All Day and a Night (12 page)

1. Nicole Henning – 2/89 – prost.

2. Jennifer Bronson – 4/91 – “lingerie model”

3. Leticia Thomas – 1/93 – prost.

4. Donna Blank – 1/95 – stripper

5. Stacy Myer – 4/95 – stripper, prost.

6. Deborah Garner – 10/95 – NYC, prost.

Rogan gave the list a quick glance. “He must have come to the city because he knew that UPD was finally looking for him.”

“Bingo. UPD stepped up the visibility of their investigation once Victims 4 and 5 were found. They had the social-service providers plugged in, too, handing out fliers to the working girls, warning them about a killer. The acceleration continued. Three kills in one year.”

“Or he was keeping that pace the whole time,” Rogan offered, “and the bodies haven’t been found. There’s no guarantee this is a complete list.”

There was so much they didn’t know.

Rogan tapped his pen against her notepad. “There’s no way Helen Brunswick belongs on this list.”

“Two of the Utica victims had prostitution convictions. The county had a counseling and education program that was mandatory with vice-related sentences. From what I can tell, the program was run at the time by Cedar Ridge Behavioral and Psychiatric Care.”

It was one of the hospitals where Helen Brunswick had interned.

“Major stretch. It’s only two of the six women, and even if Brunswick had contact with them, how does that make her a target twenty years later, and what does it have to do with Anthony Amaro?”

“You’re calling him Amaro again, huh?” she said with a smile.

“That’s the dude’s name, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but it’s not the name you’ve been using. See those chicken marks at the bottom of the page there? Four times. I counted.”

“You count everything, Rainman, and you don’t usually need notes.”

“I tallied them up to prove I was right. You said ‘the guy’ four times.
The guy went back to the same dumping ground. Like the guy’s not going to notice a police patrol. The guy knew UPD was on to him. The guy accelerated
. That’s four times you referred to the killer without calling him Amaro.”

“So what about it?”

“Admit it, Rogan. You’ve got your doubts.”

“The guy. The bad guy. The perp. The mutt. The dirtbag.
Amaro
by name. You’re making too much of a word.”

“Maybe.” She figured it was best not to press the point.

“Speaking of Amaro, I reached out to Buck Majors. I’m waiting for a call back.”

Ellie assumed the detective who put Amaro behind bars would want to help keep him there. “Talk about creative names. Buck Majors. Boom-chicka-pow-wow.”

“The idea of you and porn together is messing me up. Stop it.”

“Hey, does Donna Blank’s name seem familiar to you? From before just now, I mean.”

“I don’t know. Maybe Donovan mentioned it?”

“But it seems like we just saw it in another context, like I had a flash of letters on a page. And maybe just the last name.”

She was shuffling through the documents scattered across her desk when Rogan reached over and plucked out the demand for documents they’d received from Amaro’s attorney. “Right there,” he said. “Linda Moreland’s associate is Caroline Blank. You really hang on to every detail, don’t you?”

Ellie glanced at the signature and then grabbed for the initial missing-persons report for Donna Blank. Listed as family: Marcia Haring, the mother who called police; Henry Blank, the father; Rosemary Blank, stepmother; Carrie Blank, half sister. “Take a look,” she said, pointing at the half sister’s name. “Carrie could be short for Caroline.”

“One way to find out.” Rogan typed “Caroline Blank attorney” into Google and searched for images. He tilted the screen toward Ellie, while she laid a photograph of Donna Blank in front of it.

“The attorney’s Asian,” he said. “The vic’s a white girl. But the attorney looks like she could be mixed, which makes sense if they’re half sisters.”

“And their noses and mouths are similar,” Ellie noted. Both had long, slender noses and heart-shaped lips.

“What kind of lawyer would defend her sister’s murderer?”

“Someone who really thought he was innocent,” she said. “Rogan, what if this case is for real?”

“It’s not, all right? Amaro’s guilty. Helen Brunswick’s husband killed her. And once we prove it, we can go back to catching cases off the board.”

Her phone buzzed at her waist. It was Max.

“Hey there.”

“Well,” he said, “the moment we’ve been waiting for is here.”

“The rapture? Because I don’t think the end-times are going to work out well for us.”

“The DNA reanalysis is done. And it’s not good: we’ve got someone else’s genetic marker from one of the bodies.”

“We knew it was a risk. The victims were all working girls.”

“Except it’s not seminal fluid. It’s skin, and it’s beneath the fingernails of one of the Utica victims.”

“Which one?”

“Donna Blank.”

C
arrie dropped the two boxes with a thud on the landing at the top of the stairs. She was surprised at the weight of the files she’d retrieved from Amaro’s original attorney. She’d hauled them up four floors, and in four-inch heels no less. She caught her breath as she unlocked her front door and pushed the box through the entrance with her foot.

The other associates at Russ Waterston all lived in luxury rentals. Over drinks, they’d compare notes about doormen and various amenities: rooftop pools, in-house spas, movie-theater rooms. Not Carrie. With more than a hundred thousand dollars in student loans, this walk-up studio in Hell’s Kitchen suited her just fine.

She opened the cardboard box and began spreading its contents onto her apartment floor. Every notebook and file folder was labeled in neat, handwritten block letters: lab reports, witness interviews, penalty phase. Harry McConnell was organized. Hopefully it would be worth Carrie’s awkward interaction with his daughter to get her hands on these documents.

She knew she should attack the materials in a disciplined, logical order. She also knew that it would make sense to look first at the files relating to the New York City victim, Deborah Garner. Her murder was the basis for Amaro’s conviction. Those materials would be the most thorough.

But she was realizing now that Melanie’s concerns may have been legitimate. When it came to Anthony Amaro, she wasn’t just any attorney.

She went straight to the file labeled “Donna Blank: Victim Number Four.”

She flipped past several of the initial pages, summaries of random phone calls that had come in over the years. She saw photographs she’d never seen before—images of Donna’s partially decomposed body. That must have been the reason why there hadn’t been a funeral, just a cremation with a small memorial service at Christ the King.

Donna’s mother, Marcia, had filed the missing-person report. She had waited four days to call police. End of first paragraph: “Mother volunteers that daughter has history of drug abuse and worked as a dancer at Club Rouge. When pressed by this officer, mother admitted that it was ‘possible’ daughter was engaged in ‘prostitution activity.’”

Carrie knew from the placement of these facts at the beginning of the short report that the officer did not take Marcia’s concerns seriously. Donna was just a druggie hooker who had run off for a few days to work, score, or both. Reading the report, Carrie wanted to leap back in time, into Marcia’s living room, to tell that officer about the girl Carrie used to idolize. She wanted that officer to know that Donna had walked her to and from school for an entire semester in the sixth grade when she learned that kids were making fun of her and trying to steal her books for “acting smart.”

When Carrie reached the final, surprising sentence of the police report, she flipped through the rest of the documents in search of a subsequent correction. Nothing. She reread the sentence, ever so slowly, and knew for certain that it was wrong.

T
here was a time when Donna tried to take care of Carrie, like a big sister should. But by the time Donna died, their roles were reversed. It had been Carrie’s idea to try to help. Carrie’s mother was never supposed to know the money was gone. Donna would go to rehab, kick her habit, and then get a real job. With regular income and no drug habit, she’d pay Carrie back long before she actually needed the money for college tuition. Carrie remembered how grown-up she had felt withdrawing the money from the bank—eight thousand dollars, nearly everything in her college account. The teller smiled as Carrie beamed, probably assuming that Carrie was buying her first car.

Carrie knew something was wrong when she went to visit Donna at Cedar Ridge. The nice lady at the front desk checked the computer and reported they had no patients named Donna Blank. Carrie asked her to try Donna Haring, wondering if Donna had used her mother’s last name to conceal her identity. After all, the place was filled with people with all kinds of mental illnesses and problems far worse than Donna’s. The receptionist shook her head, trying to mask her pity. It was clear to Carrie this wasn’t the first time the woman had to disappoint a family member with that same reply.

No rehab. No money. Just lies.

The next time Carrie saw Donna, two weeks later, she was strung out on Sandy Avenue. She looked through Carrie like a stranger.

Carrie’s mother found out, of course. Rosemary Blank found out everything. Carrie was supposed to be in her room, studying, but she could hear the phone calls and the arguments. Mom was threatening to press charges if Donna ever set foot in her house or contacted Carrie again.

Carrie only saw her sister one time after that blank-faced stare on the street. At first, she didn’t hear the knock on the door. She was in her bedroom, taking a study break with her beloved TLC tape when she heard her mother yelling. Assuming it was a complaint about the volume, Carrie turned the stereo down, only to hear banging at the front door. Her mother’s voice, telling someone, “Go away. You know you’re not welcome here.”

“Please, Rosemary. I didn’t mean it—not at first. But I got to Cedar Ridge, and I freaked out. I messed up. I need Carrie to know I’m sorry. Please let me talk to her. Pleeeeeeeeaaaase!”

She watched her mother begin to step away from the door, then leap forward again when the pounding got harder. “You can’t do this!” Donna yelled. It sounded like Donna was kicking the door now. “I have a plan. I promise. I know a way to help make sure Carrie has what she needs—”

At that, Carrie’s mother unlatched the bolts, yanked the door open, and planted herself in the entry like a professional linebacker. Carrie had never seen her mother so resolved. “
I
am the one who knows what Carrie needs.” The only sign that she was the least bit frazzled was the strength of her Chinese accent. “
I
am the one who has gotten her to where she is, and where she will go. And the only mistake I ever made with my daughter was allowing you and your mother to have any part of her life. You’re a waste of human life. You are nothing. If you had any decency, you would see the shared DNA in a girl as wonderful as my daughter and realize just how pathetic you are.”

“I know. I do. And that’s why I have a plan. Please, I’m begging you—”

Carrie knew better than to step from her bedroom.

“As far as Carrie and I are concerned, you no longer exist. Come here again, Donna, and I
will
have you arrested. Your father agrees. We have a friend on the police force. We will press charges, and he will put you in jail.”

“Right, because you and your friends—the people
you
approve of—are so much better than the rest of the world.”

Carrie flinched as Donna tried to push her way through the entrance. Rosemary slammed it shut, secured the bolt, and pressed her back against the door. “Leave now, or I’m calling 9-1-1,” she yelled.

“I’m going to fix this, Rosemary, whether you accept it or not.”

In the silence, Carrie braced herself for another assault on the door, but there was none. The tension in her mother’s small body released, and the composure returned to her face. When she heard the sounds of her mother tinkering in the kitchen, she turned up the volume on her tape player a notch, resolving to find Donna later, when her mother wasn’t around.

But she never did find her. No one did, not for another three months, when police discovered her body decomposing in Conkling Park.

That’s how Carrie knew that the closing line of Donna’s brief missing-person report had to be wrong. “When last seen, daughter told mom she was going to her father’s house. Stepmother reports no knowledge of Donna going to house that day or since.”

Had the police officer misunderstood her mother’s statement? Or had he been so dismissive of the missing-person report that he failed to listen?

Carrie pulled up “Mom” on her cell but paused. She knew her mother. She could picture her being annoyed that Donna’s activities had brought a police officer to their door, not because she’d stolen Carrie’s money but because she was off being irresponsible. She could imagine her mother saying whatever she needed to avoid getting dragged into Donna’s drama. She knew her mother well enough to predict every word of the conversation that would ensue with a hit of the call button. She’d evade, claim she’d forgotten, and would hang up the minute Carrie pressed too hard. Rosemary Blank always knew what to say.

What mattered was the case. Only one day in, and Carrie already knew for certain that the police had made at least one error in their investigation into Donna’s death.

E
llie was whispering to herself as she stripped off her long-sleeved shirt and wool pants.

“Be careful what you wish for, Elsa.” It’s what her parents used to say whenever they caught her pining for something. It happened so often that Jerry and Roberta Hatcher, like Eskimos with multiple words to describe snow, had an entire vocabulary to discuss young Ellie’s desire to make her life a little better: “a case of the
I want
s,” “grass-is-always-greener complex,” “Little Miss Change-it.”