“Can you excuse me for a moment, Mr. Pandey?”
Escaping the watchful eye of a suspect always helped Ellie collect her thoughts. She turned the facts over again in her mind as she paced the narrow hallway adjacent to the interview rooms. According to the car service’s dispatcher, Pandey had picked up his last scheduled fare from the Times Square Marriott at five in the morning and dropped her off at her Bronx apartment thirty minutes later. Pandey was late returning to the garage, then called in shortly after six fifteen, groggily reporting that he had just come to after the assault and robbery he suffered on the drive downtown. He was only missing the fifty bucks from that last fare, and he would have had to have knocked himself in the head to get it. Ellie had seen the bump. He wasn’t messing around.
Looking at the old-fashioned, round clock that hung at the end of the hallway, Ellie evaluated her next move. She knew what her training detective would have said during her probation period. He would have told her to save her energy because this was how the system worked: An employee pilfers cash, then blames it on a robbery. The employer uses the police department as a bullshit detector by requiring a report. Sometimes the employee caves and retracts the allegation, afraid of getting in trouble for filing a false statement. More often, he calls his boss’s bluff, knowing the cops are too busy to pursue a robbery complaint with no leads. Ellie knew that a good, efficient detective – one who could prioritize her limited time in sensible ways – would act as a transcriber, file the report, and move on to the real work.
Efficiency, however, had never been Ellie’s first priority. She knew that Pandey was lying, so that made him important – to her at least. She didn’t especially care about punishing the man. He seemed decent enough. What she needed was an explanation for why this decent-enough person would bother. Find the motive, her father used to say. Until she understood Pandey’s motive, this inconsequential robbery report would continue to nag at her.
She was telling herself to defer to efficiency, just this once, when a uniformed officer informed her she had a visitor. A dark-haired, dark-skinned woman in a multicolored maternity sari was waiting down the hall near the entrance to the detective bureau. From the looks of her girth, the baby she carried in her stomach was just about done.
“I’m here about my husband?” the woman explained. “Samir Pandey. I called his employer when he was late coming home. There has been a robbery?”
“He’s fine,” Ellie said. “Just a little rattled. Nothing to worry about – especially when you’ve got enough to keep your mind on. When are you due?”
“One week.” The woman beamed proudly. “A daughter.”
“Well, congratulations. If you want to have a seat, your husband will be out shortly. We’re just about done with his report.”
“Hatcher, aren’t you supposed to be in here?” Jenkins scrutinized her from the doorway of his office.
“Just one more second, boss,” she said, smiling.
It was more like ninety seconds. Ellie found a comfortable chair for Mrs. Pandey in the cramped waiting area, then stopped at her desk. A quick call to the car service’s dispatcher, followed by a few keystrokes on her computer, and she had her answer. She darted to the bureau’s communal printer, removed the spooling page that awaited her, and shook the printout excitedly as she headed back to the interview room.
Pandey wasn’t just out the fifty bucks. He was also out forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes when his extrapregnant wife was waiting for him, wondering why he hadn’t come home. She knew Pandey’s reason for lying, and she had the piece of paper that would persuade him to come clean.
The photograph of Sandra Carr, the woman whom Pandey had driven to the Bronx as his last fare, had been taken courtesy of the New York Police Department after Carr was busted for solicitation a year earlier. Pandey’s face fell when he saw the picture slip to the table from Ellie’s fingertips.
“Forty-five minutes,” Ellie said to her robbery victim. “You were missing the cash from your fare and the next forty-five minutes.”
“Please do not tell my wife,” he said. “It is our first child. I have never done such a thing until today. I almost made it. Just one more week for the baby, then the doctor says we must wait six weeks after that. When I went upstairs with the lady, I could not even-”
Pandey pushed the photograph away, and Ellie thought she heard a sniffle. She understood why he was here. A few lies – even the self-inflicted head injury – were to this man a small price to pay to put this morning’s activities in the past.
“Mr. Pandey, I think we can mark your report as unlikely to be solved if you can behave yourself for the next seven weeks. I hear you’ve got a little girl on the way.”
The driver was still thanking Ellie as he walked out of the station with his wife.
“HATCHER. GET YOUR ass in here.” Jenkins had stepped from his office doorway into the detectives’ room.
“The interview went a little long, boss. Sorry.” Ellie followed Jenkins into his office and rested a hip against a two-drawer file cabinet.
“Seems to happen to you a lot. You ought to be careful about that curiosity,” he warned. “You’re either going to wind up a hero, or dead.”
“Or both.”
“Yeah, well, either one’s a bitch.” Jenkins lowered his dense, muscular frame into his chair, working his jaw like he was still mulling something over. “We have a situation. And I’m not saying anything until you take a seat. You’ve got too much energy, Hatcher.”
Ellie did as she was told, but Jenkins’s jaw was still grinding. The lieutenant did that a lot. Hatcher suspected he maintained that stoic facial expression and the close shave of his dark black skull for a reason. His look was unambiguously serious. Authoritative. One eyeful of him, and the largely white detectives he supervised knew he was the real deal. No handouts when it came to Jenkins. But Hatcher had realized about a month into the detective bureau that the movement of Jenkins’s jaw gave a hint at what went on beneath the hardened exterior. And now it was telling Ellie that he was bothered.
Jenkins was bothered, and she was in his office. Sitting, not standing. Something was definitely up.
“I got a call from a homicide detective this morning.”
“Is everything all right?” She could hear the alarm in her voice. Ellie’s job had nothing to do with the homicide division. She’d made detective just thirteen months earlier and was lucky to work scams and robberies. The one and only time she’d received a surprise call from the police about a dead body, she had been fourteen years old, and the body had been her father’s.
“I suppose that depends on what you mean by ‘all right.’ A detective over there has a couple of dead women on his hands and seems to think you can help figure out who might have put them there.”
“Excuse me?”
“No offense, but I was surprised too. Apparently someone’s got himself a theory and thinks you’re in a unique position to help him. You’ve got a special assignment.”
“To homicide?”
“Now don’t go getting that tone. It’s an assignment. Temporarily. You’ll help out as you can, and then you’ll come straight back here when you’re done playing with the big boys.”
“Of course. It’s just temporary.”
Jenkins looked through the window that divided him from the detectives, working his jaw. “You don’t want it to become more than that. No matter what they say, it can’t come easy. Not to me, and not to you. You better deserve it twice as much as they do. You get what you want too soon, and you won’t be seen as earning it.”
Ellie knew precisely what he meant. She had made detective quicker than most, after four years on patrol, and the assignment had coincided with the wave of media attention thrown her way that year. She knew other cops speculated she got a leg up either because she was female, because of the press, or both.