Angel’s Tip

by Alafair Burke

  “Then along came Symanski,” Ellie said, “ready to sell his last remaining months to take care of his daughter and unborn grandchild.”

  Jake chewed on his lower lip. Without all the hair gel and ridiculous clothing, she could see how Chelsea Hart had found him attractive.

  “When Susan first called me, it sounded crazy. But the guy was dying anyway, and he came to me. This wasn’t my idea. He wanted the money. And when Susan told me he had a prior rape conviction, I figured, better him than me. Once I remembered about the earring, I knew we could use that so you’d believe him.”

  “It didn’t dawn on you that the person you were helping the most was Chelsea Hart’s actual killer?” Ellie said.

  He stared at his hands again. “I wasn’t thinking about that.”

  “You were only thinking about yourself.”

  “Maybe,” he said quietly, before glancing up at her. “But it’s not like you were looking for anyone other than me, were you?”

  Rogan leaned across the table and pointed a finger at Myers. “Don’t put this on us.”

  Myers slumped into his chair. Any remaining bravado was gone as he looked to Max Donovan with desperate eyes. “You believe me, right?”

  As Ellie scanned the faces in the room, she had no doubt that, at that moment, they all, in fact, believed him.

  “DAMN IT.” Simon Knight slammed his fist against his desk. “So now I have to explain to the mayor’s office why Jake Myers is a free man?”

  Donovan started to explain that they’d returned a protesting Myers to custody to face obstruction charges, but Knight waved him off.

  “Are we absolutely positive about this? Why did Symanski run if the entire point was to take the blame? The guy stabbed a cop, for Christ’s sake.”

  Cut, Ellie thought, looking at the white gauze. “According to his daughter, Symanski panicked. The plan sounded fine in theory, but when we showed up at his house, the thought of living his last months in prison got to him. He figured that as long as we found the earring, Jake would get sprung even if he got away. And once I had him cornered in the alley, he decided he’d rather die right then and there. Suicide by cop.”

  “So where are we?” Knight asked. “We start from scratch?”

  “We’ve got more than you think. We know we’ve got someone who started killing in the late nineties, almost ten years ago.”

  Knight furrowed his brow. “Why are you so sure Lucy Feeney was his first kill?”

  “There’s no way to be sure until we find the asshole, but it does fit a pattern. What ties the girls together is the collection of their hair. The victims are all grabbed after going out to the clubs, but my guess is that’s not part of anything special to him. It’s opportunistic. It allows him to find girls when they’re vulnerable. It allows him to hide himself by preying upon that vulnerability in a city where a lot of girls have bad things happen to them at four in the morning. So it’s really about the killing and the hair. Lucy Feeney was strangled and also stabbed. She also had her hair blatantly hacked off, like Chelsea Hart.”

  “A total release,” Knight said.

  “Exactly. No restraint. No fear yet that his MO will be detected. With Robbie Harrington, he strangles her, but does not couple it with stabbing. He’s more discreet about the hair, limiting himself to the bangs. He doesn’t want police to see the pattern. With Alice Butler, he switches things up again. He stabs her eighteen times. There’s some slight bruising on her neck, but he doesn’t strangle her. Something about the fact that she got her hair cut short set him off, but my guess is that he still took a souvenir, either by somehow collecting some of the clippings from the salon when she had it cut, or snipping off some small pieces after he killed her—so subtly that no one noticed.”

  “Then we have a six-year break before Chelsea Hart,” Rogan said.

  “Exactly, and six years is a long time. By now, he’s no longer worried about law enforcement detecting a pattern. He does what he truly wants. And after six years of controlling himself, he’s got a lot of pent-up violence. He strangles her, cuts her up, and hacks off all her hair.”

  “Just like Lucy Feeney,” Donovan said.

  Ellie nodded. “That’s why I’m fairly confident that we’re going to find out that Lucy Feeney was his first. Or if he did kill before, it was in another series preceded by another long break, or it was outside the New York City area.”

  “So why the hiatus?” Simon Knight leaned back in his office chair and steepled his fingers beneath his chiseled chin.

  She shrugged. “He could have been in prison for something else. He could have been in some kind of long-term relationship that somehow satisfied his urges. His life could have changed in a way where he no longer needed to kill to feel satisfied.”

  William Summer had stopped murdering women in Wichita around the same time he earned a promotion at his job working private security at a gated community in the suburbs. After his arrest, the residents reported a pattern of abuses of Summer’s power, such as it was. Armchair psychologists had concluded that the new responsibilities in his job had satisfied his egotistical need for control in a way that only murder previously could.

  “But now he’s back,” Rogan said, “and that apparently has something to do with you. He dumps Chelsea Hart where you’ll find her, setting her cell phone alarm for added assurances. And he dumps Rachel Peck outside Vibrations, knowing you’ll get wind of it from your brother.”

  It felt good to hear her partner articulate the theory aloud. No cynicism. No sarcasm.

  “And he messes with Rachel’s hair to send a message to me. This is where we’re way past starting from scratch.”

  “Because, as lovable as you are, only so many people can be jonesing to fuck with you this hard.”

  “Or one would hope,” Ellie said. “I’ve only been on the job five years, and until a couple of months ago, I was working fraud cases. I only got major time on a handful of creeps, and most of those are still in the pen.”

  Simon Knight followed the implications. “So we need to look at your old cases and look for enemies who went to prison after the Alice Butler murder, who recently got sprung.”

  “There’s a shot. I’ve been thinking about this, though, and there’s another possibility.”

  Ellie paused, making sure she had their complete attention.

  “Our guy could be a cop.” She watched the surprise register on all three faces, particularly Rogan’s. With him, it was more than hearing the unexpected. It was the shock of a slap to the face. “I don’t like this theory. At all. But I keep coming back to the timing. I got my assignment to the homicide unit a month ago. I was actually working in the squad for only a week before Chelsea Hart turned up on my running path. He wants to engage us. He wants us to know that after hiding his pattern for so long, he’s coming out to play. And it seems like the person he really wants to play with is me—and I was warned going in that other cops would resent my assignment to homicide.”

  “The coming out to play is what’s been tripping me up,” Rogan said. “He bobs and weaves, denying himself the cutting that seems to define his MO. But now he drops a billboard in your front yard.”

  “So the question is, Why is he upping the ante after getting away with it for so long? One possibility is, it’s a bad guy I put away in the past. But it’s awfully coincidental that when they get sprung from custody, I just happen to be in the homicide unit, where I can catch the new cases. Another possibility is that we’ve got a cop who stopped for some reason but has now decided to kill again as a way to challenge me.”

  “He was clean as a whistle with Chelsea Hart,” Rogan said.

  “Right. The only physical evidence we found on her pointed us to Jake Myers. One of the lead detectives on Rachel Peck’s case tells me there’s no physical evidence with her, at least so far. And I’ve seen the files on Feeney, Harrington, and Butler—no blood, no semen, no hairs. This guy is good. And he knows the pattern of city homicides. He knows he ca
n obscure the serial nature of his murders by committing them at night, against drunken party girls, who go down in the books as unsolveds—lessons to be learned by others.”

  “Any suggestions on where to look in the NYPD for a person like this?” Knight asked.

  “Don’t look at me,” Rogan said. “Hatcher can attest that I was home at bed with my woman when Chelsea Hart was killed. She woke my ass up.”

  “Well, we can apparently exclude Rogan and myself. That leaves approximately thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight cops.”

  “Do I look like I’m in the mood for jokes right now?” Knight asked. He certainly did not.

  Ellie adopted a more somber tone. “I suppose we start by looking at anyone who’s been trying to get into homicide and feels passed over. I think we’ve also got to look at the current homicide squad. They’ve got reason to resent me, plus it’s possible they got wind of Flann snooping around a few years ago, and that would explain why the murders stopped until after his death.”

  “So now what?” Donovan asked.

  She was about to set out a process for going forward, but Simon Knight interrupted her.

  “You all go home for a break, and I call the commisioner. We take a new look at everything tomorrow with an expanded task force, most likely with the assistance of the FBI.”

  “Wait a second—” Ellie’s words cut into Rogan’s louder statement of “Absolutely not.”

  “We can do this, sir,” she said.

  “And we don’t need a break to regroup tomorrow,” Rogan added. “This is our case, and we want to work it.”

  “You will work it, but the question of how and with what other personnel is a decision well above your pay grade, and well outside the boundaries of this office. The Chelsea Hart case was being worked out of this office’s Homicide Investigation Unit, with you in my command, because an arrest had been made and we were doing everything with an eye toward the prosecution of Jake Myers. Now that we’re all agreed that we have no murder case against Myers, the two of you go back to police command, where they can figure out what to do with this—I think it’s safe to say—clusterfuck.”

  Ellie could see precisely where Knight was headed. He would tell the mayor and the police commissioner that his office had done everything it could with the case that had been given to them so hastily, but had no choice but to dismiss the charges once they had exonerated Jake Myers. Without a suspect, Knight was free to extract himself from the mayhem. Just as Rogan had warned, Knight cared more about himself than he ever would about them.

  “No offense, sir, but I hope you’ll point out to police command that Rogan and I deserve to run this. I’m the one the killer wants to engage. The more he’s getting what he wants on that front, the more likely he’s going to do something that will lead us to him.”

  “The counterargument, Detective, is that the more he gets to push your buttons, the more dangerous he becomes. We know for a fact that the Daily Post’s break of this story is imminent. Who knows what kind of reaction that could trigger from him.”

  “We need to warn people,” she said. She did not want to look at herself in the mirror tomorrow morning if the killer claimed another victim while she was taking Simon Knight’s mandated “break.”

  “I don’t want to do anything that validates the Daily Post’s story,” Knight said. “It’s premature.”

  “We don’t need to validate the story. Any casual news watcher is going to at least wonder if there’s a connection between the deaths of Chelsea Hart and Rachel Peck. Even without confirming that we’re looking at a single killer, we can contact the clubs and bars. Make sure they’re watching girls, warning them about wandering off alone.”

  “They’re not the only ones who need a warning,” Knight said. “I’m sure you’re smart enough to have figured out where this game might be taking this man.”

  The thought had more than crossed her mind. A killer who came out of the shadows to announce his existence was taking a risk of getting caught. And if he was willing to get caught, there had to be a payoff. Maybe besting her at a cat-and-mouse game would be enough for him, but she suspected that this was all just a warm-up.

  “I can take care of myself.” The words didn’t come out as confidently as she’d intended.

  “I’m sure that’s true,” Knight said. “But if I were you, I’d stay away from dance clubs for the time being.”

  AN HOUR LATER, she and Rogan had drafted a press release that passed muster with both Knight and the department’s Public Information Office, and had forwarded it to every precinct in Manhattan to hand-distribute to the city’s hot spots. Ellie was impressed that Donovan had stuck it out with them, even going so far as to take a stack of the announcements with him to post around his NoLIta neighborhood.

  By the time they finally called it a night, it was eight o’clock. She hadn’t eaten anything since the Danish she’d bought from Manny that morning. She felt guilty thinking about food, but she couldn’t help it. As if pushing her over the edge, her stomach let out a little rumble in the courthouse elevator.

  Donovan placed his hand flat on his stomach. “Was that me or you?”

  “Nice of you to try to take the blame, but that was all me.”

  “I could use something to eat myself. Are you guys up for a bite?”

  Ellie looked to Rogan.

  “The man said take a break. I’m taking a break and going home for a serious sleep session. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He walked away, leaving Ellie the privacy to accept or reject Donovan’s invitation on her own.

  “Food sounds good.”

  “FIVE DEATHS, TEN YEARS,” read the headline on the Daily Post’s home page. The photograph accompanying the teaser was a shot of Rachel Peck. She looked more glamorous in the picture than the man had ever seen her—even more than the night he’d taken her off the streets of the Meatpacking District. His guess was that it was a publicity shot taken for a literary agent. From what he could tell, publishers cared about those kinds of things these days.

  He clicked on the headline and read the full text of the article at the jump. All of the basics were covered: Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, Alice Butler, Chelsea Hart, and Rachel Peck. All wild. All drunk. All dead, snippets of their hair stolen as souvenirs.

  The reporting was remarkably thorough, given that Rachel’s body had just been discovered that morning. It was quite a scoop for the paper. Posting the story on the Web site gave them credit for breaking the news first, but they’d sell a lot of papers in the morning with a more detailed version.

  He moved from the sofa onto the floor, slid the ottoman away, and pulled up the wooden tiles, followed by the piece of particleboard. He removed five plastic bags—two new, three discolored with age. Lucy’s and Chelsea’s bags contained the most hair. Robbie’s and Rachel’s were less full. Alice’s held just a few snips. How tempted he had been to retrieve all of those beautiful locks she’d chopped off. He’d caught sight of her walking into the salon and had watched while the hairdresser clipped away. But he hadn’t dared to walk in, let alone attempt to pilfer the piles of hair on the salon floor.

  Lucy, Robbie, Alice, Chelsea, and Rachel. Thanks to the Daily Post, he was no longer the only one to know that their stories belonged together.

  Now just one last victim remained.

  CHAPTER 43

  MAX DIRECTED THE CAB to the Flatiron district, and then led the way to Sala One Nine, a Spanish restaurant on Nineteenth Street.

  “I hope you like tapas,” he said, opening the heavy wooden door to a red restaurant with exposed brick and stone, lit by small tea candles scattered throughout the room.

  “I love anything that involves getting to eat seven different kinds of food in a single sitting.”

  The restaurant was already filled with hungry customers. Rather than cope with a forty-five minute wait, they accepted the host’s invitation to eat at the bar, where Max ordered a pitcher of sangria and some queso and croquetas to get th
em started.

  This was their first chance to be alone since their coffee that wasn’t quite a coffee had ended the previous night. The transition from their official roles to what was presumably a date was not an easy one for either of them. Ellie found herself wanting to talk about the case, and apparently Max had questions of his own.

  “So, tell me if this is none of my business, but I picked up on a kind of secret language between you and Rogan today.”

  “Nothing secret. We’re still getting into the groove of being partners.”

  “From an outsider’s perspective, you seem to have found the rhythm pretty quickly. I could tell he was the one who was resistant to let Knight and me in, but the two of you seemed to work it out without even exchanging words.”

  “We exchanged words,” Ellie said, flashing back to the scene in the car while they’d been waiting for Donovan. “You just weren’t there to hear them.”

  “I’ve got to tell you, I’ve been doing this a few years now, and you’re not like most of the cops I’ve met.”

  “Being a girl type person is still enough to stand out in the NYPD.”

  “It’s more than that. I don’t know. You were pre-law at some point, right? Do you ever regret not seeing it through?”

  Ellie had come across this reaction before. Cops were supposed to be simple-minded, blue-collar traditionalists. She’d gone to college. She lived in Manhattan. Her last boyfriend was an investment banker. She even used big words on occasion.

  When people said she didn’t seem like a cop, it often said more about their stereotypes of police than anything having to do with Ellie. The investment banker, for example, had continually asked her when she was going to “get over” being a cop. Bill’s refusal to accept that she wasn’t too good for her job was one of the reasons she lived on her own now. She hoped she wasn’t going to have the same problem with Max.