“Think it was Amaro? If he knew Carrie was related to one of the victims, paranoia could have gotten the better of him. He goes to Carrie’s hotel room, throws the documents around, steals her journal to find out where her loyalties truly lie. Then, when he finds out she’s no longer on the team, he comes to the city to make sure she’s not a problem.”
“Not on the team,” Rogan said.
“Right. Meaning, she quit.”
“No, that’s it. It was in front of us the whole time.”
“What’s it?”
“You’re the one who’s been saying how weird it was that Carrie Blank would defend her sister’s killer.”
She saw it now. “The tips we’ve been getting—”
“Not the first one,” he clarified. “Not the one about Helen Brunswick.” He was talking about the communications the DA’s office had been getting since reopening the Amaro investigation.
“You think it was Carrie Blank feeding us information?”
“Think about it: those messages gave us two names—the former cellmate Robert Harris and the former foster sister Debi Landry, and the original police reports contained neither. But Amaro certainly knew who they were, which means he could have given those names to his lawyers. Who do we need to worry about? Who out there in the world can hurt your case? That kind of thing. And if he had names to give Carrie Blank . . .”
She finished the train of thought. “Then Anthony Amaro is guilty, and Carrie Blank knew it and tried to tell us. Amaro slipped into the Governor to get at the evidence. He sees Carrie’s journal. If she was leaking information to us, that’s the kind of thing she’d write in a diary. Then when she quits, Amaro follows her to New York to shut her up and make sure she’s not hanging on to anything incriminating.”
“And what about Joseph Flaherty? We’ve got the bodega video.”
They were thinking out loud, and their thoughts were flowing together, and gelling, a smooth mix of idea upon idea. This was the first time since they had heard the name Anthony Amaro that they were finally in sync. By the time Ellie spoke, she was speaking for both of them. “Flaherty killed Helen Brunswick, Amaro killed the rest. Two different killers, just like you thought from the beginning.”
CHAPTER
FORTY-SIX
It hadn’t been hard to find Buck Majors. When she and Rogan had talked to him at the golf course, he’d proudly recited the normal routine of his postretirement lifestyle. On his list was his and his wife’s standing date with two other couples at a neighborhood restaurant for Wednesday-night trivia. Ellie had searched Yelp, a restaurant review website, for trivia nights in Majors’ zip code. Voilà.
The parking lot of Christo’s was nearly full. She pulled her fleet car next to an SUV with a bumper sticker boasting: “My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student.” Call it stereotyping, but she suspected the driver would not be winning any knowledge-based contests this evening.
The restaurant itself was exactly what Ellie would have imagined of a place calling itself Christo’s and bringing in diners for trivia night: red-and-white-checked vinyl tablecloths, servers in oxford cloth shirts, and the glorious smell of garlic and baked cheese.
She recognized Buck Majors at one end of a rectangular table for six. Two of the couples were Buck’s age—sixties—and the other was younger. They sat boy-girl-boy-girl, and were huddled together, discussing the question just announced by the bartender over the microphone: “What New Jersey punk band sang the song ‘Astro Zombies’?”
A few groans came from the crowd. “New questions, Marco!”
As Ellie approached Majors’ table, she overheard their deliberations. “The Sex Pistols were punk.” “But weren’t they British?” “What about the Ramones?”
She crouched down at Buck’s end of the table. “It’s the Misfits.”
A guy in the next group cried out, “Hey, who’s she? They’re cheating!”
“You sure about that?” Majors asked.
She remembered how proud Jess had been in high school when the student Bible group had prayed for him and his first band, Sick Kittens, after they covered the song at a house party. Their mother’s demand to know “Why is it so necessary to sing about astro zombies exterminating an entire race of people?” became a classic Hatcher family quote. “Final answer,” she assured Majors. “No phone-a-friend needed.”
“She’s on our team,” he announced. “Rules say we can have up to eight. Write that one down, Mindy. This is my wife, by the way—Mindy Majors. Go ahead and laugh. She knows it sounds like a stripper, and if you ask me, I think that’s the only reason she took my name. Wife, this is one of the young whippersnappers I told you about the other day. Hatcher, right?”
The woman waved. “Hi Whippersnapper. How do you spell Miss Fitz?” She said it like two words.
“One word. The Misfits.”
“Oh, well that means something else entirely. Got it. Bet that’s a point no one else will get.”
The next question came—this one about a recent change in the playing pieces for Monopoly. Her fellow teammates, as well as everyone else in the room, seemed to have a lock on the answer: something about the iron being out and a cat being in. Who knew?
“This might surprise you,” Majors said, “but I’m glad you’re here.”
“You must really want to win at trivia.”
“I’ve been wanting to call since that scumbag Anthony Amaro got released. I assume that’s why you came?”
“I know this can’t be easy for you.” As a follow-up to the story about Amaro’s release, the New York Times had a two-page article about the acclaimed Buck Majors and the problems Linda Moreland had identified over the course of his long career eliciting confessions when no other detectives could. According to Max, the DA was days away from announcing an internal review of every conviction tied to one of Majors’ interrogations, more than fifty in total. “My dad was a cop. I’m not—what did you call it the other day? Precious? I just need to know if we’re on the right track. I need to know what really happened when you questioned Amaro.”
“She seems like a nice girl,” Mindy said. “Just tell her what you told me, Buck. She’ll understand. And if not, fuck ’em. Sorry, dear.”
“No offense taken,” Ellie said.
“This is the honest-to-God truth.” Majors jabbed an index finger on the table. “Amaro confessed. He was the guy. But times were different back then. We didn’t parse apart the words, or videotape the sessions. It was either they confessed or they didn’t. Yes or no. Simple as that. And over time, I learned that DAs and juries, they loved it when you had the exact words and the colorful phrases. It was better that way than to say, ‘Yeah, he gave it up.’ But I’m not a savant, you know? I don’t remember all the details. I was a guy on the job who was good at getting people to give it up. And then I’d go to the reports and write down the way I heard it in my head. So, in retrospect, the exact words might have been more mine than theirs. But it doesn’t change the fundamental facts.”
“Amaro gave it up?”
“Damn straight. He killed that girl, Deborah Garner, and I assume that means he killed the rest of them, too. And if the papers want to vilify me, and the department wants to throw me under the bus, let them have at it. But the people I put in the can belong where they are. In fact, all day and a night’s not enough. Anthony Amaro deserved to die.”
What are you humming?” Max had beat her home and was cooking something that smelled delicious.
She finished hanging her jacket in the front hallway closet. Back in her old apartment, a chair in the corner of the living room had served as her coat closet. “Oh, I didn’t even realize I was humming. It’s something these two little girls were singing in the elevator.” She did her best to mimic their singsong chant. “We like potatoes, we like potatoes, we like potatoes . . . and Thai food. I told them it was an ear worm. They thought the whole idea of an ear worm was pretty disgusting.”
“Look at you, making friends with the kids
in the elevator. They’re not so horrible, are they?”
She stepped behind him and gave him a kiss on the back of the neck as he continued to chop some kind of fresh herb. “Ah, but my motive for the friendly banter was to get them to stop once the cuteness wore off. Adult curmudgeon: one. Adorable little children: zero.”
The rhythm of his chopping temporarily slowed, then resumed.
“Jeez, Max. Why don’t you just start taking a nightly poll. Am I ready to become a mommy yet? Because the answer’s still no.”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“No, but you were thinking it. I can’t make a single joke involving marriage or a child or pregnancy or motherhood without it becoming a thing.”
“Except it’s not a thing until you make it a thing. It’s like you’re trying to convince yourself I’m the one who’s unhappy, when I’m perfectly content just the way we are. How about you stop and take a quick look around this kitchen? Prime dry-aged steak, all the way from Ottomanelli & Sons. Arugula salad. Chef Max doing all the work.”
“Sorry. Thank you. It all looks delicious.”
“Did you manage to track down Majors?”
“I did. And I’ve got to say, I believe him. Amaro admitted killing Deborah Garner.”
“Any particular reason you’re persuaded?”
She poured a glass of wine from the bottle he had already opened. “Your office is reexamining all of Majors’ old cases. It might be better if you didn’t know too much.”
The chopping slowed again. “Well, I’ve got news I can actually share. We got another tip on Amaro.”
“Today?” Carrie Blank was still unconscious in the hospital. Ellie was so sure it was the lawyer who sent them to Robert Harris.
“In the mail,” he said. “Postmarked two days ago from Manhattan.”
“Rogan and I think Carrie Blank might be the source. The cellmate, the foster sister—those are names Amaro himself could’ve given his lawyers. We think Carrie wants us to talk to these people for a reason. Is the new tip also something Carrie would have known?”
“Possibly. It’s a report from child services when Amaro was only thirteen years old, and it does relate to the foster sister. Amaro and Debi Landry were removed from their foster mother for abuse. They begged not to be separated, but the state couldn’t find a home willing to take both of them.”
“Why would Carrie want us to know that?”
Max walked to the dining room table and came back with a manila envelope. She read the enclosed report in its entirety. If she’d had any doubts before, they were gone now.
Anthony Amaro. Joseph Flaherty. Two killers, seven victims.
CHAPTER
FORTY-SEVEN
You better get a spring in your step, or I’m telling Sydney on you.” Ellie was on the fourth-floor landing of a Chinatown walk-up, waiting for Rogan to climb the final flight. Sydney Reese had been Rogan’s live-in girlfriend as long as Ellie had known him. “I see another cleanse in your future.”
“Don’t you dare. I love that woman, but she wants a grown-ass man to eat like Gwyneth Paltrow. Sending me to work with kale smoothies the second my slim-fit shirts are snug. Tell me, how many men my age can pull off slim-fits? Tell me, Hatcher.”
He took a deep breath when he reached the top step.
“All done?” she asked.
“Proceed.”
Ellie knocked at the apartment belonging to Anthony Amaro’s former foster sister, Debi Landry. The door cracked open, and Ellie nearly choked on the odor of ashtray. “Told you people to go away.”
You people must have referred to Max, who had tried to return “her” phone call after their anonymous helper had used Debi’s name and number to leave a message with the district attorney’s switchboard.
Ellie stuck her foot out just in time for the door to slam against her favorite black wedge pumps. “It’s us or a grand jury, Debi.”
The door reopened, but the woman wasn’t budging from the entryway. Ellie recognized her from her most recent booking photo for trespassing after she refused to leave a bar at closing time. Previous entries on her rap sheet included numerous busts for assault, disorderly conduct, and public intoxication. “I’m not saying anything on Tony.” Her voice had the rasp of a million cigarettes.
“You don’t have a choice. If you’re hauled before a grand jury and refuse to testify, the DA will have you held in contempt. And if you lie, he’ll charge you with perjury.”
“How you gonna prove anyone’s a liar? People lie in court all the time.”
(Note to future perjurers: Don’t declare to a police detective your intention to lie in advance.)
“Because we have this,” Rogan said, handing her a copy of the report from Child Protective Services that Max had received in yesterday’s mail. Debi held the document with both hands as she studied it. Like so many others Ellie had met on the job, she wasn’t able to read without moving her lips.
When she looked up, her expression appeared confused. “Janet was the one who called?”
Janet Haynes was the foster parent in the home where Debi and Amaro had met. They were numbers four and five of six children in the house at the time.
Ellie nodded. “She basically reported herself. She wasn’t prosecuted criminally, but she never had another foster placement again.”
“Janet wasn’t that bad. Like I told that DA who called, Tony always protected me.”
“But Tony was always getting in trouble,” Ellie said. “And he wouldn’t listen to Janet. Then she called CPS, asking to give Tony back to the state.”
“She overreacted. She was just mad because she loved that stupid doll collection so much. She caught me playing with three of the dolls one time, and held my elbow against a hot burner while she counted to three, one for each doll. Told me if I did it again, next time would be my face.”
Rogan made a tsk sound. “I thought you said she wasn’t that bad.”
She shrugged. “I never touched the dolls again.”
According to the report, Janet wanted Amaro removed from her care because he was, in her words, “a sicko.” When a social worker asked the nature of the problem, Janet said the only way she could get control over Amaro when he was misbehaving was to grab his favorite child in the house, fourteen-year-old Debi, and threaten to break her limbs if he didn’t behave. “Now that little sicko’s obsessed with the idea,” the foster mother complained. “It’s not right.”
“You read the whole report?” Ellie asked Debi.
She nodded.
“Janet told CPS that she noticed her dolls disappearing, one by one. She finally found them hidden under Tony’s bed. He had broken all their arms and legs. Some of them were posed in what she called perverted positions, and she found drawings depicting similar images of women. When she confronted him about the dolls, he told her it was just a matter of time before he did the same to her.”
“It was just talk.”
“You never noticed any kind of fascination he may have had with hurting women in that specific way?” Ellie asked. “Maybe perhaps a sexual fascination?”
“Yuck, I don’t think of him that way. He’s like my brother.”
Ellie looked at Rogan. Just as Debi hadn’t denied to Max on the phone that Amaro was probably guilty, she wasn’t denying her former foster mother’s allegations about the young Amaro.
“You didn’t think this doll episode was relevant back when Tony was first suspected of killing those women?” Rogan asked.
“I’m not saying anything against Tony. You know he’s the only kid from all those years in all those homes that I’m still in touch with? And he’d say the same for me. What’s that tell you?”
“I think it tells us you’re not saying anything against Tony,” Ellie said.
Debi nodded once, her point made.
Ellie tried a different angle. “When Tony was arrested after Deborah Garner was killed, he told the detective he had come to the city to visit someone he knew from fo
ster care. That was you?”
“Damn straight. That’s how close we are. No one I know from Utica would come here like that. Only Tony. He loves me.”
“What kind of love?” Ellie asked.
“I think you have a sick kind of mind. You come here with one little report from CPS. Do you know the big picture? Do you know why Tony was in foster care in the first place?”
They said nothing.
“Tony broke the shower rod in the bathroom. His mother heard the sound, found him in there, and gave him such a beating that she broke his arm.” Another broken limb in Amaro’s background. “She didn’t seem to care that the shower rod broke because Tony tried to hang himself from it as a twelve-year-old. So when I say Janet wasn’t so bad, it’s because that’s the kind of parents me and Tony had. My whole life, everyone I ever met used me. Never Tony, though. We found family with each other at Janet’s, and then we all got broken up to different homes. His love for me is pure, and you’re trying to make it into something sick.”
“And what about Deborah Garner? Wasn’t Tony using her? There was nothing pure about picking up a prostitute.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. Tony told me he only gave that girl a ride because she was stranded at that rest stop and needed to get to the city. He has no idea who went and killed her. That’s it. Do what you want with your grand jury. I’ll be there with bells on if you make me, but I’m done for now.”
They reported back to Max from the car, using Ellie’s cell as a speaker phone.
“Paydirt,” Rogan said. “She didn’t contest a word of the CPS report. Plus, she added the fact that Amaro’s mother broke his arm as a child. And get this: she placed Deborah Garner inside Amaro’s car. She was trying to defend him, saying he was only giving her a ride. No way Amaro can try to pin that on Buck Majors.”
While Ellie had given Max an edited version of her powwow with Buck Majors the previous night, Rogan had gotten every detail.
“That’s good,” Max said. “Very good. It doesn’t change the plan for now, though. Utica’s already got a BOLO out on Amaro. And they still need to pick up Joseph Flaherty. I’m keeping the affidavits for Flaherty’s arrest warrant simple, focusing solely on the murder of Helen Brunswick.” They had Brunswick’s complaint about Flaherty as a teenager; his presence near her apartment, armed with a gun, just hours before she was shot to death; and a lifetime of his interactions with law enforcement to demonstrate his tendency to fixate on perceived grievances. It was enough to do the job.
All Day and a Night: A Novel of Suspense (Ellie Hatcher) Page 23