Harry caught my eye, and I excused myself from Mrs. Hollis. The lieutenant led me into the hallway, away from the commotion of the waiting room.
Harry nodded over at the woman he’d been talking to earlier, who was now also dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex. “The young lady in yellow over there, Kelly Konick, tells me that Hollis jumped into the road to save her when she was knocked into the street, and he got hit instead.”
I was not surprised to hear that Hollis had been injured in an act of bravery. He had already impressed me, and I’d told Grissom as much, but his actions today were in line with the best of the NYPD.
“Ms. Konick says she thinks someone pushed her. Intentionally. But she didn’t get a good look at who it was.” Harry paused. “It’s all speculation right now. But do you think this might’ve had anything to do with your case?”
I thought about it for a minute and said, “I have no idea. But if it was related to us, why would the guy push her and not Hollis?”
I couldn’t help but wonder if it was a simple accident. Were we being paranoid? I thought back to the man I saw rushing from the computer room in the library, the strong feeling I’d had that he might be the killer. He had evaded detection that day, but he may have changed course. Instead of trying to outrun the investigation, maybe he was attempting to derail it. But that was crazy talk.
Wasn’t it?
Chapter 63
By the time I left the hospital, I was emotionally spent. I’d stayed with Brett Hollis’s mother while her son was in surgery. Mrs. Hollis had told me what a good soccer player and student he’d been in school. She dropped in that the only thing he’d ever wanted to do was be a detective. Even after graduating from NYU and getting job offers in the private sector for more money, her Brett wanted to feel like he was contributing.
By the late afternoon, a surgeon who hadn’t bothered to change her bloody blue scrubs found Mrs. Hollis in the waiting room. I stayed with her to hear the news.
The doctor had sharp, clear eyes that focused solely on Mrs. Hollis. She said, “We’ve done everything we can do for today. We stopped all the internal bleeding and set some of the simple breaks. Tonight, an orthopedic surgeon will set his pelvis and left leg. And his nose is going to need plastic surgery. You can go up and visit him in a few minutes, but don’t expect much in the way of conversation.”
I appreciated the doctor’s direct, comprehensive delivery. Hollis’s mother and I walked up to the recovery room together. My partner, prone on his hospital bed, looked wrecked. He’d live, thank God, but he was facing a brutal recovery. I stood with Mrs. Hollis for a few minutes while she navigated the tubes and machines, held her son’s hand, and spoke to him quietly.
I said a few silent prayers over him, then eventually slipped out to return home to my own family, where I spent that evening laughing and playing games with Mary Catherine and my children, grateful for every minute of it. But even through my happiness, an unease took hold in the back of my mind, and it only intensified overnight.
I woke up troubled, staring at the white ceiling as Mary Catherine snored peacefully next to me. The familiar sound was calming.
The first rays of sunlight crept through the blinds, and then stark reality flooded in.
We had a copycat killer on our hands.
It was the only explanation. This killer had at least two victims. Maybe more. There could be more bodies that hadn’t been discovered yet.
I managed to get up, dressed, and out the door without waking anyone else. Which in my apartment is a real accomplishment, no matter what time you attempt it.
I was at my desk, going over everything I had on the Staten Island and SoHo homicides, when Harry Grissom walked into the office.
He stopped and looked at me. Then he checked his watch. “What the hell are you doing here so early?”
“Me? What about you? I thought elderly people needed as much sleep as they could get.”
“Funny. I wonder how hard you’d be laughing if I had you organize all the files according to suspect description and number of reports written.”
I patted the wooden chair next to my desk. He took a seat cautiously. Then, without pretext, I explained my copycat killer theory.
I pulled out the photos of the two victims from Staten Island and SoHo, Marilyn Shaw and Lila Stein. I set them on the desktop so Harry could see them clearly. “We have to be sure.”
Harry shook his head. “I never have to worry about much. You take on enough for both of us.”
Chapter 64
I didn’t waste much more time around the office. I was in my car, headed to Staten Island, just as the morning rush hour was picking up.
Detective Raina Rayesh was on the scene of a shooting in the Elm Park area and couldn’t meet me at Marilyn Shaw’s apartment, but she gave me her blessing to do a follow-up. I appreciated it. In police work, you never want to do anything that gives the appearance of trying to steal someone else’s case. So if a colleague gives permission for a follow-up, it signals complete trust.
I was standing outside the apartment, trying to get a feel for what the killer might have seen when looking at the building. As I stood there, a tall Hispanic man stepped out of the main door and walked right up to me. “Can I help you, Detective?” he said with a light accent.
I gave the man a bemused look. “How’d you know I was NYPD?”
“Since that poor girl was killed, most all of the people coming around here are detectives or media types, or rubbernecker creeps. Besides, you look like a cop. And you’re driving an Impala.”
I laughed. The friendly man turned out to be the building super, and he gave me a tour of the building before we went to Marilyn’s apartment.
We stepped around the crime-scene tape, and as the super opened the door, he said, “Nothing’s been touched. Once the investigation wraps, I don’t know how I’ll ever rent this apartment again. Landlords are supposed to tell potential tenants if a violent crime happened in an apartment. It’s a tough sales pitch.”
“Can’t argue that,” I said.
“I get it, of course. And God knows I’m not the only one struggling with that these days,” the super said ruefully, raising his eyebrows in acknowledgment of the recent murders all across the city.
He told me to pull the door shut when I was done, and I thanked him, then suddenly found myself alone in the apartment. Once again, I noticed the relative tidiness of the scene, especially compared to Chloe’s and Elaine’s apartments—no blood smeared on the walls, nothing really excessive aside from a significantly sized rusty-brown stain on the hardwood, about six feet from the door.
Such death markers always saddened me—the loss they represented, the people who would miss out on the rest of their lives. If I ever stopped feeling that way, I’d retire. The desire to obtain justice for these victims is what gets homicide detectives like me out of bed in the morning. Unfortunately, it’s also what keeps homicide detectives like me awake at night.
I checked the apartment thoroughly but didn’t see anything that looked like it could be one of the counting messages Hollis and I were sure our killer had left at the other scenes. Marilyn Shaw would have been the fifth victim in New York, after Elaine. The super said nothing in the apartment had been touched, and I believed him, so I couldn’t attribute it to anything having been accidentally disturbed either.
I wandered over to inspect a huge array of framed photographs sitting on a shelf along one wall of the living room, all in artistically jumbled rows, with no obvious gaps visible. Marilyn Shaw appeared to have been a very pretty brunette who was present in most of the pictures, along with people I guessed were her parents, her friends, her siblings, and presumably a bunch of nephews. She looked like someone with no worries. These are the kinds of photos that make a homicide detective even more determined.
One photo in the back caught my attention. It was of Marilyn wearing a New York Giants jersey, standing in a sports bar with a TV playing a baseball game direc
tly behind her. A light-haired man was standing next to her, his arms wrapped around her and his smiling face half hidden by her shoulder.
I was surprised to recognize the bar—a place far from Staten Island, much closer to my place on the Upper West Side. It was a spot near Morningside Park on Manhattan Avenue. I used to take my kids there. They had decent food, but the real draw was their collection of old-fashioned games like Skee-Ball and pinball, which the kids loved.
I pulled out my smartphone and took a picture of Marilyn’s photo for my records. Who was the man with her in the picture? Why had this photo meant enough for her to print and frame it?
Something told me this could be important.
Chapter 65
I drove directly from the crime scene on Staten Island to Lila Stein’s apartment in SoHo. I’d called ahead, and Detective Dan Jackson was waiting in front of the Asian grocery store as I pulled up. The big detective was chatting amiably with a shorter man, the store owner.
Jackson introduced us. The man’s name was Tom, and he was a second-generation Chinese American with a little bit of a New Jersey accent he joked he’d picked up while in college at Rutgers. Tom was also the apartment manager, so he gave us a key. As on Staten Island, this apartment was still an active crime scene so had not been touched.
“You really think there’s a copycat?” Jackson asked me as we climbed the stairs.
“I wouldn’t be here talking to you if I didn’t.”
We ducked the crime-scene tape and entered the apartment. I went straight to the long library table in the main space that held Lila Stein’s personal mementos: a glass plaque she’d received for being court clerk of the year; a ceramic dog that looked like a niece or nephew had made it; and half a dozen framed photographs.
As at Marilyn’s apartment, I could find no evidence that any of Lila’s possessions had been grouped in any sort of deliberate way by her killer. I looked over the photographs on the table. I saw Lila and her parents, the older couple standing proudly on either side of their pretty daughter. Lila and her sorority sisters, all cheering for something together. Lila and the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, at the beach—all trips she’d taken. But when I spotted another photo in the back, I thought I was suffering déjà vu. I reached back and picked it up, immediately recognizing the background—and the man standing beside Lila, again with his arms around her, but turned in profile.
Jackson said, “Of all the photos, what’s so special about that one?”
I pointed at the photo, running my finger along the upper edge. “See all the NFL logos around the mirror? I know this place,” I said, explaining that it was a restaurant/sports bar uptown where I took my kids to play games. I took a photo of Lila’s picture, just as I had the one on Staten Island, then set the frame back down.
Jackson said, “You think it means something?”
“I’m working on a theory.” I didn’t fill Jackson in just yet, or tell him about the other photo I’d found at Marilyn’s place. I told him I might call him later.
Jackson slapped me on the back and said, “There’s nothing I would rather do on my twins’ birthday than follow you around on interviews. I’ll leave my phone on.”
Chapter 66
I wasted no time speeding uptown. Neither photograph seemed to have been taken very long ago. Maybe someone at the bar would remember seeing the same man there with two different women. You never knew until you asked.
I parked on the street. It was a little before noon, so when I went through the open door, the place was so empty I thought they might still be closed. Then the portly manager, whom I used to see all the time, wobbled into view from the kitchen.
He looked at me for a moment, then recognition dawned on him. A broad smile swept across his face. “Here by yourself? Where are all those beautiful kids of yours? I’m lucky I didn’t go bankrupt when you stopped coming by.” He let out a good cackle.
I approached him and stuck out my hand. As we shook, I said, “We’d still be coming, but you know how it goes—as they get older, there are more and more school and sports events we’ve got to go to.”
The manager grinned. “Maybe I can lure you back with a good hamburger for lunch.”
I started to shake my head.
The manager said, “Some homemade lemon chicken salad?”
“I’m actually not here to eat. You remember I’m with the NYPD, right?”
He nodded carefully. The kind of nod cops get from people who think they might be suspects and start doing a mental rewind of their recent past. That kind of self-censoring slows down investigations.
I eased his mind. “I’m looking into a pair of homicides. The one thing they had in common was a photograph taken at this bar.” I showed him both photos on my phone. “The same man appears in both of them, though it’s hard to get a good look at his face.”
The chubby man studied the photos carefully, then looked over his shoulder to confirm exactly where in the bar they’d been taken. He wasted no time in leading me over to a hallway that featured a couple of Pop-A-Shot games. “Here’s where one photo was taken. I can tell by the TV in the back. The other was obviously taken near the bar. You can see the mirror and all of our NFL gear.”
“Do you think we could figure out when these photos were taken?”
“I dunno…maybe you can figure out the date of the game going on behind the girl? I can see it’s the Yankees and the Red Sox.”
I sat at the bar, checked a few websites, and made a few calls. I was able to figure out the six dates when the Yankees and Red Sox had played recently. All of the games had broadcast on the same channel here, and all had started at 7 p.m. And all the dates were within the last two months. I was onto something.
Lunchtime business in the bar picked up while I was busy on the phone. To his credit, the manager kept himself free to help me if I needed it. We searched through the security videos he had on hand. Of the six dates, he still had security videos from four of the nights.
He set me up in his rear office with a computer. He even brought me a Coke and a sandwich. We both figured I was going to be here awhile.
I started watching the first security video, and fast-forwarded to 7 p.m. I couldn’t believe my luck—I struck pay dirt within two minutes. I was easily able to identify Marilyn Shaw from her photograph, and barely another minute of searching turned up the man who appeared in both Lila’s and Marilyn’s photos. He was a tall white man with sandy hair and an athletic build, and looked to be in his mid to late thirties.
I tried to get a feel for their relationship. They held hands and laughed together, and while the video wasn’t perfect, I was at least able to pull some full-face stills of the mystery man off of it and run them through the state photo-ID database.
Then fate stepped in.
Chapter 67
As a philosophy major, I’ve read dozens of quotes about fate. How it favors one person over another. Some sayings assert that fate favors the prepared. Or the determined. Or the virtuous. But often it simply favors the lucky. There’s no other way to explain it. And every homicide detective in the world will admit to having a number of cases solved by lucky breaks.
I’d just gotten back to my car when my phone rang. The number was an NYPD exchange, and it turned out to be main dispatch sending through a call from a uniformed patrol officer named Janelle Gibbs.
Officer Gibbs said, “Detective Bennett, I’m sorry to bother you, but I just heard something odd at a domestic and I thought I should pass it along to you.”
“It’s no bother. Whatcha got?”
“I’m in Brooklyn, in Cobble Hill, at a nice brownstone. Like I said, I got called to this domestic. The husband left and the wife is really, really pissed off.”
“I’m listening.”
“She confronted her husband about some burner phones she found in the house. He threatened her and stormed out. But the wife’s no dummy. She knew they were phones he used for girlfriends.” Officer Gibbs sounded sharp.
“Anyway, she found out one of the girlfriends’ names, and when she told it to me, I recognized it as being the same as one of the victims murdered by that serial killer you’re investigating.”
“What was the victim’s name?”
“Marilyn Shaw.”
I felt a rush of excitement. Can this be the mystery man from Marilyn’s—and Lila’s—photo?
“I’ll be right there. Don’t leave and don’t give any info to the wife.”
“No problem. I told her I’d be writing reports in my car for a little bit. She’s busy with a toddler anyway.”
Officer Gibbs gave me the address and I was on my way, yet another trek from one end of the city to the other. I was starting to feel like an Uber driver. In this case, I caught a lucky break and found the FDR open all the way down to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Officer Gibbs was a tall, attractive black woman who seemed way too young to be a cop. Or maybe I was just getting older. I could tell by the look on her face that Gibbs was shocked I’d gotten to the brownstone in Cobble Hill so quickly after her call.
But she had her shit together. She had the info all ready and laid out for me as I walked up.
“The wife is inside with the kid. I haven’t reached out to the husband,” Officer Gibbs said as she concluded her report.
“You’ve done a tremendous job. Do you mind coming up to the house with me? Sounds like you and the wife already have a rapport. I don’t want to intimidate her.”
As we climbed the stairs to the top of the stoop, a woman with messy brown hair stepped out of the open front door with a little boy in her arms.
“Mrs. Cedar, this is Detective Bennett,” Officer Gibbs said.
“Please, call me Lauren,” the woman said. She hefted the toddler on her hip. “And this is Tyler.”
Tyler had blond hair and big, beautiful brown eyes. He smiled, then giggled when I tickled his bare feet.
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