ALAFAIR BURKE

City of Fear

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction.

The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are

the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is

entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in the U.S.A. by HarperCollinsPublishers, New York, NY, 2008

Copyright © Alafair Burke 2008

Alafair Burke asserts the moral right to

be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9781847561114

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2009 ISBN: 9780007320035

Version: 2018-05-30

For James Parker, Emma Marie,

Jack Owen and James Lee.

From your favorite aunt.

Contents

Cover Page Title Page Copyright Dedication Part I: The Best Night Ever Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Part II: Dream Witness Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty-One Part III: No Surprises Chapter Twenty-Two Chapter Twenty-Three Chapter Twenty-Four Chapter Twenty-Five Chapter Twenty-Six Chapter Twenty-Seven Chapter Twenty-Eight Chapter Twenty-Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty-One Chapter Thirty-Two Chapter Thirty-Three Chapter Thirty-Four Chapter Thirty-Five Chapter Thirty-Six Part IV: The Final Victim Chapter Thirty-Seven Chapter Thirty-Eight Chapter Thirty-Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty-One Chapter Forty-Two Chapter Forty-Three Chapter Forty-Four Chapter Forty-Five Chapter Forty-Six Chapter Forty-Seven Chapter Forty-Eight Chapter Forty-Nine Author’s Note Review About The Author About the Publisher

Part I

The Best Night Ever

Chapter One

The man leaned forward on his stool to make room for a big-boned redhead who was reaching for the two glasses of Pinot Grigio she’d ordered. He asked for another Heineken while the bartender was down his way, figuring he could enjoy a second beer before anyone in the restaurant bothered to take note of him.

He was good at blending into the background in even the most generic settings, but he certainly wasn’t going to stand out here, given the commotion at the other end of the bar. Four men in suits and loosened ties were throwing back limoncello shots, their second round with the group of girls that had brought the man to the restaurant in the first place. Actually, his interest was not in all three – just the tall blond one.

He was used to taking more time with his selections, but he needed to find a girl tonight. This would be his first time on a schedule, let alone a tight one. NoLIta had seemed as good a starting point as any. Lots of bars. Lots of booze. Lots of beautiful young people trying so hard to have fun that they paid little attention to someone like him.

He had been wandering the neighborhood for about half an hour when he’d spotted the trio crossing Prince Street, the blonde the obvious leader. The other two were nothing special: one average-looking brunette in average-looking clothes; the other, petite one slightly more interesting with her close-cropped black hair and bright yellow dress.

But it was the tall blonde who was a head-turner, and she knew it. She wore tight black pants and a low-cut red satin tank over a gravity-defying push-up bra. Topping off the ensemble was a well-placed V-shaped choker necklace – the equivalent of a vertical arrow sign hanging from her clavicle, instructing, ‘Direct Gaze Here.’ And her hair was perfect – long, shiny, white-blond waves.

He’d ducked into Lord Willy’s on Mott and perused the dress shirts while they’d passed, then continued his pace about forty feet behind them until they’d parked themselves next to the bar at Luna. Fortunately, the girls had been kept waiting for their eight o’clock table, so he’d had plenty of time to study the blonde up close before making a final decision.

He liked what he saw. He even had a chance to speak to her briefly when she split off from her friends to go to the restroom. That had been risky on his part. But her two gal pals were so smitten with the limoncello boys that they hadn’t noticed the exchange.

He felt a twinge of disappointment as the hostess notified the girls their table was ready. Then he heard a male voice. ‘Stay for one more shot.’ Apparently the men in suits believed that plying the girls with drinks was going to get them somewhere.

Instead, the short girl in the yellow dress handed one of the men her cell phone and asked him to take a picture of the three friends. Mission accomplished, the brunettes followed the hostess to their table with barely a thank-you to their liquor-pouring benefactors. At least the blonde gave them each a hug before she trailed along.

The decibel level in the bar area fell noticeably in the wake of the girls’ departure. The other patrons seemed relieved, but he took it as a signal to leave.

On Mott, he walked north toward Houston, forcing himself to adopt a leisurely pace. His car was parked only ten blocks away, and the girls would need at least an hour for dinner.

He had plenty of time.

Chapter Two

Somehow Stefanie Hyder always knew that her friendship with Chelsea Hart would lead to a night like this.

Since the day Stefanie had been introduced to her second-grade class at Fort Wayne Elementary as the new girl from Miami, the two had been inseparable. By the end of Stefanie’s third week, she had earned her first-ever detention after the girls were caught reading Judy Blume’s Wifey on the playground. As planned, the girls insisted they’d mistaken the book for the sequel to Blubber, but Chelsea had already earned her reputation with the teacher.

Over the course of the intervening years, Stefanie had survived her fair share of Chelsea-induced drama. Chelsea tapping at her window, well after curfew, cajoling her to sneak out for a forbidden cigarette. The R-rated games of truth or dare that Chelsea invariably initiated at middle-school parties. Rocking a sobbing Chelsea to sleep after Duncan Gere snubbed her in the ninth grade, despite the previous weekend’s activities in the backseat of his father’s SUV. Hitchhiking home from a frat party in Ann Arbor their junior year.

Chelsea was trouble, no question. Stefanie’s mom lovingly called her the Notorious B.I.C., short for Bad Influence Chelsea. But she had a spark that made her recklessness endearing and infectious, and she was unfailingly loyal, and so over the course of the past ten years, she and Stefanie had remained fast friends.

They even chose the same college, where they were now suite mates. Stefanie’s parents had warned her not to be surprised if she and Chelsea went their separate ways at Indiana University, but here they were in New York City, spring break of their freshman year, as tight as ever.

Until this final night of the trip, Chelsea had more or less kept her most impulsive ways in check. At Stefanie’s insistence, they had hit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the Guggenheim. Jordan, who lived down the hall from them at school, hung on to all of the admission buttons for the scrapbook she promised she’d be assembling back home. They also made a point of seeing a different neighborhood every day: Upper East Side, Upper West Side, Midtown, the Village, SoHo, even Chinatown. By the third day of their trip, they were relying on subways instead of taxis, and by the fifth, a stranger stopped them on the street for directions.

But on this night – their last in Manhattan – Stefanie sensed that Chelsea’s inner wild child was determined to come out and play. It started with the slutty outfit, then continued at the dive Italian restaurant. All the attention from the guys at the bar hadn’t stopped Chelsea from flirting with some other men on her way to their table, fabricating a farcical autobiography the way she always did in these situations.

If it had been up to Stefanie, they would have turned in early after dinner, happily sated with pasta and gelato, but Jordan agreed with Chelsea that their last hours in Manhattan should not be squandered. They wound their way through Little Italy into NoLIta, across SoHo, and up the West Village into the Meatpacking District. Jordan insisted they hit a club called Pulse because, according to US Weekly, Jared Leto had celebrated his birthday there three weeks earlier.

Thanks once again to their fake Indiana driver’s licenses and Chelsea’s megawatt smile, they had made it past the red velvet rope and through the club’s heavy wooden double doors. Stefanie had to admit they had entered fifty thousand square feet of nightlife paradise. The DJ worked from an elevated booth surrounded by stagelike platforms. Cameras projected the dancers’ images throughout the club in staccato sync with the music. The centerpiece of the club was the twenty-five-foot pink-lit runway protruding from the bar.

Even on a Sunday night, the place was filled to capacity. With Jordan leading the way, the girls nestled into a pocket of space adjacent to the dance floor. Stefanie had taken only one sip of the club’s signature martini – a toxic concoction that tasted like Robitussen-infused lemonade – before she noticed Chelsea talking to a guy with blond floppy hair. Catching her eye, Chelsea pointed excitedly to the white curtains that set off a VIP lounge from the rest of the club, then disappeared through the curtains behind the blond.

Stefanie hesitated. She hated the way her friend was so open with strangers. Chelsea, despite her occasional lapses in judgment, was a good and decent person at heart, and so she automatically – and carelessly – assumed the same of others. Still, as usual, Stefanie and Jordan followed Chelsea where she wanted to go.

Stefanie began to sense what was coming around one o’clock, when she noticed both the time and Chelsea’s glassy-eyed wobble. She pointed to her watch, but the gesture proved too subtle. Forty-five minutes later, she went so far as to follow Chelsea onto the catwalk to tell her it was time to go home. The only reward for her efforts was two songs’ worth of swaying her hips with her hands undulating stupidly above her head.

Finally, at two-thirty, even Jordan was done. She joined Stefanie in the backward time calculations. Seven a.m. flight. At the airport by six. In a cab by five thirty. Wake-up call at five – five fifteen at the very latest – if they packed tonight and skipped showers. They’d get little better than a two-hour nap if they left right now. It was definitely time to call it a night.

Stefanie found Chelsea dancing on a banquette, her floppy-haired companion replaced by a tall, skinny guy with an angular face. He was passing Chelsea another highball glass. Chelsea grabbed Stefanie’s hand and tried to coax her onto the banquette, but Stefanie matched the gentle force of the tug until Chelsea simply pulled her hand away.

‘Come on, Chels,’ Stefanie yelled over the music. ‘We still need to pack. Let’s go.’

Chelsea looked at her watch, then grimaced and shrugged. ‘No point in sleeping now. Looks like we better make it an all-nighter.’

‘Two against one.’ Stefanie used her index finger to pull back the curtain closing off the private room so Chelsea could see Jordan slumped over her black patent leather clutch purse on an ottoman. ‘You’re the weak link. Time to go, babe.’

She pulled again at Chelsea’s hand, and once again, Chelsea jerked away. Stefanie heard a male voice ask, ‘Why do you have to be such a drag?’

She turned to take a closer look at Chelsea’s most recent dance partner. He was about six feet tall, probably in his mid-twenties. His brown hair was gelled into a fauxhawk. He wore straight black pants, pointy black shoes, and a white shirt with a thin black tie. Stefanie shot him her best death stare, then returned her attention to Chelsea.

‘Seriously? You’re costing us precious minutes of REM sleep for Duran Duran here?’

‘You mean Jake? He looks like Jake Gyllenhaal, don’t you think?’

Stefanie didn’t waste another second on the guy. ‘We’ve had a good run, Chels. But really, we’re leaving.’

‘Go ahead,’ Chelsea yelled. ‘I’ll be fine.’

Stefanie stole another look at Jordan, who was on the verge of sleep despite the thumping bass notes vibrating through the glossy white wood floors.

‘Don’t be ridiculous. We’re not leaving without you.’

‘I’m fine. I’ll be back in time for the flight. I promise.’ Chelsea downed the last of her drink, gave her a Girl Scout’s pledge sign, then brought her hand down for a mock booty slap.

Stefanie couldn’t help but smile at Chelsea’s goofy moves. ‘Please tell me you’re not leaving with New Wave Boy.’

Chelsea laughed. ‘Of course not. I’ll take a taxi. I just want to dance a little longer. This is like, the best night ever.’

Stefanie looked around the club and realized she had no hope of persuading Chelsea to leave with them.

‘You’ve got cash?’

Chelsea jumped off the banquette and gave Stefanie a quick hug. ‘Yes, Mom. And credit cards.’

‘We can’t miss our flight,’ Stefanie warned.

‘Obviously not. I’ll come straight back, closing time at the very latest, right?’

Following Jordan out the double doors of Pulse, Stefanie tried to settle the uneasy feeling she still carried. Last call was in an hour. What was the worst that could happen?

She did not notice the blue Ford Taurus parked half a block down. Nor could she know how happy the car’s driver was to see the two brunettes leave in a cab together, without their friend.

Chapter Three

They say New York is the city that never sleeps, but Ellie Hatcher knew it got pretty drowsy around five in the morning. So did she.

‘Wake up.’

Ellie felt her sticky eyelids flutter open, then immediately fall shut, shielding her from the sliver of brightness peeking into her bedroom through the unwelcome crack in the door. The crack widened into a flood of white light, and she pulled her comforter over her head.

‘Unngh,’ she groaned under the safety of the navy-blue down.

She felt something hit her right hip, then heard her brother’s voice. ‘Get up, El.’

Jess sounded annoyingly chipper, so Ellie did what any sane person would do in the face of such early-morning cheer. She ignored him.

Another quick thump, this time dangerously close to her head.

Ellie threw the comforter aside, tossing the source of the two thumps – a pair of Saucony running shoes – to the parquet floor. ‘Go away,’ she muttered, burrowing back into the covers.

‘This is your own fault,’ Jess said, tugging at the socked foot she’d managed to leave unprotected. ‘I believe you threatened to charge me rent if I didn’t wake you up today. This was your pact: skip no more than twice a week, and never two days in a row. Sound familiar? You slept in yesterday.’

The worst part of having your own words thrown back at you, Ellie decided, was that you couldn’t argue with them.

They ran in silence for the first two and a half miles.

They had struck this deal three weeks earlier. For Ellie, the 5:00 a.m. runs were the start of an early morning; for Jess, the end of a late night at work. And for both, the exercise was a means of counteracting the cigarettes and alcohol for which they seemed to reach so frequently these days. And because Ellie was best at sticking to rituals that were clearly defined, there were rules: they could skip up to twice a week, but never twice in a row.

Jess had come to learn another, less explicit rule: these runs were not a time to discuss her recent trip back to their hometown of Wichita, which they both knew – but never acknowledged – was the true reason Ellie needed this solitary routine to mark each new day.

This particular morning, however, they were not the only ones in East River Park.

‘So what do you think’s going on over there?’ Jess asked.

Ellie followed her brother’s gaze to a group of three men gathered at the fencing that surrounded a small construction site next to the FDR Drive. The men wore T-shirts and running shorts and had the long, lean frames typical of serious runners. One of the guys also wore a fanny pack and was speaking into a cell phone. Ellie couldn’t make out the man’s words from this distance, but she could see that his two companions – peering through the honeycomb mesh – were shouting information to him.

She also detected the high-pitched jingling of an electronic gadget. Something about the melody was familiar.

‘Don’t know, don’t care.’ Ellie just wanted to get home, catch her breath, and give her legs a rest. The construction site had been there on the west side of the park since they had begun their routine. For Ellie, the only significance of the location was its proximity to the Williamsburg Bridge, the official turnaround point on their established route. Her sole focus remained on the path in front of her – the tennis courts were a few yards ahead, followed by the bridge, then it was time to head back.

‘Come on, where’s your sense of adventure?’ Jess began to jog toward the fence.

Ellie still couldn’t figure out how her brother – with his lifestyle – managed these runs, at this pace, with such apparent ease. She stayed in good shape with kick-boxing and weight training, but serious running like this had always winded her. Anyone looking to resolve the nature-versus-nurture debate need only look to Ellie and Jess. Their lung capacities were just two of the many differences between them.

‘If I stop, you may very well have to carry me home,’ she panted.

‘You weigh too much for that,’ Jess called out, sticking out his tongue as he ran backward. ‘Come on. What could be good enough to get the attention of a group of New Yorkers?’

As they approached the three runners, she could see that the men’s expressions were anxious. The one with the fanny pack flipped his phone shut.

‘They’re on the way,’ he announced.

A wave of relief washed over the runners’ faces. Ellie had seen the phenomenon countless times when she’d arrived in uniform to a crime scene, NYPD badge in hand.

Jess had wondered what could distract New Yorkers from their routine, and she had a bad feeling about the answer. She tried to tell herself it might only be vandalism, maybe a bum seeking a temporary camping zone.

‘Something worth seeing here?’ she asked.

‘You might not want to look,’ one of the men said.

Ellie readied herself for the worst, but she could not have anticipated the scene she encountered as the runners stepped aside. A section of wire had fallen slack between two metal braces that had been knocked to the ground, leaving a substantial gap in the perimeter around the construction site.

The woman – she was just a girl, really – was propped like a rag doll against a pile of white PVC pipes, arms at her sides, legs splayed in front of her. Her sleeveless red top had been unbuttoned, exposing a black satin push-up bra and matching panties. Her legs were bare. High-heeled gold sandals dangled from her feet, but whatever other clothes had covered the lower half of her body were gone.

It was the rage behind the violence that struck Ellie immediately. She had seen her fair share of murder scenes, but had never come across this kind of brutality. The girl’s wavy hair had been hacked off in handfuls, leaving large portions of her scalp exposed. Her body and face had been crosshatched with short, deep stab wounds resembling the outlines of a tic-tac-toe game. Ellie winced as she imagined the terror that must have come at the first sight of the blade.

She heard one of the men say that they had been unable to find a pulse, but Ellie had already concluded there was no point in checking. She forced herself to focus on the clinical facts she would need for her report.

A chain of ligature marks blossomed around the girl’s neck like purple delphinium. Her eyes were bulging, and her swollen tongue extended between lips caked with dried saliva and bile. Rigor mortis had not yet set in, but the girl’s skin – no doubt vibrant and pearly just a few hours earlier – was now gray and entering a deeper stage of lividity, particularly in the body’s lower extremities. Lumps of red blood cells had formed boxcars in her retinas.

As gruesome as the mutilation had been, it had also been gratuitous. It was the strangling that most likely claimed her life.

The jingling that Ellie had noted earlier was louder now. It was coming from somewhere near the body.

She was startled by a retching sound behind her. She turned to see Jess doubled over next to a black tarp draped across a fence post, just as she became aware of sirens sounding in the distance.

‘May I?’ she asked the jogger, reaching for his cell phone. Punching in a number she had memorized surprisingly quickly, she led the joggers away from what would soon be marked as a crime scene.

By the time she hung up, the first car of uniform officers had arrived.

Chapter Four

The jingling turned out to be a Gwen Stefani ring tone on the dead girl’s cell phone. The alarm had been set to go off at 5:32 a.m. Thirty-two minutes after Ellie woke up. One hour and twenty-eight minutes before she was due at the Thirteenth Precinct.

What had been the significance of that specific moment to this unnamed girl? It could have been her preferred time to get up on a Monday morning. Or maybe it was a reminder to go home on Sunday night. Time to take her medications, or walk her dog. Whatever the alarm’s original purpose, by 5:32 a.m., the girl was dead, and the sound’s only effect had been to draw the attention of three passing joggers to her corpse.

It would take Ellie’s partner at least twenty minutes to reach the scene from his apartment in Brooklyn Heights. For now, she had to make sure his trip would not be wasted.

The uniform officer riding in the passenger seat exited the sector car first. He looked like a lot of new cops. Fit. Baby-faced. Enthusiastic. Short haired. Maybe in a different decade, he would have enlisted in the army. These days, he probably had a mother who stopped him. Now he was law enforcement.

He directed a flashlight at the dead girl. Ellie could tell from his reaction that this was his first body.

‘Oh, Jesus.’ He reached for his stomach on reflex.

‘All upchuckers, over there.’ Ellie directed the officer’s attention to Jess, who, as instructed, was standing well east of the crime scene, looking out at the river, taking deep breaths. ‘Detective Hatcher, Manhattan South homicide. I need your radio.’

Ellie had wrapped up one week in the homicide bureau, and so far all she’d done was help her new partner tie together loose ends on his old cases and play support for other teams while she supposedly ‘learned the ropes’. Now she’d practically stumbled over this poor girl’s body inside the Manhattan South borough. She was the first cop on the scene, and she was a homicide detective. If she couldn’t weasel her way onto this case, she didn’t deserve her new assignment.

The uniform looked at her, blinking rapidly. First a disfigured body, now a sweaty woman in a Pretenders T-shirt and sweatpants, demanding his radio.

‘But –’

The young officer’s partner found the words he’d apparently been searching for once she’d stepped from the driver’s side of the car. ‘I’ll confirm it,’ she said, reaching for the Vertex radio microphone clipped to the shoulder of her navy blue uniform. ‘And no one’s taking our radios. Sorry, ma’am.’

Ellie nodded. The woman was a good cop. Depending on what precincts she’d been working, this could easily be her first body as well, but she was cool. Cooler than her partner. Just a quick glance at the body, then a more careful monitoring of everyone at the scene. Three runners, pacing. The sweaty woman who wanted their radio. The tall guy, looking out of place by the water.

‘Make sure that guy’s not going anywhere,’ she said to her partner. She was definitely good. Of the people at the scene, Jess was the one who should have registered on a cop’s radar. And asking her partner to keep Jess company gave the obviously nervous young cop some distance from the body.

‘You’re right,’ Ellie said, holding up her palms. ‘Call it in. But tell them homicide’s already here. Shield 27990. Hatcher. They’ll have me down as Elsa.’

She listened as the officer radioed in the essentials. They were at East River Park, south of Houston, north of the tennis courts. They had a 10–29–1.

It was standard 10 code. A 10–29–1: 29 for a past crime, 1 for a homicide. Across the country, 10-codes were dying out in favor of so-called plain language. The Department of Homeland Security had gone so far as to force the NYPD to train its officers in the kind of plain English that was supposed to assist interagency communications in an emergency. Instead, the entire notion of an eight-hour training session on plain talk became just another opportunity for the NYPD to mock the feds.

‘We still need EMTs,’ the officer said. Emergency Medical Technicians would have been dispatched with the original 911 call, but these days ambulances were in higher demand and correspondingly slower to respond than law enforcement. The homicide call-out would now bring technicians from the crime scene unit and the medical examiner’s office. So much for solitude along the East River.

Ellie motioned the woman to speed it along. The officer confirmed Ellie’s badge number and notified the dispatcher that a homicide detective was already at the scene.

‘And tell them J. J. Rogan’s on the way too,’ Ellie added. ‘Jeffrey James Rogan, my partner. Tell them to put us in the system. No need to do a separate homicide call-out.’

Ellie nodded as the woman repeated the information. Then she went to check on Jess. ‘I see you met my brother,’ she said to the young male officer. ‘He’s not as dangerous as he looks.’

Jess cocked his thumb and forefinger toward the cop. ‘Turns out your compadre here is a certified Dog Park fan.’

Dog Park was Jess’s rock band. Their biggest gigs were at ten-table taverns in Williamsburg and the occasional open mic nights in Manhattan. To say that Dog Park was an up-and-coming band would be a serious demotion to those groups that were actually on the ladder to stardom.

‘I knew someone out there had to love them as much I do,’ Ellie said.

‘Yeah. Small world.’ The officer smiled with considerable enthusiasm. Jess was eating it up, but Ellie suspected that at least some of the officer’s excitement was attributable to his relief at having a subject of conversation other than the dead body he’d just seen.

She turned at the sound of an engine and saw a second blue-and-white arrive at the scene.

‘Would you mind giving my brother a ride home, uh, Officer Capra?’ Ellie asked, squinting at the officer’s name tag. ‘I think his heart’s had enough of a workout for the morning.’

‘Sure. No problem.’

‘He’ll give you my gear and a suitable change of clothes for you to bring back here, if that’s all right.’

‘Uh, yeah.’ Capra glanced at his partner, as if worried about her reaction. First he’d almost vomited on the body. Now he was being sent away on an errand.

‘I really need my gear,’ Ellie said, following his gaze. ‘I’ll make sure she knows I told you to go.’

She touched Jess’s shoulder. ‘Get some sleep. I’ll call you later.’

Ellie looked at her watch. Five forty-five. Forty-five minutes since Jess threw shoes at her head. Thirty-four minutes since she made a mental note of her start time outside the apartment. Thirteen minutes since the first jingle of the Gwen Stefani ring tone.

She looked at the girl, abandoned and exposed against a pile of construction debris. If Ellie had kept on jogging, this would be someone else’s case. Someone else could deliver the news to the family. Someone else could offer their anemic reassurances that they were doing all they could to find out who’d done this to their daughter. But she had stopped. She had made the patrol officer use her name on the radio. This was her case now. This girl was her responsibility.

It was time to find out who she was.

Two hundred feet away, on the other side of East River Drive, a blue Ford Taurus was parked outside an apartment building on Mangin Street. The man at the wheel watched as a second patrol car arrived, followed by an ambulance with lights and sirens. Two patrol cars carrying four uniform officers had all arrived before the ambulance. He found that ironic. Good thing the girl was beyond saving.

The first of the patrol cars to have arrived left the park and turned north on the FDR. One cop up front. Civilian male in back, no cuffs. Everyone else remained at the scene for now. He wanted to stay and watch, but knew they’d be canvassing the neighborhood soon.

He turned the key in the ignition. The digital clock on his dash read 5:46. He adjusted the channel on his satellite radio. Fourteen minutes until Howard Stern.

At 5:48 a.m., twenty-two miles east in Mineola, Long Island, Bill Harrington’s eyes shot open when his newspaper carrier missed the porch once again, thumping the shutter outside his bedroom window. His body felt clammy. He kicked the quilt away to the side of the bed and welcomed the slight chill on his bare legs.

He had been dreaming of Robbie.

The dream began at the Alcoa plant outside Pittsburgh, a place he hadn’t set foot in since Penny insisted that they retire to Long Island five years ago. But he had worked in that plant five days a week for twenty-five years of his life – the majority of them happy – melting and pouring steel castings. In his dream, when he walked into the familiar employees’ break room, he found himself instead at the Harrington family’s old kitchen table.

It was Robbie’s sixth birthday. Jenna was only twelve at the time, but she’d insisted on baking the cake with only minimal assistance from her mother. The cake was lopsided, lumpy, and topped with a bizarre shade of green frosting, but Robbie hadn’t seemed to notice.

There she was, propped up on her knees on the vinyl padding of the kitchen chair, elbows on the table, her blond hair held back by a pink paper birthday-girl tiara, eagerly staring at the six burning candles while Bill, Penny, and Jenna drew out the final line of the birthday song to prolong Robbie’s excitement. Bill had smiled in his sleep when Robbie clenched her eyes shut, took that enormous breath, and whispered it cautiously across the tips of each candle. I did it, Daddy. I got every one of them, just like you told me. Will I really get my wish?

You’ll have to wait to find out, Robbie. But, remember, don’t tell anyone.

In Bill’s dream, Robbie had crawled down from her chair and walked out of the kitchen into what had moments earlier been, in his mind, the Alcoa plant. Bill followed her, longing for more time, but it was too late. He found her as he’d last seen her nearly eight years ago – naked on a stainless steel gurney, draped with a white sheet.

All these years later, Bill still found himself thinking about his younger daughter. How often, he’d never bothered counting; at least once a day, certainly; usually more. And, just as he had in the very beginning, when Penny was still with him and Jenna still lived nearby, Bill occasionally woke from dreams that gave way to nightmares.

But it had been a long time since Bill Harrington had been visited by such vivid memories of Robbie.

Chapter Five

Ellie was still in her T-shirt and sweatpants when J. J. Rogan pulled up in a white Crown Vic, hopped the curb off the FDR, and claimed a patch of dirt as his parking spot.

As she walked toward her partner, she cursed the young Officer Capra for not yet having returned from what should have been a quick errand. Her mind flashed to an image of her brother showing off a guitar riff to his newest fan while she worked a crime scene in her dirty running gear.

Her self-consciousness only heightened as Rogan stepped out of the car. As usual, he was dressed to the nines. Today’s ensemble consisted of a three-button black suit, well-starched steel gray shirt, and a purple tie with small white dots. Two days earlier, she’d seen the label on a jacket he’d thrown on the back of his chair. Canali. About two grand. She assumed this one ran about the same.

Ellie hadn’t figured out how her new partner could afford the wardrobe – or whatever other, less obvious indulgences he might have – but she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that he worked off-duty as a model. He was average height, but with a solid frame, probably just shy of six feet and at least two hundred pounds. Dark mocha skin. Smooth bald head. Really good smile.

In short, J. J. Rogan was at the top of the bell curve for looks.

And apparently that fact wasn’t lost on the almost entirely male squad of homicide detectives at the Thirteenth Precinct. Nor had it escaped their attention that Ellie wasn’t half bad herself. Ellie had already overheard another detective referring to them by a team nickname: Hotchick and Tubbs. She assumed that with time they’d conjure up something more clever, but the general theme had been established.

‘Barely six a.m., Hatcher. You know this shit should have been someone else’s call-out.’

‘You’re telling me that if you were first at a scene, you’d wait for someone else to catch the case?’

She couldn’t tell whether Rogan was satisfied with her response or was simply moving on to the business at hand, but he made a beeline to the construction site. A crime scene analyst was still cordoning off the area with yellow police tape.

Rogan winced at the sight of the body. ‘I guess someone meant business. Where are we?’

‘No official word from the ME, but based on the swelling in her face and eyes, my guess is she died from the strangling.’

Rogan nodded his agreement and shone a flashlight across the body. ‘And the cuts were just for fun. Most of them look postmortem.’ Without a beating heart to move the body’s blood, stab wounds inflicted after death were dry and bloodless. The hatch marks in the victim’s skin had the telltale look of sliced Styrofoam. ‘Have you found ID yet?’

‘We found a purse, probably tossed over the fence, but no wallet, and no ID.’

‘What about her hair?’

‘Nothing yet. He either chopped it off before he brought her here, or carried it off with him – maybe kept it as a souvenir.’

Rogan was still taking in the full visual of the body. ‘Too healthy for a working girl. No track marks. Fresh pedicure. Matching lingerie.’

Ellie had made the same observations.

‘How old, do you think? You know that’s not my strong suit,’ Rogan said with a small smile. When he’d first met Ellie last week, he had volunteered that she looked a mere twenty years old, but then added that he could never tell with white people.

‘Early twenties, tops. She could even be a teenager.’

Rogan clicked his tongue against his teeth.

‘We pulled a cell phone from behind the body,’ Ellie said. ‘It must have fallen out when the guy dumped her, before he tossed her purse.’

‘So start dialing all her contacts. Let’s find out who this girl is.’

‘Easier said than done. There’s something wrong with the screen. The display kept cutting in and out when I was turning off the alarm. Now I can’t get any image at all. Nothing but black lines.’

Rogan took a look at the broken phone. ‘The same thing happened to me when I dropped my Motorola at the gym. That thing’s shot.’

‘I did, however, find this in her purse.’ Ellie held up a ziplock bag containing a white plastic card not much larger than a business card.

He smiled, registering the significance of the bag’s contents. ‘Now that narrows it down. You plan on staying in your sweaty clothes all day?’

As if on command, a marked car pulled up next to Rogan’s Crown Vic. Officer Capra stepped out, carrying a familiar blue backpack. She hoped Jess had remembered to pack her shield, Glock, and the necessary undergarments.

‘I’m ready when you are.’

The white plastic card was a hotel key emblazoned with a blue capital H surrounded by a curly Q.

‘We got three Hiltons in Manhattan,’ Rogan said. ‘Times Square, Rockefeller Center, and the Financial District. Try your luck.’

Ellie was wriggling out of her running clothes in the footwell of the backseat, trying not to think about the various forms of mucus that had been hurled and smeared against the upholstery since the car’s last disinfection.

‘Girls that age don’t stay near Wall Street.’

‘Unless they’re hookers,’ Rogan interjected.

‘And we don’t think she was. So between the other two, I’ll go with Times Square. Who doesn’t love Times Square these days?’

By the time Rogan pulled up to the giant copper clock outside the hotel’s Forty-second Street entrance, Ellie had just finished snapping on her holster. As she stepped from the backseat, she waved off a uniformed valet. Rogan flashed his shield as he followed behind her. ‘We’ll be quick, man. Thanks.’

To their surprise, the hotel lobby was on the twenty-first floor. They bypassed whatever businesses occupied the tower’s bottom half with an express ride in the Art Deco elevator. At the front desk, they cut to the head of a long line of guests who were presumably waiting to check out.

The woman who greeted them had pale skin, red hair knotted into a bun, and glasses dangling from a chain around her neck. ‘How may I help you?’

Rogan produced the hotel key and explained in a hushed voice what they needed and why.

‘Oh, my.’ The clerk lowered her voice as well. ‘Unfortunately, that key isn’t ours.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m certain.’ She produced a white card that looked identical to the one they’d found in the victim’s purse, but with the addition of the words Times Square below the corporate logo. ‘This here’s one of our keys. People like the Times Square thing, you know. And we’re considered “boutique style”. People like that, too. You should try our hotel at Rockefeller Center. They’ve got over two thousand rooms.’

‘And the one in the Financial District?’ Ellie asked.

‘Five hundred and sixty-five.’

‘So, if you’re playing your odds –’

‘Our Rockefeller Center location is on Fifty-third Street and Sixth Avenue.’

As the two detectives rode the elevator back to the ground floor, Ellie watched as Rogan checked out his freshly shaven scalp in the mirror. She snuck a look at herself, then quickly thought better of it. She knew from experience that messy strands of her shoulder-length blond hair would be flipped in every direction, thanks to dried sweat and the ponytail holder she’d worn during her run. At some point she’d try to find a hairbrush and at least wash her face.

‘How come between the two of us we didn’t figure out to hit the monster-sized hotel first?’ Ellie asked, keeping her eyes on the elevator’s digital display as it counted down each passing floor.

‘I guess the first twenty floors are misleading. Makes it look larger than it really is.’

‘That’s what she said.’ Ellie hadn’t meant to slip into a Michael Scott impersonation in front of her new partner, but the response to his comment had been automatic.

So was Rogan’s. He laughed. It was a good laugh. Loud. From the gut. ‘Careful, Hatcher. If word gets out you’ve got a sense of humor, the guys at the house will really be chasing after you, and I won’t be able to protect you. That is, assuming you ever get around to taking a shower.’

The Monday-morning traffic was already starting to pour from the Lincoln Tunnel into Midtown. Rogan hit the wigwag flashers on the headlights of the Crown Vic and made it to the circular driveway at the Sixth Avenue entrance of the Hilton in four minutes flat. Leaving the car pulled up behind a large Trailways bus, he badged the valet as they headed for the lobby, working their way through a large group of teenagers wearing John Marshall High School band T-shirts and dragging backpacks and instrument cases. Most of them were using cell phones to snap their final photographs of Manhattan as they milled around, waiting to board the jumbo bus.

Ellie knew they’d found the right place when she spotted two girls huddled next to the bell stand on the opposite side of the lobby. She couldn’t make out their words, but she could tell from the pitch of their raised voices that the girls were distressed. They appeared to be arguing, but then one of the girls burst into tears, and her friend placed an arm around her shoulder. A bellhop in a red uniform and captain’s hat stared at the girls awkwardly, clearly wishing to extract himself from the situation.

J. J. started toward the reception desk, but Ellie grabbed his elbow and cocked her head toward the agitated girls.

‘You go check that out,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the key to the front desk and see if they can get us any information on it.’

As she approached the bell stand, she was able to catch the tail end of the girls’ conversation.

‘We can’t leave without Chelsea.’ The crying girl had dark brown hair pulled back in a low ponytail, topped off with a black headband. She wore a pink hoodie sweatsuit and Puma tennis shoes.

The girl’s friend was rubbing her shoulder soothingly. ‘I didn’t say we should leave without her. I just said we should go to the airport. Chelsea’s probably there.’

The comforting girl was petite with a black pixie haircut. Ellie spotted the top of some kind of tattoo peeking out from the back of the waistband of her jeans. The girl looked at her watch with a furrowed brow. ‘We’re missing our flight anyway. It’s almost seven o’clock.’

‘They said it was delayed,’ the girl in the ponytail reminded her. She was starting to get control over her tears. ‘Chelsea would never leave us hanging like this.’

Another bellhop hurried past the duo and grabbed a set of car keys from the counter beside them. ‘Andale,’ he shouted, hurrying along the perplexed bellhop who was trapped with the girls.

‘Chewanna cab or not?’

The question sent the crying girl into sobs again, and the bellhop finally gave up, grabbed a set of keys from the counter, and fled to the hotel entrance.

‘Do you two need some help with anything?’ Ellie asked.

The pixie threw her an impatient look, as if the attention of strangers was yet another piece of unwarranted drama.

‘We’re fine, ma’am. We didn’t mean to make a scene.’

‘No need to apologize.’ Ellie flipped up the badge that was clipped to the waistband of her pants. ‘You’re looking for one of your friends?’

‘She’s just running late. It’s fine –’

‘Stop saying it’s going to be fine, Jordan.’ The crying girl pushed her friend’s hand off her shoulder. ‘She’s missing. She should be here, and she’s not here. She knew what time we were leaving, and she’s not here. She’s … she’s missing.’

Ellie heard the girl’s pain in the way she spoke that single word. She said it with the knowledge that to be missing meant so much more than to be in an unknown location.

The petite girl with the pixie haircut and tattoo, the one whose name was apparently Jordan, said they just needed to get to the airport. If they could get to the airport, they could make it onto a later flight and wait for Chelsea.

‘I told you, I’m not leaving.’

Jordan muttered something under her breath. Ellie heard it but hoped the crying girl hadn’t.

But she had, and she responded as predicted. ‘Seriously? Chelsea’s missing, and you decide to say you’re going to kill her? Do you have any idea how disgusting that is?’

‘All right. Just try to calm down, both of you. Your name’s Jordan?’ She spoke directly to the tattoo girl, who nodded in response. ‘No one’s killing anyone, Jordan.’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry. Sorry, Stef.’

‘And you’re Stef?’ Ellie asked the crying girl.

‘Yeah, Stefanie. Stefanie Hyder.’

‘Okay. So you’re obviously upset, but I need one of you – only one,’ she said, holding up a finger, ‘to tell me what’s going on. Can you do that, Stefanie?’

The girl sniffed a couple of times and tugged on her ponytail nervously. ‘We’re on spring break. Our flight leaves this morning – like, basically now. And our friend Chelsea isn’t here.’

‘But –’

Ellie held up her hand. ‘You’ll get your turn.’

Stefanie continued without prodding. ‘We went out last night. It was time to come home, and she wouldn’t leave. Chelsea wouldn’t leave. I should have stayed, but it was time to go home. And she promised.’

Jordan placed her arm around Stefanie’s shoulder once more, and this time Stefanie didn’t push away. Her tears brought on sobs as she spoke.

‘She looked me in the eye, and she promised she’d be back by now. She promised she’d be here. She promised. And she’s not. Something happened to her. Something’s wrong.’

Rogan had snapped a digital photograph of the girl from East River Park, but she didn’t want to do the ID that way. Not in a crowded Midtown hotel lobby. Not now.

‘Do you have a picture of your friend?’

The girls both shook their heads.

‘You sure?’ Ellie recalled the band students outside snapping shots with their phones. ‘Not in your cell phone or something?’

‘Yeah, right. No, of course.’ The one called Jordan stepped over to a tangle of bags that were piled in the corner next to the bell stand counter. She rifled through a large white tote, pulled a patent leather clutch from the larger bag, and then began sifting through its tightly packed contents. ‘Sorry. You have to put everything in two bags for the airlines.’

She finally slid out an iPhone and pushed a few buttons before holding it out toward Ellie. ‘That’s her, just last night at dinner. In the middle.’

Ellie took the device from her and peered closely at the picture. The three friends were huddled together, posing for the camera with open-mouth smiles, as if they’d been laughing. A bystander in the background didn’t look too happy with them. The girls had probably been too rowdy for the restaurant. At least their last night together had been a happy one.

It was a small screen, but she could make out three faces. The girl on the right was Stefanie Hyder, with her hair down and her eyes bright, not bloodshot as they were now. The one on the left was pixie-haired Jordan.

And Ellie recognized the girl in the middle as well. She recognized the long shiny blond hair before it had been hacked off. She recognized the red sleeveless shirt, chosen no doubt to match the crimson bead chandelier earrings that peeked out from behind the beautiful blond hair. And she recognized the smiling face before someone had used it as a carving board.

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