She worked behind the counter of a New York Sports Club on the Upper East Side, but lived with her sister in Elizabeth, New Jersey. On the night of her murder, Alice borrowed her sister’s Toyota Corolla for a night of partying in the city with a girlfriend. When she parked on the corner of Thirty-ninth Street and Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, she failed to notice the adjacent fire hydrant. By the time she and her friend returned to the spot at three in the morning, the Corolla had been towed.
According to Alice’s friend, Alice grew increasingly angry while they waited to claim the car at the city tow lot. No doubt fueled by alcohol, she began muttering about abandoning her sister’s car and walking back to Jersey if necessary. The friend left an impatient Alice by herself in line while she sought out a restroom. When she returned five minutes later, Alice was gone.
Ellie recognized a familiar name in the Alice Butler file: Dan Eckels. Six years earlier, shortly before he’d earned his white-shirt status, her lieutenant had been the lead detective on the Butler murder case. As far as she could tell, he’d worked the case as well as possible. The best leads in the days following Alice’s disappearance were three separate phone calls from drivers reporting that they’d seen a blonde matching Alice’s description walking alone on the West Side Highway. Alice’s deteriorated body was found ten days later in Fort Tryon Park, dumped in a ravine between the Cloisters and the Henry Hudson Parkway. Bruises around her throat suggested she had been manually strangled, but the official cause of death had been the eighteen stab wounds to her neck, chest, and abdomen.
Including Chelsea Hart, Ellie was looking at four victims. All were young and blond, killed after late nights in Manhattan bars. But she knew that wasn’t enough for a pattern. Thanks to the inherently dangerous mix of sex, drugs, and alcohol at four in the morning, the sad reality was that several women were killed in the city each year under similar circumstances. Based solely on their demographics, Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, Alice Butler, and now Chelsea Hart were just four of many.
But she could not get past the hair.
Lucy Feeney and Chelsea Hart both had had their hair hacked off, leaving portions of their scalps exposed. Robbie Harrington, in contrast, had been wearing new and unexpected bangs.
Snipping off a few fringes of hair around the victim’s face was a far cry from the kind of angry chop job she’d witnessed on Chelsea.
Since her first skim through the files that morning, Ellie had known there was only one way to determine whether there was a pattern, but she’d forced herself to hold off. She told herself she should sit on it for the day before digging up the past for a murder victim’s family. Flann had been known for his far-fetched theories. This could all be yet another McIlMulder wild goose chase.
She looked at her watch. It was seven twenty. Eleven hours since she’d left One Police Plaza with the cold case files. Eleven hours since she’d taken her first browse of them in the elevator. Eleven hours since she’d opened her cell phone and entered a New Jersey telephone number. Eleven hours since she’d flipped the phone shut without hitting the call button.
Eleven hours, and there was still only one option. She picked up the phone and dialed before she changed her mind.
CHAPTER 23
THE WOMAN WHO picked up on the fourth ring seemed put out. Ellie could detect a television playing in the background, along with the sounds of children’s voices. Someone was accusing someone else of hogging something or other.
“Hi. I’m looking for Michelle Butler?”
Ellie realized she should have run Alice’s sister through the system. After six years, she could be anywhere, and this phone number could belong to anyone.
“It’s Trent now. Has been for a while. I’ve really got my hands full-”
“My name’s Ellie Hatcher. I’m a detective with the NYPD. I’m calling about Alice.”
Five full seconds of background noise, then the woman said, “Kids, in the family room.” The kids protested, but apparently realized that Mom meant business when she followed up with, “Now. I mean it.”
“Have you found someone?”
Ellie swallowed, hearing the hope in the woman’s voice, picturing the tears that were probably already welling in Michelle Trent’s eyes as she braced herself for words that were long overdue.
“No. And I’m very sorry to call under those circumstances, Mrs. Trent. But your sister’s case came to my attention in the course of another investigation.”
“Is this going to happen every time some other girl gets killed after drinking too much? Another detective called me-it must have been three years ago.”
“Flann McIlroy?”
“Something like that. Yeah.”
“Why did he call you?”
“Jesus Christ. Don’t you people talk to each other?”
Ellie silently cursed McIlroy for not making any notes in the case files. “I’m very sorry,” she said once again. “I would speak to Detective McIlroy directly, but he’s passed on.”
Michelle either hadn’t seen the stories about Flann’s murder in the papers, or hadn’t made the connection to the detective who’d phoned her three years earlier.
“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. When he called me, he was asking questions about Alice’s hair. He wanted to know whether whoever killed her might have cut her hair.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I told him, How could I know? I took one quick look to identify her, and then they had my sister on ice for days. We couldn’t get the body. We couldn’t have the funeral. They had to cut her open for an autopsy so they could explore every little part of her insides, and for what? No evidence. No arrests. Nothing. With all that poking and prodding, if whoever killed her cut off her hair, shouldn’t you people have noticed that?”
“I know this is very upsetting for you, Mrs. Trent.”
“Damn right it’s upsetting. I’m married now. I’ve got kids. My sons sleep in the room that was Alice’s when she was here. My own children don’t even know their mom used to have a sister. They think Mommy was an only child. I’ve moved on. And now I’m going to keep getting these phone calls when you’ve got nothing?”
“If I thought it was nothing, I wouldn’t have called you. I assumed you would want us to do whatever we could.”
“Okay, fine. So if you have something, it’s going to be news that whoever killed my sister has been out there for the last six years, breathing, eating, sleeping, and now killing other women. I’ve been able to get on with my life by convincing myself karma caught up to this guy. He stepped into the wrong fight, or was burned to ashes in some terrible car accident. Maybe in prison for something else. And now I have to go to sleep tonight wondering if he’s still out there and what he’s thinking and whether he even remembers anything special about Alice.”