City of Fear (26 page)
Five minutes after Nick Warden visited Jake Myers in custody, Myers called Willie Wells and fired him as his attorney. His next call was to Susan Parker, seeking her representation for the purpose of contacting Simon Knight and offering to take a polygraph examination to clear his name. By the time that call came in, Knight had already lined up the polygrapher.
They all knew, of course, that the so-called lie detecting machine was far less reliable than its name might suggest. The machines were only as good as their operators and, even at their best, were not entirely accurate. But the intangible value of a polygraph transcended the questionable science.
A defendant’s willingness to sit for one said something in itself, especially if he managed to make it through an entire examination without breaking into a spontaneous confession. And a good polygrapher’s opinion, while no guarantee, would do a lot to confirm the feeling in Ellie’s gut that Jake Myers – although guilty of other wrongs – was no murderer.
The process was painstaking, with the most important components transpiring before Myers was even hooked up to the machine. It started with an open-ended debriefing in which Myers was free to state his version of the facts – at his pace, in his own words. Then he was subjected to detailed questioning from Ellie, Rogan, and Donovan, until all three were satisfied they had asked every possible question that might trip Myers up.
Only after the conversation had been exhausted did the polygrapher hook Myers up to the instruments that would measure his physiological responses during innocuous inquiries such as ‘Is your name Jake Myers?’ and money questions like ‘Did you cause the death of Chelsea Hart?’ By the time the polygrapher announced that he had detected no signs of deception, Ellie could already replay the scene between Chelsea Hart and Jake Myers in her head.
‘
Holy shit. What the fuck did you give me?
’
When Chelsea had snorted the line of whatever Jake
had passed her in the VIP lounge, she had assumed it
was cocaine. She’d tried it twice before and thought she
could handle it, but tonight something was different.
Whatever the powder had been, Jake and his friend had
done a lot more of it than she had
.
‘
Just a little speed. It’s great for a second wind.’ It was
meth, actually, but he knew a lot of girls freaked out about
the name
.
Jake placed his arms around Chelsea’s waist and pulled
her closer on the dance floor. She treated him to a little
grind and didn’t object when he slipped his hands beneath
the back of her shirt. His palms felt good against her bare
skin, but she knew it was time for her to wrap things up
before they went too far. She had promised Stefanie she’d
be just behind them, and she knew what a worrywart her
friend could be
.
Chelsea pulled playfully on Jake’s skinny black tie and
leaned in so he could hear her over the music. ‘I hate to
be a tease, but it’s time for me to go.’
He tried to persuade her to stay, just as they both
knew that he would. She looked at her watch. Just past
three a.m. ‘Look at it this way,’ she said. ‘You let me
leave now, and you’ve got an entire hour to line up one
of these little sluts to go home with you. Waste all your
time on me and, well, you and your friend there are on
your own –’
She pushed up against him again
.
‘Damn, you’re hot,’ he said, kissing her neck and
fingering the top button of her blouse
.
‘
Occasionally. Want me to pick out a girl for you, or
are you going to be fine on your own?
’
Jake smirked and shook his head. ‘Let me at least walk
you out.’ He took her hand and led her from the club.
‘Do you have a car?’
Town cars and limos were parked and double-parked
outside. ‘Yeah, right. I used my entire student loan check
to pay for a car service while we were in New York this
week.’
‘
My car’s in a lot in SoHo,’ Jake said. ‘Nick’s driver’s
waiting out here somewhere. Let me just run in and
check –
’
They both knew a ride in his friend’s car would start
something they’d finish en route to her hotel. She was
tempted but decided against it. She’d been faithful to
Mark the entire trip and didn’t want to mess that up
now
.
‘
Really, I’m fine with a cab
.’
Jake walked to the curb and tried to hail a taxi, but
four yellow cabs passed them by, already taken, their
rooftop medallion numbers unlit
.
‘I’ll be fine,’ Chelsea finally said
.
He ignored her and remained in the street, one arm
raised above his head
.
‘
Tick tock, Jake Gyllenhaal. You’re wasting that final
hour. The other players are locking down all the pretty
girls at Pulse as we speak
.’
He touched her hair and leaned in for a kiss before
thanking her for the fun and turning away. As Chelsea
watched him return to the club, she still felt his lips against
hers and wondered if it was a feeling of regret about
turning down the invitation to go further
.
Five more taxis passed her by before one finally stopped.
She crawled into the back seat and shut the door. ‘The
Hilton at Rockefeller Center, please. Fifty-third Street at
Sixth Avenue.’
The cab rolled a few feet and then stopped. ‘You have
cash?’
‘
Excuse me?
’
‘
You have cash, right?
’
‘No. I’ll pay by Visa.’ Chelsea had spent her final bills
on that last Angel’s Tip at the bar. She was so messed up
she’d forgotten about the free liquor in the VIP lounge
.
‘
No credit cards
.’
Chelsea knocked on the machine installed on the
partition in front of her. ‘What’s this thing for if you can’t
take a credit card?’
‘
It’s broken. Only cash tonight
.’
‘
I’ll pay you when I get there – my friends have money,
I promise
.’
‘
I do not run a loan company, miss. I will not drive
you if you do not have the money
.’
‘
Well, I’m not getting out of the cab. What do you think
about that?
’
‘
The meter is still running, miss, and you don’t have
any money. You need to find another taxi
.’
Chelsea was startled by a knock against the window.
It was Jake
.
‘
My savior,’ she said, rolling down the window. ‘I don’t
have any cash, and this asshole won’t take my fucking
credit card
.’
‘
He wouldn’t do that to you, now, would you, kind sir?
’
‘
Tell him, kind sir,’ Chelsea said. ‘Tell him how you
want to strand a girl here on the streets of New York City
all by herself
.’
‘
You need to get your drunk friend out of my car,’ the
driver said
.
Jake touched the tip of his chin, as if pondering the
situation. ‘This is quite a predicament, isn’t it?’
Chelsea knew Stefanie hadn’t seen the appeal, but this
guy really was incredible. The hair and clothes were too
much, but the smile – those lazy eyes and the softness
around his mouth – were irresistible
.
‘
Can I borrow twenty bucks?’ she asked. ‘I mean, I
know you’re hurting for money and all, so I’ll be sure to
mail it to you from Indiana
.’
‘
I tell you what. Get out of that cab and stay with me
a little longer. I’ll make sure you get home
.’
‘
I told you I have to go. My flight’s in, like, three hours
.’
‘
Fine, here’s your money.’ He removed a hundred-dollar
bill from the money clip in his pocket. Chelsea reached
through the window to take it, but Jake snatched his hand
back. ‘As my father always says, there’s no such thing as
a handout. You’ve got to
earn
this money, young lady
.’
Chelsea tilted her head to one side. ‘And what would
your father propose I do to earn it?’
‘That is it,’ the driver said. ‘Get
out
of my cab.’ He
opened his door, and Chelsea knew it was only a matter
of seconds before he was going to pull her physically from
the car
.
She and Jake were still laughing by the time they made
their way to the entry stairwell of a basement apartment
around the corner
.
Chelsea felt the cold concrete against her exposed toes
as she dropped to her knees and tried not to think about
Mark. This was just a onetime thing. Spring break. New
York. Jake Gyllenhaal. It was all a fantasy, and tomorrow,
it would be as if nothing happened
.
Jake was touching her hair softly at first, but by the
time he got close, he was gripping her head firmly with
his fingers, guiding her movements. He felt the wire hook
in her right earlobe come loose. He did not want it to fall
to the ground. Not now. Not at this moment. She might
stop what she was doing. He slipped the earring into his
pocket and replaced his hand on the back of her head
.
When she had finished, he helped her to her feet and
gave her a quick peck on the mouth. He loved girls who
swallowed, but that didn’t mean he needed to put his
tongue in there afterward. She laughed when he brushed
the dust from the knees of her pants
.
‘Where’s my hundred bucks?’ she said
.
‘
Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll take Nick’s car
.’
‘
Don’t
you
be ridiculous. Give me my money, or my
pimp’s coming after you
.’
He slipped a hundred-dollar bill into her purse. ‘Let’s
get you a cab before your pimp says I’m monopolizing
you.’
‘
If I can turn tricks in doorways, I’m perfectly capable
of hailing my own cab. And now I even have money to
pay. You better get back
.’
‘
You sure?
’
‘
Go on. I mean it
.’
He kissed her one more time before walking away. He
was nearly back to Pulse when he placed his hands in his
coat pockets to warm them. He felt the tiny glass beads
of her earring. He thought of turning back to find her,
but didn’t want to spoil the perfect ending
.
Rogan looked like he’d just seen William Shatner walk through 100 Centre Street in a hula skirt.
‘You figured you were innocent, so it was your God-given right to offer up another innocent man to take your place in prison?’ Rogan was still coming to terms with Myers’s newfound experimentation with honesty – and he wasn’t happy about it.
Jake Myers stared at his hands. He was seated in the same District Attorney’s conference room, at the same table, where, just yesterday, Jaime Rodriguez had told them about a club janitor who might be of interest.
Susan Parker was a sleazebag of a lawyer, but she was at least trying to protect her new client from Rogan’s outrage. ‘Give the guy a break. You had him on a murder he knew he didn’t commit, and he freaked out.’
Donovan rose from the table and paced their side of the room. ‘You could have told him to come clean, Susan. Instead, you orchestrated this.’
Jake looked up from his hands. ‘You were going to send me to fucking prison for the rest of my life. What was I supposed to do?’
‘You could have told us the truth that first night we talked to you at Pulse,’ Ellie said.
‘Fine. So kill me. I made a mistake. A bunch of cops barged into the club and started asking questions about some girl I got a little crazy with. I’d had a couple drinks – and more, as you now know – and I flipped, okay? I didn’t see how anything I had to say could even matter. But then all I kept hearing about was the evidence you had against me. The cabdriver. My DNA. The time of death. I had
nothing
. For once, I did a decent thing – I went straight home that night so I wouldn’t have to put up with Nick begging me for the details. I had no one to vouch for me.’
‘Then along came Symanski,’ Ellie said, ‘ready to sell his last remaining months to take care of his daughter and unborn grandchild.’
Jake chewed on his lower lip. Without all the hair gel and ridiculous clothing, she could see how Chelsea Hart had found him attractive.
‘When Susan first called me, it sounded crazy. But the guy was dying anyway, and he came to me. This wasn’t
my
idea. He wanted the money. And when Susan told me he had a prior rape conviction, I figured, better him than me. Once I remembered about the earring, I knew we could use that so you’d believe him.’
‘It didn’t dawn on you that the person you were helping the most was Chelsea Hart’s actual killer?’ Ellie said.
He stared at his hands again. ‘I wasn’t thinking about that.’
‘You were only thinking about yourself.’
‘Maybe,’ he said quietly, before glancing up at her. ‘But it’s not like you were looking for anyone other than me, were you?’
Rogan leaned across the table and pointed a finger at Myers. ‘Don’t put this on us.’
Myers slumped into his chair. Any remaining bravado was gone as he looked to Max Donovan with desperate eyes. ‘You believe me, right?’
As Ellie scanned the faces in the room, she had no doubt that, at that moment, they all, in fact, believed him.
‘Damn it.’ Simon Knight slammed his fist against his desk. ‘So now I have to explain to the mayor’s office why Jake Myers is a free man?’
Donovan started to explain that they’d returned a protesting Myers to custody to face obstruction charges, but Knight waved him off.
‘Are we absolutely positive about this? Why did Symanski run if the entire point was to take the blame? The guy stabbed a cop, for Christ’s sake.’
Cut
, Ellie thought, looking at the white gauze. ‘According to his daughter, Symanski panicked. The plan sounded fine in theory, but when we showed up at his house, the thought of living his last months in prison got to him. He figured that as long as we found the earring, Jake would get sprung even if he got away. And once I had him cornered in the alley, he decided he’d rather die right then and there. Suicide by cop.’
‘So where are we?’ Knight asked. ‘We start from scratch?’
‘We’ve got more than you think. We know we’ve got someone who started killing in the late nineties, almost ten years ago.’
Knight furrowed his brow. ‘Why are you so sure Lucy Feeney was his first kill?’
‘There’s no way to be sure until we find the asshole, but it does fit a pattern. What ties the girls together is the collection of their hair. The victims are all grabbed after going out to the clubs, but my guess is that’s not part of anything special to him. It’s opportunistic. It allows him to find girls when they’re vulnerable. It allows him to hide himself by preying upon that vulnerability in a city where a lot of girls have bad things happen to them at four in the morning. So it’s really about the killing and the hair. Lucy Feeney was strangled and also stabbed. She also had her hair blatantly hacked off, like Chelsea Hart.’
‘A total release,’ Knight said.
‘Exactly. No restraint. No fear yet that his MO will be detected. With Robbie Harrington, he strangles her, but does not couple it with stabbing. He’s more discreet about the hair, limiting himself to the bangs. He doesn’t want police to see the pattern. With Alice Butler, he switches things up again. He stabs her eighteen times. There’s some slight bruising on her neck, but he doesn’t strangle her. Something about the fact that she got her hair cut short set him off, but my guess is that he still took a souvenir, either by somehow collecting some of the clippings from the salon when she had it cut, or snipping off some small pieces after he killed her – so subtly that no one noticed.’
‘Then we have a six-year break before Chelsea Hart,’ Rogan said.
‘Exactly, and six years is a long time. By now, he’s no longer worried about law enforcement detecting a pattern. He does what he truly wants. And after six years of controlling himself, he’s got a lot of pent-up violence. He strangles her, cuts her up, and hacks off all her hair.’
‘Just like Lucy Feeney,’ Donovan said.
Ellie nodded. ‘That’s why I’m fairly confident that we’re going to find out that Lucy Feeney was his first. Or if he did kill before, it was in another series preceded by another long break, or it was outside the New York City area.’
‘So why the hiatus?’ Simon Knight leaned back in his office chair and steepled his fingers beneath his chiseled chin.
She shrugged. ‘He could have been in prison for something else. He could have been in some kind of long-term relationship that somehow satisfied his urges. His life could have changed in a way where he no longer needed to kill to feel satisfied.’
William Summer had stopped murdering women in Wichita around the same time he earned a promotion at his job working private security at a gated community in the suburbs. After his arrest, the residents reported a pattern of abuses of Summer’s power, such as it was. Armchair psychologists had concluded that the new responsibilities in his job had satisfied his egotistical need for control in a way that only murder previously could.
‘But now he’s back,’ Rogan said, ‘and that apparently has something to do with you. He dumps Chelsea Hart where you’ll find her, setting her cell phone alarm for added assurances. And he dumps Rachel Peck outside Vibrations, knowing you’ll get wind of it from your brother.’
It felt good to hear her partner articulate the theory aloud. No cynicism. No sarcasm.
‘And he messes with Rachel’s hair to send a message to me. This is where we’re way past starting from scratch.’
‘Because, as lovable as you are, only so many people can be jonesing to fuck with you this hard.’
‘Or one would hope,’ Ellie said. ‘I’ve only been on the job five years, and until a couple of months ago, I was working fraud cases. I only got major time on a handful of creeps, and most of those are still in the pen.’
Simon Knight followed the implications. ‘So we need to look at your old cases and look for enemies who went to prison after the Alice Butler murder, who recently got sprung.’
‘There’s a shot. I’ve been thinking about this, though, and there’s another possibility.’
Ellie paused, making sure she had their complete attention.
‘Our guy could be a cop.’ She watched the surprise register on all three faces, particularly Rogan’s. With him, it was more than hearing the unexpected. It was the shock of a slap to the face. ‘I don’t like this theory. At all. But I keep coming back to the timing. I got my assignment to the homicide unit a month ago. I was actually working in the squad for only a week before Chelsea Hart turned up on my running path. He wants to engage us. He wants us to know that after hiding his pattern for so long, he’s coming out to play. And it seems like the person he really wants to play with is me – and I was warned going in that other cops would resent my assignment to homicide.’
‘The coming out to play is what’s been tripping me up,’ Rogan said. ‘He bobs and weaves, denying himself the cutting that seems to define his MO. But now he drops a billboard in your front yard.’
‘So the question is, why is he upping the ante after getting away with it for so long? One possibility is, it’s a bad guy I put away in the past. But it’s awfully coincidental that when they get sprung from custody, I just happen to be in the homicide unit, where I can catch the new cases. Another possibility is that we’ve got a cop who stopped for some reason but has now decided to kill again as a way to challenge me.’
‘He
was
clean as a whistle with Chelsea Hart,’ Rogan said.
‘Right. The only physical evidence we found on her pointed us to Jake Myers. One of the lead detectives on Rachel Peck’s case tells me there’s no physical evidence with her, at least so far. And I’ve seen the files on Feeney, Harrington, and Butler – no blood, no semen, no hairs. This guy is good. And he knows the pattern of city homicides. He knows he can obscure the serial nature of his murders by committing them at night, against drunken party girls, who go down in the books as unsolveds – lessons to be learned by others.’
‘Any suggestions on where to look in the NYPD for a person like this?’ Knight asked.
‘Don’t look at me,’ Rogan said. ‘Hatcher can attest that I was home at bed with my woman when Chelsea Hart was killed. She woke my ass up.’
‘Well, we can apparently exclude Rogan and myself. That leaves approximately thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight cops.’
‘Do I look like I’m in the mood for jokes right now?’ Knight asked. He certainly did not.
Ellie adopted a more somber tone. ‘I suppose we start by looking at anyone who’s been trying to get into homicide and feels passed over. I think we’ve also got to look at the current homicide squad. They’ve got reason to resent me, plus it’s possible they got wind of Flann snooping around a few years ago, and that would explain why the murders stopped until after his death.’
‘So now what?’ Donovan asked.
She was about to set out a process for going forward, but Simon Knight interrupted her.
‘You all go home for a break, and I call the com misioner. We take a new look at everything tomorrow with an expanded task force, most likely with the assistance of the FBI.’
‘Wait a second –’ Ellie’s words cut into Rogan’s louder statement of ‘Absolutely not.’
‘We can do this, sir,’ she said.
‘And we don’t need a break to regroup tomorrow,’ Rogan added. ‘This is our case, and we want to work it.’
‘You
will
work it, but the question of how and with what other personnel is a decision well above your pay grade, and well outside the boundaries of this office. The Chelsea Hart case was being worked out of this office’s Homicide Investigation Unit, with you in my command, because an arrest had been made and we were doing everything with an eye toward the prosecution of Jake Myers. Now that we’re all agreed that we have no murder case against Myers, the two of you go back to police command, where they can figure out what to do with this – I think it’s safe to say – clusterfuck.’
Ellie could see precisely where Knight was headed. He would tell the mayor and the police commissioner that his office had done everything it could with the case that had been given to them so hastily, but had no choice but to dismiss the charges once they had exonerated Jake Myers. Without a suspect, Knight was free to extract himself from the mayhem. Just as Rogan had warned, Knight cared more about himself than he ever would about them.
‘No offense, sir, but I hope you’ll point out to police command that Rogan and I deserve to run this. I’m the one the killer wants to engage. The more he’s getting what he wants on that front, the more likely he’s going to do something that will lead us to him.’
‘The counterargument, Detective, is that the more he gets to push your buttons, the more dangerous he becomes. We know for a fact that the
Daily Post
’s break of this story is imminent. Who knows what kind of reaction that could trigger from him.’
‘We need to warn people,’ she said. She did not want to look at herself in the mirror tomorrow morning if the killer claimed another victim while she was taking Simon Knight’s mandated ‘break.’
‘I don’t want to do anything that validates the
Daily
Post
’s story,’ Knight said. ‘It’s premature.’
‘We don’t need to validate the story. Any casual news watcher is going to at least wonder if there’s a connection between the deaths of Chelsea Hart and Rachel Peck. Even without confirming that we’re looking at a single killer, we can contact the clubs and bars. Make sure they’re watching girls, warning them about wandering off alone.’
‘They’re not the only ones who need a warning,’ Knight said. ‘I’m sure you’re smart enough to have figured out where this game might be taking this man.’
The thought had more than crossed her mind. A killer who came out of the shadows to announce his existence was taking a risk of getting caught. And if he was willing to get caught, there had to be a payoff. Maybe besting her at a cat-and-mouse game would be enough for him, but she suspected that this was all just a warm-up.
‘I can take care of myself.’ The words didn’t come out as confidently as she’d intended.
‘I’m sure that’s true,’ Knight said. ‘But if I were you, I’d stay away from dance clubs for the time being.’