City of Fear (30 page)
Ellie stood on the porch for thirty seconds before Kittrie’s front door opened, a tiny gap at first, then another few inches, until she could see the terrified eyes of Dan Eckels peering out at her. His mouth was wrapped with silver duct tape. His hands were taped in front of him, and his legs were bound together at the ankles.
‘It’s okay, sir. Come on out.’
She pushed open the door slowly until she heard a voice from farther inside the house. ‘That’s far enough. I saw your SWAT bus.’
Eckels turned sideways to slip through the crack in the door. He looked into her eyes intensely and gave her a slight shake of his head. He was trying to tell her something. He was telling her not to go inside.
Is … this … a … trap
? She mouthed the words silently. Eckels responded with the same intense stare and a harder shake of his head.
‘This is a trade, remember. You get in here before he gets out.’
Ellie turned sideways as well and pressed herself past Eckels. As the two exchanged places, she saw him blink back tears.
‘Go,’ she whispered. He looked at her one more time before hopping down the porch steps. She saw Foreman running to meet Eckels on the front lawn before she heard the voice behind her again.
‘Shut that door.’
She closed the door, only to be slammed immediately against it. She could feel George Kittrie’s body pressed against hers, his hands groping beneath her jacket. The weight of Rogan’s Glock left the small of her back.
‘That was quite a show when you dropped your weapon in the yard, Detective. I’m not that stupid.’
He yanked off her coat and threw it to the floor. He stepped away from her and moved farther into the house. Ellie turned and took in the layout.
At the front of the house, the living room shades were drawn. The vertical blinds that covered a set of sliding doors off the dining area in the back were pulled shut. He had positioned a wood-framed dining chair in the entry to a small hallway that broke away from the living area. He was smart. The entry to the hallway gave him cover from any incoming bullets.
‘On the couch.’ He gestured toward a beige sofa against the living room wall as he took his own protected seat in the hall, placing the gun in his left hand on the floor beside him. She tried to keep her eyes on his, but they automatically leapt to the glint of the silver blade on the knife in his right hand.
On another day, in a different context, the image should have scared her. But instead Ellie felt emboldened. He had been holding a police lieutenant hostage. Now he had a new captive, exchanging one source of unpredictability for another. If he was at all comfortable with guns, she would be looking down the barrel of one – either his own or the one he’d just taken from her.
Her instincts had been right. Only one of Kittrie’s victim had been shot – Darrell Washington – and, as Ken Garcia had said, whoever killed Washington had been a lousy marksman. He also used the same weapon Washington had wielded to rob Jordan and Stefanie, then left that gun at the scene. Kittrie’s current location in the hallway ruled out immediate access to any place where another gun might be hidden.
She knew now what Eckels had been trying to tell her – Kittrie didn’t have a gun. Kittrie had apparently managed to restrain her lieutenant before Eckels had established that critical fact. She wasn’t going to let the same thing happen to her. She was a good, strong fighter. If the only advantage Kittrie had on her was a knife and Rogan’s unloaded gun, she might just walk out of here alive.
She took a seat on the sofa as instructed and saw for the first time a pair of orange-handled sewing shears on a glass end table. Kittrie must have noted the movement of her glance, because he said, ‘Unh-unh. Not yet. Later. I want to look at you here. Left hand into the cuffs.’
Only then did she notice a pair of handcuffs dangling from the same glass table where the scissors rested. One end was hooked through the table’s wrought iron base. The other hung open. Ellie slid across the sofa, crossing her left leg in front of her, and closed the cuffs around her left wrist.
‘So I would ask you to tell me about your father, but I know how you feel about men who’ve watched
Silence of the Lambs
too many times. I don’t want to be a cliché.’
He was reciting from her
Dateline
interview. Ellie stared at him as if he were a lizard on display behind glass.
‘Tell me about William Summer instead.’
‘What about him?’ she said.
‘Why are you so convinced you would have found him earlier?’
‘I found you, didn’t I?’
‘I was waiting to be found.’
‘So was William Summer,’ Ellie said. ‘It’s another thing you two have in common.’
‘Tell me more about that.’
‘You both have an ability to control the pace of your killings more than most profilers believe is common. You both stopped when something else in your lives brought you satisfaction, a feeling of accomplishment. You both resurfaced when your lives started to feel weak again – him because a newspaper article made him sound like an irrelevant relic, and you because there’s cancer metastasized in your brain.’
‘So would you say that I, like Summer, have an “insatiable ego”?’
‘I don’t purport to know you, Mr. Kittrie.’
‘Neither did Rachel Peck or Chelsea Hart. Go ahead and pick up those scissors.’
Ellie wiggled her restrained left arm.
‘Cute, Detective, but I’m sure you can manage.’
She raised the scissors with her right hand.
‘Your hair, Detective. Is it naturally blond?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought so. And is that the length you usually wear it?’
Ellie’s hair was well past her shoulders, longer than it had ever been since she became a cop five years ago. There had been no time for a haircut in the past two months. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I cut it this short a few months ago.’
For reasons she would never be able to explain, she took comfort in the small lie.
‘Please go ahead and cut the rest of it off for me now.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You saw Chelsea Hart, I believe. Go ahead. Not too quickly,’ he said, unbuttoning his pants. Ellie suppressed a gag reflex.
She tilted her head and held the scissors up to the lock of hair that fell forward, but could not force herself to bring the blades together.
‘Would you like to put the scissors down and find another way to do this, Detective?’
She clenched her jaw and clamped the scissors shut. Six inches of her hair fell to the floor. She reached forward to pick it up, but he stopped her.
‘Leave it wherever it falls. It looks good that way.’ He was beginning to slowly pleasure himself. Ellie desperately wanted to avert her gaze, but knew that would disrupt the choreography. She opened the shears around another section and snipped again. Then a third section, and a fourth. She tried to stop thinking of the movement of his hand against himself.
She picked up the pace of her cutting and willed herself to look at Kittrie’s pinched face, starting to color. She told herself she had to do this. She had to do this for five girls who had suffered far worse.
She saw the muscles in Kittrie’s body begin to tense and she knew she would have only seconds to respond. She cut away another two clumps, feeling stronger with each lock that fell to the floor.
When Kittrie lurched forward, she was ready. She dropped the scissors and reached for the top of the left ankle boot crossed in front of her. She unsnapped her Kahr K9 and pulled the trigger softly to disengage the striker block and cock the weapon.
Kittrie opened his eyes and spun from his chair, dropping the knife as he reached for the Glock on the floor. She continued to press against the trigger, locking her elbow and tightening her forearm muscles to absorb the recoil.
She heard the blast of the pistol as her arm jerked against her will and searing pain tore through the wound in the back of her hand. A magenta stain slowly blossomed across the left sleeve of Kittrie’s white shirt. She had clipped him in the shoulder.
Kittrie winced as he moved his left hand to support the Glock. Even through the pain of the gunshot wound, he managed a slight smile as he looked down at Ellie, handcuffed on the sofa, and pulled the trigger. Realizing his mistake, his smug expression changed to one of confusion, then anger. He threw the gun at her and lunged for the knife he’d discarded next to his chair.
Ellie fired again, this time a pair of quick shots, compensation for the lack of control that came with one-handed shooting. One bullet through the screen of Kittrie’s television, one in his left side. Kittrie barreled toward her, the handle of his knife clenched in his fist.
She threw her body to the floor and drop-rolled in the direction of the end table. Using the leverage of her cuffed wrist against the wrought iron, she pulled herself up to a forty-five-degree angle. She leveled the butt of the K9 on her left forearm for support, and popped off three rapid-fire rounds.
All three shots landed in center mass. Kittrie’s mouth formed a large O as he stumbled backward, then collapsed to the floor. Ellie allowed her own muscles to relax as the convulsions in his body subsided.
The sound of a thousand cars crashing at once broke the silence. A helmeted ESU officer emerged from the shattered sliding glass door just as Rogan burst through the front door at the head of a battering ram. They must have coordinated the simultaneous entries with the first shot fired. What had felt like an eternity to her had taken place in just seconds.
Ellie then saw the scene in the living room through their eyes. Kittrie dead, shot five times with his pants around his knees. Ellie handcuffed to a table, lying on the floor in a pile of her own hair. She looked at Rogan and began to laugh, hysterically and uncontrollably, until she found herself sobbing harder than she had in years.
‘No one told me it was prom night.’
John Shannon set his roast beef sandwich on his napkin and used the back of his hand to wipe a smear of mustard from the corner of his mouth. Given Rogan’s usual appearance, his black suit and gray silk tie would never have drawn Shannon’s attention. But Ellie’s wardrobe change in the locker room was apparently another story.
Thanks to their squad neighbor, all eyes in the room were on her. Shannon’s partner let out a wolf whistle. Someone else asked if she was already trying on outfits for this year’s Medal Day Ceremony, a reference to the broad speculation that she would be receiving the Police Combat Cross for her role in what the media were now calling the Manhattan Barber case. Apparently the press didn’t see the irony in retaining the sensationalist nickname originally conjured by George Kittrie for his own byline.
Ellie looked down at her black wool A-line dress and slingback pumps, and touched the fringe of her new, very short hairdo. The fact that this stood out as a special effort had her rethinking her everyday attire.
Dan Eckels emerged from his office and placed his hands on his hips. ‘Quiet down out here. So Hatcher cleans up all right. Leave the woman alone.’
She sucked in her cheeks and faked a model’s awkward pose, and a few more detectives broke into laughter. It had been four days since she killed George Kittrie, and she’d noticed the ongoing efforts to make her smile. It was too soon to know whether the new thaw in the ice was a sign that she had passed some kind of litmus test with the squad, or just a temporary warm front.
‘Great. See what happens when I try to stick up for you? You’re encouraging these assclowns.’
She looked at her lieutenant for some kind of confirmation of the rumor she’d heard the previous night at Plug Uglies. Apparently questions regarding the whereabouts of Eckels’s gun when he was abducted had led to some kind of investigation into his extracurricular activities. If the rumors were true, Eckels seemed surprisingly untroubled. Perhaps surviving his night with Kittrie had given him a new perspective on life. Or maybe the rumors were just rumors.
‘I believe the two of you have somewhere to be?’ Eckels asked pointedly.
‘Oh, they need to be somewhere all right,’ Shannon said. ‘“
Going to the chapel, and we’re gonna get
married
.”’
Ellie held her palms against her ears until Rogan handed her her coat. They could still hear the squad’s off-tune singing when they hit the staircase.
* * *
Rogan parked half a block away from their destination on Bleecker Street.
‘This was really generous of you, J. J.’
‘Stop thanking me.’
They made their way inside and were directed to a room off the main entrance hall. Powder blue velvet curtains hung from ceiling to floor. Mauve upholstered chairs were lined up neatly in four rows. About a third of the seats were already occupied.
Ellie recognized a bulky man in the front row. Detective Hank Dodge gave her a nod of acknowledgment, and she returned the gesture.
At the front of the room, a blowup of Rachel Peck’s author photo, the one that never had the chance to grace the back of a book jacket, rested on an easel next to a simple wreath of pastel roses and a closed casket.
Ellie had phoned Rachel’s father three days earlier, pleading with him to claim his daughter’s body so she would not be buried in a cardboard box on Hart Island, where prison inmates stacked the coffins five high. By the time Ellie hung up on the man, she’d called him several names she was pretty sure weren’t supposed to be directed at a man of God.
She would never have asked Rogan to pay for a funeral, but he had caught her side of the conversation. An hour after she hung up on the Reverend Elijah Peck, Rogan had already set a time and a place. All she had to do was notify Rachel’s friend Gina.
Ellie felt a lump in her throat when she saw a familiar face in the back of the room. Her brother had even worn a sports coat for the occasion.
‘Where’d you get this?’ she whispered, tugging at his sleeve.
‘Don’t ask, at least not without Miranda warnings.’
As they took three seats in the back row, Jess and Rogan muttered their hellos in the whispery tones that came automatically in these settings.
‘You are such a softie,’ she said, giving her brother’s shoulder a little squeeze.
‘It’s no big deal.’
She had told him that morning that she was worried no one would show up at the funeral home. As she looked around the room, she realized her concerns had been misplaced. Rachel may not have had a family, but she had been a woman with friends.
One of those friends took her place now at a lectern beside Rachel’s photograph. She introduced herself as Gina DaCosta. She told the guests that she didn’t know what she was supposed to say at her best friend’s funeral. The nice man who ran the home had suggested a few prayers that would be appropriate, but they all knew that Rachel would come back and haunt her ass for allowing any such thing. So instead she talked about Rachel’s generosity. Her talent. The night she’d given herself a concussion trying to leapfrog a parking meter on Jones Street. She invited others to share their memories as well. No sad talk allowed, she warned.
Ellie recognized the latecomer slipping quietly into the room. Finding a seat, he spotted her in the back and gave her a sad smile. She raised a hand for a quick wave. She had known he was the kind of man who would be here today.
As people took their turns at the front of the room, she clasped her hands in her lap, closed her eyes, and silently delivered her own testimonial:
I had three days
to save Rachel after I found Chelsea on Monday morning.
It wasn’t enough. I wasted thirty-six hours going through
the motions while I had three cold cases in my backpack
telling me something was wrong. Thirty-six hours would
have made the difference. I had three days, and I failed.
I second-guessed my own instincts. I wasn’t confident
enough. Next time, I won’t hesitate. Next time, I will
picture Rachel and Chelsea, and I’ll be better
.
When Ellie opened her eyes, she felt her guilt begin to wash away. She felt at peace. She felt like she belonged here, in this room, at that moment. She felt normal.
Tonight, after Jess left for work, and from the solitude of her living room, she would do one last thing before turning the page on the case. She would call Bill Harrington and thank him for phoning the tip line. She would thank him for listening to Robbie.
