“Yes, sir. Thank you. I still don’t understand, though. Who’s the detective?” Not that it made a difference. Ellie didn’t know anyone in homicide.
“Flann McIlroy. You ever heard of him?”
“By name, sure.” The truth was she usually heard Flann McIlroy referred to by a slightly different name. McIl-Mulder, as he was called, was a colorful subject of discussion – usually complaints – among other career detectives who resented the singular adoration he appeared to enjoy. In the case that sealed his status as a media darling, a clinical psychiatrist had been pulled from the elevator of her Central Park West building when it stopped at a floor that was supposedly closed for construction. She had been stabbed eighty-eight times. The M.E. couldn’t determine whether the rape came before, during, or after.
“Well, apparently McIlroy thinks he knows something about you,” Jenkins said. “Face it. You’ve gotten more press lately than most of us experience in a career. What the hell that’s got to do with two bodies in New York is for you to figure out.”
Ellie would have loved to explain that she did not want the attention. To start with, the news stories weren’t about her. They were about her father. No, not even. They were about the man her father had hunted – the man who may have killed him. She was a mere human-interest sideshow, the daughter who followed in her dead daddy’s footsteps, who still believed in him.
Instead, she nodded silently. A homicide detective read about her and for some reason thought she could help him. Two dead women, and a role for her in the investigation. Only one explanation for this temporary assignment came to mind: The women were working girls, and the department needed a decoy. She had a sudden image of herself in a sequined tube top and capri pants, roaming Penn Station.
She’d managed to avoid decoy work as a patrol officer, even though her male colleagues had always made a point of reminding her that she was an obvious candidate for a job in vice. She was thirty years old, but heard all the time that she looked younger. She had thick, shoulder-length honey blond hair and pool-blue eyes. Her five-foot-five frame was naturally curvy, but with some added muscles thanks to kickboxing and light weight training. Despite her current job, New Yorkers never seemed surprised when she confessed with embarrassment that she was once first runner-up in a Junior Miss Wichita beauty pageant. She’d been told a few times she was a real “Midwestern knockout.” For some reason, they always threw in that regional qualifier.
She wasn’t doing tube tops, though. Spaghetti straps would have to suffice.
Jenkins had a different kind of advice for her. “This won’t go over well with some people. McIlroy’s got favor with the higher-ups, but his own people? The people in his house? They won’t like this.”
“From what I read about that psychiatrist case, the guy’s smart. Maybe that’ll be enough to protect me.”
Ellie remembered the case from the news. The primary detectives focused on the building’s construction crew because the workers had access to the closed floor. McIlroy, on the other hand, got wrapped up in the fact that the murder was on the eighth floor, and the victim was stabbed eighty-eight times. He even studied photographs of the bloody smears of the crime scene until he was convinced they were shaped in a chain of number eights. The rest of the homicide task force wrote it off as another crazy McIl-Mulder theory, but McIlroy hit the neighborhood homeless shelters and found a paranoid schizophrenic who’d been treated by the victim two years earlier while he was on his meds. Off his meds, he’d been walking the streets on the Upper West Side mumbling to whoever’d listen about the number eight.
Jenkins ran a palm over his head stubble. “I think some people would say he’s lucky. And they’d also say it was bad form, working another team’s case. But what really pissed the task force off were the department’s press releases. McIlroy looked like a lone hero.”
“And we know how that must’ve gone over.” Ellie thought of the barbs about McIl-Mulder she’d overheard among older detectives. She wasn’t sure which seemed to bother them more – his supposedly half-baked theories or the astonishing coincidence that the press always seemed to have a heads-up on the inner workings of his investigations.
Jenkins shrugged. “He’s still the favored boy there, at least with the brass. But he’s got a reputation – well, it sounds like you’ve heard about it. I could tell them I need you here. I can keep my own people when I need to.”
“No, sir. If I can help there and come back when I’m through, that’s what I’d like to do.”
“I didn’t have a doubt in my mind that you’d say precisely that.” He handed her a slip of paper with McIlroy’s name and an address scrawled on it. The tell in his jaw was gone. Ellie took it as a sign of something Jenkins would never say aloud – he had been worried about her ability to handle the scrutiny that would come with the assignment, but he no longer was.
It took Ellie only ten minutes and one box to pack up her desk, and the box was only half full. A picture with her mom and brother taken two Thanksgivings ago back in Wichita, a handful of hair clips, her favorite water glass, a jar of Nutella, a spoon, a cigarette lighter, and the potpourri of pens, Post-its, Jolly Ranchers, and other crap that fell out of her top desk drawer. That was it. All she had gathered in thirteen months.
And somehow those thirteen months had led her to a murder assignment.
3
ELLIE HATCHER NEVER THOUGHT SHE’D BE A COP. SURE, LIKE ANY little kid modeling herself after a parent, she’d thrown around the idea. But police officer had fallen somewhere on the list between fashion designer and astronaut. Then, after her father died, she believed she’d lost every positive feeling she had about law enforcement. Her father literally gave his life to the job, and it left his family with nothing. No money. No support. Not even answers about his death.
It also left her without the luxury of dreams about her future. When her older brother, Jess, ran off to New York to become a rock star, Ellie and her mother had been on their own. Even if Ellie had been willing to leave as well, the scholarship money she earned in B-level beauty pageants fell far short of out-of-state tuition. That left Ellie as a part-time waitress and a part-time prelaw student at Wichita State University.
She’d probably be a lawyer in Kansas now if it weren’t for Jess – or at least for her mother’s inability not to worry about his pattern of mixing alcohol (and most likely other substances) with a general penchant for recklessness. After two years of watching her mother age ten, Ellie realized the best thing she could do for her mother – and herself – was to leave Wichita to look after her brother.
Then a strange thing happened. She fell in love – not with a man, but with New York City. Young people, living beyond their means in cramped apartments, walking to the corner deli for takeout – tiny specks moving intently, carving out their own patterns among the chaos. Life in the city was exciting and unpredictable, exactly the opposite of the endless enclaves of ranch homes she’d known as a child. She was turned down for every paralegal job she applied for, but she learned not to care. Waiting tables paid more anyway, at least on the good nights.
Then a stranger thing happened. As is inevitable in any relationship, Ellie started to notice the darker side of the city she loved. Beneath the tall buildings, upscale boutiques, and bright lights lived signs of a seedier and more harsh New York. A woman with fading bruises, pausing discreetly at the garbage can outside of the bakery, eyeing the half-eaten croissant lying just under that discarded cigarette butt. A homeless man tucking himself more tightly beneath urine-soaked cardboard boxes, hoping to avoid a roust to the shelters that would not permit his one and only possession – the matted beagle snuggled into the crook of his knees. Too many men waiting at the Port Authority for the young girls who arrive from faraway towns with big dreams but nowhere to sleep.