“Were her memories gone by the time Detective McIlroy contacted you?”
“They were fading, certainly, but she was still home with me then. She did speak with him directly, and I tried a couple of times to work with her on the information the detective wanted. I never did quite understand what the issue was.”
“What about at the time she made the comment, after the two of you identified the body. Didn’t she give some idea of what she meant back then?”
“Not to be specific. She just blurted out that Robbie’s hair looked funny when she saw her lying like that on the table. She brought it up later when we were driving back home, but it was just this observation that made her realize how little we’d seen Robbie since she moved to the city. I guess a mother is like that-figures she should know when her own daughter changes her appearance.”
“But you don’t know exactly what the change was?” The fact that Chelsea Hart’s hair had been crudely chopped off had not been released to the public, and Ellie did not want to share the information with Harrington. But she had to think that such a brutal transformation would have been noticed by more than just one of Robbie’s parents.
“It looked a little shorter to me, but Penny was just so bothered by it, saying it didn’t seem like a style Robbie would go for. I don’t know enough about those kinds of things to be any more specific than that, and by the time anyone asked Penny about it, it was too late. I tried and tried, but all she could say by then was that Robbie liked her hair long. No, wait, that wasn’t it-because Robbie did sometimes keep her hair a little neater, cut up above her shoulders, I guess.”
“So, I’m sorry-what is it your wife meant?”
“I don’t know what it’s called, but Penny was saying Robbie liked her hair to be-you know, even. All the same around, how most of the girls wore it back then. She didn’t like it being different lengths, the way you see it now, with all the long hair, but then short on the top.”
“Do you mean bangs, where it’s cut above the eyebrows?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Bangs. When Detective McIlroy called a few years ago, I finally got Penny to focus, and she told me that Robbie didn’t like bangs. Apparently she was wearing her hair that way when she was killed.”
“And you passed that on to Detective McIlroy?”
“I did. But what does any of this have to do with that girl who was found in the park? I called because she’d also been out all night like my Robbie, and there was something about the picture that reminded me of her, and, well, I told you about my dream.”
If Robbie Harrington really had sent her father to the NYPD tip line, perhaps it was because she was in a position to know something that her father could not-that whoever strangled her on August 16, 2000, may have claimed another victim yesterday morning.
PART III / No Surprises
CHAPTER 22
“I TOLD YOU. Detective McIlroy would check out stacks of cold cases at a time. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it, and you can stand here all morning while I pull files, and none of that’s going to change.”
Ellie looked at her watch. She didn’t have all day. She had a precinct to go to. But her first stop on Wednesday morning had been to the Central Records Division at One Police Plaza.
She had come in the hope that it would be easy to identify which cases Flann McIlroy had been reviewing along with Robbie Harrington’s. The task was anything but. Flann had a penchant for checking out old files and looking for patterns. It had been his imaginative theories-connecting seemingly unrelated cases-that had earned him both praise and ridicule from his peers in the department, along with the nickname McIlMulder.
“He had all of these cases checked out at the same time as the Roberta Harrington file?”
She had asked the clerk to pull up any case files McIlroy had checked out in the three months preceding his phone call to Bill Harrington. The resulting printout was pages long.
“Like I said, he didn’t have all of these at the same time. He had up to fifteen cases checked out at a time. And, as far as I can tell, in that three-month window, he pulled a total of a hundred and seven.”
Once again, Ellie scanned the list of files. Once again, total disbelief.
“That’s actually a little light,” the woman remarked. “I used to joke he had a ten-file-a-week habit.”
Ellie had already asked the clerk to pull a random sample of the different files, and, on a brief skim, she had been unable to figure out which cases had been linked in McIlroy’s mind to Robbie Harrington’s murder, and which had been of interest for any number of other, unknowable reasons.
“You want me to pull some more reports or not?”
Ellie looked at the two-foot-high stack the clerk already needed to reshelve because of her morning research project.
“Don’t feel bad. God knows McIlroy never did.”
It wasn’t that Ellie didn’t want the woman to work. She just didn’t want the work to be futile.
One hundred and seven files? Ellie had only known Flann for a week before his death. During that time, she’d become a staunch supporter, but now she was beginning to wonder if he really had been certifiably insane. Even when she narrowed the list to female victims under thirty-five years old, seventy cases were left taunting her.
“What day did Flann return the Harrington file to CRD?”
The clerk entered a few keystrokes on her computer and recited a date about nine months after Flann had reached out to Robbie’s father. He had let the theory grind around in his brain for nine months after that phone call, until he’d apparently given it up. She wondered what more she could possibly add.
“Can you figure out which of these other cases he turned in on the same day?” Ellie asked.
More keystrokes. “He turned in three files all together. Your Harrington case, plus two others: Lucy Feeney and Alice Butler.”
“And how old were the victims?”
“Feeney was twenty-one. Alice Butler was twenty-two. Feeney was killed two years before Harrington. Butler, almost two years after.”
“I’ll take those, please.”
ONE BY ONE, the men filed into the Thirteenth Precinct’s lineup room.
Watching from the other side of the viewing window, Ellie recognized number 1 as Jim Kemp, a desk clerk from downstairs. Number 2 was Toby Someone, who worked behind the counter at the bagel shop on Second Avenue. Number 3 was Jake Myers. She maintained a neutral expression, lest Myers’s attorney accuse them later of a biased process. Number 4 was another desk clerk, Steve Broderick. Number 5 was a kid they’d found playing guitar outside Gramercy Park.