Once again, it was Rogan who spoke up. “Hatcher and I-we’ve kept it in the vault. But other people saw the girl. The joggers. The medical examiner. The EMTs. Could be anyone.”
Ellie’s memory flashed to Officer Capra, the first uniform on the scene, holding court the night of Jake Myers’s arrest at Plug Uglies. Peter and his boss, George Kittrie, had gone to the bar that night for the express purpose of finding loose-lipped cops. She would’ve cold-cocked Capra on the spot if he were in the room, but she still wasn’t going to dime him out to Eckels.
“I knew Peter Morse when everything went down with Flann McIlroy, and you know I didn’t give him any tip-offs on that. It’s your choice whether to believe me, Lou, but I would hope you’d give me the benefit of the doubt.”
Rogan leaned back in his chair. “You said the reporter asked if Chelsea Hart’s head was shaved? See, now that shit’s not even right. No one who saw that girl would’ve said that. Myers hacked that shit up. Sounds like the paper’s heard something third- or fourth-hand.”
Ellie had been wondering whether to point out the discrepancy to Eckels herself, but it sounded more persuasive coming from Rogan. She was finding it hard to focus on anything beyond the question that kept echoing in her mind: Why hadn’t Peter mentioned any of this last night?
Whether Eckels was persuaded or simply acquiescing to the fact that he couldn’t prove his suspicions, he moved on. “For what it’s worth, I told the PIO to shell out a no-comment to Morse. I expect you-both of you-to do the same. I just got off the phone with Simon Knight to give him a heads-up on the story, and I assured him that we will keep control over this case. The last thing we need is a media circus around Myers’s trial.”
Eckels picked up a newspaper that was open on the corner of his desk and dropped it in front of the detectives. “This, of course, didn’t help.”
It was a copy of the morning’s New York Sun. Most of the page was occupied by a photograph of Jake Myers’s perp walk, snapped while Rogan and Ellie escorted him from the back of a squad car to be arraigned after his lineup at 100 Centre Street.
But it was a smaller headline on the sidebar that Eckels was tapping with a meaty index finger: “For Victim’s Friends, Another Encounter with NYC Crime.” Ellie skimmed the first paragraph. As Jordan McLaughlin and Stefanie Hart had sat on the front steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art the previous afternoon, an armed assailant had snatched their purses from the sidewalk and escaped through Central Park.
“Oh, Jesus,” Ellie said. Those girls had been put through enough.
“You mean to tell me you haven’t seen this?” Eckels asked.
“I’ve been catching up on other work,” Ellie said. She’d scanned the coverage of the Hart case this morning, but hadn’t noticed the ancillary sidebar.
Eckels looked at Rogan for his explanation.
“I just walked in,” Rogan said. “I had some personal stuff I’d pushed off during the heat of the case.”
“Why didn’t we hear about this yesterday?” Ellie asked. “We spent a lot of time with those girls.”
“They reported it to museum security,” Eckels said. “The museum turned it over to Central Park precinct, where some uniform took a complaint without thinking to reach out to us.”
She shook her head. “I’ll call the girls right away.”
Eckels held up his hand. “Already done. Public Information’s getting a victim’s advocate in touch with them for damage control. Make sure they’ve got all their credit cards canceled, that kind of thing. We’ll get them to the airport for their flight later this morning. They’re more than ready to go home. Just promise me you’ll do everything you can to make sure no more shit sandwiches.”
She and Rogan both nodded. Ellie was beginning to detect a pattern: Eckels liked to blow off steam but generally calmed down before breaking the huddle.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t quite ready to break. Easy way and a hard way. All things being equal, she was one to opt for ease. But she saw no detour around this one. She didn’t want to be that cop who twenty years down the road-after an innocent man had been exonerated-had lacked the courage to challenge the conventional wisdom.
“Sorry, sir. One more thing, while we’re here. We got a phone call off the tip line from a victim’s father on a cold case. His daughter was also killed after getting a little wild, on the Lower East Side in 2000.”
“So call him back and make nice.”
“I did, sir. But here’s the thing. His daughter also had her hair chopped off. And if the news is going to come out about Chelsea, then he’s going to see the resemblance between the two cases.”
“He’s going to see the resemblance, or you are?” Eckels shot her an annoyed look, but then a glimmer of recognition crossed his face. “Please tell me this isn’t that same case McIlroy bothered me about a few years ago.”
“Probably,” she said. “He apparently was looking into three different cases-all young blondes, all killed late at night, all possibly having to do with their hair.”
“Emphasis on possibly. As in impossibly. You really are McIlroy’s long-lost love child. The case I had didn’t fit the pattern at all, as I recall.”
“It depends what you mean by the pattern. The victim thought someone was stalking her when she left Artistik, a salon on the Upper East Side. Her hairdresser took off five inches. We could be talking about one killer-someone with a hair fetish. He cuts his victims’ hair. In your case-Amy Butler-he could have been set off by the haircut. Or he could have taken more of it when he killed her, and no one noticed because she’d just had the big change.”
Eckels shook his head in frustration. “Our job, despite what you may have learned from McIlroy, is not to work cold cases. If you think you’ve got something, send it to the Cold Case Squad and listen to them laugh at you. Until then, Rogan, please get your partner out of my office. I believe you have grand jury today on Jake Myers?”
Rogan looked at his Cartier watch. “In an hour.”
“Fingers crossed, guys. And, Hatcher, no surprises.”
CHAPTER 26
RACHEL PECK HAD been forced to alter her usual writing routine. Today was the second of two days this week she’d agreed to switch shifts with Dan Field, the afternoon bartender. Dan’s request had been accompanied by an explanation that his agent had lined up afternoon auditions for him, but Rachel suspected it was just another ploy to get access to her more lucrative peak-hour tips and to stick her with the lunch crowd. Still, Dan was generally a nice guy, and she didn’t want to be seen as an inflexible bitch, so she’d made the swap.
Her usual routine was to sleep late, do some yoga, and then write until it was time to show up to the proverbial day job, which, in her case, was a night job. Her goal each day was eight hundred words, even if it sometimes meant gluing herself to her keyboard at 2:00 a.m. when she returned from the restaurant.