All Day and a Night (17 page)

Carrie hit the “end” button on her phone and set it on top of her journal on her worktable.

“You and that adorable little notebook,” Linda said. “You weren’t kidding about that habit of yours, were you?”

Carrie shrugged. She was regretting telling Linda the truth when she’d asked what Carrie was scribbling before that morning’s court hearing. Now she felt like Linda was questioning her efficiency.

“I’m glad the case is going well for you,” Carrie said. “But we talked about this when you hired me. I want to know the truth about my sister’s murder. I need to know whose DNA is beneath her fingernails.”

“As well you should,” Linda said. “But we’re not the state. We don’t have search warrants or grand juries or the inherent power that comes with being part of the government.
This
—embarrassing them—is our only power.”

“Embarrassing them doesn’t tell me who killed my sister.”

“Look, Carrie. I hired you on the assumption that you were smart enough to understand that identifying the real killer was only a possibility. This isn’t Perry Mason. The best we can do is to pressure the state to produce the answers they should have gotten for you twenty years ago.”

“So what’s left for me to do at this point?” Carrie asked.

“If you think we’ve done anything to truly get their attention, you’re giving them too much credit. We’ve got a clock ticking over them before Amaro’s release, but that’s not enough. It’s all about damages now. Money.”

“I thought we were supposed to be getting to the truth.” She realized how naïve she sounded the minute the words escaped her lips.

“That’s
their
job. Ours is to force them to do it, and money’s the only way to motivate them. If it weren’t for Buck Majors, they might have gotten to the truth about Donna nearly two decades ago. The DA is going to have to review every single conviction obtained as a result of one of his supposed confessions. We could keep a dozen lawyers employed full time for the next five years. We could even change the way people feel about the treatment of criminal defendants. And the first step is to convince these SOBs to finally figure out what happened to Donna. You have no idea how important you are to this case now. You’re the one who knows the lay of the land. You’re the one who’s going to make this happen.”

“And what exactly is
this
?”

“Making this a statewide case. We have Martin Overton’s attention here in the city, but now we’ve got to start pulling in the upstate players. We need to tear down not just the Deborah Garner investigation, but Utica’s complacency. Why did the Utica PD let the NYPD close their case without doing the real work?”

“I’m not sure what you want me—”

“Go to Utica,” she said. “I’m sending Thomas, too. And don’t argue with me about that. He’s got a list of all my investigators if you need anyone up there, and you’re going to want someone to drive for you, make your appointments, fetch you toothpaste from the drugstore. Trust me—the dear heart is invaluable on the road.”

The lawyers Carrie had worked for at Russ Waterston had tended to be painfully specific with their requests, down to the nitty gritty of the number of pages and the preferred font for any given legal memo. Linda was terribly eager to send Carrie back to her hometown, complete with a personal assistant in tow, but she hadn’t actually explained why. “I’m sorry, Linda. I don’t understand what you’re asking me to do.”

“Find the dirt. Find our poster child. Who epitomizes the Keystone Kops who failed to figure out the truth earlier? I don’t want you and Thomas back here until you can bring me Utica’s Buck Majors.”

J
ohn Shannon nearly ran right into Ellie as she and Rogan climbed the stairs at the 13th Precinct.

“Whoa, bruiser,” Rogan said.

“Sorry, I’m late for grand jury. If I’m a no-show, no OT, know what I’m saying? Oh, and a heads-up: there’s some guy waiting for you up there. Not a happy camper. Have fun!” He gave a chirpy wave as he continued on his way.

Their visitor turned out to be Mitch Brunswick. He leapt from his chair in the waiting area the second they hit the stairwell landing. His body language read angry, but his eyes were fatigued and red. He’d been crying in the recent past.

“When were you going to tell me?”

In the rush to react to this morning’s hearing, they hadn’t even thought to call Helen Brunswick’s husband to notify him that Anthony Amaro was alleging a connection between his wife’s murder and the crimes he was suspected of committing. By now, he would have heard about it from the news.

Rogan held out an arm to keep Brunswick back. “We’re in the middle of an ongoing investigation.”

“You don’t think I know that? It’s bad enough that I’ve been treated like a suspect. But you were in my home when I told you that Helen used to work upstate, right around that same time, and you said
nothing
.”

If Mitch Brunswick was involved in his wife’s murder, they would be idiots to talk about the case with him. If he wasn’t, he would always remember this conversation as just one more indignity he suffered at the hands of police after his children’s mother was killed. Until they had more information, all they could do was err on the side of caution. Cruelty was better than jeopardizing a murder investigation.

Rogan started to walk past Brunswick. “Like I said, we’re working on the investigation. We promise to give you answers as soon as we have them.”

“In the meantime, I have to tolerate photographs of my wife’s dead body on the Internet?”

“What are you talking about?”

He handed them his cell phone. “My
kids
saw these. Some future sociopath at their school was sending it to everyone.”

His smartphone was open to the website of one of the local tabloid papers. Ellie recognized the photograph as one taken at the crime scene after Helen’s body was discovered. The editors had the decency to blur her bloodied torso and face, which was already gray and bloated by then, but the picture clearly depicted her broken limbs. The headline read:
RETURN OF A SERIAL KILLER?

“I promise you,” Ellie said. “We have no idea how they could have gotten this photograph.”

His hand was trembling when she returned the phone to him.

“I was the one who identified the body,” he said, staring at the screen. “She was covered with a white sheet. Her body, I mean. I saw her face, but—this.” He shook the phone. “It isn’t right. My wife was a person. A real person, and a good person. She didn’t deserve to die, and she sure as hell doesn’t deserve this.”

As they watched Mitch Brunswick make his way down the stairs, Rogan said, “You know who must have leaked those pictures, don’t you?”

She mumbled that she didn’t know.

“Linda Moreland.”

“Or whoever’s leaking information to her could’ve sold them to the paper.”

“Nope, it’s Moreland. She’s calling out the press, bigtime. Nothing gets the dogs barking like a lurid crime-scene picture.”

There was no way to be sure who was responsible for that photograph going public, but Ellie was now convinced of one thing: Mitch Brunswick had not killed his wife.

Y
ou the one here to see Christy McCann?”

Ellie nodded. To save time, she had made the trip alone, leaving Rogan free to work the bigger picture. It didn’t take two detectives to question an eyewitness who had identified Anthony Amaro eighteen years earlier.

In movies, prostitutes are always good people with bad luck who manage through hard work and big hearts to find happiness. In the most romanticized version of the fairy tale, prostitution is fun and glamorous and leads to true love and luxury shopping sprees with men who look like Richard Gere. In the real world, prostitutes could be good or bad people, but nearly always ended up with short, harrowing lives. Jess’s coworker Mona, who had managed to convince herself that she was saving girls by teaching them the difference between stripping and whoring, was the closest thing Ellie had ever seen to some kind of hooker’s happy ending.

When the marshal escorted Christy McCann into the meeting room, Ellie could see that the woman who’d been turning tricks with Deborah Garner at a rest stop in Secaucus had arrived at nothing close to happiness. She was almost shockingly gaunt, with pocked skin and missing teeth. At least she’d been easy to find, right here at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. Six years ago, she was sentenced to life in prison for forcing drain cleaner down the throat of another prostitute because she had dared to hold back money from their shared pimp.

McCann took one look at Ellie and then glanced back at the male guard for an explanation. Ellie kicked out the chair on the opposite side of the table with her foot, and McCann finally took a seat. “You’re too pretty to be a cop,” she said.

“Should I say thank you?” Ellie asked.

“You here about Lincoln?” Lincoln Turner was the peach of a pimp whom police suspected had ordered the drain-cleaner punishment. “Every time he gets the better of one of you people, seems I get a visit. Instead of pigs, they should call you elephants, you got such long memories.” She smiled at her own joke. “But I still got nothing to say.”

“I could care less about an over-the-hill pimp. I’m here about your friend, Deborah Garner.”

“Ain’t my friend no more. She got herself killed.”

“You can drop the badass front, Christy. I read the police reports. You were beside yourself when you learned she was dead. The two of you were at that rest area together for a reason. You didn’t have pimps. You had each other. She protected you, and vice versa.”

“Lot of good it did us,” she muttered.

“You helped her even after her death,” Ellie said. “A lot of girls would have kept their heads down and their mouths shut. But when you didn’t see your friend for two days, you made a call: you reached out to the police. Even after you learned that her body had been found, you kept helping her. If it hadn’t been for you, they never would have known that Deborah had been working that rest stop. And they wouldn’t have found the E-Z Pass records, so they wouldn’t have had photographs to show you of suspects. You were the key to finding Deborah’s killer.”

“Deb . . .” The word was hard to make out initially, but then Christy spoke up. “She absolutely hated Deborah. Said it sounded like ‘candelabra.’” Her face softened at the memory.

“Sorry. I mean, Deb. You helped find Deb’s killer.”

“Where were you when they were putting my ass in here for life?”

“Two different things, Christy. All I’m saying is that I know you wanted justice for your friend. I need you to tell me what you remember about Anthony Amaro.”

“I know he’s a killer, just like you said. Why are we talking about him after all this time?”

“There are problems with some of the evidence. But you identified him. You told police you recognized him as the man who picked up Deb at the rest stop.”

“That’s right. Nothing else to say.”

“My understanding is that Detective Majors showed you several photographs of drivers whose cars had passed through that area around the same time. How sure were you of the identification?”

“Maybe you should be asking your own boy instead of me.”

“By ‘my boy,’ do you mean Detective Majors? I should be asking
him
how sure
you
were that Amaro was the man you saw? That doesn’t make sense.”

She pursed her lips and worked her jaw back and forth. The effect was disturbingly goatlike. “What exactly do you want me to say?”

“The truth, Christy. There’s no right answer except the truth.”

“You people say that, but it’s never what you mean. Not with Lincoln. Not ever.”

“Are you saying that you had the impression back then that you were
supposed
to identify Anthony Amaro?”

“Duh. He killed Deb. Of course I was going to identify him.”

This was like talking to a windup doll. “Christy, I really mean this: Did you identify Amaro because you actually remembered seeing him, or because you thought you were supposed to pick him?”

“He was the guy. His car was in the right place, at the right time. He was a john. And he was from the same town where a bunch of girls got killed the same exact way. So I picked him.”

“How did you know all that?” According to Majors, Christy had flipped through a series of driver’s-license pictures and homed in on Amaro’s.

“Because the cop told me when he showed me the photo. So I said, ‘Yeah, that’s the guy,’ and he told me I did a good job. He said that was all he needed for probable cause so he could make an arrest back where the guy lived. And then, when I called him later to find out what happened, he said the dude confessed.”

“But did you actually recognize him as the man Deb left with?”

“Yeah, sure. What’s the problem?”

Law enforcement knew much more now about the fallibility of eyewitness memory, but even back then, Christy should never have been told so much about the evidence against an individual suspect before viewing his photograph.

“That’s not how it’s supposed to work—” Ellie bit her lip. She wanted to crawl back in time and shake Buck Majors until his teeth rattled. This was his mess.

She could picture all the mistakes. Majors would have been so pleased with himself for pulling the E-Z Pass information. When he got a hit on a Utica driver with a previous record as a john, he gave the eyewitness a little push. Her ID then confirmed his certainty that Amaro was guilty, so he pushed on the interrogation, either forcing or fabricating that confession. They might never know the truth about Amaro because of his shoddy investigation.

“You want me to say I remember?” Christy offered. “Then I remember. You want me to say something on that detective, I’m happy to do that, too. I’d do anything to help myself out here.”

“Funny you should be so willing to make that offer,” Ellie said. “You didn’t sound willing to deal when you thought I was here about Lincoln Turner.”

Christy lifted her stringy brown hair and turned to show Ellie a tattoo on the back of her neck.
LINCOLN’s GIRL
. “He did it himself. Lincoln was the only man who ever loved me.”