to follow Chelsea onto the catwalk to tell her it was time to go home. The only reward for her efforts was two songs’ worth of swaying her hips with her hands undulating stupidly above her head. Finally, at two-thirty, even Jordan was done. She joined Stefanie in the backward time calculations. Seven a.m. flight. At the airport by six. In a cab by five thirty. Wake-up call at five – five fifteen at the very latest – if they packed tonight and skipped showers. They’d get little better than a two-hour nap if they left right now. It was definitely time to call it a night. Stefanie found Chelsea dancing on a banquette, her floppy-haired companion replaced by a tall, skinny guy with an angular face. He was passing Chelsea another highball glass. Chelsea grabbed Stefanie’s hand and tried to coax her onto the banquette, but Stefanie matched the gentle force of the tug until Chelsea simply pulled her hand away. ‘Come on, Chels,’ Stefanie yelled over the music. ‘We still need to pack. Let’s go.’ Chelsea looked at her watch, then grimaced and shrugged. ‘No point in sleeping now. Looks like we better make it an all-nighter.’ ‘Two against one.’ Stefanie used her index finger to pull back the curtain closing off the private room so Chelsea could see Jordan slumped over her black patent leather clutch purse on an ottoman. ‘You’re the weak link. Time to go, babe.’ She pulled again at Chelsea’s hand, and once again, Chelsea jerked away. Stefanie heard a male voice ask, ‘Why do you have to be such a drag?’ She turned to take a closer look at Chelsea’s most recent dance partner. He was about six feet tall, probably in his mid-twenties. His brown hair was gelled into a fauxhawk. He wore straight black pants, pointy black shoes, and a white shirt with a thin black tie. Stefanie shot him her best death stare, then returned her attention to Chelsea. ‘Seriously? You’re costing us precious minutes of REM sleep for Duran Duran here?’ ‘You mean Jake? He looks like Jake Gyllenhaal, don’t you think?’ Stefanie didn’t waste another second on the guy. ‘We’ve had a good run, Chels. But really, we’re leaving.’ ‘Go ahead,’ Chelsea yelled. ‘I’ll be fine.’ Stefanie stole another look at Jordan, who was on the verge of sleep despite the thumping bass notes vibrating through the glossy white wood floors. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. We’re not leaving without you.’ ‘I’m fine. I’ll be back in time for the flight. I promise.’ Chelsea downed the last of her drink, gave her a Girl Scout’s pledge sign, then brought her hand down for a mock booty slap. Stefanie couldn’t help but smile at Chelsea’s goofy moves. ‘Please tell me you’re not leaving with New Wave Boy.’ Chelsea laughed. ‘Of course not. I’ll take a taxi. I just want to dance a little longer. This is like, the best night ever.’ Stefanie looked around the club and realized she had no hope of persuading Chelsea to leave with them. ‘You’ve got cash?’ Chelsea jumped off the banquette and gave Stefanie a quick hug. ‘Yes, Mom. And credit cards.’ ‘We can’t miss our flight,’ Stefanie warned. ‘Obviously not. I’ll come straight back, closing time at the very latest, right?’ Following Jordan out the double doors of Pulse, Stefanie tried to settle the uneasy feeling she still carried. Last call was in an hour. What was the worst that could happen? She did not notice the blue Ford Taurus parked half a block down. Nor could she know how happy the car’s driver was to see the two brunettes leave in a cab together, without their friend. Chapter Three (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) 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 socked foot she’d managed to leave unprotected. ‘I believe you threatened to charge me rent if I didn’t wake you up today. This was your pact: skip no more than twice a week, and never two days in a row. Sound familiar? You slept in yesterday.’ The worst part of having your own words thrown back at you, Ellie decided, was that you couldn’t argue with them. They ran in silence for the first two and a half miles. They had struck this deal three weeks earlier. For Ellie, the 5:00 a.m. runs were the start of an early morning; for Jess, the end of a late night at work. And for both, the exercise was a means of counteracting the cigarettes and alcohol for which they seemed to reach so frequently these days. And because Ellie was best at sticking to rituals that were clearly defined, there were rules: they could skip up to twice a week, but never twice in a row. Jess had come to learn another, less explicit rule: these runs were not a time to discuss her recent trip back to their hometown of Wichita, which they both knew – but never acknowledged – was the true reason Ellie needed this solitary routine to mark each new day. This particular morning, however, they were not the only ones in East River Park. ‘So what do you think’s going on over there?’ Jess asked. Ellie followed her brother’s gaze to a group of three men gathered at the fencing that surrounded a small construction site next to the FDR Drive. The men wore T-shirts and running shorts and had the long, lean frames typical of serious runners. One of the guys also wore a fanny pack and was speaking into a cell phone. Ellie couldn’t make out the man’s words from this distance, but she could see that his two companions – peering through the honeycomb mesh – were shouting information to him. She also detected the high-pitched jingling of an electronic gadget. Something about the melody was familiar. ‘Don’t know, don’t care.’ Ellie just wanted to get home, catch her breath, and give her legs a rest. The construction site had been there on the west side of the park since they had begun their routine. For Ellie, the only significance of the location was its proximity to the Williamsburg Bridge, the official turnaround point on their established route. Her sole focus remained on the path in front of her – the tennis courts were a few yards ahead, followed by the bridge, then it was time to head back. ‘Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?’ Jess began to jog toward the fence. Ellie still couldn’t figure out how her brother – with his lifestyle – managed these runs, at this pace, with such apparent ease. She stayed in good shape with kick-boxing and weight training, but serious running like this had always winded her. Anyone looking to resolve the nature-versus-nurture debate need only look to Ellie and Jess. Their lung capacities were just two of the many differences between them. ‘If I stop, you may very well have to carry me home,’ she panted. ‘You weigh too much for that,’ Jess called out, sticking out his tongue as he ran backward. ‘Come on. What could be good enough to get the attention of a group of New Yorkers?’ As they approached the three runners, she could see that the men’s expressions were anxious. The one with the fanny pack flipped his phone shut. ‘They’re on the way,’ he announced. A wave of relief washed over the runners’ faces. Ellie had seen the phenomenon countless times when she’d arrived in uniform to a crime scene, NYPD badge in hand. Jess had wondered what could distract New Yorkers from their routine, and she had a bad feeling about the answer. She tried to tell herself it might only be vandalism, maybe a bum seeking a temporary camping zone. ‘Something worth seeing here?’ she asked. ‘You might not want to look,’ one of the men said. Ellie readied herself for the worst, but she could not have anticipated the scene she encountered as the runners stepped aside. A section of wire had fallen slack between two metal braces that had been knocked to the ground, leaving a substantial gap in the perimeter around the construction site. The woman – she was just a girl, really – was propped like a rag doll against a pile of white PVC pipes, arms at her sides, legs splayed in front of her. Her sleeveless red top had been unbuttoned, exposing a black satin push-up bra and matching panties. Her legs were bare. High-heeled gold sandals dangled from her feet, but whatever other clothes had covered the lower half of her body were gone. It was the rage behind the violence that struck Ellie immediately. She had seen her fair share of murder scenes, but had never come across this kind of brutality. The girl’s wavy hair had been hacked off in handfuls, leaving large portions of her scalp exposed. Her body and face had been crosshatched with short, deep stab wounds resembling the outlines of a tic-tac-toe game. Ellie winced as she imagined the terror that must have come at the first sight of the blade. She heard one of the men say that they had been unable to find a pulse, but Ellie had already concluded there was no point in checking. She forced herself to focus on the clinical facts she would need for her report. A chain of ligature marks blossomed around the girl’s neck like purple delphinium. Her eyes were bulging, and her swollen tongue extended between lips caked with dried saliva and bile. Rigor mortis had not yet set in, but the girl’s skin – no doubt vibrant and pearly just a few hours earlier – was now gray and entering a deeper stage of lividity, particularly in the body’s lower extremities. Lumps of red blood cells had formed boxcars in her retinas. As gruesome as the mutilation had been, it had also been gratuitous. It was the strangling that most likely claimed her life. The jingling that Ellie had noted earlier was louder now. It was coming from somewhere near the body. She was startled by a retching sound behind her. She turned to see Jess doubled over next to a black tarp draped across a fence post, just as she became aware of sirens sounding in the distance. ‘May I?’ she asked the jogger, reaching for his cell phone. Punching in a number she had memorized surprisingly quickly, she led the joggers away from what would soon be marked as a crime scene. By the time she hung up, the first car of uniform officers had arrived. Chapter Four (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) 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. Short haired. Maybe in a different decade, he would have enlisted in the army. These days, he probably had a mother who stopped him. Now he was law enforcement. He directed a flashlight at the dead girl. Ellie could tell from his reaction that this was his first body. ‘Oh, Jesus.’ He reached for his stomach on reflex. ‘All upchuckers, over there.’ Ellie directed the officer’s attention to Jess, who, as instructed, was standing well east of the crime scene, looking out at the river, taking deep breaths. ‘Detective Hatcher, Manhattan South homicide. I need your radio.’ Ellie had wrapped up one week in the homicide bureau, and so far all she’d done was help her new partner tie together loose ends on his old cases and play support for other teams while she supposedly ‘learned the ropes’. Now she’d practically stumbled over this poor girl’s body inside the Manhattan South borough. She was the first cop on the scene, and she was a homicide detective. If she couldn’t weasel her way onto this case, she didn’t deserve her new assignment. The uniform looked at her, blinking rapidly. First a disfigured body, now a sweaty woman in a Pretenders T-shirt and sweatpants, demanding his radio. ‘But –’ The young officer’s partner found the words he’d apparently been searching for once she’d stepped from the driver’s side of the car. ‘I’ll confirm it,’ she said, reaching for the Vertex radio microphone clipped to the shoulder of her navy blue uniform. ‘And no one’s taking our radios. Sorry, ma’am.’ Ellie nodded. The woman was a good cop. Depending on what precincts she’d been working, this could easily be her first body as well, but she was cool. Cooler than her partner. Just a quick glance at the body, then a more careful monitoring of everyone at the scene. Three runners, pacing. The sweaty woman who wanted their radio. The tall guy, looking out of place by the water. ‘Make sure that guy’s not going anywhere,’ she said to her partner. She was definitely good. Of the people at the scene, Jess was the one who should have registered on a cop’s radar. And asking her partner to keep Jess company gave the obviously nervous young cop some distance from the body. ‘You’re right,’ Ellie said, holding up her palms. ‘Call it in. But tell them homicide’s already here. Shield 27990. Hatcher. They’ll have me down as Elsa.’ She listened as the officer radioed in the essentials. They were at East River Park, south of Houston, north of the tennis courts. They had a 10–29–1. It was standard 10 code. A 10–29–1: 29 for a past crime, 1 for a homicide. Across the country, 10-codes were dying out in favor of so-called plain language. The Department of Homeland Security had gone so far as to force the NYPD to train its officers in the kind of plain English that was supposed to assist interagency communications in an emergency. Instead, the entire notion of an eight-hour training session on plain talk became just another opportunity for the NYPD to mock the feds. ‘We still need EMTs,’ the officer said. Emergency Medical Technicians would have been dispatched with the original 911 call, but these days ambulances were in higher demand and correspondingly slower to respond than law enforcement. The homicide call-out would now bring technicians from the crime scene unit and the medical examiner’s office. So much for solitude along the East River. Ellie motioned the woman to speed it along. The officer confirmed Ellie’s badge number and notified the dispatcher that a homicide detective was already at the scene. ‘And tell them J. J. Rogan’s on the way too,’ Ellie added. ‘Jeffrey James Rogan, my partner. Tell them to put us in the system. No need to do a separate homicide call-out.’ Ellie nodded as the woman repeated the information. Then she went to check on Jess. ‘I see you met my brother,’ she said to the young male officer. ‘He’s not as dangerous as he looks.’ Jess cocked his thumb and forefinger toward the cop. ‘Turns out your compadre here is a certified Dog Park fan.’ Dog Park was Jess’s rock band. Their biggest gigs were at ten-table taverns in Williamsburg and the occasional open mic nights in Manhattan. To say that Dog Park was an up-and-coming band would be a serious demotion to those groups that were actually on the ladder to stardom. ‘I knew someone out there had to love them as much I do,’ Ellie said. ‘Yeah. Small world.’ The officer smiled with considerable enthusiasm. Jess was eating it up, but Ellie suspected that at least some of the officer’s excitement was attributable to his relief at having a subject of conversation other than the dead body he’d just seen. She turned at the sound of an engine and saw a second blue-and-white arrive at the scene. ‘Would you mind giving my brother a ride home, uh, Officer Capra?’ Ellie asked, squinting at the officer’s name tag. ‘I think his heart’s had enough of a workout for the morning.’ ‘Sure. No problem.’ ‘He’ll give you my gear and a suitable change of clothes for you to bring back here, if that’s all right.’ ‘Uh, yeah.’ Capra glanced at his partner, as if worried about her reaction. First he’d almost vomited on the body. Now he was being sent away on an errand. ‘I really need my gear,’ Ellie said, following his gaze. ‘I’ll make sure she knows I told you to go.’ She touched Jess’s shoulder. ‘Get some sleep. I’ll call you later.’ Ellie looked at her watch. Five forty-five. Forty-five minutes since Jess threw shoes at her head. Thirty-four minutes since she made a mental note of her start time outside the apartment. Thirteen minutes since the first jingle of the Gwen Stefani ring tone. She looked at the girl, abandoned and exposed against a pile of construction debris. If Ellie had kept on jogging, this would be someone else’s case. Someone else could deliver the news to the family. Someone else could offer their anemic reassurances that they were doing all they could to find out who’d done this to their daughter. But she had stopped. She had made the patrol officer use her name on the radio. This was her case now. This girl was her responsibility. It was time to find out who she was. Two hundred feet away, on the other side of East River Drive, a blue Ford Taurus was parked outside an apartment building on Mangin Street. The man at the wheel watched as a second patrol car arrived, followed by an ambulance with lights and sirens. Two patrol cars carrying four uniform officers had all arrived before the ambulance. He found that ironic. Good thing the girl was beyond saving. The first of the patrol cars to have arrived left the park and turned north on the FDR. One cop up front. Civilian male in back, no cuffs. Everyone else remained at the scene for now. He wanted to stay and watch, but knew they’d be canvassing the neighborhood soon. He turned the key in the ignition. The digital clock on his dash read 5:46. He adjusted the channel on his satellite radio. Fourteen minutes until Howard Stern. At 5:48 a.m., twenty-two miles east in Mineola, Long Island, Bill Harrington’s eyes shot open when his newspaper carrier missed the porch once again, thumping the shutter outside his bedroom window. His body felt clammy. He kicked the quilt away to the side of the bed and welcomed the slight chill on his bare legs. He had been dreaming of Robbie. The dream began at the Alcoa plant outside Pittsburgh, a place he hadn’t set foot in since Penny insisted that they retire to Long Island five years ago. But he had worked in that plant five days a week for twenty-five years of his life – the majority of them happy – melting and pouring steel castings. In his dream, when he walked into the familiar employees’ break room, he found himself instead at the Harrington family’s old kitchen table. It was Robbie’s sixth birthday. Jenna was only twelve at the time, but she’d insisted on baking the cake with only minimal assistance from her mother. The cake was lopsided, lumpy, and topped with a bizarre shade of green frosting, but Robbie hadn’t seemed to notice. There she was, propped up on her knees on the vinyl padding of the kitchen chair, elbows on the table, her blond hair held back by a pink paper birthday-girl tiara, eagerly staring at the six burning candles while Bill, Penny, and Jenna drew out the final line of the birthday song to prolong Robbie’s excitement. Bill had smiled in his sleep when Robbie clenched her eyes shut, took that enormous breath, and whispered it cautiously across the tips of each candle. I did it, Daddy. I got everyone of them, just like you told me. Will I really get mywish? You’ll have to wait to find out, Robbie. But, remember,don’t tell anyone. In Bill’s dream, Robbie had crawled down from her chair and walked out of the kitchen into what had moments earlier been, in his mind, the Alcoa plant. Bill followed her, longing for more time, but it was too late. He found her as he’d last seen her nearly eight years ago – naked on a stainless steel gurney, draped with a white sheet. All these years later, Bill still found himself thinking about his younger daughter. How often, he’d never bothered counting; at least once a day, certainly; usually more. And, just as he had in the very beginning, when Penny was still with him and Jenna still lived nearby, Bill occasionally woke from dreams that gave way to nightmares. But it had been a long time since Bill Harrington had been visited by such vivid memories of Robbie. Chapter Five (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) 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 wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he worked off-duty as a model. He was average height, but with a solid frame, probably just shy of six feet and at least two hundred pounds. Dark mocha skin. Smooth bald head. Really good smile. In short, J. J. Rogan was at the top of the bell curve for looks. And apparently that fact wasn’t lost on the almost entirely male squad of homicide detectives at the Thirteenth Precinct. Nor had it escaped their attention that Ellie wasn’t half bad herself. Ellie had already overheard another detective referring to them by a team nickname: Hotchick and Tubbs. She assumed that with time they’d conjure up something more clever, but the general theme had been established. ‘Barely six a.m., Hatcher. You know this shit should have been someone else’s call-out.’ ‘You’re telling me that if you were first at a scene, you’d wait for someone else to catch the case?’ She couldn’t tell whether Rogan was satisfied with her response or was simply moving on to the business at hand, but he made a beeline to the construction site. A crime scene analyst was still cordoning off the area with yellow police tape. Rogan winced at the sight of the body. ‘I guess someone meant business. Where are we?’ ‘No official word from the ME, but based on the swelling in her face and eyes, my guess is she died from the strangling.’ Rogan nodded his agreement and shone a flashlight across the body. ‘And the cuts were just for fun. Most of them look postmortem.’ Without a beating heart to move the body’s blood, stab wounds inflicted after death were dry and bloodless. The hatch marks in the victim’s skin had the telltale look of sliced Styrofoam. ‘Have you found ID yet?’ ‘We found a purse, probably tossed over the fence, but no wallet, and no ID.’ ‘What about her hair?’ ‘Nothing yet. He either chopped it off before he brought her here, or carried it off with him – maybe kept it as a souvenir.’ Rogan was still taking in the full visual of the body. ‘Too healthy for a working girl. No track marks. Fresh pedicure. Matching lingerie.’ Ellie had made the same observations. ‘How old, do you think? You know that’s not my strong suit,’ Rogan said with a small smile. When he’d first met Ellie last week, he had volunteered that she looked a mere twenty years old, but then added that he could never tell with white people. ‘Early twenties, tops. She could even be a teenager.’ Rogan clicked his tongue against his teeth. ‘We pulled a cell phone from behind the body,’ Ellie said. ‘It must have fallen out when the guy dumped her, before he tossed her purse.’ ‘So start dialing all her contacts. Let’s find out who this girl is.’ ‘Easier said than done. There’s something wrong with the screen. The display kept cutting in and out when I was turning off the alarm. Now I can’t get any image at all. Nothing but black lines.’ Rogan took a look at the broken phone. ‘The same thing happened to me when I dropped my Motorola at the gym. That thing’s shot.’ ‘I did, however, find this in her purse.’ Ellie held up a ziplock bag containing a white plastic card not much larger than a business card. He smiled, registering the significance of the bag’s contents. ‘Now that narrows it down. You plan on staying in your sweaty clothes all day?’ As if on command, a marked car pulled up next to Rogan’s Crown Vic. Officer Capra stepped out, carrying a familiar blue backpack. She hoped Jess had remembered to pack her shield, Glock, and the necessary undergarments. ‘I’m ready when you are.’ The white plastic card was a hotel key emblazoned with a blue capital H surrounded by a curly Q. ‘We got three Hiltons in Manhattan,’ Rogan said. ‘Times Square, Rockefeller Center, and the Financial District. Try your luck.’ Ellie was wriggling out of her running clothes in the footwell of the backseat, trying not to think about the various forms of mucus that had been hurled and smeared against the upholstery since the car’s last disinfection. ‘Girls that age don’t stay near Wall Street.’ ‘Unless they’re hookers,’ Rogan interjected. ‘And we don’t think she was. So between the other two, I’ll go with Times Square. Who doesn’t love Times Square these days?’ By the time Rogan pulled up to the giant copper clock outside the hotel’s Forty-second Street entrance, Ellie had just finished snapping on her holster. As she stepped from the backseat, she waved off a uniformed valet. Rogan flashed his shield as he followed behind her. ‘We’ll be quick, man. Thanks.’ To their surprise, the hotel lobby was on the twenty-first floor. They bypassed whatever businesses occupied the tower’s bottom half with an express ride in the Art Deco elevator. At the front desk, they cut to the head of a long line of guests who were presumably waiting to check out. The woman who greeted them had pale skin, red hair knotted into a bun, and glasses dangling from a chain around her neck. ‘How may I help you?’ Rogan produced the hotel key and explained in a hushed voice what they needed and why. ‘Oh, my.’ The clerk lowered her voice as well. ‘Unfortunately, that key isn’t ours.’ ‘Are you sure?’ ‘I’m certain.’ She produced a white card that looked identical to the one they’d found in the victim’s purse, but with the addition of the words Times Square below the corporate logo. ‘This here’s one of our keys. People like the Times Square thing, you know. And we’re considered “boutique style”. People like that, too. You should try our hotel at Rockefeller Center. They’ve got over two thousand rooms.’ ‘And the one in the Financial District?’ Ellie asked. ‘Five hundred and sixty-five.’ ‘So, if you’re playing your odds –’ ‘Our Rockefeller Center location is on Fifty-third Street and Sixth Avenue.’ As the two detectives rode the elevator back to the ground floor, Ellie watched as Rogan checked out his freshly shaven scalp in the mirror. She snuck a look at herself, then quickly thought better of it. She knew from experience that messy strands of her shoulder-length blond hair would be flipped in every direction, thanks to dried sweat and the ponytail holder she’d worn during her run. At some point she’d try to find a hairbrush and at least wash her face. ‘How come between the two of us we didn’t figure out to hit the monster-sized hotel first?’ Ellie asked, keeping her eyes on the elevator’s digital display as it counted down each passing floor. ‘I guess the first twenty floors are misleading. Makes it look larger than it really is.’ ‘That’s what she said.’ Ellie hadn’t meant to slip into a Michael Scott impersonation in front of her new partner, but the response to his comment had been automatic. So was Rogan’s. He laughed. It was a good laugh. Loud. From the gut. ‘Careful, Hatcher. If word gets out you’ve got a sense of humor, the guys at the house will really be chasing after you, and I won’t be able to protect you. That is, assuming you ever get around to taking a shower.’ The Monday-morning traffic was already starting to pour from the Lincoln Tunnel into Midtown. Rogan hit the wigwag flashers on the headlights of the Crown Vic and made it to the circular driveway at the Sixth Avenue entrance of the Hilton in four minutes flat. Leaving the car pulled up behind a large Trailways bus, he badged the valet as they headed for the lobby, working their way through a large group of teenagers wearing John Marshall High School band T-shirts and dragging backpacks and instrument cases. Most of them were using cell phones to snap their final photographs of Manhattan as they milled around, waiting to board the jumbo bus. Ellie knew they’d found the right place when she spotted two girls huddled next to the bell stand on the opposite side of the lobby. She couldn’t make out their words, but she could tell from the pitch of their raised voices that the girls were distressed. They appeared to be arguing, but then one of the girls burst into tears, and her friend placed an arm around her shoulder. A bellhop in a red uniform and captain’s hat stared at the girls awkwardly, clearly wishing to extract himself from the situation. J. J. started toward the reception desk, but Ellie grabbed his elbow and cocked her head toward the agitated girls. ‘You go check that out,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the key to the front desk and see if they can get us any information on it.’ As she approached the bell stand, she was able to catch the tail end of the girls’ conversation. ‘We can’t leave without Chelsea.’ The crying girl had dark brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail, topped off with a black headband. She wore a pink hoodie sweatsuit and Puma tennis shoes. The girl’s friend was rubbing her shoulder soothingly. ‘I didn’t say we should leave without her. I just said we should go to the airport. Chelsea’s probably there.’ The comforting girl was petite with a black pixie haircut. Ellie spotted the top of some kind of tattoo peeking out from the back of the waistband of her jeans. The girl looked at her watch with a furrowed brow. ‘We’re missing our flight anyway. It’s almost seven o’clock.’ ‘They said it was delayed,’ the girl in the ponytail reminded her. She was starting to get control over her tears. ‘Chelsea would never leave us hanging like this.’ Another bellhop hurried past the duo and grabbed a set of car keys from the counter beside them. ‘Andale,’ he shouted, hurrying along the perplexed bellhop who was trapped with the girls. ‘Chewanna cab or not?’ The question sent the crying girl into sobs again, and the bellhop finally gave up, grabbed a set of keys from the counter, and fled to the hotel entrance. ‘Do you two need some help with anything?’ Ellie asked. The pixie threw her an impatient look, as if the attention of strangers was yet another piece of unwarranted drama. ‘We’re fine, ma’am. We didn’t mean to make a scene.’ ‘No need to apologize.’ Ellie flipped up the badge that was clipped to the waistband of her pants. ‘You’re looking for one of your friends?’ ‘She’s just running late. It’s fine –’ ‘Stop saying it’s going to be fine, Jordan.’ The crying girl pushed her friend’s hand off her shoulder. ‘She’s missing. She should be here, and she’s not here. She knew what time we were leaving, and she’s not here. She’s … she’s missing.’ Ellie heard the girl’s pain in the way she spoke that single word. She said it with the knowledge that to be missing meant so much more than to be in an unknown location. The petite girl with the pixie haircut and tattoo, the one whose name was apparently Jordan, said they just needed to get to the airport. If they could get to the airport, they could make it onto a later flight and wait for Chelsea. ‘I told you, I’m not leaving.’ Jordan muttered something under her breath. Ellie heard it but hoped the crying girl hadn’t. But she had, and she responded as predicted. ‘Seriously? Chelsea’s missing, and you decide to say you’re going to kill her? Do you have any idea how disgusting that is?’ ‘All right. Just try to calm down, both of you. Your name’s Jordan?’ She spoke directly to the tattoo girl, who nodded in response. ‘No one’s killing anyone, Jordan.’ ‘Yeah, I’m sorry. Sorry, Stef.’ ‘And you’re Stef?’ Ellie asked the crying girl. ‘Yeah, Stefanie. Stefanie Hyder.’ ‘Okay. So you’re obviously upset, but I need one of you – only one,’ she said, holding up a finger, ‘to tell me what’s going on. Can you do that, Stefanie?’ The girl sniffed a couple of times and tugged on her ponytail nervously. ‘We’re on spring break. Our flight leaves this morning – like, basically now. And our friend Chelsea isn’t here.’ ‘But –’ Ellie held up her hand. ‘You’ll get your turn.’ Stefanie continued without prodding. ‘We went out last night. It was time to come home, and she wouldn’t leave. Chelsea wouldn’t leave. I should have stayed, but it was time to go home. And she promised.’ Jordan placed her arm around Stefanie’s shoulder once more, and this time Stefanie didn’t push away. Her tears brought on sobs as she spoke. ‘She looked me in the eye, and she promised she’d be back by now. She promised she’d be here. She promised. And she’s not. Something happened to her. Something’s wrong.’ Rogan had snapped a digital photograph of the girl from East River Park, but she didn’t want to do the ID that way. Not in a crowded Midtown hotel lobby. Not now. ‘Do you have a picture of your friend?’ The girls both shook their heads. ‘You sure?’ Ellie recalled the band students outside snapping shots with their phones. ‘Not in your cell phone or something?’ ‘Yeah, right. No, of course.’ The one called Jordan stepped over to a tangle of bags that were piled in the corner next to the bell stand counter. She rifled through a large white tote, pulled a patent leather clutch from the larger bag, and then began sifting through its tightly packed contents. ‘Sorry. You have to put everything in two bags for the airlines.’ She finally slid out an iPhone and pushed a few buttons before holding it out toward Ellie. ‘That’s her, just last night at dinner. In the middle.’ Ellie took the device from her and peered closely at the picture. The three friends were huddled together, posing for the camera with open-mouth smiles, as if they’d been laughing. A bystander in the background didn’t look too happy with them. The girls had probably been too rowdy for the restaurant. At least their last night together had been a happy one. It was a small screen, but she could make out three faces. The girl on the right was Stefanie Hyder, with her hair down and her eyes bright, not bloodshot as they were now. The one on the left was pixie-haired Jordan. And Ellie recognized the girl in the middle as well. She recognized the long shiny blond hair before it had been hacked off. She recognized the red sleeveless shirt, chosen no doubt to match the crimson bead chandelier earrings that peeked out from behind the beautiful blond hair. And she recognized the smiling face before someone had used it as a carving board. Chapter Six (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) 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 framed picture of their daughter’s second-grade portrait. Everyone tellsme your daughter had a smile that lit up the room. It was a sentiment offered in kindness. Trite, maybe, but well intended. The victim’s father had upended the coffee table and shoved Jerry Hatcher into the fireplace mantel. Why? Because he’d used the past tense too soon. Ellie’s memories of her father were filled with stories like that one. Other kids’ fathers talked about client meetings when they got home from work. Or a real piece of work on the delivery route. Or a tough cross-examination of a trial witness. Ellie’s father explained why he had a bandage on his head, and if the telling of the story happened to involve an eight-year-old girl buried in an oil drum, so be it. And, although she didn’t realize it at the time, she’d learned from those stories. On that particular day, she’d learned never to use the past tense. Even after delivering the news to the family. Even after the official ID. Even after the body’s in the ground. Until the family starts using the past tense, everyone else must remain in the present. Of course Chelsea’s friends still spoke of her in the present. They didn’t know her body was on a stainless steel table at the medical examiner’s office. Rogan led the way through the Thirteenth Precinct, past the front desk officers, the precinct briefing room, and two wire holding cages, up the narrow staircase to the third-floor homicide squad. Their head start on the day was over. Detectives bustled throughout the squad room, crowded to capacity with desks, chairs, file cabinets, and random boxes of evidence waiting to be cataloged. Jack Chen, one of the younger civilian aides, sat perched at the front desk. Rogan asked Chen to get two coffees and Danishes, then handed him a twenty-dollar bill from his wallet. Ellie flashed three fingers over Rogan’s shoulder and threw Chen a wink. Detouring around their desks, Rogan headed for the back corner of the squad room, then down a hallway leading to three interrogation rooms. He skipped the first two doors and held the final one open for Stefanie, Jordan, and Ellie. Because it was at the end of the hall, interview room 3 was the least used, and therefore the most presentable, of their interrogation rooms. There were only three chairs surrounding the small laminate table in the center of the room. Two on the left. A single on the right. Two detectives. One suspect. That’s how the room was arranged. The girls stood awkwardly until Ellie gestured toward the chairs. Jordan and Stefanie sat together, side by side. They started with names and dates of birth. Stefanie Hyder was the worried brunette with the ponytail and headband. Jordan McLaughlin was the girl with the dark pixie hair and a tattoo on her lower back. And Chelsea Hart was their missing friend. Ellie jotted down all three names, in that order, in a spiral reporter’s notebook. She circled the last one. All the girls were nineteen years old. Rogan let her take the lead on questioning. ‘I heard you mention at the hotel that you’re here in New York on spring break?’ ‘Right,’ Stefanie said. ‘We got here Tuesday. We were supposed to fly out this morning. Chelsea didn’t come back to the hotel last night, and she wasn’t there when we were ready to leave for the airport.’ Jordan shifted in her seat. She was clearly still fixated on that flight home. ‘When was the last time you saw Chelsea?’ Ellie asked. ‘Last night. Or I guess this morning. We were out late.’ ‘Doing what?’ The girls stared at the table. Stefanie studied her pearly red fingernails. Jordan chewed her lower lip. ‘You can’t find your friend. I think we can look past a little barhopping.’ ‘We went clubbing. We left around two thirty.’ Stefanie paused and dropped her head. ‘Chelsea stayed.’ Ellie scribbled ‘2:30 a.m.’ in her notebook. ‘Stayed where? Was she at a specific club?’ ‘Yeah. It’s called Pulse.’ Ellie was pretty sure she’d heard of the place, one of the newest, hippest Manhattan hot spots among the many new, hip Manhattan hot spots that were several notches too cool for her to frequent. ‘In the Meatpacking District, right?’ The girls nodded. ‘What other clubs did you hit?’ ‘None.’ Stefanie shook her head. ‘That’s it.’ ‘You sure? No quick pop-ins somewhere you might have forgotten about?’ The girls shook their heads. It was just the one club. ‘You went straight from your hotel to the club?’ she asked. The girls started to speak at once, then Jordan deferred again to Stefanie. ‘No, we went to dinner first. Some place in Little Italy. Wait. I’ve got the name.’ Stefanie slipped her fingers inside a small black purse and pulled out a wrinkled piece of yellow carbon paper. She smoothed it out. ‘Luna.’ Ellie wanted to nail down a basic timeline while the girls were still relatively calm, before she had to deliver the news. She walked them through the activities of the previous day. Brunch at Norma’s at 10:30 a.m. At the Museum of Modern Art by twelve thirty. One drink at the hotel bar at five o’clock. Back to their rooms at six to get ready. Taxi to SoHo at seven fifteen. At the Luna bar by eight. Seated at eight thirty. Ate between nine and ten. Left around eleven and walked to Pulse. Two of the girls left at 2:30 a.m. Chelsea stayed. Into the notebook it all went. Somewhere in that timeline Chelsea’s killer had found her. ‘And it was just the three of you the entire day?’ Two nods for yes. ‘No guys?’ Two shaking heads said no. Ellie didn’t buy it. ‘So tell me about the restaurant. Luna. You didn’t speak to anyone while you were there?’ ‘No,’ Stefanie said. ‘We ate by ourselves. Well, we had a couple shots with these lawyers at the bar, but we didn’t see them again once we were seated.’ ‘No chance Chelsea gave one of them her number and hooked up with him later in the night?’ Stefanie shook her head. ‘No way. Those guys were probably, like, thirty. Way too old for us.’ ‘You sure about that?’ Rogan asked. ‘You said you had two drinks with them.’ ‘It’s not like we were bonding or anything. Chelsea gave them fake names and told them we were models in town for a car show. They knew we were messing with them.’ Ellie had always assumed that the New York City dating scene was kinder to men than women, but these girls were painting a different picture. ‘What about the club? Did you meet any guys there?’ Two sets of shrugged shoulders and nervous eyes until Stefanie spoke up. ‘She started talking to some guys in one of the VIP rooms. We were all hanging out in there.’ ‘Did you get any names?’ Ellie asked. ‘No.’ She looked to Jordan, who shook her head. ‘Nothing? First names? A nickname?’ ‘It’s really loud in those places. You just say things like, “Hey, cool place, have you been here before?” that kind of thing, unless you take it outside to actually talk.’ ‘And you didn’t see Chelsea go outside?’ Two shaking heads. ‘Okay, well, was Chelsea with anyone in particular in the VIP room? Or just a big group?’ ‘Mostly just the whole group,’ Stefanie said. ‘But she was talking to this one guy when we first got there, and he was the one who brought us all into the VIP room.’ ‘Can you describe him?’ ‘He was tall, probably a little over six feet. Sort of shaggy, sandy blond hair. Cute.’ ‘Oh, I remember him,’ Jordan said. ‘Chelsea was with him for, like, a couple of hours, I think. They were dancing. Looked pretty hot and heavy.’ ‘It was flirting,’ Stefanie admonished. ‘I know. I’m just saying, I noticed.’ ‘So you got a good look at him, too?’ Ellie asked. Jordan nodded. ‘He kind of looked like an older Zac Efron. You know, cute more than good looking.’ ‘And I would know him from where?’ ‘High School Musical? Hairspray? Like, every single tabloid magazine known to man?’ Feeling slightly older than she had a minute earlier, Ellie tried not to think about how much easier this would be if the people who met at Manhattan clubs bothered to exchange names like normal people. She was going to have to sit these girls down with a sketch artist in the small hope of finding someone who apparently looked like an overage teen hunk and probably had absolutely nothing to do with Chelsea’s death. ‘Now, Jordan, you said Chelsea was with this guy for a couple of hours. Did you see her with anyone else?’ Jordan shook her head, but Stefanie spoke up. ‘Yeah, she was dancing with some other guy when I told her we were leaving. I didn’t really pay any attention to him, though. He was giving me a hard time for trying to get Chelsea to leave. Jesus, I let it get to me, and I shouldn’t have. I should have made her come home with us.’ Jordan told Stefanie it wasn’t her fault. Ellie got the impression she’d spoken those words many times that morning. ‘Can you remember anything about him?’ Stefanie chuckled to herself. ‘Yeah, I called him Duran Duran. He had that poser fauxhawk hairdo.’ ‘Kind of gelled into the middle?’ Ellie said. ‘Exactly,’ Stefanie said. ‘And he was dressed like some retro eighties MTV video star. Skinny pants. Skinny tie. Really stupid.’ ‘What about the basics? Height, weight, age?’ ‘Also kind of tall. Not as tall as the first guy. Probably right around six feet. A little older than us, maybe mid-twenties? Dark brown hair. Kind of thin, I guess. I really didn’t pay any attention, but I might recognize him if I saw him again.’ ‘Well, I can understand how the outfit might have distracted you.’ Ellie was hoping a little humor might deter Stefanie from another guilt-induced digression. ‘Oh, and Chelsea was calling him Jake.’ ‘His name was Jake?’ Ellie clarified. ‘No, like for Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s this thing Chelsea does. If someone looks like a celebrity, she’ll just call them that. So, I didn’t get a great look at the guy, but according to Chelsea, he looked like Jake Gyllenhaal.’ Ellie could certainly see how a guy who looked like that – regardless of the outfit – might get the attention of a nineteen-year-old girl from Indiana. ‘Okay, so we’ve got the shaggy-haired guy who brought you into the VIP room and Jake the bad dresser,’ she said. ‘Anyone else from last night you can remember?’ ‘No.’ ‘What about back home? Does Chelsea have a boyfriend?’ ‘Her boyfriend’s not here,’ Stefanie said. ‘Where is he?’ Ellie asked. ‘Indiana. He went to Canc?n for break, but he came back yesterday so he wouldn’t miss any classes. Oh, my God. He’s totally going to flip out when we’re not on the plane.’ ‘Worry about that later. What’s his name?’ ‘Mark. Mark Linton.’ Two more words for the notebook. She didn’t care whether the boyfriend was supposedly hiking in the Amazon rain forest. Until she verified his whereabouts, the boyfriend was always a suspect. ‘Who else?’ Ellie asked. Stefanie cocked her head, clearly put off by the question. Jordan gave her an annoyed look. ‘Who else other than Mark Linton?’ Ellie asked again. ‘I mean, it’s not like they’re married, right?’ ‘Not married,’ Stefanie said defensively, ‘but dating. And for like nine months. He’s her boyfriend, okay? She was dancing with some guys last night, but so were the rest of us.’ ‘No problem. Sorry if I offended you. I figured in college most people would still be dating around. You girls all right? Need to take a bathroom break or anything?’ Jordan raised her hand chin-high. ‘Detective Rogan will show you the way.’ Jordan scooted past her friend and followed Rogan out, while Ellie continued to walk Stefanie through the basics. Chelsea had no enemies. No one was watching them. No one was following them. No tawdry affairs or illicit drug deals over spring break. The guys at Pulse seemed harmless enough, and Chelsea wouldn’t have left with any of them anyway. It was just a fun night in the city. In fact, Chelsea had told Stefanie, just before they left her alone at the club, that it was the best night ever. When Rogan returned to the room with Jordan, he gave Ellie the look she was expecting. ‘This has been good, you guys. Very helpful. We’re going to make a few calls, and we’ll be right back.’ Ellie waited for the door to close behind them to talk to her partner in the hallway. ‘So?’ ‘Miss All-American Innocent, my black ass.’ Ellie feigned a judgmental tsk. ‘My goodness, Jeffrey James. You are so cynical.’ Facts. Reality. The truth. A timeline. It all sounds objective. Absolute. Black and white. It never was. Sometimes a story changed because a witness lied. But more often, it was simply because there was another side to the story. According to Rogan, it hadn’t taken much to get Jordan to come clean. ‘I caught her on the way out of the ladies’ room,’ Rogan said. ‘I told her I noticed her expression when Stefanie insisted Chelsea had only the one boyfriend. She gave me the usual “I don’t want to say anything about my friend”. ’ ‘And then you said we need the truth if we’re going to help.’ Rogan nodded. ‘Chelsea was getting her party on last night. Hard. All these girls were polluted by the time they left, and Chelsea was probably the worst. And she’s got a wild streak. She’s got the one boyfriend, Mark Linton, but that doesn’t stop her from flirting with other dudes behind his back, or even in front of his face.’ ‘Just flirting, or following up on the flirting?’ ‘That’s where the girl was less certain. She’s personally witnessed Chelsea make out with guys at bars – not last night, but in the past. I think she suspects things have gone further from time to time, but doesn’t know for sure and didn’t want to be too catty under the circumstances.’ ‘We don’t have long before this one breaks.’ The local crime reporters always had a way of learning about cases involving photogenic young women whose pictures made good front-page coverage. Add in a tourist at a trendy nightclub in Manhattan’s premier party district, and Chelsea Hart’s story became irresistible. ‘And we need to get to the parents before that poor chump of a boyfriend goes to the airport and sees that his girl’s not on the plane,’ Rogan added. ‘And we definitely need to get the Lou on board.’ The idea of Lieutenant Dan Eckels being on board with anything having to do with Ellie was a long shot. To say that Ellie wasn’t her lieutenant’s favorite detective was like saying the Hatfields and McCoys weren’t the friendliest of neighbors. ‘At least you can fuel up before you face your maker.’ Jack Chen turned the hallway corner, juggling a pastry bag and a cardboard tray filled with three Styrofoam cups of coffee. Ellie recognized both as coming from a deli on Third Avenue. She took one of the cups and removed a cherry Danish from the bag, along with a napkin, while Chen handed five dollars and some coins back to Rogan. Rogan waved him off, and Chen thanked him before heading off to deliver the rest to the girls down the hall. Ellie took a much-needed first sip of the black coffee. ‘I’ll meet you back out here in ten?’ Rogan said. ‘Are you going somewhere?’ ‘I’m going in there to prepare these girls to sit down with a sketch artist,’ he said, hitching a thumb over his shoulder. ‘You, however, are going to tell Eckels about your morning jog.’ Chapter Seven (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) 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 low forehead, the grin created an unfortunate Frankenstein effect. ‘Let me guess. You and this heart-attack-inducing breakfast ball are here to explain why you and Rogan were already well into a call-out when I arrived here at seven o’clock.’ ‘Something like that.’ She explained how she came upon the crime scene that morning before the first blue-and-white had even arrived. ‘I was already there, Lou. What was I supposed to do? Miss the opportunity for us to get a head start on the investigation just so I could finish my run?’ She said it as if she’d really been looking forward to that last mile. ‘You know what your problem is, Hatcher? You’re a smart-ass, just like Flann McIlroy.’ Ellie dropped the sunny smile. The last time she saw Detective Flann McIlroy, he was dying in her arms on a cabin cruiser at City Island, gunshots in his stomach and throat. ‘McIlroy was a great cop.’ ‘He was a good investigator. He knew how to follow his gut. Problem was, his instincts could be back-assward, and he wouldn’t listen. He didn’t listen to anyone. He thought he was smarter than everyone else.’ Eckels pointed to imaginary people standing around his office. ‘Thought he could go his own way as long as he shined on all the stupid people around him.’ ‘I’m not like that, sir, and I’m not shining you on.’ ‘But you do think I’m stupid,’ Eckels said, rocking back in his chair. ‘Of course not, sir.’ Ellie hadn’t realized until that moment the kind of insecurity Dan Eckels must live with. Eckels locked eyes with her, sucking his teeth. Ellie held up both palms. ‘No bullshit, Lieutenant. I’m here to pull my weight. And I won’t bring you breakfast anymore. For the sake of your heart. And, well, I really can’t stand being a kiss-ass.’ ‘Jesus H.,’ Eckels grunted, letting his weight drop forward. ‘Just go ahead and tell me what you’ve got.’ She drew him the bare-bones picture they’d gathered so far. ‘A college student killed on spring break in Manhattan? Please tell me the girl’s a bow-wow.’ Ellie shook her head. ‘She was very pretty. And blond. I hear the public likes crime stories about midwestern blondes.’ The self-deprecating crack about her own personal brushes with the media was enough to get another creepy smile out of him. ‘I was tempted to reassign this case to another team, Hatcher, the way you grabbed it. But you know something? You want to be in the middle of the shit storm? Then go for it. You weaseled your way into this squad after only five years on the job? We’ll see how much the brass loves you when your clusterfuck’s on the front page of every paper in the country.’ He unfurled the imaginary headline with outstretched hands: ‘Murder in the Big Apple.’ ‘I won’t say I wasn’t warned.’ ‘Keep me in the loop, Hollywood. McIlroy never did.’ ‘Not a problem, sir.’ She turned to leave his office, but Eckels wasn’t finished. ‘How are things with Rogan?’ ‘Good. Real good so far. Thanks.’ ‘Just so you know, you’d be paired with that lazy fuck Winslow if Rogan hadn’t saved you. Don’t be a pain in his ass.’ Ellie let the door fall closed behind her. She found Rogan on his cell phone at his gray metal desk. There were at least eight different varieties of desks among the twenty that were scattered throughout the squad room. From the looks of things, someone with a borderline case of obsessive-compulsive disorder had at some point attempted to pair them into matching sets for partners. Eight variations. Twenty desks. The math did not work. She took a seat at her own wood-veneer setup. Rogan lowered his voice to a whisper and swung his chair away from her. She heard him mutter something about ‘three thousand.’ She wondered if the call had something to do with his wardrobe. Maybe the price of a new suit. Or maybe a bet to help pay for the next one. To avoid any appearance of eavesdropping, she picked up her phone to make a call of her own. ‘Peter Morse.’ ‘Hey there.’ ‘Hey, yourself. I’m glad you called. I was worried maybe you met some other guy last night when I wasn’t on watch.’ ‘Nah, maybe back in my old skanky days. I kicked it at home alone last night.’ Ellie had only known Peter Morse for two months, and she’d been in Kansas for half of that time. But since she’d been home, they’d spent more nights together than apart. ‘Did you get a lot of work done?’ Peter was a crime beat reporter at the Daily Post by day, aspiring author by night. After spending all weekend together, Ellie had insisted that they have two nights on their own so he could have some time to write. ‘Oh, tons. Forty pages, at least. A book contract is just around the corner, complete with an all-expenses-paid tour and a straight shot to the top of the best-seller list.’ Peter tended to understate just how important his writing was to him, and sarcasm often proved handy on that front. ‘If you’re really on a roll, maybe we should take tomorrow night off, too.’ ‘Don’t even joke. I was sort of hoping I could come over tonight.’ ‘Nope. Two nights. Those are the rules.’ ‘Damn you and your stinking rules.’ ‘You were the one who told me it always takes you a day to get up to speed after a long break.’ ‘Damn me and my big mouth.’ ‘Tonight you’ll be in the zone,’ Ellie said. The grumble on the other end of the line suggested he had doubts. ‘And tomorrow?’ ‘And tomorrow, we’ll make up for lost time.’ ‘Now I like the sound of that.’ Rogan flipped his phone shut at the desk across from her. ‘Hey, I’ve got to run. I’ll call you tomorrow.’ ‘Promise?’ ‘I always mean what I say,’ she said before hanging up. ‘Sorry about that,’ Rogan said, holding up his cell. ‘With you dragging my ass out of bed so early this morning, I didn’t get a chance to take care of some personal business.’ ‘No need to explain.’ ‘So, turns out our girls from Indiana are a little tougher than you’d think. I told them we found a body this morning. Said you and I both saw her. That she resembles the picture they showed us of their friend.’ ‘You didn’t tell them the rest, did you?’ Rogan shook his head. ‘I made it clear there still needs to be an official ID, but they know we’re pretty confident this is Chelsea. For a couple of kids, they’re handling it all right. A whole lot of crying, of course, but I persuaded them to give me their phones until we’ve had a chance to call the family.’ He opened his desk drawer to reveal two cell phones. ‘And we’ve got a sketch artist on the way?’ ‘Done,’ he said. ‘It sounds like they got a decent enough look at the shaggy-haired guy that we might have a shot with him. On the one they called Jake, their descriptions are so vague, it might be a lost cause. Anyway, that’s for the doodler to figure out. We can have a victim’s advocate get them back into the Hilton once they’re done here.’ ‘So what’s next?’ ‘I call the parents. You call CSU and the ME. See if they’re ready for us.’ Breaking the news of a daughter’s death compared to checking on the status of the crime scene unit and medical examiner’s office? Definitely not equal billing. The call to Indiana was something she had signed on for when she took responsibility for the girl she’d found during her run. To a cop, it was one call at the beginning of yet another case. One call to deliver the news before the real investigative work started. But to the people at the other end of the line, that one phone call would mark the indelible moment that changed everything they thought they knew to be true. One minute, they’re living their lives – worried about the costs of remodeling the kitchen, trying to lose a few pounds before the upcoming reunion, wondering what to eat for dinner. The next, the phone rings, and nothing else matters. Ellie’s father used to say that was the worst part of the job – the knowledge that good people would forever remember your voice, your words, that one phone call, as the moment that changed everything. Ellie wasn’t looking forward to making her first call to a family, but she knew she had to do it eventually. ‘Not exactly a fair trade,’ she said. ‘That first call to a family is enough to rework your brain for the next twenty-four hours. I’d rather make the call than be stuck with a brain-dead partner all day.’ Rogan was offering to carry the load for her on this one. He had been a detective in NYPD’s homicide squad for a little more than eight years. That was a little more than eight years longer than Ellie. With some amount of guilt, she gratefully accepted. * * * Her calls took less than three minutes. CSU would be ready for an initial briefing from the crime scene in an hour. The ME needed two. Rogan was still on the phone. He had his head down, eyes closed – right hand on the handset, the other massaging his left temple. It was as if he were picturing himself outside this room, away from New York City, standing on a front porch with two parents in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Ellie could almost imagine Rogan looking Mr. and Mrs. Hart in the eye and breaking the news: Your daughter was supposed to takea cab back to the hotel, but she never arrived. The image gave her an idea. She opened Internet Explorer on her computer, Googled the New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission, and dialed the telephone number listed on the commission’s Web site. For decades, drivers of New York City’s taxis had maintained their trip sheets by hand, using pen and paper to log the location and amount of each fare. Trying to track down a cab driver on the basis of paper trip sheets was like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack of thirteen thousand yellow cabs. The tide in the sea of paper had shifted just last year, however, when the city’s new high-tech requirements for all medallioned cars had gone into effect. Although a few drivers remained at war with the commission over the expensive technology, a critical mass of taxis was now equipped with computers that not only accepted credit card payments but also used GPS technology to automate the ancient trip sheet practices. Obtaining a list of the cabdrivers within a one-block radius of Pulse around the time of last call would have once been impossible; now it was just a matter of a few keystrokes on a computer. Ten minutes later, they had finished their calls. Rogan had learned that Chelsea’s parents would be coming to New York City on the next available flight. Ellie had faxed a photograph of Chelsea Hart to be circulated among cabdrivers who’d picked up early-morning fares in the Meatpacking District. And the lives of Paul and Miriam Hart were forever changed. Chapter Eight (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) 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 baggie. ‘Is that Florkoski?’ The woman sealed the evidence collection bag and eased herself back to standing. She had a broad face that broke into a friendly smile at the sight of Rogan. ‘Hey there, Double J. Good to see you.’ She snapped a latex glove off of her right hand and extended it for a shake, first to Rogan and then to Ellie. ‘Mariah Florkoski.’ ‘Ellie Hatcher,’ Ellie said, returning both the smile and the handshake. ‘New partner,’ Rogan said. ‘Oh, sure.’ Florkoski nodded. ‘I recognize the name.’ Ellie had no doubt that the recognition was due to her one and only previous homicide case two months earlier, when she had been recruited to help investigate a series of murders tied to an Internet dating company. By the time the case was solved, a serial killer was arrested, a Russian identity-theft ring was busted, and one of the best cops Ellie would ever know was dead. And apparently other cops knew her name as a result. ‘What happened to Casey?’ Mariah asked. ‘Retired. Last month.’ ‘Don’t tell me. He’s finally going to Scottsdale.’ ‘The movers are coming next week.’ Rogan turned to Ellie and explained. ‘My last partner. Jim Casey. He’d tell anyone who’d listen he was retiring to Arizona.’ ‘That his only wish was to die on a Scottsdale golf course,’ Mariah said. ‘With a gin and tonic in hand,’ Rogan added. ‘You getting along all right without him?’ ‘Hatcher here’s good peeps.’ Ellie gave a tiny mock bow of gratitude. ‘Well, at least you didn’t wind up with that lazy slug Winslow.’ Ellie struggled to place the name, then remembered Lieutenant Eckels’s remark – that she would have been the one stuck with Winslow if it hadn’t been for Rogan. ‘I take it this case belongs to the two of you?’ ‘What have you got so far?’ Rogan asked. ‘Well, I can tell you the vic wasn’t killed here.’ Rogan’s lips set into a line of disappointment. All crime scenes were important. Any could yield evidence. But it was the primary crime scene that was most likely to yield blood, saliva, semen, hair, fibers, and fingerprints – all of the physical evidence that jurors increasingly insisted upon, now that the fictional world of the multiple CSI shows had become ingrained in the minds of ordinary people. Mariah pointed to a male officer who was photographing the dirt in front of him. ‘We’ve got a whole bunch of footprints in the area in front of her body – all with treads, consistent with athletic shoes. But fortunately, our runners didn’t crowd the body. They gave her some space. Closer in to the corpse, we’ve got another set of footprints – smooth bottomed, not likely an athletic shoe – pointing into and then away from the body. One guy. He carried her in, dropped her, then walked out.’ ‘Any chance you’re going to tell us the shoe is one of a kind,’ Rogan said, ‘custom-made at the foot of the Swiss Alps?’ Mariah smiled and shook her head. ‘It looks like any footprint you’d see on a Ballroom Dancing 101 instruction chart. Oval toe, square heel. No markings. About as generic as it gets.’ ‘How do you know she didn’t walk over here with him, then he walks out alone?’ Rogan asked. ‘Chelsea was wearing high heels,’ Ellie said. ‘Lucky for us.’ Mariah walked a few feet to a blue plastic storage bin resting on the ground just beyond the yellow crime tape. She reached in and pulled out a larger baggie containing a pair of high-heeled sandals. Ellie recognized them as the shoes Chelsea had been wearing that morning. ‘These bad boys would have left behind an imprint like a big exclamation point.’ ‘Anything else?’ Rogan asked. ‘We picked up a bunch of garbage lying around – Coke cans, cigarette butts, that kind of crap. We’ll look for prints. Have you guys talked to the ME yet?’ ‘Next stop,’ Rogan said. ‘Well, I’ve got one piece of good news for you. I took the shoes, but the ME took the clothes. But before they carried the vic away to the bus, I dusted her shirt. I pulled one latent off the underside of the top button of her blouse.’ ‘Chances are, she was the one to leave it behind.’ Mariah nodded. ‘Probably, but that’s not the best part.’ She paused to make sure she had their full attention. ‘When I was working on her blouse, I saw a stain that may or may not have been seminal fluid.’ Rogan rubbed his palms together. ‘Now that’s what I’m talking about.’ ‘Don’t go getting too excited. The girl could’ve dripped a smoothie on herself, for all I know. I can run the print in a couple of hours, see if there’s a match in the database. The stain – I can tell you within a day or so whether it’s bodily fluid or Tasti-Delite. But if it’s the former, it’ll take a good couple of weeks before we get DNA back.’ ‘But the fingerprint in a couple of hours?’ ‘End of the day at the latest.’ ‘Call my cell, all right?’ Rogan gave her his card. ‘No problem. And congrats on landing Jeffrey James here, Hatcher. He’s a good egg.’ More than five miles north, a man exited the 6 train at 103rd Street and Lexington. He kept his head down and his hands in his pockets, focusing on each step as he tried to ignore the steady push of harried subway riders hoping to catch a waiting train. He hated the proximity to other people that was required by mass transportation. The eye contact. The bumps. The pressing of sweaty bodies against one another in the rush of squeezing onto the train before the doors closed. The name – mass transportation – said it all. The transport of the masses. Moving through narrow turnstiles like cattle moving through the sorting gates. Moo, cow, moo. His hatred of the subway was part of the reason he paid for a car and two garage parking spots, one near home, one near work. But today his car was on West Eleventh Street for complete interior detailing – rugs vacuumed, mats shampooed, every surface hand-polished. He had worked quickly last night on that desolate Tribeca corner outside the Holland Tunnel, but he’d nevertheless been careful, strangling the girl in the front seat, then moving the body to the carefully draped plastic tarp in his trunk for the cutting. Now, for a mere hundred bucks, any trace of the girl would be gone from his Taurus. He walked briskly up Lexington Avenue to the familiar brick building at 105th Street. He used his security key to open the front door. No doorman. No elevators, which meant no cameras. No electronic entry system that tracked the residents’ comings and goings. Those were the kinds of luxuries that could cost you big-time down the road. He climbed the stairs to his third-floor apartment. Used one key on the auxiliary mortise dead latch. Heard the metal tumble from the block cylinder. Used another key on the dead bolt. Inserted the same key into the doorknob. Then he was home. He did a quick protective sweep of the apartment. Living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, two closets. Everything was in place. He checked the light on his answering machine. No calls. He rolled the brown leather ottoman away from its matching chair and pushed it against the living room wall. Then he took a seat on the floor – back against the ottoman, legs crossed in front of him – and carefully pulled up six wood parquet tiles, stacking them neatly to his left as he went, one through six. He worked his index finger into a crevice in the subfloor. It took three tries before he popped up the rectangular piece of removable particleboard. That was how perfectly he had cut it to fit – like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle, disappearing into the rest of the world around it. He propped the particleboard carefully against the sofa, then took a deep breath. He reached in and removed two ziplock bags. He placed both on the floor in front of him. He didn’t dare remove the contents of the one on the right – too much of a danger that it wouldn’t all make it back in. He allowed himself to open the one on the left and remove a single earring and a small plastic card. The earring was a chandelier of crystal and red beads dangling from a simple gold hook. The plastic rectangle was an Indiana driver’s license. It had been in the girl’s teeny-tiny purse, along with a lipstick, a cell phone, a hotel key, and a credit card. Name: Jennifer Green. According to the date of birth, she was twenty-four years old. The license probably wasn’t real. She hadn’t said she was from Indiana, and girls like that often had reasons for using fake names and IDs. Not to mention, he realized now, that the photograph was too good – too posed, too pretty – to have originated with any Department of Motor Vehicles. The girl’s credit card had been in yet another name, and the thought had crossed his mind it might have been stolen. He’d tossed it in a garbage can along the FDR, along with the tarp and the girl’s pants. The picture on the license was definitely his Jennifer, though. Those were undeniably the same girl’s bright blue eyes, round cheeks, and square jaw. That sexy smile, turned up on one side like she had a secret she might just be willing to share under the right circumstances. And, whether it was real or not, the card had belonged to her. She had carried it, touched it, used it. Those were the things that mattered – not the name or address. He looked at his watch. He was running on empty but had a meeting at three. He held the ID carefully between his left index finger and thumb. He unbuttoned his pants with his right hand. For the next three minutes, his eyes remained fixed on the other plastic bag – still sealed, its contents still safe and contained. All of that beautiful wavy blond hair worn by Jennifer Green in her fake Indiana driver’s license belonged to him now. Chapter Nine (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) 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 the hours. No one in the house wants to work with that. Lucky for me you came along.’ ‘But you never would have gotten partnered with him after you’d just had one partner retire on you. Eckels made it sound like I was the one who was supposed to inherit Winslow. In fact, he said I had you to thank for sparing me.’ Rogan reached for the radio, hit the power button, and began scanning for a song that met his approval. He settled on Hot 97, a mainstream hip-hop station. He turned up the volume on a Kanye West tune, and Ellie reached over and turned it down a notch. ‘Sorry, but if we’re going to be partners, you need to know now I like dealing with things head-on. If I’m out of line, bringing up something I shouldn’t, just tell me. I’ll back off. But drowning me out with the radio?’ ‘Don’t read into it. It’s just, this is my joint, y’know?’ Rogan moved his head back and forth with the beat. ‘Yeah, I know. And I also know there’s some story behind how you and I became partners. And if everyone else in the house knows about it, I thought maybe I should, too.’ ‘See? This right here? That’s what the issue was.’ Rogan turned the radio off. ‘What do you mean, “This right here”?’ ‘This whole dialogue.’ Rogan moved his right hand back and forth between them. ‘It’s like fighting with your girl or something. Like, “C’mon baby, we just need to talk.” ’ ‘Uh, except I’m not your girl, and I didn’t call you “baby.” ’ ‘That’s not what I meant. It’s just, partners need to get each other, you know? And, well, some of the guys weren’t so sure you’d ever be able to get them, and vice versa.’ ‘Because of the whole not-having-boy-parts thing? Because that’s not really something I can get past.’ ‘Honestly? Yeah, that’s probably part of it. But it’s got a lot more to do with how you got into the unit. It doesn’t help that McIlroy brought you over – my moms taught me not to talk smack about the dead, but no one liked that guy. He was a show-off. He had a picture of him and Rudy and Bill Bratton on his desk. Who does that? And then that First Date case exploded all over the place, and suddenly it’s your face in all the papers instead of his. Then your cute little self makes second grade in record time, and you’re in the squad? You have to see that’s a hard pill to swallow. The guys in the squad are all asking who’s your rabbi.’ The old Tammany Hall phrase was now standard code for questioning a fellow officer’s connections. She had wondered how long it would take for another detective to call her out on the genesis of her new assignment. After four years on patrol, she had spent only one year as a detective before the First Date case had come along. In the aftermath, she found herself holding newfound leverage with the department brass. A gig in the homicide squad was unusual for her level of experience, but not prohibited, and Ellie had cashed in all her chips to get it. She supposed she was her own rabbi. ‘Look, I know I got here faster than most, and I know I have to put in my dues, but I made sure to stay out of the papers on the First Date case.’ ‘That trip to Kansas wasn’t exactly secret.’ ‘That was on my own time. For my family. Anyone who would even begin to suggest that I get off talking to the press about my father has no idea what we’ve been through.’ For more than twenty-five years, the Wichita police had insisted that Jerry Hatcher killed himself. For more than a quarter of a century, Ellie’s mother had to live with the consequences of that decision: no insurance money, no pension, no answers. The trip to Wichita had offered a chance to prove that her father had not voluntarily widowed his wife and left his children fatherless. Of course she had to go. And when Dateline called her for an interview, she had to give it. ‘I’m not saying any of this is fair,’ Rogan said. ‘I’m just saying how it is. You worked with McIlroy. You’re in the news just like McIlroy. That means you’ve essentially inherited his shit. Plus you’re a woman, plus you’re all blond and pretty and wholesome looking, and people think you got a leg up from that.’ ‘And so how did that translate into me almost getting partnered with Winslow?’ Rogan paused before answering. ‘Because Lieutenant Eckels told everyone that’s what he was planning to do unless someone else volunteered. It was Eckels’s way of leading from the top down, making sure we all knew it was all right with him if we gave you the cold shoulder. You should’ve seen Winslow’s face. Ironically, I don’t think it had anything to do with you personally. That man just doesn’t want to be out in the street anymore.’ ‘So why aren’t I with Winslow? Why am I with you?’ Given the strings she’d pulled, she knew why Eckels never said good morning when he passed her on the way to the locker room. She got why he’d given her nothing but grunt work last week. She would even have understood if Eckels had partnered her up with a loser like Winslow. What she didn’t understand is why Rogan would have gone out on a limb for her. Cops who were skeptical of her, she could handle. Old news. She’d eventually win them over. A man who gave her a pass for no obvious reason was another problem altogether. Rogan kept his eyes on the road. ‘Because, you know, I’m not looking to get personal with anyone I work with.’ Rogan’s stoic expression changed to a stifled smile, then he broke out into a full laugh. ‘In your dreams, woman. I’m very much spoken for. Oh, my lord, look who thinks she’s all irresistible and shit.’ ‘That’s not what I meant. It’s just – I didn’t know why – really, that is not what I meant.’ ‘That’s exactly what you meant. Stupid-ass Eckels goes and tells you I stepped up to the plate, and you assume the only reason a man would help you out is if he’s looking to hit that. Well, don’t think I didn’t get the same flack around the house. That, or they figured I was somehow sympatico with you because of the number of times I’ve heard bullshit behind my back. Affirmative-action hire. Diversity detective.’ ‘And that’s not it either?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘So this is just going to remain a lifelong mystery? D.B. Cooper, Jimmy Hoffa, and why J. J. Rogan rescued Ellie Hatcher?’ His smile faded as he turned onto First Avenue. ‘I trust my instincts about people. I thought Eckels sticking you with Winslow sucked, and I thought it was going to cost the squad a good cop. And let’s just say I haven’t always had the easiest time with partners myself.’ It was the closest she was going to get to an answer, at least for now. ‘So you saved me,’ she said in a fairy-tale voice. ‘If you want to think of it that way.’ ‘I do.’ ‘All right, then. Can I listen to my radio now?’ ‘You may.’ He turned up the volume and began moving with the beat again. ‘And I’m sorry to break this to you, Hatcher, but I really am spoken for. I was just telling my girl last night you and I were getting on good.’ Ellie looked out the window and bopped her head a little, too. The Manhattan office of the chief medical examiner was located on First Avenue and Thirtieth Street, just north of the Bellevue Hospital Center. As they rolled past the canopied glass entrance of the hospital’s new addition, they caught a glimpse of the original building’s historic facade, still standing behind the modern entrance. Bellevue Hospital is the site of the nation’s first ambulance service and maternity ward and the oldest public hospital in the state. But outside of New York, it’s known for one thing and one thing only: its crazies. Ellie had lived in the city for ten years now, but it was still hard for her to hear the word Bellevue without envisioning a stringy-haired man in a straitjacket screaming like a hyena. Rogan found a spot on the street in front of the ME’s office. When they stepped out of the car, the sun was peeking out through a break in the clouds above them, and the air was still. They made their way through the building’s glass doors and up to the fourth floor. A clerk at the front window checked their shields, buzzed them through to the back, and pointed them in the direction of a stocky man standing at a nearby desk, dictating into a digital voice recorder. He had brown curly hair and a graying beard, and wore a white lab coat over khakis and blue sweater. He held up one finger while he completed his thought, then flipped a button to turn off the recorder. ‘J. J. Rogan, right?’ Rogan accepted his handshake. ‘You’ve got a good memory, Doc. This is my partner, Ellie Hatcher.’ ‘Richard Karr,’ the man said, extending his hand. ‘We spoke on the phone. First murder case?’ ‘Second,’ Ellie said, ‘but close enough.’ ‘All right, well, our first one all together, then. Let’s hope I can help you out. Now when you called, Detective, you said our young Miss Hart was nineteen years old and was last seen alive at a nightclub last night at two thirty a.m., correct?’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘That’s consistent with my best estimation of her time of death. Rigor mortis hadn’t set in yet.’ Corpses began to stiffen about three hours after death, due to changes in the muscles’ biochemistry. ‘I found undigested pasta. You said she last ate at ten o’clock?’ ‘That’s when her friends say they finished eating.’ ‘Again, it’s consistent. Digestion was well past the gastric phase, and into the duodenum –’ ‘She was killed sometime between three and five this morning?’ Ellie asked, cutting to the chase. Chelsea’s friends last saw her dancing at two thirty; her pallor was gray by the time Ellie saw her at five thirty. It only stood to reason. ‘Sorry, some of the detectives are more dazzled by the science than others,’ Dr. Karr said. ‘Okay, so, on to some other findings, then. You probably already know this too, but Miss Hart appears to have taken full advantage of the libations at said club. She had a blood alcohol content of point-two-six.’ ‘Drunk times three,’ Ellie said. ‘Three and a quarter, to be precise. Now, it takes the liver sixty to ninety minutes to metabolize the alcohol in a single serving of liquor, so the body’s BAC actually continues to rise during that time before it starts to dissipate. Depending on how long she was drinking –’ ‘Her friends say she had an early drink before dinner,’ Ellie cut in, ‘but then the real partying started around ten. She was definitely still drinking at ten thirty, and the club closed at four.’ Karr nodded, looking up to the ceiling as he ran the numbers. ‘Very well, then. Assuming she continued her consumption, I’m probably correct that she was still on the upswing at the time of death. With a body weight of only a hundred and twenty-two pounds, my best guess is she must have consumed nine or ten drinks over the course of the night.’ Ellie shook her head at the stupidity of it all. Attractive girl, scantily clad, underage. Blasted out of her mind. Wandering the streets of Manhattan alone in the middle of the night. A few times a year, a handful of girls were killed after making the identical mistake. And no one seemed to learn. ‘Plus we’ve got the tox screen. Positive for crystal meth.’ That one caught Ellie by surprise. She liked to think she could spot a liar, and none of the usual red flags went up with Chelsea’s friends. They’d been clear: no sex, no drugs. ‘Can you tell how recent?’ ‘She used within four hours of her death.’ Add methed up to attractive, scantily clad, underage, and drunk. Ellie couldn’t think of a more dangerous combination. Rogan cut in with a question of his own. ‘CSU thought the vic was killed off-site and then moved to the East River scene.’ ‘Oh, yes. Certainly. As you might know, it’s the power of the beating heart that keeps our blood cells and platelets all mixed together in our vessels.’ He pantomimed a mixing gesture with his hands. ‘So once the heart stops beating, and the mixer loses its power, the red blood cells begin to settle with gravity. That’s what causes the telltale discoloration of lividity – that look of a layer of grape jelly beneath the skin.’ ‘And the discoloration on Chelsea?’ Ellie asked. ‘Her body may have been found propped up in a seated position, but the grape jelly was on her back.’ It meant that Chelsea Hart’s body was lying faceup after her death and was then moved into the position in which she was found. ‘The movement of the body was not the only postmortem activity. Based on the minimal amount of blood on the wounds’ edges, my best estimation is that the cuts you saw on her arms, legs, and face were inflicted after death. If you told me she’d been immersed in water – a hot tub or a bath, for example – I might revise my opinion to antemortem cuts, but there’s no evidence of that, especially in light of the speed with which the body was discovered.’ ‘So cause of death is strangulation?’ ‘I still need to complete the entire autopsy, but yes, I’m confident that’s what I will ultimately conclude. Looking at the pattern of bruising on her neck, you can see she was strangled manually, from the front.’ He held his hands out, fingers strong and splayed. ‘Thumbs at the larynx, palms on the carotid arteries, fingers wrapped all the way around the back of her neck. With her on her back, and him on top of her, it creates a tremendous amount of pressure.’ Manual strangulation was in many ways the most dedicated form of murder. It wasn’t an instantaneous decision, like the pulling of a trigger or the slashing of a throat. It wasn’t remote, like poison or a contracted kill. And there was nothing to physically separate the killer from his victim – no rope, no scarf, no belt to do the strangler’s job for him. Everything about the act guaranteed that if the killer had any kernel of doubt – any second of hesitation – he could stop. Among murderers, stranglers who used their bare hands were the most committed and least repentant. And they were almost always motivated by sexual desire. ‘Any evidence of sexual assault?’ she asked. ‘Surprisingly, there was no indication of either vaginal or anal trauma. I did a rape kit anyway, obviously. Sometimes we get a hit on the oral swab. It will take a couple of days for the initial results on the swabs – weeks for any DNA profile, if we do in fact have any fluids to examine. Will there be evidence of voluntary sex within the last few days?’ ‘Not according to her friends. She has a boyfriend who’s supposedly been in Mexico all week.’ ‘Well, at least we’ll know that any DNA we find is for us. That’s all I have for you now,’ Karr said, switching gears abruptly, ‘but I’ll be in touch when we get those labs back.’ As they walked back to the car in the sunshine that was warming the cold morning into day, Ellie thought about the last hour of Chelsea Hart’s life and the fear and pain she must have experienced. Then she pictured Chelsea two hours earlier, smiling, dancing, and telling her best friend that she was having the best night ever. Chapter Ten (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) Chelsea Hart’s favorite movies were Run Lola Run,The Notebook, and The Princess Bride. Her favorite books were Wuthering Heights and The UnbearableLightness of Being. Her favorite drink was called an Angel’s Tip, a mix of dark cr?me 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 all social obligation when it comes to that stuff.’ That was fine with Ellie. No sharing meant more for her. Chelsea Hart’s top MySpace friends were Stefanie, Jordan, and a Mark whom Ellie assumed was her boyfriend, Mark Linton. She listed as her heroes ‘my parents, friends, and random-ass people I meet everyday.’ Ellie clicked on the link that read ‘My Pictures.’ The majority of the photographs depicted groups of teenagers clustered together, arms around each other’s shoulders, smiling for the camera. Chelsea was in the middle of most of the clusters. Stefanie was almost always close by. An entire photo album was devoted to a white-and-brown English bulldog that was apparently named Stacy Keach. Another contained pictures of Chelsea in various high school theater productions – Godspell, A ChorusLine, Into the Woods. Another of Chelsea in a purple-and-gold track uniform. Ellie stared at the intensity in Chelsea’s face – a perfect blend of happiness, pride, and pain – as she pressed through the ribbon across a finishing line, and she wondered how a girl like this had wound up drunk, alone, and on crystal meth in New York City. ‘We need to get hold of Chelsea’s parents,’ Ellie said. ‘All I did was Google the name Chelsea Hart, and her MySpace page popped right up. Once the news hits, every member of the press will be scouring this for all the details about Chelsea’s personal life. They need to pull it down.’ ‘They’ve got to be on a plane by now. When I talked to them this morning, they sounded like they were literally going straight to the airport once we hung up.’ ‘Knock, knock.’ Jack Chen rapped his knuckles against an imaginary door. ‘Detectives, there’s a couple here to see you. They say they’re Chelsea Hart’s parents?’ ‘Talk about on cue.’ Ellie gave a mock shudder. ‘Creepy.’ Rogan’s phone rang. He held up an index finger toward her before answering. ‘Rogan … Correct. That’s my case … Yes, I believe they just walked into the precinct a second ago … That goes without saying … Of course … I’ll be sure to tell them you called.’ He returned the handset to its cradle. ‘Amend that to really fucking creepy. That was the mayor’s deputy chief of staff. Apparently, they want to be certain that we give the Harts our closest attention.’ They were on their way to the front of the squad room when Dan Eckels popped his head out of his office. ‘A word with you two?’ he said, waving them over. ‘The vic’s parents are up front, sir.’ ‘I just got a call from the assistant chief. The Harts have already been in contact with the mayor’s office.’ ‘We know, sir. We don’t want to leave them waiting.’ ‘Right. You’re taking them to interview three?’ ‘Assuming it’s empty,’ Ellie said, still following Rogan. ‘I’ll sit in.’ ‘Of course. Whatever you want.’ Paul Hart had thinning brown hair, ruddy skin, and an extra twenty pounds on his large frame. He wore a light blue crewneck sweater over a collared shirt and navy blue dress slacks. His wife Miriam wore a long black jersey dress that could have been selected either for mourning or simply as a wrinkle-free travel outfit. She had chin-length light gray hair that had probably once been blond, and she seemed unconcerned with her red, puffy eyes or makeup-free face. They were probably just hitting fifty, married more than twenty years, and walked into interview room 3 holding hands. Even on the most difficult day of their lives together, the Harts carried themselves like good people. Rogan took care of the introductions and gestured for the couple to be seated next to each other. He took the chair on the other side of the table. Ellie and Eckels stood against the window of the interview room, creating the impression of more privacy. ‘Thank you for coming so quickly,’ Rogan said. ‘We weren’t expecting you until later tonight.’ ‘We made some calls on the way to the airport,’ Miriam said. ‘A friend is a friend of a friend of the CEO of Centennial Wireless. They had a private jet waiting for us at the Fort Wayne Airport.’ ‘The people close to us are doing everything they can.’ Paul gave his wife’s hand a squeeze. ‘We’re at least fortunate in that respect.’ Were Ellie in their position, she did not think she would be able to find anything to be thankful for. She was constantly amazed by the variation in human responses to misfortune. ‘It’s as if we had this entire network of people working the phones for us while we were coming to terms with all this on the plane,’ Miriam continued in businesslike fashion. ‘It turned out that Paul’s brother-in-law was fraternity brothers with someone in your mayor’s office. He made some calls, and now we’re supposed to speak this afternoon with some volunteers with the Polly Klaas Foundation – you know, just to help us navigate the system and figure out what we need to do.’ ‘They’re an excellent organization,’ Ellie said, wondering if her words sounded as hollow as they felt. ‘You just let us know how we can assist,’ Eckels said. ‘You can assist,’ Paul said firmly, ‘by finding the person who murdered our daughter.’ Ellie intervened before Eckels unwittingly offended the Harts further. ‘We’re doing everything we can on the investigative front. The crime scene unit and the medical examiner’s office have collected some physical evidence that might prove very important. We obtained detailed statements this morning from your daughter’s friends. They were extremely helpful. Thanks to Stefanie and Jordan, we have a thorough timeline of their activities yesterday and are following up on every lead.’ ‘Are the girls here?’ Paul asked. ‘They just left a few minutes ago,’ Rogan said. ‘They worked with a sketch artist for a couple of hours –’ ‘You have a suspect?’ Miriam interrupted, sitting up straighter. Rogan shook his head. ‘It’s too early to say. Just a man Chelsea was talking to at the club last night. But the sketch artist wants to work with the girls again tomorrow, so we had a victim’s advocate take them back to the hotel.’ ‘We’re going to need them to stick around in New York for the time being,’ Ellie said. ‘Once we have a suspect, it’s essential that we get a prompt identification.’ Miriam nodded. ‘I’ll call their parents and the university this afternoon and make sure they know it’s important that the girls stay here. We’ll be here, too. However long it takes. Those poor girls,’ Miriam said, her voice breaking. ‘I promised their parents I’d make sure they were holding up.’ ‘They’re strong girls,’ Rogan said. ‘They’re hanging in there.’ ‘I do think they’re putting some of the blame on themselves,’ Ellie added. ‘They shouldn’t. Do you know how many times I caught Chelsea breaking curfew, just to learn that Stefanie had been there trying to get her to come home?’ ‘Our daughter wasn’t perfect, but she was a remarkable girl,’ Paul said. That single sentence was enough to fully break Miriam’s composure. Her shoulders began to shake, and she choked back a sob. ‘She was unique and wonderful and remarkable in every way. But she did what she wanted, Paul. I was trying to say it wasn’t Stefanie or Jordan’s fault. They didn’t do this.’ ‘Shh.’ Paul placed an arm around his wife’s shoulder. ‘What do we need to do next?’ he asked quietly. ‘Unfortunately, I think you need to prepare yourselves for significant media attention. Reporters are going to call you for quotes, for photographs, for old yearbooks. Your daughter’s MySpace profile will have thousands of hits before the end of the day.’ ‘The Polly Klaas people mentioned that, too,’ Paul said, ‘right off the bat. They’re going to contact the company on our behalf to remove her profile.’ ‘Good,’ Ellie said. ‘They can help you juggle the media requests as well. You’re also free to refer anyone you want to the NYPD’s public information office.’ ‘What else?’ Paul asked. Rogan cleared his throat. ‘When you’re ready, we’re going to need you to make an official identification of your daughter’s body.’ Miriam let out another sob, but Paul nodded stoically. ‘We’re ready. I’ll do it,’ he said to his wife. ‘You won’t need to see.’ ‘I can take you to the medical examiner’s office,’ Eckels offered, ‘while Detectives Rogan and Hatcher continue the investigation.’ The Harts muttered their thanks as they rose from their seats. As Miriam Hart passed Ellie, she turned and looked at her directly with puffy, bloodshot, pleading eyes. ‘Chelsea wasn’t just a drunk girl at a club last night. She was my baby.’ ‘I know,’ Ellie said, returning the eye contact. ‘She loved Wuthering Heights and that bulldog of hers. She lit up a stage and could run like the wind. And she was good to her friends. She was the glue that held them together, and she could make them laugh through anything.’ A tear fell down Miriam’s cheek, and she mouthed a silent ‘Thank you.’ Part II (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) Dream Witness (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) Chapter Eleven (#uea692545-f844-5ba8-a6b5-d19f1cab5ecf) 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 was the name. Not SoHo. Not Tribeca. Not NoLIta. Nothing cutesy, crisp, or clean. This was the Meatpacking District, and, lest you forget it, the distinctly bloody odor emanating from the remaining butchers and beef wholesalers was there to remind you: this was a neighborhood with substance, history, and dirt beneath its blue-collar fingernails. Just ask the Appletini-sipping supermodel taking a load off her Manolo Blahniks on the stool next to yours. Ellie had called Pulse from the car on their way to the west side. There had been no answer at the club where Chelsea was last seen – just a recording over techno music with the club’s location and hours – but Rogan figured it was worth a pop-in before trying to track down a manager through business licenses and other paperwork. The entrance to the club was underwhelming, at least before sundown. No velvet rope. No bass thumping onto the street outside. No well-dressed revelers lined up in front, eager to be selected for admission. No stone-faced body builders clothed in black to pass judgment on who was worthy and who must remain waiting. Just a set of double wooden doors – tall, heavy, and closed, like the sealed entrance to a fortress. A frosted glass banner ran along the top of the threshold, the word Pulse etched discreetly across it. The trendiest establishments always had the least conspicuous signage. Some bars had no signs at all. One hot spot around the corner from here didn’t even have a name. If you were cool enough to be welcome, you’d know it was there, and you’d know where it was. As Ellie pulled open the heavy wooden door on the right, the first thing that struck her about the darkened club was its temperature. In the second week of March, it shouldn’t have been colder inside the building than out. ‘Geez. They’re taking the whole meatpacking concept a bit literally,’ she said. ‘Don’t you get out, Hatcher?’ ‘Not to places like this.’ Ellie wondered again about her partner’s off-duty lifestyle. She scanned the lofty space. The club was dark and windowless, but had enough accent lights here and there to provide a general sense of the place. Clean. White. Really white. Swaths of crisp cotton hung from the twenty-foot ceilings to the floor. Ellie’s usual haunts were decorated by dartboards, jukeboxes, and dusty black-and-white photographs of pregentrified New York. ‘A few hours from now, bodies will be crammed into this place like a full pack of cigarettes. And trust me, no one will be complaining that it’s cold.’ ‘Hey, numbnuts.’ A tall, muscular man wearing a fitted black T-shirt and dark blue jeans appeared behind the glass bar. ‘We’re closed.’ His announcement delivered, he continued on with his business of unpacking bottles of Grey Goose vodka from a cardboard box. Ellie looked at her partner with amusement. ‘Which of the numbnuts gets to break the news?’ Rogan flashed a bright white smile, pulled his shield from his waist, and held it beside his face. ‘You say you’re closed, but your door out front’s unlocked. Who’s the numbnut?’ The man behind the bar emptied his hands of the two bottles he was holding and brushed his palms off on his jeans pockets. ‘Sorry ’bout that. You guys look more like customers than cops.’ He stepped around the counter and met them halfway, next to an elevated runway extending across the dance floor. A trim of hot pink neon light ran along the runway edge. ‘I’m expecting a couple deliveries,’ he said, nodding toward the entrance. ‘But I’m the only one here right now.’ ‘Not a problem if you’re the person who can help us out,’ Rogan said. ‘And who exactly are you?’ ‘Oh, sorry.’ Two apologies already. That was good. Rogan was establishing his authority over a guy who was used to lording over the minions who felt blessed to enter this sanctuary. ‘Scott Bell. I’m the assistant club manager. Is there some kind of problem? We’ve been keeping our occupancy down since the last time you guys were out.’ ‘We’re not here about fire codes. We’re here because of her.’ Rogan removed a sheet of paper from his suit pocket and unfolded it. It was the photograph of Chelsea and her friends that had been taken with Jordan’s iPhone the previous night at the restaurant before dinner. Ellie had cropped it down to a close-up of Chelsea. They were more likely to find people who recognized her using that picture than one taken today. Bell the bartender took a two-second glance at the printout. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. We’ve got hundreds of girls just like her coming through here every night.’ ‘Well, this particular girl was here last night,’ Rogan said. ‘Late.’ ‘So were a lot of people.’ ‘Yeah, but my guess is, most of them got home safe and sound and are sleeping it off as we speak.’ ‘What’s the problem? She OD’d, and you want to blame it on my club? I don’t know how many times I’ve told you guys that we do everything we can to keep that shit out of here.’ ‘You really think two detectives are going to show up in the middle of the day about some drugs going in and out of a Manhattan nightclub? Why don’t we go down to Christopher Street and bust some of the flip-flop boys for having wide stances while we’re at it?’ ‘Hey, whatever floats your boat.’ ‘Take another look, Scott,’ Rogan said. As he tapped the paper in front of the bar manager another time, Ellie found herself looking at it as well. Now that the picture was cropped to focus only on Chelsea, something about it was bothering her. She scanned the photograph from top to bottom, left to right, but couldn’t place her finger on the problem. ‘She was here last night. She was hanging in one of the VIP rooms.’ Bell locked resentful eyes with Rogan until the detective dropped the bombshell. ‘And she was found strangled a couple hours later.’ Bell’s eyes dropped immediately to the printout. ‘Oh, fuck.’ ‘There we go. That’s the most authentic response you’ve given us since we got here. By tomorrow morning, the name of this club is going to be in every newspaper, next to a picture just like this one, while everyone who scans the headline is going to wonder whether this is a safe place to be. So if I were you, I’d drop the attitude and start asking how you can help us.’ Bell swallowed. ‘I – I –’ He ran the fingertips of both hands through his dark brown hair. ‘Fuck. I don’t know what I can do to help. I don’t remember her.’ ‘You’re sure?’ Ellie asked. He shook his head. ‘If you’re saying she was here, then she was here. But when you spend enough time in clubs, everyone looks the same.’ Ellie had of course never met Chelsea Hart, but she found herself replaying flashes of the conversations she’d had that morning with Chelsea’s friends. Chelseawould never leave us in limbo like this. She was alwaysthe one who’d meet other people for us to hang out with.Chelsea’s going to freak if she misses the deadline for herOthello paper; she wants to be an English major. Someonehas to remember seeing her – she’s a really good dancer. It seemed profoundly sad that Chelsea had spent her last couple of hours in a place where no one was special, where everyone looked the same. ‘Her friends said she was in a VIP room,’ Ellie said. ‘Who were the VIPs?’ ‘You’re kidding, right?’ ‘Hey, now, I thought we were done with the attitude,’ Rogan said. ‘Sorry. It’s just, I mean, we call them VIP rooms, and sometimes we get some actual celebs in here, but usually because they’re C-list and we’re paying them. Most nights, it’s just some dumb group of nobodies who called with enough notice and slapped down a fat enough deposit for prepaid liquor to create a guest list.’ ‘See, you’re more helpful than you think,’ Ellie said. ‘We’ll take a look at those guest lists.’ Bell’s face momentarily brightened before it fell again. ‘Shit. They’ll be gone by now.’ He made his way over to a stainless steel podium near the entrance and fished out a clipboard from a built-in shelf. He skimmed through the top few pages, then flipped to the back. ‘This one’s for tonight. We got rid of last night’s already.’ ‘It’s not in a computer?’ Ellie asked. ‘All in pencil. Too many last-minute changes to run back and forth to the office.’ ‘Garbage?’ ‘Gone,’ Bell said, shaking his head. ‘We’ve got to get the place clean right after closing so it doesn’t stink like all the spilled booze.’ ‘We’ll take credit card numbers instead,’ Ellie said. ‘Easy enough for us to get names from there.’ ‘What credit card numbers?’ ‘You said people have to leave a deposit for the VIP rooms? I assume that involves credit cards.’ ‘Yeah, right. Okay, yeah. I can get that for you. Definitely.’ It was clear from Bell’s eagerly nodding head that he was happy to have finally found a way to be useful. ‘A list of employees would be nice, too,’ she added. The nodding continued for a few rounds, but then slowed to a pensive halt. ‘Employees. From here?’ Bell asked, pointing to the ground in front of him. ‘Unless you know of some other club this girl went to before someone tossed her body by the East River.’ ‘But – but what does that have to do with –’ ‘Um, hello? Does the name Darryl Littlejohn ring a bell?’ A couple of years earlier, a student from Ellie’s alma mater, John Jay College, disappeared after having a final drink at a SoHo bar just before closing time. Her barely recognizable naked body was found the next day on a road outside Spring Creek Park in Brooklyn. It took police a week to conclude that the helpful bouncer who told them he’d seen the victim leave alone was in fact the same man who’d stuffed a sock in the girl’s mouth, wrapped her entire head with transparent packing tape, and then brutally raped and strangled her. When she saw the victim’s photograph in the newspaper, Ellie thought that she might have met the criminology graduate student during an alumni event at John Jay’s Women’s Center. ‘That’s my point,’ Bell said. ‘That guy had, like, five felony convictions.’ Seven, actually, Ellie thought. And he was on parole. His mere presence in that bar past nine o’clock at night would have been enough to violate him if his PO had known. ‘We don’t run that kind of club. I do background checks. We do drug testing. We have biannual employment reviews.’ Bell ticked off each of his good deeds on his fingers. ‘Scott, calm down.’ Rogan put his hand on Bell’s shoulder and gave it a small squeeze. It was one of the standard moves that Ellie rarely got to use. For Rogan, and about ninety percent of cops, a small touch like that was a sign of brotherhood, a soothing indication that the touch’s recipient was viewed as one of the good guys. From thirty-year-old Ellie, with her wavy blond hair and a body that men always seemed to notice no matter how modestly she dressed, that kind of contact was viewed – depending on the confidence of the recipient – as either provocative or emasculating. ‘When are you gonna clue in?’ Rogan continued. ‘We are not code enforcement. We’re not vice. We want to find out who murdered this sweet college girl who was visiting New York from Indiana. That’s all we’re trying to do. There’s no problem here.’ Rogan moved his hand across the gap between the two men’s chests. They were copacetic. ‘Yeah, all right. I got it on the computer in back. With the credit cards.’ ‘Good man, Scott.’ ‘I gotta call my boss, though, okay? The manager.’ ‘You wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t. But you’ll tell him we’re cool, right?’ ‘Yeah, no problem.’ ‘Do we need to worry about him back there alone?’ Ellie asked, watching Bell walk through an office door at the rear of the club. ‘I don’t get that feeling,’ Rogan said, helping himself to a spot behind the counter to check out the labels on the various liquor bottles. ‘Do you?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Just checking?’ ‘Yep.’ Ellie was grateful to have a few minutes away from Scott Bell so she could refocus her attention on the photograph of Chelsea Hart that had been bothering her. ‘Take a look again at this,’ she said, laying the now-familiar image before Rogan on the bar. ‘Notice anything significant?’ ‘No, but apparently I’m supposed to. What’s up?’ ‘Earrings. She was wearing earrings last night at dinner, but not this morning when we found her at the park.’ He squinted, mentally pulling up an image of the body he’d seen at the crime scene. ‘You’re sure?’ ‘Positive.’ He was silent for a few seconds, and Ellie assumed he was having the same thoughts that ran through her mind when she’d first made the observation. No pawnshop would buy what was obviously costume jewelry, so there was no point following that avenue. The earrings could have fallen out in a struggle. Or, more interestingly, they could have been removed as a souvenir. ‘Any ideas about how we use that information?’ Rogan asked. ‘Not yet.’ ‘Well, at least we know what to look for.’ ‘If only we knew where to look.’ Bell returned from the back office carrying a thin stack of paper just as Rogan’s cell phone rang. Rogan flipped open the phone, read the screen, and excused himself to the corner of the bar. Bell handed Ellie a two-page document, neatly stapled together in the upper left-hand corner. ‘This is a list of bills last night for parties with bottle service – amounts with form of payment. A couple of them paid cash, but there’s a bunch of credit cards there as well.’ Ellie gave the single-spaced document a quick scan and had to suppress a cough. The two parties who paid with cash had racked up bills of nearly a thousand dollars each. Most of the credit card charges went into the four digits. ‘Are these charges just for drinks?’ she asked. Bell folded his arms across his chest, his confidence returning for a subject matter that was familiar territory. ‘Depends on what you mean by ‘just drinks’. We don’t serve food, that’s for sure. But people pay big for bottle service.’ ‘That just means you pay for a bottle of liquor. Even if you use a triple markup, how much can that be?’ ‘We don’t look at it as a markup.’ His grin told a different story. ‘It’s not just a bottle. It’s bottle service. You get the VIP room. You get a private server assigned to your room to mix and pour the drinks. It’s the personal touch that people are paying for.’ ‘That,’ Rogan said, returning from his phone call, ‘and not having to wait in a five-man-deep crowd around the bar, just to get a drink.’ Ellie suddenly got the picture. In a world where a $15 martini bought you crummy service, the wealthy were willing to pay for something different. ‘So how much is, I don’t know, a bottle of Grey Goose, for example?’ ‘We’re at $350.’ Now she did allow herself a cough. ‘Bungalow 8’s at $400,’ Bell continued. ‘I hear a few places are about to go even higher.’ Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/alafair-burke/city-of-fear/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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