Angel’s Tip

by Alafair Burke

  Ellie stopped multitasking so she could focus on Donovan’s news.

  “His lawyer produced a photograph that Warden took with his cell phone that night inside the club. He was snapping the picture because some cow—Warden’s words, not mine, I swear—was making an idiot of herself on the runway, but guess who pops up in the background? Jake Myers walking hand in hand with Chelsea Hart out of the front doors of Pulse. And the time stamp says 3:03, almost an hour before closing.”

  Sex. Alcohol. Drugs. Now they’d caught Jake Myers in a lie on his alibi, proving not only opportunity, but consciousness of guilt. Unless the DNA on Chelsea Hart’s shirt belonged to someone else, Myers was done.

  “How long will it take for the crime lab to give us DNA results from the stain on Chelsea’s shirt?”

  “A couple of weeks, but Simon Knight swears he can find a shortcut. The mayor’s office is breathing down our necks.”

  “Too bad Myers invoked,” she said. “With Warden flipping on him, we might’ve been able to get a confession.”

  “We’re going to get him anyway. If all cops were as good as you and your partner, my job would be a lot easier. I was just telling Knight what a dream witness you are. Smart. Articulate.”

  “For a cop.”

  “Sorry. That’s not what I meant. It was actually my insanely awkward way of trying to transition into asking if you wanted to get something to eat. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been running around all day, and I’m starving.”

  In Ellie’s mind, she could feel laser beams from Peter’s eyes penetrating the back of her skull and piercing her neocortex where the words of their phone conversation were being processed.

  “Sorry, I’ve got plans tonight.”

  “So, does that mean maybe some other night, or should I take that as an extremely polite shutout?”

  “It doesn’t sound very polite when you put it that way,” she said with an embarrassed laugh.

  “Okay, I think I can take a hint. I hope it’s not weird I asked. Knight will kill me if I alienated our star witness.”

  “Consider me wholly unalienated. People get hungry. They eat, sometimes together. Not a problem.”

  If Peter had been eavesdropping on her neocortex, she was pretty sure she’d passed with flying colors. Still, Ellie couldn’t help but notice that she was still smiling as she flipped her phone shut, took a sip of her drink, and returned to her reading.

  TEN MINUTES LATER, she had finished reviewing the Robbie Harrington file. Her smile was gone. She drained the rest of her whisky, tucked the file into her backpack, and sent a quick text message to Peter, who was still with his boss, chatting up a couple of cops who looked familiar from the Thirteenth Precinct: “I’ve got a little work left, but call me later.”

  When she returned to the squad’s huddle, John Shannon was in the middle of some story about a witness who’d made the moves on his partner that day. “She was a ten all right,” he said, taking a swig from his mug of amber-colored beer. “As in four teeth and a six-pack.”

  Ellie cut through the laughter and thanked Rogan for the drink.

  “You’re heading out already?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Another drink, and I might fall asleep right here in the bar. That call before was from Max Donovan at the DA’s office.”

  Rogan snuck a peek at the cell phone clipped to his waist.

  “That’s funny. He didn’t call me. Hey,” he said to anyone within earshot, “why do you think a young, single ADA might have called Hatcher here for the case update instead of her more senior, and equally fine-looking, partner?”

  That got a laugh out of the crowd, but not as much as Ellie’s follow-up: “He was asking for your home number.”

  “Nice,” Rogan said, giving her a high five.

  She ran through a quick summary of Donovan’s update, pulling on her coat as she talked.

  “News like that, and you can’t stay for another drink? Come on.”

  “I can’t keep up with you. I’ve got to go home and hit the sack.”

  But as Ellie walked out of the bar, she knew she wasn’t going home anytime soon. The case against Jake Myers was sealed up tight. But she had just read the police reports on the murder of Robbie Harrington, and now she was wondering if perhaps it had all been a little too easy.

  CHAPTER 21

  ON THE NIGHT OF August 16, 2000, a homeless woman named Loretta Thompson thought she had found a safe place to sleep when she passed a pile of Mexican serape blankets tossed into the basement entrance of a Chinese massage parlor on the corner of Fourth Street and Avenue B.

  It was a warm, dry night, and Loretta had decided not to check into one of the shelters, filled as they were with strung-out and angry women. She was not like the others. She just needed a break—a friend to take her in for a few weeks, an employer to take a chance on her—some way to get back on her feet after leaving the man whose beatings had caused her to miscarry the only child she’d ever managed to conceive.

  When she reached the bottom of the unlit stairwell, she realized that the blankets were wrapped around something firm. Her hope was that it was a rug—something she could use as padding between her body and the filthy concrete. But when she pulled one of the blankets loose from the bundle, she felt something heavy shift beneath it. She tugged at the blanket with more force to get a better look.

  Her screams awakened multiple Fourth Street residents. The 911 calls followed.

  It took police three days to identify the body as Robbie Harrington, a twenty-four-year-old artist who paid her bills working at a tattoo parlor on the Lower East Side. She was last seen having a drink alone at a dive bar a few blocks from her job. She had been strangled with a brown leather belt that was left wrapped around her neck.

  According to the log notes on the outside of the Harrington file, the active investigation had been put to rest about a year after Robbie’s body had been found, and her murder joined the legions of cold case files that gather dust until a new lead lands unexpectedly in the department’s lap. But three years ago, someone had brushed off the dust from the case. Three years ago, Detective Flann McIlroy had requested this file and read the same reports that Ellie had just finished reviewing for the second time at her desk.

  She could see why the media reports of Chelsea Hart’s murder would have caught Bill Harrington’s attention. Like Chelsea, Robbie was a very young, white, blond female murdered after leaving a New York City bar, although her club of choice on the Lower East Side was significantly less glitzy than Pulse.

  Ellie picked up the phone and dialed the number that Harrington had left that morning when he contacted the department’s tip line. She took note of the Nassau County area code, a change from the Pittsburgh number listed for the Harringtons at the time of their daughter’s death.

  “Hello?” The man had a smoker’s voice.

  “This is Detective Ellie Hatcher with the New York Police Department. I’m calling for Bill Harrington.”

  “This is him.”

  “You called the tip line about a recent case of ours?”

  “I did. I’m feeling foolish about it now. I don’t know anything about that poor girl’s murder other than what I heard on the news. The minute I called, I regretted it. Some old man’s imagination could keep you from leads that might actually get you somewhere.”

  Ellie realized that the man had probably experienced his share of false leads and crank calls eight years ago. “Why don’t you go ahead and tell me why you called.”

  “This is going to sound crazy, but I had a dream the other night, and I think it was a message from Robbie. I wasn’t calling the tip line for myself. I was calling for her.”

  IT TOOK THE MAN some effort to get the words out, but Ellie eventually put the picture together. Flann McIlroy had tracked Bill Harrington down out of the blue three years earlier, looking for additional information about Robbie’s murder. By then, Bill had retired, and he and his wife, Penny, were living in Mineola on Long Island.
It had been a year since they’d communicated with anyone from the NYPD about their daughter’s case.

  “At first, when the trail went cold, we’d call every month or so. Usually it was me, not Penny. Then every month became every season, and then just every August on the anniversary. Ultimately, it was our older daughter Jenna who convinced us that to move on with our lives, we needed to accept the probability that we would never know who took away our girl from us. I think that most of Penny’s reason for wanting to move closer to New York was to show that she hadn’t forgotten about Robbie. Being near to the city that Robbie had insisted on living in was my wife’s way of being close to our daughter after it was too late.”

  “I’m sorry if my call has dredged all of this up for you again, Mr. Harrington.” Ellie hoped she had made the right decision contacting this man.

  “I told you, it was the dream that did the dredging. I called you, remember?”

  “You said in your message that Flann McIlroy told you he thought there were others. What did you mean by that?”

  “That’s what he said when he called us three years ago. He had been working a few months before that on a different case and had pulled up a mess of cold cases looking for patterns, I guess. He told us it turned out the case he was working was some kind of a domestic thing. But in the process of looking at all those old cases, he thought he’d noticed some connections between Robbie’s death and a couple of other unsolved murders.”

  “Did he tell you anything about the other cases?”

  “No names or anything. He said the others were girls around the same age, and they had been out on the town before—well, before someone got to them.”

  “Did he have any leads? I’m trying to understand why he would have called to tell you all this if he didn’t have any developments to report.”

  “I remember exactly why he called. He said the same thing, in fact—that he was sorry for calling us and wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t think it might be important. It was the strangest thing, though. I couldn’t imagine how an offhand comment could possibly matter.”

  An offhand comment. Ellie’s fingers involuntarily clenched the handset of the telephone as she braced herself for what Harrington was about to tell her. She did not want the nagging feeling that had pulled her from the bar tonight to go any further. She wanted Flann to have had another reason for calling.

  “He wanted to talk to Penny about something she said when we identified Robbie’s body.”

  Ellie knew immediately which single sentence in the voluminous police reports had triggered Flann’s phone call. It was the same line that had caused her to leave the bar earlier than she’d intended. Victim’s mother confirmed ID but said victim’s hair looked odd.

  “What exactly did Detective McIlroy want to know?” Ellie asked. “Would it be better for me to speak directly with your wife?”

  “Penny’s not in a position to answer any questions. She has early-onset Alzheimer’s. It’s advanced.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “It is what it is. She recognizes me on good days but doesn’t understand why I look so old. The only silver lining I’ve been able to find in my wife’s condition is that she seems to have no memory of Robbie’s murder. She either forgets her daughters altogether, or remembers them as they were when they were young and we were still living as a family in Pittsburgh.”

  “Were her memories gone by the time Detective McIlroy contacted you?”

  “They were fading, certainly, but she was still home with me then. She did speak with him directly, and I tried a couple of times to work with her on the information the detective wanted. I never did quite understand what the issue was.”

  “What about at the time she made the comment, after the two of you identified the body. Didn’t she give some idea of what she meant back then?”

  “Not to be specific. She just blurted out that Robbie’s hair looked funny when she saw her lying like that on the table. She brought it up later when we were driving back home, but it was just this observation that made her realize how little we’d seen Robbie since she moved to the city. I guess a mother is like that—figures she should know when her own daughter changes her appearance.”

  “But you don’t know exactly what the change was?” The fact that Chelsea Hart’s hair had been crudely chopped off had not been released to the public, and Ellie did not want to share the information with Harrington. But she had to think that such a brutal transformation would have been noticed by more than just one of Robbie’s parents.

  “It looked a little shorter to me, but Penny was just so bothered by it, saying it didn’t seem like a style Robbie would go for. I don’t know enough about those kinds of things to be any more specific than that, and by the time anyone asked Penny about it, it was too late. I tried and tried, but all she could say by then was that Robbie liked her hair long. No, wait, that wasn’t it—because Robbie did sometimes keep her hair a little neater, cut up above her shoulders, I guess.”

  “So, I’m sorry—what is it your wife meant?”

  “I don’t know what it’s called, but Penny was saying Robbie liked her hair to be—you know, even. All the same around, how most of the girls wore it back then. She didn’t like it being different lengths, the way you see it now, with all the long hair, but then short on the top.”

  “Do you mean bangs, where it’s cut above the eyebrows?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Bangs. When Detective McIlroy called a few years ago, I finally got Penny to focus, and she told me that Robbie didn’t like bangs. Apparently she was wearing her hair that way when she was killed.”

  “And you passed that on to Detective McIlroy?”

  “I did. But what does any of this have to do with that girl who was found in the park? I called because she’d also been out all night like my Robbie, and there was something about the picture that reminded me of her, and, well, I told you about my dream.”

  If Robbie Harrington really had sent her father to the NYPD tip line, perhaps it was because she was in a position to know something that her father could not—that whoever strangled her on August 16, 2000, may have claimed another victim yesterday morning.

  PART III / No Surprises

  CHAPTER 22

  “I TOLD YOU. Detective McIlroy would check out stacks of cold cases at a time. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it, and you can stand here all morning while I pull files, and none of that’s going to change.”

  Ellie looked at her watch. She didn’t have all day. She had a precinct to go to. But her first stop on Wednesday morning had been to the Central Records Division at One Police Plaza.

  She had come in the hope that it would be easy to identify which cases Flann McIlroy had been reviewing along with Robbie Harrington’s. The task was anything but. Flann had a penchant for checking out old files and looking for patterns. It had been his imaginative theories—connecting seemingly unrelated cases—that had earned him both praise and ridicule from his peers in the department, along with the nickname McIlMulder.

  “He had all of these cases checked out at the same time as the Roberta Harrington file?”

  She had asked the clerk to pull up any case files McIlroy had checked out in the three months preceding his phone call to Bill Harrington. The resulting printout was pages long.

  “Like I said, he didn’t have all of these at the same time. He had up to fifteen cases checked out at a time. And, as far as I can tell, in that three-month window, he pulled a total of a hundred and seven.”

  Once again, Ellie scanned the list of files. Once again, total disbelief.

  “That’s actually a little light,” the woman remarked. “I used to joke he had a ten-file-a-week habit.”

  Ellie had already asked the clerk to pull a random sample of the different files, and, on a brief skim, she had been unable to figure out which cases had been linked in McIlroy’s mind to Robbie Harrington’s murder, and which had been of interest for any number of other, unknowable
reasons.

  “You want me to pull some more reports or not?”

  Ellie looked at the two-foot-high stack the clerk already needed to reshelve because of her morning research project.

  “Don’t feel bad. God knows McIlroy never did.”

  It wasn’t that Ellie didn’t want the woman to work. She just didn’t want the work to be futile.

  One hundred and seven files? Ellie had only known Flann for a week before his death. During that time, she’d become a staunch supporter, but now she was beginning to wonder if he really had been certifiably insane. Even when she narrowed the list to female victims under thirty-five years old, seventy cases were left taunting her.

  “What day did Flann return the Harrington file to CRD?”

  The clerk entered a few keystrokes on her computer and recited a date about nine months after Flann had reached out to Robbie’s father. He had let the theory grind around in his brain for nine months after that phone call, until he’d apparently given it up. She wondered what more she could possibly add.

  “Can you figure out which of these other cases he turned in on the same day?” Ellie asked.

  More keystrokes. “He turned in three files all together. Your Harrington case, plus two others: Lucy Feeney and Alice Butler.”

  “And how old were the victims?”

  “Feeney was twenty-one. Alice Butler was twenty-two. Feeney was killed two years before Harrington. Butler, almost two years after.”

  “I’ll take those, please.”

  ONE BY ONE, the men filed into the Thirteenth Precinct’s lineup room.

  Watching from the other side of the viewing window, Ellie recognized number 1 as Jim Kemp, a desk clerk from downstairs. Number 2 was Toby Someone, who worked behind the counter at the bagel shop on Second Avenue. Number 3 was Jake Myers. She maintained a neutral expression, lest Myers’s attorney accuse them later of a biased process. Number 4 was another desk clerk, Steve Broderick. Number 5 was a kid they’d found playing guitar outside Gramercy Park.