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.