All Day and a Night (3 page)

Any New Yorker who hadn’t been in a recent coma had seen that same photograph of the slain psychotherapist. It seemed to be the favorite of the local journalists who had been captivated by the case. Rogan undoubtedly knew the same basic facts that Ellie had gathered from the media coverage, but that didn’t stop Max from covering the fundamentals. “Park Slope shrink. Two kids. Recently separated. Six weeks ago, she didn’t come home from a counseling appointment in time to meet the ex-husband. No answer on her cell. No pickup at work. The ex finally made the six-block walk from their brownstone to check on her, and found her body in her office. Two shots. Signs of a struggle, but no forced entry.”

Like any high-profile case, Helen Brunswick’s had brought out the armchair detectives who scoured the Web for information about the victim, her husband, their kids, and all potential enemies. In the process of a divorce, initiated by the husband. Not quite enough money to keep up the standard of living the couple had once shared. Last Ellie had heard, the doctor-husband had been forced to hire security to escort the kids between his Upper East Side apartment and their Brooklyn private school undisturbed.

“Two responses,” Rogan said. “One, everyone knows the husband did it. Two, last time I checked, any place six blocks from a Park Slope brownstone can’t be in Manhattan South, which means this has nothing to do with us.”

Rogan was twisting the cap on his Montblanc pen, always a sign that he was growing impatient with a conversation and didn’t care if people noticed. Ellie was about to encourage Max to get to the point, but remembered all the times she’d insisted that he not treat her like a girlfriend at work. She owed it to him to hold up her end of that bargain. If this were any other ADA, she’d give him a few more seconds before piling on.

“I mentioned our Conviction Integrity Unit. Our job is to look at all innocence claims that come in on any case our office prosecuted. Eighteen years ago, this man, Anthony Amaro, pled guilty to the murder of a prostitute named Deborah Garner.” He handed them another photograph, this one a mug shot. The displayed date of birth put Amaro at thirty-one years old at the time. He had a round, flat face, and the line of his black, slicked-back hair was already beginning to recede. He appeared to stare straight through the camera. “At the time, it was believed that whoever killed Deborah Garner also killed five other women in upstate New York—all shot, all with ties to the sex trade. Their bodies all carried the same signature, specific enough to connect the cases together: broken limbs. Always after death.”

“Sounds like the kind of person who might read about a big case like Brunswick and ask a random buddy to send an anonymous letter claiming a connection,” Rogan said. “Oh my goodness, he must be innocent.”

“I promise, it’s more than that. Usually, in the Conviction Integrity Unit, a cursory glance makes it clear there’s no issue. We know everyone in prison claims he’s innocent. This one? The lawyers are pretty torn.”

It dawned on Ellie that Max would not describe his colleagues as “torn” without considerable deliberation. “When did your office get the letter?”

“One month ago, tomorrow. We’ve been tight-lipped on it—with everybody.”

Moving in together had been a bigger leap for Ellie than for Max. Besides the lingering question of whether marriage and children were in their future, they had the added complication of entangled jobs. She and Max had promised each other to be utterly scrupulous not to blur the lines between the professional and the personal. In her position as a detective, she had yet to encounter a situation where she couldn’t talk about her work with her ADA roommate. Apparently, the reverse wasn’t true.

“And it’s not just the letter that concerns us. As much media attention as the Brunswick murder has gotten, we managed to hold back some details.”

“The signature,” Ellie said. “Brunswick’s limbs were broken?”

Max nodded. “Both arms. And not in a struggle. Postmortem, just like Amaro’s victims. When Amaro was prosecuted, it was a fetish unobserved—or at least unrecorded—in any prior homicides. And now we’ve got the same postmortem injuries inflicted on Helen Brunswick, and we’ve got someone out there writing letters about information that was never made public. We’re going to need follow-up. The only question is: Who’s going to do it?”

Ellie was intrigued, but Rogan, apparently, did not need time to mull over a response. “Brunswick’s not our case,” he said. “Neither was Deborah Garner.”

“Not originally,” Max acknowledged. “But what we want is a ‘fresh-look team.’ These innocence claims are—well, they’re a little schizophrenic. Obviously, we want to make sure we got it right, but there’s this theory that we develop a form of tunnel vision. Psychologically, we want the people who have been arrested, especially the ones who have already been convicted, to be guilty. We
need
them to be guilty, so we can continue to believe that the system doesn’t make serious mistakes. A fresh look means bringing in new people, unassociated with the original case, to look for evidence of innocence. A fresh look is supposed to be neutral. I’m the most experienced ADA in the office with no personal connection to the original detectives and prosecutors on the Deborah Garner case, but we need an investigative component, too.”

Ellie had never seen Rogan look so annoyed with an ADA, and, unless she was mistaken, his irritation didn’t stop with Max. She couldn’t blame him for wanting to avoid the assignment. Revisiting Amaro’s conviction meant second-guessing the work of the people who put him behind bars.

“Sorry,” Rogan said, “but we need to clear cases on the board.” His eyes were fixed on the squad’s white board. Now that they had Laura Bendel’s confession, they could change her husband’s name from red to black ink.

Max cleared his throat, and Ellie knew immediately she wasn’t going to like whatever came out next. Maybe she had her own form of tunnel vision, because she wanted to believe there was a good reason for Max to pull them into this.

Rogan’s gaze moved suddenly from the white board to the far corner of the squad room. Their lieutenant, Robin Tucker, was leaning halfway out her office door. “Why are you two still here?”

“Sorry, Lou,” Ellie said. “ADA Donovan was just running something past us.”

“No, duh. Who do you think has to approve something like that? And I got a Brooklyn South captain on the phone wondering why his guys haven’t heard from you on Helen Brunswick. Increase the words per minute, all right? From what I hear, you’ve got a lot of work on your hands.”

C
arrie Blank tucked her skirt beneath her crossed legs once again, hoping it wasn’t too short for a job interview.

“Ms. Moreland will be with you shortly,” the receptionist assured her.

Oh no. Had the shift in her chair registered as a sign of impatience? Carrie didn’t want the receptionist to tell Linda Moreland that the potential new hire was pushy. “Oh, no problem at all. I’m happy to wait.”

Crap. Had that sounded sarcastic? Or too sycophantic?

She felt dampness building inside her silk blouse. Why was she so nervous? She knew precisely why: because last week her former-professor-turned-famous-criminal-defense-lawyer Linda Moreland had phoned her out of the blue, asking if she had any interest in representing the man who was as near to the boogeyman as Carrie could imagine.

C
arrie remembered the first time she heard about a serial killer in their city.

An eighth-grader named Doug Bronson—the kids called him Dougie-Bro—had been absent for more than a week. Even at Bailey Middle, a week was enough time for school administrators to start asking questions. Pretty soon, Mrs. Jenson was pulling guidance-counselor duty, visiting each class to explain that their fellow student was moving to Baltimore to live with an aunt.

Carrie could see the frustration in Mrs. Jenson’s face as she reported, without elaboration, that Dougie had “lost his mother.” The school board, she announced, had decided that it would be “inappropriate” for students to repeat any rumors they might hear beyond the fact that Dougie’s only parent had died. Instead, students were “encouraged” to report any such “gossip” to the principal’s office. Mrs. Jenson didn’t bother suppressing a closing eye roll—because, right, students at Bailey were known for reporting their peers to the principal.

Predictably, the announcement Mrs. Jenson had been forced to make immediately led to desperate and frenzied discussion of the
real
story about Dougie’s departure. His mother, they soon heard, had been murdered. And not just her. There were other victims, but the police were keeping the case quiet—supposedly so the killer wouldn’t know they had made the connection, but more likely, in the eyes of kids from Red View, the Keystone Kops didn’t want everyone to see they were a helpless joke.

In an escalating war for the latest updates, it was Monique Davidson who broke the juiciest tidbit. Carrie remembered how Monique, with her giant hoop earrings, ballcap turned backward, had huddled anyone she could gather on the school’s front steps. The bell was about to ring, but no one cared. The coy teases of “You won’t believe this” and “No wonder Dougie left town,” delivered between pops of chewing gum, were too delicious to resist.

Dougie’s momma was a ho
. The reason the
po-po
didn’t care was because the victims were all prostitutes.

Not to be one-upped by Monique, other kids came forward each day with new information, each report more gory and lurid than the last. Dougie didn’t even know who his daddy was; his mom had gotten knocked up by a john. Dougie had an uncle in town, but the state wouldn’t let Dougie stay with him, because he was the one who was pimping out his own sister.

Then, by the ninth grade, there were rumors about the other victims—three, then five, then six, then ten, then forty. The police thought the perpetrator might be a cop. Or maybe it was a teacher. Some of the victims had their eyes plucked out. Or their stomachs cut open. Or their genitals mutilated. Why hadn’t the adults realized what would happen when they instructed children not to talk about a killer in their midst?

Carrie and Melanie had formed a pact to stay together on the walk to and from school, enlisting Bill for additional protection whenever possible. They ducked into storefronts at every sighting of a container van, which struck them as the perfect vehicle for abduction and torture.

The two girls were still virgins, but they also knew they were among a dwindling minority—and Melanie had let first one boyfriend, and then another, get to third base. (In fact, Carrie suspected a few stolen steps past that, though remaining technically short of home plate.) At a time when they were just starting to think about their sexuality, the idea of women being killed for selling it made their bodies seem dangerous. And intriguing.

When Carrie’s mother finally overheard the girls whispering after school about the latest link in the gossip chain—a new victim—she decided she needed to intervene. She told them that the victims were
at risk
. They had a
perilous
lifestyle. They weren’t
good girls
—like
them
. And because Carrie’s mother was Carrie’s mother, she could not resist admonishing them to let this be one more reminder of the importance of working hard in school and going to college.

But as much as Rosemary Blank tried to maintain the protective bubble she had inflated around her daughter, Carrie had always known that the realities of their life put her one tiny little pin-pop of a bubble away from the hardships of Red View. The walk between their house and the Burlingame Mall inevitably took her to Sandy Avenue, where sometimes the men slowing on street corners mistook two fourteen-year-old girls for fresh meat on the block. Carrie herself had been to Doug Bronson’s house more than once in the sixth grade. His mom hadn’t
seemed
like a prostitute. And if rumors could be trusted, Trina Martin—who used to stick up for Carrie when the older middle schoolers made fun of her honor-student ways—had started giving bj’s in the high school parking lot for money, defending the practice because it “wasn’t really sex.”

And then there was Carrie’s own sister, Donna. Or “
half
sister,” as her mother consistently corrected. (And that was when she was feeling generous. “That girl,” “bad seed,” and “your father’s little accident” were some of the other terms that were known to flow effortlessly from her tongue—and that was in English. Carrie could only imagine the meaning of the Chinese words her mother often mumbled under her breath when Donna was around.) Donna—ten years Carrie’s elder and a high school dropout—was another subject her mother tried to wall off from the Blank home. But for the first sixteen years of her life, Carrie had overheard snippets of her parents’ fights about her half sister:
drinking
, a friend who was a
bad influence
, a phone call from police, posting bail,
drugs
. These were words Carrie had been raised to fear.

And now she had words about dead women to add to the mix.

As much as Carrie’s mother had tried to convince her the killings had nothing to do with them, all Carrie knew was that she was becoming a woman in a place where someone was killing women. Without any real information to make her feel safe, Carrie’s imagination—sometimes boundless—filled in the blanks. Then, her senior year of high school, the danger wasn’t only in her imagination.

Donna was dead.

H
er thoughts were interrupted by the
click-click
sound of four-inch heels on the hardwood floor of the small waiting area. She looked up to see a pair of well-moisturized, muscular legs beneath a skirt three inches shorter than hers. It was her former professor, Linda Moreland. Carrie was surprised that such a busy lawyer would even remember her, but the woman had called Carrie three times in the last week to discuss the possibility of joining her law practice. When Linda initially explained the nature of the case Carrie would be working on, Carrie nearly hung up. But proving how effective a lawyer she was, Linda had not only persuaded Carrie to accept the appointment but had Carrie convinced that the assignment was inevitable.