All young, thin, and brunet. Decent looking. Similar heights and builds. She was just giving herself a silent congratulations on a well-built lineup when number 6 entered, provoking a skeptical laugh from Willie Wells, the defense attorney Jake Myers had retained after his arrest the previous night.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
Number 6 was the homicide squad’s very own civilian aide, Jack Chen. Young, thin, brunet, decent looking-and noticeably Asian.
“The kid we pulled from the holding room backed out,” Rogan explained. “A sudden worry he might be falsely accused.”
“So you found this guy?” Wells said, pointing at Chen. “What? Fat Albert wasn’t available? How about the Abominable Snowman? He’d probably fit in.”
“Is that your way of saying you’d rather proceed with five?” Rogan said.
“I’d rather have a good six.”
Max Donovan intervened. “And you know that any court would say the first five will do.”
“It’s not my job to help you sink my client. Do what you’re gonna do, and if you screw it up, you’ll hear about it at the Wade hearing.”
Donovan looked to Rogan, who pressed a speaker button next to the glass and excused number 6.
“We’re ready?” Ellie asked, once the lineup was down to Myers and the four suitable decoys. She wished she hadn’t noticed Donovan’s sleepy gray eyes. If he was at all embarrassed about asking her out to dinner the previous night, he wasn’t showing it.
He nodded, and Ellie opened the door to the hallway. Tahir Kadhim sat by himself on a metal folding chair outside the viewing room. Stefanie Hyder, Jordan McLaughlin, and Miriam Hart stood huddled together a few feet away, Paul pacing next to them.
Ellie called in Kadhim first. The taxi driver had not even made it to the glass before pointing to Jake Myers. “That’s the man,” he said. “He is the one I saw take the girl from my taxi.”
“You didn’t actually see anyone take Ms. Hart anywhere, did you?” Wells asked.
Donovan held up a hand. “We’re here for a lineup, Willie. If you want to have an investigator chat with Mr. Kadhim on your own time, that’s your call.”
“And by then you will have no doubt had your standard talk with him.”
“I am under no obligation to speak to you,” Kadhim said. “You can ask your questions of me at trial.”
“Ah, I see I’m too late,” Wells said.
Donovan smiled, and Ellie walked the taxi driver to the door. Next up was Stefanie Hyder.
Unlike Tahir Kadhim, Chelsea’s best friend took her time at the window, but it was not out of apprehension. Her eyes did not dart from person to person. Instead, they remained focused solidly on the middle of the lineup. As she stared at Jake Myers, her face became contorted with hatred.
Finally, after a full minute, she spoke. “It’s number three. No doubt.” She used the sleeve of her sweatshirt to wipe a tear from her cheek, and Ellie placed an arm around her shoulder and walked her out of the room.
Paul and Miriam Hart were waiting in the hallway with expectant eyes.
“No question,” Stefanie said. “It was definitely him.”
Miriam and Jordan wrapped their arms around Stefanie, while Mr. Hart shook Ellie’s hand with both of his, thanking her for catching the man who had killed their daughter.
“I just want to go home,” Stefanie said, crying into Mrs. Hart’s shoulder.
“You can go back to Indiana whenever you’re ready,” Ellie said. “We needed you to identify Myers, and you’ve done a great job. The trial won’t be for at least a couple of months, and the district attorney’s office will stay in touch with you about any hearings that come up beforehand.”
Mrs. Hart wiped her eyes with a tissue. “The girls have something they want to do this afternoon to remember Chelsea-a way for them to close the door on all this, at least in New York. But we’re going to fly home tomorrow. It’s time for us to take Chelsea home.”
As they told her once again how grateful they were for her help, all Ellie could think of were the three cold case files in her blue backpack and the damage a lawyer like Willie Wells could do with them in front of a jury.
LYING ON HER COUCH that evening, Ellie closed the files and tossed them on the coffee table. By this point, she had read them enough times to have memorized the critical details.
Lucy Feeney had been killed nearly a decade ago. She was three months past her twenty-first birthday, still in that phase where making full use of one’s legal age was a top priority. She and three roommates shared a converted two-bedroom in Washington Heights, but Lucy could be found downtown during most of her waking hours, where she’d spent the last two years waiting tables at six different restaurants.
The week of Lucy’s murder, she and her roommates, in various combinations, had gone out partying on each of the previous four nights. The roommates’ appetites for adventure had been sated. Lucy’s had not. On the evening of September 23, 1998, she hit the bars on her own. According to her roommates, it wasn’t an unusual move for any of them. They enjoyed semi-regular status at a sufficient number of places that they could be comfortable on their own.
The last time anyone saw Lucy Feeney alive, she was at B Bar on Bowery, enjoying a Cosmopolitan. The bartender remembered her. He also recalled sneaking her a couple extra shots of Stoli, one of the privileges of semi-regular bar status. He did not, however, spend enough time with her to recall anything about the man with whom he saw her leaving shortly before closing time.
Lucy’s roommates did not report her missing for two days, another indication of the kind of lifestyle the girls considered to be normal. Lucy’s naked body wasn’t found until three days after that, wrapped in black plastic garbage bags and dumped in the Bronx near the Harlem River.
She’d been strangled. Stabbed four times in the chest and stomach. And her blond hair had been chopped off in blunt chunks near the roots, just like Chelsea Hart’s.
The second of the three files was Robbie Harrington’s. She too was strangled after a night of barhopping, nearly two years after Lucy Feeney. And if Robbie’s mother was correct in her observation about her daughter’s changed hairstyle, Robbie’s killer may also have tampered with her hair, albeit with more subtlety.
That left the third file, Alice Butler. Alice disappeared a year and a half after Robbie Harrington’s murder. She was twenty-two years old at the time-slightly older than Lucy Feeney, a couple of years younger than Robbie Harrington. Alice had been an on-and-off student at the City University of New York for two and a half years, earning barely enough credit hours to be considered a college sophomore by the time she dropped out for good a year before her death.