All Day and a Night: A Novel of Suspense (Ellie Hatcher)

by Alafair Burke

  “I don’t know, Rogan. It’s not like he dropped that information in our laps. Those files he was digging through were recent. It was only after we blew them off that he mentioned her past in Utica.”

  Rogan shrugged. “So he’s smart. He wouldn’t be the first.”

  “So we keep digging. You haven’t gotten anywhere with the hospitals?”

  “The most information I got was from Alex Sumner, the shrink Mitch mentioned. He said Helen quit the program after getting a dressing-down from the department head for calling the police about two different patients she thought were a danger to the public.”

  “God forbid she should try to protect anyone.”

  “Exactly. But there are rules about confidentiality, and apparently the powers that be thought she was a little too quick to step outside of them. She decided that dealing with the criminally insane wasn’t a good fit for her after all. According to Dr. Sumner, people who do that work have to have—how did he put it?—empathy for people who don’t have empathy for others. They have to believe there’s a hope for change. And Helen didn’t.”

  “So who were those two patients?”

  “That’s where I thought I was getting somewhere. Dr. Sumner pulled major strings with his hospital contacts and got me the names of the two patients she reported. I made a quiet call to Utica PD’s records department.” Rogan slid a clipped set of documents across the table. She flipped through the pages as he summarized them. “First patient was Gregory Katz. He told her he fantasized about boiling a woman in a pot and eating the stew.”

  “Nice.”

  “Sumner says Helen’s call to police violated the ethics rules because there wasn’t a specific victim in imminent danger.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  “So for half a second, I thought we might actually have someone worth talking to. Not a big stretch to think that a guy who wants to boil women in a pot might break their limbs first. But flip the page and you’ll see the problem.”

  It was another Utica Police Department report—a fatal car accident on Christmas Day 1998. Gregory Katz was killed by a drunk driver.

  She flashed a thumbs-up. “Go karma.”

  Rogan slid another pile of documents across the table, this one much thicker. “Second guy was just a kid: Joseph Flaherty. Not nearly as interesting as the wannabe cannibal. Helen thought he was a danger to a fellow patient at the hospital. According to Brunswick, he was completely noncommunicative and nonsensical when he was off his meds, but obsessive and paranoid when he was on them—accusing this other patient of being the devil and trying to kill his five wives. And, mind you, the kid didn’t have any wives.”

  “And calling police on him broke the rules, too?”

  “According to Sumner, it did. This time, she at least had a specific individual she was trying to protect; problem was, the potential danger wasn’t grave enough.”

  “I can see why she wanted to quit.” Ellie was flipping through the pages of reports. “What’s all this other stuff?”

  “The mess that became of that kid, Joseph Flaherty. In and out of hospitals—in fact he’s in as we speak—but mostly he’s homeless. Twenty-two arrests: criminal trespass, disturbing the peace, basically acting a fool. Four of those calls are noise complaints from the same address. Guess Flaherty got obsessed with some cop and kept showing up in the yard, screaming at the windows until neighbors called the police. He was only a teenager when the Utica killings were happening, so not exactly the profile of a serial killer.”

  “Not totally unprecedented, though,” she said.

  “The real problem’s the timing of Helen’s report. Check out the date.” She flipped back to the first document in the pile. Helen had called police about Flaherty on July 5, 1995. Five women had been killed in Utica by then. “And check out the notation at the end.”

  Patient is on commitment hold, per mother. Held involuntarily, inpatient, full-time for last nine months.

  Two of the victims were killed in early 1995. A teenager couldn’t stalk prostitutes on the streets of Utica while confined to a mental institution.

  Rogan was right: the hospital angle was a bust.

  “Any luck on your end?” he asked.

  While Rogan had been calling treatment centers, Ellie had been reviewing the information they had about Anthony Amaro and his victims, looking for any connections to Helen Brunswick.

  “We’ve got the one New York City victim—Deborah Garner—and the five Utica victims. The first bodies were found in May, 1991, at Roscoe Conkling Park by a family that had taken their cat there for burial. I guess it was Fluffy’s favorite place to run off to every time he escaped. Dad’s digging the hole, and the kids are crying about Fluffy, when Mom whispers to Dad that she sees a bone in the dirt, and the bone looks human.”

  “That’s one very detailed police report.”

  She shrugged. “I made up the kid tears. And the kitty name.”

  “Fluffy? Show some originality.”

  “Says the man who named his first dog Snoopy. But, whatever. You get the picture. Family calls police. Police dig for more bones and find the remains of two bodies within a sixty-foot radius. They’re eventually identified as Nicole Henning and Jennifer Bronson. Henning had been dead longer.” To help Rogan keep track, she wrote down their names on a legal pad. “Bronson had a kid, and was reported missing by her brother, but no one called in Nicole Henning’s disappearance. Going by when the women were last seen, plus the best guess of the medical examiner, they estimate that Nicole Henning was killed around February of 1989 and Jennifer Bronson in April of 1991.” She noted the dates next to the women’s names. “Fast forward a year to March 1993. A peach of a mother calls police after it dawns on her she hasn’t seen her thirty-two-year-old daughter since Christmas. It turns out the daughter, Leticia Thomas, has a history of prostitution. On a lark, the police take a cadaver dog back out to Conkling Park and find Thomas’s body. The ME said she’d been dead a couple of months, max.”

  She added Leticia’s name and “estimated 1/93” to the growing list of victims and dates.

  “So the guy went right back to the same dumping ground,” Rogan said.

  “You could literally throw a stone to Leticia’s grave from either of the first two victims’.”

  “And this is when Utica PD finally admitted they had a serial killer on their hands?”

  “Correct. They didn’t release specifics yet, but they did alert the working girls to be careful and to let police know if they saw anything or anyone suspicious. They also started patrolling the area of the park where the bodies had been found, hoping for a repeat visit.”

  Rogan shook his head. “Like the guy’s not going to notice that.”

  Ellie made two small hatch marks on the bottom of the page and then continued her summary. “Fast forward again to April 1995. Another family is at Conkling Park, but this time in the northwest corner. They find what looks to be a human bone.”

  “Another cat funeral?”

  “No cat in this family—at least not to my knowledge. But they did have a dog, who was very much alive. Alive enough to pick up the scent of a dead body during the family hike. The body was identified as Stacy Myer, last seen a week earlier. And she wasn’t buried well, not like the first three. More like she was dumped and covered with leaves.”

  “Because the guy knew the police were looking for him by then. He rushed.”

  She nodded and made a third hatch mark. “And they probably realized they’d been pretty stupid to do a visual patrol of one part of the park to the exclusion of the rest. So the cadaver dog came back out, and found another body with more advanced signs of decomposition. Donna Blank. Reported missing, also by her mother, shortly after New Year’s, a time frame consistent with her remains. Her body was in a deep grave, like the others, but her postmortem injuries were less severe. Both of her wrists were broken, but the limbs were otherwise intact. Hard to know why exactly, but maybe he had to rush with her, too
.” She flipped the legal pad to face Rogan. “Put it all together: five victims in six years and change.”

  “The guy accelerated,” Rogan noted. “Two victims within a few months in 1995.”

  Ellie added a fourth hatch mark, and then made some additional notes. “Henning, Thomas, and Myer were known prostitutes, all with vice records, Henning and Thomas with convictions. Jennifer Bronson worked out of a lingerie modeling establishment.” She batted her eyes with mock innocence. Back before the Internet had given prostitutes an alternative to working the streets, lingerie modeling shops, massage parlors, and other “jack shacks” provided cover. “Donna Blank worked at a strip club. And her family confirmed she had a drug problem.” The line between stripping and prostitution was a thin one when a drug habit needed to be fed. As she added Donna Blank’s name to the list, something about it felt familiar, as if she had recently seen it in another context. She tried to pull the moment to the surface, but kept losing its edges.

  “You still there, Hatcher?”

  “Yeah, sorry.” She continued her summary. “Then we get to New York City, October 1995. Deborah Garner. Picked up from a New Jersey rest stop, found dead in Fort Washington Park.”

  1. Nicole Henning – 2/89 – prost.

  2. Jennifer Bronson – 4/91 – “lingerie model”

  3. Leticia Thomas – 1/93 – prost.

  4. Donna Blank – 1/95 – stripper

  5. Stacy Myer – 4/95 – stripper, prost.

  6. Deborah Garner – 10/95 – NYC, prost.

  Rogan gave the list a quick glance. “He must have come to the city because he knew that UPD was finally looking for him.”

  “Bingo. UPD stepped up the visibility of their investigation once Victims 4 and 5 were found. They had the social-service providers plugged in, too, handing out fliers to the working girls, warning them about a killer. The acceleration continued. Three kills in one year.”

  “Or he was keeping that pace the whole time,” Rogan offered, “and the bodies haven’t been found. There’s no guarantee this is a complete list.”

  There was so much they didn’t know.

  Rogan tapped his pen against her notepad. “There’s no way Helen Brunswick belongs on this list.”

  “Two of the Utica victims had prostitution convictions. The county had a counseling and education program that was mandatory with vice-related sentences. From what I can tell, the program was run at the time by Cedar Ridge Behavioral and Psychiatric Care.”

  It was one of the hospitals where Helen Brunswick had interned.

  “Major stretch. It’s only two of the six women, and even if Brunswick had contact with them, how does that make her a target twenty years later, and what does it have to do with Anthony Amaro?”

  “You’re calling him Amaro again, huh?” she said with a smile.

  “That’s the dude’s name, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but it’s not the name you’ve been using. See those chicken marks at the bottom of the page there? Four times. I counted.”

  “You count everything, Rainman, and you don’t usually need notes.”

  “I tallied them up to prove I was right. You said ‘the guy’ four times. The guy went back to the same dumping ground. Like the guy’s not going to notice a police patrol. The guy knew UPD was on to him. The guy accelerated. That’s four times you referred to the killer without calling him Amaro.”

  “So what about it?”

  “Admit it, Rogan. You’ve got your doubts.”

  “The guy. The bad guy. The perp. The mutt. The dirtbag. Amaro by name. You’re making too much of a word.”

  “Maybe.” She figured it was best not to press the point.

  “Speaking of Amaro, I reached out to Buck Majors. I’m waiting for a call back.”

  Ellie assumed the detective who put Amaro behind bars would want to help keep him there. “Talk about creative names. Buck Majors. Boom-chicka-pow-wow.”

  “The idea of you and porn together is messing me up. Stop it.”

  “Hey, does Donna Blank’s name seem familiar to you? From before just now, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Donovan mentioned it?”

  “But it seems like we just saw it in another context, like I had a flash of letters on a page. And maybe just the last name.”

  She was shuffling through the documents scattered across her desk when Rogan reached over and plucked out the demand for documents they’d received from Amaro’s attorney. “Right there,” he said. “Linda Moreland’s associate is Caroline Blank. You really hang on to every detail, don’t you?”

  Ellie glanced at the signature and then grabbed for the initial missing-persons report for Donna Blank. Listed as family: Marcia Haring, the mother who called police; Henry Blank, the father; Rosemary Blank, stepmother; Carrie Blank, half sister. “Take a look,” she said, pointing at the half sister’s name. “Carrie could be short for Caroline.”

  “One way to find out.” Rogan typed “Caroline Blank attorney” into Google and searched for images. He tilted the screen toward Ellie, while she laid a photograph of Donna Blank in front of it.

  “The attorney’s Asian,” he said. “The vic’s a white girl. But the attorney looks like she could be mixed, which makes sense if they’re half sisters.”

  “And their noses and mouths are similar,” Ellie noted. Both had long, slender noses and heart-shaped lips.

  “What kind of lawyer would defend her sister’s murderer?”

  “Someone who really thought he was innocent,” she said. “Rogan, what if this case is for real?”

  “It’s not, all right? Amaro’s guilty. Helen Brunswick’s husband killed her. And once we prove it, we can go back to catching cases off the board.”

  Her phone buzzed at her waist. It was Max.

  “Hey there.”

  “Well,” he said, “the moment we’ve been waiting for is here.”

  “The rapture? Because I don’t think the end-times are going to work out well for us.”

  “The DNA reanalysis is done. And it’s not good: we’ve got someone else’s genetic marker from one of the bodies.”

  “We knew it was a risk. The victims were all working girls.”

  “Except it’s not seminal fluid. It’s skin, and it’s beneath the fingernails of one of the Utica victims.”

  “Which one?”

  “Donna Blank.”

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  Carrie dropped the two boxes with a thud on the landing at the top of the stairs. She was surprised at the weight of the files she’d retrieved from Amaro’s original attorney. She’d hauled them up four floors, and in four-inch heels no less. She caught her breath as she unlocked her front door and pushed the box through the entrance with her foot.

  The other associates at Russ Waterston all lived in luxury rentals. Over drinks, they’d compare notes about doormen and various amenities: rooftop pools, in-house spas, movie-theater rooms. Not Carrie. With more than a hundred thousand dollars in student loans, this walk-up studio in Hell’s Kitchen suited her just fine.

  She opened the cardboard box and began spreading its contents onto her apartment floor. Every notebook and file folder was labeled in neat, handwritten block letters: lab reports, witness interviews, penalty phase. Harry McConnell was organized. Hopefully it would be worth Carrie’s awkward interaction with his daughter to get her hands on these documents.

  She knew she should attack the materials in a disciplined, logical order. She also knew that it would make sense to look first at the files relating to the New York City victim, Deborah Garner. Her murder was the basis for Amaro’s conviction. Those materials would be the most thorough.

  But she was realizing now that Melanie’s concerns may have been legitimate. When it came to Anthony Amaro, she wasn’t just any attorney.

  She went straight to the file labeled “Donna Blank: Victim Number Four.”

  She flipped past several of the initial pages, summaries of random phone calls tha
t had come in over the years. She saw photographs she’d never seen before—images of Donna’s partially decomposed body. That must have been the reason why there hadn’t been a funeral, just a cremation with a small memorial service at Christ the King.

  Donna’s mother, Marcia, had filed the missing-person report. She had waited four days to call police. End of first paragraph: “Mother volunteers that daughter has history of drug abuse and worked as a dancer at Club Rouge. When pressed by this officer, mother admitted that it was ‘possible’ daughter was engaged in ‘prostitution activity.’”

  Carrie knew from the placement of these facts at the beginning of the short report that the officer did not take Marcia’s concerns seriously. Donna was just a druggie hooker who had run off for a few days to work, score, or both. Reading the report, Carrie wanted to leap back in time, into Marcia’s living room, to tell that officer about the girl Carrie used to idolize. She wanted that officer to know that Donna had walked her to and from school for an entire semester in the sixth grade when she learned that kids were making fun of her and trying to steal her books for “acting smart.”

  When Carrie reached the final, surprising sentence of the police report, she flipped through the rest of the documents in search of a subsequent correction. Nothing. She reread the sentence, ever so slowly, and knew for certain that it was wrong.

  There was a time when Donna tried to take care of Carrie, like a big sister should. But by the time Donna died, their roles were reversed. It had been Carrie’s idea to try to help. Carrie’s mother was never supposed to know the money was gone. Donna would go to rehab, kick her habit, and then get a real job. With regular income and no drug habit, she’d pay Carrie back long before she actually needed the money for college tuition. Carrie remembered how grown-up she had felt withdrawing the money from the bank—eight thousand dollars, nearly everything in her college account. The teller smiled as Carrie beamed, probably assuming that Carrie was buying her first car.