Ellie noticed that Michelle had calculated the number of years since her sister died without missing a beat. She’d heard other family members of murder victims say the same thing-that the worst part of it in the long run is realizing that the killer lives in real time with the rest of us. That for every happy moment you have, he might have two. That he might be watching the same television program, or admiring the same sunset, or boasting to his friends about your loved one’s murder while you are putting the kids down for the night.
“If he’s out there, Michelle, I’m going to do everything I can to find him. And that’s the only reason I would make this phone call. The chance-however small-that I might be able to call you six months down the road with some answers is the only possible reason I would ever ask you to revisit these kinds of questions.”
The line fell silent, and Ellie wondered whether she had missed the click of a hang-up. Then she heard a quiet sniffle.
“So what do you need to know about Alice’s hair?”
Ellie felt the tension leave her fingers, wrapped so tightly on the handset. “In the file, it says you were the one to identify your sister’s body.”
“That’s right. Our mom died a few years before Alice, and our dad-he wasn’t around.”
“When you saw her, did you notice anything unusual about her hair?”
“I wasn’t paying attention to her hair. It’s really hard to see your kid sister like that. I made myself look at her face, saw it was her, and made a point not to turn away. But, like I told the other detective, I think I would have noticed if someone had chopped off all Alice’s hair. I assume you have pictures of her like that. Can’t you check?”
“I’m sorry. I don’t have anything to compare the medical examiner’s photos against.”
“I’m sorry I sound so angry. It’s just that I don’t understand how this can possibly matter. Back when it all happened, I told the detectives that Alice had thought something was wrong. She told me she was being followed. Why couldn’t they find the guy?”
Ellie recalled a mention in one of Eckels’s reports that, according to Alice’s sister, Alice had complained a week before her murder that a man was following her on the street. Eckels was never able to identify who the man might have been, or even to confirm whether he in fact existed.
“It was my understanding from the crime reports that your sister didn’t give you any specific information about the person she thought may have been watching her.”
“What was she going to say? Obviously she didn’t know who it was.”
“But there was no physical description, no identifying information, nothing to give us a lead on the man. You told the police that this happened somewhere near the health club where she worked?”
“Right. It must have been a couple of weeks before she was-well, you know, it was a couple of weeks before. She came home from work and told me she might be going crazy, but that she thought someone was tailing her. She said she noticed some guy behind her on the street when she was a few blocks from the gym. Whenever she’d turn around to look at him, he’d check out a store window or a newspaper or whatever. She was pretty creeped out about it.”
“But she didn’t file a report at the time?”
“You know, I still blame myself. Once she said she didn’t see the guy again after she got to work, I told her it didn’t sound like a big deal, and she seemed to calm down. Obviously it took on more importance after what happened.”
Ellie knew from the reports that police had canvassed a five-block radius around Alice’s branch of New York Sports in an attempt to find a witness who might have noticed anyone suspicious watching either Alice or the club. It had been a long shot, and, as one could have predicted, it hadn’t panned out.
Something was bothering Ellie, though, about Michelle’s recollection of her sister’s complaint. “You said she was on her way to work when she saw the man?”
“Yeah. Near Eighty-sixth and Lex.”
“The file said she usually worked days, eleven to seven, but that she spotted the guy at night. I assumed she was on her way home.”
The canvassing had focused around evening hours on the assumption that people in the neighborhood likely followed the same weekday routines. If the police had searched at the wrong time of day six years earlier, they may have blown their best chance at locating a witness who might have spotted the man who had been stalking Alice two weeks before her murder.
“No, that’s right. She did work days. But she got home late that night, and told me she saw the guy on her way to the gym.”
“So it was in the morning.” Ellie was getting seriously confused.
“No, I’m sure it wasn’t. I even asked her because it just didn’t seem like anything creepy was going to happen in the middle of the morning. She told me it was around eight o’clock. Not late, but dark. She said, ‘It was dark, Shell. I didn’t get a good look at him, but I really think he was following me.’ I’m absolutely positive. For so long I blamed myself for not making her call the police. I’d replay her voice over and over in my head. But you’re right. She worked days. And she was home and telling me this story by, like, ten o’clock.”
“Don’t beat yourself up over it. It’s natural for us to fill in memory gaps over time.”
“But here’s the thing. She was on her way to the club. She told me the route and the various places she spotted him watching her. I remember now. She got off work at seven, ran some errands, and then went back to the club for her bag. Oh, shit. Oh, this is weird. Her errands-”
Ellie took a deep breath.
“She went to her hairdresser’s. She wanted a change.”
“How much of a change?”
“About five inches worth. She got her hair cut into a bob, and the guy was following her when she left. I completely forgot about that. It’s coming back to me now, though. I remember telling the detective about it.”
“You told this to Detective McIlroy?”
“No, I mean the detective at the time.”
“Detective Eckels?”
“Yeah, that was the one. I told him the guy had followed my sister on her way back to work from the hairdresser’s. I’m sure of it.”
There was no mention of the hair salon in any of Eckels’s reports, but that was the kind of detail that some cops might not jot down. What troubled Ellie more was the certainty that, in the nine months he had carried around these three cold case files, McIlroy would surely have approached the lieutenant who had been the lead detective on one of the cases. And if McIlroy had run his theory by Eckels, why hadn’t Eckels been the one to point out the resemblance between these cases and Chelsea Hart’s?