No DNA. Clean crime scenes. A knowledge of city crime patterns. The stakeout abilities to nail down her running routine.
Simon Knight had asked her earlier in the day where they might begin looking for a killer among forty thousand officers in the NYPD. One of them had just jumped to the top of the list.
CHAPTER 44
J. J. ROGAN AND MAX DONOVAN seemed out of place on Ellie’s familiar brown couch. A few weeks ago, she hadn’t met either one of them, and now they sat side by side on her living room sofa, hips nearly touching, surrounded by piles of magazines, clothing, and empty beer bottles, all of which she made a point of blaming entirely on Jess.
As soon as she’d heard Peter’s voice mail, she’d known she had to head straight home. If Eckels was looking for her, she wanted to be here. She wanted to be found. She wanted to look him in the eye and figure out how he’d fooled so many people for so long.
Max had insisted on coming with her. And when she’d called Rogan from the cab, he’d insisted on driving in from Brooklyn. And so now here they sat on her sofa in a room that was usually restricted to her, Jess, and restaurant deliverymen.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Rogan was saying. “Lieutenant Dan Fuckin’ Eckels? Strangling chicks and cutting them up and hacking off all their hair? I mean, Jesus H. We need to think through this shit.”
“I have thought it through,” Ellie said. “He was the lead detective on Alice Butler’s case. He mentioned in the reports that Alice told her sister someone was following her shortly before her murder, but he left out the fact that she picked up on the guy after she left a hair salon.”
“And you’re so sure that’s a detail that you would have included in a report?”
“Would I have included it? Of course.”
“Okay, but you’re fricking rain man. You’re positive that every cop would’ve noted that?”
“Of course not. That’s why I assumed Eckels had simply left it out. But after we caught the Chelsea Hart case, he never bothered to mention the possibility of a pattern. We know for a fact that McIlroy went to Eckels three years ago about the earlier cases. And one of those was Lucy Feeney’s-and you can say that Robbie Harrington and Alice Butler and Rachel Peck don’t look like the Chelsea Hart case, but you can’t deny the similarities between Chelsea and Lucy. Both strangled. Both stabbed. And the hair-give me a break, that’s not something you miss. Why didn’t he mention it? He pressured McIlroy three years ago not to pursue a connection, then did the same thing with me yesterday morning in his office.”
Donovan cleared his throat before interjecting. “And McIlroy’s snooping around three years ago could explain the gap in the killings. Eckels may have been ready to kill again, but got scared off when McIlroy picked up the pattern.”
“And with McIlroy gone,” she said, “the coast is clear. Eckels also knew that the photograph in the Sun-taken that night at the restaurant-came from Jordan McLaughlin. And as a cop, he could have easily come into contact with a guy like Darrell Washington. The neighbors said he had a way of talking to the cops too much.”
“Shit,” Rogan said. “You said Washington lived in the LaGuardia Houses?”
“Right off the Manhattan Bridge. With his grandmother.”
“Eckels used to work out of the Seventh back in the day. He would’ve been in and out of those projects all the time when Washington was a kid. Now I’m getting sucked into this whack idea.”
“And Eckels isn’t exactly my biggest fan,” she reminded them.
“He thinks you’re a pain in the ass,” Rogan said. “That’s not the same as wanting to carve your initials into some girl’s forehead.”
“Then do you want to tell me why Dan Eckels suddenly showed up at my apartment tonight, circling the block and coming to my front door?”
“Maybe Peter made that shit up just to have an excuse to see you.”
“He wouldn’t do that,” Ellie said. “If he says Eckels was here, then he was here.” She hadn’t bothered filling Donovan in on the specifics of her relationship to Peter Morse, and he’d been polite enough not to pry.
“Hopefully we’ll get an explanation soon enough,” Donovan said. He had called Simon Knight, who had covered his butt once again by pointing them to Deputy Chief Al Kaplan for guidance. As the head of Manhattan South Detective Borough, Kaplan had been the one to pull the strings necessary to move Ellie into homicide, and now here she was on his radar again already. Kaplan was unnerved enough to hear that the DA’s office would be dismissing the murder charges against Myers in the morning. He wasn’t about to ignore the possibility-however remote-that one of his own had something to do with this.
The Deputy Chief had been the one to make the call. As the three of them sat waiting in her pigsty of a living room, investigators from the DA’s Homicide Investigation Unit, accompanied by Internal Affairs, were on their way to Eckels’s house in Forest Hills.
DONOVAN WAS PLACING his fourth call to the HIU investigator. “Any sign of him?…I know you said you’d call. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to call you every thirty minutes for an update… Good. Thanks for staying on it.”
He flipped his phone shut and looked at his watch. “Almost one in the morning. Is Dan Eckels the kind of guy who stays out until one in the morning, even on a Friday night?”
Ellie had that discomforting, racing feeling caused by a combination of sleep deprivation and an overdose of adrenaline. “I don’t know anything about the man.”
She remembered Flann McIlroy’s description of a lecture from Lieutenant Eckels: Just imagine the mean, gruff boss in any cop movie you’ve ever seen.
She had come to assume in the short time she’d known her lieutenant that he behaved that way to compensate for his own insecurities. Now she wondered if the adoption of a well-worn and familiar persona wasn’t the perfect cover for a much darker secret.
“I’d feel a lot better if we’d found him by now,” Donovan said.
“Me too.”
She had finally convinced Rogan to go home shortly after midnight, with a promise that she’d call with any news. The more time that passed without any sign of Eckels, the less implausible of a suspect he seemed.
“If he weren’t a cop, you’d be yelling at me to wake up the most conservative judge I could find to sign a search warrant for his house.”
“I wouldn’t yell.”
“Beg?”
“In your dreams.” Ellie sat in her off-white armchair with her knees pulled up tight in front of her, wondering why she wasn’t pushing harder. If they were right, Eckels had already killed at least five women, two on her watch. If they were right, he could at that moment be selecting his next victim, or planning to come after Ellie directly.
But maybe they were wrong.
If they were wrong, and she led the charge to execute a search warrant at Dan Eckels’s house, her career would be over. Tomorrow it would be good-bye homicide unit. Within a year, she’d be chased out of the department altogether. Another cop could go gypsy, relocating to another city to start anew, but not her. She was Ellie Hatcher, that chick on Dateline and in People magazine whose whack job of a father offed himself with his service weapon.
Ellie trusted her gut. She trusted it so much that she’d kick down the door on Eckels’s house personally if her gut told her it was the right thing to do, damn the consequences.
But it wasn’t the devastating consequences of a mistake that had her tucked into a ball in her armchair. Her gut was telling her she was missing something. Her head knew the facts, but her instincts were telling her that there was another way of looking at them. Like a child’s blocks that could be formed into an infinite number of completed shapes, the facts would tell a different story if she could somehow rotate and rearrange them until they fell into the correct combination.