by R. G. Belsky
The truth was, I finally admitted to myself, I was letting my thoughts drift to stuff like this because I didn’t want to deal with what was really on my mind.
Melissa Ross.
I didn’t know where she was.
And I didn’t know what she was doing.
That all scared me.
Sure, I’d come on strong with Marilyn and Stacy about how I knew enough to take care of myself and not become another one of her murder victims. I was too damn smart to go to a hotel room with Melissa Ross or get in a car with her or let her into my apartment so she could murder me.
Except—and this was the part that scared me—all of her other victims probably felt the same way, until it was too late.
I checked the locks on the door before I went to bed.
And I walked around my apartment just to make sure no one was hiding anywhere.
I wasn’t really scared.
Just being careful.
There’s a big difference.
I think.
But the bottom line was I sure hoped the cops caught Melissa Ross pretty soon.
CHAPTER 29
THEY found Melissa Ross the next day.
A teenaged girl in Ohio taking an early morning swim at a place called Munson Lake saw a dark object at the bottom of the water. She dove down to take a look and discovered it was a car. There was a dead woman inside. The girl called police, who dragged the car and the body to the surface.
The driver’s license and other identification in the car identified the woman as Melissa Ross. The serial killer the entire nation was looking for.
Everything pointed to suicide. She was still in the driver’s seat, with her seatbelt on. There was no sign of a struggle to get out. No evidence of any kind that she tried to save herself. The tire tracks along the side of the lake didn’t show any skid marks or anything else to indicate the car had gone out of control. It appeared as if she had simply driven into the water to die.
Also, there was a room key for a local motel in her purse. The room was registered under the name of Melissa Ross. Her real name. Even though she was the object of a massive police manhunt. It was almost as if she didn’t care if anyone recognized her anymore. Inside the room, the police found a suicide note.
It read:
To the people and police of New York City: I’m so sorry for all of the pain I have caused. I don’t know why I did it. I was just so angry, so filled with hate because of what men had done to me that I wanted to hurt them. But now I can no longer live with myself because of what I have done. I just can’t go on. I hope God shows more mercy on me than I did with those men I did all the terrible things to. The world will be a better place once I’m gone.
It didn’t take long to confirm for certain that the dead woman was Melissa Ross. Her fingerprints were on file with the police department from when she’d been on the force. The Ohio State Police made copies of her prints from the body and sent them to New York to be checked against the ones on file. The prints turned out to be a perfect match. The dead woman in the lake was definitely Melissa Ross.
“What the hell was she doing in Ohio?” I asked Wohlers.
“She was on the run,” he pointed out. “Maybe it just worked out that’s where she decided to give up—she was tired of running, knew she’d be caught eventually and have to spend the rest of her life in prison. So she left a note and killed herself.”
“It doesn’t sound like her. Doesn’t sound like the previous notes. The previous notes and phones calls were all arrogant, cocky, taunting—no hint that she had any misgivings of any kind about what she was doing. This one wasn’t like that at all.”
“She was crazy,” Wohlers said. “She probably had up and down moods. Maybe she was on some kind of drugs that made her temperament go through all sorts of volatile mood swings.”
“And she used her real name when she registered at the hotel. Jesus, why would she do that? I mean the minute someone recognized the name . . .”
“Who cares?” Wohlers said. “I’m just glad it’s over.”
* * *
The Daily News newsroom was pure bedlam, of course. We’d already tweeted out the discovery of Melissa Ross’s body, sent out alerts for our online subscribers, and flooded the rest of social media with the breaking news. I’d put a rudimentary story on the website, and now I was adding details, polishing it and turning it into a news story with sidebars that would carry us through the rest of the day. Meanwhile, all the editors were trying to figure out the best Page One headline for the morning edition. The favorite at the moment was: BLONDE ICE ICES HERSELF.
There’d be follow-ups and analyses and opinion pieces running for days. But Wohlers was right about one thing. The Blonde Ice story itself was finally over. Even if there were still a lot of unanswered questions.
In the middle of all this, Zeena called me at my desk phone.
“There’s someone here at the front desk who wants to see you,” she said.
“Okay.”
“Are you in?”
“I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”
“Sometimes you want me to say you’re not in depending on who it is looking for you.”
“Who is it?”
“Let me ask him.”
“Good idea, Zeena.”
She came back on the line a few seconds later.
“He said his name is Luis Velez.”
A few minutes later, a Hispanic man of about twenty-five—Luis Velez, the waiter from the Hotel Madison I’d been looking for—approached my desk.
Stacy had walked over to my desk too, to find out what was going on.
“I got a message you wanted to talk to me about the Blonde Ice woman,” Velez said.
Stacy laughed. “You’re a little late, Velez.”
“What do you mean?”
“Melissa Ross was just found dead,” I told him. “That’s what we wanted to talk to you about.”
“So you don’t need me now?”
“Sure, you can go,” Stacy said. “The Melissa Ross case is over.”
Stacy was right, of course. There was no reason to question Velez now. But old habits die hard. And I always liked to wrap up all of the loose ends in any case. So, since Velez was there anyway, I decided to ask him a few questions about Melissa Ross.
He went through everything he remembered from that morning when he delivered breakfast and talked—albeit briefly—to Ross.
“Man, she was hot,” Velez said. “I mean what guy wouldn’t have wanted to go to bed with her? I was thinking about her after I left. Not because of the murder, I didn’t know anything about that yet. Just because she was so hot. I mean smokin’ hot.”
“I think we’ve established that Melissa Ross was hot,” I smiled.
“Anyway, she ordered two eggs, coffee, and toast. Breakfast for one.”
“Did that seem unusual at all?”
“What do you mean?”
“That it was breakfast for only one. There were supposed to be two people in the room.”
“Didn’t matter any. I don’t know who’s in the rooms. I just take the food to them. I’m a waiter. That’s what I do. She opened the door and took the food. I didn’t figure she was a murder suspect or anything.”
I smiled.
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it. I went back to the kitchen. A few days later, cops are all over and I find out I served breakfast to a killer that morning.”
Just like Stacy said, there had been no real point in talking to Velez. But at least I’d tried. I thanked Velez for his time and told him we were done now.
Just before he left, Velez looked at a picture of Melissa Ross on my computer screen for the front page of tomorrow’s paper.
“Who’s that?” he asked, obviously intrigued by the sexy blonde woman in the picture.
“Melissa Ross.”
Velez stared at the photo for a long time. He looked confused.
“No, it’s not.”
&nbs
p; “Sure, it is,” I told him.
Velez looked at the photo again, and then shook his head vehemently from side to side.
“That wasn’t the woman I met in the hotel room,” he said.
* * *
“I don’t have time to talk to you,” Wohlers said when I called him.
“This is important.”
I told him about my conversation with the Hotel Madison waiter.
“Well, he must have been mistaken,” Wohlers said.
“He seemed pretty certain now that the woman he saw in the room didn’t look like the picture of Melissa Ross.”
“So then she was wearing some kind of disguise that morning. Changed her hair color or something so that people didn’t recognize her. She probably didn’t look exactly like the picture the waiter saw. But so what? She’s dead now. We know she’s dead. You should be happy. I’m happy. We’ve solved the case, Malloy.”
“Did you get all the autopsy results from Ohio yet?”
“I was just about to do that when you called and interrupted me.”
“Let me know what they are.”
“Sure. Do you want me to have a squad car stop by the News and deliver the coroner’s report to you personally so you don’t even have to bother picking up a phone or going online to read it?”
“C’mon, Lieutenant, I’m trying to be a good guy. There’s something wrong here. Just tell me what else you find out before anyone else in the media gets the information. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Yeah, whatever,” he said.
I sat and waited for what seemed like hours for him to call me back. Finally, he did. His voice was different now. More subdued, almost sheepish. I knew even before he told me the details of the autopsy that I was right.
“I just got off the phone with the people in Ohio. They’re not calling it a suicide anymore. The preliminary autopsy showed Ross didn’t die of drowning in that lake—she was dead before she went into the water. A long time before. Maybe as long as a week ago. Tim Hammacher died less than a week ago. So, according to this timetable, Melissa Ross would have been dead before Hammacher was murdered. Which makes no sense at all.”
“Sure it does,” I said. “Think about it, Lieutenant. The waiter insisted the woman he saw in that hotel room that morning after the Issacs murder didn’t look like Melissa Ross. The killer only had sex with the victim the first time, not the next two. Tim Hammacher—who should have recognized Melissa Ross—let her pick him up anyway that night they met in the bar.”
“There’s more than one killer,” Wohlers said.
“Or maybe Melissa Ross didn’t kill anybody at all.”
“My God . . .”
“We’ve been looking for the wrong woman all along,” I said.
Part IV
THE LADY IN THE LAKE
CHAPTER 30
THE police held a press conference the next day where they confirmed the news to everyone that Melissa Ross was not the Blonde Ice killer we were looking for after all.
Wylie was not there this time, which was unusual since he always took a high-profile position with the media. Instead, the press conference was conducted by Police Commissioner William Eaton. Eaton had been pretty much overshadowed in his role by the hands-on Wylie in the past. He didn’t look particularly happy to be up there in the spotlight now.
“There was a small bruise on her head,” Eaton said. “At first, the people in Ohio thought she had hit her head there during the crash, as the car went into the lake. But the abrasion didn’t come from a steering wheel or a windshield or anything else inside the car. It was made by a blunt object—a piece of metal or wood, maybe even a club or a baseball bat that had smashed into her head. That’s what killed her.
“There’s also evidence now that she’d been in the trunk of the car she was found in. We discovered pieces of fabric in her hair and on other parts of her clothing and body that matched up with materials from the interior of the trunk. It looks like she was killed somewhere else, transported in the trunk of the car to the lake, then placed behind the wheel of the car before it was pushed into the lake, to look like she’d committed suicide.
“And, along with these new developments, the medical examiner has now placed the estimated time of death for Melissa Ross at least one week earlier.”
I had already broken much of this information in the News hours earlier, of course.
“Just to be clear, you’re saying that she died before Tim Hammacher’s murder?” someone asked.
“That’s right.”
“So she couldn’t have killed him,” one reporter said, pointing out the obvious.
“Not unless she figured out a way to come back from the dead,” another reporter laughed.
“Maybe she didn’t kill the first two either,” someone else said.
Eaton had a shell-shocked look on his face and seemed like he just wanted to get out of there. I thought again about how unusual it was that Wylie wasn’t here. Sure, it was a tough situation and he was no doubt badly shaken up by the death of his confidant and friend Hammacher. But he had shown up to answer questions even after Hammacher’s death. It seemed unlike him to dodge the media, even under these circumstances.
“I thought Melissa Ross was identified by someone going up in the hotel elevator to the room of Walter Issacs, the first victim,” a woman reporter asked Eaton. “Doesn’t that show she at least killed him?”
“We have a witness now who puts a different woman in Issacs’s room the next morning.”
“A sexy blonde woman?”
“Yes.”
“But different?”
“This woman was definitely not Melissa Ross.”
“So you think Melissa Ross took Issacs up to the hotel room, but never killed him—that the second woman did that.”
“That is a viable scenario at this point,” Eaton said.
“So are we talking about two women murderers—or one?”
“At the moment, we believe there is only one woman killer—and Melissa Ross was a victim of this woman, along with the men that were killed.”
“Who is this woman?” a reporter asked him.
“Where is she?” another one wanted to know.
“We don’t have any of those answers yet,” Eaton said.
The press conference erupted into pandemonium, reporters yelling questions at Eaton in rapid-fire succession.
I shouted out: “Where is Deputy Mayor Wylie and why isn’t he here?”
Eaton mumbled something about “no more information at this time” and hurriedly left.
* * *
When I got back to the News, I called Wylie’s office. I wanted to talk to him directly about all this. With Hammacher gone, I didn’t have a real contact in his office. So I just told the woman who answered that I needed to talk to him about a job offer he’d made to me. I said I was ready to give him a decision. I wasn’t, but I figured that was the best way to get him to the phone.
The woman put me on hold for a long time.
“The deputy mayor says he’s unable to talk to you now,” she said when she returned.
“Did you tell him who I was?”
“Yes.”
“Please go back and tell him it’s important I discuss the job offer with him now.”
She disappeared again, then came back on the line.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Malloy. The deputy mayor says that job offer is no longer available. He has made other plans for our campaign team. But he said he wishes you the best in your career endeavors.”
After I hung up, I sat there trying to figure out why Wylie might have pulled the job offer. He had been really hot for me to join his campaign. And now he wasn’t. So what changed? Well, Hammacher was dead. But that should have made me an even more desirable commodity to him. What else could it be?
I had one theory.
Houston.
Wylie probably had no idea Houston was still out there until I did my mea culpa broadcast/story about me and he
r. He wanted me on his staff badly before I revealed that; now he wanted no part of me. Ergo, I was betting Houston had to be the reason. It was a potential scandal for him—top cop patronizing top prostitute. So the last thing he wanted was a guy on his staff who knew Houston and might find out about his secret. No, now he’d want to put as much distance between himself and me as he could. Which is what he was doing.
The more I thought about it, the more that made sense to me.
What didn’t make sense was why he hadn’t been at the Melissa Ross press conference.
I also was still bothered by why Melissa Ross’s body would have turned up in a lake in the middle of Ohio—hundreds of miles from the other murders.
I found a map of Ohio online and studied it. Munson Lake was in the northeast section of the state, about twenty miles south of Cleveland. Melissa Ross had grown up on Long Island and lived in Queens. As far as I could tell, she had never lived in Ohio. There was no evidence she had even been there at any time until the end. So how did her body wind up in a car at the bottom of this lake?
Did Ross drive to Ohio—to elude the police or for some other reason—before being murdered there?
Or, as it seems more likely now, was she killed somewhere else—probably right here in New York City—and then driven to Ohio to be put into her watery grave?
But why? Why Ohio? Why did whoever killed her go to all the trouble of putting her in that lake—and trying to make it look like suicide—instead of just leaving the body wherever the murder took place?
Looking at the map of Ohio on my computer screen, I suddenly remembered something else. I had called up a map of Ohio a few days earlier too. When I was finding out more about Bob Wylie’s background. Wylie had grown up in a place called Massillon, Ohio. I found Massillon on the map. It was about twenty-five miles from where Melissa Ross died. Not exactly the same location. Still, close enough that it piqued my curiosity.
But what could Ross’s death possibly have to do with Wylie, who grew up in the same general area more than three decades earlier?
