All Day and a Night (27 page)

She glanced at Rogan in her periphery, wondering if he was going to argue with that assessment. He glanced at her, clearly frustrated, but said nothing.

“So now what?” she asked.

Sullivan jumped in. “At least we know where to find Joseph. His commitment hold expired, and he’s back on his meds. He’s at his mother’s, so I’ll have my guys keep eyes on him. And we’ve got a BOLO out for Amaro and have guys looking—his old contacts, the motels, shelters. My guess is his attorneys have told him by now to lay low.”

“We should see what we can learn about Joseph’s recent mental state,” Ellie said. “And his whereabouts—whether he could have been in New York City when Helen Brunswick was killed. We could talk to his mother, maybe, as a starting point.”

“We can handle that,” Sullivan said. “The way she sees it, I was pretty sympathetic toward her son when he was fixated on me all those years ago.”

“And us?” Rogan asked. “What role does the
fresh-look
team play in all this?”

She could tell from Max’s forced smile that Rogan’s sarcasm wasn’t lost on him. “You’ll be on the ground back here in the city; Sullivan will be in charge up there. It’s time for you guys to come home.”

Sullivan led the way out of the room, followed by Siebecker and Rogan. When she was alone in the conference room, she looked straight into the webcam. “This sucks, Max.”

“What’s wrong?”

“The whole purpose of the fresh look was to get a fresh look, right? But Sullivan’s entangled. He knew at least one of the victims. He buried the info from Amaro’s cellmate. He intimidated a woman who came forward to say that Donna Blank wasn’t like the other girls. And he seems intent on going after Joseph Flaherty, who was a teenager locked up in a psych ward when Donna Blank was killed. As far as I can tell, the only thing Flaherty’s guilty of is harassing a police officer who, oh yeah, just happens to be Will Sullivan.”

“We’ll talk it through together, okay? Come on home.”

She nodded, and he blew a kiss and clicked offline, leaving her alone in the room. She was about to walk out when she noticed the red plastic coffee stirrer on the conference table, flattened and gnawed by Sullivan’s nervous chewing.

She pulled a Kleenex from her shoulder bag and used it to scoop up the straw. She knew an analyst who would quietly do her the favor.

Couldn’t hurt to check.

B
y the time Ellie put keys into her front door four hours later, she felt like she’d been on the road for a month. She let her gym bag fall to the floor.

Max appeared in the front hallway and handed her a highball glass full of Johnnie Walker Black on the rocks.

“You are a god.” She took a big gulp and gave him an even bigger hug.

“You notice anything different about the apartment?”

The dining room table was set with two candles and a buffet of Chinese takeout. Then she realized this was the first time she’d walked into their home on a hot day and felt chilled.

“It’s freezing. And it’s
wonderful
.”

“I dropped the thermostat five degrees in your honor.”

At least Ellie had managed to solve one problem this week. She grabbed a spare rib from the spread and ate it with her fingers.

She was about to tell him about her pitstop at the crime lab. Michael Ma had agreed to test the coffee stirrer against the DNA beneath Donna Blank’s fingernails. He’d do it fast and quietly, without even asking where the plastic stick originated. But as she started to speak, she realized how ridiculous it would sound. She could make a good case that Will Sullivan was lazy, that he had been a stone wall in the investigation over and over again, that he was oddly complacent. But to go from being an incompetent cop to involvement in Donna Blank’s murder? Once she got the negative results back, she could set aside her nagging suspicions about Sullivan, and there would be no reason for anyone to know that she’d gone out on such a precarious limb.

She handed Max a set of chopsticks from the table. “Can we eat in front of the TV?”

“I’ve got last night’s
Daily Show
all cued up.”

“Perfection.”

B
y the time she went to bed, her belly was stuffed with egg rolls, scallion pancakes, and three helpings of double-cooked pork. She felt like she’d been home for days. She heard Max’s electric toothbrush running in the bathroom. She clicked off her nightstand lamp and turned his low, grateful now that he had insisted on getting the ones with dimmers. Resting her head, she realized how much smoother the sheets were here than in the Utica hotel, and how the pillow supported her neck perfectly.

As she closed her eyes, she reflected on how they had reached a new, slower place in the investigation. For days, they had been rushing from one urgent lead to the next, hoping that one would turn out to be the thing that opened the floodgates. But not every case had a breakthrough. There were no more obvious places to turn. They’d move on to the long shots. And they’d start taking new callouts.

What had Rogan said to her?
We get through this case, then we go back to normal
. At the time, they both believed they would identify whatever person or people killed Helen Brunswick, Deborah Garner, Stacy Myer, Donna Blank, Jennifer Bronson, Leticia Thomas, and Nicole Henning. They would get justice for those victims. They would get answers for their families.

But sometimes cases went cold. Once this one did, the fresh-look team would be disbanded. They wouldn’t quit immediately. They’d keep working for a few days, maybe even add more officers in a last-ditch surge of effort. But when the leads didn’t pan out and no new tips came in, the team would close up shop. Things would go back to normal for Ellie, with Rogan and with Max.

By the time she fell asleep, she was telling herself it wasn’t their fault: the mistakes had been made before she and Rogan had ever heard of Anthony Amaro. She was prepared to let the case go. Had she been able to admit it to herself, she was almost eager to move on.

F
or as long as Carrie could remember, she’d been working as much and as hard as possible. In school to get into the best college possible. At Cornell to maintain the minimum GPA for her scholarship. Back in Utica, waiting tables to help her mother keep the house after her father died. Back in school again—at Cortland State, CUNY Law, then Fordham—trying to prove she was still worth taking a chance on. At Russ Waterston, making up in hours and effort for the networking advantages her peers had over her.

Carrie had spent her entire life reaching for the next thing, but today her life was suddenly different. Today she opened her eyes, then closed them again, and did that several times over. By the time she got out of bed, the clock read two thirty-four and she had violated her mother’s motto of not losing an hour in the morning seven times over.

She kept forcing herself back into sleep for a reason: she didn’t have a job. She didn’t have work to do. And, worst of all, the confidence she used to have in her work was shaken. She had managed to help free Anthony Amaro but still had no idea who killed Donna and those other women. Under the circumstances, bed seemed like a sensible place to spend the day.

But this was also the first day she could remember when she had absolutely nothing scheduled. She had no assignment to complete, no goal to meet, no clock to watch. She was one of those New Yorkers Carrie always wondered about—picking up the morning paper in the late afternoon, strolling through the city streets in tennis shoes and shorts, sunglasses on head. She forced herself to leave the apartment to get coffee and a paper. Before she knew it, the errand turned into a trek down to the High Line, the elevated park just two miles from her that she’d been swearing to see for nearly three years.

On a different day, she would never have had her earbuds in as she crossed the street and entered the front door of her building. She would have checked the street before using her security key, searching for anyone who gave her the heebie-jeebies. If anyone suddenly appeared behind her, she would have pretended to fumble with her mail or her phone, any excuse to insist that they go ahead of her. She would have done all those things, because Carrie had grown up in a city where women were murdered, and she had internalized certain routines.

But today wasn’t every other day. Today was the day she blissfully crossed the street, and entered the building, and took the stairs, all while Prince’s “When Doves Cry” blasted in her ears. Today was the day she failed to notice that someone had been standing down the hall, waiting for her arrival, watching her as she inserted her key into the door.

Today was the day she didn’t worry about a thing, not until she felt the first crack on the side of her head.

As she fell forward, she covered her face and skull with her arms.

Another blow, this time to a kidney. Her right arm jerked automatically to her side. She felt another blow to the head, then another, and another. It felt like a new lifetime, while thoughts of her old one flashed before her on a screen. She felt herself falling into blackness. She was getting cold. Then she felt a warm bath comforting her.

She hadn’t seen her assailant. She had no idea what motivated her murder. But she knew she was being punished for helping Anthony Amaro regain his freedom.

E
llie knew the rhythms of an important murder investigation. When she walked into 1 Police Plaza, she could immediately connect the energy of the environment to what she knew to be true about the case itself. It was big—too big for the squad room at her home base of the 13th Precinct.

Until today, the so-called fresh-look team had been spare. Ellie, Rogan, Max. Supplements in Utica. Now forty officers flooded a room crammed with white boards and computers. They were working every possible angle that could be explored without setting foot in Oneida County. About a quarter of the team was rehashing background information from Utica: some reviewing the old evidence; some digging up information about the reliability of Amaro’s former cellmate, Robert Harris; some concentrating on Helen Brunswick’s former patient, Joseph Flaherty. Then there was the focus on the victims: most homicides were committed by an acquaintance. Even fetish-driven serial killers often targeted a victim or two with a personal connection. Then there were the officers taxed with tracing the mysterious communications that had been coming in to law enforcement—the initial tip tying Helen Brunswick’s murder to Anthony Amaro; the e-mail leading them to Robert Harris; and the telephone message that was supposedly from Anthony Amaro’s foster sister.

Anyone could look at the number of bodies involved in this effort—the ringing phones, the movement from one side of the room to the other, the pandemonium—and see that this was important. But when Ellie felt this kind of energy, she had a different take. This was the moment when an institution ramped up, but when Ellie began to shut down. This was the last gasp. The investigation was intense, but ultimately narrow. This was the surge. This was the moment when the people in charge committed every possible resource, in the hope that something would break, and in the certainty that the effort could be held up as proof down the road that they’d done everything possible before giving up.

Ellie’s own role was to work collectively on the profile of the victims. Was there a hidden commonality among them that they had missed? She reviewed every piece of background information they had on each of the victims. She made follow-up calls to friends and family members. This was usually her forte: imagining the lives that had been lost and figuring out where those lives had collided with danger. The entire time she’d been a detective, that skill had been facilitated by cell phones, computers, and security cameras—technology that allowed her to draw connections between people who wanted their associations to remain covert. She was realizing how much easier it had been for the bad guys to cover their tracks two decades ago.

She was on the phone with the third victim’s sister, searching hopelessly for some new shred of information, when she heard a voice break through the cacophony that had become the day’s background noise.

“I think I have something. Holy shit, I think I’ve got some
one
.” She couldn’t make out the responsive murmurs. “That’s him,” she heard from the same voice. “It’s the same guy.”

She rushed off the phone so she could find the speaker. He turned out to be an analyst who looked like a fan at one of Jess’s dive-bar gigs: pomade in the hair, eau de cigarettes, lots of tattoos. Central casting for hipster-punk.

“What do you have?”

“I’m on the Park Slope camera crew.” It was the unimaginative label they’d given to a duo of workers tapped with reviewing all available security camera footage within a ten-block radius of Helen Brunswick’s office. They still didn’t know if Brunswick’s death was related to the older murders, but her case was the most recent, making her their best chance of catching a break. There were no security cameras in the immediate vicinity around her office, but they had expanded the radius as part of the last-ditch surge. “You asked us to look for anything that might be worth following up on.”

“And?” Ellie asked.

The hipster-punk pushed back from his workstation to make room. “Right there. See that guy?” He pointed to the paused black-and-white image on his computer.

Ellie bent over and squinted at the screen. She looked for Rogan and found him hanging up a phone, his eyes simultaneously scanning the room. She waved him over.

He recognized the face, too.

“Where and when?” he asked.

“Three hours before Brunswick’s murder. He bought a lottery ticket seven blocks west. Isn’t that the same guy those people are talking about?” The hipster-punk’s gaze moved to a rolling bulletin board parked at the front end of the room. At the center of the board was a photograph of Joseph Flaherty. The two people standing in front of it had been dubbed “the Joseph team.”