He had busted the sleazeball who paid the rent on Marlene’s high-rise apartment right before he’d earned his white-shirt promotion. Precisely where Vinnie fell in the hierarchy of his crime family was still unclear in Eckels’s mind, but on that particular day, Eckels popped someone under Vinnie’s supervision for scalping counterfeit concert tickets.
When Eckels caught up with Vinnie at Elaine’s, his bleached-blond, fake-tittied goomah was on his arm. When Eckels pulled out the cuffs, Marlene offered to blow him in exchange for cutting Vinnie loose. Eckels was only one year divorced at the time, and he knew guys like Vinnie always managed to beat the rap anyway. Given his own stereotypes of men like Vinnie, Eckels would have expected him to give Marlene a good jab in the temple and to take him down just to save face. Instead, he’d remained at the table to finish his veal piccata while Marlene and Eckels took a little walk to the car.
Four years later, Vinnie didn’t seem to have a problem if Eckels occasionally dropped in on Marlene, as long as Eckels did him the occasional harmless favor in return: fixing tickets, running off a competitor, tracking down a plate-nothing that would get anyone hurt. The two men had an understanding.
Why Marlene put up with any of it remained a mystery. Vinnie took care of her, but she was in a 500-square-foot studio on a low floor just above the elevated portion of the West Side Highway. As far as Eckels could figure, all that mattered to Marlene was that she lived in a building bearing the Trump name.
He was careful not to take advantage of the arrangement. He dropped by Marlene’s maybe four times a year, and only on days when he really needed the escape. She had a way of calming him down.
Being with her tonight had helped, as he knew it would, but he was still anxious. The Daily Post was running a story tomorrow morning tying the Chelsea Hart murder to four others. The department would be going into full-on task-force mode.
He had been so relieved when Jake Myers had come along. The asshole looked good for it, and the possibility of a connection between Chelsea Hart and those other girls floated away. But then Hatcher had marched into his office, ragging about those same old names again.
He didn’t have much time before his captain, or maybe even the assistant chief, started asking him the hard questions. He’d caught the Alice Butler case, the third case in the series, and had failed to see the pattern. That alone would only render him a mediocre detective. No one would have a hard time believing that. He knew he wasn’t the best cop. He’d gotten the promotion based almost entirely on his test scores, but he’d never commanded the respect of the men who worked for him, or above him, for that matter.
But when the department got around to its postmortem analysis, they’d be looking at more than shoddy police work. When Flann McIlroy had come to him three years ago with his wacky theory, Eckels had shut him down and ordered him to stop investigating the cold cases. Not that McIlroy would have ever obeyed an order, but others wouldn’t look at it that way. His biggest mistake by far, though, was failing to speak up when his own detectives caught the Chelsea Hart case.
The department would come after him. He needed to cover his bases. He needed to find Hatcher. She was a pain in the butt, and he had no doubt that she’d gotten where she was based on her sex and her looks, but he had to admit that she was smart. She was also reasonable and, in the end, a decent person. He would find a way to turn those characteristics to his advantage.
He took the Forty-second Street turnoff and made his way east to Fifth Avenue, then hung a left on Thirty-eighth. He planned on parking in front of the same hydrant he’d blocked earlier tonight, but some asshole in a Ford Taurus was already there.
Eckels rolled down his window and gestured for the Taurus’s driver to do the same. “Hey buddy, no standing.”
The streetlamp was shining on Eckels’s car, so he could not see inside the Taurus. He honked his horn and signaled again for the driver to roll down his window, this time flashing the department parking permit he kept on his dash.
“Get a move on.”
The driver’s-side door of the Taurus opened, and Eckels saw the back of a man’s head and a tan coat in the dome light.
“Small world, Lieutenant.”
It took Eckels a moment to recognize the man walking toward his car. This was a prime example of Dan Eckels’s unique brand of bad luck. Eight and a half million people in this city. He gives one of them a hard time, and they just happen to recognize him. On top of all his other problems, all he needed was this loser telling people he was a jerk to boot.
The man removed a gloved right hand from his coat pocket. Eckels extended his own hand to return the shake through his open window.
He saw a quick flash of movement in his periphery. “What the fuck?” Trying to pull away from the damp cloth pressed against his face, he reached for his Glock. His seat belt restricted his movement. His coat was buttoned tight around his body. He could not get to his weapon. In fact, he could not feel it at his side.
Maybe he should have listened. Maybe he shouldn’t have been so wedded to the case against Jake Myers. But with the mayor’s office hounding him at every turn, it had been what he’d wanted to believe. He wasn’t the first cop to get a case of tunnel vision. If he’d mentioned those old files the minute they’d caught the Hart case, he wouldn’t have been in this position. All he’d wanted was to protect his job. If he made things right with Hatcher, she’d cover his ass.
He was getting dizzy. Just before passing out, he realized his gun was on Marlene’s nightstand. If he’d been a better cop, he would have realized that coming here would be dangerous.
THE DRIVER of the Taurus opened Dan Eckels’s door and took a quick look up and down Thirty-eighth Street. A couple was crossing Park Avenue, but they didn’t seem to be paying him any attention. He saw no obvious snoopers peering from the windows of the adjacent apartment buildings.
“You’re in no shape to drive, man,” he said, just to be safe. He unbelted Eckels from his seat, reached in and moved his legs to the passenger side, and then pushed his body over in one full shove.
He removed the parking permit from the dash, tossed it into his own car, and locked up the Taurus before taking a seat at the wheel of the Charger.
He had himself an NYPD lieutenant, and he was willing to bet he could trade him for a young blond detective.
CHAPTER 46
“FUCK. MY EYES, MY EYES. Someone please hand me a spear so I might gouge out my eyes. Cover yourselves, people.”
Ellie sprung from what felt like the deepest sleep of her lifetime. She saw light creeping through the living room blinds and her brother standing at her apartment entrance, keys in hand and grin on face.