City of Fear

He directed a flashlight at the dead girl. Ellie could tell from his reaction that this was his first body.

‘Oh, Jesus.’ He reached for his stomach on reflex.

‘All upchuckers, over there.’ Ellie directed the officer’s attention to Jess, who, as instructed, was standing well east of the crime scene, looking out at the river, taking deep breaths. ‘Detective Hatcher, Manhattan South homicide. I need your radio.’

Ellie had wrapped up one week in the homicide bureau, and so far all she’d done was help her new partner tie together loose ends on his old cases and play support for other teams while she supposedly ‘learned the ropes’. Now she’d practically stumbled over this poor girl’s body inside the Manhattan South borough. She was the first cop on the scene, and she was a homicide detective. If she couldn’t weasel her way onto this case, she didn’t deserve her new assignment.

The uniform looked at her, blinking rapidly. First a disfigured body, now a sweaty woman in a Pretenders T-shirt and sweatpants, demanding his radio.

‘But –’

The young officer’s partner found the words he’d apparently been searching for once she’d stepped from the driver’s side of the car. ‘I’ll confirm it,’ she said, reaching for the Vertex radio microphone clipped to the shoulder of her navy blue uniform. ‘And no one’s taking our radios. Sorry, ma’am.’

Ellie nodded. The woman was a good cop. Depending on what precincts she’d been working, this could easily be her first body as well, but she was cool. Cooler than her partner. Just a quick glance at the body, then a more careful monitoring of everyone at the scene. Three runners, pacing. The sweaty woman who wanted their radio. The tall guy, looking out of place by the water.

‘Make sure that guy’s not going anywhere,’ she said to her partner. She was definitely good. Of the people at the scene, Jess was the one who should have registered on a cop’s radar. And asking her partner to keep Jess company gave the obviously nervous young cop some distance from the body.

‘You’re right,’ Ellie said, holding up her palms. ‘Call it in. But tell them homicide’s already here. Shield 27990. Hatcher. They’ll have me down as Elsa.’

She listened as the officer radioed in the essentials. They were at East River Park, south of Houston, north of the tennis courts. They had a 10–29–1.

It was standard 10 code. A 10–29–1: 29 for a past crime, 1 for a homicide. Across the country, 10-codes were dying out in favor of so-called plain language. The Department of Homeland Security had gone so far as to force the NYPD to train its officers in the kind of plain English that was supposed to assist interagency communications in an emergency. Instead, the entire notion of an eight-hour training session on plain talk became just another opportunity for the NYPD to mock the feds.

‘We still need EMTs,’ the officer said. Emergency Medical Technicians would have been dispatched with the original 911 call, but these days ambulances were in higher demand and correspondingly slower to respond than law enforcement. The homicide call-out would now bring technicians from the crime scene unit and the medical examiner’s office. So much for solitude along the East River.

Ellie motioned the woman to speed it along. The officer confirmed Ellie’s badge number and notified the dispatcher that a homicide detective was already at the scene.

‘And tell them J. J. Rogan’s on the way too,’ Ellie added. ‘Jeffrey James Rogan, my partner. Tell them to put us in the system. No need to do a separate homicide call-out.’

Ellie nodded as the woman repeated the information. Then she went to check on Jess. ‘I see you met my brother,’ she said to the young male officer. ‘He’s not as dangerous as he looks.’

Jess cocked his thumb and forefinger toward the cop. ‘Turns out your compadre here is a certified Dog Park fan.’

Dog Park was Jess’s rock band. Their biggest gigs were at ten-table taverns in Williamsburg and the occasional open mic nights in Manhattan. To say that Dog Park was an up-and-coming band would be a serious demotion to those groups that were actually on the ladder to stardom.

‘I knew someone out there had to love them as much I do,’ Ellie said.

‘Yeah. Small world.’ The officer smiled with considerable enthusiasm. Jess was eating it up, but Ellie suspected that at least some of the officer’s excitement was attributable to his relief at having a subject of conversation other than the dead body he’d just seen.

She turned at the sound of an engine and saw a second blue-and-white arrive at the scene.

‘Would you mind giving my brother a ride home, uh, Officer Capra?’ Ellie asked, squinting at the officer’s name tag. ‘I think his heart’s had enough of a workout for the morning.’

‘Sure. No problem.’

‘He’ll give you my gear and a suitable change of clothes for you to bring back here, if that’s all right.’

‘Uh, yeah.’ Capra glanced at his partner, as if worried about her reaction. First he’d almost vomited on the body. Now he was being sent away on an errand.

‘I really need my gear,’ Ellie said, following his gaze. ‘I’ll make sure she knows I told you to go.’

She touched Jess’s shoulder. ‘Get some sleep. I’ll call you later.’

Ellie looked at her watch. Five forty-five. Forty-five minutes since Jess threw shoes at her head. Thirty-four minutes since she made a mental note of her start time outside the apartment. Thirteen minutes since the first jingle of the Gwen Stefani ring tone.

She looked at the girl, abandoned and exposed against a pile of construction debris. If Ellie had kept on jogging, this would be someone else’s case. Someone else could deliver the news to the family. Someone else could offer their anemic reassurances that they were doing all they could to find out who’d done this to their daughter. But she had stopped. She had made the patrol officer use her name on the radio. This was her case now. This girl was her responsibility.

It was time to find out who she was.

Two hundred feet away, on the other side of East River Drive, a blue Ford Taurus was parked outside an apartment building on Mangin Street. The man at the wheel watched as a second patrol car arrived, followed by an ambulance with lights and sirens. Two patrol cars carrying four uniform officers had all arrived before the ambulance. He found that ironic. Good thing the girl was beyond saving.

The first of the patrol cars to have arrived left the park and turned north on the FDR. One cop up front. Civilian male in back, no cuffs. Everyone else remained at the scene for now. He wanted to stay and watch, but knew they’d be canvassing the neighborhood soon.

He turned the key in the ignition. The digital clock on his dash read 5:46. He adjusted the channel on his satellite radio. Fourteen minutes until Howard Stern.

At 5:48 a.m., twenty-two miles east in Mineola, Long Island, Bill Harrington’s eyes shot open when his newspaper carrier missed the porch once again, thumping the shutter outside his bedroom window. His body felt clammy. He kicked the quilt away to the side of the bed and welcomed the slight chill on his bare legs.

He had been dreaming of Robbie.

The dream began at the Alcoa plant outside Pittsburgh, a place he hadn’t set foot in since Penny insisted that they retire to Long Island five years ago. But he had worked in that plant five days a week for twenty-five years of his life – the majority of them happy – melting and pouring steel castings. In his dream, when he walked into the familiar employees’ break room, he found himself instead at the Harrington family’s old kitchen table.

It was Robbie’s sixth birthday. Jenna was only twelve at the time, but she’d insisted on baking the cake with only minimal assistance from her mother. The cake was lopsided, lumpy, and topped with a bizarre shade of green frosting, but Robbie hadn’t seemed to notice.

There she was, propped up on her knees on the vinyl padding of the kitchen chair, elbows on the table, her blond hair held back by a pink paper birthday-girl tiara, eagerly staring at the six burning candles while Bill, Penny, and Jenna drew out the final line of the birthday song to prolong Robbie’s excitement. Bill had smiled in his sleep when Robbie clenched her eyes shut, took that enormous breath, and whispered it cautiously across the tips of each candle. I did it, Daddy. I got every one of them, just like you told me. Will I really get my wish?

You’ll have to wait to find out, Robbie. But, remember, don’t tell anyone.

In Bill’s dream, Robbie had crawled down from her chair and walked out of the kitchen into what had moments earlier been, in his mind, the Alcoa plant. Bill followed her, longing for more time, but it was too late. He found her as he’d last seen her nearly eight years ago – naked on a stainless steel gurney, draped with a white sheet.

All these years later, Bill still found himself thinking about his younger daughter. How often, he’d never bothered counting; at least once a day, certainly; usually more. And, just as he had in the very beginning, when Penny was still with him and Jenna still lived nearby, Bill occasionally woke from dreams that gave way to nightmares.

But it had been a long time since Bill Harrington had been visited by such vivid memories of Robbie.

Chapter Five

Ellie was still in her T-shirt and sweatpants when J. J. Rogan pulled up in a white Crown Vic, hopped the curb off the FDR, and claimed a patch of dirt as his parking spot.

As she walked toward her partner, she cursed the young Officer Capra for not yet having returned from what should have been a quick errand. Her mind flashed to an image of her brother showing off a guitar riff to his newest fan while she worked a crime scene in her dirty running gear.

Her self-consciousness only heightened as Rogan stepped out of the car. As usual, he was dressed to the nines. Today’s ensemble consisted of a three-button black suit, well-starched steel gray shirt, and a purple tie with small white dots. Two days earlier, she’d seen the label on a jacket he’d thrown on the back of his chair. Canali. About two grand. She assumed this one ran about the same.

Ellie hadn’t figured out how her new partner could afford the wardrobe – or whatever other, less obvious indulgences he might have – but she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he worked off-duty as a model. He was average height, but with a solid frame, probably just shy of six feet and at least two hundred pounds. Dark mocha skin. Smooth bald head. Really good smile.

In short, J. J. Rogan was at the top of the bell curve for looks.

And apparently that fact wasn’t lost on the almost entirely male squad of homicide detectives at the Thirteenth Precinct. Nor had it escaped their attention that Ellie wasn’t half bad herself. Ellie had already overheard another detective referring to them by a team nickname: Hotchick and Tubbs. She assumed that with time they’d conjure up something more clever, but the general theme had been established.

‘Barely six a.m., Hatcher. You know this shit should have been someone else’s call-out.’

‘You’re telling me that if you were first at a scene, you’d wait for someone else to catch the case?’

She couldn’t tell whether Rogan was satisfied with her response or was simply moving on to the business at hand, but he made a beeline to the construction site. A crime scene analyst was still cordoning off the area with yellow police tape.

Rogan winced at the sight of the body. ‘I guess someone meant business. Where are we?’

‘No official word from the ME, but based on the swelling in her face and eyes, my guess is she died from the strangling.’

Rogan nodded his agreement and shone a flashlight across the body. ‘And the cuts were just for fun. Most of them look postmortem.’ Without a beating heart to move the body’s blood, stab wounds inflicted after death were dry and bloodless. The hatch marks in the victim’s skin had the telltale look of sliced Styrofoam. ‘Have you found ID yet?’

‘We found a purse, probably tossed over the fence, but no wallet, and no ID.’

‘What about her hair?’

‘Nothing yet. He either chopped it off before he brought her here, or carried it off with him – maybe kept it as a souvenir.’

Rogan was still taking in the full visual of the body. ‘Too healthy for a working girl. No track marks. Fresh pedicure. Matching lingerie.’

Ellie had made the same observations.

‘How old, do you think? You know that’s not my strong suit,’ Rogan said with a small smile. When he’d first met Ellie last week, he had volunteered that she looked a mere twenty years old, but then added that he could never tell with white people.

‘Early twenties, tops. She could even be a teenager.’

Rogan clicked his tongue against his teeth.

‘We pulled a cell phone from behind the body,’ Ellie said. ‘It must have fallen out when the guy dumped her, before he tossed her purse.’

‘So start dialing all her contacts. Let’s find out who this girl is.’

‘Easier said than done. There’s something wrong with the screen. The display kept cutting in and out when I was turning off the alarm. Now I can’t get any image at all. Nothing but black lines.’

Rogan took a look at the broken phone. ‘The same thing happened to me when I dropped my Motorola at the gym. That thing’s shot.’

‘I did, however, find this in her purse.’ Ellie held up a ziplock bag containing a white plastic card not much larger than a business card.

He smiled, registering the significance of the bag’s contents. ‘Now that narrows it down. You plan on staying in your sweaty clothes all day?’

As if on command, a marked car pulled up next to Rogan’s Crown Vic. Officer Capra stepped out, carrying a familiar blue backpack. She hoped Jess had remembered to pack her shield, Glock, and the necessary undergarments.

‘I’m ready when you are.’

The white plastic card was a hotel key emblazoned with a blue capital H surrounded by a curly Q.

‘We got three Hiltons in Manhattan,’ Rogan said. ‘Times Square, Rockefeller Center, and the Financial District. Try your luck.’

Ellie was wriggling out of her running clothes in the footwell of the backseat, trying not to think about the various forms of mucus that had been hurled and smeared against the upholstery since the car’s last disinfection.

‘Girls that age don’t stay near Wall Street.’

‘Unless they’re hookers,’ Rogan interjected.

‘And we don’t think she was. So between the other two, I’ll go with Times Square. Who doesn’t love Times Square these days?’

By the time Rogan pulled up to the giant copper clock outside the hotel’s Forty-second Street entrance, Ellie had just finished snapping on her holster. As she stepped from the backseat, she waved off a uniformed valet. Rogan flashed his shield as he followed behind her. ‘We’ll be quick, man. Thanks.’

To their surprise, the hotel lobby was on the twenty-first floor. They bypassed whatever businesses occupied the tower’s bottom half with an express ride in the Art Deco elevator. At the front desk, they cut to the head of a long line of guests who were presumably waiting to check out.

The woman who greeted them had pale skin, red hair knotted into a bun, and glasses dangling from a chain around her neck. ‘How may I help you?’

Rogan produced the hotel key and explained in a hushed voice what they needed and why.

‘Oh, my.’ The clerk lowered her voice as well. ‘Unfortunately, that key isn’t ours.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m certain.’ She produced a white card that looked identical to the one they’d found in the victim’s purse, but with the addition of the words Times Square below the corporate logo. ‘This here’s one of our keys. People like the Times Square thing, you know. And we’re considered “boutique style”. People like that, too. You should try our hotel at Rockefeller Center. They’ve got over two thousand rooms.’

‘And the one in the Financial District?’ Ellie asked.

‘Five hundred and sixty-five.’

‘So, if you’re playing your odds –’

‘Our Rockefeller Center location is on Fifty-third Street and Sixth Avenue.’

As the two detectives rode the elevator back to the ground floor, Ellie watched as Rogan checked out his freshly shaven scalp in the mirror. She snuck a look at herself, then quickly thought better of it. She knew from experience that messy strands of her shoulder-length blond hair would be flipped in every direction, thanks to dried sweat and the ponytail holder she’d worn during her run. At some point she’d try to find a hairbrush and at least wash her face.

‘How come between the two of us we didn’t figure out to hit the monster-sized hotel first?’ Ellie asked, keeping her eyes on the elevator’s digital display as it counted down each passing floor.

‘I guess the first twenty floors are misleading. Makes it look larger than it really is.’

‘That’s what she said.’ Ellie hadn’t meant to slip into a Michael Scott impersonation in front of her new partner, but the response to his comment had been automatic.

So was Rogan’s. He laughed. It was a good laugh. Loud. From the gut. ‘Careful, Hatcher. If word gets out you’ve got a sense of humor, the guys at the house will really be chasing after you, and I won’t be able to protect you. That is, assuming you ever get around to taking a shower.’

The Monday-morning traffic was already starting to pour from the Lincoln Tunnel into Midtown. Rogan hit the wigwag flashers on the headlights of the Crown Vic and made it to the circular driveway at the Sixth Avenue entrance of the Hilton in four minutes flat. Leaving the car pulled up behind a large Trailways bus, he badged the valet as they headed for the lobby, working their way through a large group of teenagers wearing John Marshall High School band T-shirts and dragging backpacks and instrument cases. Most of them were using cell phones to snap their final photographs of Manhattan as they milled around, waiting to board the jumbo bus.

Ellie knew they’d found the right place when she spotted two girls huddled next to the bell stand on the opposite side of the lobby. She couldn’t make out their words, but she could tell from the pitch of their raised voices that the girls were distressed. They appeared to be arguing, but then one of the girls burst into tears, and her friend placed an arm around her shoulder. A bellhop in a red uniform and captain’s hat stared at the girls awkwardly, clearly wishing to extract himself from the situation.

J. J. started toward the reception desk, but Ellie grabbed his elbow and cocked her head toward the agitated girls.

‘You go check that out,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the key to the front desk and see if they can get us any information on it.’

As she approached the bell stand, she was able to catch the tail end of the girls’ conversation.

‘We can’t leave without Chelsea.’ The crying girl had dark brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail, topped off with a black headband. She wore a pink hoodie sweatsuit and Puma tennis shoes.

The girl’s friend was rubbing her shoulder soothingly. ‘I didn’t say we should leave without her. I just said we should go to the airport. Chelsea’s probably there.’

The comforting girl was petite with a black pixie haircut. Ellie spotted the top of some kind of tattoo peeking out from the back of the waistband of her jeans. The girl looked at her watch with a furrowed brow. ‘We’re missing our flight anyway. It’s almost seven o’clock.’

‘They said it was delayed,’ the girl in the ponytail reminded her. She was starting to get control over her tears. ‘Chelsea would never leave us hanging like this.’

Another bellhop hurried past the duo and grabbed a set of car keys from the counter beside them. ‘Andale,’ he shouted, hurrying along the perplexed bellhop who was trapped with the girls.

‘Chewanna cab or not?’

The question sent the crying girl into sobs again, and the bellhop finally gave up, grabbed a set of keys from the counter, and fled to the hotel entrance.

‘Do you two need some help with anything?’ Ellie asked.

The pixie threw her an impatient look, as if the attention of strangers was yet another piece of unwarranted drama.

‘We’re fine, ma’am. We didn’t mean to make a scene.’

‘No need to apologize.’ Ellie flipped up the badge that was clipped to the waistband of her pants. ‘You’re looking for one of your friends?’

‘She’s just running late. It’s fine –’

‘Stop saying it’s going to be fine, Jordan.’ The crying girl pushed her friend’s hand off her shoulder. ‘She’s missing. She should be here, and she’s not here. She knew what time we were leaving, and she’s not here. She’s … she’s missing.’

Ellie heard the girl’s pain in the way she spoke that single word. She said it with the knowledge that to be missing meant so much more than to be in an unknown location.

The petite girl with the pixie haircut and tattoo, the one whose name was apparently Jordan, said they just needed to get to the airport. If they could get to the airport, they could make it onto a later flight and wait for Chelsea.

‘I told you, I’m not leaving.’

Jordan muttered something under her breath. Ellie heard it but hoped the crying girl hadn’t.

But she had, and she responded as predicted. ‘Seriously? Chelsea’s missing, and you decide to say you’re going to kill her? Do you have any idea how disgusting that is?’

‘All right. Just try to calm down, both of you. Your name’s Jordan?’ She spoke directly to the tattoo girl, who nodded in response. ‘No one’s killing anyone, Jordan.’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry. Sorry, Stef.’

‘And you’re Stef?’ Ellie asked the crying girl.

‘Yeah, Stefanie. Stefanie Hyder.’

‘Okay. So you’re obviously upset, but I need one of you – only one,’ she said, holding up a finger, ‘to tell me what’s going on. Can you do that, Stefanie?’

The girl sniffed a couple of times and tugged on her ponytail nervously. ‘We’re on spring break. Our flight leaves this morning – like, basically now. And our friend Chelsea isn’t here.’

‘But –’

Ellie held up her hand. ‘You’ll get your turn.’

Stefanie continued without prodding. ‘We went out last night. It was time to come home, and she wouldn’t leave. Chelsea wouldn’t leave. I should have stayed, but it was time to go home. And she promised.’

Jordan placed her arm around Stefanie’s shoulder once more, and this time Stefanie didn’t push away. Her tears brought on sobs as she spoke.

‘She looked me in the eye, and she promised she’d be back by now. She promised she’d be here. She promised. And she’s not. Something happened to her. Something’s wrong.’

Rogan had snapped a digital photograph of the girl from East River Park, but she didn’t want to do the ID that way. Not in a crowded Midtown hotel lobby. Not now.

‘Do you have a picture of your friend?’

The girls both shook their heads.

‘You sure?’ Ellie recalled the band students outside snapping shots with their phones. ‘Not in your cell phone or something?’

‘Yeah, right. No, of course.’ The one called Jordan stepped over to a tangle of bags that were piled in the corner next to the bell stand counter. She rifled through a large white tote, pulled a patent leather clutch from the larger bag, and then began sifting through its tightly packed contents. ‘Sorry. You have to put everything in two bags for the airlines.’

She finally slid out an iPhone and pushed a few buttons before holding it out toward Ellie. ‘That’s her, just last night at dinner. In the middle.’

Ellie took the device from her and peered closely at the picture. The three friends were huddled together, posing for the camera with open-mouth smiles, as if they’d been laughing. A bystander in the background didn’t look too happy with them. The girls had probably been too rowdy for the restaurant. At least their last night together had been a happy one.