“I’ve been catching up on other work,” Ellie said. She’d scanned the coverage of the Hart case this morning, but hadn’t noticed the ancillary sidebar.
Eckels looked at Rogan for his explanation.
“I just walked in,” Rogan said. “I had some personal stuff I’d pushed off during the heat of the case.”
“Why didn’t we hear about this yesterday?” Ellie asked. “We spent a lot of time with those girls.”
“They reported it to museum security,” Eckels said. “The museum turned it over to Central Park precinct, where some uniform took a complaint without thinking to reach out to us.”
She shook her head. “I’ll call the girls right away.”
Eckels held up his hand. “Already done. Public Information’s getting a victim’s advocate in touch with them for damage control. Make sure they’ve got all their credit cards canceled, that kind of thing. We’ll get them to the airport for their flight later this morning. They’re more than ready to go home. Just promise me you’ll do everything you can to make sure no more shit sandwiches.”
She and Rogan both nodded. Ellie was beginning to detect a pattern: Eckels liked to blow off steam but generally calmed down before breaking the huddle.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t quite ready to break. Easy way and a hard way. All things being equal, she was one to opt for ease. But she saw no detour around this one. She didn’t want to be that cop who twenty years down the road-after an innocent man had been exonerated-had lacked the courage to challenge the conventional wisdom.
“Sorry, sir. One more thing, while we’re here. We got a phone call off the tip line from a victim’s father on a cold case. His daughter was also killed after getting a little wild, on the Lower East Side in 2000.”
“So call him back and make nice.”
“I did, sir. But here’s the thing. His daughter also had her hair chopped off. And if the news is going to come out about Chelsea, then he’s going to see the resemblance between the two cases.”
“He’s going to see the resemblance, or you are?” Eckels shot her an annoyed look, but then a glimmer of recognition crossed his face. “Please tell me this isn’t that same case McIlroy bothered me about a few years ago.”
“Probably,” she said. “He apparently was looking into three different cases-all young blondes, all killed late at night, all possibly having to do with their hair.”
“Emphasis on possibly. As in impossibly. You really are McIlroy’s long-lost love child. The case I had didn’t fit the pattern at all, as I recall.”
“It depends what you mean by the pattern. The victim thought someone was stalking her when she left Artistik, a salon on the Upper East Side. Her hairdresser took off five inches. We could be talking about one killer-someone with a hair fetish. He cuts his victims’ hair. In your case-Amy Butler-he could have been set off by the haircut. Or he could have taken more of it when he killed her, and no one noticed because she’d just had the big change.”
Eckels shook his head in frustration. “Our job, despite what you may have learned from McIlroy, is not to work cold cases. If you think you’ve got something, send it to the Cold Case Squad and listen to them laugh at you. Until then, Rogan, please get your partner out of my office. I believe you have grand jury today on Jake Myers?”
Rogan looked at his Cartier watch. “In an hour.”
“Fingers crossed, guys. And, Hatcher, no surprises.”
CHAPTER 26
RACHEL PECK HAD been forced to alter her usual writing routine. Today was the second of two days this week she’d agreed to switch shifts with Dan Field, the afternoon bartender. Dan’s request had been accompanied by an explanation that his agent had lined up afternoon auditions for him, but Rachel suspected it was just another ploy to get access to her more lucrative peak-hour tips and to stick her with the lunch crowd. Still, Dan was generally a nice guy, and she didn’t want to be seen as an inflexible bitch, so she’d made the swap.
Her usual routine was to sleep late, do some yoga, and then write until it was time to show up to the proverbial day job, which, in her case, was a night job. Her goal each day was eight hundred words, even if it sometimes meant gluing herself to her keyboard at 2:00 a.m. when she returned from the restaurant.
This morning, however, she’d set her alarm for eight and had skipped the morning yoga so she could work in a couple of hours of writing before covering Dan’s lunch shift.
Rachel was twenty-six years old and had already thought of herself as a writer for a decade. Her literary dabblings began even earlier, when, as a kid in Lewiston, Idaho, her only escape from a household dominated by her angry and possessive father was a spiral-bound journal.
The Reverend Elijah Peck had found himself a single father one night when Rachel was only seven years old. Rachel’s mother had run to the corner market for a quart of milk and never returned. Her one-way Greyhound ticket to Las Vegas turned up on the family Master-Card, but the reverend didn’t bother trying to chase her down.
Her father’s willingness to let go of the wife who had abandoned him did not, however, extend to the daughter. Rachel had begun running away when she was only thirteen. She hitched rides to Spokane, Missoula, Kennewick, Twin Falls, Seattle.
Elijah would track her down every time. The last time she’d been brought home by her father, he’d found her working at the door of a Portland strip joint, scantily clad and impersonating a hostess of legal age. He hauled her back to Lewiston and told her that if she didn’t stay put and complete her senior year, she’d be dead to him.
When she asked her father what he meant, he looked her straight in the eye and said, “I’ll deliver you home to the Lord myself before you set another harlot’s foot in a sinner shack like that.”
Rachel had never understood her father, but she knew him well enough to believe he just might follow through on his promise. For a full year, she stuck to his drill. No more missed classes, no hitchhiking. She even kept curfew. Then the Saturday before her high school graduation ceremony, she packed a bag, found the principal, and did what she needed to do to convince him to let her take her diploma away with her. She hadn’t heard from her father or Lewiston since.
For the first time in years, Rachel was thinking about the Reverend Elijah Peck. The yellowed pages of her old journals lay before her on the dining table she used for a desk. Her eyes were still wet from the intermittent tears that had formed as she’d read her own teenage words and relived all those same emotions.
She was always surprised at how the quotidian details of everyday life crept into her writing. The way a woman at the next table checked the coverage of her lipstick in the reflection of a coffee cup. The pug in her building who wore an argyle turtleneck. The taste of cigarettes and dark chocolate.
But this was the first time she had made a conscious decision to draw on her own biography. The characters were fictionalized, of course. The defiant teenager would be a boy who developed into a killer. The oppressive parent would be a mother whose law enforcement career-always so resented by her always-resentful son-would now become the one means of helping her child, if she chose to do so.
Rachel was in the middle of a pivotal scene between mother and son-the one where the detective finds critical evidence beneath her own roof, implicating her own son-when she caught a glimpse of the time on the lower right hand of her computer screen.
Ten-fifteen. Time to earn a paycheck.
Her fingers tapped away at the keyboard as quickly as she could force them, pulling all of the thoughts stacked in her short-term memory and throwing them onto the screen. Spelling and syntax be damned. As long as she could piece it all together when she returned tonight, she’d be fine.