It would take Ellie’s partner at least twenty minutes to reach the scene from his apartment in Brooklyn Heights. For now, she had to make sure his trip would not be wasted.
The uniform officer riding in the passenger seat exited the sector car first. He looked like a lot of new cops. Fit. Baby-faced. Enthusiastic. Short haired. Maybe in a different decade, he would have enlisted in the army. These days, he probably had a mother who stopped him. Now he was law enforcement.
He directed a flashlight at the dead girl. Ellie could tell from his reaction that this was his first body.
“Oh, Jesus.” He reached for his stomach on reflex.
“All upchuckers, over there.” Ellie directed the officer’s attention to Jess, who, as instructed, was standing well east of the crime scene, looking out at the river, taking deep breaths. “Detective Hatcher, Manhattan South homicide. I need your radio.”
Ellie had wrapped up one week in the homicide bureau, and so far all she’d done was help her new partner tie together loose ends on his old cases and play support for other teams while she supposedly “learned the ropes.” Now she’d practically stumbled over this poor girl’s body inside the Manhattan South borough. She was the first cop on the scene, and she was a homicide detective. If she couldn’t weasel her way onto this case, she didn’t deserve her new assignment.
The uniform looked at her, blinking rapidly. First a disfigured body, now a sweaty woman in a Pretenders T-shirt and sweatpants, demanding his radio.
“But-”
The young officer’s partner found the words he’d apparently been searching for once she’d stepped from the driver’s side of the car. “I’ll confirm it,” she said, reaching for the Vertex radio microphone clipped to the shoulder of her navy blue uniform. “And no one’s taking our radios. Sorry, ma’am.”
Ellie nodded. The woman was a good cop. Depending on what precincts she’d been working, this could easily be her first body as well, but she was cool. Cooler than her partner. Just a quick glance at the body, then a more careful monitoring of everyone at the scene. Three runners, pacing. The sweaty woman who wanted their radio. The tall guy, looking out of place by the water.
“Make sure that guy’s not going anywhere,” she said to her partner. She was definitely good. Of the people at the scene, Jess was the one who should have registered on a cop’s radar. And asking her partner to keep Jess company gave the obviously nervous young cop some distance from the body.
“You’re right,” Ellie said, holding up her palms. “Call it in. But tell them homicide’s already here. Shield 27990. Hatcher. They’ll have me down as Elsa.”
She listened as the officer radioed in the essentials. They were at East River Park, south of Houston, north of the tennis courts. They had a 10-29-1.
It was standard 10 code. A 10-29-1: 29 for a past crime, 1 for a homicide. Across the country, 10-codes were dying out in favor of so-called plain language. The Department of Homeland Security had gone so far as to force the NYPD to train its officers in the kind of plain English that was supposed to assist interagency communications in an emergency. Instead, the entire notion of an eight-hour training session on plain talk became just another opportunity for the NYPD to mock the feds.
“We still need EMTs,” the officer said. Paramedics would have been dispatched with the original 911 call, but these days ambulances were in higher demand and correspondingly slower to respond than law enforcement. The homicide call-out would now bring technicians from the crime scene unit and the medical examiner’s office. So much for solitude along the East River.
Ellie motioned the woman to speed it along. The officer confirmed Ellie’s badge number and notified the dispatcher that a homicide detective was already at the scene.
“And tell them J. J. Rogan’s on the way too,” Ellie added. “Jeffrey James Rogan, my partner. Tell them to put us in the system. No need to do a separate homicide call-out.”
Ellie nodded as the woman repeated the information. Then she went to check on Jess. “I see you met my brother,” she said to the young male officer. “He’s not as dangerous as he looks.”
Jess cocked his thumb and forefinger toward the cop. “Turns out your compadre here is a certified Dog Park fan.”
Dog Park was Jess’s rock band. Their biggest gigs were at ten-table taverns in Williamsburg and the occasional open mic nights in Manhattan. To say that Dog Park was an up-and-coming band would be a serious demotion to those groups that were actually on the ladder to stardom.
“I knew someone out there had to love them as much I do,” Ellie said.
“Yeah. Small world.” The officer smiled with considerable enthusiasm. Jess was eating it up, but Ellie suspected that at least some of the officer’s excitement was attributable to his relief at having a subject of conversation other than the dead body he’d just seen.
She turned at the sound of an engine and saw a second blue-and-white arrive at the scene.
“Would you mind giving my brother a ride home, uh, Officer Capra?” Ellie asked, squinting at the officer’s name tag. “I think his heart’s had enough of a workout for the morning.”
“Sure. No problem.”
“He’ll give you my gear and a suitable change of clothes for you to bring back here, if that’s all right.”
“Uh, yeah.” Capra glanced at his partner, as if worried about her reaction. First he’d almost vomited on the body. Now he was being sent away on an errand.
“I really need my gear,” Ellie said, following his gaze. “I’ll make sure she knows I told you to go.”
She touched Jess’s shoulder. “Get some sleep. I’ll call you later.”
Ellie looked at her watch. Five forty-five. Forty-five minutes since Jess threw shoes at her head. Thirty-four minutes since she made a mental note of her start time outside the apartment. Thirteen minutes since the first jingle of the Gwen Stefani ring tone.
She looked at the girl, abandoned and exposed against a pile of construction debris. If Ellie had kept on jogging, this would be someone else’s case. Someone else could deliver the news to the family. Someone else could offer their anemic reassurances that they were doing all they could to find out who’d done this to their daughter. But she had stopped. She had made the patrol officer use her name on the radio. This was her case now. This girl was her responsibility.
It was time to find out who she was.
TWO HUNDRED FEET AWAY, on the other side of East River Drive, a blue Ford Taurus was parked outside an apartment building on Mangin Street. The man at the wheel watched as a second patrol car arrived, followed by an ambulance with lights and sirens. Two patrol cars carrying four uniform officers had all arrived before the ambulance. He found that ironic. Good thing the girl was beyond saving.