City of Fear

by Alafair Burke

  ‘Two Bombay Sapphire martinis,’ Rachel asked once she finally got the bartender’s attention. ‘No vermouth. Up. Twists.’

  The bartender looked annoyed when she handed him a credit card. Too bad for him. At thirty-five dollars a round, a splurge like tonight belonged on the Visa.

  She tucked her card in the front pocket of her jeans and handed Gina her glass, then took a big sip from her own to bring the meniscus to a safer level. One good bump in the crowd could cost her half a cocktail. The gin was cold and smooth as it ran down her throat.

  She followed Gina into the next room, where they found comfortable standing space not too far from the club’s horseshoe-shaped dance floor.

  ‘To girls’ night,’ Gina said, leaning forward to be heard.

  Rachel clinked her glass against her friend’s and took another swallow. The toast was a subtle reference to Rachel’s recent breakup with a stockbroker she’d met three months earlier while she was bartending at the restaurant. She usually brushed off the advances of the drunken, overgrown frat boys knocking back tequila shots at the bar, but Hayden had seemed different. He’d flirted with her that night, no question, but he’d come back the next day at lunch, alone, to ask for her number. It seemed like a classy move on his part.

  For a while, Rachel allowed herself to believe that she might have lucked in to one of those relationships girls somehow seemed to find in the city. Hayden was a decent guy with a good income. He was smart and fun and actually read her short stories and appeared to appreciate them. She even entertained the thought that if things worked out, she could quit bartending and focus on her writing full-time.

  But like anything that seemed too good to be true, Hayden had an imperfection. A big one, too, unless you could look past an insatiable fondness for cocaine and the other women who started to look pretty attractive after a few lines. The first time Rachel found evidence of another woman at Hayden’s apartment – maraschino cherries and sour mix in the refrigerator for some girlie drink Hayden would never imbibe – she forgave him. It was the coke, he said. He’d stop using, he said. It wasn’t an addiction.

  And then when she found his stash in the nightstand, she forgave him again. He had a bigger problem than he realized, he said. He’d get help.

  But by then, Hayden had a read on her. She was a sucker and a doormat. She was the kind of woman who could be confronted with evidence that she’d been lied to and cheated on, and then simply forgive. She shouldn’t have been surprised when she smelled Fendi perfume in his sheets four days ago.

  But at least she hadn’t bought Hayden’s most recent round of apologies. He even cried. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I can’t just appreciate what I have with you. As if she were supposed to feel sorry for him.

  She’d seen another side of him when she walked out. His tears had turned to anger. It wasn’t what Rachel would call violence, but he did try to stop her. Physically. She had some fingerprint-sized bruises on her left bicep, but nothing major.

  So now here she was with Gina, back out on the scene from which she had hoped Hayden might save her. The men in these clubs were rich. The women were pretty. For most, there was an implicit trade-off in light of the gender preferences that drove Manhattan dating life. Men got the advantage on age and looks; women on finances.

  ‘Shit,’ Gina said. ‘One martini and I have to pee already.’

  They both knew that a pit stop to the ladies room could be a fifteen-minute wait, depending on the length of the line and the number of girls using the stalls to get high. Rachel held her index and middle fingers to her lips and puffed, indicating she’d use the time to smoke one of the cigarettes that Gina was always trying to get her to toss.

  Outside, Rachel’s ears felt cloudy from the sudden drop in volume. The blonde with the high heels was not happy to see her.

  ‘Seriously? You waltz in, and now you’re back out here already?’

  ‘Rico, cut the girl some slack.’ Rachel protected her lighter from the wind and sparked up a Newport. ‘Poor thing’s half naked and perched on top of some hardcore spikes.’

  The bouncer formerly known as Ricardo gave the girl the cursory and disapproving look that kept a certain kind of clientele coming back for more. ‘I didn’t tell her how to dress.’

  Rachel took a second, longer puff. ‘I’m going to tell Carlita on you.’

  Carlita was Rico’s mother. Even when Ricardo had just begun his transformation into Rico, Rachel had overheard Carlita complaining at the restaurant about how ‘fancy’ her son had become.

  Rico rolled his eyes and unhooked the velvet rope for the now jubilant blonde and her friends. ‘Guilt trip much?’ he said in Rachel’s direction.

  ‘Just keeping it real,’ Rachel said with a smile. The optimistic eyes of the other expectant people in line now firmly on her, she walked east on Little Twelfth Street, then watched the bustle of Ninth Avenue while she enjoyed her smoke on the corner.

  A blue Ford Taurus approached from Greenwich Street and pulled to the curb in front of her. The driver rolled down his window. ‘You know where a club called P.M. is?’

  ‘Yeah, you just passed your turn.’ Rachel pointed to Gansevoort Street.

  ‘I get so turned around down here,’ the man said.

  Rachel could see why. Greenwich, Gansevoort, Little Twelfth (not the same as Twelfth), and Ninth Avenue all merged together at this humble intersection.

  ‘No offense,’ Rachel said, ‘but you don’t exactly look like a P.M. kind of guy.’

  ‘I’m not. It’s a long story.’

  ‘Sounds interesting.’ Rachel liked hearing stories. It was one of the reasons she’d learned how to tend bar. Overheard conversations morphed into ideas that transformed into written words.

  ‘Not really. Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere? You look familiar.’

  ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘You’re really going to need better material if you’re going for P.M.’

  ‘Look at me. I’m in a Ford Taurus, for God’s sake. I’m in no position to try a line. You really do look familiar.’ He snapped his finger at the recognition. ‘You make an excellent margarita. Mesa Grill.’

  ‘Mesa Grill,’ she confirmed, rubbing her arms for warmth.

  ‘That smoking ban’s harsh in winter. Here, hop in.’ The man nodded toward the passenger seat.

  ‘Do I look like the kind of girl who jumps into cars with strangers?’

  The man shifted his weight to the left, pulled out a wallet with his right hand, and flipped it open. She took a close look at it.

  ‘See? I’m legit. That long story behind my going to P.M.? I’m out here checking out the clubs on official duty. I’m dreading it. You’re freezing. The least I can do for a woman who made me such a memorable margarita is to let you finish your smoke in my warm car. Then we’ll both get on with our lives.’

  She had a good half of a cigarette to go, and she was freezing.

  When she got into the car, she nearly hit her head on the flipped-down sun visor.

  ‘Here, let me get that for you.’ When the man reached across the car with his left arm, she saw the blur of a piece of fabric in his hand, then immediately felt a wet towel pressed hard against her face. She felt her seat recline abruptly. As she lost consciousness, she wondered who would call her father. She wondered if she would ever get a chance to finish that scene she was working on – the one in which she had hoped he would find the secret meaning.

  The man flicked Rachel’s cigarette out the window and pulled into traffic on Ninth Avenue.

  Part IV

  The Final Victim

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  ‘Morning, Manny. Can I get a large coffee? No room. And a lemon Danish.’

  ‘No room. You really think I need a reminder on that? Every morning of every day, you get a large coffee, no room. I got it now. We’re good for life, sweetheart.’

  ‘You’re my kind of person to be good with, Manny.’ Ellie didn’t mind that the o
lder man behind the deli counter called her sweetheart instead of the official titles he used with the other cops. She’d realized a long time ago that the occasional harmless byproducts of tradition actually made it easier for men of a certain generation to accept her.

  Her cell vibrated at her waist. According to the screen, it was another call from Peter, the second already this morning, and it was only eight o’clock.

  She’d called him last night when she’d gotten home from St. Vincent’s. Just as Jess had predicted, Peter had an explanation for everything. He had only kept his profile on the First Date site because he thought it might come in handy while researching the book. He had only mentioned her to the Simon & Schuster editor as he was explaining why he was having second thoughts about the project.

  An hour into the call, Ellie felt like she was on duty, interrogating a suspect who believed he could talk his way out of anything. She’d ended the conversation by telling him she needed a break. Peter had acquiesced, but he clearly had a different definition of the word. Just as she had earlier, she let the call go to voice mail. Once again, there was no beep alerting her to a new message.

  Manny passed her a tall cup of coffee across the counter. ‘What’d you do to yourself there? Those boys at the precinct aren’t beating up on you, are they?’

  She held up her hand, still wrapped in white gauze. ‘Shark bite. Can you believe it? Jumped right out of the Hudson River.’

  ‘Ah, we got a smart aleck over here now. Get a load of you, a shark bite.’

  ‘It was just a misunderstanding yesterday. I’m fine.’

  ‘The bad guy got it worse?’

  Manny had enough cops go through here to know the lingo.

  ‘That goes without saying.’

  ‘Well, if you’re gonna walk around with that humongous bandage on your hand, you need to work on your stories. The best tall tales are the ones you might actually believe are the truth.’

  Ellie found herself thinking about Manny’s words during the two-block walk to the precinct. She thought about Chelsea Hart, Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, and Alice Butler. She replayed Rogan’s argument that Chelsea was different: They were all pretty rough city chicks. Hard-knock-life, round-the-way girls, not wide-eyed college students from Indiana. She thought about the murder of Darrell Washington just one day after he’d used Jordan McLaughlin’s stolen credit card at the Union Square Circuit City.

  By the time she was at her desk, retrieving her Danish from its greasy paper bag, she had decided that her jumbled thoughts at least warranted a phone call. She used the heel of her bandaged palm to flip through the pages of her notepad.

  An electronic voice informed her that Jordan McLaughlin’s cell phone had been disconnected. She tried Stefanie Hyder’s number instead and got an answer.

  ‘Hello?’ It was barely seven o’clock in Indiana, but Stefanie sounded alert.

  ‘It’s Detective Ellie Hatcher from the NYPD. How are you holding up?’

  ‘It’s been pretty rough. You know what happened to us on Wednesday?’

  ‘I heard. That must have been awful.’

  ‘It’s not like it was anything compared to Chelsea, but the whole reason we’d gone to the museum was to read this poem she liked in front of the place she had thought was so magical when we went before – well, you know. And then to have it ruined like that … We didn’t get a good look at the guy. It’s like all either of us could see in that moment was the gun.’

  ‘Did someone from the department notify you that they found Jordan’s stolen credit card at another crime scene?’

  ‘Yeah, we got a call last night right after we landed. We were pretty freaked out by the whole thing.’

  ‘It’s probably good that you were finally able to go home. I was actually calling to follow up on something you mentioned the other day. You said Chelsea had a way of making up stories about herself?’

  Ellie could hear the smile in Stefanie’s voice. ‘That was a classic Chelsea move. She didn’t do it to be mean, but if someone really cheesy was hitting on her or something, she’d weave some crazy identity out of thin air.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Whatever happened to strike her as funny. She told some guy at a diner our first morning in the city that we were there to audition for the Martha Graham Dance Company. By the time she was done talking, she had described some elaborate improv thing we were supposedly doing with bar stools. Other times, she’d say she was a stripper. When we were in high school, she’d tell people we were lesbian runaways.’

  ‘Do you think she may have made up one of these stories the night she was killed?’

  Stefanie paused. ‘Not at Pulse. I heard her talking to a couple of guys about Indiana.’

  Ellie remembered Tony Russo, Nick Warden’s monogamous financial analyst friend, mentioning the Hoosiers when she had shown him Chelsea’s picture.

  ‘What about earlier in the night? At the restaurant?’

  ‘Yeah. Maybe. The bar was crowded, and I know she wandered off to the bathroom at one point.’

  ‘But you don’t know who she might have talked to?’

  ‘No. What’s this all about? She met that Jake Myers at Pulse, not the restaurant.’

  ‘I know. We’re just making sure we didn’t miss anything. Does Jordan still have that picture of the three of you from that night?’

  ‘No. Her phone was in her purse when it got stolen, and most of our pictures from the trip were in there.’

  ‘Do you know if she backed it up beforehand, or sent it to someone else?’

  While Stefanie talked to Jordan in the background, Ellie opened Photoshop on her computer. Damn. Just as she thought.

  ‘She doesn’t have it anymore,’ Stefanie said, ‘and the only people she sent it to were you and that guy at the newspaper.’

  Ellie flipped through the mess sprawled across her desk and plucked out a copy of the Sun’s first article about Chelsea’s death. She looked at the byline.

  ‘Was that David Marsters?’

  More talking between the two girls.

  ‘She says that’s the guy.’

  Ellie thanked Stefanie for her time, then made a quick call to the New York Sun. She got lucky: Marsters was at his desk. After a quick introduction, she gave him her cover story.

  ‘Sorry to bug you, but the DA’s office liked that picture you ran of Chelsea Hart and wants to get a copy of it for trial. Do you still have it?’

  ‘Just a sec. Yep, it’s right here on my computer. Want me to e-mail it to you?’

  ‘That would be great.’ She gave him her address. ‘Do you happen to have the original that Jordan McLaughlin gave you?’

  ‘Hold on. Nope, I plugged her phone right into my laptop. I’ve only got the version I saved after I cropped it.’

  ‘No problem. I’m sure the DA planned to crop it around the victim’s face anyway.’

  Ellie had followed the same process as Marsters. Instead of creating a separate file to crop Jordan’s original photograph, she had cropped the only copy she had on her computer, then saved the changes to the same file. She vaguely recalled the faces of bystanders in the background of the original picture, but with the theft of Jordan’s iPhone, there was no way to recover the complete image.

  She made another call, this time to Detective Ken Garcia.

  ‘This is Ellie Hatcher. My lieutenant sent me over yesterday to the LaGuardia Houses.’

  ‘Bandage hand.’

  ‘That’s me. I was checking in to see if you have any suspects yet in the Darrell Washington shooting.’

  ‘Nah. Between you and me, my hunch is it’ll go down as an unsolved.’

  ‘Did you find any other guns in the apartment?’

  ‘We found the murder weapon. That’s usually the one that counts.’

  ‘I know, but my robbery victims said Washington was armed. I’m wondering whether you found the gun he may have used.’

  ‘Good catch. I guess we’ll need to look into the possibili
ty he was killed with his own gun.’

  As Ellie thanked the detective for his time, she wondered what other possibilities she had overlooked this week.

  ‘How’s the hand?’ Rogan plopped himself down at his desk.

  ‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘Okay, brace yourself for another argument with me: I think whoever killed Darrell Washington killed Chelsea Hart.’

  ‘That’s the dude from the projects?’

  ‘Think about it. Street crime’s down all over the city, especially in Manhattan. Two girls whose friend was murdered just happen to get robbed in broad daylight on the Upper East Side? And then the man who did it just happens to get shot? That’s too many coincidences for me. Someone saw that picture of Chelsea in the Sun and realized he could have been in it. He hired Darrell Washington to steal Jordan’s cell phone, but knew Washington couldn’t be trusted to turn over all the loot. The minute we got a hit on Jordan’s credit card, we would’ve been at Washington’s door, asking questions. Our guy killed Washington to make sure there was no link back to him.’

  Rogan nodded throughout her monologue, digesting every argument. ‘You’re making a whole lot of sense, Hatcher.’

  ‘It’s about time you came around.’

  ‘All except one thing. Given Jake Myers’s current custodial status, he can’t be the someone you’re talking about, correct?’

  ‘No, but it could easily be Symanski. He could have gotten to Washington before we showed up at his front door.’

  ‘One problem with that: I just got off the phone with American Express. Capital Research Technologies took a cash advance of a hundred thousand dollars about four and half hours before we arrested Jake Myers for murder. And Myers signed for it, at the Mohegan Sun.’

  The casino was at best a two-hour drive from the city. ‘So either Myers plowed through a hundred grand in record time –’

  ‘Or he used the company credit card and some casino chips to hide one big-ass payment to someone.’