City of Fear

by Alafair Burke

  Rogan looked at his Cartier watch. ‘In an hour.’

  ‘Fingers crossed, guys. And, Hatcher, no surprises.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Rachel Peck had been forced to alter her usual writing routine. Today was the second of two days this week she’d agreed to switch shifts with Dan Field, the afternoon bartender. Dan’s request had been accompanied by an explanation that his agent had lined up afternoon auditions for him, but Rachel suspected it was just another ploy to get access to her more lucrative peak-hour tips and to stick her with the lunch crowd. Still, Dan was generally a nice guy, and she didn’t want to be seen as an inflexible bitch, so she’d made the swap.

  Her usual routine was to sleep late, do some yoga, and then write until it was time to show up to the proverbial day job, which, in her case, was a night job. Her goal each day was eight hundred words, even if it sometimes meant gluing herself to her keyboard at 2:00 a.m. when she returned from the restaurant.

  This morning, however, she’d set her alarm for eight and had skipped the morning yoga so she could work in a couple of hours of writing before covering Dan’s lunch shift.

  Rachel was twenty-six years old and had already thought of herself as a writer for a decade. Her literary dabblings began even earlier, when, as a kid in Lewiston, Idaho, her only escape from a household dominated by her angry and possessive father was a spiral-bound journal.

  The Reverend Elijah Peck had found himself a single father one night when Rachel was only seven years old. Rachel’s mother had run to the corner market for a quart of milk and never returned. Her one-way Greyhound ticket to Las Vegas turned up on the family MasterCard, but the Reverend didn’t bother trying to chase her down.

  Her father’s willingness to let go of the wife who had abandoned him did not, however, extend to the daughter. Rachel had begun running away when she was only thirteen. She hitched rides to Spokane, Missoula, Kennewick, Twin Falls, Seattle.

  Elijah would track her down every time. The last time she’d been brought home by her father, he’d found her working at the door of a Portland strip joint, scantily clad and impersonating a hostess of legal age. He hauled her back to Lewiston and told her that if she didn’t stay put and complete her senior year, she’d be dead to him.

  When she asked her father what he meant, he looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘I’ll deliver you home to the Lord myself before you set another harlot’s foot in a sinner shack like that.’

  Rachel had never understood her father, but she knew him well enough to believe he just might follow through on his promise. For a full year, she stuck to his drill. No more missed classes, no hitchhiking. She even kept curfew. Then the Saturday before her high school graduation ceremony, she packed a bag, found the principal, and did what she needed to do to convince him to let her take her diploma away with her. She hadn’t heard from her father or Lewiston since.

  For the first time in years, Rachel was thinking about the Reverend Elijah Peck. The yellowed pages of her old journals lay before her on the dining table she used for a desk. Her eyes were still wet from the intermittent tears that had formed as she’d read her own teenage words and relived all those same emotions.

  She was always surprised at how the quotidian details of everyday life crept into her writing. The way a woman at the next table checked the coverage of her lipstick in the reflection of a coffee cup. The pug in her building who wore an argyle turtleneck. The taste of cigarettes and dark chocolate.

  But this was the first time she had made a conscious decision to draw on her own biography. The characters were fictionalized, of course. The defiant teenager would be a boy who developed into a killer. The oppressive parent would be a mother whose law enforcement career – always so resented by her always-resentful son – would now become the one means of helping her child, if she chose to do so.

  Rachel was in the middle of a pivotal scene between mother and son – the one where the detective finds critical evidence beneath her own roof, implicating her own son – when she caught a glimpse of the time on the lower right hand of her computer screen.

  Ten-fifteen. Time to earn a paycheck.

  Her fingers tapped away at the keyboard as quickly as she could force them, pulling all of the thoughts stacked in her short-term memory and throwing them onto the screen. Spelling and syntax be damned. As long as she could piece it all together when she returned tonight, she’d be fine.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Rogan had driven past Cooper Square and was on the Bowery by the time he permitted Ellie to speak.

  ‘What I’ve been trying to say is that I’m sorry I didn’t give you advance warning. I tried, but you were in such a hurry –’

  ‘So this shit is my fault?’

  ‘No, of course not.’

  Rogan shook his head and kept his eyes on the road as he changed lanes to pass a minivan with Virginia plates. ‘What are the chances you’re actually going to listen to Eckels and leave this shit alone?’

  ‘Mmmm, thirty-five, forty percent?’

  ‘Higher than I would’ve thought. All right. Lay it on me.’

  Ellie mapped out all three cases for him. Robbie Harrington and her unlikely bangs. Alice Butler and her new haircut. And Lucy Feeney, whose hair had been hacked off just like Chelsea Hart’s. She pulled Feeney’s autopsy photograph from her bag, but Rogan didn’t bother to look at it.

  ‘Like the Lou said, it’s all for the Cold Case Squad.’

  This time, she held the ME’s photograph above the dash, forcing Rogan to see the resemblance. ‘J. J., it could be the same guy.’

  ‘And what year did all this go down?’ he asked, eyes back on the road.

  ‘Three women, all killed between ’98 and ’02.’

  ‘And how old was Jake Myers at the time?’

  Myers was currently only twenty-five years old. ‘I know. I’ve done the math.’

  ‘So then you know those cases can’t be connected to ours.’

  ‘The problem is, I don’t know that. What I know is that if there is a connection, we might have jumped too soon with Jake Myers.’

  ‘When a pretty white girl from Indiana gets sliced up like a roast beef, there’s no such thing as jumping too soon. We’ve got a good case, a thousand sets of eyes on us, and once that DNA match comes in, we’ll have it locked and loaded.’

  ‘Unless we missed something, in which case it’s a hell of a lot better to figure that out now instead of in the middle of a trial. It really disturbs me that Eckels didn’t say anything earlier. He told us himself that McIlroy went to him about these cases three years ago, so he knew the theory was out there. Then we catch the Chelsea Hart case, and he doesn’t bother mentioning any of this?’

  ‘Because Jake Myers is our guy, and he couldn’t have done any of those other girls.’

  ‘But what about when we first caught the case? When we didn’t have a suspect yet? You’d think Eckels would have taken the time to say, Oh, yeah, by the way, there’s some old cases you might want to look at.’

  ‘Except the cases don’t make a pattern, Hatcher. Killers don’t murder three girls within four years, then lay low for the next six.’

  She gave him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look.

  ‘Fine, with the exception of William Summer, killers don’t stay dormant for years on end. And you’re blowing this whole thing with the hair out of proportion. Cutting bangs on a victim, or snipping off a few pieces from a new hairdo? That sounds like a serious fetish. Hacking it all off with a knife is anger, or maybe destruction of physical evidence. It’s not the same. And Chelsea’s not like your victims. They were all pretty rough city chicks. Hard-knock-life, round-the-way girls, not wide-eyed college students from Indiana.’

  Ellie wasn’t persuaded, however, and Rogan knew it. They were nearing their turn onto Worth Street, but he had slowed the car in the right lane. ‘You never heard the term “exculpatory evidence” on patrol, Hatcher?’

  ‘Of course I did. It�
�s evidence suggesting that we may have gotten the wrong guy.’

  ‘Nope. All exculpatory evidence means is some bullshit that a defense attorney could use to confuse a jury into thinking we got the wrong guy. And if the prosecutor finds out about so-called exculpatory evidence, they’ve got a duty to turn it over to said defense attorney. But we don’t. And that’s why we don’t give so-called exculpatory evidence to prosecutors.’

  She returned the photograph of Lucy Feeney to her bag and zipped it shut.

  ‘So we’re keeping that to ourselves?’ he asked.

  ‘Was that a question or a conclusion?’

  Rogan pulled the car into a spot across the street from the courthouse. ‘Let’s get something straight here. I’m not your boss, Hatcher. I’m your partner, so I’ll back you, even when you do something stupid.’

  ‘Don’t you mean if I do something stupid?’

  ‘No. I mean when, whether it’s this or some other thing a year from now.’

  ‘Well, I appreciate that.’

  ‘Wait, I’m not done. I’m saying this because that’s the kind of partner I am, no matter who I’m paired up with. And, I’ll be honest with you, before Casey, I had some problems in the partnership department.’

  Ellie waited for an explanation.

  ‘My extra pocket change was an issue for some people.’

  ‘Jealousy?’ Then another possibility dawned on her. ‘You didn’t have another cop go to IA on you? Talk about assuming the worst.’

  Rogan shook his head. ‘I guess you could say they assumed the worst, but they didn’t go to the rat squad. They wanted a piece of the action. And it happened more than once. I became a magnet for trouble. Then, two partners ago, I wound up on IA’s radar for something I had nothing to do with.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I showed them bank records, my grandmother’s will, everything I had to prove I was clean. But it wasn’t enough. It didn’t explain why my partner was living just as well as I was, and they knew I had to have suspected what was going down.’

  ‘So you cooperated.’

  ‘The man deserved it.’

  To a lot of cops, that wouldn’t matter: anyone on the job who went along with Internal Affairs was a turncoat.

  ‘Then I got paired up with Casey, and it was all good. And now I’ve got my whole you-think-a-brother-can’t-have-money riff, and that puts the issue to rest.’

  ‘I’m sorry, J. J.’ She had a better idea now why Rogan might have been willing to roll the dice as her partner.

  He waved off her apology. ‘All I’m saying is that I want things to work out with you, Hatcher. But, that said, it’s a hell of a lot easier to be a good partner when it’s a two-way street. Just know that any decision you make, it’s for both of us. And I’m telling you, Myers is our guy.’

  He stood on the corner of Grand and Ludlow on the Lower East Side, watching Rachel Peck emerge from a four-story brick walk-up. Based on the blankets and stained sheets that served as makeshift curtains for most of the building’s windows, he gathered that it wasn’t the homiest place to live. A bartender probably couldn’t afford much better in Manhattan these days, however.

  He had followed Rachel home last night and had come back this morning to check on her. Ten thirty-five. It would take her twenty minutes, max, to get to Mesa Grill on the F train.

  She kept her word about covering her coworker’s shift. He liked loyalty. And she was prompt. He liked that, too. Good old reliable Rachel. He was beginning to feel like he knew her. He was looking forward to her night off.

  In the meantime, he had places to go. In ten minutes, he would meet a man called Darrell Washington in Tompkins Square Park. It was an important meeting. It would determine whether Darrell lived or died.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Simon Knight had wanted to meet the two cops he was calling his ‘dream team’ on the Jake Myers case before presenting their testimony to the grand jury. Just as Knight had already apparently decided that he loved his investigative team, Rogan had already decided that he hated the team leader.

  He made his feelings known in the elevator ride to the seventh floor. ‘Are you kidding me? The dream team? He sees a black detective, and so his mind jumps to O. J. Simpson?’

  ‘Oy. I wish I’d never mentioned it to you. I think it evolved because Max Donovan was calling us dream witnesses.’

  ‘Correction. I believe your new boyfriend called you his dream witness. And if his boss is now calling us the dream team before he’s even talked to us? It’s because he’s having a wet dream over the idea of a pretty blond girl detective and what I’m sure he’ll deem to be a – quote – articulate black man to testify against a rich, preppy white boy in front of a New York City jury. It’s got nothing to do with who we actually are.’

  ‘J. J. Rogan, I had no idea you were so profound.’

  ‘No, just a pissed-off token,’ he said with a smile that indicated he wasn’t really so angry after all.

  Simon Knight’s office reflected his seniority over Max Donovan. Not only was it twice the size, it was furnished with leather chairs, a Persian rug, and what at least appeared to be an antique mahogany desk.

  The man came across as equally dignified. Ellie took in the dark, graying hair, the fine lines etched into his thin patrician face, and the conservative navy blue suit. If someone had told her he was a four-star army general, she would have believed it, but chief prosecutor of the trial unit of the New York District Attorney’s Office suited him just as well.

  Max Donovan handled the introductions, and Ellie and Rogan took a seat across from the two lawyers, who settled into a brown leather sofa. She and Donovan exchanged a glance, and she found herself wondering who had looked first at whom.

  ‘Well, detectives’ – Knight clasped his hands together in front of his chest – ‘there’s nothing better than being able to introduce myself to the both of you with a piece of excellent news. I told the crime lab I wanted preliminary DNA results before grand jury. They said it was impossible, but I got the call half an hour ago – the semen on the victim’s blouse and in the oral swab is a match to Jake Myers’s. One in 300 billion.’

  ‘I guess you’ll have to add the criminologist to the dream team.’

  Ellie shot a disapproving look at her partner, but somehow Rogan was actually pulling it off with a broad smile and seemingly earnest enthusiasm. Had it not been for their conversation in the elevator, she would have thought that he was proudly owning his spot on the team.

  Knight was eating it up. ‘Yes, I will, Detective,’ he said, with an extended index finger. ‘Yes, I will.’

  She could already picture Rogan impersonating Knight to the rest of the house over drinks at Plug Uglies.

  ‘So,’ Knight said, continuing his rundown of the case, ‘we can place the defendant with the victim shortly before her death. We have ironclad proof of sexual contact, also shortly before time of death. We have the defendant’s attempt to create a phony alibi, now contradicted by his friend Nick Warden. We have the photograph of the defendant leaving the club alone with the victim. We’ve locked down all the other folks who were with him that night, and no one saw him again after three – oh – three a.m., the time stamp on the photograph. And of course now we have the other girl.’

  ‘What other girl?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘They haven’t heard?’ Knight asked.

  Donovan shook his head. ‘I knew we were meeting this morning.’

  ‘Donovan here worked his ass off yesterday making some calls to Cornell.’

  ‘Myers’s alma mater,’ Max explained. Ellie didn’t need the reminder. Even seemingly irrelevant details about suspects were cataloged in her memory. She still remembered the date of birth of the first person she ever arrested.

  ‘Five years ago, when Myers was a junior in college, it seems he had a little too much to drink at a party and tried to rape a girl after offering to walk her home,’ Knight said. ‘The girl didn’t file a complaint, bu
t we’ve got two of her friends who say she reported it to them the next morning.’

  ‘You can use that at trial?’ Ellie asked. A decade had passed since her on-and-off pre-law classes at Wichita State University, but she recalled serious evidentiary restrictions on using a defendant’s prior acts against him.

  Knight nodded. ‘We’ll argue it forms a pattern. Alcohol. A little flirting. It helps that the previous girl was the same age, also a blonde. She says he was very rough with her and grabbed her neck. He ran out of her dorm room when she grabbed a bottle of hair spray and shot him in the eye with it. We’ll argue that this time he didn’t give up so easily.’

  Knight’s argument sounded like a stretch to Ellie, but she kept her thoughts to herself.

  ‘As the two of you know, grand jury will be a breeze. Just us and twenty-three regular New Yorkers. And, no, that’s not an oxymoron.’ The joke was obviously one of Knight’s old chestnuts, but Ellie smiled politely anyway. ‘Any questions?’

  Ellie and Rogan shook their heads.

  ‘Very well, then. It’s time for the dream team to show ’em what we’ve got. No surprises, right?’

  That was twice this morning that Ellie had heard the phrase. Both times, she had felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach as she thought about Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, and Alice Butler. Even as Ellie took her seat in the front of the twenty-three sets of watchful eyes in the grand jury room, she had not yet decided for herself what to do about the doubts she was carrying about Jake Myers’s guilt.

  The grand jury room, as Simon Knight had pointed out, contained only the prosecutors, their witnesses, and twenty-three regular New Yorkers. The grand jury foreman, a barrel-chested man in a plaid shirt and glasses with thick lenses, asked Ellie if she swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.