Nothing to do now but wait.
CHAPTER
FORTY-EIGHT
The badge-and-gun crowd was pulling out of Plug Uglies at shift change, soon to be replaced by young bridge-and-tunnel types fresh from their first city jobs, grabbing a beer before heading back to Long Island. Jess had prepped the empty barstool next to him with a Johnnie Walker Black in front of it. It had been a while since they’d met for drinks, just the two of them. This used to be her bar of choice, located conveniently between the precinct and her apartment. Now that the apartment was his, it worked well for both of them.
He kicked back the stool with one foot. “Welcome home. Did you give Utica the finger for me when you left?”
“It wasn’t that bad, Jess. People seemed nice.”
“Didn’t you say something about two different limb-breaking murderers being on the loose there? Seems like an awfully high madman-to-normal ratio for my tastes.”
She looked at her watch. Sixty-seven minutes since the judge signed the warrant for Joseph Flaherty’s arrest. “With any luck, we’ll soon be down to one madman on the loose.”
She took a tiny sip of her drink.
“Who the hell are you, and what have you done with my lush of a sister?”
“Sorry. I want to be clearheaded if we catch a break.”
“Forty minutes late, plus you’re not drinking? Might have to trade you in. Besides, you’re more clearheaded on a liter of whisky than most of the stone-cold-sober detectives we knew growing up.”
“Not the bar I’m aiming for, Jess. How’s Mona the mama bear?”
“Slightly less freaked. Told her I’d personally lie down on the West Side Highway if you did anything to put her in jeopardy.”
“It won’t be necessary. I hope I didn’t do anything to mess up your rep at the Rump Roast.”
“Please, little sister. You got skills, but nothing close to that power.”
She looked at her watch again. Sixty-nine minutes since the warrant was signed.
“I’m the one who should be looking at my watch. Shift starts in forty. That’s why you were supposed to be here one whole drink ago.”
“I’m sorry. I should’ve called. And I’m still getting used to you being a responsible person with a job and a schedule and everything.” She leaned over and bumped him with her shoulder.
“To be truthful, your being late makes it a little easier to ask if you had a chance to call Mom today.”
“Dammit. I keep forgetting.” Freud would probably see a self-serving reason for this particular memory lapse. Ellie’s mother had a way of treating every missed call as (a) a reason to fear her daughter was dead, (b) proof that her daughter didn’t love her, or, (c) most curiously, both of the above.
“I think she knows,” he said. “She calls the apartment. I let it ring, like you told me. But she’s Mom, so a message isn’t enough. She’s got to hit redial and redial and redial. Last week, I unplugged the phone, and she called 911 to have someone check the apartment because the machine wasn’t picking up, which had to mean that someone her detective daughter arrested broke into the apartment and was in the process of torturing her. So instead, last night, I answered.”
“You didn’t tell her I moved, did you?”
“No, but despite all appearances, she’s not that stupid. You can’t spend nineteen years with Dad and not be a tad wily.”
“Message received. I’ll call her.”
He downed the rest of his beer and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Off to protect the shaking boobies from the animals. God’s work, you know.”
Ellie had every intention of talking to her mother, but another mother’s phone call interrupted her plans. It was Rosemary Blank. “You need to come to the hospital. Right now.”
Ellie spotted a petite, older Asian woman pacing in front of the nurses’ station on Carrie’s floor. She wore her hair in a straight, salt-and-pepper bob clipped directly at her chin, and the kind of dress that moms of a certain type all seemed to own—made of black jersey that could be squished into a ball in the corner of a suitcase and spring back to life the following day. Ellie had purchased a similar item for her own mother two Christmases ago, only to receive it in the mail the following February with a note saying it was too “urban” for Wichita.
“Are you Mrs. Blank, by any chance?” Ellie asked.
“What are you doing to catch the person who did this?” the woman demanded.
Apparently Ellie had found Carrie’s mother. “Is your daughter awake?” All Rosemary would say on the phone was that she wanted Ellie to come to the hospital as soon as possible.
“No, and I have no guarantee she ever will be.”
“Mrs. Blank, you gave me the impression there was an emergency here.”
“Of course there is. My daughter is in a coma. Or a ‘coma-like state,’ as it was explained to me, which sounds exactly like a coma. And this vicious assault happened to occur after she worked on one—exactly one—murder case, for one week in her entire legal career. Clearly there is a connection, and yet no one has been arrested, and I arrive at the hospital to find absolutely no one looking after Carrie.”
She was tempted to lecture the woman about misleading a police officer, but she realized she would want someone to be as dedicated to her.
“This is a well-staffed hospital, Mrs. Blank, with its own security. They know to monitor her visitors—no one without your permission, in fact—and to call us if there is any concern whatsoever.” Ellie could see an argument forming behind Mrs. Blank’s eyes. “We’ve got an entire team of officers looking for Anthony Amaro. And the doctors here are caring for your daughter. But I understand it won’t be enough until Carrie’s healthy and we punish the person who did this to her.”
The fight fell from her face.
“Were you close to her sister, Donna, at all?” Ellie asked. How difficult for one family to lose two daughters to violence.
“Half sister,” she quickly corrected. “No, I would not call the two of us close, but she was my husband’s daughter, and Carrie’s only sibling. Blood is blood, but that girl was . . . troubled.”
“Did Carrie say anything about a confrontation with Amaro? How did he handle the news that she was quitting as his defense lawyer?”
“She told me she found his presence unsettling, but, no, she didn’t mention any kind of confrontation. I got the impression she resigned by calling Linda Moreland, not Amaro himself. If anything was weighing on her, it was the past. Coming home can be hard on her. She has a lot of guilt about being the only one of her friends to have gotten out of Red View.”
“The lieutenant governor was at her bedside when I was here earlier. Seems like a success story to me.”
“Exactly, which is what I tell Carrie all the time. It goes back to this scholarship they all wanted. In hindsight, it was a cruel kind of gift—selecting one child to win a pot of gold, while the rest were left scrambling for coins.” Ellie remembered reading about the award when she first looked up Carrie on the Internet. “Carrie never expected to get it, but two of her friends—including Bill Sullivan—pulled out of the running. Carrie got it, and then lost it. She always says she won’t consider herself a success until a news search for her name turns up more information about her legal career than stories about that scholarship and what she saw as her failure to keep it.”
Ellie remembered the sight of Bill, holding Carrie’s hand, ready to say something he’d been wanting to tell her for years. Had he loved her so much, even in high school, that he held back so she could have the scholarship instead? It was a sweet story—one that Ellie hoped would have a happy ending—but had nothing to do with Anthony Amaro.
“Do you know if your daughter believed Amaro was guilty? Is that why she quit?”
“She didn’t seem to know what to believe. She took the job initially because Linda Moreland said Amaro was innocent. But then she started having doubts, and it became clear to her that Linda was using her. No one uses my dau
ghter.”
Rosemary Blank was clearly a force to be reckoned with.
“Do you think it’s possible she might have been willing to violate attorney-client privilege to make sure the truth got out?”
“You mean revealing things she found out while she was his lawyer? Do you think that’s why someone hurt her? Was it Amaro?”
“It’s just a theory at this point. We did receive some information about Amaro from an anonymous source, but until your daughter’s conscious, we don’t know if it was her.”
“That’s—oh, I really don’t think so. My daughter worked so hard to become a lawyer. She takes her ethics very seriously. If you knew her, you’d understand that she takes everything very seriously. I think it was difficult enough for her to quit when she felt a conflict between legal ethics and her personal ones. Leaking information? That would eat away at someone as principled as Carrie. No, I can’t picture that.”
As Ellie left the hospital, she thought about the way her own mother described her children. In Roberta Hatcher’s eyes, Jess was a successful rock star, the frontman for Dog Park, just one catchy single away from landing the cover of Rolling Stone. And Ellie was a doting daughter and sister, the perfect combination of beauty and smarts, following in her father’s footsteps—for now, until she met the right man and settled down to have a family. So what if Rosemary Blank didn’t believe her daughter would violate the rules of professional ethics?
She could picture Carrie Blank submitting a message on the DA’s website. Placing a phone call to the switchboard, using the name Debi Landry. Slipping a photocopy of yellowed documents from Amaro’s file with Child Protective Services into the mail.
And those weren’t the only images Ellie was seeing. She pictured Anthony Amaro, stalking the streets of Utica, in search of women whose bodies he could use to fulfill decade-old fantasies planted by an abusive mother and foster mother. She pictured him driving to New York City to visit Debi Landry, perhaps his subconscious’s true object of desire, and then selecting Deborah Garner at a New Jersey rest stop to unleash his frustrations. She pictured an obsessive Joseph Flaherty, tracking down the therapist he blamed for his lifetime of insanity and shooting her in the chest.
She was finally seeing the truth that Carrie Blank had wanted them to see.
But the series of scenes dissolved when she got to the image of Joseph Flaherty, breaking Helen Brunswick’s bones. Mailing letters to Anthony Amaro and the district attorney so they would connect the psychotherapist’s murder to the old cases.
Why? Was he fascinated by Amaro’s crimes? Did he idolize him? Maybe once he was in custody he would tell them. Or maybe he would have reasons only his delusional mind could understand.
She looked at her watch. Going on two and a half hours since the warrant to pick up Flaherty had been signed.
As if the world was aligning with her thoughts, she felt a buzz at her waist. It was a text from Max. UPD heading to Flaherty’s now.
Just a little longer.
CHAPTER
FORTY-NINE
Joseph Flaherty spread the newspaper articles around him on the bed.
He liked his bed. It was the same one he’d had since his mother took him to that parking lot off of Oriskany Boulevard, filled with furniture offered at what the signs promised were below-wholesale prices. Helium balloons floated over the entrance, cotton candy and snowcone machines drew customers to the rear. He was thirteen years old and his mother said it was time for him to have a grown-up bed. “Try as many of the mattresses as you need to,” she said. “Dr. Harper says it will help if you can get more sleep.”
Back then, they thought a change in the mattress might just fix him. Twenty-seven years later, the bed was still holding up fine. So was he, if people would only realize.
Joseph could barely remember a time in his life when he wasn’t trying to prove that everyone didn’t need to worry about him so much. He had seen pictures of himself with his mother and father and older brother when he was little. They all held him and smiled at him like they would at a normal baby, like they loved him. Even in grade school, when teachers and principals and other kids started to say he was “quiet,” or “different,” or “off,” they were all still together at home. He just didn’t like to be hugged or touched or looked at, that’s all. He didn’t see why that had to be such a problem.
It wasn’t until middle school that he went to the first doctor. Then Dad and David moved to California to start over, without him and Mom.
Joseph began to understand he was different, because everyone kept telling him that. But he never hurt anyone—not until a couple of months ago, at least. It seemed the more he tried to tell people that he was the good one—and that other people were the bad ones—the more he got into trouble. The longer he stayed at the hospital. The less he got to be home, in this room, on the comfortable bed he had chosen for himself the last time he could remember anyone else believing his troubles were about to be fixed.
That’s why it was so important to him at Cedar Ridge when he had decided to trust Dr. Brunswick with the information he had. The hero had given him some of the truth, but Joseph found out from the newspaper there was more to his story. It wasn’t just one. It was five. Going to Dr. Brunswick was Joseph’s single chance to show everyone that he was the hero, while the people who held themselves up as heroes were devils. He knew the truth, and had been handed an opportunity to prove his righteousness.
He tried to explain it all to Dr. Brunswick. He concentrated as hard as he could and tried to get the words out, in his own way. But Dr. Brunswick hadn’t believed him. Not only that, she called the police on him. And then he tried to tell people that the police were in on it, too. That they were covering up for the false hero. And that only got him in more trouble.
His whole life got so much worse because of Dr. Brunswick.
And then Joseph had seen the hero in a new light, fooling more people, and Joseph knew he had been given a second chance to tell the world what he knew.
He couldn’t just explain, not like he tried before. The pills had gotten better since then, and now he was better with his words. But he knew what the doctors had been writing about him all these years. He knew they’d never believe him. They were convinced he was delusional. Hallucinating. Crazy.
But how could someone delusional come up with such a brilliant plan? A new police investigation, with a new victim like the forgotten ones, would show the truth.
The only problem was picking the new victim. That was really the part that proved Joseph was a good person. He could have picked anyone. But justice meant that the sacrifice be paid by Dr. Brunswick. She was the one who didn’t listen when she had the chance. She had blood on her hands.
He was folding up the newspaper articles, one by one, when he thought he heard a knock—maybe even a voice—at the front door. If the sounds at the door were real, his mom would get it.
Many of the articles were worn from handling, nearly falling apart, but he’d been adding new ones since the local paper first reported that Anthony Amaro had asked a court to release him. Maybe one day soon he would be able to meet the man, and Amaro would shake Joseph’s hand and thank him for freeing him with the truth.
He had just finished tucking the final clipping into his shoebox, right beneath the gun, when he heard the thud. A shriek from his mom. “Police. Don’t move. We’re here for Joseph Flaherty.”
At last, they had come to him. Joseph was finally going to be able to show them. He had his box of articles all ready to go. He would choose his words carefully. He rose from the bed, prepared to explain it all.
His bedroom door opened. He recognized the detective. His being here was perfect. It was proof that even he understood the truth now. Everyone would know that Joseph was never the one they should have been worried about. He was never a threat.
The last word he heard was “GUN!” before he felt the impact of the first bullet.
Ellie checked the screen of her phone
yet again. Nothing.
“You?” she asked Max, who was next to her on the sofa.
Max shook his head. Tonight’s itinerary had consisted of picking at Chinese leftovers while they checked their phones for incoming calls. It had been nearly two hours since Will Sullivan told Max he had a team outside Joseph Flaherty’s house, ready to take him into custody. She could’ve been up there if they were going to take this long.
The chirp of Max’s phone broke the silence. “Donovan.”
He blinked. Then winced. Then closed his eyes as he continued to listen. She could tell it wasn’t good news.
“Anyone else hurt?” he asked.
No, she thought. No, no, no, no, no. They should have waited. She and Rogan should have been there.
“Okay. We’ll need more information to close the Brunswick case. Rogan and Hatcher will come up in the morning.”
He was about to set his phone in a container of mapo tofu when she caught his hand. His eyes were somewhere else but found focus in her stare.
“That was Mike Siebecker from the DA’s office up there. Joseph pulled a gun when they entered the house. Sullivan fired. A clean shoot. No other injuries.”
“Fatal?”
“DOA.”
“What about Amaro? Did Joseph say anything about why he used Amaro’s MO? Why he wrote the letters tying Brunswick to the other cases?”
“It happened fast. We’ll find out more tomorrow.”
Ellie didn’t need to wait another day to know that their chances of learning the full story had probably died along with Joseph Flaherty.
All Day and a Night: A Novel of Suspense (Ellie Hatcher) Page 24