City of Fear

by Alafair Burke

  No defendant. No judge. No defense attorney. No cross-examination. No difficult questions. There’s always an easy way and a hard way. What in fact was the whole truth?

  Ellie took her oath and, like a dream witness, spelled out the state’s case against Jake Myers – every bit of it truthful. As it turned out, the surprises that day would not be of her making.

  The first curveball was the attractive redhead waiting outside the grand jury room when Ellie had finished with her testimony. She wore a fitted black suit with patent leather high heels and carried an alligator attaché that must have cost more than Ellie took home in a month. She couldn’t have been any older than Ellie, but, from all appearances, carried no insecurities about either her age or her corresponding lack of experience.

  ‘Hey, Max. I was starting to wonder whether you were leaving us out of the party.’ She gave Donovan the kind of smile women tend to give men who looked like Donovan.

  Donovan cleared his throat. ‘Everyone, this is Susan Parker. She’s Nick Warden’s lawyer.’

  Simon Knight popped his head out of the grand jury room. ‘What’s going on? They’re ready to hear from Warden.’

  ‘Mr. Knight, you obviously need no introduction,’ Parker said, extending her hand for a shake before introducing herself to Rogan and Ellie.

  Ellie recalled Donovan mentioning that Warden’s lawyer was a young attorney at an aggressive securities firm. The fact that criminal courts weren’t her usual gig no doubt explained why she was considerably better dressed than the defense lawyers Ellie was used to.

  ‘Where’s your client?’ Knight asked.

  ‘He went to find the little boy’s room. The problem is, he brought a friend with him.’

  ‘The only friend of his we care about is at Rikers Island on a no-bail hold,’ Knight said.

  Then Parker dropped the second surprise. ‘I’m talking about Jaime Rodriguez.’

  ‘That’s the bouncer?’ Knight asked, looking to Donovan for clarification. Donovan nodded. ‘I would have thought your client would be scared enough to just say no these days. I don’t need him taking another pop before Myers’s trial.’

  ‘We have a problem,’ Parker said, any playfulness in her tone gone now. ‘Much to my considerable consternation, there is apparently still contact between Rodriguez and my client. And that’s how I’ve come to learn that Rodriguez has a story to tell that you might find interesting.’

  ‘Enough with the teasing,’ Knight said. ‘Get to the part where we have a problem.’

  ‘According to Rodriguez, another employee at Pulse knows a little too much about the murder of Chelsea Hart.’

  ‘What’s there not to know?’ Knight asked. ‘The press has been all over this from the second that girl’s body was found.’

  ‘So you’re saying everything’s out there? There’s nothing left that only the real killer would know?’

  ‘Jake Myers is the real killer,’ Donovan said.

  Parker held up her hands. ‘Not my job to figure this out. Apparently someone at Pulse says the killer took something that belonged to the victim. I for one had not read that in the paper, so I thought I was doing a good deed by persuading Rodriguez to come here and talk to you. If you don’t care about that, send the guy home.’

  ‘Rodriguez doesn’t even work at Pulse anymore,’ Rogan said.

  ‘No, but he still has friends who do. And one of those friends talked to this janitor who seems to think he knows something.’

  ‘It’s a janitor who said this?’ Ellie asked. Besides Rodriguez, the only other employee at Pulse who had a conviction was the janitor, Leon Symanski.

  ‘That’s right. Why? That means something to you?’

  Ellie didn’t have a chance to respond, because apparently Simon Knight had heard enough. ‘I think we need to have a little chat with Mr. Rodriguez before we ask for our indictment.’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  An hour later, without a word to the other three people in the room, Simon Knight picked up the telephone in a conference room in the District Attorney’s Office and dialed an extension.

  ‘Call the clerk to give the grand jurors their lunch break. We won’t be presenting any further evidence this after noon in the Myers case.’

  Knight had just closed the door behind Jaime Rodriguez, Nick Warden, and Susan Parker, and apparently had heard enough.

  Rogan was the first to speak up. ‘We came down here because the case was ready for grand jury.’

  ‘And that was before Rodriguez told us that a janitor with a past sex offense somehow knows more about Chelsea Hart than what’s been reported by the media. So far, of course. I’m told the Daily Post is onto the fact that the victim’s hair was cut. And that’s why the two of you need to go see this Symanski while we still have some control over that information.’

  ‘As far as the NYPD is concerned, the case has been cleared.’

  ‘You’re telling me you want me to call your lieutenant and notify him that you’re refusing to investigate your own case?’ Knight asked.

  ‘I was giving you my opinion that the case has been fully investigated. We’re a team, right?’

  Ellie could see where Rogan was going. There had been cases in which the department had pressured the DA’s office to pursue charges by threatening – implicitly or explicitly – to portray prosecutors as obstructionist if they delayed. But Rogan wasn’t necessarily packing the heat he’d need to win this fight.

  Knight turned to Ellie. ‘What do you think, Detective Hatcher?’

  Ellie looked at Rogan. Rogan looked at Ellie. Ellie looked at her bag, still holding three files about murders that had occurred when the janitor named Leon Symanski was in his thirties – still well within the window for serial violence.

  ‘The man asked for your opinion,’ Rogan said.

  ‘I think we should check out Symanski, but only so Myers’s lawyer can’t spring anything during trial. We’ve got the right guy,’ she said, doing her best to sound convinced.

  Donovan backed her up. ‘The whole thing’s going to turn out to be bullshit. Rodriguez probably heard about this guy’s prior and is making all this up to help out Myers. It’s payback, since Myers’s pal got him his deal on the drug case. “The killer took something from the victim?” What does that mean? It could be a robbery, a souvenir, her virginity. Say it in any case, and it’s bound to be true. It’s like those so-called psychics who say, “I’m getting a message from someone, and I see the letter B.” It’s vague, meaningless P. T. Barnum stuff. It lets us see whatever we want.’

  ‘So we’ll have a chat with Symanski,’ Ellie said. ‘We’ll find a way to prove Rodriguez is lying.’ Or they could find something to tie Symanski not only to Chelsea Hart’s murders, but to the other cases as well.

  ‘Very well, then. Are you all right with that, Detective Rogan?’

  ‘Right as rain.’

  ‘Call me when you’ve got something. And by the way, Hatcher, I saw you last month on Dateline. You were terrific.’

  As they left the district attorney’s office, her cell phone rang. She flipped it open. It was Peter.

  ‘I need to take this,’ she said, holding her palm across the mouthpiece. ‘I’ll meet you outside?’

  This was a conversation that would require some privacy.

  She found relative solitude and decent cell phone reception next to a window in the courthouse hallway.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Hey, it’s Peter. I need to talk to you –’

  ‘Too late,’ she said. ‘You might’ve given me a heads-up before you called the Public Information Office three hours ago. Or how about last night over dinner, or on the way home? Or, oh yeah, while you were reenacting the Kama Sutra in my bedroom?’

  ‘That’s not fair, Ellie. I didn’t even know about it until this morning. And I couldn’t call you.’

  ‘Your phone suddenly stopped working?’

  ‘Did you call me when you found a body by the East River? Did yo
u bother mentioning that you’d made an arrest when I saw you Tuesday night?’

  ‘That’s not the same.’

  ‘It’s exactly the same. And don’t think I didn’t start to call you. I did. But even if I had, it would have been like I was feeling you out for information. And the last thing I’ve ever wanted to do since we met is to take advantage of you as a source. But you can’t expect me to notify you any time we unearth something the department wants to remain secret.’

  ‘Well, as it stands, my lieutenant assumes I was your source. He knows about us, and now you know something you’re not supposed to know.’

  ‘But that’s ridiculous. I’m on the crime beat. Is he going to think you’re helping me on every case I cover?’

  ‘Yeah, probably. If it’s a case of mine.’

  ‘So I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him –’

  ‘You’ll tell him what, Peter? The only thing that’s going to convince him I’m not the leak is if you give him another name.’

  ‘You know I can’t do that.’

  ‘You don’t need to. I already figured it out. It’s that kid Jeff Capra. I checked him out. He’s not even in the Thirteenth, but he shows up at Plug Uglies to tell everyone he was first uniform on the scene. He’s one of about ten people who knows what was done to Chelsea.’

  ‘So it is true. Her head was shaved.’

  She resisted the temptation to tell him that he wasn’t quite accurate. ‘I can’t believe you. You just did exactly what you said you didn’t want to do, your supposed reason for not calling me this morning before I got bombarded by Eckels.’

  ‘I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant. Can you please just stop and look at this from my perspective? I’m a reporter. Just like you can’t tell me inside information about your case, I can’t tell you a source, or even whether I know the source.’

  ‘Oh, so now you don’t even know your own source.’

  ‘Look, this one wasn’t even my call. Kittrie’s been all over it. He’s got a really quick trigger finger. He’ll go to press with anything to get a head start on the other papers.’

  Ellie felt like screaming into the telephone. She had spoken to Kittrie herself that morning. She had listened while he’d explained how cautious he was in his reporting. It was the reason why he hadn’t run with McIlroy’s story about the three cold cases.

  ‘Don’t try to blame this on your boss, Peter.’

  ‘Look, I’ve already said more than I should. Please don’t jump to conclusions. And stop treating me like a suspect. Haven’t I earned even a little bit of your trust by now?’

  She remembered her own anger that morning in Eckels’s office, her outrage that her lieutenant had not given her the benefit of the doubt. She and Peter had a lot more between them than she and Eckels did.

  ‘So when are you going to print?’ Ellie asked, her voice calmer now.

  ‘Afternoon edition. It’ll be on newsstands in a couple of hours.’

  ‘Okay, thanks for the heads – up.’

  ‘We can talk about this more later?’

  ‘Yeah, okay. I’ll call you when I free up. It might be late.’

  ‘You know me. I like late. Need a guy on the porch at three a.m.? I’m your man.’

  Rogan began deconstructing the morning’s develop ments the second Ellie hit the passenger seat. His assessment was blunt: ‘Simon Knight’s a fucking prick.’

  ‘He wasn’t that bad.’

  ‘Are you kidding me? I hate guys like that. Pretend they’re down with the cops. Equals. Part of the team. The minute there’s a disagreement, he threatens to pull rank.’

  ‘But, J. J., I thought you were “right as rain” with all of this.’

  ‘You don’t think sarcasm suits me, huh? And what was that shit when we left about Dateline? Like you’re some monkey performing a trick. You’re Heather Fucking Mills crying on the Today Show. Does he think that’s easy, for you to go on national television and talk about that shit with your father, and then all he can say is you were great, like it’s appropriate for some passing conversation?’

  Ellie had never heard anyone but Jess acknowledge that her occasional forays into the media had not been for her own enjoyment. Rogan, however, apparently got it.

  ‘So, at the risk of getting all relationship-y on you again, are we okay?’

  ‘Yeah, we’re cool. Honestly, you saved my ass back there. I almost stepped in it, huh?’

  She laughed. ‘What? You don’t think Eckels would’ve backed us up if we’d gone on strike from the investigation?’

  ‘Right, because whenever I think of Eckels, that’s what I picture – backup. There was a minute there, though, when I thought you were going somewhere else. I’m starting to get a read on you. You had to be doing the math. Jake Myers is too young to have killed those other women, but Symanski’s not. He’s in his forties now, right?’

  ‘Forty-six.’

  ‘But you didn’t say anything.’

  ‘Better for us to take a look at it first, right? Just the two of us.’

  ‘You’re actually having doubts about Jake Myers?’

  More than doubts. ‘I don’t want to, but, yeah, honestly, I am. I’ll feel a whole lot less guilty about it if it turns out Symanski’s good for all four of the murders.’

  Ellie used her cell to call the records department for Leon Symanski’s contact information, then dialed the phone number. A man who sounded of the right age picked up.

  ‘Is this the pharmacy?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong number,’ the man replied.

  She apologized and flipped her phone shut. ‘He’s home,’ she said. ‘You ready to roll?’

  ‘Twenty bucks says this is nothing. Symanski’s either some loudmouth talking out of school, or Rodriguez made the whole thing up. You want a piece of that action?’

  She took the bet, unsure whether it was one she wanted to win.

  Chapter Thirty

  Darrell Washington flicked his favorite lighter, the one shaped like a bullet. He ran the flame up and down the length of the Optimo, spinning the blunt slowly to give it a good bake. They cost a little more than Swisher Sweets, but Optimos burned forever and were so mild that, with strong weed, you could barely taste the cigar.

  Darrell lay back on a bare mattress on the floor of his mother’s living room on the eleventh floor of LaGuardia House 6 and gave his lighter another flick. He took a long toke off the fat blunt and held his breath, deep inside his lungs, before letting it go.

  His mom would go ape-shit if she caught him smoking inside again. Some noise about how she could lose her public housing, all because of his weed. That didn’t sound right to him.

  Besides, even if she smelled it when she got home, he’d deny it. Darrell wasn’t good at much, but he was good at lying. His whole life, no one had ever been able to get a read on him.

  It wasn’t likely to come up anyways. His mom was working uptown today, taking care of some rich old white lady in a wheelchair. Then she usually walked his nieces home from P.S. 2 at the end of the day, even though it was only three blocks away. As far as Darrell could tell, there wasn’t nothing his mom wouldn’t do to make sure those two little girls didn’t wind up like his sister.

  Compared to Sharnell, Darrell was the one who’d turned out right. He was twenty years old. No prison. No guns. No gangs. Compared to everyone else he knew, he was doing all right.

  He just didn’t have the dollar bills they had. Coming up, his friends would all say to forget those by-the-hour jobs he was always working and losing. They’d make more slangin’ in a day than he’d bring home in an entire two-week paycheck. But Darrell still lived a life that made him a chump as far as most of the people around LaGuardia saw it. His most recent job was at the new Home Depot on Twenty-third Street, but he lost that when he spilled a can of paint on aisle 8 and forgot to clean it up before his break. He stayed with his mom. He helped out with his nieces. He did day work here and there as a mover for a couple of compa
nies who took work off of Craigslist.

  Today’s Optimo and its skunky contents came out of cash he got for doing a job for this guy he knew. He called the guy Jack but had no idea if that was the dude’s real name.

  About a year ago, Jack had shown up with a tape recorder, asking questions about gangs in the projects. Most folks either laughed at him or gave him the stink eye, but Darrell saw an opportunity. He told Jack he’d talk to him as long as no one knew about it. They’d meet every once in a while at Tompkins Square. Darrell would talk and leave with some easy cash in his pocket.

  Darrell figured the dude for a cop, but Jack never pressured him to name any names. Instead he’d just sit and listen while Darrell explained the difference between the genuine article, hard-core gang members, and poo-butt juvenile wannabes. And the various factions – Bloods, Crips, MS-13, Saint James Boys – weren’t about turf, like something out of West Side Story. With new condos and clubs popping up every week, there wasn’t no turf left to fight over. Instead, it was all about the rock. The chronic. The X. The horse. You name the drug, you could find it in the projects. And with each new condo or club, the market expanded, and there was more to fight over.

  Sometimes Darrell would talk about stuff that had nothing to do with gangs or drugs. Life in the projects. Life on the streets. Just life. Jack would still pay him, and for a while Darrell wondered if maybe Jack was a faggot.

  About eight months back, Jack stopped coming around. Then he showed up again yesterday morning with another job. This time Darrell had to do more than talk, but he also got paid a lot more.

  The job wasn’t exactly legal, but Jack had learned enough about Darrell in their earlier talks to know he wasn’t squeaky clean. He just didn’t do any major thugging. As far as Darrell could tell, the police had their hands full. As long as he stayed away from drugs, gangs, and guns, he’d stay alive and out of prison.