City of Fear

by Alafair Burke

  It had been four years since he’d met Marlene, and if someone had predicted then the odd relationship he shared with her today, he would have called the paramedics for a straitjacket.

  He had busted the sleazeball who paid the rent on Marlene’s high-rise apartment right before he’d earned his white-shirt promotion. Precisely where Vinnie fell in the hierarchy of his crime family was still unclear in Eckels’s mind, but on that particular day, Eckels popped someone under Vinnie’s supervision for scalping counterfeit concert tickets.

  When Eckels caught up with Vinnie at Elaine’s, his bleached-blond, fake-tittied goomah was on his arm. When Eckels pulled out the cuffs, Marlene offered to blow him in exchange for cutting Vinnie loose. Eckels was only one year divorced at the time, and he knew guys like Vinnie always managed to beat the rap anyway. Given his own stereotypes of men like Vinnie, Eckels would have expected him to give Marlene a good jab in the temple and to take him down just to save face. Instead, he’d remained at the table to finish his veal piccata while Marlene and Eckels took a little walk to the car.

  Four years later, Vinnie didn’t seem to have a problem if Eckels occasionally dropped in on Marlene, as long as Eckels did him the occasional harmless favor in return: fixing tickets, running off a competitor, tracking down a plate – nothing that would get anyone hurt. The two men had an understanding.

  Why Marlene put up with any of it remained a mystery. Vinnie took care of her, but she was in a 500-square-foot studio on a low floor just above the elevated portion of the West Side Highway. As far as Eckels could figure, all that mattered to Marlene was that she lived in a building bearing the Trump name.

  He was careful not to take advantage of the arrangement. He dropped by Marlene’s maybe four times a year, and only on days when he really needed the escape. She had a way of calming him down.

  Being with her tonight had helped, as he knew it would, but he was still anxious. The Daily Post was running a story tomorrow morning tying the Chelsea Hart murder to four others. The department would be going into full-on task-force mode.

  He had been so relieved when Jake Myers had come along. The asshole looked good for it, and the possibility of a connection between Chelsea Hart and those other girls floated away. But then Hatcher had marched into his office, ragging about those same old names again.

  He didn’t have much time before his captain, or maybe even the assistant chief, started asking him the hard questions. He’d caught the Alice Butler case, the third case in the series, and had failed to see the pattern. That alone would only render him a mediocre detective. No one would have a hard time believing that. He knew he wasn’t the best cop. He’d gotten the promotion based almost entirely on his test scores, but he’d never commanded the respect of the men who worked for him, or above him, for that matter.

  But when the department got around to its postmortem analysis, they’d be looking at more than shoddy police work. When Flann McIlroy had come to him three years ago with his wacky theory, Eckels had shut him down and ordered him to stop investigating the cold cases. Not that McIlroy would have ever obeyed an order, but others wouldn’t look at it that way. His biggest mistake by far, though, was failing to speak up when his own detectives caught the Chelsea Hart case.

  The department would come after him. He needed to cover his bases. He needed to find Hatcher. She was a pain in the butt, and he had no doubt that she’d gotten where she was based on her sex and her looks, but he had to admit that she was smart. She was also reasonable and, in the end, a decent person. He would find a way to turn those characteristics to his advantage.

  He took the Forty-second Street turnoff and made his way east to Fifth Avenue, then hung a left on Thirty-eighth. He planned on parking in front of the same hydrant he’d blocked earlier tonight, but some asshole in a Ford Taurus was already there.

  Eckels rolled down his window and gestured for the Taurus’s driver to do the same. ‘Hey buddy, no standing.’

  The streetlamp was shining on Eckels’s car, so he could not see inside the Taurus. He honked his horn and signaled again for the driver to roll down his window, this time flashing the department parking permit he kept on his dash.

  ‘Get a move on.’

  The driver’s-side door of the Taurus opened, and Eckels saw the back of a man’s head and a tan coat in the dome light.

  ‘Small world, Lieutenant.’

  It took Eckels a moment to recognize the man walking toward his car. This was a prime example of Dan Eckels’s unique brand of bad luck. Eight and a half million people in this city. He gives one of them a hard time, and they just happen to recognize him. On top of all his other problems, all he needed was this loser telling people he was a jerk to boot.

  The man removed a gloved right hand from his coat pocket. Eckels extended his own hand to return the shake through his open window.

  He saw a quick flash of movement in his periphery. ‘What the fuck?’ Trying to pull away from the damp cloth pressed against his face, he reached for his Glock. His seat belt restricted his movement. His coat was buttoned tight around his body. He could not get to his weapon. In fact, he could not feel it at his side.

  Maybe he should have listened. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so wedded to the case against Jake Myers. But with the mayor’s office hounding him at every turn, it had been what he’d wanted to believe. He wasn’t the first cop to get a case of tunnel vision. If he’d mentioned those old files the minute they’d caught the Hart case, he wouldn’t have been in this position. All he’d wanted was to protect his job. If he made things right with Hatcher, she’d cover his ass.

  He was getting dizzy. Just before passing out, he realized his gun was on Marlene’s nightstand. If he’d been a better cop, he would have realized that coming here would be dangerous.

  The driver of the Taurus opened Dan Eckels’s door and took a quick look up and down Thirty-eighth Street. A couple was crossing Park Avenue, but they didn’t seem to be paying him any attention. He saw no obvious snoopers peering from the windows of the adjacent apartment buildings.

  ‘You’re in no shape to drive, man,’ he said, just to be safe. He unbelted Eckels from his seat, reached in and moved his legs to the passenger side, and then pushed his body over in one full shove.

  He removed the parking permit from the dash, tossed it into his own car, and locked up the Taurus before taking a seat at the wheel of the Charger.

  He had himself an NYPD lieutenant, and he was willing to bet he could trade him for a young blond detective.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  ‘Fuck. My eyes, my eyes. Someone please hand me a spear so I might gouge out my eyes. Cover yourselves, people.’

  Ellie sprung from what felt like the deepest sleep of her lifetime. She saw light creeping through the living room blinds and her brother standing at her apartment entrance, keys in hand and grin on face.

  ‘Shit. Shit. What time is it?’

  ‘Five forty-five.’

  ‘Damn it. Ninety minutes. I was only going to wait ninety minutes.’

  Max Donovan was coming to on the living room floor next to her. He grabbed a corner of the fleece throw Ellie was clutching to her chest, then settled for a blue pillow instead.

  ‘Shit, we fell asleep,’ he said.

  ‘Master of the fucking obvious.’

  ‘My brother, Jess,’ Ellie said by way of explanation, scrambling to her feet and wrapping herself in the throw.

  ‘Hey.’ Max offered Jess his free hand. ‘Max Donovan. Uh, sorry about the circumstances.’

  ‘You’ll understand if I don’t return the gesture. I really don’t need to think about where that hand’s been at six in the morning.’

  ‘Jesus, Jess.’

  Jess dropped a newspaper on the coffee table. ‘I thought you’d want to see this. Hot off the presses.’

  It was a copy of the Daily Post. A glamor shot of Rachel Peck occupied the entire front page.

  With no further pleasantries, Max was simultaneou
sly pulling on his pants and pushing buttons on his cell phone.

  ‘Why the fuck haven’t you called me? … You’ve just been sitting there? … Nothing? … Damn it … No, don’t leave. You stay there until we tell you to leave.’

  Ellie had pulled on a blue terry-cloth robe by the time Donovan hung up.

  ‘He never got home. Eckels is in the wind.’ He was struggling to get his arms into the sleeves of yesterday’s shirt. ‘We need to get a warrant. I need to call Knight.’

  He was fumbling with the buttons of his cell again when Ellie caught sight of the newspaper headline blaring above Rachel Peck’s photograph: ‘The Barber of Manhattan: A Serial Killer Strikes Again?’ On the bottom of the page in smaller print: ‘Creep Collects Hair as Souvenirs.’

  ‘That Peter sure does work for a class act,’ Jess said.

  Ellie found herself reading the words again. Then a third time. Then she picked up the paper and rifled through the pages until she found the cover story.

  The nagging feeling that she’d had in her gut before she’d fallen asleep was returning. That feeling that they’d been missing something. The facts unstacked into a jumble of individual blocks, floating in random rotations in her mind – flipping, rearranging, and then settling back down into a new and entirely different pattern.

  And then the tumblers clicked. Same victims. Same pattern. Same facts. Different man.

  ‘Stop. Hang up, Max. It’s not Eckels. Hang up.’

  She was already hitting a button on her own phone. It rang three times before she got an answer.

  ‘Peter, I need you to tell me about George Kittrie.’

  They were inside Kittrie’s apartment within an hour. Three minutes to make the call to the Twenty-third Precinct to post officers outside the building. Fifteen minutes in the cab on the way to the Upper East Side, while Donovan persuaded Judge Capers to authorize a telephonic no-knock warrant. Five minutes to track down the super and his master keys. Another two minutes to figure out that Kittrie had installed an unauthorized security lock that the super could not bypass. Eighteen minutes to call in the old-fashioned battering ram.

  Now Ellie, Donovan, and four backup officers were inside the apartment, and Rogan was on the way. She led a protective sweep through the apartment. As she’d expected, it was unoccupied.

  ‘Damn it. He got to Eckels. I just know it. I should have figured this out yesterday. We could’ve stopped him.’

  There was no legitimate way that Kittrie could know about the common link between the murders. When she had called him about the three cold cases, she had kept the fact about the hair to herself. And the killer had been so careful to hide his MO that Ellie herself had been unsure of the connection, even after speaking to Robbie’s father and Alice’s sister. Only after seeing Rachel Peck with her own eyes was she certain.

  She’d thought through all of the possible leaks, but there were none. Rogan was solid. And even if Knight or Donovan might have been the type to talk, there hadn’t been time. Kittrie had sent Peter to get a quote from her before she told either of them about the cold cases.

  She had assumed that Capra had been the source for the story about Chelsea Hart’s hair, but in fact there had been no leak at all. Kittrie had even covered his tracks by getting the information slightly wrong – asking her whether Chelsea’s head was shaved. And there had been no contact with Flann McIlroy three years earlier. She had assumed that Peter was lying when he said Kittrie had a quick trigger on running the presses, but it had been Kittrie who lied about his contacts with Flann.

  George Kittrie knew that a killer was collecting his victims’ hair because he had committed the murders.

  When she had met Kittrie with Peter at Plug Uglies, he had looked familiar. Kittrie played it smart, convincing her she could have seen him at the bar during one of his investigative happy hours. But now she knew where she’d spotted him before. He had been caught in the background of the photograph Jordan McLaughlin had given her of the three girls at the Little Italy restaurant.

  They had an APB out on Kittrie’s 2004 Ford Taurus and an emergency service unit on its way to his East Hampton cottage. In the meantime, there was nothing to do but begin a search of the apartment.

  She snapped on a pair of latex gloves and started with the desk. She found what she was looking for in the file drawer, inside a folder labeled ‘Medical Records.’ She couldn’t make out the terminology on the stack of papers from Sloan Kettering, but she didn’t need an M.D. to understand that repeated references to glioblastoma multiforme in the cerebral hemisphere were not good.

  Those rumors Peter had heard about his boss’s condition were true: George Kittrie had an inoperable brain tumor.

  ‘When we found out about Symanski’s mesothelioma, we were talking about the desperate things people do when they know they’re dying. Symanski wanted to go out a hero. Kittrie wants to take others with him. Or maybe he wants to get caught. If this thing goes to trial, we might even hear some expert argue that it was the brain tumor causing his violent tendencies all along.’

  ‘And why is he so focused on you?’ Donovan asked.

  ‘I’ve gotten a lot of media attention, and that’s probably important to him. It could have been those things I said in the Dateline interview about William Summer being a loser. A man like Kittrie could empathize with someone like Summer. Both share the same desires. Both men stopped acting on those desires for long periods of time, which is probably seen by them as a sign of power and control. Summer was just given a life sentence, and now Kittrie finds himself at the end of his life. I can see how his desire to kill again could get transferred onto me.’

  She scanned the wide array of titles shelved above Kittrie’s desk. Mostly nonfiction: civil war histories, biographies of the robber barons, a few contemporary memoirs. She spotted three consecutive copies of the same book, 9/11: Scoundrels and Profiteers, by George Kittrie, and pulled one from the shelf. Kittrie smiled at her from a black-and-white photograph on the inside cover. She checked the copyright date. Five years ago.

  When she replaced the volume on the shelf, a thick black-leather-bound book caught her eye among the colorful dust jackets. She opened it to find a collection of feature articles authored by George Kittrie, arranged in chronological order. She noticed that the prominence of the stories increased after the publication of his book.

  ‘It could have been the book deal that made him stop after Alice Butler,’ she said. ‘William Summer stopped because he got a promotion at his job. Maybe being a published author gave Kittrie the satisfaction he needed to gain control over his urges. Until I set him off, of course.’

  ‘Hey,’ Donovan said. ‘This is not your fault. He knows he’s dying. He would have killed those girls anyway.’

  Ellie nodded, even though she was not convinced. ‘He must have had this bound after he got his diagnosis. The articles go all the way up to a few months ago,’ she said, flipping through the pages. She was about to replace the tome on the shelf when she backtracked a few pages. ‘Unbelievable. Take a look at this.’

  Donovan peered over her shoulder.

  ‘This article from last April is about gangs in the city projects.’ The story was accompanied by a large photograph of a man’s back, covered with gang tattoos, as well as smaller photographs depicting life in the projects. ‘And that picture right there,’ Ellie said, pointing to one of the smaller images, ‘was taken outside the LaGuardia Houses. Kittrie knew Darrell Washington.’

  Rogan charged through Kittrie’s front door like a racehorse out of the gate.

  ‘I’m on the phone with Pier 76 impound.’ He covered the mouthpiece of his cell phone. ‘Kittrie’s Taurus got towed two hours ago for blocking a hydrant. He had a city parking permit on the dash that didn’t match the registration.’

  ‘It has to belong to Eckels,’ Ellie said.

  Rogan removed his hand from the mouthpiece. ‘Where was the car? … Thirty-eighth and Madison?’

  ‘That’s half a
block from my apartment,’ Ellie said as Rogan flipped his phone shut. ‘He must have taken Eckels on the street when he came to see me, which hopefully means Eckels is still alive. We’re going to find them at Kittrie’s cottage.’

  ‘We’ve got Emergency Service Unit officers on the way with a truck and tactical weapons,’ Donovan said. ‘They’re almost to the end of the Long Island Expressway. They will take him down.’

  ‘That’s still an hour away from East Hampton, and we’re another hour behind them. If we have any chance to save Eckels, Kittrie is going to want to see me there. I need to be there.’

  Rogan was dialing again. ‘We can be in a chopper in fifteen minutes.’

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  In her brief time as Rogan’s partner, Ellie had never felt a sophistication gap between them. That all changed, however, when they pulled up to the helipad at Thirtieth Street and the West Side Highway.

  She wasn’t even sure whether it would have ever dawned on her to request a department helicopter, but the idea certainly hadn’t come to her as quickly and as effortlessly as it had for Rogan. He had immediately called the borough commander, who approved the request and gave the necessary orders. Given her partner’s familiarity with the process at the Westside heliport, Ellie got the impression that Rogan had prior experience with helicopter travel, and she wondered if perhaps her partner hadn’t seriously understated the extent of his outside money.

  Rogan badged the officer waiting for them at the gate. ‘We’re heading out to East Hampton.’

  ‘The Bell 412 just arrived from Floyd Bennett Field.’

  ‘The ten-million-dollar beast, all for us?’

  ‘Nine-point-eight,’ the officer corrected. ‘They weren’t sure how big of a team you’d have. The 412 holds the crew plus seven men. Excuse me, ma’am, seven people.’