City of Fear (27 page)

An hour later, she and Rogan had drafted a press release that passed muster with both Knight and the department’s Public Information Office, and had forwarded it to every precinct in Manhattan to hand-distribute to the city’s hot spots. Ellie was impressed that Donovan had stuck it out with them, even going so far as to take a stack of the announcements with him to post around his NoLIta neighborhood.

By the time they finally called it a night, it was eight o’clock. She hadn’t eaten anything since the Danish she’d bought from Manny that morning. She felt guilty thinking about food, but she couldn’t help it. As if pushing her over the edge, her stomach let out a little rumble in the courthouse elevator.

Donovan placed his hand flat on his stomach. ‘Was that me or you?’

‘Nice of you to try to take the blame, but that was all me.’

‘I could use something to eat myself. Are you guys up for a bite?’

Ellie looked to Rogan.

‘The man said take a break. I’m taking a break and going home for a serious sleep session. I’ll see you tomorrow.’ He walked away, leaving Ellie the privacy to accept or reject Donovan’s invitation on her own.

‘Food sounds good.’

‘Five Deaths, Ten Years,’ read the headline on the
Daily
Post
’s home page. The photograph accompanying the teaser was a shot of Rachel Peck. She looked more glamorous in the picture than the man had ever seen her – even more than the night he’d taken her off the streets of the Meatpacking District. His guess was that it was a publicity shot taken for a literary agent. From what he could tell, publishers cared about those kinds of things these days.

He clicked on the headline and read the full text of the article at the jump. All of the basics were covered: Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, Alice Butler, Chelsea Hart, and Rachel Peck. All wild. All drunk. All dead, snippets of their hair stolen as souvenirs.

The reporting was remarkably thorough, given that Rachel’s body had just been discovered that morning. It was quite a scoop for the paper. Posting the story on the Web site gave them credit for breaking the news first, but they’d sell a lot of papers in the morning with a more detailed version.

He moved from the sofa onto the floor, slid the ottoman away, and pulled up the wooden tiles, followed by the piece of particleboard. He removed five plastic bags – two new, three discolored with age. Lucy’s and Chelsea’s bags contained the most hair. Robbie’s and Rachel’s were less full. Alice’s held just a few snips. How tempted he had been to retrieve all of those beautiful locks she’d chopped off. He’d caught sight of her walking into the salon and had watched while the hairdresser clipped away. But he hadn’t dared to walk in, let alone attempt to pilfer the piles of hair on the salon floor.

Lucy, Robbie, Alice, Chelsea, and Rachel. Thanks to the
Daily Post
, he was no longer the only one to know that their stories belonged together.

Now just one last victim remained.

Chapter Forty-Three

Max directed the cab to the Flatiron district, and then led the way to Sala One Nine, a Spanish restaurant on Nineteenth Street.

‘I hope you like tapas,’ he said, opening the heavy wooden door to a red restaurant with exposed brick and stone, lit by small tea candles scattered throughout the room.

‘I love anything that involves getting to eat seven different kinds of food in a single sitting.’

The restaurant was already filled with hungry customers. Rather than cope with a forty-five minute wait, they accepted the host’s invitation to eat at the bar, where Max ordered a pitcher of sangria and some
queso
and
croquetas
to get them started.

This was their first chance to be alone since their coffee that wasn’t quite a coffee had ended the previous night. The transition from their official roles to what was presumably a date was not an easy one for either of them. Ellie found herself wanting to talk about the case, and apparently Max had questions of his own.

‘So, tell me if this is none of my business, but I picked up on a kind of secret language between you and Rogan today.’

‘Nothing secret. We’re still getting into the groove of being partners.’

‘From an outsider’s perspective, you seem to have found the rhythm pretty quickly. I could tell he was the one who was resistant to let Knight and me in, but the two of you seemed to work it out without even exchanging words.’

‘We exchanged words,’ Ellie said, flashing back to the scene in the car while they’d been waiting for Donovan. ‘You just weren’t there to hear them.’

‘I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been doing this a few years now, and you’re not like most of the cops I’ve met.’

‘Being a girl type person is still enough to stand out in the NYPD.’

‘It’s more than that. I don’t know. You were pre-law at some point, right? Do you ever regret not seeing it through?’

Ellie had come across this reaction before. Cops were supposed to be simple-minded, blue-collar traditionalists. She’d gone to college. She lived in Manhattan. Her last boyfriend was an investment banker. She even used big words on occasion.

When people said she didn’t
seem
like a cop, it often said more about their stereotypes of police than anything having to do with Ellie. The investment banker, for example, had continually asked her when she was going to ‘get over’ being a cop. Bill’s refusal to accept that she wasn’t too good for her job was one of the reasons she lived on her own now. She hoped she wasn’t going to have the same problem with Max.

‘When you grow up around here, people are doctors and lawyers and corporate executives. But my father was a cop, and my mother’s a bookkeeper. The neighbor to our left was a plumber. The one on the right worked graveyards at Boeing. Being from Wichita, it never dawned on me that I would need to apologize to anyone for being a cop.’

Donovan set his sangria down and braced his palms against the bar. ‘Okay, let’s clear up a couple of things. One, I grew up around here, but it was in Kew Gardens, where my father’s still a shoe salesman, and my mother was a dental hygienist. When I told my dad I was turning down a six-digit salary so I could be a prosecutor, he acted more like I was on the other side of an indictment, begging for bail money. So as far as I’m concerned, no one who loves their job ever has to apologize to anyone.’

‘I’m so sorry. I just get so used to –’

‘No explanation necessary. I should have been more clear about what I meant.’

‘You mean you
weren’t
challenging me to an I-grew-up-poorer-than-you-did contest?’ Ellie could still feel the red in her cheeks.

‘You’re not like most of the cops I know because you don’t seem to have the same kind of us-versus-them mentality.’

‘Ah, well, that’s an easy one,’ she said, relieved by the shift in the conversation. ‘I don’t see the point in any of that. All I care about is getting the work done.’

‘And when you were pre-law, did you ever think about being a prosecutor?’

‘I like being a cop. I like the directness of it. You’re there from the very beginning. You get to talk firsthand to witnesses and victims and suspects. Your instincts shape the investigation from day one. If I’m going to do law enforcement, I want to do it as a cop. When I thought about being a lawyer, I was in it so I wouldn’t have to deal with the dark, dreary, and depressing shit my father thought about day in and day out. I was in it for the money.’

‘So you’re saying I’ve got the worst of both worlds.’

‘No offense.’

The truth was, Ellie had wondered a few times in the last two days whether perhaps she was better suited to the district attorney’s office. Where Eckels saw her youth and enthusiasm as hurdles to be surmounted, Knight had seen a dream witness. Dan Eckels and people like him were always going to run police departments, and she would always be butting heads with them. But with Simon Knight, it had seemed like it was all about cutting through the bullshit and getting the work done. She could nail down murder cases for trial without being front and center, on the news, and in books written by ex-boyfriends.

But tonight, when the case against Jake Myers had collapsed, Knight had shown his true colors. He did what he needed to cover his ass with the police commissioner and the mayor’s office. He was talking about a possible task force. Even FBI involvement.

And she had responded just as Rogan had. Possessive. Territorial. Knight had shown his true colors, but so had she. And hers were bluer than she liked to acknowledge.

Her true colors also made her the kind of cop who couldn’t stop talking about work.

‘So do you think Myers was right?’ she asked.

‘To hire some guy at death’s door to take the rap for him? Uh, no, I’m pretty sure in any version of morality, that wouldn’t count as right.’

‘No, I mean about us having tunnel vision. We all wanted it to be him. It gave us an arrest. A suspect. A trial. The mayor’s office was happy.’

‘I’ve known you three days, and I can already tell you’re a good cop. If he’d told you the truth, you would have fought like hell against everyone to make sure we did the right thing.’

‘Maybe,’ she said, popping another
croqueta
in her mouth. ‘Maybe if he’d come clean Monday night. If he’d told the truth when we first questioned him at Pulse. But once he lied about everything –’

‘No jury would’ve believed him,’ Donovan said, ‘that’s for sure.’

‘I don’t think I would have either.’

They had just ordered another four little plates to share when the television above the bar cut from a break in the Knicks game to a teaser for the night’s local news.

‘
Tonight at eleven
.’ At the top of the telecast was a scaffolding collapse on the Upper West Side. A window washer had plummeted thirty-six floors and survived.

Plus, a local newspaper drops an Internet bombshell. Is a serial killer targeting Manhattan’selite nightclubs? And why isn’t the NYPD tellingyou about this killer and his shocking MO?The paper promises more details tomorrowmorning, but we’ll have the scoop for you tonight,at eleven.

The screen changed to an AT&T ad.

‘Jesus,’ Max said. ‘Those kinds of stories piss me off to no end.’

‘Did you notice how they phrased it? “A local newspaper drops a bombshell.” That way the story is about the story.’

‘That’s what irritates me. One of the tabloid newspapers prints some wild speculation, and then the rest of the bottom feeders pile on, repeating the same crap without having to do any kind of verification like a real journalist.’

‘Ah, except this time, the
same crap
happens to have a wee bit of truth to it,’ she said, leaning in so others at the bar would not overhear.

‘Well, shit.
They
don’t know that, and they don’t really care. They scare people and shock them to get better ratings. And if they screw up an investigation, or put people at risk, or make it harder for us to get a conviction – they don’t care about any of that either. Sorry, I get a little riled up.’

‘Don’t apologize,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to talk to someone who gets it. My ex-boyfriend – sorry, I know exes are taboo first-date talk, but this was forever ago – he would always ask me why I had to dwell on such depressing topics.’

Like most people, Bill got through each day by refusing to think about the horrible things that people did to each other on a regular basis. With Peter, she had been grateful that he at least shared her inability to blissfully ignore the realities of the world. But they would never see those realities through the same lens. Peter got worked up over crime because a body found in the right location, and abused in just the right way, could make for great copy. His commitment to his book was just a sign that he would never really get her.

‘Well, do you know how many women I’ve gotten even semi-serious with before they start asking me when I’m going to cash in on my law degree?’

‘Did you go straight from law school to the DA’s office?’

‘Nah. I did the big-firm thing for a couple of years to pay down my loans, but I can’t imagine ever going back. Eighty hours a week, all for some multimillion-dollar commercial lawsuit and squabbling over who would get the biggest bonus or who’d make partner first. Once you’ve seen the kind of cases I’ve worked on, you just don’t look at things the same way. What everyone else considers the real world seems like a complete fantasyland. It’s like you get a new definition of normal. Do you know what I mean, or should I stop babbling?’

‘Please, you’re not babbling, and I know exactly what you mean.’

Donovan, like her, had seen the aftermath of the crimes of people who were inhabited by pure, untarnished evil – men who inflicted sexual torture, who casually took the lives of others, who could bury a child alive and then make themselves a bologna sandwich.

Ellie had spent her entire adult life chasing the normalcy that came to others as naturally and effortlessly as breathing. Since the day her father’s body was found, Ellie had been convinced that her darkest thoughts would someday be put to rest, once she finally uncovered the true circumstances surrounding his death. But she had returned from Kansas with a new acceptance of the possibility that serenity would never be a part of her makeup. She would always wake up with nightmares. She would never learn to turn off the job.

A new definition of normal
. Maybe that was what she needed to get past the feeling that she was never going to be like other people.

The vibration of her cell phone startled her. It was Peter, yet again. She felt the phone buzz in her hand seconds later, indicating a new message.

She did her best to ignore it. She was having a delicious dinner with a smart, sweet, over-the-top-good-looking guy who might actually share her same ridiculous sickness. She had every reason to ignore her stupid phone. She made it through four more bites of chorizo before excusing herself to the ladies’ room.

‘
Hey. It’s me. I swear, I’m not a fucking stalker. Well, okay,
maybe a little bit of a fucking stalker, since I am calling
from outside your apartment
.’

Ellie shook her head. ‘
I shouldn’t have come, I know,
but I hate the idea of you hating me. I don’t want things
to end this way
.’ Jess had been right about Peter. The ending itself wasn’t the problem for him. He just couldn’t stand the idea of being the bad guy.

‘
So I’m sitting on the stoop of your building, being
semi-stalkerish, and I noticed a car circle around the block
a few times, then park out front. By the time the driver
got out, I had gone into the coffee shop to warm up.
Anyway, it was your lieutenant. I couldn’t tell if he rang
up to your apartment or not, and I just saw him drive
away, but I thought I’d let you know. Either you’re having
a secret affair with your nemesis, or it’s something
important. And, no, I won’t try to figure out what it is
so I can write about it
.’

She found herself smiling sadly.

‘
Sorry for rambling. I won’t bother you anymore. The
ball’s in your court. Bye, Ellie
.’

Ellie knew she’d eventually go to Peter’s apartment to end things with him on a better note, but at that moment all she could think about was the image of Dan Eckels outside her building.

No DNA. Clean crime scenes. A knowledge of city crime patterns. The stakeout abilities to nail down her running routine.

Simon Knight had asked her earlier in the day where they might begin looking for a killer among forty thousand officers in the NYPD. One of them had just jumped to the top of the list.