City of Fear (23 page)
‘Morning, Manny. Can I get a large coffee? No room. And a lemon Danish.’
‘No room. You really think I need a reminder on that? Every morning of every day, you get a large coffee, no room. I got it now. We’re good for life, sweetheart.’
‘You’re my kind of person to be good with, Manny.’ Ellie didn’t mind that the older man behind the deli counter called her sweetheart instead of the official titles he used with the other cops. She’d realized a long time ago that the occasional harmless byproducts of tradition actually made it easier for men of a certain generation to accept her.
Her cell vibrated at her waist. According to the screen, it was another call from Peter, the second already this morning, and it was only eight o’clock.
She’d called him last night when she’d gotten home from St. Vincent’s. Just as Jess had predicted, Peter had an explanation for everything. He had only kept his profile on the First Date site because he thought it might come in handy while researching the book. He had only mentioned her to the Simon & Schuster editor as he was explaining why he was having second thoughts about the project.
An hour into the call, Ellie felt like she was on duty, interrogating a suspect who believed he could talk his way out of anything. She’d ended the conversation by telling him she needed a break. Peter had acquiesced, but he clearly had a different definition of the word. Just as she had earlier, she let the call go to voice mail. Once again, there was no beep alerting her to a new message.
Manny passed her a tall cup of coffee across the counter. ‘What’d you do to yourself there? Those boys at the precinct aren’t beating up on you, are they?’
She held up her hand, still wrapped in white gauze. ‘Shark bite. Can you believe it? Jumped right out of the Hudson River.’
‘Ah, we got a smart aleck over here now. Get a load of you, a shark bite.’
‘It was just a misunderstanding yesterday. I’m fine.’
‘The bad guy got it worse?’
Manny had enough cops go through here to know the lingo.
‘That goes without saying.’
‘Well, if you’re gonna walk around with that humongous bandage on your hand, you need to work on your stories. The best tall tales are the ones you might actually believe are the truth.’
Ellie found herself thinking about Manny’s words during the two-block walk to the precinct. She thought about Chelsea Hart, Lucy Feeney, Robbie Harrington, and Alice Butler. She replayed Rogan’s argument that Chelsea was different:
They were all pretty rough city
chicks. Hard-knock-life, round-the-way girls, not wide-eyed college students from Indiana
. She thought about the murder of Darrell Washington just one day after he’d used Jordan McLaughlin’s stolen credit card at the Union Square Circuit City.
By the time she was at her desk, retrieving her Danish from its greasy paper bag, she had decided that her jumbled thoughts at least warranted a phone call. She used the heel of her bandaged palm to flip through the pages of her notepad.
An electronic voice informed her that Jordan McLaughlin’s cell phone had been disconnected. She tried Stefanie Hyder’s number instead and got an answer.
‘Hello?’ It was barely seven o’clock in Indiana, but Stefanie sounded alert.
‘It’s Detective Ellie Hatcher from the NYPD. How are you holding up?’
‘It’s been pretty rough. You know what happened to us on Wednesday?’
‘I heard. That must have been awful.’
‘It’s not like it was anything compared to Chelsea, but the whole reason we’d gone to the museum was to read this poem she liked in front of the place she had thought was so magical when we went before – well, you know. And then to have it ruined like that … We didn’t get a good look at the guy. It’s like all either of us could see in that moment was the gun.’
‘Did someone from the department notify you that they found Jordan’s stolen credit card at another crime scene?’
‘Yeah, we got a call last night right after we landed. We were pretty freaked out by the whole thing.’
‘It’s probably good that you were finally able to go home. I was actually calling to follow up on something you mentioned the other day. You said Chelsea had a way of making up stories about herself?’
Ellie could hear the smile in Stefanie’s voice. ‘That was a classic Chelsea move. She didn’t do it to be mean, but if someone really cheesy was hitting on her or something, she’d weave some crazy identity out of thin air.’
‘Like what?’
‘Whatever happened to strike her as funny. She told some guy at a diner our first morning in the city that we were there to audition for the Martha Graham Dance Company. By the time she was done talking, she had described some elaborate improv thing we were supposedly doing with bar stools. Other times, she’d say she was a stripper. When we were in high school, she’d tell people we were lesbian runaways.’
‘Do you think she may have made up one of these stories the night she was killed?’
Stefanie paused. ‘Not at Pulse. I heard her talking to a couple of guys about Indiana.’
Ellie remembered Tony Russo, Nick Warden’s monogamous financial analyst friend, mentioning the Hoosiers when she had shown him Chelsea’s picture.
‘What about earlier in the night? At the restaurant?’
‘Yeah. Maybe. The bar was crowded, and I know she wandered off to the bathroom at one point.’
‘But you don’t know who she might have talked to?’
‘No. What’s this all about? She met that Jake Myers at Pulse, not the restaurant.’
‘I know. We’re just making sure we didn’t miss anything. Does Jordan still have that picture of the three of you from that night?’
‘No. Her phone was in her purse when it got stolen, and most of our pictures from the trip were in there.’
‘Do you know if she backed it up beforehand, or sent it to someone else?’
While Stefanie talked to Jordan in the background, Ellie opened Photoshop on her computer. Damn. Just as she thought.
‘She doesn’t have it anymore,’ Stefanie said, ‘and the only people she sent it to were you and that guy at the newspaper.’
Ellie flipped through the mess sprawled across her desk and plucked out a copy of the
Sun
’s first article about Chelsea’s death. She looked at the byline.
‘Was that David Marsters?’
More talking between the two girls.
‘She says that’s the guy.’
Ellie thanked Stefanie for her time, then made a quick call to the
New York Sun
. She got lucky: Marsters was at his desk. After a quick introduction, she gave him her cover story.
‘Sorry to bug you, but the DA’s office liked that picture you ran of Chelsea Hart and wants to get a copy of it for trial. Do you still have it?’
‘Just a sec. Yep, it’s right here on my computer. Want me to e-mail it to you?’
‘That would be great.’ She gave him her address. ‘Do you happen to have the original that Jordan McLaughlin gave you?’
‘Hold on. Nope, I plugged her phone right into my laptop. I’ve only got the version I saved after I cropped it.’
‘No problem. I’m sure the DA planned to crop it around the victim’s face anyway.’
Ellie had followed the same process as Marsters. Instead of creating a separate file to crop Jordan’s original photograph, she had cropped the only copy she had on her computer, then saved the changes to the same file. She vaguely recalled the faces of bystanders in the background of the original picture, but with the theft of Jordan’s iPhone, there was no way to recover the complete image.
She made another call, this time to Detective Ken Garcia.
‘This is Ellie Hatcher. My lieutenant sent me over yesterday to the LaGuardia Houses.’
‘Bandage hand.’
‘That’s me. I was checking in to see if you have any suspects yet in the Darrell Washington shooting.’
‘Nah. Between you and me, my hunch is it’ll go down as an unsolved.’
‘Did you find any other guns in the apartment?’
‘We found the murder weapon. That’s usually the one that counts.’
‘I know, but my robbery victims said Washington was armed. I’m wondering whether you found the gun he may have used.’
‘Good catch. I guess we’ll need to look into the possibility he was killed with his own gun.’
As Ellie thanked the detective for his time, she wondered what other possibilities she had overlooked this week.
‘How’s the hand?’ Rogan plopped himself down at his desk.
‘Not bad,’ she said. ‘Okay, brace yourself for another argument with me: I think whoever killed Darrell Washington killed Chelsea Hart.’
‘That’s the dude from the projects?’
‘Think about it. Street crime’s down all over the city, especially in Manhattan. Two girls whose friend was murdered just
happen
to get robbed in broad daylight on the Upper East Side? And then the man who did it just
happens
to get shot? That’s too many coincidences for me. Someone saw that picture of Chelsea in the
Sun
and realized he could have been in it. He hired Darrell Washington to steal Jordan’s cell phone, but knew Washington couldn’t be trusted to turn over all the loot. The minute we got a hit on Jordan’s credit card, we would’ve been at Washington’s door, asking questions. Our guy killed Washington to make sure there was no link back to him.’
Rogan nodded throughout her monologue, digesting every argument. ‘You’re making a whole lot of sense, Hatcher.’
‘It’s about time you came around.’
‘All except one thing. Given Jake Myers’s current custodial status, he can’t be the someone you’re talking about, correct?’
‘No, but it could easily be Symanski. He could have gotten to Washington before we showed up at his front door.’
‘One problem with that: I just got off the phone with American Express. Capital Research Technologies took a cash advance of a hundred thousand dollars about four and half hours before we arrested Jake Myers for murder. And Myers signed for it, at the Mohegan Sun.’
The casino was at best a two-hour drive from the city. ‘So either Myers plowed through a hundred grand in record time –’
‘Or he used the company credit card and some casino chips to hide one big-ass payment to someone.’
‘Then, lo and behold, two days later, Leon Symanski conveniently steps up and confesses to Chelsea Hart’s murder.’
‘The baby daddy’s the missing link,’ Rogan said.
She was picturing the same chain, one leading from Myers to Symanski. The connection between Myers and Nick Warden was clear: between their friendship and the hedge fund, the two men were practically inseparable. Warden was tight with his drug supplier, Jaime Rodriguez. And after last night’s sighting of Symanski’s pregnant daughter at the hospital, the safe bet was that Rodriguez was the father of Symanski’s unborn grandchild. Combined with Myers’s quick, covert, and well-timed disposal of a hundred thousand dollars, it all led to one conclusion: Myers had paid Symanski to take the fall for him.
Rogan tapped a ballpoint pen against his palm. ‘I guess now we know why Warden wanted a deal for Rodriguez as part of his cooperation agreement to flip on Myers: that was also part of the quid pro quo.’
‘It also explains why Symanski was so evasive when we asked about the girl we saw at his house. If we’d gone to her, we might’ve found Rodriguez and started drawing the same connections.’ Ellie shook her head. ‘Jesus. First Rodriguez knocks up Symanski’s daughter, then he asks him to go down for a murder he didn’t commit?’
‘Maybe he didn’t ask him. Rodriguez spent a night in jail when we popped him on the drug charge. Symanski’s daughter couldn’t have been happy about that. She shows up back at Daddy’s house, crying about the father of her child heading upstate for six to nine as a repeat drug offender. Daddy sees the chance to be a hero before he powers down in a few months anyway from the melathemiona.’
‘Mesothelioma.’
Rogan rolled his eyes. ‘Plus, you’re going to love this. I was picturing how it must have all gone down, and I kept coming back to Nick Warden’s smoking-hot lawyer.’
‘Susan Parker.’
‘Exactly. The junior associate at a law firm that doesn’t even handle criminal defense. But she’s the one who told us Warden wanted a deal not just for himself, but also Rodriguez. And she was the one who brought Rodriguez to us at the courthouse, pointing the finger at Symanski.’
‘You think she was in on it, too?’
‘I went to her law firm’s Web site. Turns out she graduated from Cornell.’
‘Jake Myers’s alma mater.’
‘Right again. She graduated one year ahead of him. They were both members of some club called the Entrepreneur Society. I still haven’t figured out whose idea this was, but she should have known about it. They all did, every link in the chain.’
‘Damn it,’ Ellie said. ‘Symanski was looking good for it all.’
‘But now we’re back to Myers – who couldn’t have started killing nearly ten years ago.’
‘You certainly had a busy morning while I was wasting my time trying to pull up the lost background of a photograph from the computer vortex. You didn’t happen to cure cancer while you were at it, did you?’
‘No. I’m saving that for the afternoon, but I do have a health tip for you.’ He eyed the half-eaten pastry on her desk. ‘Did it ever dawn on you to watch what you eat? You aren’t
that
young.’
‘I watch what I eat every day, right before I pop it into my pie hole.’
‘Hatcher.’
Ellie looked up to see Lieutenant Eckels standing at his office door on the perimeter of the squad room.
‘Morning, boss.’
‘How’s that hand?’
‘A lot better. Thanks.’
‘A word with you both?’
He closed his office door without waiting for confirmation.
‘You hear that? He asked about my injury. My lieutenant cares about my well-being.’ She used her good hand to fan away fake tears of emotion. ‘I’m
verklempt
.’
‘You really think Simon Knight saved your ass, don’t you?’
‘He said he would last night.’
‘You know Eckels could be calling us in there to pull you off this case for good, right? He seems damn chipper about something.’