Dead Connection

by Alafair Burke

  When his wife finished, Hampton Davis cleared his throat. “You’ll have to forgive us if we seem to dwell on the past,” he said, looking at Evelyn. “But the experience my wife’s talking about was a horrible one. I ultimately had to go to court for a restraining order. The boy was actually arrested after the incident at the mall, and then — well, let’s just say things got worse from there. Amy blamed herself for years.”

  “Our point,” Evelyn insisted, “is that our daughter would not have agreed to go on dates with strangers.”

  “I’m very sorry,” McIlroy said, “but we’ve confirmed that Amy did sign herself up for an account with this service. In fact, she had a date that very night with a man she’d met online.”

  “Well, then, that’s the man you should be looking at,” Hampton insisted.

  “That was one of the first things we did,” McIlroy said patiently. “We were able to confirm his alibi, but we’re continuing to do everything we can—”

  “No,” Hampton said, slapping the table. “You’ll have to check him out again. I refuse to believe that Amy would agree to meet men this way.”

  Ellie tried to help by explaining how common it was for women Amy’s age to use services like FirstDate, but her efforts only served to upset the couple further.

  Hampton cut off the conversation abruptly. “Unless you require anything else of us, Detectives, we’ll thank you for your time and let you get back to Amy’s case.”

  Ellie and McIlroy walked the Davises out, pausing briefly at the men’s locker room, from which McIlroy retrieved the makeshift carrier he had fashioned for Chowhound. As Ellie watched Hampton take the awkward cardboard box from McIlroy, she couldn’t help but feel that these people were owed something more.

  She heard the words come out of her mouth before she’d decided to speak them. “We’re going to find him.”

  JOHNNY’S BAR ON Greenwich Avenue is roughly the size of a typical suburban closet — the walk-in kind with enough room to accommodate the typical suburban wardrobe. In Greenwich Village, however, people are not typical, and Johnny’s Bar has just the right dimensions for a kick-ass watering hole.

  Ellie wasn’t sure how she even knew the bar’s name. The sign out front read Bar. She arrived forty minutes after the time she told Jess to expect her. By her brother’s standards, that wasn’t the same as being forty minutes late. It meant Ellie would have to sit alone for another fifteen. But she’d learned over the years that she needed to be the one to arrive first. Jess couldn’t be relied upon to wait. Jess could not be relied upon at all.

  The woman behind the bar was called Josie. Josie had long curly black hair, pulled into a giant floppy knot at the top of her head. She wore a black tank top and jeans, accessorized with tattoos and piercings. She managed to look comfortable perched on top of the counter, her feet resting on the bar. She argued with a regular about whether it was finally time for Steinbrenner to go. Johnny’s was the kind of place where people talked baseball even with snow on the ground.

  It was also the kind of place where a bartender like Josie remembered an occasional customer like Ellie — as well as her drink.

  “Johnny Walker, right?”

  “Black. On the rocks.”

  Josie scooted off the counter and reached for a bottle on the top shelf. “We don’t get too many people in here for the good stuff. Hey Frank, Hatcher here is a full-blown detective on the NYPD.”

  “Prettiest cop I ever saw,” Frank grumbled, turning his attention to the television. A football game of some kind was playing.

  “Your brother’s late again?” Josie was pouring.

  “No, I’m early.” Josie turned back to the game, leaving Ellie alone with her thoughts after a long two days.

  Ellie let the whiskey warm her chest and stomach, untangling the knots she’d felt since Evelyn and Hampton Davis arrived at the precinct. They were good people, but, like a lot of parents, they knew nothing about their adult child. They still saw her as a precocious little girl, an ingenue just out of college — not as a woman who was already lying about her age on an Internet dating site. They were naive enough to believe their daughter would be safe forever. They thought nothing evil could ever get to her — all because she learned a few lessons in caution from a bad ex-boyfriend after high school.

  What the parents from Louisiana didn’t realize is that most women have a similar story somewhere in their past — a boyfriend who can’t let go, a classmate who sits too close, a coworker who insists despite all reason that he’s more than just a friend. Bumping into a creep early in life back in Louisiana simply made Amy Davis a little smarter, a little sooner. It didn’t make her safe. Nothing does.

  But Ellie could identify with the Davises’ grief. Since she was fourteen years old, she had known how hard it could be to accept the death of a family member at the hands of a monster. For more than fifteen years, she lived with the belief that her father had been murdered, without possessing even an image of the face of the man she hated, let alone a suitable punishment. She had her theories — a white guy, probably in his early twenties for his first kill in 1978. Rigid. Ordered. Bossy, compensating for insecurities. A wannabe cop. One of her reasons for leaving Kansas was her inability to pass a man of a certain age and demeanor without wondering, Is that the man who shot my father? To lose a child that way — she could not begin to imagine.

  McIlroy had handled the parents the way a homicide detective should. He was compassionate but professional. He gave them the cat they had come for and made sure they knew the department was giving the case its highest attention. But Ellie had crossed a line when she spoke the words you were never supposed to utter: We’re going to find him. McIlroy wasn’t happy about it. He made that much clear after the Davises left.

  But Ellie had no regrets, despite the assurances she handed to McIlroy. The Davises might not have believed it, and perhaps neither did McIlroy. Ellie, however, was sure of it. When she made that promise to Amy Davis’s parents, she made a promise to herself.

  Ellie had just ordered a second Johnny Walker when Jess walked in. She and her brother had little in common. He was brunette, tall, and wiry — hard and dark against her soft and light. They often joked that the Wichita hospital had switched at least one of them at birth.

  “Knocking them back again, baby sis?”

  “You know me. I’ve got a problem with the booze.”

  They both knew she didn’t. Jess might, but they rarely mentioned it. As much as they joked about the hospital switch, the one thing Jess and Ellie had in common was that they were clearly their parents’ children. Ellie looked like her mom and acted like her dad. The opposite was true of Jess, and Mom’s behavioral genes did not mix well with alcohol.

  “You picking up the tab?”

  “For a little while at least.” Ellie glanced at her watch.

  “God bless the NYPD.” Jess asked Josie for a shot of bourbon with a bourbon chaser and took a seat next to Ellie.

  “How’s life as a crime fighter?”

  Ellie smiled at her brother. He was so predictable.

  “What’s going on, Jess?”

  “Nothing. I can’t get with my sister every once in a while for a drink and some chat?”

  In addition to being predictable, Jess was also frustrating.

  “We’ll chat after you tell me what’s up.”

  “You still got that extra key?”

  Ellie sighed heavily and shook her head. “What happened to your apartment?”

  She used the second-person possessive pronoun loosely. Other than a couple of guitars, a pair of work boots, and a gym bag of clothes, very little in this world belonged to Jess Hatcher. The last she heard, though, Jess had a place to crash in Williamsburg.

  “My buddy needed to find a roommate who actually paid some rent.”

  “Funny how that works. And the job?” Against her better judgment, Ellie had helped Jess with yet another employment placement, this time as a short-order cook at a diner in
the Garment District, not too far from the Midtown South precinct, where Ellie once worked a beat. The seventy-year-old Swede who ran the place always had a weakness for Ellie. Apparently not enough to hang on to the likes of Jess.

  “The old man had a few too many morning shifts for me. It’s hard to fry up the bacon at six when you’re frying up a little rock and roll till four.” He threw in a little air guitar for comedic flair.

  “It wouldn’t be that hard on you if you did your gig, went to work, then slept later.” Ellie fished the spare key from her purse. She always carried it when Jess asked to meet her.

  “Chat time now?” Jess tucked the key in the front pocket of his blue jeans. He gave Ellie the same boyish smile she had been looking up to as long as she could remember. It was the grin of a bashful chipmunk, so out of place on Jess’s lined, unshaven face.

  “I’ve got a murder case.”

  The shy grin faded. “I thought you were ‘quite happy solving your everyday garden variety felonies.’”

  It was the line she gave Jess and her mother whenever they worried that she didn’t have the psychological makeup to stick it out as a cop. For completely different reasons, it was also the line she used to give Bill, her ex-boyfriend, to settle his completely separate concerns. Bill wondered how long she was going to work her job. Her family wondered how long it would take before Ellie’s job started working her.

  “I was happy. I am happy. But working a homicide — this is different. I stood yesterday in a woman’s apartment, reading her mail, smelling her clothing, touching the contents of her medicine cabinet, all the while knowing that someone out there killed her. And then her parents came to the precinct to pick up their daughter’s cat.”

  “You met her parents?”

  Ellie ignored the question. “Another woman died exactly one year earlier. There are some commonalities.”

  “You’re working a serial case? Ever dawn on you that might not be the best idea?”

  “I’ll be fine. This is important, Jess. Some guy is out there right now, picking his next victim.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to be the one to stop him. You really feel like going down that road?”

  Ellie knew what road he was talking about. “I won’t be like that. You can be a good cop without cutting yourself off from every other part of life.”

  “And exactly what else do you have going in your life right now, El? You dumped Bill a year ago and have no prospects in sight.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “You know what I mean.” Jess gave her two months of healing time after she moved out of Bill’s apartment but had since been trying to throw Ellie back into the dating world. They both knew the efforts were ridiculous, since most of Jess’s friends had the kinds of backgrounds that could land her in the middle of an I.A. investigation. And never mind that Jess couldn’t commit to anyone other than his fellow band members.

  “Besides, what happens if you actually find the guy? What happens when a man who kills women for sport gets an eyeful of you? Have you thought about that?”

  She hadn’t, but she also did not want to. She had imagined her father’s death too many times. She had pictured him, forced at gunpoint behind the wheel of his car for his own staged suicide. Had he known he was about to die? Had he thought of his family in those last seconds? She did not want to imagine herself like that — outmatched, resigned, absolutely finished.

  She sipped her drink in silence, and Jess stopped fighting her. Since Ellie had followed her brother up to New York nearly ten years ago, they had learned to simply accept each other.

  “So how’s Mom?” Jess finally asked.

  “Wondering what you’re up to, as always.”

  “And the case against the city?”

  “Cluster fuck, as usual. The attorney’s not getting anywhere, and Summer and the WPD are both still saying there were only the eight victims.”

  “The Wichita Police are the same bozos who insisted he stopped at six kills all those years ago. Now they say it’s eight because he confessed to two more. They never would have known about those if that arrogant prick hadn’t given them all the information himself. What makes them so sure he isn’t still playing games with them? I’m sure he gets off knowing that he’s got one more kill in his back pocket they don’t know about. A cop, to boot.”

  “You’re preaching to the choir, Jess. I’m just telling you what I know.”

  After the Wichita police finally arrested William Summer, the man formerly known only as the College Hill Strangler, Ellie had immediately retained yet another attorney to represent her mother in yet another claim against the city for her father’s pension. For a year and a half, the attorney had been fighting the city for access to the evidence collected against Summer. He had also been fighting the state for access to Summer himself. But until they found proof tying Summer to her father’s death, Jerry Hatcher remained a suicide, and the contrary suspicions carried by his family for the past decade and a half remained exactly that. Ellie hated the word closure, but she had to hope that an answer about her father’s death might snap her mother out of her limbo of grief.

  “I’m heading home. Want to come back with me to call Mom?”

  “There’s an open mic night at The Charleston in Williamsburg.”

  “And a ten-minute phone call to Mom will keep you from playing?”

  “No, it’ll put me in a serious funk and screw up the rest of my night. I’ll pass.”

  Part of Ellie wanted to do the same. But while Jess did what he wanted, Ellie did what she thought she was supposed to do. It had always been that way in the Hatcher family. Ellie swallowed down the rest of her drink, then left enough money with Josie to cover a few more rounds of her brother’s bourbon.

  10

  JESS HAD SAID HER LIFE WAS EMPTY EXCEPT FOR HER JOB. THE accusation was unfair. Her job was part of her life. It would be like saying Jess’s life was empty without his music, or that a mother’s life was empty without her children. Remove the things that matter, and any life looks empty.

  Jess of all people knew how important her work was. It was precisely because the job was part of her identity that Ellie no longer lived with Bill. Despite what Jess thought, Bill wasn’t a bad guy. She’d met him, ironically enough, at one of Jess’s gigs in the West Village. Bill was immediately smitten and, after five months, persuaded Ellie to leave her rented room behind and move in with him. He was a hard worker, an investment banker who liked to enjoy the little time off that he had. And what he enjoyed the most — flattering enough — was having Ellie at his side, giving him her full attention. Bill assumed she’d happily leave the job once he offered to take care of her. He assumed that was what every woman wanted. He was envious, in fact, that women enjoyed that as a lifestyle option.

  But, despite his every assurance that she didn’t need to work, Ellie insisted that she did. After a few months of wrangling, she realized Bill was spending more than a few nights after work having cocktails with a woman in his marketing department. Knowing Bill, Ellie was sure it wasn’t a physical affair. But she could see the end coming, so she made way for Bill to have the kind of future he wanted — one that didn’t involve the NYPD. She told him she was moving out, and he didn’t try hard to stop her. That’s what convinced her it was never the real thing. It had been far too easy, for both of them, to leave.

  In a switch of roles, Jess was the one who helped Ellie get settled after the breakup. He had an old girlfriend who was grateful for a watch-cop on her Lower East Side sofa for two weeks, and, before Ellie knew it, Jess had found her this sublet of a friend of a friend of a friend. Ellie suspected the original tenant was lying on a beach somewhere in Fiji, but as long as she had a place of her own, she wasn’t going to shed a tear for her landlord. It was a big step down from Bill’s Upper East Side junior four, but it was all hers, and she could afford it. Barely. It had taken several months and a few coats of paint, but the one-bedroom illegal sublet in Murray Hill finally fel
t like home.

  She nestled herself onto her couch in front of the television, then muted the set and reached for the telephone, ready to get the nightly call to her mother out of the way.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey Mom. Sorry I’m a little late. I just wanted to say good night.”

  “Were you working?” Roberta sounded happy, but artificially so, assisted no doubt by a little vodka. Ellie and Jess called it their mother’s nighttime voice. “Did you make a case on those forged theater tickets?”

  “We’re still working on it. I just had some paperwork to take care of.”

  “Your father used to always complain about the paperwork. Remember how he used to say if he had a donut for every piece of paper he generated in his career, he could feed every cop in America?”

  “Did you hear anything else from the lawyer?” Ellie asked, hoping to cut off her mother’s muddled trip down memory lane.

  “The city told him that Summer kept mementos from all the murders. That’s how they linked him to the cases they pinned on him. He also had photographs.”

  “Did he tell them we already knew that?”

  From the beginning, the College Hill Strangler had a fondness for sharing images of his crime scenes. In one letter mailed to the Wichita Eagle in 1981, he included a sketch of one of the murder scenes — so graphic and accurate that police speculated it was drawn from a photograph. After another the next year, he sent the police an actual photograph along with an audiotape of the victim struggling to breathe. For years, that package was the College Hill Strangler’s last known communication.

  Then precisely twenty years later, a reporter at the city newspaper received an envelope containing a necklace and a Polaroid picture. The necklace was one police had been looking for since 1978 — stolen from the single mother who was the College Hill Strangler’s first victim. The picture was of the corpse of another woman, the victim of a still-unsolved murder in 1997. With hopes of revival, EMT’s had rushed her immediately from the bedroom where she was found strangled to the hospital where she died. Only her killer could have a photo of her body.