City of Fear

by Alafair Burke

  Finally, after a full minute, she spoke. ‘It’s number three. No doubt.’ She used the sleeve of her sweatshirt to wipe a tear from her cheek, and Ellie placed an arm around her shoulder and walked her out of the room.

  Paul and Miriam Hart were waiting in the hallway with expectant eyes.

  ‘No question,’ Stefanie said. ‘It was definitely him.’

  Miriam and Jordan wrapped their arms around Stefanie, while Mr. Hart shook Ellie’s hand with both of his, thanking her for catching the man who had killed their daughter.

  ‘I just want to go home,’ Stefanie said, crying into Mrs. Hart’s shoulder.

  ‘You can go back to Indiana whenever you’re ready,’ Ellie said. ‘We needed you to identify Myers, and you’ve done a great job. The trial won’t be for at least a couple of months, and the district attorney’s office will stay in touch with you about any hearings that come up beforehand.’

  Mrs. Hart wiped her eyes with a tissue. ‘The girls have something they want to do this afternoon to remember Chelsea – a way for them to close the door on all this, at least in New York. But we’re going to fly home tomorrow. It’s time for us to take Chelsea home.’

  As they told her once again how grateful they were for her help, all Ellie could think of were the three cold case files in her blue backpack and the damage a lawyer like Willie Wells could do with them in front of a jury.

  Lying on her couch that evening, Ellie closed the files and tossed them on the coffee table. By this point, she had read them enough times to have memorized the critical details.

  Lucy Feeney had been killed nearly a decade ago. She was three months past her twenty-first birthday, still in that phase where making full use of one’s legal age was a top priority. She and three roommates shared a converted two-bedroom in Washington Heights, but Lucy could be found downtown during most of her waking hours, where she’d spent the last two years waiting tables at six different restaurants.

  The week of Lucy’s murder, she and her roommates, in various combinations, had gone out partying on each of the previous four nights. The roommates’ appetites for adventure had been sated. Lucy’s had not. On the evening of September 23, 1998, she hit the bars on her own. According to her roommates, it wasn’t an unusual move for any of them. They enjoyed semi-regular status at a sufficient number of places that they could be comfortable on their own.

  The last time anyone saw Lucy Feeney alive, she was at B Bar on Bowery, enjoying a Cosmopolitan. The bartender remembered her. He also recalled sneaking her a couple extra shots of Stoli, one of the privileges of semi-regular bar status. He did not, however, spend enough time with her to recall anything about the man with whom he saw her leaving shortly before closing time.

  Lucy’s roommates did not report her missing for two days, another indication of the kind of lifestyle the girls considered to be normal. Lucy’s naked body wasn’t found until three days after that, wrapped in black plastic garbage bags and dumped in the Bronx near the Harlem River.

  She’d been strangled. Stabbed four times in the chest and stomach. And her blond hair had been chopped off in blunt chunks near the roots, just like Chelsea Hart’s.

  The second of the three files was Robbie Harrington’s. She too was strangled after a night of barhopping, nearly two years after Lucy Feeney. And if Robbie’s mother was correct in her observation about her daughter’s changed hairstyle, Robbie’s killer may also have tampered with her hair, albeit with more subtlety.

  That left the third file, Alice Butler. Alice disappeared a year and a half after Robbie Harrington’s murder. She was twenty-two years old at the time – slightly older than Lucy Feeney, a couple of years younger than Robbie Harrington. Alice had been an on-and-off student at the City University of New York for two and a half years, earning barely enough credit hours to be considered a college sophomore by the time she dropped out for good a year before her death.

  She worked behind the counter of a New York Sports Club on the Upper East Side, but lived with her sister in Elizabeth, New Jersey. On the night of her murder, Alice borrowed her sister’s Toyota Corolla for a night of partying in the city with a girlfriend. When she parked on the corner of Thirty-ninth Street and Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, she failed to notice the adjacent fire hydrant. By the time she and her friend returned to the spot at three in the morning, the Corolla had been towed.

  According to Alice’s friend, Alice grew increasingly angry while they waited to claim the car at the city tow lot. No doubt fueled by alcohol, she began muttering about abandoning her sister’s car and walking back to Jersey if necessary. The friend left an impatient Alice by herself in line while she sought out a restroom. When she returned five minutes later, Alice was gone.

  Ellie recognized a familiar name in the Alice Butler file: Dan Eckels. Six years earlier, shortly before he’d earned his white-shirt status, her lieutenant had been the lead detective on the Butler murder case. As far as she could tell, he’d worked the case as well as possible. The best leads in the days following Alice’s disappearance were three separate phone calls from drivers reporting that they’d seen a blonde matching Alice’s description walking alone on the West Side Highway. Alice’s deteriorated body was found ten days later in Fort Tryon Park, dumped in a ravine between the Cloisters and the Henry Hudson Parkway. Bruises around her throat suggested she had been manually strangled, but the official cause of death had been the eighteen stab wounds to her neck, chest, and abdomen.

  Including Chelsea Hart, Ellie was looking at four victims. All were young and blond, killed after late nights in Manhattan bars. But she knew that wasn’t enough for a pattern. Thanks to the inherently dangerous mix of sex, drugs, and alcohol at four in the morning, the sad reality was that several women were killed in the city each year under similar circumstances. Based solely on their demographics, Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, Alice Butler, and now Chelsea Hart were just four of many.

  But she could not get past the hair.

  Lucy Feeney and Chelsea Hart both had had their hair hacked off, leaving portions of their scalps exposed. Robbie Harrington, in contrast, had been wearing new and unexpected bangs.

  Snipping off a few fringes of hair around the victim’s face was a far cry from the kind of angry chop job she’d witnessed on Chelsea.

  Since her first skim through the files that morning, Ellie had known there was only one way to determine whether there was a pattern, but she’d forced herself to hold off. She told herself she should sit on it for the day before digging up the past for a murder victim’s family. Flann had been known for his far-fetched theories. This could all be yet another McIlMulder wild goose chase.

  She looked at her watch. It was seven twenty. Eleven hours since she’d left One Police Plaza with the cold case files. Eleven hours since she’d taken her first browse of them in the elevator. Eleven hours since she’d opened her cell phone and entered a New Jersey telephone number. Eleven hours since she’d flipped the phone shut without hitting the call button.

  Eleven hours, and there was still only one option. She picked up the phone and dialed before she changed her mind.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The woman who picked up on the fourth ring seemed put out. Ellie could detect a television playing in the background, along with the sounds of children’s voices. Someone was accusing someone else of hogging something or other.

  ‘Hi. I’m looking for Michelle Butler?’

  Ellie realized she should have run Alice’s sister through the system. After six years, she could be anywhere, and this phone number could belong to anyone.

  ‘It’s Trent now. Has been for a while. I’ve really got my hands full –’

  ‘My name’s Ellie Hatcher. I’m a detective with the NYPD. I’m calling about Alice.’

  Five full seconds of background noise, then the woman said, ‘Kids, in the family room.’ The kids protested, but apparently realized that Mom meant business when she followed up with, ‘Now. I mean it.’

/>   ‘Have you found someone?’

  Ellie swallowed, hearing the hope in the woman’s voice, picturing the tears that were probably already welling in Michelle Trent’s eyes as she braced herself for words that were long overdue.

  ‘No. And I’m very sorry to call under those circumstances, Mrs. Trent. But your sister’s case came to my attention in the course of another investigation.’

  ‘Is this going to happen every time some other girl gets killed after drinking too much? Another detective called me – it must have been three years ago.’

  ‘Flann McIlroy?’

  ‘Something like that. Yeah.’

  ‘Why did he call you?’

  ‘Jesus Christ. Don’t you people talk to each other?’

  Ellie silently cursed McIlroy for not making any notes in the case files. ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said once again. ‘I would speak to Detective McIlroy directly, but he’s passed on.’

  Michelle either hadn’t seen the stories about Flann’s murder in the papers, or hadn’t made the connection to the detective who’d phoned her three years earlier.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that. When he called me, he was asking questions about Alice’s hair. He wanted to know whether whoever killed her might have cut her hair.’

  ‘And what did you tell him?’

  ‘I told him, How could I know? I took one quick look to identify her, and then they had my sister on ice for days. We couldn’t get the body. We couldn’t have the funeral. They had to cut her open for an autopsy so they could explore every little part of her insides, and for what? No evidence. No arrests. Nothing. With all that poking and prodding, if whoever killed her cut off her hair, shouldn’t you people have noticed that?’

  ‘I know this is very upsetting for you, Mrs. Trent.’

  ‘Damn right it’s upsetting. I’m married now. I’ve got kids. My sons sleep in the room that was Alice’s when she was here. My own children don’t even know their mom used to have a sister. They think Mommy was an only child. I’ve moved on. And now I’m going to keep getting these phone calls when you’ve got nothing?’

  ‘If I thought it was nothing, I wouldn’t have called you. I assumed you would want us to do whatever we could.’

  ‘Okay, fine. So if you have something, it’s going to be news that whoever killed my sister has been out there for the last six years, breathing, eating, sleeping, and now killing other women. I’ve been able to get on with my life by convincing myself karma caught up to this guy. He stepped into the wrong fight, or was burned to ashes in some terrible car accident. Maybe in prison for something else. And now I have to go to sleep tonight wondering if he’s still out there and what he’s thinking and whether he even remembers anything special about Alice.’

  Ellie noticed that Michelle had calculated the number of years since her sister died without missing a beat. She’d heard other family members of murder victims say the same thing – that the worst part of it in the long run is realizing that the killer lives in real time with the rest of us. That for every happy moment you have, he might have two. That he might be watching the same television program, or admiring the same sunset, or boasting to his friends about your loved one’s murder while you are putting the kids down for the night.

  ‘If he’s out there, Michelle, I’m going to do everything I can to find him. And that’s the only reason I would make this phone call. The chance – however small – that I might be able to call you six months down the road with some answers is the only possible reason I would ever ask you to revisit these kinds of questions.’

  The line fell silent, and Ellie wondered whether she had missed the click of a hang-up. Then she heard a quiet sniffle.

  ‘So what do you need to know about Alice’s hair?’

  Ellie felt the tension leave her fingers, wrapped so tightly on the handset. ‘In the file, it says you were the one to identify your sister’s body.’

  ‘That’s right. Our mom died a few years before Alice, and our dad – he wasn’t around.’

  ‘When you saw her, did you notice anything unusual about her hair?’

  ‘I wasn’t paying attention to her hair. It’s really hard to see your kid sister like that. I made myself look at her face, saw it was her, and made a point not to turn away. But, like I told the other detective, I think I would have noticed if someone had chopped off all Alice’s hair. I assume you have pictures of her like that. Can’t you check?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t have anything to compare the medical examiner’s photos against.’

  ‘I’m sorry I sound so angry. It’s just that I don’t understand how this can possibly matter. Back when it all happened, I told the detectives that Alice had thought something was wrong. She told me she was being followed. Why couldn’t they find the guy?’

  Ellie recalled a mention in one of Eckels’s reports that, according to Alice’s sister, Alice had complained a week before her murder that a man was following her on the street. Eckels was never able to identify who the man might have been, or even to confirm whether he in fact existed.

  ‘It was my understanding from the crime reports that your sister didn’t give you any specific information about the person she thought may have been watching her.’

  ‘What was she going to say? Obviously she didn’t know who it was.’

  ‘But there was no physical description, no identifying information, nothing to give us a lead on the man. You told the police that this happened somewhere near the health club where she worked?’

  ‘Right. It must have been a couple of weeks before she was – well, you know, it was a couple of weeks before. She came home from work and told me she might be going crazy, but that she thought someone was tailing her. She said she noticed some guy behind her on the street when she was a few blocks from the gym. Whenever she’d turn around to look at him, he’d check out a store window or a newspaper or whatever. She was pretty creeped out about it.’

  ‘But she didn’t file a report at the time?’

  ‘You know, I still blame myself. Once she said she didn’t see the guy again after she got to work, I told her it didn’t sound like a big deal, and she seemed to calm down. Obviously it took on more importance after what happened.’

  Ellie knew from the reports that police had canvassed a five-block radius around Alice’s branch of New York Sports in an attempt to find a witness who might have noticed anyone suspicious watching either Alice or the club. It had been a long shot, and, as one could have predicted, it hadn’t panned out.

  Something was bothering Ellie, though, about Michelle’s recollection of her sister’s complaint. ‘You said she was on her way to work when she saw the man?’

  ‘Yeah. Near Eighty-sixth and Lex.’

  ‘The file said she usually worked days, eleven to seven, but that she spotted the guy at night. I assumed she was on her way home.’

  The canvassing had focused around evening hours on the assumption that people in the neighborhood likely followed the same weekday routines. If the police had searched at the wrong time of day six years earlier, they may have blown their best chance at locating a witness who might have spotted the man who had been stalking Alice two weeks before her murder.

  ‘No, that’s right. She did work days. But she got home late that night, and told me she saw the guy on her way to the gym.’

  ‘So it was in the morning.’ Ellie was getting seriously confused.

  ‘No, I’m sure it wasn’t. I even asked her because it just didn’t seem like anything creepy was going to happen in the middle of the morning. She told me it was around eight o’clock. Not late, but dark. She said, “It was dark, Shell. I didn’t get a good look at him, but I really think he was following me.” I’m absolutely positive. For so long I blamed myself for not making her call the police. I’d replay her voice over and over in my head. But you’re right. She worked days. And she was home and telling me this story by, like, ten o’clock.’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up over it. It�
��s natural for us to fill in memory gaps over time.’

  ‘But here’s the thing. She was on her way to the club. She told me the route and the various places she spotted him watching her. I remember now. She got off work at seven, ran some errands, and then went back to the club for her bag. Oh, shit. Oh, this is weird. Her errands –’

  Ellie took a deep breath.

  ‘She went to her hairdresser’s. She wanted a change.’

  ‘How much of a change?’

  ‘About five inches worth. She got her hair cut into a bob, and the guy was following her when she left. I completely forgot about that. It’s coming back to me now, though. I remember telling the detective about it.’

  ‘You told this to Detective McIlroy?’

  ‘No, I mean the detective at the time.’

  ‘Detective Eckels?’

  ‘Yeah, that was the one. I told him the guy had followed my sister on her way back to work from the hairdresser’s. I’m sure of it.’

  There was no mention of the hair salon in any of Eckels’s reports, but that was the kind of detail that some cops might not jot down. What troubled Ellie more was the certainty that, in the nine months he had carried around these three cold case files, McIlroy would surely have approached the lieutenant who had been the lead detective on one of the cases. And if McIlroy had run his theory by Eckels, why hadn’t Eckels been the one to point out the resemblance between these cases and Chelsea Hart’s?

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Peter was waiting for Ellie at the bar when she walked into Dos Caminos at eight o’clock. The popular restaurant was a bit of a scene, especially for the relatively sedate Gramercy neighborhood, and was much fancier than her usual take-out Mexican fare, but she supposed that had been the point when Peter had selected it.

  He handed her a margarita on the rocks, with salt. ‘I took the liberty.’

  ‘You dear, wonderful man.’