Angel’s Tip

by Alafair Burke

  “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 kickboxing 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 4

  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 re
action 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. Paramedics 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, Lou 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 5

  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.