All Day and a Night (16 page)

“Wash your mouth out.”

“My point is, once you retire, you’ve earned the right to be let alone. The least we can do is meet the man on his own turf.”

“So how many more minutes, Uncle J. J.?”

They passed a monument that read “Town of Orangetown,” which struck her as redundant, and Rogan hit the turn signal. “We’re there.”

There
turned out to be a parking lot for a golf course.

“I’ll take Long Island bingo night,” Ellie said as she got out of the car.

“You’re missing out, Hatcher.” Rogan paused and held a finger to his lips as they passed a golfer about to tee off. Rogan let out a whistle as the ball sailed down the fairway. “Dude crushed it.”

“You told me we were meeting Buck Majors at his work.”

“And that’s what we’re doing.” He opened the door marked
Pro Shop
. Ellie felt like every person inside was inspecting them. She wanted to believe it was because they weren’t dressed for golf, but suspected that her gender and Rogan’s skin color might be part of it. Rogan made his way to the check-in counter and said they were here to meet with Buck Majors. As the clerk pulled out a walkie-talkie, Rogan explained: some cops took second careers as security guards or private investigators; Buck Majors now spent his days as a golf ranger.

“I don’t understand those two words together. Lone Ranger. Army Ranger. Ford Ranger. Park Ranger. Got it, but no
golf
ranger.”

“They keep up the pace of play.”

“Still,
no comprendo
.”

“So the course doesn’t get all backed up. If some knuckleheads are taking too many mulligans—do-overs—or searching through the woods for a lost ball, the ranger comes by and tells them to hurry along.”

“Now, that actually sounds fun.”

“You make me sad sometimes, Hatcher.”

B
uck Majors came across like a happy-go-lucky golfer, not a cop. As they entered the clubhouse, she noticed that his eyes didn’t dart around to measure up the other customers. He took the first seat at the table in the clubhouse, and didn’t seem to mind having his back to the crowded restaurant. The man didn’t even walk like most cops, back straight with shoulders squared. If not for the embroidered NYPD insignia on his collared golf shirt, she never would have known he’d ever been on the job.

A young waitress in a Georgetown tank top appeared immediately. “A Stella,” Majors said. “For these guys, too. Just kidding. I remember the days before I could drink at work. You want a soda, maybe some ice tea? They do real brewed here, not that fake stuff.”

Two teas and a Stella it was.

“Funny thing: there was a time when my whole life was NYPD. You guys are young enough, that’s probably where you’re still at. But to me? Now? It all feels like someone else’s memories. Lost two different wives to the job, then a year after retiring, I meet a nice lady up here while shopping for books at the Barnes & Noble—you know, trying to keep myself busy? Just had our ninth anniversary and we’re still going strong. Days, I spend here at the course. I don’t have to pay greens fees, plus I get some extra dough to cover beers and burgers. Made some good friends among the regulars. Every Wednesday night we go to the restaurant down the street for trivia night with two other couples.” He looked at his half-drained bottle of beer. “Pretty hard to beat that, wouldn’t you say?”

“You had me at free golf,” Rogan said.

“You said you need info on Anthony Amaro?”

“We’ve got a fresh body with the same MO, and now he’s challenging his conviction. Linda Moreland’s helping him.”

“Had I known that, I would have come down to the city myself. Amaro was a true sadist. Cruel. Unrepentant. Sociopathic. And, ultimately, a coward.”

“How so?” Ellie asked.

“Why break arms and legs? To inflict pain. To watch human suffering. But Amaro does it after shooting the women point-blank. Why would that be? I figure two possible explanations. Either he was too afraid of allowing a live woman a chance to fight back, so he killed them first, when they were caught off guard. Or he was too afraid of his own instincts and desires to permit another person to see them. Either way, he’s a coward.”

“We read all the reports,” Rogan said. “You initially homed in on Amaro from E-Z Pass records?”

E-Z Pass was the system for collecting road tolls electronically throughout the Northeast.

“We were one of the very first investigations to use it to track a driver’s movement. Deborah Garner was dumped at Fort Washington Park, just at the foot of the George Washington Bridge. We talked to her friends. She’d been working with another girl at the Alexander Hamilton rest stop in Secaucus. Mostly tricks right out of the parking lot, but they’d roll with the john if he insisted. Deborah got in a car and never came back. We were driving to the rest stop to take a look when one of the E-Z Pass readers at the turnpike toll plaza caught my eye. At the time, we still weren’t sure what the system did, but I figured it was worth a shot. Based on the broken bones, we already thought we had a possible connection between Garner and the girls killed in Utica. We looked for cars that passed through that toll plaza that were registered to the Utica area. Turned out, one of the registered owners—Amaro—had a previous stop on his record for suspicion of loitering to pick up a hooker in Utica. We showed pictures of all the drivers to Garner’s rest-stop partner and bingo, she goes right to Amaro. We had him.”

“What do you remember about the confession?” Rogan asked.

“You said you read the reports.” Majors held up a finger toward the waitress, and another beer appeared.

“We did,” Rogan said. “But the district attorney wants us to make sure all the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed.”

“Well, you can check that off your list, then. My reports speak for themselves.”

“No report captures the atmosphere in the box.” Ellie placed her giant plastic cup of tea on the table and leaned forward. “Look, my dad was a detective. He told me how the world worked—the difference between the field and the courthouse. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the world cops will always occupy. But, like we said, we’ve got another victim. And just like you cracked your case by tying Garner to the Utica victims based on the postmortem treatment of the bodies, we’re looking at the same situation. And here’s the thing: the latest woman also has ties to Utica that go back to that era. So we just need to know: How much pressure went into that confession?”

“You’re saying I
coerced
it?” It wasn’t a word cops used except facetiously.

“No. I’m recognizing that I, and my partner, and you, and my father, and every other detective who has ever managed to persuade a person to give it up has to do more than say please with a cherry on top. People don’t land themselves in prison for a long, long time without a little push. We’re asking how hard you pushed.”

“Apparently not hard enough. Never got him to confess to the Utica girls, did I?”

“No, but you got him to confess to Garner with nothing but evidence of his E-Z Pass moving through a New Jersey toll booth.”

“And a witness ID. It was a clean confession. You wasted your time coming up here.”

She and Rogan had already discussed the strategy for this line of questioning. With Rogan reluctant to go anywhere beyond taking Majors at his word, they eventually agreed to start with a light touch, before confronting Majors with hard questions. She looked to Rogan, wondering if he had anything else to ask Majors while he was still relatively cooperative.

“Did Amaro ever say why he had come downstate?” Rogan asked. If Majors had looked into the reasons behind Amaro’s trip, the information wasn’t in the police reports.

“Said he was visiting a kid he knew from foster care, but I always figured that was a cover. He was hoping to make regular visits down here for his kills, because the heat was on up in Utica.”

“Amaro was in foster care?” Rogan asked. “Because these days he’s playing the role of a good guy who’s missed the chance to mourn his mother’s funeral and play uncle to his niece and nephew.”

“He’s bullshitting. When he was facing the needle, he was crying about the years he spent rotating from foster home to foster home.”

In the short time Ellie had been a homicide detective, New York had had a capital punishment moratorium. She’d never had the power to use death as a motivator in the box. “How much did that figure in the interrogation? The possibility of execution.”

Majors looked like a mild-mannered senior citizen enjoying the links, but the laugh that escaped his lips was cruel. “There’s not much I miss about the job these days, but the threat of the needle sure did make it easier to run an interrogation. You know how I got the nickname Buck? My parents named me after James Buchanan. When I was old enough to look him up, I found out he opposed the South’s secession, but then waffled on the legality of the war to stop it. I was only seven years old, but I knew I didn’t want to be named after someone who couldn’t make up his mind. All the high-level talk about what’s moral and what’s not, whether the death penalty deters—I’ll leave that to the politicians and philosophers, but one thing I know for sure about the death penalty: you get more confessions, which means more guilty pleas, which means fewer people getting off on technicalities. What do you think Linda Moreland would have to say about that? Bet you anything she’s got security alarms on her house, her office, her car. Takes a driver instead of the subway. Expects the hardworking people of the police department to keep her protected from the riffraff. But comes time for court,
we’re
the bad guys.” He spun his empty bottle on the table. “Listen to me. Guess the old Detective Dime is still in there after all.”

“Did Detective Dime ever go the extra mile in coming up with a confession?” Ellie asked.

“Already told you. It was clean.”

“Linda Moreland says it’s too clean.
‘You got it right
.
That’s how it happened. I didn’t mean to do it
.’ Do those phrases sound familiar?”

Like a suspect in the box, he looked to Rogan for support. “What’s your partner talking about?”

“She’s quoting Moreland quoting you—quoting confessions you obtained. Count yourself lucky that she wasn’t around when you were on the job, because Moreland’s a real piece of work. She’s got a theory that you were putting words on the page that never came out of a suspect’s mouth. Turns out, those three sentences appear in most of the confessions you got over the years. We just need the explanation so we can keep Amaro where he belongs.”

Majors took a deep breath, then squinted at them and smiled. He rose from the table. “You two kids trying to pull good cop/bad cop on me? On
me
? That’s precious. Have a good drive back to the city, because we’re done talking.”

R
ogan seemed worry free as they walked to the golf course’s parking lot, his gaze fixed on the balls soaring above the practice range.

“What did you make of that?” she asked.

“Seemed like most of the guys who were on the job when I started. Old school.”

“Like, not above smacking-Amaro-in-the-head-with-a-telephone-book old school?”

“Sometimes I wonder if you really were raised by a cop, Hatcher. You know how it works in the box. No one gives it up easy. Sometimes you’ve got to suggest a path for them to get the words out.”

“You can’t possibly think it’s okay to force innocent people to confess, telling them precisely what to say?”

“I think old Dime Majors back there would say, ‘But what if they ain’t so innocent?’”

“And that was for Majors to decide?”

“It is what it is, Hatcher. We’ve pressed for confessions, too, and you know it. When you’ve got the right guy, and you need to seal the deal, you do what you need to do.”

“But it’s starting to look like Majors had the wrong guy in Amaro’s case.”

“And now you’re sounding like Max and his boss. We see this one different, and that’s that.” She started to speak, but he interrupted. “It’s okay. You’re in a bad position, and I get that. We get through this case, then we go back to normal.”

She was struggling for something to say. She never should have let Max convince her to take this assignment.

“Seriously, Hatcher, we’re cool. We got this.”

They got into the car in silence, and then he started the engine.

“What next?” she asked.

“We do like we do. The best evidence was the confession and the eyewitness.”

“We need to find Deborah Garner’s partner at the rest stop.”

“Bingo.”

L
inda had barely spoken a word to Carrie since they left the courtroom. She’d been pacing between her office, the narrow hallway, and the tiny lobby the entire time as she gave quotes to the media via her cell phone.

“Please tell Anderson,” she said dramatically, “that I’ve always believed that the clients I’ve worked to exonerate were the anomalies—the few blips in an imperfect system that we must continue to review and perfect. But when I see a detective who was held up by the NYPD as a hero—as a
miracle worker
for his ability to pull self-incriminating statements from the suspects he and he alone decided to target—I start to wonder if we might not have a more systemic problem. There’s no doubt in my mind that Anthony Amaro should be released. The real question is: How many more innocent people are behind bars because of Buck Majors?”

Carrie had no idea what she could possibly do to help. And she still hadn’t told her mother she had quit Russ Waterston to represent Anthony Amaro. If Linda was getting this many calls, she could only imagine the extent of the media coverage in Utica. But she was certain that the minute she dialed her mom, Linda would come looking for her. She felt trapped.

Carrie finally decided that Linda was sufficiently preoccupied for her to make a quick call to her mother. Sure enough, her mom’s line had rung three times when Linda walked into the storage room that was doubling as Carrie’s workspace, her hands laced behind her head in triumph.

“Amazing. I thought this case had the potential to break everything open, but I never really anticipated the power of a single narrative to capture all of the harms I’ve been trying to highlight.”