“That’s Valentine’s Day. Did you and Seth do anything to celebrate?”
She gave a sad smile. “We used to, when we first met. But once we were married, we had an anniversary to celebrate instead. Seth always says Valentine’s Day is more of a Hallmark-card holiday for people who don’t have the real thing. Amateur night.”
Rogan’s eyes had moved to Ellie’s jacket pocket. He knew something was up.
“The ER doc who treated you made a note: he saw you snap a cell-phone picture of your injured face before he cleaned you up.” Ellie’s best guess was that the doctor added the notation to aid the prosecution in the event Laura subsequently changed her mind and decided to press charges.
“I thought I might need it someday. Plus it was just something to remember. I take pictures of my food, too.” Laura laughed nervously at her own self-deprecating comment.
“Or you wanted to be able to show Seth the lengths to which you’d go to ensure you had power over him. That you would tell people he was beating you. That you had evidence. That you would ruin him.”
“I don’t understand,” Laura said, complete with a confused head shake.
“I would have been pissed too if my husband spent Valentine’s Day drinking at the Soho Grand with all his unmarried work buddies.” She placed her cell phone on the interrogation room table in front of Laura. Rogan craned his neck, trying to get a better view of the screen. From his vantage point, he would only be able to see that it was a Facebook profile, but that would be enough for him to figure out that Ellie had found a flaw in Laura’s story.
“Right here, Laura.” Ellie pointed to the relevant post. “A ‘check-in’ at the Soho Grand bar on February 14th at 11:10 p.m. He didn’t even bother covering his tracks. Did he tell you he got stuck at work? Sorry to miss Valentine’s Day, babe, I’ll make up for it? Or was he the type who didn’t even bother to call? You just sat there in your living room—maybe even in a new dress—wondering where he was and why he didn’t pick up his cell or answer your texts. Then you checked his Facebook page. Look, one of his buddies was even nice enough to tag everyone so you could see whose company your husband chose over yours.”
“The time on the hospital report must be wrong,” Laura said. “He came home drunk. Picked a stupid fight, like always. Then he punched me.”
“Speaking of his drinking, I notice from all these many pictures your husband posted, he seemed to favor martinis.”
“What about it? I don’t know why you’re treating me this way,” Laura protested. “You told me I was here voluntarily. That I’m not under arrest. And now—”
Ellie looked at Rogan and could tell he knew it was over. “I’m trying to give you a chance to keep it that way, Laura. Just hear me out. See, he always seems to be drinking martinis in these photos. Meanwhile, this woman standing next to him in every single group shot on Valentine’s Day—according to the tag, her name is Megan Underhill, works with your husband at Morgan Stanley, went to Harvard, very attractive by the way. She appears to favor a dark drink served in a highball glass. Could even be Macallan, like the bottle I saw thrown on your living room rug tonight.”
“Sometimes he drank martinis, sometimes he had scotch.”
“Fine, let’s say your husband’s beverage choices ran the gamut. No big deal. But here’s the more curious thing. This very attractive woman named Megan? She’s not as attractive as you, if you ask me, but she’s different, especially in her coloring. Olive skin. Black hair. That dark-plum lipstick she’s wearing in these photographs wouldn’t do much for blondes like us, and yet it would appear to be a perfect match to the lipstick I noticed on the rim of a highball glass in your kitchen sink.”
“This is crazy,” Laura said. “I had a drink myself when Seth first started to pick at me tonight. Sometimes it would calm everything down if I would just tell him I needed to take the edge off—like I was taking the blame for whatever imaginary slight set him off. And maybe I wear the wrong colors for my skin. I didn’t realize this was a makeover session.” She looked to her ally Rogan for help.
“Fine, then,” Ellie said, crossing her arms. “Just tell me where I can find that lipstick in your apartment. Or your purse. Or, you know, wherever you keep your makeup.”
“Um, I don’t know where I put it.”
“Okay, so how about the name of the color? Or the brand? Anything you can give us to help clear up the confusion.”
Ellie flashed a glance at Rogan. He knew—when was he ever going to learn?—that she’d been dealing from a stacked deck all along. At her side, she rubbed her thumb and index finger together. Pay up, partner.
Less than an hour later, they had Laura’s confession on videotape. The woman was still blaming her husband for his own death, but instead of self-defense, she claimed that the discovery of the lipstick-stained highball glass had sent her into an uncontrollable rage. A battered woman might have had a shot getting past a prosecutor, but not a jealous wife. Laura would be indicted for murder, no question; a jury would handle the rest.
Rogan was handing Ellie a crisp new set of twenties from his wallet when John Shannon emerged from their lieutenant’s office to witness the transaction. “Looks like a nice wad of dough you guys got there.”
Ellie could already see where this was heading. The most effort Detective John Shannon ever put into the squad room was cracking wise. With money changing hands from Rogan to Ellie, his wee brain was probably overheating from the collision of potential barbs: Would it be the attractive female detective earning her money the old-fashioned way, or yet another comment about Rogan’s family wealth? Lucky for Ellie, more often than not Shannon had a way of opening the door for her go-to retort.
“You mean like those wads of dough you snarf down every morning at Krispy Kreme?” She tapped out a “bu-dump-bump” on her desktop. “I’m sorry, man. You just make lame cop-eating-doughnut jokes so . . . damn . . . easy.”
“When you got it, you flaunt it,” he said, patting his oversized belly. At least the guy had as good a sense of humor about himself as he expected in others. Ellie saw his gaze move to the squad room entrance. “You don’t see your man enough at home, Hatcher? He’s got to come see you in our house? I owe him a follow-up report, so I’m heading for the can till he’s out of here.”
The he in question was Ellie’s boyfriend, Max Donovan. She had only just gotten used to the word boyfriend to describe a relationship between two level-headed grown-ups when the nature of that relationship suddenly changed three months ago. Now they lived together. And at this minute, he was—as Shannon noted—coming to her house.
Max knew better than to greet her with a kiss, hug, or even a handshake in the squad room. Once he reached her desk, he simply said, “I must not have heard the music.”
“Music?” she asked.
“Of whatever ice cream truck had Shannon hauling ass.”
Ellie laughed, but Rogan shook his head in mock disappointment. “You two are morphing into the damn Wonder Twins, is what you’re doing. You realize that, don’t you?”
“The Wonder Twins didn’t actually morph into one,” she corrected. “They touched each other to activate their individual morphing powers. One could transform into water and its various states; the other changed into animals. Form of—” She held up her fist for Rogan’s return tap, but all she got was a death stare.
“Don’t make me join Shannon in the men’s room. You don’t want to know what that man is capable of in there.”
Max feigned a shudder. “So I need to run something past you in my official capacity as a representative of the New York District Attorney’s Office’s Conviction Integrity Unit.”
“Conviction integrity unit” was the preferred prosecutorial language for a specialized unit that reviewed what defense attorneys would call either “innocence cases” or “wrongful convictions.” Ellie knew that Max viewed his recent appointment to the unit as a sign that the elected district attorney, Martin Overton, was looking at him as a pote
ntial supervisor.
Max took a seat in the worn, wooden guest chair next to their face-to-face desks. “And before you get too worried, it’s not a claim from a defendant, and it’s not a claim about you. This is about a conviction that was locked and loaded eighteen years ago: a serial killer named Anthony Amaro. Problem is, we got an anonymous letter. The author claims that Amaro is innocent and that the same guy who killed six women twenty years ago is still at it.”
He reached into his briefcase and pulled out, not a letter, but an eight-by-ten photograph of a woman’s face. He handed it to Rogan, who gave it a quick look and passed it to Ellie. “And supposedly the latest victim is Helen Brunswick.”
CHAPTER
TWO
Helen Brunswick is looking up at the camera from beneath a “Life Is Good” baseball cap as she accepts a face lick from a chocolate Lab. Someone who had never seen the photograph before would have placed the woman in her mid-to-late thirties, but Ellie knew she was forty-five. Ellie also knew that the cap had been a Mother’s Day gift from the woman’s ten-year-old daughter, Jessica. The dog’s name was Gus. The photographer had been Jessica’s fourteen-year-old brother, Sam.
Any New Yorker who hadn’t been in a recent coma had seen that same photograph of the slain psychotherapist. It seemed to be the favorite of the local journalists who had been captivated by the case. Rogan undoubtedly knew the same basic facts that Ellie had gathered from the media coverage, but that didn’t stop Max from covering the fundamentals. “Park Slope shrink. Two kids. Recently separated. Six weeks ago, she didn’t come home from a counseling appointment in time to meet the ex-husband. No answer on her cell. No pickup at work. The ex finally made the six-block walk from their brownstone to check on her, and found her body in her office. Two shots. Signs of a struggle, but no forced entry.”
Like any high-profile case, Helen Brunswick’s had brought out the armchair detectives who scoured the Web for information about the victim, her husband, their kids, and all potential enemies. In the process of a divorce, initiated by the husband. Not quite enough money to keep up the standard of living the couple had once shared. Last Ellie had heard, the doctor-husband had been forced to hire security to escort the kids between his Upper East Side apartment and their Brooklyn private school undisturbed.
“Two responses,” Rogan said. “One, everyone knows the husband did it. Two, last time I checked, any place six blocks from a Park Slope brownstone can’t be in Manhattan South, which means this has nothing to do with us.”
Rogan was twisting the cap on his Montblanc pen, always a sign that he was growing impatient with a conversation and didn’t care if people noticed. Ellie was about to encourage Max to get to the point, but remembered all the times she’d insisted that he not treat her like a girlfriend at work. She owed it to him to hold up her end of that bargain. If this were any other ADA, she’d give him a few more seconds before piling on.
“I mentioned our Conviction Integrity Unit. Our job is to look at all innocence claims that come in on any case our office prosecuted. Eighteen years ago, this man, Anthony Amaro, pled guilty to the murder of a prostitute named Deborah Garner.” He handed them another photograph, this one a mug shot. The displayed date of birth put Amaro at thirty-one years old at the time. He had a round, flat face, and the line of his black, slicked-back hair was already beginning to recede. He appeared to stare straight through the camera. “At the time, it was believed that whoever killed Deborah Garner also killed five other women in upstate New York—all shot, all with ties to the sex trade. Their bodies all carried the same signature, specific enough to connect the cases together: broken limbs. Always after death.”
“Sounds like the kind of person who might read about a big case like Brunswick and ask a random buddy to send an anonymous letter claiming a connection,” Rogan said. “Oh my goodness, he must be innocent.”
“I promise, it’s more than that. Usually, in the Conviction Integrity Unit, a cursory glance makes it clear there’s no issue. We know everyone in prison claims he’s innocent. This one? The lawyers are pretty torn.”
It dawned on Ellie that Max would not describe his colleagues as “torn” without considerable deliberation. “When did your office get the letter?”
“One month ago, tomorrow. We’ve been tight-lipped on it—with everybody.”
Moving in together had been a bigger leap for Ellie than for Max. Besides the lingering question of whether marriage and children were in their future, they had the added complication of entangled jobs. She and Max had promised each other to be utterly scrupulous not to blur the lines between the professional and the personal. In her position as a detective, she had yet to encounter a situation where she couldn’t talk about her work with her ADA roommate. Apparently, the reverse wasn’t true.
“And it’s not just the letter that concerns us. As much media attention as the Brunswick murder has gotten, we managed to hold back some details.”
“The signature,” Ellie said. “Brunswick’s limbs were broken?”
Max nodded. “Both arms. And not in a struggle. Postmortem, just like Amaro’s victims. When Amaro was prosecuted, it was a fetish unobserved—or at least unrecorded—in any prior homicides. And now we’ve got the same postmortem injuries inflicted on Helen Brunswick, and we’ve got someone out there writing letters about information that was never made public. We’re going to need follow-up. The only question is: Who’s going to do it?”
Ellie was intrigued, but Rogan, apparently, did not need time to mull over a response. “Brunswick’s not our case,” he said. “Neither was Deborah Garner.”
“Not originally,” Max acknowledged. “But what we want is a ‘fresh-look team.’ These innocence claims are—well, they’re a little schizophrenic. Obviously, we want to make sure we got it right, but there’s this theory that we develop a form of tunnel vision. Psychologically, we want the people who have been arrested, especially the ones who have already been convicted, to be guilty. We need them to be guilty, so we can continue to believe that the system doesn’t make serious mistakes. A fresh look means bringing in new people, unassociated with the original case, to look for evidence of innocence. A fresh look is supposed to be neutral. I’m the most experienced ADA in the office with no personal connection to the original detectives and prosecutors on the Deborah Garner case, but we need an investigative component, too.”
Ellie had never seen Rogan look so annoyed with an ADA, and, unless she was mistaken, his irritation didn’t stop with Max. She couldn’t blame him for wanting to avoid the assignment. Revisiting Amaro’s conviction meant second-guessing the work of the people who put him behind bars.
“Sorry,” Rogan said, “but we need to clear cases on the board.” His eyes were fixed on the squad’s white board. Now that they had Laura Bendel’s confession, they could change her husband’s name from red to black ink.
Max cleared his throat, and Ellie knew immediately she wasn’t going to like whatever came out next. Maybe she had her own form of tunnel vision, because she wanted to believe there was a good reason for Max to pull them into this.
Rogan’s gaze moved suddenly from the white board to the far corner of the squad room. Their lieutenant, Robin Tucker, was leaning halfway out her office door. “Why are you two still here?”
“Sorry, Lou,” Ellie said. “ADA Donovan was just running something past us.”
“No, duh. Who do you think has to approve something like that? And I got a Brooklyn South captain on the phone wondering why his guys haven’t heard from you on Helen Brunswick. Increase the words per minute, all right? From what I hear, you’ve got a lot of work on your hands.”
CHAPTER
THREE
Carrie Blank tucked her skirt beneath her crossed legs once again, hoping it wasn’t too short for a job interview.
“Ms. Moreland will be with you shortly,” the receptionist assured her.
Oh no. Had the shift in her chair registered as a sign of impatience? Carrie didn�
��t want the receptionist to tell Linda Moreland that the potential new hire was pushy. “Oh, no problem at all. I’m happy to wait.”
Crap. Had that sounded sarcastic? Or too sycophantic?
She felt dampness building inside her silk blouse. Why was she so nervous? She knew precisely why: because last week her former-professor-turned-famous-criminal-defense-lawyer Linda Moreland had phoned her out of the blue, asking if she had any interest in representing the man who was as near to the boogeyman as Carrie could imagine.
Carrie remembered the first time she heard about a serial killer in their city.
An eighth-grader named Doug Bronson—the kids called him Dougie-Bro—had been absent for more than a week. Even at Bailey Middle, a week was enough time for school administrators to start asking questions. Pretty soon, Mrs. Jenson was pulling guidance-counselor duty, visiting each class to explain that their fellow student was moving to Baltimore to live with an aunt.
Carrie could see the frustration in Mrs. Jenson’s face as she reported, without elaboration, that Dougie had “lost his mother.” The school board, she announced, had decided that it would be “inappropriate” for students to repeat any rumors they might hear beyond the fact that Dougie’s only parent had died. Instead, students were “encouraged” to report any such “gossip” to the principal’s office. Mrs. Jenson didn’t bother suppressing a closing eye roll—because, right, students at Bailey were known for reporting their peers to the principal.
Predictably, the announcement Mrs. Jenson had been forced to make immediately led to desperate and frenzied discussion of the real story about Dougie’s departure. His mother, they soon heard, had been murdered. And not just her. There were other victims, but the police were keeping the case quiet—supposedly so the killer wouldn’t know they had made the connection, but more likely, in the eyes of kids from Red View, the Keystone Kops didn’t want everyone to see they were a helpless joke.
In an escalating war for the latest updates, it was Monique Davidson who broke the juiciest tidbit. Carrie remembered how Monique, with her giant hoop earrings, ballcap turned backward, had huddled anyone she could gather on the school’s front steps. The bell was about to ring, but no one cared. The coy teases of “You won’t believe this” and “No wonder Dougie left town,” delivered between pops of chewing gum, were too delicious to resist.
All Day and a Night: A Novel of Suspense (Ellie Hatcher) Page 2