Angel’s Tip

by Alafair Burke

  “When you grow up around here, people are doctors and lawyers and corporate executives. But my father was a cop, and my mother’s a bookkeeper. The neighbor to our left was a plumber. The one on the right worked graveyards at Boeing. Being from Wichita, it never dawned on me that I would need to apologize to anyone for being a cop.”

  Donovan set his sangria down and braced his palms against the bar. “Okay, let’s clear up a couple of things. One, I grew up around here, but it was in Kew Gardens, where my father’s still a shoe salesman, and my mother was a dental hygienist. When I told my dad I was turning down a six-digit salary so I could be a prosecutor, he acted more like I was on the other side of an indictment, begging for bail money. So as far as I’m concerned, no one who loves their job ever has to apologize to anyone.”

  “I’m so sorry. I just get so used to—”

  “No explanation necessary. I should have been more clear about what I meant.”

  “You mean you weren’t challenging me to an I-grew-up-poorer-than-you-did contest?” Ellie could still feel the red in her cheeks.

  “You’re not like most of the cops I know because you don’t seem to have the same kind of us-versus-them mentality.”

  “Ah, well, that’s an easy one,” she said, relieved by the shift in the conversation. “I don’t see the point in any of that. All I care about is getting the work done.”

  “And when you were pre-law, did you ever think about being a prosecutor?”

  “I like being a cop. I like the directness of it. You’re there from the very beginning. You get to talk firsthand to witnesses and victims and suspects. Your instincts shape the investigation from day one. If I’m going to do law enforcement, I want to do it as a cop. When I thought about being a lawyer, I was in it so I wouldn’t have to deal with the dark, dreary, and depressing shit my father thought about day in and day out. I was in it for the money.”

  “So you’re saying I’ve got the worst of both worlds.”

  “No offense.”

  The truth was, Ellie had wondered a few times in the last two days whether perhaps she was better suited to the district attorney’s office. Where Eckels saw her youth and enthusiasm as hurdles to be surmounted, Knight had seen a dream witness. Dan Eckels and people like him were always going to run police departments, and she would always be butting heads with them. But with Simon Knight, it had seemed like it was all about cutting through the bullshit and getting the work done. She could nail down murder cases for trial without being front and center, on the news, and in books written by ex-boyfriends.

  But tonight, when the case against Jake Myers had collapsed, Knight had shown his true colors. He did what he needed to cover his ass with the police commissioner and the mayor’s office. He was talking about a possible task force. Even FBI involvement.

  And she had responded just as Rogan had. Possessive. Territorial. Knight had shown his true colors, but so had she. And hers were bluer than she liked to acknowledge.

  Her true colors also made her the kind of cop who couldn’t stop talking about work.

  “So do you think Myers was right?” she asked.

  “To hire some guy at death’s door to take the rap for him? Uh, no, I’m pretty sure in any version of morality, that wouldn’t count as right.”

  “No, I mean about us having tunnel vision. We all wanted it to be him. It gave us an arrest. A suspect. A trial. The mayor’s office was happy.”

  “I’ve known you three days, and I can already tell you’re a good cop. If he’d told you the truth, you would have fought like hell against everyone to make sure we did the right thing.”

  “Maybe,” she said, popping another croqueta in her mouth. “Maybe if he’d come clean Monday night. If he’d told the truth when we first questioned him at Pulse. But once he lied about everything—”

  “No jury would’ve believed him,” Donovan said, “that’s for sure.”

  “I don’t think I would have either.”

  THEY HAD JUST ORDERED another four little plates to share when the television above the bar cut from a break in the Knicks game to a teaser for the night’s local news.

  “Tonight at eleven.” At the top of the telecast was a scaffolding collapse on the Upper West Side. A window washer had plummeted thirty-six floors and survived.

  Plus, a local newspaper drops an Internet bombshell. Is a serial killer targeting Manhattan’s elite nightclubs? And why isn’t the NYPD telling you about this killer and his shocking MO? The paper promises more details tomorrow morning, but we’ll have the scoop for you tonight, at eleven.

  The screen changed to an AT&T ad.

  “Jesus,” Max said. “Those kinds of stories piss me off to no end.”

  “Did you notice how they phrased it? ‘A local newspaper drops a bombshell.’ That way the story is about the story.”

  “That’s what irritates me. One of the tabloid newspapers prints some wild speculation, and then the rest of the bottom feeders pile on, repeating the same crap without having to do any kind of verification like a real journalist.”

  “Ah, except this time, the same crap happens to have a wee bit of truth to it,” she said, leaning in so others at the bar would not overhear.

  “Well, shit. They don’t know that, and they don’t really care. They scare people and shock them to get better ratings. And if they screw up an investigation, or put people at risk, or make it harder for us to get a conviction—they don’t care about any of that either. Sorry, I get a little riled up.”

  “Don’t apologize,” she said. “It’s nice to talk to someone who gets it. My ex-boyfriend—sorry, I know exes are taboo first-date talk, but this was forever ago—he would always ask me why I had to dwell on such depressing topics.”

  Like most people, Bill got through each day by refusing to think about the horrible things that people did to each other on a regular basis. With Peter, she had been grateful that he at least shared her inability to blissfully ignore the realities of the world. But they would never see those realities through the same lens. Peter got worked up over crime because a body found in the right location, and abused in just the right way, could make for great copy. His commitment to his book was just a sign that he would never really get her.

  “Well, do you know how many women I’ve gotten even semi-serious with before they start asking me when I’m going to cash in on my law degree?”

  “Did you go straight from law school to the DA’s office?”

  “Nah. I did the big-firm thing for a couple of years to pay down my loans, but I can’t imagine ever going back. Eighty hours a week, all for some multimillion-dollar commercial lawsuit and squabbling over who would get the biggest bonus or who’d make partner first. Once you’ve seen the kind of cases I’ve worked on, you just don’t look at things the same way. What everyone else considers the real world seems like a complete fantasyland. It’s like you get a new definition of normal. Do you know what I mean, or should I stop babbling?”

  “Please, you’re not babbling, and I know exactly what you mean.”

  Donovan, like her, had seen the aftermath of the crimes of people who were inhabited by pure, untarnished evil—men who inflicted sexual torture, who casually took the lives of others, who could bury a child alive and then make themselves a bologna sandwich.

  Ellie had spent her entire adult life chasing the normalcy that came to others as naturally and effortlessly as breathing. Since the day her father’s body was found, Ellie had been convinced that her darkest thoughts would someday be put to rest, once she finally uncovered the true circumstances surrounding his death. But she had returned from Kansas with a new acceptance of the possibility that serenity would never be a part of her makeup. She would always wake up with nightmares. She would never learn to turn off the job.

  A new definition of normal. Maybe that was what she needed to get past the feeling that she was never going to be like other people.

  The vibration of her cell phone startled her. It was Peter, yet
again. She felt the phone buzz in her hand seconds later, indicating a new message.

  She did her best to ignore it. She was having a delicious dinner with a smart, sweet, over-the-top-good-looking guy who might actually share her same ridiculous sickness. She had every reason to ignore her stupid phone. She made it through four more bites of chorizo before excusing herself to the ladies’ room.

  “HEY. IT’S ME. I swear, I’m not a fucking stalker. Well, okay, maybe a little bit of a fucking stalker, since I am calling from outside your apartment.”

  Ellie shook her head. “I shouldn’t have come, I know, but I hate the idea of you hating me. I don’t want things to end this way.” Jess had been right about Peter. The ending itself wasn’t the problem for him. He just couldn’t stand the idea of being the bad guy.

  “So I’m sitting on the stoop of your building, being semi-stalkerish, and I noticed a car circle around the block a few times, then park out front. By the time the driver got out, I had gone into the coffee shop to warm up. Anyway, it was your lieutenant. I couldn’t tell if he rang up to your apartment or not, and I just saw him drive away, but I thought I’d let you know. Either you’re having a secret affair with your nemesis, or it’s something important. And, no, I won’t try to figure out what it is so I can write about it.”

  She found herself smiling sadly.

  “Sorry for rambling. I won’t bother you anymore. The ball’s in your court. Bye, Ellie.”

  Ellie knew she’d eventually go to Peter’s apartment to end things with him on a better note, but at that moment all she could think about was the image of Dan Eckels outside her building.

  No DNA. Clean crime scenes. A knowledge of city crime patterns. The stakeout abilities to nail down her running routine.

  Simon Knight had asked her earlier in the day where they might begin looking for a killer among forty thousand officers in the NYPD. One of them had just jumped to the top of the list.

  CHAPTER 44

  J. J. ROGAN AND MAX DONOVAN seemed out of place on Ellie’s familiar brown couch. A few weeks ago, she hadn’t met either one of them, and now they sat side by side on her living room sofa, hips nearly touching, surrounded by piles of magazines, clothing, and empty beer bottles, all of which she made a point of blaming entirely on Jess.

  As soon as she’d heard Peter’s voice mail, she’d known she had to head straight home. If Eckels was looking for her, she wanted to be here. She wanted to be found. She wanted to look him in the eye and figure out how he’d fooled so many people for so long.

  Max had insisted on coming with her. And when she’d called Rogan from the cab, he’d insisted on driving in from Brooklyn. And so now here they sat on her sofa in a room that was usually restricted to her, Jess, and restaurant deliverymen.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Rogan was saying. “Lieutenant Dan Fuckin’ Eckels? Strangling chicks and cutting them up and hacking off all their hair? I mean, Jesus H. We need to think through this shit.”

  “I have thought it through,” Ellie said. “He was the lead detective on Alice Butler’s case. He mentioned in the reports that Alice told her sister someone was following her shortly before her murder, but he left out the fact that she picked up on the guy after she left a hair salon.”

  “And you’re so sure that’s a detail that you would have included in a report?”

  “Would I have included it? Of course.”

  “Okay, but you’re fricking rain man. You’re positive that every cop would’ve noted that?”

  “Of course not. That’s why I assumed Eckels had simply left it out. But after we caught the Chelsea Hart case, he never bothered to mention the possibility of a pattern. We know for a fact that McIlroy went to Eckels three years ago about the earlier cases. And one of those was Lucy Feeney’s—and you can say that Robbie Harrington and Alice Butler and Rachel Peck don’t look like the Chelsea Hart case, but you can’t deny the similarities between Chelsea and Lucy. Both strangled. Both stabbed. And the hair—give me a break, that’s not something you miss. Why didn’t he mention it? He pressured McIlroy three years ago not to pursue a connection, then did the same thing with me yesterday morning in his office.”

  Donovan cleared his throat before interjecting. “And McIlroy’s snooping around three years ago could explain the gap in the killings. Eckels may have been ready to kill again, but got scared off when McIlroy picked up the pattern.”

  “And with McIlroy gone,” she said, “the coast is clear. Eckels also knew that the photograph in the Sun—taken that night at the restaurant—came from Jordan McLaughlin. And as a cop, he could have easily come into contact with a guy like Darrell Washington. The neighbors said he had a way of talking to the cops too much.”

  “Shit,” Rogan said. “You said Washington lived in the LaGuardia Houses?”

  “Right off the Manhattan Bridge. With his grandmother.”

  “Eckels used to work out of the Seventh back in the day. He would’ve been in and out of those projects all the time when Washington was a kid. Now I’m getting sucked into this whack idea.”

  “And Eckels isn’t exactly my biggest fan,” she reminded them.

  “He thinks you’re a pain in the ass,” Rogan said. “That’s not the same as wanting to carve your initials into some girl’s forehead.”

  “Then do you want to tell me why Dan Eckels suddenly showed up at my apartment tonight, circling the block and coming to my front door?”

  “Maybe Peter made that shit up just to have an excuse to see you.”

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Ellie said. “If he says Eckels was here, then he was here.” She hadn’t bothered filling Donovan in on the specifics of her relationship to Peter Morse, and he’d been polite enough not to pry.

  “Hopefully we’ll get an explanation soon enough,” Donovan said. He had called Simon Knight, who had covered his butt once again by pointing them to Deputy Chief Al Kaplan for guidance. As the head of Manhattan South Detective Borough, Kaplan had been the one to pull the strings necessary to move Ellie into homicide, and now here she was on his radar again already. Kaplan was unnerved enough to hear that the DA’s office would be dismissing the murder charges against Myers in the morning. He wasn’t about to ignore the possibility—however remote—that one of his own had something to do with this.

  The Deputy Chief had been the one to make the call. As the three of them sat waiting in her pigsty of a living room, investigators from the DA’s Homicide Investigation Unit, accompanied by Internal Affairs, were on their way to Eckels’s house in Forest Hills.

  DONOVAN WAS PLACING his fourth call to the HIU investigator. “Any sign of him?…I know you said you’d call. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to call you every thirty minutes for an update…. Good. Thanks for staying on it.”

  He flipped his phone shut and looked at his watch. “Almost one in the morning. Is Dan Eckels the kind of guy who stays out until one in the morning, even on a Friday night?”

  Ellie had that discomforting, racing feeling caused by a combination of sleep deprivation and an overdose of adrenaline. “I don’t know anything about the man.”

  She remembered Flann McIlroy’s description of a lecture from Lieutenant Eckels: Just imagine the mean, gruff boss in any cop movie you’ve ever seen.

  She had come to assume in the short time she’d known her lieutenant that he behaved that way to compensate for his own insecurities. Now she wondered if the adoption of a well-worn and familiar persona wasn’t the perfect cover for a much darker secret.

  “I’d feel a lot better if we’d found him by now,” Donovan said.

  “Me too.”

  She had finally convinced Rogan to go home shortly after midnight, with a promise that she’d call with any news. The more time that passed without any sign of Eckels, the less implausible of a suspect he seemed.

  “If he weren’t a cop, you’d be yelling at me to wake up the most conservative judge I could find to sign a search warrant for his house.”

>   “I wouldn’t yell.”

  “Beg?”

  “In your dreams.” Ellie sat in her off-white armchair with her knees pulled up tight in front of her, wondering why she wasn’t pushing harder. If they were right, Eckels had already killed at least five women, two on her watch. If they were right, he could at that moment be selecting his next victim, or planning to come after Ellie directly.

  But maybe they were wrong.

  If they were wrong, and she led the charge to execute a search warrant at Dan Eckels’s house, her career would be over. Tomorrow it would be good-bye homicide unit. Within a year, she’d be chased out of the department altogether. Another cop could go gypsy, relocating to another city to start anew, but not her. She was Ellie Hatcher, that chick on Dateline and in People magazine whose whack job of a father offed himself with his service weapon.

  Ellie trusted her gut. She trusted it so much that she’d kick down the door on Eckels’s house personally if her gut told her it was the right thing to do, damn the consequences.

  But it wasn’t the devastating consequences of a mistake that had her tucked into a ball in her armchair. Her gut was telling her she was missing something. Her head knew the facts, but her instincts were telling her that there was another way of looking at them. Like a child’s blocks that could be formed into an infinite number of completed shapes, the facts would tell a different story if she could somehow rotate and rearrange them until they fell into the correct combination.

  She just wasn’t ready to pull the trigger on Eckels. They had people watching his house. They had investigators quietly calling Eckels’s friends in the department to see where he might be—a girlfriend’s, a late-night poker game, some explanation for his disappearance after the mysterious drop-in at Ellie’s apartment.