“Well, you can check that off your list, then. My reports speak for themselves.”
“No report captures the atmosphere in the box.” Ellie placed her giant plastic cup of tea on the table and leaned forward. “Look, my dad was a detective. He told me how the world worked—the difference between the field and the courthouse. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the world cops will always occupy. But, like we said, we’ve got another victim. And just like you cracked your case by tying Garner to the Utica victims based on the postmortem treatment of the bodies, we’re looking at the same situation. And here’s the thing: the latest woman also has ties to Utica that go back to that era. So we just need to know: How much pressure went into that confession?”
“You’re saying I coerced it?” It wasn’t a word cops used except facetiously.
“No. I’m recognizing that I, and my partner, and you, and my father, and every other detective who has ever managed to persuade a person to give it up has to do more than say please with a cherry on top. People don’t land themselves in prison for a long, long time without a little push. We’re asking how hard you pushed.”
“Apparently not hard enough. Never got him to confess to the Utica girls, did I?”
“No, but you got him to confess to Garner with nothing but evidence of his E-Z Pass moving through a New Jersey toll booth.”
“And a witness ID. It was a clean confession. You wasted your time coming up here.”
She and Rogan had already discussed the strategy for this line of questioning. With Rogan reluctant to go anywhere beyond taking Majors at his word, they eventually agreed to start with a light touch, before confronting Majors with hard questions. She looked to Rogan, wondering if he had anything else to ask Majors while he was still relatively cooperative.
“Did Amaro ever say why he had come downstate?” Rogan asked. If Majors had looked into the reasons behind Amaro’s trip, the information wasn’t in the police reports.
“Said he was visiting a kid he knew from foster care, but I always figured that was a cover. He was hoping to make regular visits down here for his kills, because the heat was on up in Utica.”
“Amaro was in foster care?” Rogan asked. “Because these days he’s playing the role of a good guy who’s missed the chance to mourn his mother’s funeral and play uncle to his niece and nephew.”
“He’s bullshitting. When he was facing the needle, he was crying about the years he spent rotating from foster home to foster home.”
In the short time Ellie had been a homicide detective, New York had had a capital punishment moratorium. She’d never had the power to use death as a motivator in the box. “How much did that figure in the interrogation? The possibility of execution.”
Majors looked like a mild-mannered senior citizen enjoying the links, but the laugh that escaped his lips was cruel. “There’s not much I miss about the job these days, but the threat of the needle sure did make it easier to run an interrogation. You know how I got the nickname Buck? My parents named me after James Buchanan. When I was old enough to look him up, I found out he opposed the South’s secession, but then waffled on the legality of the war to stop it. I was only seven years old, but I knew I didn’t want to be named after someone who couldn’t make up his mind. All the high-level talk about what’s moral and what’s not, whether the death penalty deters—I’ll leave that to the politicians and philosophers, but one thing I know for sure about the death penalty: you get more confessions, which means more guilty pleas, which means fewer people getting off on technicalities. What do you think Linda Moreland would have to say about that? Bet you anything she’s got security alarms on her house, her office, her car. Takes a driver instead of the subway. Expects the hardworking people of the police department to keep her protected from the riffraff. But comes time for court, we’re the bad guys.” He spun his empty bottle on the table. “Listen to me. Guess the old Detective Dime is still in there after all.”
“Did Detective Dime ever go the extra mile in coming up with a confession?” Ellie asked.
“Already told you. It was clean.”
“Linda Moreland says it’s too clean. ‘You got it right. That’s how it happened. I didn’t mean to do it.’ Do those phrases sound familiar?”
Like a suspect in the box, he looked to Rogan for support. “What’s your partner talking about?”
“She’s quoting Moreland quoting you—quoting confessions you obtained. Count yourself lucky that she wasn’t around when you were on the job, because Moreland’s a real piece of work. She’s got a theory that you were putting words on the page that never came out of a suspect’s mouth. Turns out, those three sentences appear in most of the confessions you got over the years. We just need the explanation so we can keep Amaro where he belongs.”
Majors took a deep breath, then squinted at them and smiled. He rose from the table. “You two kids trying to pull good cop/bad cop on me? On me? That’s precious. Have a good drive back to the city, because we’re done talking.”
Rogan seemed worry free as they walked to the golf course’s parking lot, his gaze fixed on the balls soaring above the practice range.
“What did you make of that?” she asked.
“Seemed like most of the guys who were on the job when I started. Old school.”
“Like, not above smacking-Amaro-in-the-head-with-a-telephone-book old school?”
“Sometimes I wonder if you really were raised by a cop, Hatcher. You know how it works in the box. No one gives it up easy. Sometimes you’ve got to suggest a path for them to get the words out.”
“You can’t possibly think it’s okay to force innocent people to confess, telling them precisely what to say?”
“I think old Dime Majors back there would say, ‘But what if they ain’t so innocent?’”
“And that was for Majors to decide?”
“It is what it is, Hatcher. We’ve pressed for confessions, too, and you know it. When you’ve got the right guy, and you need to seal the deal, you do what you need to do.”
“But it’s starting to look like Majors had the wrong guy in Amaro’s case.”
“And now you’re sounding like Max and his boss. We see this one different, and that’s that.” She started to speak, but he interrupted. “It’s okay. You’re in a bad position, and I get that. We get through this case, then we go back to normal.”
She was struggling for something to say. She never should have let Max convince her to take this assignment.
“Seriously, Hatcher, we’re cool. We got this.”
They got into the car in silence, and then he started the engine.
“What next?” she asked.
“We do like we do. The best evidence was the confession and the eyewitness.”
“We need to find Deborah Garner’s partner at the rest stop.”
“Bingo.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Linda had barely spoken a word to Carrie since they left the courtroom. She’d been pacing between her office, the narrow hallway, and the tiny lobby the entire time as she gave quotes to the media via her cell phone.
“Please tell Anderson,” she said dramatically, “that I’ve always believed that the clients I’ve worked to exonerate were the anomalies—the few blips in an imperfect system that we must continue to review and perfect. But when I see a detective who was held up by the NYPD as a hero—as a miracle worker for his ability to pull self-incriminating statements from the suspects he and he alone decided to target—I start to wonder if we might not have a more systemic problem. There’s no doubt in my mind that Anthony Amaro should be released. The real question is: How many more innocent people are behind bars because of Buck Majors?”
Carrie had no idea what she could possibly do to help. And she still hadn’t told her mother she had quit Russ Waterston to represent Anthony Amaro. If Linda was getting this many calls, she could only imagine the extent of the media coverage in Utica. But she was certain that the minu
te she dialed her mom, Linda would come looking for her. She felt trapped.
Carrie finally decided that Linda was sufficiently preoccupied for her to make a quick call to her mother. Sure enough, her mom’s line had rung three times when Linda walked into the storage room that was doubling as Carrie’s workspace, her hands laced behind her head in triumph.
“Amazing. I thought this case had the potential to break everything open, but I never really anticipated the power of a single narrative to capture all of the harms I’ve been trying to highlight.”
Carrie hit the “end” button on her phone and set it on top of her journal on her worktable.
“You and that adorable little notebook,” Linda said. “You weren’t kidding about that habit of yours, were you?”
Carrie shrugged. She was regretting telling Linda the truth when she’d asked what Carrie was scribbling before that morning’s court hearing. Now she felt like Linda was questioning her efficiency.
“I’m glad the case is going well for you,” Carrie said. “But we talked about this when you hired me. I want to know the truth about my sister’s murder. I need to know whose DNA is beneath her fingernails.”
“As well you should,” Linda said. “But we’re not the state. We don’t have search warrants or grand juries or the inherent power that comes with being part of the government. This—embarrassing them—is our only power.”
“Embarrassing them doesn’t tell me who killed my sister.”
“Look, Carrie. I hired you on the assumption that you were smart enough to understand that identifying the real killer was only a possibility. This isn’t Perry Mason. The best we can do is to pressure the state to produce the answers they should have gotten for you twenty years ago.”
“So what’s left for me to do at this point?” Carrie asked.
“If you think we’ve done anything to truly get their attention, you’re giving them too much credit. We’ve got a clock ticking over them before Amaro’s release, but that’s not enough. It’s all about damages now. Money.”
“I thought we were supposed to be getting to the truth.” She realized how naïve she sounded the minute the words escaped her lips.
“That’s their job. Ours is to force them to do it, and money’s the only way to motivate them. If it weren’t for Buck Majors, they might have gotten to the truth about Donna nearly two decades ago. The DA is going to have to review every single conviction obtained as a result of one of his supposed confessions. We could keep a dozen lawyers employed full time for the next five years. We could even change the way people feel about the treatment of criminal defendants. And the first step is to convince these SOBs to finally figure out what happened to Donna. You have no idea how important you are to this case now. You’re the one who knows the lay of the land. You’re the one who’s going to make this happen.”
“And what exactly is this?”
“Making this a statewide case. We have Martin Overton’s attention here in the city, but now we’ve got to start pulling in the upstate players. We need to tear down not just the Deborah Garner investigation, but Utica’s complacency. Why did the Utica PD let the NYPD close their case without doing the real work?”
“I’m not sure what you want me—”
“Go to Utica,” she said. “I’m sending Thomas, too. And don’t argue with me about that. He’s got a list of all my investigators if you need anyone up there, and you’re going to want someone to drive for you, make your appointments, fetch you toothpaste from the drugstore. Trust me—the dear heart is invaluable on the road.”
The lawyers Carrie had worked for at Russ Waterston had tended to be painfully specific with their requests, down to the nitty gritty of the number of pages and the preferred font for any given legal memo. Linda was terribly eager to send Carrie back to her hometown, complete with a personal assistant in tow, but she hadn’t actually explained why. “I’m sorry, Linda. I don’t understand what you’re asking me to do.”
“Find the dirt. Find our poster child. Who epitomizes the Keystone Kops who failed to figure out the truth earlier? I don’t want you and Thomas back here until you can bring me Utica’s Buck Majors.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
John Shannon nearly ran right into Ellie as she and Rogan climbed the stairs at the 13th Precinct.
“Whoa, bruiser,” Rogan said.
“Sorry, I’m late for grand jury. If I’m a no-show, no OT, know what I’m saying? Oh, and a heads-up: there’s some guy waiting for you up there. Not a happy camper. Have fun!” He gave a chirpy wave as he continued on his way.
Their visitor turned out to be Mitch Brunswick. He leapt from his chair in the waiting area the second they hit the stairwell landing. His body language read angry, but his eyes were fatigued and red. He’d been crying in the recent past.
“When were you going to tell me?”
In the rush to react to this morning’s hearing, they hadn’t even thought to call Helen Brunswick’s husband to notify him that Anthony Amaro was alleging a connection between his wife’s murder and the crimes he was suspected of committing. By now, he would have heard about it from the news.
Rogan held out an arm to keep Brunswick back. “We’re in the middle of an ongoing investigation.”
“You don’t think I know that? It’s bad enough that I’ve been treated like a suspect. But you were in my home when I told you that Helen used to work upstate, right around that same time, and you said nothing.”
If Mitch Brunswick was involved in his wife’s murder, they would be idiots to talk about the case with him. If he wasn’t, he would always remember this conversation as just one more indignity he suffered at the hands of police after his children’s mother was killed. Until they had more information, all they could do was err on the side of caution. Cruelty was better than jeopardizing a murder investigation.
Rogan started to walk past Brunswick. “Like I said, we’re working on the investigation. We promise to give you answers as soon as we have them.”
“In the meantime, I have to tolerate photographs of my wife’s dead body on the Internet?”
“What are you talking about?”
He handed them his cell phone. “My kids saw these. Some future sociopath at their school was sending it to everyone.”
His smartphone was open to the website of one of the local tabloid papers. Ellie recognized the photograph as one taken at the crime scene after Helen’s body was discovered. The editors had the decency to blur her bloodied torso and face, which was already gray and bloated by then, but the picture clearly depicted her broken limbs. The headline read: RETURN OF A SERIAL KILLER?
“I promise you,” Ellie said. “We have no idea how they could have gotten this photograph.”
His hand was trembling when she returned the phone to him.
“I was the one who identified the body,” he said, staring at the screen. “She was covered with a white sheet. Her body, I mean. I saw her face, but—this.” He shook the phone. “It isn’t right. My wife was a person. A real person, and a good person. She didn’t deserve to die, and she sure as hell doesn’t deserve this.”
As they watched Mitch Brunswick make his way down the stairs, Rogan said, “You know who must have leaked those pictures, don’t you?”
She mumbled that she didn’t know.
“Linda Moreland.”
“Or whoever’s leaking information to her could’ve sold them to the paper.”
“Nope, it’s Moreland. She’s calling out the press, bigtime. Nothing gets the dogs barking like a lurid crime-scene picture.”
There was no way to be sure who was responsible for that photograph going public, but Ellie was now convinced of one thing: Mitch Brunswick had not killed his wife.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
You the one here to see Christy McCann?”
Ellie nodded. To save time, she had made the trip alone, leaving Rogan free to work the bigger picture. It didn’t take two detec
tives to question an eyewitness who had identified Anthony Amaro eighteen years earlier.
In movies, prostitutes are always good people with bad luck who manage through hard work and big hearts to find happiness. In the most romanticized version of the fairy tale, prostitution is fun and glamorous and leads to true love and luxury shopping sprees with men who look like Richard Gere. In the real world, prostitutes could be good or bad people, but nearly always ended up with short, harrowing lives. Jess’s coworker Mona, who had managed to convince herself that she was saving girls by teaching them the difference between stripping and whoring, was the closest thing Ellie had ever seen to some kind of hooker’s happy ending.
When the marshal escorted Christy McCann into the meeting room, Ellie could see that the woman who’d been turning tricks with Deborah Garner at a rest stop in Secaucus had arrived at nothing close to happiness. She was almost shockingly gaunt, with pocked skin and missing teeth. At least she’d been easy to find, right here at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. Six years ago, she was sentenced to life in prison for forcing drain cleaner down the throat of another prostitute because she had dared to hold back money from their shared pimp.
McCann took one look at Ellie and then glanced back at the male guard for an explanation. Ellie kicked out the chair on the opposite side of the table with her foot, and McCann finally took a seat. “You’re too pretty to be a cop,” she said.
“Should I say thank you?” Ellie asked.
“You here about Lincoln?” Lincoln Turner was the peach of a pimp whom police suspected had ordered the drain-cleaner punishment. “Every time he gets the better of one of you people, seems I get a visit. Instead of pigs, they should call you elephants, you got such long memories.” She smiled at her own joke. “But I still got nothing to say.”
“I could care less about an over-the-hill pimp. I’m here about your friend, Deborah Garner.”
“Ain’t my friend no more. She got herself killed.”
“You can drop the badass front, Christy. I read the police reports. You were beside yourself when you learned she was dead. The two of you were at that rest area together for a reason. You didn’t have pimps. You had each other. She protected you, and vice versa.”
All Day and a Night: A Novel of Suspense (Ellie Hatcher) Page 13