All Day and a Night: A Novel of Suspense (Ellie Hatcher)

by Alafair Burke

  “I think the way he put it was ‘human garbage can.’ He was using anything he could get his hands on. Heroin, speed. Meth was brand-new. I think the main problem was crack. But look at him now.”

  Something about the timeline didn’t sound right. If Bill was too addicted to compete for a scholarship, why did he postpone counseling until after graduation? And how many kids skipped college for rehab when their own friends hadn’t even noticed a problem?

  “This may sound like an odd question,” Ellie said, “but are you sure he actually went to rehab?”

  “You mean, did he pull a walkout like my sister? No. I visited him, so I know for a fact he went.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Same place I wanted Donna to go. Cedar Ridge. A few months of inpatient did the trick.”

  Ellie was mentally replaying the conversation with Carrie Blank as they made their way to the hospital exit. The sound of Rogan’s muttering pulled her from her thoughts. “Five victims,” he was saying to himself.

  “Now who sounds like Rainman?”

  “That’s what Amaro told his pedantic cellmate, Robert Harris—that he was afraid that the other prisoners would figure out he killed all five victims.”

  Ellie opened her mouth to speak, then paused as she realized his point. By the time Amaro was housed with Harris, he had already been charged with killing Deborah Garner in the city, and five bodies had been found in Conkling Park. Harris had insisted that he was a stickler for wording. If Amaro had feared that the other inmates would realize he’d killed the local women in addition to Garner, he would have referred to all six victims.

  “It’s just like Carrie said: Donna was different,” Rogan said, hitting his clicker to unlock the car doors. “If she was killed because of whatever plan she had to pay Carrie back, that would leave only five total victims, including Deborah Garner. We know Donna Blank had a drug problem, and that Utica’s a small town. Wouldn’t take a lot for her to find out Will Sullivan’s kid was a fellow addict.”

  Ellie hopped in the passenger seat, pulled up a contact on her phone, and hit enter. Michael Ma picked up his line in the crime lab.

  “M and M, it’s Ellie Hatcher.”

  “Hey, Ellie Belly. Where are my cookies?” As far as Ellie could tell, Michael Ma had three favorite things: his work, nicknames, and the peanut-butter cookies he thought Ellie made for him from scratch as a token of appreciation when he bent over backwards for her in the crime lab. Ellie Belly might lose her favored-cop status if M and M ever found out that her “homemade” Nutter Butters came from Bouchon Bakery.

  “That plastic coffee stirrer I brought you the other night? Do you still have it?” Ellie was now glad she’d forgotten to cancel the request.

  “Is that how we’re playing now? You used to show up, treats in hand, before you even asked for something. Now I need to produce results before I get . . . yummy cookies?”

  His Cookie Monster impersonation wasn’t too shabby. “A double batch, Mike, I promise. This is important.”

  “Yeah, I’m working on it. Compare coffee stirrer against Donna Blank fingernail scrapings. It’s DNA, from a fucking swizzle stick. I’m a miracle worker, but miracles take time.”

  “When?”

  He let out a pained whine. “Tomorrow. I can get back to you tomorrow.”

  “What time?”

  “I remember when I used to like you. Morning. Okay?”

  “As in barely before noon, or real morning?”

  “Morning!”

  Ellie had a lot of practice detecting when people were about to hang up on her. She yelled “Wait” to keep him on the line. “With the DNA, if it’s not a true match—you can still tell if it’s a family member, right?”

  “Don’t they teach biology in Kansas? Of course.”

  “Be sure to check that too, okay? And thanks, M and M. Extra cookies, and love, and appreciation, and world peace, and namaste, and you are so awesome.”

  “You can stop now. We’re good.”

  Rogan started the engine as she hung up. “God help me,” he said, “but I think I actually followed that entire conversation. Do I understand correctly that you brought home one of Will Sullivan’s gnawed-on, nasty coffee stirrers as a souvenir?”

  “I was having a particularly dubious moment.”

  “And you didn’t bother to tell your partner you were comparing his DNA against the Donna Blank samples?”

  “You would have tried to stop me,” she said.

  “Because you were wrong about him.”

  “Maybe so, but we could be right about his son.”

  He pulled away from the curb. “Where am I dropping you?” Rogan asked. “Back at your restaurant, or home?”

  Ellie briefly pictured herself sprawled on the sofa in her old apartment on Thirty-eighth Street. “Home.”

  “You mean the new place.”

  “Of course. Why would you ask that? That’s where I live. Home.”

  “No reason.” Sometimes it scared her how well Rogan could read her.

  She opened the apartment door to find Max asleep on the couch, the light of a muted Seinfeld repeat providing the only light. She placed a hand on his shoulder. “Come to bed.”

  He turned on his side and let out a deep sigh.

  She rocked him gently. “Max, come to bed.”

  He groaned and pulled a cushion over his head. She turned off the television and walked alone to their bedroom, knowing he would follow in his own time, and knowing she could have tried harder to wake him.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY

  The Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan struck just the right tone as a forum for a politician who appealed to the working class. It was elegant, but not the least bit trendy. Refined, but not snooty. From the original Gatsby-era architecture to the Grand Central Station–style clock overlooking the lobby to the namesake’s presidential portrait (Teddy, not Franklin) hanging from a bathroom wall, the place was steeped in history. It was the perfect spot for Bill Sullivan’s town hall on public safety, which doubled as a fundraiser for the generous supporters who had enjoyed his company at a banquet breakfast earlier this morning.

  Carrie took a seat in the back row. About half of the folding chairs were occupied, mostly by retirees and younger parents, many with children in tow. A few attendees carried signs with handwritten messages that appeared evenly split between the “Support the Police”/“NYPD Heroes” types and the “Kids Aren’t Criminals”/“End Stop and Frisk Now” types.

  An African-American woman around Carrie’s age asked what the moderator had announced would be the final question. She read from a sheet of paper, but her voice was loud and clear: “I live in the 40th Precinct with my two teenaged sons.” Someone in the crowd called out a supportive South Bronx, Boogie Down! “We want our streets to be safe. We want the police to protect us. But what are my sons supposed to think when they and their friends are regularly asked to explain their presence on the sidewalks, while the drugs and the gangs and the guns are still everywhere they look?”

  “Thank you for the very thoughtful question,” Bill said. “What is your name?”

  “Nicole. Nicole Watson.”

  “I know you’re not alone in how you feel about these stop-and-frisk practices, Ms. Watson. You want to be safe in your neighborhood, but too often you see good kids—the ones you want to go on and become civic leaders and fathers—treated like criminals, while the real criminals continue to rule the streets. As a result, an entire community distrusts the police. Both federal and state law are clear on this point: police need an actual, articulable reason to stop a person from going about his or her own business. And, separate from that, they need a reason to suspect the person is armed in order to do a frisk. Every police department in the state—the NYPD included—should be following those requirements. But the public should understand that, lawfully implemented, investigatory stops keep them safe. They make New York a safer place to live. No one wants to go back t
o the days where robbers and thugs behaved like they owned the streets. And there’s a lesson here for law enforcement, too. I was a cop, and I’m the son of a cop, so I speak from experience. When police start acting lawlessly—when they are the ones who act like they are unaccountable, when they stop people for no reason—or, worse, for discriminatory reasons—it undermines the rule of law. It risks the legitimacy of law enforcement. And it invites entire communities to disengage from the social contract. That doesn’t make anyone safer, including the police. At the state level, I’ve been working with the governor to provide training assistance to local police departments all across New York. We need them to understand that we support stop and frisk, and want to make sure they know how to do it lawfully and, hopefully, with the support of the affected communities. Thank you, everyone. You’ve been a terrific group. I always learn something new when people like you show up and give me a few minutes of your time.”

  Carrie watched Bill work his way through the crowd—shaking hands, grasping forearms, leaning forward to listen to a comment. He didn’t talk down to his constituents in clichés and platitudes. He treated them as equals. He had real-world experience, movie-star charisma, and a deep knowledge of how government worked and its powers and limitations. Her best friend had the potential to go on to become governor of New York, maybe even find a place on the national ticket.

  She saw him notice her when he was five rows away. He smiled at her and, for the first time since Linda Moreland had called her about the possibility of a job, she believed everything would be okay.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-ONE

  Dude, I thought we had a pact: DNA, coffee stirrer, Donna Blank.” It was officially noon—no longer morning by any definition—and yet Ellie’s call to Michael Ma at the crime lab had gone straight to his voice mail. “It’s important. Give me a call, okay? And, oh yeah, this is Hatcher, so don’t pretend you don’t know.”

  “Hate to point this out,” Rogan said, “but the Donna Blank murder case isn’t ours anymore.”

  She jabbed her spoon of Nutella in his direction. “Say it again and I’ll flick this at you.”

  “I’m serious. You know as well as I do: we were working this case on loan to the DA’s office. Last I heard, the fresh-look team closed up shop.”

  “Right, like Utica PD is going to entertain the notion that their golden boy Bill Sullivan murdered someone. Admit it, Rogan, you feel it, too.”

  “Since when do we go by feelings?”

  “You know what I mean. Even before Carrie told us about the scholarship, we thought her sister didn’t fit the pattern. And it was the DNA under her nails that’s been the biggest hurdle in keeping Amaro locked up. Now we find out that the last time anyone saw her, she was on a tear to make sure her little sister got a prize other people were in line for?”

  “It’s a solid theory.”

  “It’s more than a theory. For someone to make Donna appear to be one of Amaro’s victims, he’d have to know about the broken bones. Bill’s father would have known.” She thought back to all of the horrific, supposedly non-public facts about the College Hill Strangler that she had memorized as a child. “And Donna’s mother said she saw her daughter in Will Sullivan’s car. She assumed that Will was trying to help Donna, but Donna could just as well have been seeing Bill in the car, not the father.”

  “And you think a high school senior pulled this off by himself? Killing the girl? Staging the body? Finding the right dump spot?”

  Motive. Who had motive? “I think Bill killed Donna—probably in a panic, maybe even by accident. And I think Will Sullivan loves his son more than anything. Like you said, unconditional love. I think he was the kind of father who would internalize any possible shortcoming in Bill, convincing himself that it was because he was a single father, or hadn’t been home enough.” Ellie saw the scene playing out. Will Sullivan in tears as he replicated the postmortem injuries he’d seen in Amaro’s victims. Disposing of the body. Protecting his son, but then insisting that he go straight from high school to Cedar Ridge as some form of rehabilitation. Repentance. “It would also explain why Will didn’t seem to have the least bit of anger toward Carrie when she was representing Amaro.”

  “We already had an explanation for that: he cares about the woman.”

  “But we didn’t have an explanation for why Joseph Flaherty was so fixated on the Amaro killings, or why he kept showing up at the Sullivan house, yelling about the devil. It all goes back to Cedar Ridge. Helen Brunswick originally called the police on Flaherty because he was obsessed with another kid at Cedar Ridge. Then after his release, the kid starts making a fuss at the Sullivan house. Will Sullivan made it seem like Flaherty’s beef was with him, but what if it was all about Bill? What if Flaherty knew what Bill had done, and tried to tell Helen Brunswick about it. Instead of believing him, she saw him as obsessed. Take those facts and combine them with Flaherty’s mental illness—”

  “Too bad we don’t have any proof, and are supposed to be working another case.” He threw a file folder full of photographs at her. They’d gotten the callout in the middle of the night, just as Max was crawling into bed with her. She’d already seen them all ten times, the crime scene at a liquor store robbery gone bad.

  “We put the suspect photos out. Now we wait.”

  Rogan tapped his Montblanc against the desk. “Cedar Ridge,” he said, nodding. He could feel it, too.

  “Yep. But like you said, we’ve got another case to work,” she said, slowly scooping up another heap of Nutella.

  “I hate you right now, woman.”

  She smiled.

  “Hold tight,” he said. He picked up the handset to his telephone, dialed a number and asked for a listing for Sandra Flaherty in Utica. They both waited as the call was connected. She listened as Rogan explained he was calling from the NYPD and offered condolences for the loss of her son. Then he asked the question they’d both been asking themselves: Had Joseph known a boy named Bill Sullivan?

  Rogan muttered Uh-huh and I see, then thanked the woman and hung up.

  “So? What did she say?”

  He broke into a wide smile. “Bingo. She didn’t even hesitate. She said of course they knew each other. They met when they were just teenagers, at—you guessed it—Cedar Ridge. And then she told me that, in his own way, Joseph must have been proud of his old acquaintance—the way he went on to become such a success.”

  “And why did she think that?”

  “Because her son saved so many pictures of Bill over the years.”

  “Obsession. Does she still have the pictures?”

  “Nope. She said the Utica PD took them all when they searched the house after the shooting, along with the articles about those horrible murders. But she assured me she saw them. And she wanted me to know they meant that, at heart, her son was a good boy.”

  “Why do I have a sudden image of Will Sullivan on his porch swing, burning those pictures one by one?”

  “We need to get Donovan on board,” he said. “Utica PD can’t be the ones to work this. Think he’ll back us up on that?”

  A week ago, she would have been certain that Max would back her up on anything. Now, all she could say was that she hoped so.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-TWO

  Carrie was surprised by the effort it took to rise from her chair in the back of the town hall meeting. All those days of inactivity had taken their toll.

  “What are you doing here?” Bill asked. “I was planning to go to the hospital for a visit.”

  “Bellevue kicked me out—thank you, HMO. And, frankly, I had a panic attack when the cab pulled up in front of my apartment.”

  “That’s only natural.”

  “Seriously, I might need to call a real estate agent. I can’t imagine feeling safe there again.” He gave her a hug, gentle at first, but then she pulled him in tight.

  “Why don’t you get a hotel room until you feel up to dealing with your apartment? Here, or anywhere
else you’d be comfortable.”

  “I was actually thinking of going up to Utica for a while. Any chance you’re heading back to the capital? I can train it from there.”

  “How does door-to-door service sound? Dad called last night. I thought I’d spend a couple days with him, so I scheduled some last-minute local meetings.”

  “He’s having a hard time with the shooting?” So much had happened in those days she had lost.

  “He’s acting like . . . Dad. But it’s got to be rough.”

  He waved away the driver who started to step out of the black Town Car as they approached, and they both hopped in the backseat.

  “I have no idea why,” she said, “but with all these thoughts I’ve been having about the past, the idea of watching television with my mother and sleeping in my old bed feels really comforting.”

  “You just described your mother as comforting. Maybe that hit to your head did more damage than you thought.”

  As the car pulled away from the curb, she blurted out the real reason she had told her cabdriver she’d changed her mind, to take her instead to the Roosevelt Hotel.

  “One of the nurses told me she saw you visiting me at the hospital. She said you were crying and holding my hand. You said you’d always meant to tell me something, but then one of the detectives came in.” She wanted to hit the rewind button. Maybe she had brain damage after all. “I’m sorry. I obviously wasn’t there, not in a real sense. And the nurse could have misheard. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “Don’t be sorry. And she didn’t hear wrong. That’s exactly what I said. I don’t know that I’d describe myself as crying, mind you—” He started to laugh, but then stopped himself. He looked serious as he grabbed her hand.

  She waited for him to say something. Anything. She had spent three full days in a quasi–dream state. Was she there again? She was staring at his hand entwined in hers. They’d been here before, with much more physical entanglement. But not like this. Not in the middle of the day, sober, as two grown-ups. Not with this intensity.