“So soon? We’ve hardly talked.”
“I’ll call again.”
“You always say that.”
“I know. I always mean it.”
When she hung up with her mother, Ellery did take the dog out into the night for a brisk walk. Down close to the ocean, the winter air set on her like a sea monster from the blackest depths, wet and icy cold. It froze the inside of her nose and burned the tips of her ears. She heard a siren in the distance, the belligerent honk of a fire truck, and it made her turn for home. She quickened her steps but she couldn’t outrun Myra’s painful grimace and melted face as she’d said those words, we both know that’s a lie. The woman had been in therapy for more than twenty years and she obviously wasn’t healed yet. It didn’t give Ellery a lot of confidence in Dr. Sunny or her methods.
Back inside, pink cheeked and breathless, Ellery put on water for tea and resolved to focus her attention on someone she could help: Wendy Mendoza. She looked up Wendy’s case on the internet while she waited for the kettle to whistle. Wendy had provided enough identifying details that Ellery was able to find the news stories with no trouble, and what she read largely matched Wendy’s narrative. The rapist broke in through an open second-floor window. The police had no clues, at least that they were sharing publicly, and no physical description beyond the fact that he was big and wore a ski mask. Detective Manganelli said they were looking to match the M.O. to other open cases, and he urged anyone with information that might be helpful to the case to come forward. That was eight months ago, with nothing since. Maybe Manganelli would be able to offer some additional tidbits in person.
The kettle warmed from a noisy vibration to a full howl, and Ellery hurried to pull it from the stove. She singed her thumb in the process, leaving a red mark that again made her think of Myra. Unable to resist this time, she took her mug of tea to the couch and started a new search on Myra and the fires. Myra was right that there had been a lot of press, so Ellery had many links to peruse. She got the basics easily: there had been more than two dozen four- or five-alarm fires across South Boston over the course of two years in the mid-1980s, with eight firefighters injured during the fires, including one hurt badly enough that he had to take early retirement. The target buildings were all empty at the time of the blaze until the final one, at Gallagher Furniture, a small business that specialized in hand-carved wood pieces. Deceased in that fire was Robert Gallagher, aged two. He was survived by his mother, Myra, who was badly burned in the fire; his father, Patrick; and an older teenage brother, Jacob.
Ellery noted that Myra had survived only because fireman Kevin Powell was passing by and happened to see the smoke and flames soon after they started. Powell was also the one to spot Luis Carnevale, a two-bit criminal who had been on no one’s radar as the arsonist, among the onlookers at the scene of the fire. He’d been arrested on the spot, stinking of gasoline. When she looked him up, she found Kevin Powell had been richly rewarded for his bravery and was now fire commissioner for the City of Boston.
Ellery looked at Bump, who wagged his tail happily whenever her gaze set on him. “Lucky he happened to be passing by at the right time,” she told the dog. She hoped for Myra’s sake that Carnevale remained locked up, because Wendy’s desperation showed how crazy-making it felt when your tormenter was free. Ellery had one predator in the grave and another one on his way, assuming they ever did give Coben the needle. Still she lived in an apartment with no closets and a gun on her nightstand, and yet half the nights she could not sleep at all. No, she would have told Wendy if she’d been entirely truthful. It does not stop when they are dead.
* * *
The next night, Detective Joe Manganelli was more than happy to meet her for a drink, as she’d suspected he would be. Yes, he’d been generous with his knowledge all those years ago, but now she was infamous and not telling her story to anyone. Cops, like reporters, loved a good story, and she knew that Joe would show up for hers. “Ellery,” he said warmly when she slid into the booth across from him. “Long time, no see. You look great.”
She wished she could say the same, but Joe was balding, ruddy cheeked, and always looked about eight months pregnant. “Thanks for meeting with me,” she replied. “Drinks are on my tab—what’ll you have?”
“Another one of these,” he said, nodding at his empty beer glass.
Ellery bought them both a round and settled in for shop talk. “You might have seen something about me in the news,” she began, and Joe threw back his head with a laugh.
“Something? Darlin’, you were leading the six o’clock hour for two weeks straight. Most cops don’t sniff a serial case their entire career, and you bring down two of ’em.” His tone was somewhere between admiration and envy.
“And two’s my limit,” she replied lightly. The last thing she wanted to do was get sidetracked into the gruesome details of the Coben case or its reprise from the summer. But Joe was curious and she had to pay the piper if she wanted to dance to the tune, so she had to accept at least a few of his questions.
“I read a book on Coben a few years back,” he said. “That was some twisted shit, the way he cut off all those girls’ hands. Did he try that with you?”
Reluctantly, she showed him the scars at her wrists.
“Wow, incredible. Guess he messed with the wrong girl, huh? Have you seen him since it happened?”
“No, and I don’t care to.”
The finality of her tone made him blush. “No, no, of course not. Why would you?”
She took advantage of his discomfort to press her agenda, leaning conspiratorially over the booth. “Anyway, the thing is—they’ve got me doing mandated therapy now, on account of what happened over the summer.”
Joe made a face. “Yeah, I read about that, too. The bastard got what was coming to him. Why’re they yanking your chain about it?”
“Because they’re just as glad he’s dead but they’re afraid to give me back my gun for fear I might shoot someone else.” There, she’d said it. It was kind of liberating to have the truth out loud.
“I hear ya. It’s always cover-your-ass mode with the brass, ain’t it? We do the dirty work and they’ll look the other way so long as the collars keep rolling in and nobody ends up on the wrong side of the news.”
“Yeah, well. That’s where I went wrong, I guess.”
They clinked glasses. “So tell me what I can do you for,” Joe said as he licked the foam from his upper lip.
“This therapy group I’m in,” she said, figuring she would play it straight. “Wendy Mendoza is in it, too.”
Joe knew the case right away. Just the sound of Wendy’s name seemed to deflate him in his seat. “Aw, hell. That poor kid. I wish I had some good news for her, I really do. You don’t know how hard we worked that case—night and day for a solid month. It was priority one. Sick freak like that, you figure he’s going to do it again if we don’t stop him, right? And the city was panicked there for a while. Women calling all day long, wanting to know why we haven’t caught the guy yet. We tried. We’re still trying. There’s just nothing to go on.”
“I heard you were trying to tie it to other open cases,” Ellery said, fishing delicately now that they were in open waters.
“Yeah, there are a couple that seem possibly related, but it’s hard to say. One of ’em, the victim is an old lady of eighty-two. I mean, we’re talking gray hair, walker—the works. In that case, no weapon was used. In another case, it wasn’t nighttime but the middle of the day. A woman came back from a jog and found the perp waiting for her in her bedroom with a gun. He had rope, too. In the Mendoza case, it was nighttime, a young, attractive victim, and he had a knife. We have no hair or fluid from any of these cases, which is one reason we think they might be related—but at the same time, we have nothing solid to connect them. Goddamn frustrating, I tell ya.”
“Maybe I could look at the cases,” Ellery suggested.
Joe’s eyebrows shot up. “You pass the detective’s exam i
n Somerville and I didn’t notice?”
“Just trying to help out a friend. I have the time.”
He looked her over skeptically and then took another drink. “I appreciate the offer, Ellery, but we’ve had a dozen eyeballs on these files already, so I don’t think it’s worth either of us risking our heinies just to get one more, capisce?”
Ellery turned her glass around in her hands as she considered her next move. She could just give up here and tell Wendy, Hey, I tried, but the desperation in the woman’s eyes and the way she’d said I thought maybe you’d understand kept eating away at Ellery. “What if,” she said slowly, “what if I could get you access to an FBI profiler? Someone who might take a look at the case and move the investigation forward.”
“FBI? They don’t get involved in this low-level shit.”
“He would if I asked him to,” Ellery said, sounding more confident than she felt. It’s not like Reed Markham owed her any favors. This time, it was definitely the other way around.
“He,” Joe repeated, putting the pieces together. “You mean Markham. The guy who caught Coben.”
“If I can convince him,” Ellery pressed. “Will you let us see the cases?”
“Let you? I’ll throw a goddamned ticker-tape parade.”
Ellery smiled in triumph and drank down her beer. Tomorrow she would figure out how to call up the decorated Agent Reed Markham and tell him she had pimped him out to the Somerville PD.
2
“You’re doing it all wrong!” Reed’s six-year-old daughter, Tula, clutched her cheeks and used her fingers to pull down the lower lids of her eyes to express her full displeasure at his dubious hairstyling technique.
“What? It’s a ponytail,” Reed protested as he met her eyes in the mirror.
“It’s all lumpy on this side,” she complained as she patted the supposedly offending bump, whose presence Reed could not detect at all, and he was an FBI-trained investigator. The doorbell rang downstairs, and Tula took off with the hairbrush. “That’s Mom! She can fix it!” Tula fled the room at the same breakneck speed at which she’d done everything else in her short life, including being born four weeks early. Reed smiled faintly, wondering how long he’d be able to keep up with her, and followed Tula downstairs to greet his ex-wife, Sarit. By the time he arrived in the living room, Sarit had redone the ponytail and Tula was smiling again.
“Are your things gathered for school?” Sarit asked her, and Tula looked at the floor.
“Not yet.”
“Off with you then, and hurry—we don’t want to be late!” Sarit patted Tula on the backside as if to spur her into action, while Reed lingered from his place at the edges of their old life, still unsure how he fit into this new version. The divorce had become final two months ago, the ink barely dried on the pages, but Sarit seemed to be completely at peace. Her warm brown skin had a pink undertone of happiness, her shoulder-length hair had a new, stylish cut, and the new man in her life seemed to be sticking around. Reed still hadn’t found anything to put on the bare walls of his condo.
“Reed,” Sarit said, and then bit her lip in the way he’d used to find so adorable. “I wanted to talk to you about something. Randy is surprising Amanda with a trip to Disney World over Christmas, and I know it’s technically your time with Tula, but I think she would be over the moon with happiness if she could go, too, and—”
“You want to take her for Christmas?”
“I know. We agreed it was your year. It’s just this trip popped up at the last minute, and Randy, Amanda, and I will be going no matter what, so I thought I would see if you might be flexible this one time. We’d be back on the twenty-seventh and you could have her the rest of the school break, if you wished. That’s eight days.”
His usual ration was six days per month: a three-day weekend twice per month, plus dinner on Tuesday nights if he wasn’t away or Tula didn’t have some school function to attend. Although they shared legal custody fifty-fifty, the physical custody was heavily slanted in favor of Sarit due to Reed’s erratic schedule. Plus, Sarit remained in the family home where Tula had been raised thus far, and it seemed best for her to let her stay in familiar surroundings most of the time. Still, Reed had been looking forward to taking Tula to his parents’ home for the holiday, where she could run around with all her cousins. It had been his inner mantra for weeks now as he’d sent his daughter away on Sunday nights. At least you’ll have Christmas, he told himself.
“You’ve put me in an impossible position,” he said to Sarit. “If I say no, I’m the monster who kept his kid from spending Christmas at Disney World with her mother, her best friend, and her mom’s cool new boyfriend. Have you told her about it already?”
Sarit looked offended. “Of course not. I wanted to speak to you first.”
Reed put his hands on his hips and turned his gaze to the bare, beige wall, which he stared at until his vision started to blur. They both knew he could kick up a fuss about this if he wanted to—for once, he had the power here. “Maybe I wanted to be the one to take her to Disney World,” he said finally, turning back to look at her.
Sarit appeared perplexed at this idea. “Did you?”
He stuck out his chin. “Maybe.”
Sarit seemed to consider this a moment, but then she shook her head brusquely. “Let’s be realistic for a moment, shall we? We took exactly one family vacation in six years—a trip to the Grand Canyon that got cut short when you had to fly to Seattle because a teenage boy had been murdered there.”
The third one, Reed remembered. Gary Warner, age fifteen, a runaway and street hustler who picked up the wrong trick. It had taken them another three months to find his killer, during which time Reed flew back and forth across the country a dozen times.
“As for Christmas,” Sarit continued, “half the time, you weren’t even home.”
He looked at her sharply. “One time. I missed Christmas one time.” It was a kidnapping on that occasion; eighteen-year-old Kacie Daniels left to buy a last-minute gift for her boyfriend and never came home. Her body turned up in a nearby swamp just after New Year’s.
Sarit looked sad but sympathetic. “It felt like more,” she said gently, and what could Reed reply to that?
“Fine,” he said with a sigh. “Take her. Have a great time.”
“Thank you. Thank you for me, and for Tula. I owe you one,” she said as their daughter came bounding back into the room with her school backpack in hand.
“I’m ready!”
“Is that so?” Sarit chucked her lightly on the chin. “Take a look at your feet, my sweet.”
“Oh … shoes. Right.” She went skipping out of the room again, and Reed gave in to the baser temptation to lob a surprise back at Sarit.
“McGreevy’s retiring this year,” he informed her. “They’re going to need someone else to run the unit.”
She blinked at him. “You mean … someone like you?”
“Why not? McGreevy indicated to me recently that the job might well be mine, and they’ll take his recommendations into account. I’ve certainly got the experience.”
“Yes, of course. It’s just that I didn’t think you wanted a management-type role. Someone has to go out and catch these monsters. Isn’t that what you always told me?”
“Someone would still be doing that. It just wouldn’t be me getting on the plane for every case. I’d be sticking closer to home, which means I could spend more time with Tula.” He said the last part casually, but the implication was clear—he might be soon able to cash in on any debts Sarit owed him.
Sarit’s expression appeared clouded for a moment, but all she said was, “I think she would love that.”
Tula entered the room again, this time with shoes on her feet. “I’m ready now.”
“Say good-bye to your father,” Sarit commanded, and Tula launched herself at Reed.
“Bye, Daddy. I love you.”
“Bye, sweetheart.” He barely had time to kiss her warm head before she was o
ff again, disappearing out the door in a whirl of chatter and a sudden gust of winter air. “I love you, too,” Reed whispered to the room. But there was no longer anyone around to hear it.
* * *
At his desk, Reed focused on the background workup on a suspect in a car bombing case in Birmingham, Alabama, that one of his colleagues had finished that morning. Reed had mastered the ability to tune out the world around him, disappearing the other agents and their tap-tapping on keyboards or ringing phones, so it took him a minute to realize his pants were buzzing. He fished out his phone, and a little jolt went through him at the sight of Ellery Hathaway’s name on his caller ID. He had not spoken to her since the summer and all that ugliness up in Woodbury.
Gingerly, he pressed the button to accept the call. “Reed Markham,” he said, and then looked around to see if anyone was watching him. For some reason, Ellery still felt like his secret, even though the rest of the world knew who she was now.
“Reed? It’s Ellery. I, uh, I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.”
“No, no, not at all. It’s fine. I’m glad to hear from you. I’ve been meaning to give you a call, but…” He trailed off because he didn’t really have a good excuse. Mostly, after the Coben story blew up again in the wake of the new murders, this time with Ellery’s identity revealed, Reed felt like the best thing he could do for her was to get the hell out of there. Hanging around in her orbit would have only helped keep the story alive. He groped around in his head for some amount of truth, something real that wouldn’t scare her off entirely. “I’ve wondered,” he said at last. “How you were doing.”
“Oh.” She gave a short, dark laugh. “Well, I haven’t shot anyone since you left. So there’s that.”
“I read that you were suspended,” he replied.
“Yeah, they have me shrinked up at the moment. First, they tried offering me an early retirement—no pension or anything, just a couple of years’ pay to hush up and go away, and I think they were praying I’d take it. They don’t want me back but they don’t want to fire me, either. I mean, how would that look on the news, right?”
No Mercy--A Mystery Page 3
