Alafair Burke

by Ellie Hatcher 03 - 212 (v5)

  None of this was easy for Katie’s mother. Phyllis Battle had always been a woman who had known what she wanted. When her first daughter, Barbara, had been killed in a car accident in 1974, she had known—and insisted to her husband—that they would adopt another, even though they had each already celebrated their fiftieth birthdays. And she had known—and insisted to her husband—that they would name the girl Katie, after the confident and independent woman who leaves Robert Redford behind in The Way We Were. And when her husband passed away ten years ago, leaving behind debts he had never mentioned to his wife, Phyllis had known—and insisted to her daughter, Katie—that she would continue to live in the family home alone.

  The highest hurdle Katie had ever faced had come a year ago when she told her mother she needed to move. For the first time, someone for once was insisting on something to Phyllis. Katie had eventually won that initial battle between the Battle women, but that didn’t mean her mother was going to forfeit what might remain of the war. No plastic drinking straws. No arts and crafts in the common room with the women whom her mother called the “pathetic old biddies.” None of the loose, maintenance-free cotton housedresses that were practically a uniform at Glen Forrest.

  And definitely no wheelchairs.

  “Mom, I know you don’t want to hear this, but another fall could be really bad.”

  “I can…take care…of myself.”

  “I know. But you’d find it’s a lot easier if you’d take advantage of some of the things they have here to help you, like a chair, Mom.”

  Katie leaned forward and rested her hand gently on top of her mother’s. At eighty-two years old, her mother had maintained her full cognition and spirit, but her hand had never felt so thin and frail, her blue veins bulging beneath the loose and wrinkled skin.

  “You mean…a wheelchair. I’m not…an invalid.”

  “We could ask for a really crappy one if that would make you feel better. None of this high-speed electric power stuff. You’d wheel yourself. Think of the upper-body workout you’d get. I can even request a bum wheel so it would be like a bad shopping cart if you want.”

  Katie was happy to see her mother smiling, but then the smile turned into a laugh and her mother wheezed and then coughed. Her hand moved reflexively to her chest again.

  “Shhh,” Katie said soothingly.

  Her heart. The stroke. The falls. Keeping track of her mother’s ailments required Mensa-caliber mental juggling.

  The second her mother caught her breath, she was back on message. “No wheel…chairs.”

  “You scare me, Mom. I know you like to think it’s just a fall. But this isn’t something you can play around with. Falls in the elderly—”

  Her mother shot her a look of darts.

  “Falls now can be fatal. Do you know how stupid it would be to survive everything you’ve survived, just to go out by falling down? Phyllis Battle is way too tough—and much too smart—to allow that.”

  Her mother set her jaw, but she at least wasn’t arguing anymore.

  “I’ve asked Marj to bring a chair up tonight.” Now her mom shook her head, but still no verbal resistance. “Just for you to experiment with. She’ll work with you out in the hallway when the others are listening to a music group that’s coming in tonight.”

  “Horrible, horrible…they call themselves singers. Like someone threw…a cat…in a washing machine.”

  “OK, so when all the old biddies are down there clapping along with the terrible music, you be nice to Marj. I’ll check in with her tomorrow about how it went, and we can go from there.”

  Still, her mother said nothing. Progress.

  Katie rose from the bed, picked up her purse from the floor, and leaned over to place a kiss on the top of her mother’s head.

  “Good night, Mom.”

  Katie had already opened the apartment door when she heard her mother’s quiet voice behind her.

  “I’m…sorry, Katie. For…falling. For…being old.”

  “Don’t you ever apologize. Just be nice to Marj tonight. I want you around for a long, long time.”

  On her walk to the F train, Katie retrieved her BlackBerry from the depths of her oversize black leather satchel. Pulling up a phone number, she hit the dial button, only to hang up after one ring. She wanted someone to take her place tomorrow night. With Mom’s latest fall, the last thing she wanted to deal with was tomorrow night.

  Ironically, though, it was her mother’s situation that required her to handle this appointment herself. It was only a few hours. She’d get through it, just like she always did.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  6:45 P.M.

  If there was a bar in the East Twenties that epitomized the drinking side of the law enforcement culture, it was Plug Uglies. Where glass-walled martini bars soaked in ubiquitous lounge music had begun to dominate even Murray Hill, Plug Uglies was still a dark wood pub adorned with black-and-white photographs of old New York, dartboards, and a well-stocked jukebox.

  The comments began the moment Ellie opened the door.

  “Look alive, Officers. We’ve got a hardened ex-con in our midst.”

  “Call the probation department. Make sure she’s checked in.”

  More jokes about the need for a shower, despite the fact that she’d cleaned up hours earlier.

  Ellie took a mock bow in recognition of the attention, and someone playing shuffleboard in the back broke out in a round of “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow.”

  And then it was over.

  “See, not so bad,” Jess said, ordering a Johnnie Walker Black for her and a Jack Daniel’s for himself.

  Ellie took a seat on the bar stool next to his. “So how was life without me last night?”

  After briefly shacking up with a self-described exotic dancer for two months last summer, Jess was back on Ellie’s living room sofa again, where he always seemed to spend the largest bulk of his residency.

  “Quiet.”

  “It’s not the first time you’ve been trusted at home alone without a watcher.”

  Ellie and Max were taking things slow. Casual. Dating. No relationship talk yet. But she did spend the night with him about twice a week, enough to justify a second toothbrush at his place.

  “Quieter than that,” Jess said. “I was worried about you.”

  “I think you got our roles switched. I’m the worrier. You’re the worri-ee.” She smiled, picturing her usually stress-free brother alone in her apartment fretting over her.

  “Oh, shit,” she said, her momentary inner calm destroyed. “Did Mom call? I totally spaced.”

  With rare exceptions, Ellie called her mother in Wichita every single night. The routine dated back to her first days in New York, where she’d followed Jess more than ten years ago to assuage her mother’s concerns about her only son, and most reckless child, living on his own in a city where a person like Jess could find more than his fair share of trouble. Ellie would call her mother each night because she knew her mother would sleep better once she heard her two children in the big city were safe.

  Then slowly what had begun as a sweet habit had become a requirement—minimal validation to lonely, widowed Roberta that the children who’d abandoned her at least missed her from afar.

  And now Ellie had forgotten to call. She knew from experience she would pay for it the next time they spoke.

  “You didn’t tell her where I was, did you?”

  “Are you kidding? I didn’t pick up the phone.”

  “Jess.”

  “Sorry, sis. That drama’s your department.”

  “I assume she left an epic message?”

  Jess nodded, knocking back a toss of bourbon.

  “Don’t tell me. She did her whole passive-aggressive, I-know-you’ve-got-more-important-things-to-do speech.”

  “Something like that. I believe she may have said something about spending all your time with a man she still knows nothing about and has never met.”

  “Jesus. I never should
have mentioned Max to her.”

  “Uh, duh? Don’t ask, don’t tell, is my motto. Tie me to a water board at Gitmo. Call out the dogs. I say notzing,” he said in his best Sergeant Schultz impersonation.

  “You know the only reason you get away with that is because I tell Mom what’s going on with you.”

  “No, you tell her what she wants to hear about what’s going on with me. The dude featured in the fictional tales of those phone calls is a complete and utter tool.”

  Ellie did have a tendency to convey to their mother a brighter version of her and Jess’s lives. In the fairy-tale world that Ellie had created for her mother’s benefit, Ellie was a well-adjusted woman who just happened to be a cop, who had girlfriends, dates, and hobbies. She was nothing like the father, and her mother’s husband, who had given everything to the job. And in these stories Jess’s band, Dog Park, actually got paid to play standing-room-only gigs, and a lucrative record contract was waiting for them around the next corner.

  “You should have picked up, Jess. Just to make her feel better.”

  “And you should stop coddling her, and allowing her to hold you hostage with your daily calls. But that’s not up to me.”

  Instead of responding, Ellie took another sip of her drink.

  “So,” Jess said, filling the silence, “I may have met the stupidest woman on the planet yesterday.”

  “Hmm, I don’t know. The competition in that arena can be pretty stiff.”

  “I was walking down Fifth Avenue to meet this girl at Park Bar when I notice this kid—couldn’t have been but four years old—sitting in the passenger seat of this parked car. And I noticed because I was thinking that’s how we’d ride when we were kids—just plunked down in the front seat like that—no child seats, no seat belts, whatever. Then I notice the windows are down and there’s no one else in the car. Then I see there’s a purse sitting on the console, and the keys are hanging from the ignition.”

  “Brilliant.”

  He took in another gulp of bourbon. “So then I see this lady stroll out of the deli with an arm full of flowers, carefree as can be, and she starts making her way over to the car. I said, ‘This is your car?’ ‘Oh yeah,’ like nothing’s wrong. And I told her she couldn’t be leaving her kid alone in the car like that. She’s all, ‘But I could see him the entire time.’”

  “Idiot.”

  “Right. So I say, ‘I could’ve hopped into that front seat and been gone in a second. Your car, your kid, your shit, would be gone.’ You know what she says? ‘I don’t worry. I’m a woman of God.’ Like everyone in the world who has bad crap happen to them must have turned their backs on God.”

  Ellie found herself smiling. “Aren’t you the one who usually says ‘Live and let live’?”

  “Even I’m not such an apathetic sack not to notice when some little four-year-old’s at stake.”

  “No, but getting in a woman’s face like that? Trying to convince her to be a better mother? Jess Hatcher, you actually tried to change the world.”

  “Shit. I really have been spending way too much time with you. I’m turning…earnest.”

  “Poor you. You know you’re welcome to vacate Chez Hatcher whenever you feel like it,” she teased.

  “And give up the best-priced sofa space in Manhattan? And with cable, no less? Not a chance.”

  Ellie spun the bottom of her glass—down only to the remnants of ice—in a circle against the bar. There had been a time when she’d been annoyed by Jess’s repeated periods of tenancy in her living room, each one a sign that his most recent job and/or roommate situation hadn’t taken. But he had now held the same job for more than six months—a new personal record. It happened to be at a strip club called Vibrations, but Ellie had long stopped worrying about that. To know that he was staying with her by choice changed everything.

  “So, El, when are we going to talk about what happened?”

  “What happened when?”

  “Don’t try to play this cool with me. Yesterday. In court. Getting a judge mad enough that he put you in a jail for a night? That doesn’t sound like my well-behaved team player of a little sister.”

  “I already told you what happened. The entire thing got out of control.”

  “You don’t get out of control, Ellie. It’s not your nature. You are the most controlled person I have ever known.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’ve seen how you work. Even at home, when you’re reading cold case reports, you hunch over your documents and create this private world that no one else can penetrate. That little notebook of yours? You treat that shit like the gold at Fort Knox. So you tell me: How’d that rich prick’s lawyer wind up sneaking a peek?”

  “You think I did this on purpose?” She shook her head and laughed. Catching the bartender’s eye, she pointed to their empty glasses to signal for another round. “Maybe we should take this conversation home so I can lie on the couch while you tell me what other Freudian tendencies I have.”

  “I’m not saying you did it intentionally. I’m saying you did something that’s not you, El. You’re usually the chick who can talk her way out of anything.”

  They sat in silence while the bartender set down two fresh glasses. Ellie gave the guy an awkward smile as he cleared away their empties, extricating himself from what he clearly sensed was a private conversation.

  “I can’t believe you’re blaming me for this. Do you have any idea how much last night sucked? It was filthy, and awful, and lonely, and terrifying. And totally humiliating.”

  “You’re misunderstanding me,” he said, his voice softening. “I’m not saying you wanted this to happen. All I’m saying is that it could only have happened if you were off your game. And I’m sorry, El, but that scares me. For your own whacked reasons, you are totally committed to doing the same crazy work Dad did. This time you got twenty-four hours of hell, but next time, you might really fuck up. That’s the kind of shit that can really get you hurt.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not,” he said, holding her stare.

  Her brother was rarely serious, let alone stern. As she looked at his concerned face, she felt her defiance begin to melt away. She didn’t want to talk about this. She didn’t want to think that Jess had seen something in her that she was completely unaware of.

  “I don’t know what happened. It’s Sparks. It’s this feeling in my gut that I missed something, and now he’s getting away with it. Because of me. And no one else cares because he’s who he is. And that poor man, Jess.” She thought about Robert Mancini’s body, laid out naked and bloody against the crisp, clean white cotton sheets. God, she was tired. And the whiskey on a near-empty stomach was taking its toll. “It’s been four months. He has a sister, and two little nieces, and they don’t have any answers. And Sparks. He doesn’t even care. And his lawyer had the nerve to bring up the Dateline thing and People magazine, as if I had done any of that for myself.”

  Media interest in her father had briefly landed Ellie in the national spotlight. Back in Wichita, Jerry Hatcher spent the better part of his career as a detective—close to fifteen years—hunting the infamous College Hill Strangler. When he was found dead behind the wheel of his Mercury Sable on a country road north of town, the department labeled it a suicide, but Ellie had spent the length of her father’s search and then some convinced it was not. The media became momentarily fascinated with Ellie when the Wichita Police Department finally captured the killer, nearly thirty years after his first murder. Ellie thought the attention would pressure the WPD to honor her father’s pension.

  That was all in the past. Six months ago, she had begun to accept the truth about her father’s death. Sometimes fathers killed themselves. Ernest Hemingway. Kurt Cobain. Jerry Hatcher. She’d never understand it, but she had finally stopped fighting. But then Sam Sparks’s lawyer tried to use it all against her in court.

  “I let him get to me,” she said. “I hate him. I hate him, and I let it show.
I let him get to me.”

  She felt her brother’s arm around her shoulder and saw him throw crumpled bills from the front pocket of his jeans onto the bar. He managed to shuffle her out of Plug Uglies, away from the view of her fellow officers, before she began to cry.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26

  8:15 A.M.

  Eight-fifteen a.m. on Friday.

  Two days had passed since Megan Gunther had discovered that hideous Web site, Campus Juice. Day one had been spent reading and rereading the posts, trying to digest the fact that someone out there apparently despised her. Day two had brought her parents and a trip to the police station, but nothing had changed. She wondered whether day three might finally be the end of it.

  She laid belly-down on her double bed, kicking alternating calves against the bedspread while she read her next biochemistry assignment and listened to Death Cab for Cutie on her iPod. With a neon pink highlighting marker, she traced a sentence in her textbook about the biosynthesis of membrane liquids. She had an exam in a week and was going to have to set the curve to have any shot at an A after missing lab yesterday.

  She had e-mailed her lab TA with a polite explanation for the absence, but had not received a reply—at least not when she’d last checked her e-mail twenty minutes ago. She thought about logging in again but didn’t want to go online. She didn’t want the temptation of reading those horrible messages about herself again. She didn’t want to think about the possibility that there could be newer postings.

  As impossible as it seemed, she was trying to follow Courtney’s advice to ignore the Web site altogether. She and Courtney had practically grown up together in New Jersey. When they had both accepted college admissions in the city—Courtney at Columbia, Megan at NYU—they had celebrated the fact that going off to school was not going to separate them. But now they were sophomores, and the reality was that the six miles between Courtney’s Morningside Heights apartment and Megan’s Greenwich Village place may as well have been a train ride between Chicago and Philly. Between classes, homework, and making new friends at their respective schools, they were lucky to see each other once a month.